Colleen McCullough - Naked Cruelty

“He’s not hurting, sir. He drives a black Porsche and owns a lovely property. What’s he like as a person? Stiff as a board and about as exciting as Parsifal . But I like Kurt. He has beautiful manners, and if he ever keeps me waiting on a date, I could safely bet my life that nothing less than an escaping muon has detained him. Kurt’s a gentleman, and in case you haven’t checked lately, sir, they’re a dying breed.”

“He sounds more and more like the Dodo to me,” said Nick.

“Enough, Nick!” Carmine said sharply. “What do you know about Mark Sugarman, Helen?”

“Another of the dying breed,” Helen said, a little tartly. “Like me, he owns his condo. An extremely organized person-in fact, the most obsessive man I know when it comes to work habits and organizing his life in general. Kurt’s in the amateur league compared to Mark. He used to throw the best parties until Leonie Coustain got sick-raped, we know now.” She shuddered. “To think that the Dodo invaded Talisman Towers! But Mark isn’t the Dodo either, sir, truly. In the summer he uses the pool, and his chest is covered with hair. Kurt’s hairy too.”

“Haven’t you heard of a chest toupee?” Delia asked.

Helen’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding,” she said hollowly.

“Anything but. It’s seen as an indication of masculinity, so men who feel inadequate wear them.”

“Thank you, Delia,” said Carmine, eyes twinkling. “While you’re about it, see if you can work out how a stark naked man left no trophy of himself behind in Maggie Drummond’s apartment. Maggie told us he wears surgeon’s gloves, but she had no answer for his lack of blemishes.”

“He touched himself up with greasepaint,” Delia said.

“ Greasepaint ?” Nick gaped.

“Think about it,” Delia said eagerly. “I think we have to presume that the Dodo has beautiful skin-hardly a blemish. But no human being has absolutely flawless skin. If he’s sandy or red, he has freckles. If his skin’s olive, he has moles. And think of how many men have pimples on their bums. What flaws the Dodo has, he touches up with greasepaint. The Dodo is vain.”

“Good girl!” Carmine said. “Three stars on your wall chart, Delia. We can add greasepaint to his repertoire, along with plucked body hair.”

“Won’t greasepaint come off?” Nick asked.

“Not very easily, if it’s top quality. It may also be that his blemishes are in places that don’t come in heavy contact with his victim. He may also wipe off any transferred greasepaint with an organic solvent-alcohol, xylene, chloroform.”

“We have enough to develop a protocol for questioning the victims,” Carmine said, looking pleased. “Girls, make sure you ask about smells, little scrubs of parts of their skins-you may get a clue as to where the Dodo wears his greasepaint from where he scrubs it off the victims.”

Danny Marciano’s last day as Captain of Uniforms had come and gone; today, Thursday, September 26, was Fernando Vasquez’s first day in the same job. Though as he climbed the stairs Carmine’s mind was not on Fernando Vasquez or the uniformed division.

What was he going to do with Corey Marshall? At their meeting this morning, Corey hadn’t turned up. Worse than that, Abe was smelling a rat now that the Tinnequa truck stop heist was out of his hair and he could assume a more regular schedule. Like so many of Abe’s cases, the gas station holdups were slow to start yielding pointers as to where a canny lieutenant ought to distribute his forces, and Abe was intelligent enough to go with the flow. So while Liam and Tony were out and about prowling, he was using his brain-and had sufficient vacant segments of it to notice something was up between Carmine and Corey.

“I got into the elevator with him yesterday,” Abe said as the two of them concluded their business, “and he cut me dead. I wouldn’t worry, except that lately he’s been saying some hard things about you, Carmine.”

“He feels as if the whole world’s against him at the moment,” Carmine said, knowing he couldn’t palm Abe off with platitudes; Abe was almost preternaturally sensitive to atmosphere in a way that, for instance, seemed to give him second sight about secret compartments. So while he wasn’t in the slightest paranoid, he could see through evasions. “First, he inherited Morty while you got Liam and Tony, then Wes Cooper dropped dead-that’s more than anyone’s fair share of bad luck. And most of his cases haven’t worked out well. You know Corey-he takes things to heart, Abe, without always seeing the best way to fix them.”

“Say no more,” Abe said with a wry smile, and took himself off to his own office.

What do I do about Corey? Carmine wondered, reaching the top of the stairs.

Having entered the Holloman PD straight from high school, Corey had been a cop for seventeen years, and spent the last five of them in Detectives: he knew the ropes. Yet he wasn’t making it as a lieutenant. Most of the considerable paperwork was devoted to interviews, simultaneously a cop’s nightmare and salvation; out of them came so many leads. But first, they had to be written down. If, for instance, a case went cold, like that triple murder at the railroad station in 1930, the written testimony was all that stood between continued frigidity and a case suddenly on fire. Regarding that old triple murder, pathetically inadequate reportage had stymied Carmine until he found a lead elsewhere. Morty Jones’s notes were vestigial, and Corey’s not much better. Nor did Corey have Morty’s excuse, of working for Larry Pisano for nine years; his boss had been Carmine, a stickler. Now that he thought about it, Abe had done most of the writing up, but he had seen Corey put in his two cents’ worth. Now he had to wonder if those had been the only occasions. Abe would never have told; that kind of pettiness wasn’t in the man.

Corey’s notes about the much vaunted Ziggy Taylor heroin shipment were unacceptable- three lines ! Had it been a genuine tip from a snitch, or Corey manufacturing something more impressive than a series of bag snatchings and burglaries? Drugs had come to be regarded as Corey’s turf, for no other reason than that Corey had laid claim to it with an elaborate network of snitches. It was also, Carmine well knew, the hardest area to police-free-wheeling and under the control of the lieutenant. I am being conned, Carmine thought, for no other reason than that Corey knows he can’t hack it. He knows the lieutenant’s job is too big for him, but he can’t let it go.

What to do?

Silvestri’s office loomed; squaring his shoulders, Carmine entered it.

Fernando Vasquez had come into a uniformed division fizzing with anticipation; no one knew what to make of a Puerto Rican boss after the crafty Commissioner had finally broken the news. The uniforms, stunned, didn’t know at whom to be angry, or to whom they could go with their grievances when the time came, as come it would; Judge Thwaites got the blame for this bizarre appointment, and Commissioner John Silvestri said nothing to dispel the misconception. Sergeants like Joey Tasco and Mike Cerutti had filed every one of Captain Vasquez’s qualifications in their minds looking for ammunition, the trouble-makers started assembling their troops, and the entire uniformed division was prepared for war.

At interview several months before, Carmine had been a little surprised at Vasquez, though very agreeably. Silvestri, he knew, was absolutely determined to bring in fresh blood of a different kind, for nothing escaped that black eagle’s eye in his anything but ivory tower at the top of County Services. And he had set his heart on Fernando Vasquez.

Laying eyes on Vasquez again today only reinforced Carmine’s conviction that this man would lose no battles, let alone the war. He looked like every super-efficient army major Carmine had ever seen: on the short side, ramrod straight, solidly built, radiating not so much confidence as determination. His dark face was handsome in a Silvestri mode, with a straight, blade-thin nose, a very firm mouth, and black eyes that looked clear through a man, exposing him for what he was. Not the kind of man you could lie to, and not a sympathetic type either. Get on the wrong side of him, and you’d wish you hadn’t. Carmine liked the new captain, and hoped he had sufficient flexibility to sort the sheep from the wolves fairly painlessly. Mind you, Vasquez had a lot riding on this appointment: it was his first virtually autocratic command, and if he couldn’t make a go of it, his career would inevitably dwindle.