Sins of the Flesh. Colleen McCullough

dear.”

      “Anyway, now at least we had a reason for the gay community’s ignorance—apparently James Doe wasn’t a homosexual and his murder had no gay aspects. Instead, we had to ask ourselves if he might have raped someone.”

      “Perhaps he was homosexual, and raped a male?”

      “Delia! That implication I don’t need!” Abe glowered at her, “Hot weather and you don’t mix, lady. I need a smoke.”

      “Codswallop, of course you don’t. You’re down in the mouth, Abe dear, because the discovery of Jeb Doe does rather put the kibosh on rape theories of any kind. The killer lives for the act of murder, and has to be regarded as a multiple. His reasons for castration will be absolutely individual, not due to some Freudian generalization.” Delia arose in a mustard and coral cloud. “Come on, let’s see if Gus has done the autopsy.”

      They stepped out into the August humidity, up near saturation point, and gasped.

      “There’s method in my madness,” Delia said cheerfully as they descended to the Morgue, one floor below ground. “Everywhere in the ME’s is air-conditioned.” Her face saddened. “It’s still a wee bit of a shock, not seeing Patrick’s cheeky face. He seemed to resign his coroner’s duties overnight.”

      “You can’t blame him.”

      “No, of course not. But miss him, I do.”

      Gustavus Fennell had stepped into Patrick O’Donnell’s shoes as Medical Examiner, a decision that had pleased everybody in the aftermath of Patrick’s sudden illness, a particularly malevolent arthritis. To have replaced a forceful, vital, pioneering man like Patrick with another of the same sort would have led to all kinds of wars, internal and external, whereas dear old Gus (who in fact was neither very old nor very much of a dear) knew all the ropes and could be relied upon to run the Medical Examiner’s department smoothly. Lacking his retired chief’s good looks and charm, Gus had gotten along as Second-in-Command by consciously playing the second lead, as Commissioner John Silvestri was well aware. Now, after three months as ME, the real Gus was starting to shed his veils in an intricate dance that would, Silvestri knew, finally end in revealing a gentle yet obdurate autocrat who would push his department onward and upward with extreme efficiency.

      Like Patrick, Gus enjoyed performing criminal autopsies, the more complicated or mysterious, the better. When Delia and Abe walked, gowned and booteed, into his autopsy room, he was just stripping off his gloves, leaving an assistant to close for him. If the cause of death were unknown and might conceivably have a contagious factor, he worked masked, as he had on Jeb Doe.

      Mask off, he led his visitors to several steel chairs in a quiet corner of the room, and sat with a sigh of relief. His face and hair, stripped of their coverings, were displayed as—no other word would do—nondescript. Mr. Average Everything, to which add, fade into the wallpaper. However, his slight body had a wiry strength its proportions belied, and his face said its owner could be trusted. That he had certain crotchets Abe and Delia knew: he was a strict vegetarian who forbade smoking anywhere in his department, and if circumstances deprived him of his two generous pre-dinner sherries or after-dinner ports, then mild-mannered Dr. Fennell became a hideous Mr. Hyde. His passion was bridge, at which he was an acknowledged master.

      “Unless the fluid or tissue assays come back to show some toxin—I doubt they will—the cause of death is simple starvation,” Gus said, kicking off his chef’s clogs. “My feet are so sore today, I don’t know why. The testicles were enucleated about six weeks before death, by someone who knew exactly how to do it. There was nothing in the alimentary canal that I could call a food residue, but he wasn’t dehydrated.”

      “Water, Gus? Or fruit juice, maybe?” Abe asked.

      “Nothing but plain water is my guess. Certainly nothing with fiber of any kind in it, or indigestible end products. If he were given plain water the starvation metabolism would proceed smooth as silk, and it did. There were no substances under his nails.”

      “May we have a look at him?” Delia asked.

      “Sure.”

      Delia and Abe moved to the dissecting table, where the body now lay unattended.

      Thick, waving black hair, cut to cover the neck and ears but not long enough to be tied back, they noted; it was almost the sole evidence of normality that the corpse displayed, so dynamic were the ravages of a metabolism forced to digest itself to obtain sustenance. The skin was very yellow and waxy, stretched fairly tautly over the skeleton, which showed in vivid detail.

      “His teeth are perfect,” Delia said.

      “Good nutrition and fluoride in the water supply. The latter says he wasn’t raised in Connecticut.” Abe shook his head angrily, balked. “I’ll get Ginny Toscano to flesh out the skull for me, no matter how bad her hysterics are. Jeb needs an artist’s sketch.”

      “Haven’t you heard? We have a new artist,” said Delia, first with this news too. “His name is Hank Jones, and he’s a child just out of art school with a cast iron digestion, absolutely no finer feelings, and a macabre sense of humor.”

      “A child?” Abe asked, grinning.

      “Nineteen, bless him. Ethnicity—you name it, he has at least a drop of it in his veins. His hobby is drawing cadavers at the Medical School, but I met him in our parking lot sketching Paul Bachman’s 1937 Mercedes roadster. He’s gorgeous!”

      “Gorgeous I can live without, but if he doesn’t mind the sight of a nasty dead body, he’s worth knowing,” Abe said.

      “Those who’ve seen his work say he’s good.” Delia raised her voice. “Gus, does starvation make body hair fall out, or has someone depilated the poor little blighter?”

      “The latter, Delia,” Gus answered. “He wasn’t hirsute by nature, but what body hair he had was plucked. Further to hair, his head hair has been dyed black, which was also true of James Doe. The natural color was fairish, for James as well as Jeb. Both had very blue eyes, and skins that tanned well. Bone structure—Caucasian.” Gus spoke from his chair, still waggling his feet.

      Delia and Abe continued to cruise around the table, curiously unsettled by Jeb Doe, who was far from the most horrible body either had ever seen, yet had a power to impress beyond most victims of a violent end. His smell was oddly wrong, which Abe, better educated scientifically than Delia, put down to the beginnings of decay minus some of the usual murder concomitants—no blood, vomitus, open rot. Delia simply thought of it as an utterly bloodless murder, as murder by inches over months. Jeb’s body didn’t look moist or damp, and the head, with its black mop of hair, was a terrifying sight, the skull showing fully under its wrapping of veined skin, which of course gave it the death grin, emphasized by a pair of brown lips drawn back and up in a rictus. Appalling! The eyelids were closed, but Jeb had been gifted with dense, long dark lashes and arched, definitive brows. Nothing about the body suggested mummification—those, Abe and Delia had seen aplenty.

      Finally, convinced Jeb Doe had nothing more to tell them, Abe and Delia thanked Gus and departed.

      Detectives Division was a trifle scattered through the big police presence in County Services, but Carmine’s (and Delia’s) end was easier to access from the ME’s domain by taking the first flight of stairs or elevator; she started up with a wave, leaving Abe to wend his way to his end alone, and grateful for that—with Delia, you never could tell where the conversation might go, and he wanted to hang on to his current thoughts undeflected. Her technique was oblique or tangential because she never saw things as mere mortals did, but that, of course, was exactly why Carmine so valued her. And, he amended, be fair, Abe Goldberg! You value her just as much.

      Carmine had taken Desdemona and their sons to visit his old pal, the movie mogul Myron Mendel Mandelbaum, in Beverly Hills, and wasn’t due back for three weeks. He had bribed Delia by giving her permission to work on a series of missing women that had been bothering her for months, and telling her that the usual crimes and suspects were safe in Abe’s hands, so butt out unless Abe orders