Naked Cruelty Read online

  “Naturally,” she said, brows rising haughtily.

  “Okay, then—but keep in touch, hear me? Buzz, you want to ride with me, or go on your own?”

  “On my own,” Buzz said quickly. “We’re just looking, we don’t need brute strength. If one of us finds something, it’s a find for the whole team.”

  “I can live with that,” Corey said, moving doorward.

  “Sir, may I check up on Morty first?” Helen asked.

  She really was a pest! “Okay, okay, whatever!” he snapped, and departed.

  Helen clattered down the stairs in her nun’s shoes—not very silent, for all their practicality—and crossed the courtyard that led to the old annex and the cells.

  She pushed open the door and beheld Virgil Simms in his glass-fronted office, head bent, working away.

  “Hi, Virgil,” she said. “How’s Morty?”

  “Asleep by now, I guess. His wife served him divorce papers and he’s real cut up.”

  “Oh, poor Morty! Did he tell you?”

  “Didn’t need to. The papers were all around him on the bed. He’s much better off without the bitch, but he refuses to see it. It’s more than his loving her. I think he’s terrified she’ll take him to the cleaners. Morty’s tighter than a fish’s ass.”

  The roar of a .38 going off in an enclosed space destroyed their conversation; they went rigid.

  “Morty!” Virgil cried, leaping around his desk.

  He was out the door and running down the hall in a flash, toward a door at its end. He charged through it and stopped, Helen cannoning into him.

  “Jesus, Morty!”

  Helen shoved him to one side so she could see Morty Jones sitting on the edge of a bed, sagging forward, his .38 still in his hand, his brains a surreal pattern on the wall behind him.

  “Get out of here, Virgil,” she rapped, pushing him through the door and closing it on two uniforms hurrying toward them. “You,” she said to one of them, “go back and guard the main entrance. No one is to come into Cells. And you,” she said to the other, “stay here outside this door. Don’t let anyone in.”

  Virgil Simms looked on the verge of collapse; Helen got him into his office chair and picked up the phone.

  “Captain Delmonico? Please come immediately to the Cells, and bring Captain Vasquez with you. There’s been an accident.”

  Carmine and Fernando arrived together five minutes later, staring in some amazement at the young woman who had apparently assumed command.

  “No one’s come in or gone out, but I haven’t called the Medical Examiner yet,” she said, forehead dewed with sweat. “Sergeant Jones ate his gun five minutes ago. Sergeant Simms and I heard the report. There was nothing we could do for Sergeant Jones, so we closed the door on him, came here, and called you at once.”

  “We?” asked Captain Vasquez.

  “Yes, sir, we,” Helen said steadily.

  “Why are you here at all, Miss MacIntosh?” Fernando asked.

  “I was worried about Sergeant Jones, sir, because I thought he had been served with divorce papers.”

  “Why look for him here?”

  “I understand that in his shock he came looking for Sergeant Simms, sir. Or so my enquiries indicated.”

  “When Morty appeared I thought he was going to pass out, sir, so I told him to rest in the women’s cell,” said Virgil Simms.

  “Let’s look,” said Fernando.

  The two captains gazed at the ruin of Morty Jones, whose body still remained as it had been when he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The door opened and Patrick O’Donnell walked in.

  “Jesus, Carmine, didn’t anyone suspect this was coming?”

  “Yes, I did,” said Carmine. “Unfortunately I was howled down by his lieutenant.” He peered at the papers on the bed, drew a glove out of his pocket and picked up the full length photograph of Ava Jones. “Someone’s touched this up,” he said to Fernando Vasquez.

  “The poor bastard!” Fernando said. “Why didn’t he wait until he had a legal opinion? The touching up is amateurish, it would never hold up in court.”

  “Too late now,” Carmine said. “Did he suffer, Patsy?”

  “I would say, not at all, cuz. The bullet went through the vital structures of the brain stem, from the exit wound.”

  Fernando drew Carmine aside. “What’s with his being allowed to use the women’s cell?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” said Carmine with complete truth. “I can tell you that Morty and Virgil Simms have been pals since academy days. They worked a patrol car together for years, too. Simms hasn’t been down here more than a few weeks, I understand?”

  “True. But we do have a sick bay, Carmine. I’ll have to question Miss MacIntosh.”

  Carmine stared at him blankly. “Why?”

  “She was down here at the time.”

  “Under specific orders from me. I asked her to keep an eye on Morty after I learned he’d been served with papers I assumed were divorce. Miss MacIntosh is needed where everyone we can spare is needed, Fernando—looking for Kurt von Fahlendorf.”

  The Captain of Uniforms thought for a moment, then nodded. “Very well, I’ll take your word for it.”

  “You’d better!” said Carmine, none too pleased. “I’m not used to its being doubted, and nothing gives you the right to doubt it. New brooms ought to save their bristles for genuine corruption. This is not corruption, it’s a tragedy.”

  He jerked his head at Helen as he passed the Cells office on his way out, his expression flinty; Helen scrambled to keep up as he strode away.

  “Did you fix Virgil up with a watertight story?” he asked. “If Captain Vasquez suspects liquor’s involved—”

  The eyes gazing up at him were limpid blue pools. “Yes, of course, sir. It’s too complicated for a new captain of uniforms.”

  “Good. Now go do what you were going to do.”

  While I, he thought, clean up the shambles that the death of Morty Jones is going to make. He will have died intestate; men like Morty don’t make wills, or plan for the future. That means his cop-fucking wife won’t get everything, though if he’d made a will he would probably have named her sole legatee. His kids will inherit at least half, and Ava is no stranger to Child Welfare; they won’t let a court give Ava power over the kids’ share. Oh, Jesus, what a mess!

  That stupid, horny wife! Why did Morty love her?

  When Carmine tried to find Corey, he was told that Lieutenant Marshall was out searching for Kurt von Fahlendorf.

  “I failed to take adequate precautions,” he told Silvestri a few moments later.

  “Nonsense, Carmine! It’s a rare cop who’s killed in the line of duty, though the statistics are creeping up every year, whereas cops who eat their gun are common. The work’s hard, and all too often thankless. How many women do you know who can put up with a police marriage? Damned few! My Gloria, Danny’s Netty, your Desdemona, Abe’s Betty. Looks like Fernando’s Solidad. A few yeah, but it’s worst for the cops with unsuitable wives.”

  “You’re right, John, it’s Ava at fault. Screwing cops for a hobby! I wonder what her real name is? Bertha? Gertrude?”

  “You don’t think it’s Ava?”

  “The only Ava I know is Ava Gardner.”

  “A movie star. But stop blaming yourself, Carmine. If a rookie like Helen MacIntosh could see this coming, Corey should have. Helen’s turning out a good girl.”

  “Far better than I’d hoped. The NYPD lost a fine detective when it stuck her in Traffic. Resourceful too.”

  However, Carmine didn’t inform the Commissioner that her resourcefulness ran to concocting leakproof stories for cell sergeants moved by pity to break the rules for an old friend.

  “I’d better find an address for Ava,” Carmine said.

  There was a bunker
light in the ceiling just to one side of the trapdoor; a dim bulb burned behind extremely thick glass and a steel cage, though Kurt’s keen eyes discerned faint hints of more powerful wiring. The original light hadn’t been this one.

  He was hungry, but far thirstier. As best he had calculated, he was somewhere in the second twelve hours of his captivity; his watch was on his wrist, but broken. Vaguely he remembered skidding on Persimmon Street and getting out of his car to see if he had collided with anything. Then came a hard blow to his head, and then—nothing. The most horrifying part of a painful arousal had been the throbbing in his left hand, roughly bound in his own handkerchief—his little finger was gone! Amputated! Dislodging the blood-soaked linen to find this out had started the stump bleeding again, and he had wrestled to seal it using his right hand and his teeth; but it ached badly, and the fabric was wet again. Why had they done that?

  There was no food of any kind, but a half-gallon container of water was sitting on the ground in one corner, and an empty bucket in another. Without thinking he had drunk deeply, even spilled some of the water down his shirt front before suddenly realizing that when it was gone, he had no guarantee of more. His head pounded, his eyes felt gritty and sore.

  He could hear nothing. No wind whined or howled, no fluid coursed through pipes or a stream bed, no traffic roared either near or far, no 60-cycle hum came from overhead wires or buried power cables, no rattle of jack-hammers or ponderous grope of caterpillar tracks came to his ears. Nothing. Nothing! Nor could he feel even the faintest flutter of vibration. As for sight—without the bunker light he would be blind.

  How long he sat huddled in a corner he couldn’t know, save that he dozed, even slept deeply once. Then he got to his feet and began to pace, up and down, up and down, up and down … A wasted, futile activity! Faltering, he sat down on the concrete floor with a thump that hurt his sacrum, and started to weep. But that accomplished nothing either; sniffling, he rummaged in his hip pocket for his other handkerchief. It wasn’t there, they must have used it on his hand, then thrown it away. A pencil fell out, rolled a tiny distance, and stopped; swiping his face with his bound hand, Kurt considered what the pencil had done, and concluded that the floor was almost perfectly level. At least in that spot.

  Checking the level of the floor took some time; he felt occupied, at least. One hand out, he stroked a wall. Plaster, quite smooth. Unpainted, which was interesting. Who would go to so much trouble to plaster a wall, then leave it unpainted or unpapered? Another mystery. From that he passed to emptying out every one of his pockets: three in his jacket, one in his shirt, five in his trousers. No wallet or keys, though he had had them in the Porsche after Buffo’s. His plunder was typical, he thought wryly: a total of fifteen German-made 2B pencils; four red ball-point pens; a Faber-Castell eraser; a notebook on a spiral wire; a Swiss Army knife; a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers in a clear plastic case; and a bottle of Liquid Paper white-out.

  A consuming thirst was drying out his mouth and he was finding it increasingly difficult to wet it with a new secretion of spit, so he shut it as tightly as he could. He wasn’t a physiologist, no, but he did understand that an open mouth was drier than a closed one. Since he was alone and had no need to speak, he would keep his mouth permanently shut. Until, he thought ironically, death ensued. For he knew now that he was meant to die.

  How to pass the time? That was the worst, the vainest question of all—until he really looked at his treasure trove of pencils and pens, his eraser and white-out.

  I will use the walls to do mathematics! he thought, suddenly excited. I will go back over all my equations and check that they are right. Some of my peers insist I am wrong, and I have refuted them in the comfort of my study, using proper blackboards that must be erased. But here, in this place, I cannot do that. I’ll write very small, and not erase one single step. By the time I am too weak to hold a pencil, I will have left my entire career behind on these walls. And when my pencils grow blunt, I will sharpen them with my Swiss Army knife. I may never need the implement that gets a stone out of a horse’s hoof, but I will make great and fine use of the blade.

  He stood in the center of the room and surveyed his prison keenly: where to begin? Yes, that far left-hand corner! One wall at a time. He was so excited that he knocked his left hand against a wall as he spun around; the bleeding increased. Sparing it no more than an angry glance, Kurt von Fahlendorf ignored it as he went to the designated spot and started below a very large infinity sign written in red ball-point. His chapters would be in red, a little like Helen and her colored journals.

  “When I heard,” said Desdemona, tramping through the forest alongside Carmine, “that almost everybody was working alone, I decided that it wouldn’t do Julian or Alex any harm to spend a few days with Prunella. It’s impossible for me to hike these days, so don’t you dare send me home.”

  She had topped the ridge in front of him like a glorious figurehead on a mighty ship of the line, he had thought, winded; as he watched her come down the slope to join him; his knees went weak, it was all he could do to stay upright. What a woman! A goddess! And she’s mine!

  “Today is one day I don’t need to be alone,” he said. “I guess you’ve heard about Morty Jones?”

  “Yes. Netty Marciano called me. So did John Silvestri, who says you’re blaming yourself too much.”

  “How do people box themselves so tightly into a corner that the only way out is to eat a gun?” he asked.

  “Suicide is the ultimately selfish act, my love, you know that. Think what a mess Morty’s left behind. No will, even, so Netty says. He and Ava should have made wills on their wedding day as we did. Quitting this earth is complicated when there are children and property involved, and worse with a vengeful, greedy wife. Though Ava is going to have to look elsewhere for lovers than the Holloman PD, according to Netty. The ranks have closed against her. The poor little children are in a bit of a limbo—Ava’s more interested in what money she can get.”

  “And here was I thinking that when Danny retired, Netty’s sources would dry up. I’m glad they haven’t. Many’s the time she’s given us a lead.” Carmine sighed. “Like you, I grieve for the kids. I sometimes think people should have to have a license to produce them. Whatever, it shouldn’t have happened to Morty, he didn’t have the strength to deal with Ava. The thing is, how do I approach Corey?”

  She paused, shading her eyes; the sun was past its zenith. “Is that a shack down here?”

  “It is. It won’t yield anything, Desdemona, but we leave no stone unturned.”

  “You approach Corey as you ought,” she said as their pace increased. “He’s earned some censure, no doubt of that.”

  “I dread bad feelings. Stay back behind this tree until I make sure the coast is clear.”

  “Of course you dread bad feelings!” she shouted at his back. “You’re a good boss, and good bosses are soft as well as hard. I suffer because I have to watch you suffer, but I’ll do what I can to help. Like a favorite dinner,” she said slyly.

  “Terrible woman! Food is not uppermost in my mind.”

  “It will be, by dinner time.”

  They examined the shack, long decayed; it had no cellar or stouter compartment.

  “We’re working toward North Rock, aren’t we?” Desdemona asked as they walked on.

  “Yes, into the cleft where the deserted mansion is.”

  “Do you think—?”

  “We’ll reach it tomorrow, but we won’t find Kurt there. Would you use it if you were a kidnapper, knowing it will be gone over the way a chimpanzee picks for lice? A whole week has to elapse between demand and ransom payment—no, they’ve stashed Kurt in a place virtually impossible to find.”

  “Oh, Carmine!” she cried. “People are so diabolical—and so greedy! I can understand the Dodo better, killing for sexual urges he can’t control. But greed? It’s—it’s despicable, and that’s
worse than monstrous!”

  “Murder of any kind is diabolical.” Carmine gave his wife a shrewd glance. “The shadows are too long, lovely lady. Let’s go home to our kids.”

  CHAPTER IV

  “We’re searching on a proper grid, Frau von Fahlendorf … That makes it more likely that we’ll find your brother’s prison, but we’re working in ignorance … I don’t think you need fear that our police efficiency isn’t up to the task … Yes, ma’am, that is correct, but we cannot tell our journalists what to say. We have freedom of the press, and the trashier ones tend to make things up if the story isn’t dramatic enough … I agree, this is one story doesn’t need embroidering, but … Thank you, Frau von Fahlendorf … Good afternoon.”

  “Phew!” Helen exclaimed, putting the phone down. “They really do think they’re the only ones can do anything, don’t they? She’s an autocrat, the Frau. She either suspects or knows that the kidnappers are German, so she’s on the defensive. Was I okay, sir?”

  “You did well,” said Carmine. “What intrigues me is that the family von Fahlendorf hasn’t sent someone to Holloman, though they’ve had the weekend to do it. It’s where Kurt is, no matter where the kidnappers are. That raises some possibilities: one is that Dagmar knows Kurt is already dead, and another, that Dagmar knows they’re going to get Kurt back alive. I ask myself, is someone in Germany, acting for the kidnappers, in direct contact with Dagmar, who would rather trust villains from her own part of the world than good guys from a country she doesn’t know? A country, moreover, that stole her beloved Kurtchen. She’s forgotten it was his choice to emigrate.”

  “To me, the most important point,” said Delia, “is why the family hasn’t sent someone here? What if we find Kurt alive? The poor chap won’t be greeted by one family face, and that positively stinks. Even my potty papa would come for me.”

  “That tells me they know he’s dead,” said Nick.

  “They’re going to refuse to pay the ransom?” Helen asked.