“Mind if I do the deed?”
“Mind? Be my guest. I don’t want to see the bitch!”
She was sitting in a comfortable chair, Biddy lying at her feet, ignoring the two uncomfortable young women ordered never to take their eyes off her. Since she couldn’t see, somehow that seemed an unpardonable invasion of her privacy.
“Why, Lieutenant Delmonico!” she exclaimed, straightening as he walked in.
“No V-8 engine in my car to give me away this time. How do you do it, Miss Ponsonby?”
She achieved a simper that made her look old, sly, pinched, pitiful; something about the expression gave him one of those lightning flashes of insight so vital to his police career. It said that she was definitely the second Ghost. Oh, Patsy, Patsy, find me something to put her in the killing premises! Find me a photograph or a movie of her and Chuck in the middle of rape and murder. Grow up, Carmine! There is nothing. The only memorabilia they keep are the heads. What use is a picture, still or moving, to a blind person? What use, for that matter, is a head?
“Lieutenant,” she said with a purr, “you carry your V-8 with you wherever you go. The engine’s not in your car, it’s in you.”
“Have you been informed that your brother, Charles, is dead?”
“Yes, I have. I also know that he did none of the things you say he did. My brother was a highly intellectual, fastidious and terribly kind man. That peasant Marciano accused me of being his lover – pah! I’m glad that I don’t have a cesspool for a mind.”
“We have to take every possibility into account. But you’re free to go, Miss Ponsonby. All charges have been dropped.”
“So I should think.” She tugged the loop on Biddy’s harness.
“Where are you going to stay? Your house is still a crime scene under police investigation and will remain so for some time to come. Would you like me to phone Mrs. Eliza Smith?”
“Certainly not!” she snapped. “If it hadn’t been for that woman’s tale-telling, none of this would have happened. I hope she dies of cancer of the tongue!”
“Then where are you going?”
“I will be at Major Minor’s until I can move back into my home, so be warned. I intend to retain lawyers to watch for my interests as owner of Six Ponsonby Lane, therefore I suggest that you damage nothing. The house committed no crime.”
And out she swept. Winner take all, Carmine. Ghost or no Ghost, that is one formidable woman.
He went back to the house that committed no crime, though he hadn’t offered to drive Claire to Major Minor’s. Silvestri had donated his Lincoln for that. They were now entering upon the saddest time in any case – the flat, uninspiring aftermath.
By the time everyone arrived at the Hug, the news that the Connecticut Monster had been caught was, in news terms, quite old. Each face looked smoother, younger, and each pair of eyes glowed. Oh, the relief! Perhaps now the Hug could return to normal, for obviously the Monster was not a Hugger.
Desdemona hadn’t seen Carmine since she returned from her hike, nor had she expected to, with the Ghost watch keeping him away. But just as she was about to leave for her escorted squad car trip to the Hug on this Wednesday morning, the phone rang: Carmine, sounding curiously unemotional.
“There’s a TV in the Hug boardroom as I remember,” he said. “Turn it on and watch channel six, okay?” Click! He hung up.
Feet dragging, crushed at his impersonal tone, Desdemona unlocked the boardroom and pushed the button on the TV just as the wall clock registered 9 A.M. Oh, how she didn’t want to see this! No sooner had she gotten through the Hug door than all and sundry were whooping that the Monster had been caught. As if the cops in her squad car hadn’t been full of it! Now she would have to see what Carmine had been up to in the night marches, and she feared that. Presumably he was unhurt, but for three nights she had been eaten by worry, even terror. What would she do if he never came home again? Oh, what on earth had possessed her to declare her independence by hiking the weekend before his Ghost watch commenced? Why hadn’t she realized that he wouldn’t come home on Sunday night? All her hopes had been pinned on that as she walked the magic of the woods: how she would throw her arms around him and tell him she couldn’t live without him. But – no Carmine. Just the echoes of his richly red apartment.
The TV shimmered into life. Yes, there was the courthouse, surrounded by a crowd many hundreds strong, journalists everywhere, police everywhere. One cameraman from channel six apparently had found himself a perch on top of a van roof and could pan the whole scene; another was in the crowd, and a third on the sidewalk near an arriving squad car. She spotted Carmine standing with a big uniformed captain she recognized as Danny Marciano. Commissioner Silvestri was at the top of the courthouse steps looking very smart in a uniform twinkling with silver braid. Then from out of the back of the squad car emerged Dr. Charles Ponsonby. Her heart seeming to squeeze up, Desdemona watched with jaw dropped. Ye gods, Charles Ponsonby! A Hugger. Bob Smith’s oldest and best friend. I am witnessing, she thought, the extinction of the Hug. Are the Parson Governors watching this in New York City? Yes, of course they are! Our channel is a network affiliate. Have the Parson Governors found that escape clause? If they haven’t, they will redouble their efforts after this bombshell.
What happened next was so fast it seemed over before it had begun: the little black man, that hat saying WE HAVE SUFFERED, the sound of four shots, Charles Ponsonby going down, and Carmine deliberately putting himself in front of the little black man still holding a squat, ugly pistol. When Carmine did that as the cops all around slapped leather, Desdemona felt herself die, waiting frozen in time for the sound of a dozen guns reflexively cutting him down. His roar of “Hold your fire!” came clearly on the airwaves. Carmine stood miraculously unharmed, the cops were holstering their weapons and moving to grab the little black man, who made no attempt to evade them. She sat shivering, hands over her mouth, eyes starting from their sockets. Carmine, you fool! You idiot! You flaming soldier! You didn’t die – this time. But I am doomed to the fate of a soldier’s woman, always.
Whom to tell first? No, best tell them all at once, right this moment. The Hug had a speaker system: Desdemona used it to summon every Hugger to the lecture theater.
Then she went to Tamara’s office; someone would have to man the phones. Poor Tamara! A shadow of her old self since Keith Kyneton had slammed his door in her face. Even her hair seemed to have wasted away, lackluster and unkempt. She didn’t even react, just nodded and continued to sit staring into space.
The news of Charles Ponsonby’s secret activities broke upon the people in the lecture theater like a clap of thunder: gasps, exclamations, a degree of incredulity.
To Addison Forbes, it was God in the burning bush: with no Ponsonby or Smith in the way, the Hug would become his. Why would the Board of Governors search elsewhere when he was so eminently suitable? He had the clinical experience that drove researchers to produce, his reputation was international. The Board of Governors liked him. With Smith and Ponsonby gone, the Hug under Professor Addison Forbes would go on to bigger and better things! And who needed the conceited Great Panjandrum from India? The world was full of potential Nobel Prize winners.
Walter Polonowski hardly heard Desdemona’s crisply succinct summary; he was too depressed. Four kids from Paola, and a fifth coming up from Marian. With a wedding band looming, Marian was shedding her mistress’s skin to reveal a new epidermis striped in wifely colors. They are serpents, we are their victims.
To Maurice Finch, the news brought sorrow, but sorrow of a peaceful kind. He had always thought that to give up medicine would be tantamount to a death sentence, but the events of the past few months had taught him that this need not be so. His plants were patients too; his skilled and loving hands could tend them, heal them, help them multiply. Yes, life with Cathy on a chicken farm looked very good. And he’d beat those mushrooms yet.