The Gorgon Festival (8 page)

“When we find her body,” Cabroni said, “we’ll check the skeleton for calcification.”

“If you don’t mind a layman’s suggestion,” Ward said, “I know where I could look for her body.”

“Where?” Cabroni was suddenly alert, but no expression showed in his voice.

“I would go down to the Embarcadero and look for a long line of longshoremen. At the front of the line, you’ll probably find Ruth Gordon’s body, and very active. Those side effects were quite potent.”

Cabroni smiled knowingly. “The greatest aphrodisiac in the world, eh, Alex?”

“Her words exactly,” Ward said, half astonished. A man who couldn’t pronounce “hermaphrodite” had rolled out “aphrodisiac” with practiced ease.

“By the way, Joe. If you don’t accept my opinion, don’t go digging around in Ruth’s garden looking for her body.”

Suddenly Cabroni’s voice was harsh, edged. “Why not, Doctor Ward?”

“Practically every bush in that garden bears a prizewinning rose, and she’ll be very angry if you dig among them. She’s spent all spring pruning those bushes.”

“Corpses cut no roses,” Cabroni said.

“Nor do they make good fertilizer when they’re arthritic,” Ward added. “There’s too much calcium.”

For a moment, Cabroni wished he were back at headquarters questioning some ghetto kid who could answer only yes or no. After he had alerted himself for a self-incriminating remark from Ward, he had gotten a short lecture on horticulture.

When they pulled up in front of the house, Cabroni said, ominously, “There’s a couple of items in her office I’d like to interrogate you about, first, Doctor Ward.”

Ward did not like the official sound to the word “interrogate,” but he said nothing as they entered the office and Cabroni handed him Ruth’s typewritten release.

To Whom it May Concern: It is my intention to conduct an experiment using myself as the control on this day in the presence of Doctor Alexander Ward, my friend and colleague. In the event that this experiment results in maiming or fatality, I wish to exonerate Doctor Ward of any and all responsibility for the results.

Doctor Ruth Diane Gordon

“I told Ruth this release had no legal value,” Ward said.

“It has,” Cabroni said flatly. “It might make the difference between first-degree murder and manslaughter, if an investigating officer went to the D.A. in behalf of a cooperating suspect.”

Cabroni walked over to the bookcase and fumbled for the family album, taking more time than necessary to let his offer sink in. “Police are like everybody else,” he mused, “do them a favor and they’ll do you a favor.”

He returned with the family album and laid it on the desk. He flipped the pages over. All photographs had been torn from the first section of the album. Only paste marks remained.

“There’s not a photograph in the album,” Cabroni said, “taken of Ruth Gordon when she was under thirty.” Suddenly his voice went flat. “Why?”

Ward said nothing as he slowly leafed through the pages. Cabroni studied his profile, waiting for the lips to part, the eyes to narrow.

Ward understood why the photographs were missing. Ruth had taken them to preclude recognition of herself when young, and by setting up this “mysterious disappearance” which pointed to his complicity, she was trying to force him to follow her. Hardened criminals broke under hours of police grilling, and she knew that he possessed a secret no police department, no authority, and no official of the Defense Department should ever share.

Why had she done it? Surely not from feminine spite after Ester’s misdirected remarks. Perhaps, by forcing him to follow her she hoped to cure him of his imagined breast obsession, but if she had done it for his therapy she was being damned unethical.

Cabroni saw a flicker of anger in Ward’s eyes and snapped, “Out with it, Doctor Ward. What’s your explanation?”

Ward deliberated a moment and finally said, “You’re the specialist in solving mysteries, Joe. You explain it.”

Ward continued to thumb through the album.

“Then, I’ll explain it, Alex.” Cabroni’s voice was again gentle. “Down at headquarters, we get educated in perversions. There’s a type of sex maniac who murders a female and takes along her panties or her hosiery. Later, just by sniffing, he gets a helluva charge out of what he’s done. But the highbrow maniacs, the ones with imagination, take photographs to get their kicks. Necrophilia, we call it.”

“You need more competent educators down at headquarters, Joe. The obsession you describe is called fetishism. Necrophilia is an abnormal love of the dead. The most interesting case of necrophilia I’ve encountered occurred in Florida, about forty years ago. A man spent eight years sleeping beside his dead wife at night. She was superbly embalmed, of course, because Florida’s hot and humid… Say, here I am! She kept the original print from the Ethan Allen yearbook,
The Minuteman
. This cadet’s uniform’s an authentic reproduction of that worn by the Continental Army… Have I put on the pounds!”

“Let’s go to the bathroom,” Cabroni snapped.

Over the bathtub, Cabroni explained the
modus operandi
of the murderer.

“It was simple for him to lean over the old lady as she sat in the tub and flip on the maximum current switch and shoot the juice to her. As the gentle, cultivated type, he wouldn’t use even the minimal violence necessary to push her head under the water.”

“If he did that, Joe, her next of kin would have an excellent suit against the Electrical Underwriters’ Association. That’s a step-down transformer which converts alternating current to direct current, and the maximum voltage is five volts.”

Cabroni recovered fast. “He used a jumpwire to bypass the transformer.”

If he had done that, Ward decided, with Ruth sitting there watching him, she would have seen what he was doing and protested so vehemently the murderer would have had to use more than minimal violence to force her head under.

“Why would he have done that?” Ward mused aloud, still thinking of the jumpwire.

“To get an undivided share of the Nobel loot,” Cabroni said.

Cabroni had been talking to Carrick, Ward decided.

“Money’s not the object in a Nobel award,” Ward said.

Cabroni had Carrick’s opinion to the contrary, and he could read the genuine concern on Ward’s face.

“Another aspect of this case which supports my theory that the murderer was an alleged gentleman is in the laboratory. Let’s go.”

In the laboratory, Cabroni pointed out the pens and the fresh droppings.

“She kept hamsters in those pens,” Ward agreed, “and she let them out to keep them from starving.”

“Or her murderer was too tender-hearted to let them stay and suffer,” Cabroni said. “Let’s go. You don’t want to keep Ester waiting, all alone, at night.”

Together the two men walked into the gathering twilight to the car.

“I’ve got a line on her murderer,” Cabroni said. “Someone who enjoyed her confidence, a bathtub buddy. Probably a fellow scientist. They were onto something together, and he didn’t want her to share credit for the discovery. So he eliminated her. Personally, I’m betting he’s a professor at Stanford.”

“That would be a very good theory, Joe, if she were dead.”

“She’s dead. As an old friend and fellow professor, Alex, you just refuse to face the fact of her going this way.”

Only one professor on the campus fitted Cabroni’s description—Ward himself. Ruth had planned it this way, but her plans had gone astray; Cabroni would get him before he could get to her. Diana Aphrodite had taken his available supply of rejuvenating solution. Besides, he did not know what absorbent she had mixed with the liquid.

They drove to the first boulevard stop on Pinyon Verde when Cabroni turned to face Ward. “What were you doing in Doctor Ruth Gordon’s bedroom between 10 p.m. and midnight, Saturday, May 29th, and why did you leave her house without turning on your car lights or starting the motor?”

Caught off balance by the question, Ward stammered, “Well, my battery was weak and the car wouldn’t start.”

“What about the bedroom?”

“I was checking Ruth for side effects.”

“What kind of side effects were you checking?”

“Well, for one thing, the arthritis treatment unfroze her pelvis.”

“Alex, you aren’t telling me you laid the old broad?”

There was no point in lying to protect the reputation of a woman who was branding him a murderer, Ward decided.

“ ‘To lay’ is hardly the verb form one would use, Joe. It was more of a horizontal dance, but she kept breaking my rhythm by humming pop music and changing the tunes.”

“It’s honest of you to admit this, Alex,” he said.

“Since I know you’re a family man, Joe, who gives fittings on the side, I figure my secret’s safe with you.”

This one was wily, Cabroni decided. He was attempting to head off an investigating officer’s testimony by appealing to male loyalty. Or was it blackmail?

As Cabroni drove on in silence, pieces began to assemble in Ward’s mind: the card from Los Angeles, the Javert who drove beside him, and there had been more to the Luke Havergal reference than an invitation.

Because he had no choice, he would go to the western gate of the rose garden, take the solution she had hidden there, and follow the ghost of his first love into the jungles of the young, specifically to the Electric Daisy Chain in Los Angeles, where Big John would tell him where to find Diana Aphrodite, nee Ruth Gordon.

He loved his wife, but Ester could make out quite well without him and this was a matter of prior loyalties, not to Ruth but to the continuing processes of evolution. In her youth mania, Ruth intended more than a limited rejuvenation. To widen the scope of her experiment, she needed his help and unlimited amounts of the youth solution.

When Cabroni pulled up before the house, Ward invited him in for dinner, but Cabroni declined. “No, Alex, I’ve got to get back downtown. I want to wrap up this case by Friday. By the way, Doctor Ward, don’t leave this jurisdiction without checking with the D.A.’s office. He might want to question you… Enjoy your dinner.”

When he entered the dining room, Ester came out of the kitchen wearing her long-suffering smile. “Your stride is off, Alex. I know what’s troubling you, but I forgive you. You had your little fling with Ruth, but she’s dead or gone.”

“It isn’t Ruth, Ester. I’ve been immersed in theory so long I think I should come up for air, get in some field work. Down Mexico way, they’re doing some interesting work in the effects of mescaline on white mice. I think I’ll head down for a while, during the summer session, and look into it. Care to come along?”

“When will you leave?”

“Tomorrow. All I have to do is check out enough money, buy some rough clothes, a jeep, and anti-venom serum for rattlesnake bites. You’d enjoy wandering around in the desert this summer. Those landscapes are romantic with the rock and the cacti, and we could both use a little sun.”

“No thanks, Alex. I’ll stay and tend house.”

“In that event, I have some papers I’d like for you to type and take over to Doctor Waverly-Pritchard, after you get them notarized.”

Tuesday, after lunch in San Jose, along a freeway he had once feared to venture over in his VW, an organically twenty-years-old Alexander Ward tooled a green BMW 280 south toward Highway 101. A motorcycle’s speed of escape made it worth the risk, he had decided, and the BMW 280 was proving his judgment. Under a blue crash helmet with wind visor, wearing a black leather jacket over a pink suede shirt with a white silk scarf, shod in hobnailed motorcycle boots, Ward felt like a bird gliding currents of concrete air, soaring over hills and swooping into valleys, banking around automobiles which seemed stalled at sixty miles per hour.

Rejuvenation and escape had been simple. Cabroni had posted no guard around Ruth’s house and he had used her tub, afterward taking his equipment and the remaining solution, which were stowed in his bag on the carrier rack behind. His only difficult moment had been personal. After he tidied up his lab, and locked the door for perhaps the last time, he had turned to face the jacaranda tree in bloom. Then the poignancy of departure knifed him and he remembered a line from Hopkins.

Margaret, are you grieving

Over goldengrove unleaving?

Now, all sadness had been pummeled from him by the wind-whip of his passage, and youth let him lose himself in sensualities. He felt the heat of the westering sun on the jeans hugging his thighs, the bounce of seat springs, the plasticity of handlebar grips and, riding easy in the saddle, the charged buoyancy of the lance he bore to the jousting grounds of the Sunset Strip.

At intervals the heavy licorice female odor of alfalfa floated across the highway to mellow the astringency of diesel fumes. From the tank beneath him wafted the scent of gasoline, heady with nuances of speed and freedom. South of Salinas he smelled the wetness of irrigated loam and the tang of eucalyptus as the valley stroked by, and then he climbed into the oak humus smells of Paso Robles.

Atascadero, San Luis Obispo, and, toward the southeast, the Sierra Madres formed their names in his mind with the tinkle of mission bells. Winding down from the Santa Lucias, past white dunes by the sea, he came at last to the most unforgettable, unforgotten place name of all, Pismo Beach. After Pismo Beach, Santa Maria, Los Alamos, Gaviota, and Santa Barbara sounded pedestrian.

At Ventura, he swung east on the Ventura Freeway into Los Angeles after picking up a signalert on his mounted transistor radio that 101 was paralyzed from Malibu to Santa Monica with beach traffic. The Ventura was clear almost to Sherman Oaks, where it clogged for the San Diego Freeway intersection. He wove through the lanes and gunned his motorcycle east toward the Hollywood Freeway. Another signalert warned that eastbound traffic on the Hollywood was backed up two miles west of Cahuenga Pass by an accident.

From what he had heard of Los Angeles traffic, Ward assumed that “catastrophic” was an Angeleno code word meaning at least five dead. He knew that he could navigate through the jam on his cycle, but the rims and spokes of his wheels were clean and bright and he didn’t want them blood-splattered, so he turned off at Laurel Canyon and went over the Hollywood Hills as the twilight turned the smog over San Fernando Valley a deep purple.