On, Off. Colleen McCullough

look in his eyes told Carmine that he had a very big racial chip on his shoulder.

      Neither wife nor her nephew was willing to leave, but Carmine didn’t have to exert his authority: Otis exerted his.

      “Go away and leave us be,” he said curtly.

      Both of them left immediately, Celeste with warnings of what would happen to Carmine if he upset her husband.

      “You have a loyal family,” said Carmine as he perched on a large, clear plastic ottoman filled with red plastic roses.

      “I got a loyal wife” from Otis, followed by a snort. “That kid’s a menace. Wants to make a name for hisself in the Black Brigade, says he’s found the prophet Mohammed an’ is gonna call hisself Ali somethin’ or other. It’s the roots thing, like with any people stolen in millions, but far as I know, the le Clercs come from a part of Africa worshiped King Kong, not Allah. I am an old-fashioned man, Lieutenant, don’t hold with tryin’ to be someone I ain’t. I go to the Baptist church an’ Celeste goes to the Catholic church. I been a black man in a white man’s army, but if the Germans and the Japs had won, I’d a been a helluva lot worse off, is how I see it. I got a little money in the bank, an’ when I retire, I am goin’ back to Georgia to farm. I had it up to here”—he put his hand to his throat—“with Connecticut winters. Still an’ all, that’s not why I wanted to see you, sir.”

      “Why did you want to see me, Mr. Green?”

      “Otis. To get it outta the way. How many people know what I found in that fridge?”

      “Hardly any, and we’re trying to keep it that way.”

      “It was a little girl, wasn’t it?”

      “No. Not a child, at any rate. We know she was from a family of Dominicans, and we know she was sixteen years old.”

      “So she black, not white.”

      “I’d prefer to say she was neither, Otis. A mixture.”

      “Lieutenant, this is a terrible sin!”

      “Yes, it is.”

      Carmine paused while Otis muttered under his breath, let him calm down, then broached the subject of bags.

      “Is there a usual pattern to the number and size of the bags in the fridge, Otis?”

      “I guess so,” Otis said after some thought. “I mean, I know when Mrs. Liebman’s doin’ decerebrations ‘cos there’s four to six cat bags. Otherwise, it’s mostly rat bags. If a macaque dies, the way we thought Jimmy had, then there’s a real big bag, but I will always know what’s in it ‘cos Cecil will be cryin’ his heart out.”

      “So when there are four to six cat bags in the fridge, you know that Mrs. Liebman has been decerebrating.”

      “ ’s right, Lieutenant.”

      “Can you remember any time in the past when there were four to six cat bags in the fridge that Mrs. Liebman couldn’t have had anything to do with?”

      Otis looked surprised, tried to sit up.

      “You want your wife in jail for murdering me, Otis? Lie back down, man!”

      “About six months ago. Six cat bags when Mrs. Liebman was away on vacation. I remember wonderin’ who was fillin’ in for her, but then I was needed, so I just threw them bags into my bin an’ wheeled them off to the incinerator.”

      Carmine rose. “That’s a great help. Thanks, Otis.”

      The visitor hadn’t let himself out of the downstairs front door before Celeste and Wesley were back.

      “You okay?” Celeste demanded.

      “Better than before he came,” said Otis sturdily.

      “What color’s the body?” Wesley demanded. “Did the cop say?”

      “Not white, but not black either.”

      “A mulatto?”

      “He didn’t say that. That’s a Louisiana word, Wes.”

      “Mulatto’s black, not white,” said Wesley with satisfaction.

      “Don’t you go makin’ mountains outta molehills!” Otis cried.

      “I gotta see Mohammed,” was Wesley’s rejoinder. He zipped himself into his black imitation leather jacket with the white fist painted on its back.

      “You’re not seeing Mohammed, boy, you’re going to work this minute! You do not qualify for Welfare and I am not boarding you for nothing!” Celeste snapped. “Go on, shoo!”

      Sighing, Wesley divested himself of his passport to Mohammed el Nesr’s headquarters at 18 Fifteenth Street, put on a down jacket instead, and hied himself off in his battered 1953 De Soto to Parson Surgical Instruments. Where, if he had bothered to enquire, which he didn’t, he could have discovered that his dexterity at crafting mosquito forceps had more than once made the difference between continued employment and a pink slip.

      

      For Carmine the day was depressing and bitter; the missing persons files that fitted the Mercedes description were beginning to arrive on his desk. Six more, to be exact, one every two months throughout 1964: Waterbury, Holloman, Middletown, Danbury, Meriden and Torrington. The only place where he had repeated himself in nearly two years was Norwalk. Every girl was sixteen years old and of mixed blood originating in the Caribbean, though never a family of recent immigrants. Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad, Martinique, Cuba. Five feet tall, stunningly pretty, of mature figure, extremely carefully reared. All the new arrivals on his desk were Catholic, though not all had gone to Catholic schools. None had had a boyfriend, all were straight-A students and popular with their classmates. More importantly, none had confided in a friend or a member of her family about having a new friend, or a new kind of good deed to practise, or even a new acquaintance.

      At 3 p.m. he climbed alone into the Ford and started down I–95 to Norwalk, where Lieutenant Joe Brown had arranged for him to see the Alvarez family in their home. He couldn’t be there himself, he was quick to add; Carmine knew why. Joe couldn’t face another session with the Alvarezes.

      The house was a three-family one that Jose Alvarez owned; he lived in the bottom floor apartment with his wife and children, and rented out the middle and top floor apartments. This was how all working people aspired to live: virtually rent free themselves, the middle apartment paying the mortgage and utilities, and the top one bringing in that little extra against repairs as well as to save for rainy days. Living on the bottom floor, they had the backyard, half of the four-car garage, and the basement for their own use. And a landlord who lived on the premises was able to keep a stern eye on the tenants.

      Like all its neighbors, the house was painted a darkish grey, had double windows whose outer sets were replaced in summer by insect screens, a front porch right on the sidewalk, but a big backyard surrounded by a high chain link fence; the garage sat across its back beyond a driveway down one side of the house. As Carmine stood on the oak-lined street looking, he could hear the baying of a large dog; scant chance of anyone’s breaking in via the back porch with a hound on patrol.

      The priest opened the front door, which was separate from the door leading to the two upstairs apartments. Carmine gave the cleric a smile and shrugged himself out of his overcoat.

      “I’m sorry to have to do this, Father,” he said. “My name is Carmine Delmonico. Should I be Lieutenant or Carmine in there?”

      After some consideration the priest said, “Lieutenant would be better, I think. I’m Bart Tesoriero.”

      “Do you need to speak Spanish in your parish?”

      Father Tesoriero opened the inner door. “No, though I do have a fair number of Hispanic parishioners. It’s an old part of town, they’ve all been here a long time. No Hell’s Kitchen, that’s for sure.”

      The