Too Many Murders Page 23

  Experience with Delia had taught Carmine that she would recount her doings in her own inimitable style, but that today’s effort was a tour de force she had planned as meticulously as the Maxwell Foundation had its banquet. He just had to wait.

  “Put succinctly, Mr. Norton was too terrified to invite his own friends,” Delia continued, satisfied Carmine was on the edge of his chair. “Pride of place at the Fourth National table went to Mr. Desmond Skeps, who elected to sit at Mr. Norton’s out of all the many tables he could choose from. With him as his lady companion he brought Dee-Dee Hall.”

  “What?”

  “She’s down in black and white on the master guest roster as accompanying Mr. Desmond Skeps. See?” Delia thrust a sheet of paper at Carmine.

  He grabbed it and read incredulously. “What the hell was he up to? Something nasty, I bet! Go on, go on!”

  “That gave me four women—Cathy Cartwright, Bianca Tolano, Beatrice Egmont and Dee-Dee Hall—and four men—Desmond Skeps, Peter Norton, Evan Pugh and Dean John Denbigh. Eight people, all now dead. Which still left the Fourth National table rather lightly populated. Two of the ten chairs were unoccupied.”

  Carmine shook his head. “No wonder I haven’t seen hide or hair of you for days! You didn’t get all of this off a list.”

  “Well, no,” she confessed. “I had to speak to a lot of people on the phone and visit the Maxwell Foundation several times. At one point I actually thought my precious lists had been thrown out or burned, but I should have known better. Even charities are riddled with bureaucrats, and bureaucrats won’t discard anything that might imperil their parasitic existence.”

  “Why do you hate paper pushers so much, Delia? You’re one yourself,” Carmine said slyly.

  She rose to the bait instantly. “I am not a parasite! My work bears fruit, I am a cog in the necessary machinery of the constabulary! And you give me an instance of one police unit that has even enough paper pushers!” she said indignantly.

  “Calm down, calm down! I’m pulling your leg. And you have just processed more paper with positive results than an entire government department,” he said. “Desmond Skeps! What was he doing arm in arm with a street whore? Not that she’d have looked like one. Dee-Dee could—could—”

  “Tart herself up?” Delia suggested.

  “Put on a nice dress and skate on the edge of respectability. She’d still have looked more street than home in the suburbs, but on Skeps’s arm she’d have been forgiven a lot. People can’t bear thinking that a man of Skeps’s wealth and standing might be taking the mickey out of them.” Carmine frowned. “Okay, that’s eight out of the eleven. What about the black victims?”

  “They were present too,” said Delia. “The event was catered by Barnstaple Catering, a new name for affairs that size. It’s a firm that has previously concentrated on smaller affairs, but there is a contract with Chubb coming up to cater its banquets, and the Maxwell function was a dummy run for Barnstaple. In view of this, at least according to their general manager, Barnstaple agreed to take a smaller profit than it will be asking in the future. Maxwell had some conditions of its own, apparently having had bad experiences in the past. The thousand-dollar-table dinner dance was a new sort of venture, and they wanted the first one to be memorable, with the intention of having one each year. So Barnstaple had to provide a three-person wait team for each table. Cedric Ballantine, Morris Brown and Ludovica Bereson waited on the Fourth National table. The system worked a treat,” Delia went on, the excitement dying out of her voice now that the last goody was revealed. “People got their meals piping hot and very quickly, the liquor flowed uninterruptedly, and no one sat staring at a dirty plate for longer than two or three minutes.”

  “Was there any method that assigned the three black victims to that table?” Carmine asked.

  “No, beyond the fact that they all worked for Barnstaple at weekend functions, and had done for some time, including Cedric Ballantine, who put his age up to get the work. They didn’t check ages very stringently, and Cedric looked older than his years. If it had been a weeknight, the two boys wouldn’t have been able to work because of school. Mrs. Bereson probably wouldn’t have been interested either, after a day housecleaning. But it was a Saturday night, ideal.”

  “If I were not a happily married man, Delia, I’d be waiting at your door determined to make you mine,” Carmine said, smiling. “I also doubt that we three men would have found out half as much. You’re a nit-picker, and if ever a job needed a nit-picker, this one was it. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Thanks are not necessary. I loved every minute of it.” She got up, but didn’t move to take her papers. “These should stay with you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll choofle off.”

  As soon as she disappeared, Carmine was calling Desdemona. “What kind of flowers can I give Delia for some terrific work?”

  “Brightly colored orchids,” said Desdemona instantly. “In a pot, not as a corsage. Cattleyas.”

  “The big question is, why did Desmond Skeps sit at Peter Norton’s table?” Carmine asked Corey and Abe.

  “I don’t see how we’ll ever know,” Corey said gloomily. “Everyone attached to the table is dead.”

  “What I want to know,” said Abe, “is why did four months elapse between this banquet and the murders?”

  “I don’t think we’re going to find that out, so I propose we shelve it for the moment,” Carmine said.

  “But we can find out the names of plenty of people who went and didn’t die,” Corey said. “We need to get a feel for the kind of function it was.”

  “Silvestri!” Carmine exclaimed. “He was there, so were Danny and Larry.” He was halfway to the door in seconds. “I’ll talk to him, so don’t mention it to the others. For the time being, we sit on this.”

  John Silvestri listened raptly, intensely proud of his niece and in a lightning moment resolving to write to his uppity Oxford brother-in-law to the effect that Delia would leave more of a mark on history than her father would. Then reality crunched down and he concentrated on Delia’s actual revelations. “Jesus H. Christ!” he said at the end of it. “What was that tricky bastard doing? There’s no use asking me, Carmine, I’m as much in the dark as you are.”

  “Yes, John, but you were present,” Carmine said. “We’d just had Julian, and weren’t. Tell me what it was like, what went on. I need to get a picture of things.”

  Silvestri closed his eyes, the better to remember. “I guess it stayed in my mind better than these charity functions usually do because, to pinch a phrase from Stan Freberg, it ran on mink wheels. Smooth! We got three courses in an hour, so there was plenty of time for dancing and socializing without our needing to be there until after midnight. The food was good, and it was served without a hitch because of the sheer number of waiters and waitresses. Once the dessert plates were cleared, they kept the coffee and after-dinner drinks coming as fast as we wanted them. The coffee was good and kept hot, there was tea for those who wanted it. I remember we all agreed you couldn’t find a thing to complain about.”

  Carmine listened intently, then zeroed in on one word. “You said there was time for socializing, John. What did you mean?”

  “If you went to more big events instead of dodging them, Carmine, you’d know,” the Commissioner said, deftly inserting a tiny shaft of reproach. “New York City this ain’t. A lot of the people who go don’t meet much anywhere else, so as soon as the coffee’s on the table, they start table hopping to catch up. Like Elder Jesse Bateman of Busquash—I hardly ever see him, so when a couple at his table got up and went somewhere else, the wife and I joined them. It was a big dance floor and the band was playing Glenn Miller, but not everybody wants to dance. Table hopping is probably more popular than dancing.”

  “And there were two vacant chairs at the Fourth National table,” Carmine said. “That means other people must have joined Norton and his guests.” He let out an explosive sigh. “Somewhere in Holloman are a bunch of
people who included Norton’s table in their hopping. All I have to do is find them.”

  “Well, don’t count on me,” Silvestri said quickly. “I took one look at Desmond Skeps sitting there and steered a wide berth around the Fourth National. So did a lot of others, including the Mayor and his ass-kissers.”

  “Why?” Carmine asked, astonished at the Mayor’s omission.

  “Even long distance, anyone could see Skeps was as drunk as a skunk.”

  “Wow! So much for the temperance myth. A million thanks, sir. You’ve helped immeasurably.”

  He returned to his office in a very thoughtful mood, to find Corey and Abe leaning over the Maxwell Foundation plan of fifty round tables, each one labeled with its sponsor and number. The Fourth National table was number 17, with 16 to its left and 18 to its right. There were ten rows of five tables, number 17 near the north end and well away from any important Cornucopia table. Phil Smith’s was number 43, Wal Grierson’s 39, Fred Collins’s 40. Everywhere around number 17 were tables of relative nonentities. So why did Desmond Skeps sit there? Because he knew he’d be on the sauce? Or because, squiring Dee-Dee, he had to walk almost the length of the hall to reach number 17?

  “So why with Peter Norton?” Carmine asked yet again.

  “And why with Dee-Dee?” Corey asked yet again.

  “Erica Davenport would have been his logical choice,” Abe said.

  “No way! He’d just dumped her as his mistress,” Corey said, “and she was with her usual date, Gus Purvey.”

  “He was throwing dust in someone’s eyes,” Abe said positively. “For sure he invited himself to sit with Norton, who must have been over the moon at being noticed by the King of Kings.”

  “Who was blind drunk, apparently,” Corey said.

  “Yeah, but Norton wasn’t to know that would happen when Skeps told him to reserve two places at his table,” Abe countered.

  “I wonder,” Carmine asked dreamily, “how did women like Bianca and Cathy and the old lady see Dee-Dee? Especially if Skeps was as pissed as a newt. Even if they hadn’t recognized Skeps, Norton or Denbigh would have enlightened them, but I doubt they were impressed. Evan Pugh would have known, but it wasn’t in him to be impressed by anyone except himself. So I’d say the vacant chairs were on either side of Skeps and Dee-Dee. Beatrice, Cathy and Bianca must have been on tenterhooks—women tend to think that drunks are going to throw up all over the place.”

  “We should get a few answers from Gerald Cartwright,” Corey said. “I’m sure Cathy would have told him about Skeps the drunk.”

  “Any bets she didn’t?” Abe asked. “Whichever way we turn, it’s the same old blank wall. Norton’s wife is crazy, Cathy Cartwright was overworked and coping with Jimmy, Bianca and the poor old lady came alone and lived alone, the blacks lived in a world where Skeps didn’t matter, and I doubt Denbigh and his wife engaged in pillow talk. Though it’s weird that Marty Fane didn’t say anything about Dee-Dee’s date with Skeps. He was willing to do anything to help us track her killer down.”

  “I don’t think Marty even knew,” Carmine said. “Dee-Dee was loyal to him in her way, but if Skeps slipped her a couple of big ones, she’d have buttoned her mouth. She probably pretended to have the bug that was going around.”

  “We never get a break,” Corey said.

  “Yes, we do! Delia’s given us the Maxwell banquet, and I call that a break.” Carmine put his elbows on his desk and his chin on his hands. “Erica Davenport told me Skeps never had more than one drink a day. She even gave me a reason for it. But the longer I know them, the harder I find it to believe anything a Cornucopia Board member tells me. Add to them Philomena Skeps, Anthony Bera and Pauline Denbigh. The other thing eating at me is the certainty that our mastermind has an assistant here in Holloman, probably someone we don’t even know. Definitely not someone who hangs around County Services or Malvolio’s with his ears cocked for information. He doesn’t need to.”

  “What makes you think there’s an assistant rather than a series of hirelings?” Abe asked.

  “Oh, there was that, but every master has an apprentice.” Carmine straightened and gazed at them sternly. “One thing is for sure. Those eleven people died because of something that went down at Peter Norton’s table. What we have to do is find out what it was.”

  “Locate any table hoppers who sat there?” Corey asked.

  “Of course. Beatrice Egmont was popular, she must have had visitors. Abe, you have a list of her friends. Go ask all of them what happened at Norton’s table. Some of them were bound to be at the banquet.”

  Carmine switched his attention to Corey. “You get to grill Gerald Cartwright. If his wife was too harassed to tell him about what happened, the fact that he insisted she go unaccompanied says he knew there would be plenty of friends there. Get their names and talk to them as well as Cartwright, Corey.”

  “While you,” Abe said, “tackle Erica Davenport.”

  * * *

  With Myron’s departure Dr. Erica Davenport had diminished, though the hair, makeup and apparel could not be faulted. Today she wore a softly draped dress of lavender-blue, with matching eyes. Her walk had lost its imperiousness, and when she sat behind her lacquered desk she couldn’t keep her hands still, had to fiddle with a pen, a file, her own perfectly manicured nails. She was near some kind of breaking point, but what kind eluded Carmine, for he knew she wasn’t the mastermind any more than she was Ulysses. It was more, he decided, as if she had suddenly realized that she was far less important than she ought to be, and harbored a colossal sense of betrayal.

  Why had four months elapsed between the Maxwell affair and the murders? Sitting facing the nominal Managing Director of Cornucopia Central, Carmine felt that if anybody knew the answer to that question, she did.

  It took him a full ten seconds to force her to meet his stare; when she yielded and looked, he was staggered by the craze of fear, worry and sick desperation in her eyes. Jesus, what exactly did she know? How could he pry it out of her? She was near the breaking point, yes, but he wasn’t capable of giving the blow necessary to make her fly apart. Suddenly he longed for Myron, understanding that Myron might be the only one who could. If ever a woman needed exquisite tenderness to break, she was Erica Davenport.

  “Missing Myron?” he asked.

  “Very much,” she answered. “But I’m sure you’re not here to pay condolences, Captain. What do you want?”

  “All eleven of the people whose murders I am investigating were closely attached to the table sponsored by the Fourth National Bank at a function held more than four months ago,” he said, watching her so intently that he hated needing to blink. “December third of last year, a Saturday night. It was a banquet held by the Maxwell Foundation.”

  “Yes, I remember it,” she said, composed now. “I went with Gus Purvey and we sat at Phil Smith’s table.”

  “Do you know where Desmond Skeps sat?”

  Her smooth brow creased, her lids fell. “He was in an odd mood, I remember that. Not that it was unexpected. I had been informed that my amorous services were no longer wanted. His table was at the other end of the hall, and the people at it were unknown to me.”

  “Yet you visited the table.” Say yes, Erica, say yes!

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I did.” She grimaced. “It was unpleasant, but I should have known it would be.”

  “How, unpleasant?”

  “Des was drunk.”

  “Yet according to your own statement, Mr. Skeps had limited himself to one drink a day for many years. At the time you gave that statement, you didn’t mention his lapse from grace at the Maxwell banquet.”

  “It only happened the once, Captain.”

  “Why?”

  “Why the lapse from grace, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have no idea, but if you think it was because he had done with me, you’re mistaken, Captain. There was no love lost between us.” She thought a moment, then said, “Nor liking.”<
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  “What about the woman with him at the table?”

  She looked genuinely puzzled. “What woman? He was alone.”

  “A woman who stood six feet tall, and would have seemed tall even seated. To your eyes, very common. Some black blood, handsome face, bottle-blonde hair, a lot of makeup, busty. I think she probably wore a tight satin dress in a bright color—emerald green or shocking pink. Not scarlet. There may have been a white mink stole, the real thing.”

  Her face had cleared. “Oh! She was at the table, but she was sitting between an attractive young woman and an old lady with white hair who had trouble breathing. She didn’t pay Des any attention, and he ignored her. Well, he was too drunk to see across the table—sloppy drunk. I couldn’t understand a word he said, so I didn’t stay long.”

  “If you sat next to Desmond Skeps, was there anyone on his other side?”

  “Yes, a very fat man who overflowed his chair.”

  “And beyond him?”

  “I couldn’t see. The fat man blocked my view.”

  “Who sat next to you besides Skeps?”