Too Many Murders Read online

  At County Services they split up. Armed with details supplied by the head accountant, horrified at violence in the world of numbers, Abe and Corey went to the dead man’s apartment. Carmine, a ferocious look on his face, walked up to the autopsy room, unaware that people who saw him scattered.

  “Joshua Butler, single, aged thirty-five,” said Patsy, who had the stripped body on his table already. “He’s one of those poor souls with a congenital pituitary syndrome that prevented hormonal maturity. His testes are undescended, he has no body hair, and he has the penis of a prepubescent boy. I doubt he could sustain an erection, let alone ejaculate motile sperm. So if he’s Bianca Tolano’s murderer, the rape was all done with an object, probably the bottle before he broke it. He didn’t act in a frenzy, as you remember—he cleaned up too well. The short leg is due to a break that was disgracefully treated at some time during childhood. I doubt a doctor saw it at all. I’ll find what I’m looking for inside the cranium, when I see the base of the brain and the pituitary. Histology will be very important. He might be a situs inversus as well—heart on the right side, some other organs reversed too. Cause of death? I’ve not changed my mind. It’s cyanide.”

  Carmine sighed. “He could never have installed that bear trap in Evan Pugh’s closet,” he said. “I know strength can’t always be equated with size or even muscularity, but this guy is definitely a ninety-pound weakling. I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” said Patsy, itching to get on with his examination. It wasn’t every day that he saw a body like this.

  So somewhere, Carmine thought, leaving Patsy to it, there is an exceedingly artful dodger capable of impersonating a runt like Joshua Butler. And capable of igniting a fire inside Joshua Butler hot enough to drive him to murder.

  Not five minutes later Patsy called him.

  “Carmine, the cause of death is definitely cyanide, but I don’t think it was murder. I found a capsule inside his mouth made of very thin plastic, and shreds of the plastic around his teeth. He committed suicide.”

  “That makes sense,” said Carmine, beyond amazement. “Just like Dr. Goebbels, except that he wouldn’t have any kids.”

  “Be of good cheer!” said Delia, trying comfort. “At least you’re chipping away at them. Bianca Tolano is sorted out.”

  “Huh!” Carmine grunted. “All it goes to show is that if you turn over enough stones, you’re bound to find something horrible. We’re down to four that have real answers to our questions.”

  “Go home,” Delia said sternly. “You need a dose of Julian.”

  A dose of Julian did help, but then Myron ruined Carmine’s well-being by turning up on his doorstep angry enough to adopt a fighting stance. Carmine took one look and broke into fits of laughter.

  “Myron, you dodo!” he said, throwing an arm around his friend’s shoulder and forcing him inside. “You look like a whippet squaring off against a Great Dane!”

  Myron’s umbrage lasted a few more seconds, then he gave in. “At least you called me a whippet,” he said then. “I can count myself lucky I guess that you didn’t call me a chihuahua.”

  “No,” said Carmine, rolling his eyes at Desdemona, “you’re not yappy. On the other hand, you’re not big enough to be a greyhound, though you do have a lot of the breed in you. Have a drink and tell me what’s bothering you.”

  “Your—your persecution of Erica, that’s what’s bothering me! Why are you picking on her?”

  “I am not picking on her, Myron.” Some women! he thought to himself. Why do some women always sweet-talk a poor, hapless schmo into fighting their battles for them? “She can’t have her cake and eat it too. Cornucopia is in a lot of trouble, and she is now el supremo—or la suprema. You’re a businessman, you know that kind of power has a price tag. If Erica can’t stand the heat, she’d better get out of the kitchen.”

  The mood had utterly vanished; Myron could never sustain rage against a beloved friend, especially when his position was untenable. “Oh, Carmine,” he wailed, “how did I wind up in the middle? I love the girl and I hate to see her badgered, but she made me promise I’d try to get you to ease up on her.” He looked doleful. “But I can’t, can I? You’re not a Great Dane, you’re a bulldog.”

  “This conversation’s gotten far too doggy.” Carmine handed him a Scotch. “Has it occurred to you that Erica is petrified at being handed Cornucopia? I don’t think she expected it, and I do think she’s afraid she won’t make the grade.”

  The Scotch was going down smoothly. Carmine kept good liquor, though it was not a boozy house. “There’s that to it,” Myron admitted.

  “She’d believe you way sooner than me, so why don’t you tell her to cool her jets? It’s my experience of mighty undertakings like corporations and governments that they tend to run themselves. The problems start when people interfere with the running, you must know that. Cornucopia has rolled along for years and years, just like the river in the song. She should just let it keep on rolling.”

  “You’d run it better than any of us,” Myron said.

  “Me? No! According to the girl you love, I’m too insatiably curious, and she’s right. I’d spend all my time poking and prying into what shouldn’t concern me.”

  “Are you eating with us, Myron?” Desdemona asked. “It’s a rib roast, and there’s plenty.”

  He groaned. “I wish I could, but I have to get back to Erica.” The last of the Scotch disappeared. Myron rose to his feet and stood looking at them a little disconsolately. “I wish things could go on the way they used to,” he said wistfully, “but they can’t, can they?”

  “That’s life,” said Desdemona, and laughed. “How’s that for corny? Never you mind, Myron dear. Things will settle down.”

  “But they won’t,” she said to Carmine later, when some of the rib roast had been devoured. “If only I could like her! I can’t, you know. She’s so brittle, though brittle I could manage if it weren’t for the coldness. She’ll break poor Myron’s heart.”

  “Maybe not,” said Carmine, feeling the optimism that went with a full stomach of good food. “I think he’s fascinated by all the things in her we dislike. He’s fifty years old, lovely lady, and ready for a bitch. Erica’s a phase.”

  “Do you think so? Truly?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Is shepherd’s pie all right for the leftover roast?” she asked. “I got a big one because Sophia said she’d be in, and have two friends sleeping over.”

  That irritation flared up again. Carmine scowled. “It may be high time to have a word with my daughter,” he said.

  “No, Carmine, don’t! There will be a good reason, I’m sure of it,” said Desdemona.

  As if on cue, Sophia burst through the front door wide-eyed and white. “Daddy!” she cried, going straight to him. “Someone locked me in the physics lab closet!”

  See, what did I tell you? Desdemona’s eyes were saying, but Carmine held Sophia off and looked at her closely. She was a little disheveled, and her fright was genuine. “Do you know how it happened, honey?” he asked.

  “No, that’s just it! It shouldn’t have! No one ever locks that closet!” She shivered, shrank against him. “I could hear someone on the other side walking up and down, and something thumping on the floor. Daddy, I don’t know why, but I was sure he was after me! I was on tidy-up duty, everyone saw me going back and forth to the closet. At first I thought it was a joke, then I heard the walking and I got this awful feeling!”

  “Did he go away?” Carmine asked, conscious of a sinking in his belly. “How long were you in there?”

  “About five minutes. I knew he was going to open the door and attack me as soon as the school quietened down, so I got out through a manhole in the roof. It led to the main fume duct, so I crawled for ages and came out in the fume cabinet at the other end of the lab. The lights were off, but it was still daylight outside, and I could see him—a little guy with a limp. I tried not to make any noise and kind of wriggled out of the cabinet onto
the floor. Then I crawled for the door at my end and waited until he was walking the opposite way before I opened it a crack and wriggled through. Then I got to my feet and ran!”

  Amazing, thought Carmine. She’s my girl, for sure. Gives a good report even if she is scared stiff. “Then you made it to your car and drove home,” he said.

  She stared at him scornfully. “Daddy! If I’d done that, I would have been home ages ago! No, he must have opened the closet door and found nobody there. I ran and dived into the forsythia just in time—he was heading for my car. That’s how I know he was after me—not just anybody, me! So I hunkered down and waited until it was dark, then I sneaked up to Route 133 and hailed a cab. But I wouldn’t get in until I got a good look at the driver. He was black, so I knew I was safe. He’s up on the Circle now, Daddy. I didn’t have my pocketbook, and the fare’s humongous!”

  Desdemona slipped out, money purse in hand, while Carmine led his doughty daughter into the sitting room and gave her a red wine spritzer.

  “To use a phrase of the Mayor of New Britain’s, you done good, kid,” he said, bursting with pride.

  That, plus gratitude to whatever power had looked after Sophia, carried him through giving her dinner—she was starving—and getting her to bed sedated with one of Desdemona’s “bombs.” Once the girl’s elation at escaping by her own efforts died down, she would sleep a sleep of nightmares unless her busy, clever brain was damped.

  Then the reaction set in. He sat and shook as if in a rigor, twisting his hands together.

  “The bastard! The fucking bastard!” he said to Desdemona, his teeth clenched. “Why couldn’t he come after me? Why a sixteen-year-old innocent, for crying out loud? The sweetest, nicest, kindest kid imaginable! I’ll rip his head from his neck!”

  She cuddled in close and stroked his face. “You don’t mean that, Carmine. You mean a life sentence, marked never to be released. Are you sure it’s your murderer?”

  “A little guy with a limp? It’s got to be. But why Sophia? He chose her deliberately—targeted her at school, had it worked out down to the last t crossed and the last i dotted. By rights her body should have been found tomorrow in the physics lab closet, maybe beaten to death if what he thumped on the floor was a baseball bat. The best club ever invented. What he didn’t count on was Sophia’s presence of mind in a crisis.”

  “And the fact that she’s inherited your gut instinct, dear heart. Where any other victim would have assumed she was locked in by mistake, Sophia knew almost at once that she was in danger. So she concentrated on escape rather than waiting to be let out.”

  He managed to find a smile. “Resourceful, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, very. I don’t think you ever need worry about Sophia being one of life’s victims,” said Desdemona. “She’s going to pick life up and wring it dry.”

  He got up feeling like an old man. “I don’t think I’ll be making a little brother or sister for Julian tonight, Desdemona.”

  “There’s always tomorrow night,” she said cheerfully. “Now let’s break the rules and have a drink before bed. I can bomb Sophia and keep her out of school tomorrow, but I can’t do that to you. An X-O cognac is the answer for Daddy.”

  “I’ll have to put a cop at the Dormer to keep an eye on our daughter,” he said, taking the snifter and warming it in his hand. “Concealed surveillance, but Seth Gaylord will have to know in case the duty sergeant puts a dodo on watch. Then tomorrow you’ll have to talk to Sophia and persuade her not to mention the incident to anyone, including Myron.”

  Desdemona blinked. “Including Myron?”

  “We can’t trust his tongue these days because I don’t know how discreet his lady love is. Tell Sophia it’s not a good idea to be marooned on her own at school or anywhere else right now. She’s to stick with a group and leave school along with everyone else. And that goddamn red Mercedes that Myron gave her goes into the garage! She can drive my mother’s Mercury clunker.”

  Desdemona shivered. “It’s like the Ghost,” she said.

  “Yes. That’s why I’m convinced our best weapon is Sophia’s ingenuity. If you talk to her frankly and don’t pull your punches, she won’t buck.”

  The news about Sophia hit no one quite the way it did John Silvestri, whose daughter Maria had been savagely beaten some years ago. It had been a revenge aimed at Silvestri, who took it very hard. But Maria healed, married happily and moved on with her life; the perpetrator got a thirty-year sentence, twenty before parole. Knowing all this, Carmine told him in private of the attempt on Sophia; to see Silvestri weep was an ordeal and not for other eyes.

  “Terrible, just terrible!” the Commissioner said, mopping his face. “We have to catch this bastard, Carmine. Anything you want, you got. Such a beautiful child!”

  “I know it doesn’t really look that way,” Carmine said, sitting down, “but somehow I feel as if we’ve rattled his cage. It’s nine days since the twelve murders, and we’ve actually managed to solve some of them—Jimmy Cartwright, Dean Denbigh, Bianca Tolano—and catalogued the assassination of the three blacks as commissioned. There’s been a thirteenth death—the suicide of Bianca Tolano’s killer.”

  “I think it’s impressive,” Silvestri said, composure restored. “Where to now?”

  “Peter Norton, the banker who drank strychnine in his orange juice. An agonizing death.”

  “So’s cyanide,” Silvestri pointed out.

  “Yes, but cyanide is quick. As soon as enough of the blood’s hemoglobin is stripped of its oxygen, death ensues. Whereas, John, strychnine takes twenty, thirty minutes, depending on the dose. Norton got a huge dose, but drank only half of it. He was a dead man, but not for some time. Vomiting, purging, strong convulsions—I don’t know how much consciousness remains, but his wife and two little kids witnessed it. That’s disgusting.”

  “Are you implying that the killer wanted that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I am,” Carmine said, sounding surprised.

  “If choosing a method that tortured Norton’s wife and kids was a part of the crime, it opens up new territory, Carmine,” the Commissioner said thoughtfully. “Maybe we should be looking harder at the victims’ families.”

  “Every stone will be turned over again,” Carmine promised.

  Mrs. Barbara Norton had had more than a week to recover from her screaming hysterics, though Carmine suspected her doctor had her on some pretty powerful tranquilizers. Her eyes were vacant, and she moved as if pushing her way through a sea of molasses.

  However, she spoke logically. “It’s some nutter he refused a loan to,” she said, giving him a cup of coffee. “You have no idea, Captain! People seem to expect a bank to lend them money without any collateral at all! Most people eventually give up, but the nutters never do. I can remember at least half a dozen crazies who filled our mailbox with dog do, put caustic soda in our pool, even wee’d in our milk! Peter reported all of them to the North Holloman police, so look there for the names.”

  She was fairly plump, Carmine noted, but her rotundity had a certain seductiveness for some men, and she had a pretty face—dimples, rosy cheeks, flawless skin. When her children came in, he stifled another sigh at this second sight of them: this was a fat family, the genes predisposed to obesity. Peter Norton, he remembered from the autopsy, had been very overweight in the manner of one always so: fat arms and legs, puffy hands and feet, the adiposity packed on from shoulders to hips rather than just around his middle. According to police notes taken in the neighborhood, Mrs. Norton had tried to limit the family’s food intake, but her husband would have none of it. He was always taking the kids to Friendly’s for parfaits and shakes.

  “Were your friends your husband’s friends as well, Mrs. Norton?” Carmine asked.

  “Oh, definitely. We did everything together. Peter liked me to have the same friends.”

  “What kind of things did you do?”

  “We went bowling on Tuesday nights. Thursday nights were canasta at someone’s
home. Saturday nights we went out to dinner and took in a movie or a play.”

  “Did you use a babysitter, ma’am?”

  “Yes, always the same girl, Imelda Gonzalez. Peter picked her up and drove her home.”

  “You never went out on your own?”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Who are your friends?”

  “Grace and Chuck Simmons, Hetty and Hank Sugarman, Mary and Ernie Tripodi. Chuck’s with the Holloman National, Hank’s an accountant with a tax practice, and Ernie owns a bed and bath store. None of us girls work.”

  Middle management types, thought Carmine, sipping coffee. It was flavored with cardamom, a pet hate. In his opinion coffee was coffee, never to be adulterated with alien tastes.

  “Did you ever go anyplace else, Mrs. Norton?”

  Her bright curls bounced in time to her nods, robotic. “Oh, sure! Charity functions, mostly, but they aren’t regular. Cornucopia functions Peter and I went to on our own—the Fourth National is owned by Cornucopia. Otherwise the eight of us went together.” Her face fell, her chin wobbled. “Of course from now on I can’t go to anything much. Our friends are real kind, but I’m a drag without Peter. He was the joker, full of tricks!”

  “Things will sort themselves out, Mrs. Norton,” Carmine comforted. “You’ll make plenty of new friends.”

  Especially, he thought privately, with the size of Peter Norton’s pension and insurance payouts. Beneath the dominated housewife lurked someone determined to save herself. Maybe she’d go on a luxury cruise looking for someone she could dominate? Were it not for that inescapable date, April third, he might have suspected her of putting paid to domination by a person few seemed to like. Despite the horror of his death, a certain kind of poisoner would have relished witnessing his suffering. But Mrs. Norton had not relished it. She had gone into hysterics so strong that the neighbors had heard and come running. By the time that he, Carmine, had arrived, the children were emerging from their shock, whereas Mrs. Norton had needed two medics, her doctor, and a shot of something so potent she had slept for hours.