Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [72]
The detective and his family had not progressed half a block when a chunky man in a dark suit crossed the street and tapped Littlemore on his shoulder. It was one of Director Flynn’s deputies.
“I got a message for you,” said the deputy.
“Oh yeah?” said Littlemore. “Spill it.”
“Chief knows you been questioning United States letter carriers.”
“So?”
“He don’t like you questioning United States letter carriers.”
“Is that right? Well, I got a message for Big Bill,” replied Littlemore. “You tell him the word is mailman. Just mailman. Going to church today?”
“Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” said Flynn’s man. He looked at Littlemore’s children and then at their mother in her church dress. “Nice family. Chief knows all about your family. Eye-talian, ain’t they?”
Littlemore walked up close to the man. “You wouldn’t be trying to threaten me, would you?”
“We was just wondering why the son of an Irishman would marry an Eye-talian.”
“Nice investigating,” said Littlemore. “My father isn’t Irish.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Then how come he drinks like one?” The deputy, a much larger man than Littlemore, laughed richly at his jest, producing the sounds har har har. “I heard your Pa hasn’t been sober since they kicked him off the force.”
Littlemore laughed good-naturedly, shook his head, and turned away. “Okay, you win round one,” he said before spinning around and leveling the deputy with one punch to his midsection followed by another to his rotund face. The deputy tried to get up, but fell in a stupor back to the sidewalk. “You might want to work on round two next time.”
Littlemore and his family proceeded to church.
After developing and fixing the exposed plates, Younger thought he must have badly mistaken the machine’s milliamperage. There was no image on the plates at all—only a white amorphous cloud, flecked with a seething shadow pattern of a kind Younger had never seen before. On the other hand, the top of the girl’s sternum appeared with clarity, suggesting that the film hadn’t been overexposed. It was as if the X-rays had simply been unable to pass through whatever was growing inside the girl’s neck.
Younger took another set of films. This time he varied the length of irradiation, using both shorter and longer intervals. When the new set of pictures was developed, the results were either useless or identical to the first.
In principle, the fact that a part of the human body was roentgenopaque—impervious to X-rays—wasn’t startling. Bones, for example, are roentgenopaque. Nor would it have been unthinkable for the engorgement protruding from the girl’s jaw to be composed of solid bone. In advanced rheumatoid arthritis, for example, osseous processes could grow in all sorts of grotesque shapes and at many different places in the afflicted person’s body. A bone growth inside the girl’s chin and neck would have produced a perfectly white image on Younger’s plates.
There were three problems with this theory. First, a bone growth would have shown sharp definition in shape, not the borderless amoeba of white that appeared on this girl’s radiograms. Second, bone would not have produced the shadowy, foaming pattern inside the formless white—a pattern that seemed to shift ever so slightly on every plate, as if whatever produced it were constantly altering its position. Finally, Younger had felt the mass with his fingers, pressing on either side of the thin blue fissure. Whatever was inside wasn’t bone. It was too pliable—and too evasive, shifting as if to avoid his touch.
Younger considered, swallowing drily, the possibility that something was alive—something impervious to X-rays—inside the girl’s neck.
The Bankers and Brokers Club occupied a fine Greco-Roman townhouse downtown. At a quarter past seven that evening, on the fourth floor of the club, Littlemore found Thomas Lamont seated alone in the corner of an otherwise crowded, comfortably appointed room, apparently devoted