stiffened with thick starch.”
“What about the lace?”
“French, but not top quality. Machine made.”
“With that kind of price tag, we should look in the children’s wear at places like Saks and Bloomingdale’s in New York City? Or maybe Alexander’s in Connecticut?”
“A fairly expensive shop or department store, certainly. I would call the frock showy, not elegant.”
“Like Astor’s pet horse,” he said absently.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Just a saying.” He drew a deep breath. “Am I forgiven?”
Her eyes thawed, even twinkled. “I suppose so, you graceless twit. Too little Carmine Delmonico is worse than too much.”
“Malvolio’s?”
“Yes, please!”
“Now to a different subject,” he said over coffee. “It’s late, we can talk here. Manual skills.”
“Who at the Hug has them, and who doesn’t?”
“Exactly.”
“Starting with the Prof?”
“How is he, incidentally?”
“Shut up in an exclusive loony bin somewhere on the Trumbull side of Bridgeport. I imagine they’re loving him as a patient. Most of their intake consists of alcoholics or drug addicts drying out, plus heaps of anxiety neuroses. Whereas the poor old Prof has had a severe breakdown – illusions, delusions, hallucinations, loss of contact with reality. As to his manual skills, they are considerable.”
“Could he wire for electricity and plumb a house?”
“He wouldn’t want to, Carmine. Anything requiring hard manual labor he would regard as beneath his dignity. The Prof dislikes getting his hands dirty.”
“Ponsonby?”
“Couldn’t change the washer on a tap.”
“Polonowski?”
“A fairly skilled domestic handyman. He hasn’t the money to hire a carpenter when the children break a door or a plumber when the children stuff a cuddly toy down the lavatory.”
“Satsuma?”
She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Lieutenant,
“Forbes?”
“I’d say he was competent with his hands. He works on his house, I do know that. They were so lucky, the Forbeses! At the time they bought it, the mortgage rate was two percent, and they have thirty years to pay it off. Now it’s worth a fortune, of course – water frontage, two acres, no oil tanks next door.”
“Relocating those to the bottom of Oak Street helped everyone on the east shore. Finch?”
“Builds his own glasshouses and greenhouses. There is a big difference, he tells me. Isn’t above grubbing out a mushroom tunnel. But I’d say Catherine is even more competent. All those thousands of chickens.”
“Hunter and Ho the engineers?”
“Could construct the Empire State Building, with improvements.”
“Cecil?”
“Now isn’t that an indictment?” she asked, scowling. “I just can’t tell you, Carmine. He has skills, but in one’s mind he tends to be not only a flunky, but a black flunky into the bargain. No wonder they hate us. We deserve to be hated.”
“Otis?”
“At present Otis isn’t doing any heavy lifting. Apparently he has the beginnings of congestive cardiac failure, so I’m trying to arrange a nice pension for him with the Parsons. Personally I doubt his troubles have much to do with how hard he works. His bugbear is Celeste’s nephew, Wesley. Otis is terrified that the boy is going to make mischief for Celeste. The Hollow and Argyle Avenue are rather boiling.”
“Wait until spring,” Carmine said grimly. “We’ve bought some time with the weather, but when it gets warmer, all hell is going to break loose.”
“Anna Donato’s husband is a plumber.”
“Anna Donato…Refresh my memory.”
“She looks after all the cranky equipment, has the touch.”
“The Kyneton menage?”
“Oh, dear! The fourth floor is a circus these days. Hilda and Tamara are at daggers drawn. Mostly screaming matches, but on one occasion they rolled around the floor, kicking and biting. It took our four office workers and me to drag them apart. So we are profoundly glad that the Prof isn’t there to see women at their worst. However, Hilda will be gone before the Prof is due to come back. Dearest, darlingest Keith got the partnership he was after in New York City.”
“What about Schiller?”
“How about coming back to my place for a cognac?”
Desdemona slid out of the booth. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Carmine walked her down the block back in that high school happy haze after his prom date had told him she’d loved the evening and offered him her lips. Not that Desdemona was about to offer her lips. A pity. They were full and unlipsticked. He started to laugh at the memory of trying to scrub off bright red lipstick.
“What’s so funny?”
“Not a thing, not a thing.”
Chapter 19
Commissioner Silvestri held a discreet conference to which he invited all the various heads of the Ghost investigations throughout Connecticut. “In a week’s time it will be thirty days,” he said to the room of silent men, “and we have no idea whether the Ghost or Ghosts have switched their pattern to one a month or are still on the two-month pattern, just rung in the New Year with a special spree.”
Though the press still referred to the killer as the Monster, most of the police involved now alluded to him as the Ghost or the Ghosts. Carmine’s ideas had taken root because men like Lieutenant Joe Brown from Norwalk saw the sense in them.
“Between this Thursday, the twenty-seventh, and the following Thursday, February third, all departments will put a surveillance team on any suspect they have twenty-four hours a day. If we get no results, at least it’s an elimination process. If we
“And if no girl goes missing?” asked a cop from Stamford.
“Then we do it all again at the end of February. I agree with Carmine that everything we know points to a bunch of changes – time interval, a night abduction, the party dress, decapitation only – but we can’t be sure he’s into a new pattern permanently. One or two of him, he’s way ahead of us. We just gotta keep on pluggin’ on, guys, best way we know how.”
“What if a girl goes missing and no suspect is involved?” a cop from Hartford asked.
“Then we think again, but in a different way. We broaden the net to bring in new suspects, but we won’t abandon the old. I’ll hand you over to Carmine.”
Who had little more to say, except upon the subject of their present suspects. “Holloman is in the unique position of having many more than one suspect,” he said. “The rest of the departments will be watching known
