and he noted the presence of psychosis in the medical history. No changes in the brain were present to indicate cause of the psychosis. The boy’s penis, he noted, was uncircumcised and very large, whereas the testes were only partially descended. For 1939, a thorough job. Carmine was left with no doubts that Morton Ponsonby was no more and no less than a hapless victim of the family’s tendency to tragedy. Or maybe what it really said was that Ida Ponsonby’s genetic contribution to her offspring was unsatisfactory.
Right, on to Leonard Ponsonby. The crime happened halfway through January of 1930, in the midst of two feet of snow – one of the colder winters, to produce January blizzards. The train, which had originated in Washington, D.C., had come in from Penn Station in New York City, running two hours late due to frozen points and a snow slide off a steep bank onto the line. Rather than sit inside and perish, the passengers had elected to dig the line free of snow. One car had held about twenty drunks in a group, jobless men hoping for work in Boston, the train’s ultimate destination; they had been the most reluctant shovelers, boozed up, angry, aggressive, working only to keep warm. When the train reached Holloman it stopped for a quarter-hour, enabling the through passengers to buy snacks from the station cafe, a cheaper alternative than the train’s under-patronized dining car.
Ah, here was the most interesting news! Leonard Ponsonby was not disembarking! He was boarding the train to travel to Boston, for so said his ticket. He’d chosen to wait outside in the cold, and, according to one observant passenger, he appeared furtive.
The time was 9 P.M., and this Boston train was the last one for the day. It steamed off on its journey while the station staff made the rounds to lock the waiting rooms, ladies’ room and toilets against the army of vagabonds tramping the nation in search of work or hand-outs, though the twenty-odd drunks had not left the train in Holloman. Somewhere between Hartford and the Massachusetts border they jumped off into the night, which was why they had come under suspicion and why, after fruitless inquiries, they had ended in bearing the blame.
Leonard Ponsonby was lying in the snow with his head beaten to a pulp; near him lay a woman and a female child, their heads also reduced to pulp. Ponsonby’s wallet contents identified him, but the woman and child carried nothing to say who they were. Her old, cheap pocketbook held one dollar and ninety cents in coins, an unironed handkerchief and two cookies. A carpetbag contained clean but very cheap underwear for a woman and a girl child, socks, stockings, two scarves and a little girl’s dress. The woman was quite young, the child about six. Ponsonby was described as well dressed and prosperous, with $2,000 in notes in his wallet, a diamond stick-pin in his tie, and four valuable diamonds in each of his platinum cuff links. Whereas the woman and child had been summed up in one powerfully suggestive word: “breadline.”
To Carmine’s sensitive nose, three weird murders. One man, prosperous, on his own, plus a breadline woman and child not connected to him. Robbery not a motive. All three skulking outside in the snow when they should have been inside warming their hands on a steam radiator. Of one thing he was sure: the gang from the train had had nothing to do with these murders.
The real question was, which one was the intended victim? The other two were mere witnesses, killed because they had seen the wielder of the blunt instrument that had done for all three with a degree of savagery commented upon in the otherwise tersely sloppy police report. Heads, the intended victim was Leonard Ponsonby. Tails, it was the woman. If the coin stood on its edge, then it was the little girl.
There were no photographs whatsoever. The information about the woman and her presumed daughter or relative of some kind was contained in their slender file next to Ponsonby’s thicker one in the January Box 2 archives. All three had died a blunt-instrument death confined to their skulls, mashed to pulp, but the detective hadn’t been smart enough to see that Ponsonby had to have been the first victim; the woman and child looked on, paralyzed with fear, until the woman’s turn came, and then the child’s. Had Ponsonby not been first, he would have put up a fight. So whoever had held the blunt instrument – Carmine’s experienced money was on a baseball bat – had crept up through the snow and struck Ponsonby before he noticed anyone approaching. Another ghost, how extraordinary.
When he went outside to see the archivists, they had locked up their trailer and gone for the day – half an hour early. Time, John Silvestri, to turn the blinding beam of your duty supervisors upon Police Archives at Caterby Street. The three files in his left hand, Carmine departed too: those cockroaches would not discover any missing files until he chose to return them. A pair of cool little bureaucratic crooks, secure in the knowledge that, provided the records didn’t burn, no one would be interested enough in their existence to worry about them. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
On his way back to the County Services building he called in to the
What with one thing and another, he was late meeting Desdemona in Malvolio’s.
“Sorry,” he said, sliding into the booth opposite her. “You now have a preview of what life is like when your boyfriend is a cop. Scads of missed appointments, a lot of dinners gone cold. I’m glad you’re not a cook. Eating out is the best alternative, and nowhere better than Malvolio’s, a cop diner. They’ll doggy-bag anything from a whole meal to one spoonfull of apple pie the minute someone raps on the window.”
“I quite like a cop boyfriend,” she said, smiling. “I’ve ordered, but asked Luigi to hold off for a while. You’re far too generous, never letting me pay at least my share of the bill.”
“In my family, a man who let a woman pay would be lynched.”
“You look as if you’ve had rather a good day for a change.”
“Yes, I found out bunches of things. Trouble is, I think that they’re all red herrings. Still, it’s fun finding out.” He reached across the table to take her hand, turned it over. “It’s fun finding out about you too.”
She squeezed his fingers. “Ditto, Carmine.”
“In spite of this terrible case, Desdemona, my life has improved over the last days. You’re a part of it, lovely lady.”
No one had ever called her a lovely lady before; she felt a rush of confused gratification flood through her, went a bright red, didn’t know where to look.
Six years ago in Lincoln she had thought herself in love with a wonderful man, a doctor; until, passing his door, she heard his voice through it.
“Who, Desperate Desdemona? My dear chap, the ugly ones are always so grateful that they’re well worth wooing. They make good mothers, and one never has to worry about the milkman, does one? After all, one doesn’t gaze at the mantelpiece while one is poking the fire, so I shall marry Desdemona. Our children will be clever into the bargain. Also tall.”
She had started making plans to emigrate the very next day, vowing to herself that she would never again lay herself open to that kind of pragmatic cruelty.
Now, thanks to a faceless monster, here she was living with Carmine in his apartment and perhaps taking it for granted that he loved her the way she loved him. Words were cheap – hadn’t the Lincoln doctor proved that? How much of what he had said to her originated in his job, his protectiveness, his shock at what had almost happened to her? Oh, please, Carmine, don’t let me down!
Chapter 25
Day Thirty since Faith Khouri’s abduction would arrive in one week’s time, and no one, including Carmine, had reason to believe that they stood a better chance now to prevent another murder than they had four months ago. When had any other case gone on so long in the face of so much manpower, so many precautions, warnings, such statewide publicity?
They had agreed that the general procedure would be the same: every suspect in the state would be placed
