Too Many Murders Page 20

  “He thinks I’m too stupid to read.”

  “Then that’s his mistake, isn’t it?” Having tidied the mess on his desk, she sat down and handed him the sheaf he had given her. “It’s a glancing reference only, by”—she giggled—“who else, the milkman. Now he’s genuinely stupid, and I’m sure you gained the impression that he had rather a crush on Erica. In amongst his ramblings about her boyfriends—I must digress and say that they seem without foundation, which may be why no one put a note beside the reference. Why do they ink out some words or phrases? Anyone can fill them in from imagination!”

  “Get on with it, Delia!”

  “Oh! Oh, yes, of course. One of her boyfriends talks gibberish, and she gibbers back. Here it is, and I quote: ‘He jabbers at her like he does with his pals, real quick.’ It could mean a fast talker, but if he jabbers at Erica, then she must understand the jabber and, by extrapolation, jabber back.”

  “A Russian boyfriend in 1944, huh? An immigrant?”

  “Why not? From what I know and have seen of Dr. Davenport, she likes secretiveness. Conversing in a foreign language would have been just her ticket.”

  “According to the milkman, he had pals.”

  “That’s not uncommon, Carmine. Immigrants with poor command of English tend to clump together. Where is this place?”

  “An outer suburb of Boston.”

  “Then presumably there would have been work.”

  “In 1944? Scads of it.”

  Okay, so she spoke Russian, Carmine decided, going back to the Smith years. Shawcross’s money must have come in handy. The formal exchange program hadn’t yet found its feet, but the students were encouraged to broaden their experience as well as their education by going elsewhere for two semesters, fall and spring, in their junior year. In 1947 the twenty-year-old Erica asked if she could attend the London School of Economics, provided her courses there were accredited toward her degree. And so off to London she went. Her brilliance and dedication at the L.S.E. never faltered; while other students stumbled at the strangeness of different routines, attitudes and customs, Erica Davenport fitted into her new environment faultlessly. She managed to acquire a few friends, go to parties, even have several love affairs with men generally held unattainable.

  Having concluded her studies at the close of the academic year, she spent the summer of 1948 exploring the Continent; her canceled passport showed entry and exit stamps for France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. She traveled second-class and unaccompanied, explaining to those who asked that the solitude was good for her soul. When she touched base in London between trips, she inflicted color slide shows on her L.S.E. circle, one of whom complained that the scenery was gorgeous, but where were the people?

  “I am not insensitive enough to photograph people going about their usual existence as if they were freaks!” she had said, annoyed. “If their costumes are alien to us, to them they are what everyone wears.”

  “Then pay them to have their pictures taken,” someone said. “You’re a rich American, you can afford the dollar.”

  “What, and drag them down to our level? That’s disgusting!”

  Well, well! Carmine fingered this statement as if the paper were coated in gold. Once upon a time you had passions, Erica! Strong, ineradicable passions. Ideals too.

  The law degree from Harvard and the doctorate from Chubb produced nothing new; the only thing about Erica Davenport’s second twenty years that he found intriguing was how immobile they were. After that three-month orgy of sampling Europe’s charms, she never went back, and that was strange. In his experience people always tried to recapture the joys and flings of youth, especially when they involved junkets to Europe. She hadn’t gone to West Germany and she had steered clear of Cyprus and Trieste; she had caught a ferry from Brindisi to Patras, thus avoiding any chance of encountering Yugoslavia. Was the visa situation that bad in 1948, before the cold war heated up?

  “Delia!” he hollered. “I’m going to Cornucopia!”

  “How good’s your Russian?” he asked Dr. Erica Davenport bluntly. “The Russian boyfriend hone your grammar too?”

  “Oh, you are a busy boy!” she said, tapping the end of a gold pencil on her desk.

  “It can’t be a secret. It’s in your FBI file.”

  “Am I to infer that you believe the FBI have cleared me of suspicion in their espionage investigation?” she asked coolly.

  “The FBI is the FBI, a law unto itself. In my eyes it does not clear you of suspicion,” Carmine said.

  “I had a Russian boyfriend in my teens, I admit, and I happen to pick up languages very easily. A Smith professor gave me a special course in Russian grammar and literature out of sheer gratification at finding someone interested. I also toyed with the idea of going into the State Department as a diplomat. Satisfied?”

  “How much of this does the FBI know?”

  “Clever Captain Delmonico! You know I didn’t mention the boyfriend, yet you knew about him. Someone in the FBI slipped.”

  “Bigger organization, more chance of slips.” He tilted his head and considered her. “What happened to the passion?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The passion. At twenty you were full of it.”

  Her smile resembled a sneer. “I don’t think so.”

  “I do, and you’ll never convince me otherwise. Your aspirations for humanity burned your brain like red-hot pokers. You were going to change the world. Instead, you joined it.”

  The face had gone pinched, pale. “I think…” she said slowly, “I think I found new outlets for my passions, if by that you mean youthful dreams. I discovered that women are not equipped to change the world, because the power resides with men. They assert it both physically and psychically. First things first, Captain. We must acquire power, that is our primary objective at this time.”

  “We? Our?”

  “The monstrous regiment of women.”

  “Knox was a woman hater as well as a dirty old man.”

  “But think of the power he wielded! Then name me a female equivalent. You can’t. Old men can deflower young girls with impunity when they control and direct the thoughts of others.”

  “Are you tied to Dr. Pauline Denbigh and the feminists?”

  “No.”

  “Is Philomena Skeps?”

  She laughed. “No.”

  Carmine got up. “I’d like to meet Dr. Duncan MacDougall.”

  “Why? To badger him the way you did my secretary?”

  “I hardly think so. He’s director of Cornucopia Research.”

  “I see. Power again. Underlings can be badgered, chiefs are sacrosanct.” She picked up a file. “Do your worst,” she said, sounding bored. “He makes his own appointments.”

  The hardest aspect of having a conversation with Dr. Duncan MacDougall lay not in lack of coöperation but in understanding what he said. Carmine got a taste of it in the parking lot, his prearranged meeting spot. He watched the slight, sinewy little man walk toward him, stop, gaze at the array of chimneys dotting the vast hangarlike roof, then finish his approach at a run, face terrified.

  “Coom on, mon, the lamp’s reekin’!” he cried, and hustled Carmine along like a teacher to a tardy child.

  At least, that was what Carmine thought he said. Inside, the director hollered down a phone, then looked relieved.

  “The lamp shoodna reek,” he said to Carmine.

  “Excuse me?”

  “There was smoke coming out of Peabody’s chimney.”

  And so it went, though Carmine managed to translate most of what Dr. MacDougall said into plain English. It was impossible to fault his security measures, or see how he could improve them. Inside his time vault were a number of smaller safes, their size depending upon what they had to contain; blueprints went into big, flat safes with drawers inside, whereas papers went into the more usual kind of repository. There were guards, and they were as competent as well trained, and getting a document
out of the vault was the most public of undertakings.

  “I don’t think the thefts happen here, Dr. MacDougall,” he said at the end of a very comprehensive breakdown of procedures. “For instance, the new formulae for Polycorn Plastics and all the experimental scraps have never left this vault since Mr. Collins refused to take delivery. And I’d bet my bottom dollar Ulysses hasn’t gotten a whiff of them. I had some hard things to say about security in Cornucopia headquarters, but I don’t include this facility, sir. Keep it going like this, and you’ll always be squeaky-clean.”

  “Yes, but that’s not good enough!” MacDougall said angrily. “So much great work comes out of Cornucopia Research, and no one who works here can stomach the thought that his or her ideas, energies and labor end up in Moscow or Peking.”

  “Then we have to catch Ulysses, sir. You can do your share by making careful logs of exactly who handles sensitive material once it leaves you. You must have some notion of who the people in each division are as well as in Cornucopia Central. I’d really like to see what names you come up with.”

  “As distinct from the FBI,” said Dr. MacDougall.

  “Definitely,” said Carmine. “They don’t share much.”

  “Och, aye, ye shall hae it!” the director said. Or something like that, anyway.

  “No one understands a Scot except another Scot,” Desdemona said, dishing up veal scallops in a cream and white wine sauce made with mushrooms; she was getting very gastronomically adventurous now that Julian was turning into a human being.

  “He might as well have spoken a foreign language.” Carmine eyed his plate with almost lascivious pleasure. Rice—ideal for sopping up sauce—and asparagus. This was definitely one of those occasions when he could thank his lucky stars he had amnesia of the stomach—after two hours it forgot it had eaten, so Luigi’s salad wasn’t even a memory.

  He didn’t speak again until the scallopini were all gone. Then he grabbed his wife’s hand and kissed it reverently.

  “Superb!” he said. “Better than my mother by far. Better even than my grandmother Cerutti, and that’s saying something. How did you get the veal so tender?”

  “Beat the blazes out of it,” said Desdemona, delighted. “I am not a five-foot-nothing old lady from Sicily, Carmine, I’m a six-foot-three Boadicea. I can actually reach the back burner of a stove without stretching.”

  “Sophia missed a feast, serve her right. Pizza, yet!”

  “She’s entertaining in her eyrie, my love. Much as I adore her, it’s nice to have you all to myself sometimes.”

  “I agree. It’s just that someone should have been here to bear witness to your skill.”

  “Enough about my skill. I won’t be able to get my head through the door. You look pleased about more than mere food tonight, so pray enlighten me.”

  “I called FBI Kelly a totally unprintable word, he insisted we step outside—we were in Malvolio’s—and we had a fight.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said, sighing. “Is he still alive?”

  “Walking wounded. It wasn’t much of a fight—he’s no boxer. A Primo Carnera, trips over his own feet, they’re so big. It was nice, I enjoyed it. Saw the usual suspects. Felt sorry for poor old Corey—the wife’s on his back big-time. Stirred up a hornet’s nest or two, and set Delia the human bloodhound on a new scent. I wish I could give her the lieutenancy!”

  He frets more about that wretched promotion than he does about his murders, Desdemona thought, watching him. One of them has to lose. I could kill John Silvestri for keeping him on the panel! It’s a sort of death knell, and Carmine knows it. The loser will seek promotion in another police department, and the old team will be gone forever. Maybe the state legislature will raise the retirement age and the crisis will disappear. No, it won’t. If anything, retirement age will go down, not up. I love him so much, and I know he loves me equally. We have a life together, even when we’re apart. We look forward to each other.

  “Poor Erica Davenport!” she said suddenly.

  “Huh?”

  “The brains, the beauty, the bank balance. Her life is so terribly empty.”

  “She doesn’t think so,” Carmine said, grinning. “In fact, she preached me a sermon about it this afternoon. Power, that’s the wellspring of her existence.”

  “Pooh! Power over what? People’s jobs? People’s lives? It’s an illusion, it has the same substance as chessmen on a chessboard—very bright men play a game with inanimate pieces. Only one thing grants genuine power—the loss of personal liberty. That awful certainty that if one’s papers are not properly stamped or one is in a place one shouldn’t be, one will be put against a wall and shot. That one can be shipped off to a concentration camp without a word of explanation, and that there is no process of appeal. That where one lives, works, even goes for a holiday, is decided by someone faceless without consultation. Power turns human beings into beasts—tell that to your precious Dr. Davenport next time you see her!”

  Whatever else she might have had to say on the subject was not said. Desdemona found herself flat on her back on the dining room floor, looking up into a pair of fiery eyes.

  “Carmine! You can’t! What if Sophia… ”

  “Then you have ten seconds to hit the bedroom.”

  How far can the long arm of coincidence go?” Carmine asked Abe and Corey early the next morning.

  Neither man had any idea what he meant, but both hesitated to say so: was this some kind of test?

  Corey swallowed. “How do you mean, boss?”

  “April third. Jimmy Cartwright was coincidental. So, we’re being led to believe, was Dean Denbigh. The thing is, could our fat banker also have been coincidental to April third?”

  “That’s stretching it,” Corey said, relieved that he’d been frank. With Carmine, you never knew whereabouts his mind might go. Last night Corey’d had a bitter fight with Maureen that almost became knock-down, drag-out, but it had cleared the air, and this morning he felt as if the nagging and the whining might actually stop. She’d smiled at him and cooked him breakfast, and said not a word about the promotion.

  “What makes you wonder, Carmine?” Abe asked.

  “That window of opportunity. It’s so—convenient. I’d spend more time on Mrs. Norton, except for the date. April third! How can it possibly be her?”

  “Is there anything else significant about April third?” Corey asked. “It’s a Monday. It’s the first working day of the month, which is the last month of quite a few financial years—”

  “It’s a frustration because April Fool’s Day fell on a Saturday,” said Abe, grinning. “No pranks this year.”

  “A source for the strychnine never turned up,” said Carmine.

  “No,” said his team in chorus.

  “Let’s look at things a different way, even if it does make us seem macabre.”

  Carmine didn’t like using a blackboard, but occasionally it became necessary to tabulate things, and then a board was handy.

  “There are gentle deaths and agonizing deaths.” He drew a line up the center, forming two columns. “On the gentle side are Beatrice Egmont, Cathy Cartwright, and the three black victims. I call them gentle because none of them saw it coming and all of them died very quickly. Okay, five gentle.”

  He entered the left-hand side of his board. “Agonizing has to include Dean Denbigh, but we exclude him here because he falls outside our scope. Which leaves us with five agonizing deaths: Peter Norton, Dee-Dee Hall, Bianca Tolano, Evan Pugh, and Desmond Skeps. However, I want to write them down in order of magnitude—easiest to worst. Who had the easiest death?”

  “Peter Norton,” Corey said. Man, he was flying today!

  “Why?”

  “Because he probably lost consciousness the moment the convulsions began. I know we can’t say that for sure, but I’m betting Patrick would say generalized convulsions interrupt the brain’s conscious pathways.”

  “I agree, Corey. So we write Peter Norton down as easiest. Who next in
this grisly catalogue?”

  “Dee-Dee Hall,” said Abe. “She didn’t fight. She just stood and exsanguinated. A slow bleed from both jugulars, but slow is relative—the blood would have poured out like any liquid under pressure from a pump, and the heart’s a perfect pump. Her suffering would have been as much mental as physical, except that she didn’t move a muscle to defend herself or run. That might suggest that Dee-Dee wasn’t sorry her life was ending.”

  Carmine wrote her name on the blackboard. “So we equate her as more or less equal with Peter Norton.”

  “Evan Pugh next,” said Abe.

  “You really think so, Abe?”

  “I do too,” Corey said. “He died of trauma to the spinal cord and internal organs. It was slow, but it was clean. The worst of it would have been inside his mind, and that we can’t speculate about. Everybody’s different.”

  “Evan Pugh,” said Carmine, writing. “Next to last?”

  “Desmond Skeps,” said Abe. “His death was diabolical, but most of the torture wasn’t half as bad—in my view, anyway—as what Bianca Tolano went through.”

  “Abe’s right, Carmine,” said Corey firmly. “Skeps was a famous man, he knew he’d made a lot of enemies, and he must have known there was always a chance one of them would hate him enough to kill him. His torture was superficial, even the cut-off nipples. Whereas Bianca Tolano was an innocent who suffered the ultimate degradation. Skeps could only have equaled her if he’d been raped, and he wasn’t. His murderer—um—”

  “Preserved his integrity as a man,” Carmine finished. “Yes, that’s important. None of the male victims was sexually tampered with, and only one female: Bianca Tolano.”

  He wrote her name at the bottom of the right-hand column, and stared at the board. “We have to presume that the killer knew them all, so what was it about each one that decided their particular death?”

  “Beatrice Egmont was a real nice old lady,” Abe said.

  “Cathy Cartwright was a nice woman having a helluva bad time with her family and Jimmy,” Abe said.