the bags were put in the fridge while Cecil and Otis were on duty. Later in the day, is my bet.”
“What about the possible number of dump sites?”
“I finally found seven different dead animal refrigerators, excluding the Hug’s. Dean Dowling wasn’t amused to have to talk to a cop about something so far underneath his job description, and no one seemed to have a list. No way any of them once I found them would have been as easy as using the Hug’s—all more public, busier. Man, they must get through millions of rats! I hate ‘em alive, but I hate ‘em dead a lot worse after today. I’m putting my money on the Hug.”
“So am I, Abe, so am I.”
Carmine spent the rest of his day at his desk studying the case files until he could recite them off by heart. Each was fairly thick because of the quality of the victims. Clearly the police of each city had put a great deal more work into their investigations than was usual; the average sixteen-year-old girl who disappeared had a reputation (sometimes a rap sheet) that fitted in with disappearance. But not these girls. The pity of it is, thought Carmine, that we don’t liaise with each other enough. If we did, we might have gotten on to this guy earlier. However, no body and there’s no physical evidence of murder. No matter how many bodies there have been—and I won’t know that for a while yet—I know that they wound up in the medical school incinerator. So much safer than, say, burying them in the woods. Connecticut has plenty of forests, but they’re used, they’re not limitless like Washington State forests.
My gut instinct says that he’s keeping their heads as memorabilia. Or else if he disposes of their heads too, he’s got the girls on film. Super–8 in color, maybe several cameras to catch every angle of their suffering, his own power. I know he’s a memorabilia man. This is his private fantasy, he’ll be compelled to record it. So he’s either filming it or he’s keeping the heads in a freezer or in glass jars of formalin. How many cases have I investigated involving memorabilia? Five. But never a multiple killer. That is so rare! And the others left me evidence. This guy doesn’t. When he looks at his films or his heads, what does he feel? Exultation? Disappointment? Excitement? Remorse? I wish I knew, but I don’t.
When he went into Malvolio’s to eat dinner he sat in his usual booth aware that he wasn’t hungry, even if he knew he had to eat. Early days; he had to keep his strength up for this one.
The waitress was a new girl, so he had to let her write it down, from the yankee pot roast to the rice pudding. A beautiful girl, but not his killer’s type; the way she eyed Carmine up and down was a blatant invitation that he ignored. Sorry, baby, he said silently, those days are over. Though she did remind him a little of Sandra: a looker marking time for some better job like acting or modeling. New York City was just down the road.
How many things had happened in 1950! He was a brand new detective; the Hug was built; the Holloman Hospital was built; and Sandra Tolley had come to wait on table at Malvolio’s. She had knocked him off his feet at first glance. Tall, stacked like Jane Russell, legs six feet long, a mass of gold hair and wide, myopic eyes in a gorgeous face. Full of herself and the career she knew she was going to have as a model; she’d put her portfolio in to all the New York agencies, but couldn’t afford to live there. So she had moved a two-hour train ride into Connecticut, where she could rent for less than $30 a month and eat for free if she was a waitress.
And then all her ambitions went west because the sight of Carmine Delmonico had knocked her off her feet too. Not that he was handsome or more than acceptably tall at five-eleven, but he had the kind of beat-up face that women adored, and a body bulging with natural muscle. They met at New Year’s; they were married within the month; and she was pregnant within three. Sophia, their daughter, was born right at the end of 1950. In those days he’d rented a nice house in East Holloman, which was the Italian quarter of town, thinking that if he surrounded Sandra with hordes of his relatives and friends she wouldn’t feel so alone when his job kept him working long hours. But she was from Montana ranching stock, and neither understood nor liked the way of life that East Holloman practised. When Carmine’s mother called in to see her, Sandra thought that Mom was checking up on her, and by extension she saw all the kind visits and invitations from his family circle and his friends as evidence that they didn’t trust her to behave.
There was never a genuine quarrel, nor even much discontent. The baby was the image of her mother, which pleased everyone; no one knows better than the Italians that they paint the angels fair.
As a matter of course Carmine was in line for free tickets whenever a play on tryout for Broadway had its final airing at the Schumann Theater; at the end of 1951, when Sophia was a year old, his turn for free tickets came. The attraction was an important play that had already received rave reviews from tryouts in Boston and Philadelphia, so everyone from New York City would be there. Sandra was ecstatic, dug out her most glamorous strapless dress, cyclamen satin that fitted like a second skin and then flared at the knees, a white mink stole to keep her warm against what was a cold winter. She pressed Carmine’s dinner suit, frilled shirt and cummerbund and bought him a gardenia buttonhole. Oh, how excited she had been! Like a kid going to Disneyland.
A case intruded and he couldn’t go. Looking back on it, he was glad now that he hadn’t seen her face when she found out; he had called her on the phone. Sorry, honey, I have to work tonight. But she went to the play anyway, all on her own in the cyclamen satin strapless dress and the white mink wrap. When she told him later that night, he hadn’t minded a bit. But what she didn’t tell him was that she had met Myron Mendel Mandelbaum the movie producer in the Schumann’s foyer, and that Mandelbaum had usurped Carmine’s seat, though his own was in a box much nearer to the stage.
A week later Carmine came home to find Sandra and Sophia gone, a brief note on the mantel to say that Sandra had fallen in love with Myron and was taking the train to Reno; Myron was divorced already and wanted desperately to marry her. Sophia was the icing on the wedding cake, as Myron couldn’t have children.
It came like a bolt from the blue to Carmine, who hadn’t begun to realize how unhappy his wife was. He didn’t do any of the things wronged husbands were supposed to do. He didn’t try to kidnap his daughter, beat up Myron Mendel Mandebaum, take to the bottle, or fail to give of his best to his work. Not for want of encouragement; his outraged family would have done the first two of those things for him gladly, and couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t let them. Simply, he admitted to himself that his had been a misalliance based on profound physical attraction and nothing else. Sandra wanted glamor, glitz, gallivanting, a life he couldn’t give her. His pay was good but not princely, and he was too in love with his job to lavish attention on his wife. In many ways, he decided, Sandra and Sophia would be better off in California. Oh, but it hurt! A hurt he mentioned to no one, even Patrick (who guessed), just buried deeper than remembrance.
Every August he went to L.A. to see Sophia, for he loved his daughter dearly. But this year’s visit had revealed to him a burgeoning facsimile of Sandra, limo’d every day to a fancy school where booze, pot, cocaine and LSD were easier to buy than candy, bored by possessions. Poor Sandra had become a coke-head on the Hollywood party circuit; it was Myron who tried to give the child a life, out of his depth though he was. Luckily Sophia shared some of her father’s inquisitiveness, was intellectually bright, and had gained a little wisdom from watching her mother’s deterioration. Between them, Carmine and Myron had spent three weeks persuading Sophia that if she stayed off the booze, pot, cocaine and LSD and worked on her education, she wouldn’t end like Sandra. Over the years Carmine had come to like Sandra’s second husband more and more; this last trip had cemented a strong bond, the cause of which was Sophia.
“You ought to get married again, Carmine,” Myron had said, “bring our little girl to some place saner than here. I’d miss her like hell, but I love her enough to know it would be better.”
But, never again, Carmine had vowed after Sandra, and was as true to that vow today as ever. For sexual solace he had Antonia, a widowed remote cousin in Lyme; she had offered him this with great candor and no love.
“We can get our rocks off without driving each other crazy,” she had said. “You don’t need