On, Off

“Whereabouts are they made?”

She nibbled on a cruller, clearly enjoying her role as an expert.

“We have a small factory in Worcester, Mass. My sister runs Boston, I run White Plains, our brother runs the factory. A family business – we’re the sole owners.”

“Do men ever come in to buy?”

“Sometimes, Lieutenant, but on the whole Tinker Bell clients are women. Men may buy lingerie for their wives, but they usually avoid buying party dresses for their daughters.”

“Would you ever sell two dresses in the same size and color to the same buyer on the same day? Like, for twins?”

“Yes, it does happen, but it involves a wait of a day for us to get in the second dress. Women with twins order in advance.”

“What about someone’s buying, say, my pink lace and my lilac whatever-it-is -”

“Broderie Anglaise,” she interrupted.

“Thanks, I’ll write that down. Would someone buy two models in different colors in the same size on the same day?”

“Only once,” she said, and sighed in reminiscent pleasure. “Oh, what a sale that was! Twelve dresses in the ten-to-twelve size, each one a different model and color.”

The hair on Carmine’s neck stood up. “When?”

“Toward the end of 1963, I think it was. I can look it up.”

“Before we go back and I get you to do that, Mrs. Dobchik, do you remember who this buyer was? What she looked like?”

“I remember very well,” said the perfect witness. “Not her name – she paid cash. But she was in the grandmother age group. About fifty-five. Wore a sable coat and a snappy sable hat, had blue-rinsed hair, good but not overdone make-up, big nose, blue eyes, elegant bifocal glasses, a pleasant speaking voice. Her bag and shoes were matching Charles Jourdan, and she wore longish kid gloves in sable brown like the shoes and bag. A uniformed chauffeur carried all the boxes out to her limo. It was a black Lincoln.”

“Doesn’t sound as if she needed food stamps.”

“Heavens to Betsy, no! It remains the biggest single sale in party dresses we’ve ever had. One-fifty each, eighteen hundred bucks. She peeled hundred-dollar bills off a two-inch stack.”

“Did you happen to ask her why she was buying so many party dresses in the same size?”

“Sure I did – who wouldn’t? She smiled and said she was the local representative of a charity organization that was sending the dresses to an orphanage in Buffalo for Christmas gifts.”

“Did you believe her?”

Giselle Dobchik grinned. “It’s just as believable as buying twelve dresses in the same size, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

They returned to Tinker Bell, where Mrs. Dobchik produced her record of the sale. No name, cash tendered.

“You took the numbers of the bills,” Carmine said. “Why?”

“There was a counterfeit scare at the time, so I checked with my bank while the girls were boxing everything up.”

“And they weren’t counterfeit?”

“No, they were the real McCoy, but the bank was interested in them because they’d been issued in 1933 right after we went off the gold standard, and were in near-mint condition.” Mrs. Dobchik shrugged. “Ask me did I care? They were legal tender. My bank manager thought they’d been hoarded.”

Carmine scanned the list of eighteen numbers. “I agree. They’re consecutive. Very unusual, but no help to me.”

“Is this a part of some big, exciting case?” Mrs. Dobchik asked, walking him to the door.

“Afraid not, ma’am. Another hundred-dollar bill scare.”

“We now know that the Ghosts had planned the second series of murders before they started on the first,” Carmine said to his fascinated audience. “The sale was made in December of 1963 well before the very first victim, Rosita Esperanza, was abducted. They ploughed through a dozen girls at the rate of one every two months for two years with twelve Tinker Bell dresses packed in mothballs against the day when they’d be used. Whoever the Ghosts are, they are not following a moon cycle, which is what the psychiatrists want to think now that they’re down to one every thirty days. The moon has nothing to do with the Ghosts. They’re cycling on the sun – twelves, twelves, twelves.”

“Does finding out about Tinker Bell help?” Silvestri asked.

“Not until there’s a trial.”

“But first, find the Ghosts,” said Marciano. “Who do you think Grandma is, Carmine?”

“One of the Ghosts.”

“But you said these aren’t women’s crimes.”

“I still say that, Danny. However, it’s much easier for a man to disguise himself as an elderly woman than a young one. Rougher skin and creases don’t matter as much.”

“I love the props,” Silvestri said dryly. “Sable coats, a chauffeur and limo. Could we try the limo angle?”

“I’ll get Corey on to it tomorrow, John, but don’t hope. The chauffeur was the other Ghost, I’m picking. Funny, that. Mrs. Dobchik could remember every detail about Grandma down to bifocal glasses, but not a thing about the chauffeur apart from a black suit, cap, and leather gloves.”

“No, it’s logical,” said Patrick. “Your Mrs. Dobchik is in the clothing business. She caters to wealthy women every day, but not to workingmen. The women she files in her memory, and she knows every kind of fur, every make of French bags and shoes. I’ll bet Grandma never took her kid gloves off for a second, even when she peeled hundreds off her stack.”

“You’re right, Patsy. Gloved throughout.”

Silvestri growled. “So we’re no closer to the Ghosts.”

“In one way, John, yet we have made progress. Since they leave no evidence and no one has come forward with a description, we’re looking for a needle in a haystack. How many people in Connecticut, three million? As states go it’s pretty small – no big cities, a dozen small ones, a hundred towns. Well, that’s our haystack. But I wasn’t long into this case before I realized that looking for the needle isn’t the way to go. The Tinker Bell dresses may seem like one more dead end, but I don’t think that’s true. They’re a new nail in the coffin, another piece of evidence. Anything that tells us a fact about the Ghosts gets us that much closer to them. What we’re looking at is a jigsaw puzzle made of cloudless blue sky, but the Tinker Bell dresses have filled in a blank space. The amount of sky is growing.”

Carmine leaned forward, running with his idea. “First off, one Ghost has become two Ghosts. Secondly, the two Ghosts are as close as brothers. I don’t know what color their skin is, but what they see in their collective mind is a face. More than anything else, a face. The kind of face you don’t see on white white girls, nor very often on black black girls. The Ghosts work as a team in the true sense – each has a specific set of tasks, areas of expertise. That probably extends to what they do with and to their victims once captured. The rape turns them on, but the victim has to be a virgin in every sense – they’re not interested in heavy petters with intact hymens. One Ghost gives the victim her first kiss, so maybe the other Ghost deflowers her. I see the teamwork persisting – you get to do this, I get to do that. About the actual killing, I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the subservient Ghost does it. He cleans up. The only reason they keep the heads is the face, which means that when we find them we are going to find every head going back to Rosita Esperanza. While ever their activities weren’t known to the police, they got a kick out of the daylight abductions, but from Francine Murray on, they sweated. I’m beginning to think that they switched to the night because of police awareness, not as part of a consciously designed new method. Night abductions are less risky, simple as that.”

Patrick sat with eyes narrowed as if focused on something very small. “The face,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve heard you discard all the other criteria, Carmine. What makes you think it’s just the face? Why have you discarded color, creed, race, size, innocence?”

“Oh, Patsy, you know how often I’ve been fixed on all of them and each of them, but I’ve finally settled for the face. It came to me on the drive – wham!” He palmed a fist, wham! “Margaretta Bewlee told me. My black pearl after a dozen creamy ones. What did she have in common with the other girls? And the