On, Off

always have those first three, and in most cases the fourth. Margaretta Bewlee’s sixteenth birthday present from her mother was a visit to the beauty parlor to have her hair straightened and styled like Dionne Warwick – she was performing one of Dionne’s numbers in a school concert. That news made me wonder about her, but after I checked it out I realized it wasn’t evidence of – how can I put it? – declining virtue? Though Margaretta is the one who gnaws at me, John. She is the sole black pearl in a collection of creamy ones. Too tall, too black, too inappropriate.”

“Maybe the Ghosts are jumping on the racial bandwagon. Their activities sure aren’t helping the racial situation.”

“Then why not another equally dark victim now? The Times crossword had a clue recently – ‘go back to beige.’ Six letters. The answer was ‘rebuff.’ When I tumbled to it I laughed until I cried. Every place I go, I am rebuffed.”

Silvestri didn’t say what he was thinking: you need a long vacation in Hawaii, Carmine. But not yet. I can’t afford to take you off this case. If you can’t crack it, no one can. “It’s time I held a press conference,” he said. “I got nothing to tell the bastards, but I gotta eat crow in public.” He cleared his throat, munched on the end of a very tattered cigar. “The Governor agrees I should eat crow in public.”

“Out of favor with Hartford, huh?”

“No, not yet. How do you think I spend most of my days? On the phone to Hartford, that’s how.”

“None of the Huggers showed a whisker outside last night. Though that doesn’t mean I don’t intend to watch them thirty days from now, John. I still have a gut feeling that the Hug is very much involved, and not merely as the object of vendetta,” said Carmine. “How much truth are you going to tell the press?”

“A little this, a little that. Nothing about Margaretta’s party dress. And nothing about two killers.”

Chapter 21

Tuesday, February 1st, 1966

The Holloman City Hall was famous for its acoustics, and the administrative duties of the Mayor having been removed to the County Services building a decade earlier, Holloman City Hall was left to do what it did best: play host to the world’s greatest virtuosi and symphony orchestras.

Behind the auditorium was a rehearsal room designed for these artists to record in as well as rehearse in; its clutter of music stands and chairs arranged in semi-circular rows did not suggest the murder of anything more horrific than music. John Silvestri positioned himself on the conductor’s podium clad in his best uniform, with the Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck. This plus the campaign ribbons on his chest said that he was no ordinary man.

About fifty journalists came, most from papers and magazines, one TV crew from the local station in Holloman, and one reporter from WHMN radio. The nation’s major dailies sent stringers; though the Connecticut Monster was big news, a canny editor understood that this police exercise wasn’t going to produce any startling new developments. What would come out of the conference was a chance to write scathing editorials about police incompetence.

But Silvestri in public mode was a smooth operator, especially when he was eating crow. No one, thought Carmine, listening, ate crow more gracefully, with more apparent relish.

“Despite the freezing conditions, various police departments throughout this state kept a total of ninety-six possible suspects under surveillance twenty-four hours a day from last Thursday until Faith Khouri’s abduction. Thirty-two of these people were in or around Holloman. None of them could have been implicated, which means we are no closer to knowing the identity of the man you call the Connecticut Monster, but we are now calling the Ghost.”

“Good name,” said the crime writer from the Holloman Post. “Have you any evidence to implicate anyone? Anyone at all?”

“I’ve just finished saying that, Mrs. Longford.”

“This killer – the Ghost, I rather like that – must have a special place to keep his victims. Isn’t it about time that you started looking for it more seriously? Like searching premises?”

“We can’t search any tenanted premises without a warrant, ma’am, you know that. What’s more, you’d be the first one to pounce if we did.”

“Under normal circumstances, yes. But this is different.”

“How, different? In the horrible nature of the crimes? I agree as a person, but as a lawman I can’t. A police force may be a vital arm of the law, but in a free society like ours it is also restrained by the same law it serves. The American people have constitutional rights that we, the police, are obliged to respect. Unsubstantiated suspicion doesn’t empower us to march into someone’s house and search for the evidence we haven’t been able to find elsewhere. The evidence must come first. We have to present an evidential case to the judicial arm of the law in order to be granted permission to search. Talking until we run out of spit won’t persuade any judge to issue a warrant without concrete facts. And we do not have concrete facts, Mrs. Longford.”

The rest of the journalists were happy to appoint Mrs. Diane Longford as their workhorse; nothing was going to come out of her inquisition anyway, and they could smell the coffee and fresh doughnuts laid out at the back of the hall.

“Why don’t you have concrete facts, Mr. Commissioner? I mean, it boggles the imagination to think that a great many experienced men have been investigating these murders since the beginning of last October without coming up with a single concrete fact! Or are you saying that the killer is a real ghost?”

Barbed irony affected Silvestri no more than did aggression or charm; he ploughed on regardless.

“Not a real ghost, ma’am. Someone far more dangerous, far more lethal. Think of our killer as a very strong hunting cat in his prime – a leopard, say. He lies comfortably in a tree on the edge of the forest, perfectly camouflaged, watching a whole herd of deer grazing their way closer to the forest and his tree. To a bird in that tree, every deer looks the same. But the leopard sees every deer as different, and his target is one particular deer. To him, she’s juicier, more succulent than the others. Oh, he’s very patient! The deer pass under him – he doesn’t move – the deer don’t see him or smell him on his branch – and then his deer wanders below him. The strike is so fast that the rest of the deer hardly have time to start running before he’s back up his tree with his catch, legs helpless, neck broken.”

Silvestri drew a breath; he had caught their attention. “I admit it’s not a brilliant metaphor, but I use it to illustrate the magnitude of what we’re up against with the Ghost. From where we are, he’s invisible. Just as it doesn’t occur to deer to look up into a tree, just as the smells the wind carries to deer nostrils originate on their level, not from up a tree, so it is with us. It hasn’t occurred to us to look or smell in the right place for him because we have no idea where his place is, what kind of place he uses. We might pass him on the street every day – you might pass him on the street every day, Mrs. Longford. But his face is ordinary, his walk is ordinary – everything about him is ordinary. On the surface he’s a little alley cat, not a leopard. Underneath, he’s Dorian Gray, Mr. Hyde, the faces of Eve, Satan incarnate.”

“Then what protection can the community have against him?”

“I’d say vigilance, except that vigilance didn’t prevent his taking girls of a specific type even after we saturated Connecticut with bulletins and warnings. However, it is clear to me that we have frightened him, forced him to give up his daylight abductions in favor of the night. That’s nothing to boast about because it hasn’t stopped him. It hasn’t so much as slowed him down. Yet it’s a ray of hope. If he’s more scared than he was, and we keep the pressure up, he’ll start to make a few mistakes. And, ladies and gentlemen of the press, you have my word that we will not miss his mistakes. They’ll make us the leopard up the tree, and him our particular deer.”

“He did well,” Carmine said to Desdemona that night. “The AP stringer asked him if he was planning to run for governor at the next elections. ‘No, sir, Mr. Dalby,’ he said, grinning from ear to ear, ‘compared to government, a policeman’s lot is a happy one, ghosts and all.’”

“People respond to him. When I saw him on the six o’clock news, he reminded me of a battered old teddy bear.”