Naked Cruelty. Colleen McCullough

quite exclusive. I use the same two elevators everyone else does. There’s a slot for a key in them.”

      “Do you have any contact with your fellow tenants?” Delia asked. “Any sort of contact.”

      “I know a few of them, but the only one I’m on friendly terms with is Mark Sugarman. He’s three floors down, on the eighth. His girlfriend, Leonie Coustain, lives on the tenth floor. She’s French.” Helen pulled a face. “She used to be vivacious and outgoing, but about three months ago she had a nervous breakdown. Now, not even Mark manages to see her. She’s a snail inside its shell. The worst of it is she won’t get any help, Mark says. He’s very much in love with her, and I used to think that they were made for each other. Now—I really don’t know. Leonie sure doesn’t like him anymore, but he swears he doesn’t know why.” She flushed. “Sorry. That wasn’t a good report—I rambled.”

      “Sometimes rambling is better,” Carmine said. “I don’t think Leonie fell out of love with Mark. She was raped.”

      The color drained from Helen’s face. “Raped?”

      “Yes, definitely,” Carmine said, not yet prepared to mention the Dodo. “What do you know about the Gentleman Walkers of Carew?”

      “The Gentleman Walkers?” she asked, sounding bewildered. “They walk,” she said, and laughed. “Up and down and around and around Carew. They’re a great group of guys.”

      “Do you know them as individuals?” Nick asked.

      “Sure, some of them. Not all of them—Mark says there are over a hundred-forty of them. Mark’s their head honcho.”

      “Good, a name,” said Carmine. “A big group of men patrolling worried me—vigilantes. But so far they’ve kept well within the law, including when they apprehended a couple of peeping Toms and a women’s underwear thief. Then last night a young woman named Maggie Drummond was viciously attacked and raped inside her Carew apartment. She notified us. Now we have sufficient evidence to act, including coming down harder on the Gentleman Walkers.”

      Helen sat, her face a mixture of horror and eagerness. “But I know Maggie Drummond!” she cried. “She goes to all Mark’s parties—so smart! Well, you have to be smart to get post-grad work in bird physiology at Chubb. She’s doing a Ph.D. in bird migration under Professor Hart—the world’s authority.” Her face softened. “Poor Maggie! Will it ruin her, Captain?”

      “Scar her, certainly, but she’s unusually resilient. She insisted on seeing me last night, while the ordeal was still fresh in her mind. He’d partially asphyxiated her multiple times, and she was worried that the trauma might cause her to forget details. She even gave us his name—Didus ineptus. That’s the old term for the dodo, now known as Raphus cucullatus.”

      “Can’t I be of more use than giving you Mark Sugarman’s name?” Helen asked.

      “Yes, you can,” said Delia, “provided you put yourself under my authority and do exactly as you’re told. Will you?”

      “Yes, of course,” Helen said, face lighting up.

      “Good. I suspect we’re going to meet a number of the Dodo’s victims, and it’s vital that women comprise the front face of the investigation. Ever since their individual attacks, these young women can’t cope with men, no matter how sympathetic. You and I, Helen, have to do all the victim contact until we can persuade them to seek help from Dr. Liz Meyers at the rape clinic. That means we spend as much time as we can this afternoon coaching you in how to behave— it’s a matter of technique as well as feminine bonding. I’m hoping to be taking calls tomorrow after Mighty Mike’s breakfast show, but it’s possible we’ll have some responses after Luke Corby. You’re my shadow, Helen—wherever I go, you go. Understood?”

      “Yes!” said Helen fervently. It was here at last, her first case, and she was going to make sure that Delia shone. Because if Delia shone, so did she.

      Carmine took himself off to Carew and the eighth floor of Talisman Towers, the only ritzy block of high rise apartments in a district chiefly famous for its peace, prettiness, and hordes of women students at all levels of a tertiary education. Helen had explained that Mark worked from home, so Carmine fully expected to find him in his apartment.

      “Like Helen, I own my condo,” Mark Sugarman said, leading the way into a big room that had been intended as the living room, but had been turned into a studio. He indicated two hard chairs at a table, and went to the kitchen area to fetch mugs and a coffee pot, then sugar and cream.

      In all visual respects he was a large-yet-medium man, from his height of just under six feet to his face and coloring. What saved him from obscurity were his eyes: long-lashed, widely open, and a vivid green. He was wearing baggy, faded jeans and a short-sleeved shirt whose two breast pockets bulged with items including pencils, cigarettes, a short steel ruler.

      If typical artists are supposed to live in extreme disorder, he was not typical, for the room was immaculately kept; it was painted white and its natural lighting consisted of a whole wall of glass panes looking over the treetops toward Long Island Sound, dreamily blue in this lovely start to Indian summer. Rather than an easel, he worked on a drafting board, in front of which sat a bar stool. A tall table to either side held inks, pens, pencils, an electric pencil sharpener, various protractors and T-squares, a neat pile of rags, and a jar of water. As they passed the board, Carmine was amused to see that it held a black-and-white Indian ink drawing of a wacky-looking family of raccoons. It was very well done, its human element only subtly— but tellingly—suggested.

      “I’m a book illustrator,” Sugarman explained, pouring the coffee. “This one’s aimed at a general market from teens to nineties, so the publisher wants classy drawings—no cheating with cross-hatching or other short cuts. Therefore, hire Mark Sugarman. Few art schools teach classical ink drawing, so I’m in demand. I learned in London and Antwerp.”

      “How long has the neighborhood watch been in existence?” Carmine asked, adding cream and sugar; the coffee was old. “I should tell you that Maggie Drummond was raped last night, and wasn’t frightened enough not to call us. Her rape was atrocious— particularly brutal and demeaning—but I come from her with a request that you tell me everything you know. Maggie is very emphatic. She wants this monster caught.”

      The unusual emerald eyes had widened and shone with tears; Sugarman’s coffee slopped. “Oh, Jesus!”

      “Time to spill the beans about the Gentleman Walkers, sir.”

      “And that’s a relief, Captain.” He drew a breath, reached out automatically for a stack of paper napkins and wiped up his spill. “The first one we knew about was Leonie—my dear, sweet Leonie! I found her when I went up to see if she felt like a walk to blow the cobwebs away. She was—oh, a terrible mess! Not cut up or anything, but bruised and soiled. He’d raped her three times, once real pervert stuff. I wanted to call you, but she wouldn’t let me, swore she’d deny the whole thing. Babbling about her family in France, the disgrace.” He ground his teeth. “Nothing I could say would persuade her to change her mind.”

      “Did you believe Leonie was the first victim?”

      “I did, but Mason Novak—he’s my best pal—said his girl, Shirley Constable, had behaved so like Leonie that he was having suspicions that had never occurred to him before—he thought Shirley had had a nervous breakdown over her work, even though she loved it. After Leonie, he was convinced she’d been raped, but he can’t even get into the same room with her, so—who knows?”

      Carmine put his coffee down. “Mr. Sugarman, even if the women refused to co-operate, you should have brought your suspicions to the police, not organized a neighborhood watch.”

      “l see that now, Captain, but at the time neither Mason nor I did. I put an ad in the Holloman Post announcing that I was forming a walking club—Carew residents only need apply. And I was inundated with walkers! The Gentleman Walkers were an instant success.”