Naked Cruelty (7 page)

“In what way?” Fernando asked, sounding interested.

“Organization, including paperwork. Except for Buzz Genovese, the reports from Corey's team are lousy. For instance, there was a drug-related murder of a prostitute behind City Hall a month ago—before Buzz's time. Corey handled it himself, but if I were a cop thirty years in the future trying to make head from tail of it, I couldn't. He hadn't taken enough photos and his description of the scene was pathetic. I chewed him out about it, but he never bothered to augment the report. There are a lot of Corey's cases done like that.”

“Does he offer a reason?” Silvestri asked.

“Sure. It's not important enough to merit the time spent on the kind of report he would an interesting crime.”

Fernando let out a breath. “Ah! He's an exclusive man.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your lieutenant resents pedestrian cases, he wants glamor.”

“Yes, exactly,” Carmine said, nodding. “He dislikes routine of any kind as well, hence sloppy time sheets and poor rapport with his team members.”

“No, he's okay with routine, believe it or not. How long did he work for you?”

“Five years.”

“So he's okay with routine, otherwise you wouldn't have put up with him for five minutes, let alone five years. He wants exclusive-looking cases, not chickenshit stuff, and I'd be willing to take a bet he thinks your cases are much better than his. But he hexes himself—who's got his ear?” Fernando asked.

“His wife,” said Carmine and Silvestri in unison.

“That makes it tough.”

“Welcome to the Holloman Police Department,” Silvestri said with a wide grin. “That's the trouble with small cities. No one can keep a secret. Within six months Netty Marciano will have you squared away too, Fernando.”

When he stopped laughing, Carmine asked a question. “Is it true that you're going to reorganize the uniformed hierarchy?”

“Given the fullness of time, yes,” Fernando said readily. “There are too many sergeants among the uniforms, which leads to confusion—who's senior to whom, et cetera. There's no hurry, Mr. Commissioner. It will happen when I'm ready.” He stretched luxuriously. “Detectives is overloaded with chiefs as well. If the Holloman PD has a fault, it's lack of Indians. Your loots basically do the same work as your team members, Carmine. Your division sounds as if whoever structured it thought paperwork a terrible bogey.”

“That was Johnny Catano,” said Silvestri. “He was chief for years, but never captain. His belief was that each team of three men should be led by a lieutenant, with himself as the most senior. Carmine was made the first captain in 1966, more as a thank you than any change in structure.”

“Mr. Commissioner and I are aware there are too many chiefs, but it's not easy to fix,” Carmine said. “Tell me more about your changes, Fernando.”

“I want three lieutenants, who will be promoted up from the sergeants. I need an executive, Carmine, so as not to fritter away my own time on—paperwork. I've been brought in to get this police department in shape for the stormy times that are coming. Two assassinations within three months are appalling. We can't let it happen again.”

“Ah! Hence the rotation of men like Joey Tasco and Mike Cerutti. Under the old tradition, they would have automatically stepped into the new officer slots, though it's years since Joey's been anywhere but the desk, and Mike anywhere but patrol. It's brilliant. By the time you have to appoint your new loots, you'll know who are the best men.”

“So I believe.”

“You're right about stormy times,” Carmine said. “I've had to put Corey and his team on a case I wish I could take myself—is that an indictment of me, or Corey? Not of me, I contend. The Principal of Taft High found a cache of firearms in the gym. We have them in the cage already, but the kids aren't talking and we don't know why the cache was there. Both Taft and Travis, the two high schools, have disciples of Mohammed el Nesr and his Black Brigade among the pupils, but Mohammed is vigorously denying any BB connection.”

“Lieutenant Marshall should do well,” Fernando said. “It's potentially high profile and certainly important. What was in the cache?”

“The report will be on your desk, but it's scary. Twenty .45 caliber and ten .22 caliber semi-automatic pistols, as well as spare clips. A lot of people could have died.”

Silvestri crossed himself. “As well for us that our high school principals are on the ball. If it's not the Black Brigade responsible, then who is? They're not the kind of arms high school kids have access to, and it's not some parent's collection. It's an arsenal cache, not an array of different guns. Just .45s and .22s, all the same make and model.”

“It's their potential as automatics worries me,” Carmine said.

“Kick ass, Carmine, including Corey's.”

“Actually it's up his alley, if he sticks to procedure. My chief worry is, what's he
not
writing down?”

Carmine took time that Friday to drive around Carew, look at houses belonging to rape victims and Gentleman Walkers. Why did Nick have to conceive such a hot dislike of Helen? He couldn't pass up an opportunity to needle her.

Helen had been right when she called Kurt von Fahlendorf's house the prettiest in the district. It was a pre-Revolutionary saltbox with a pillared porch set in an acre of beautifully gardened grounds; a look around the back revealed a breezeway connecting the main structure to what, in the old days, would have been a kitchen annex. Now it was probably a guest house; someone whose family resided in West Germany would need adequate guest accommodation. The guy definitely had money, Carmine decided, between the address and the wages he must pay his gardener.

Mason Novak, the inorganic chemist whom Mark Sugarman had called the spirit of the Gentleman Walkers, lived in a small cottage on Curzon Close just two doors down from Kurt von Fahlendorf. A man named Dave Feinman lived in a neat little cottage on Spruce Street just around the corner from Curzon Close. He was a widower and was listed as a retired freelance statistician who still took an occasional commission.

No Walker seemed impoverished, and hardly any were married or lived with a woman. Probably because wives were not likely to want their husbands off patrolling for the benefit of other women when they had a woman at home. Privately Carmine thought that the reason for 146 unattached men in Carew lay in its hordes of young women. Carew was rich pickings for one kind of man in particular: a gentleman. And what else were the Gentleman Walkers?

Arnold Hedberg, a professor of history at East Holloman State College, lived his on-the-verge-of-forty existence in the bottom third of a three-family house on Oak Lane that he owned outright, no mortgages. Mike Donahue, a plumber with a thriving business, was young enough at thirty-one to live in a block of apartments he too owned, though he had a mortgage. He had plenty of women tenants under his own roof, but none had been targeted by the Dodo. Gregory Pendleton was a forty-five-year-old assistant district attorney; he occupied the top floor of a six-storey apartment block on State Street that he owned outright. Bill Mitski was another who lived in a private house he owned; he had an accounting business that specialized in taxation. And more, and more … Few Gentleman Walkers were genuine bachelors. Most seemed to be men who had suffered so badly in the divorce court that they were once bitten, twice shy. Sugarman, Mitski, Novak and von Fahlendorf described themselves as “single”—which didn't say that they weren't towing more wives than Bluebeard. If his divorce was through, a man was legally single.

After due consideration Carmine decided that his entire team, including Helen, should accompany him to the Gentleman Walkers' meeting at six o'clock on the seventh floor of the Susskind Science Tower on Chubb's Science Hill campus. This was Henry Blackburn's brain child, and a good one. The President of Chubb just after the Second World War, Blackburn had sequestered 29 acres of Chubb land on Cedar to the east of the Green, and given it to the Chubb School of Architecture to turn into a science campus. Both the Burke Biology Tower and the Susskind Science Tower hadn't gone up until 1960, but there were plenty of smaller buildings dotted around, as well as the great truncated, grassy pyramid that was the physics bunker, where all work went on way underground in cooled and filtered air. This grassiness was a perpetual frustration as far as the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament was concerned; they had nowhere to paint their CND symbols, so had to content themselves by parading with placards that said BAN THE BOMB.

Having heard the widely disseminated news of Maggie Drummond's rape, all the Gentleman Walkers came to a venue Carmine thought ideal for an observer down on the podium, as every face was visible in the curved tiers of seats.

Delia and Helen sat on the podium flanking Mark Sugarman on one side, with Carmine and Nick on his other side. The Walkers stared hard at them, but hardest at Helen, whom most of them seemed to know. Probably, thought Delia, we don't look much like cops, between two women and a black man.

Mark Sugarman began. “I'm sure you know that Maggie Drummond has been raped, but what you won't know is that six other girls have come forward—I won't name names, but some of you will make educated guesses. You're here tonight to meet the police in charge of the case, answer their questions, and ask questions.”

He introduced Carmine and his team, while Carmine's eyes continued to rove across the assembled ranks. Easy to decide who was Mason Novak and who Kurt von Fahlendorf; they sat together in the front row, together with a very elderly fellow of the kind Carmine always called a “Dapper Dan”—a bit like the 1930s movie star, William Powell, even including the little mustache.

Kurt von Fahlendorf was a looker in any language. Six feet tall, a good physique, and the kind of Nordic good looks a fan of Teutonic myth might associate with Siegfried. His crew-cut hair was so fair that it glittered as if made of frost—no fan of the fashionable Beatles-length hair here! His eyes were the same shade of ice-blue as Desdemona's, and his facial features sharply defined, including high cheekbones that made it easy to mentally put a Wehrmacht general's cap on his head. Odd, that he didn't look Gestapo. Maybe that's because I heard Helen on Prussian junkers? To Carmine he seemed cold in a scientific way; the eyes were extremely intelligent, but not involved as were the eyes of Mason Novak next to him. This was a passionate man, about the same height and physique as von Fahlendorf, but coppery in coloring and owning a face most women would probably prefer to the Prussian's; despite his facial irregularities, Mason was powerfully attractive. The heart and soul of the Gentleman Walkers? Yes, he looked all of that. The way he and Kurt sat said that they were very good friends who trusted each other, which said a lot about both men. Probably not the Dodo.

Mark then asked each Walker to rise and give his name; after driving around Carew and looking at records, this was a bonus Carmine hadn't expected. He had imagined that he would be obliged to demand identification, which would have put the meeting on a different, more antagonistic footing. Sugarman was a good guy. Feinman was a youthful sixty-eight, fit and appealing; he probably had no trouble pulling women. Arnold Hedberg looked studious, Mike Donahue looked as if he went rock climbing for pleasure, Gregory Pendleton was darkly handsome, Bill Mitski a “gold” man—hair, eyes, skin.

What all shared was remarkable physical fitness, and none was small in stature, maybe because small men would have found it hard to stay in stride with long-legged men: a man's height was in his legs, not his trunk.

“Our patrols are convivial because we always walk with the same companions,” said Dapper Dave.

“Do you roster everybody?” Delia asked.

“Yes, for every second night, come hell or rainstorms,” Sugarman answered. “We field twenty-four trios, with two men in reserve. As Dave says, always the same three men in a trio. They sorted themselves out amicably during the first six weeks, and haven't changed since. So on any one night, we saturate the district. That's why we don't understand how we've missed him.”

“You walk at the wrong hour, Mr. Sugarman,” Nick said. “He starts earlier than you do, so by the time you're on the streets, he's already inside his premises of choice.”

“Yes, but he has to come out!”

“If he were a run-of-the-mill rapist, sir, you're right, he would be leaving while you're patrolling. Unfortunately he makes a night of it,” Nick said. “Instead of attacking and leaving at once, he remains—and rapes multiple times—for about five hours. So he's in before you start, and not out until way after you've all gone home.”

“We're
useless
!” Mason Novak cried, voice breaking.

“No, sir, you're not,” Carmine said in a strong, positive voice. “Look at what you know you've done! While you're on the streets patrolling, the women of Carew know they can walk safely. You've apprehended three potential rapists. And as long as you enjoy the exercise, keep on going. Your activities may not affect the Dodo, but they do make Carew safer nonetheless.”

That made them feel better; they began to sit up straighter, murmur among themselves.