Too Many Murders Read online

  When he came into the bedroom she was still sitting near the crib, which normally stood in the nursery next door. She had managed to get her feet under her and sat hunched over, eyes on the sleeping baby.

  Carmine didn’t try to lure her away. He found another chair and put it down opposite hers, but not where it impeded her view of Julian. Her face was dry, though because of her huddled posture he couldn’t tell if she was shaking. Her expression was of flintlike hardness, but her eyes held absolute love.

  “It’s time to give me some details,” he said, matter-of-fact.

  “Ask away.”

  “Can you describe the guy?”

  “His size, yes. About average—not tall, not short. I think he was a fit man. His reflexes were quick. His pistol was an automatic, but I imagine a .22. There was no silencer, so a big round would have sounded loud. I certainly didn’t hear a shot, and I presume he shot that poor woman in the boat shed?”

  “No, she was strangled,” Carmine said quietly. “The handgun must have been for emergencies. You were an emergency.”

  “What I have to sort out in my mind, dear love, is my fear,” she said steadily. “I can do that better if I can see Julian. It wouldn’t be logical or sensible to skulk about for the next however-many years expecting something like that to happen again, but that’s what I want to do. Somehow I have to put today behind me, and Julian says I can do that. Look at him! He went for his first swim and his first underwater dive, he didn’t have a clue what was happening to him, but he had Mummy.”

  “He’s also not old enough to remember,” his father said.

  “We won’t know that until he sees the Harbor again, or perhaps is taken into a swimming pool, or has a paddle at Busquash Beach. If there are buried memories, they’ll surface.”

  “No one knows that for sure. Look at him, Desdemona! Our son is peacefully asleep. Has he woken in distress? Thrashed around in his crib?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I’m not worried about him—half of him is me,” Carmine said with a smile. “You’re doing the English thing, bottling it all up, using logic to repress it. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t carry some scars out of this, and the most prominent will be fear that it might happen again. My mother—who blames herself terribly, I should tell you—will certainly be a basket case for months. If you really want that little brother or sister for Julian, you can’t let today rule your life. But not by doing mental gymnastics, my lovely lady. Just by keeping busy and enjoying what you’ve got—what we’ve got. You can’t let that bastard ruin us, ruin our family. Stop thinking so much about how to forget it. Time will do that for you, it always does.” He played his trump card. “After all, Desdemona, you came out on top! Nothing worse than a freezing swim happened to you and Julian. You’re a heroine, just like that vaulting exercise on the outside of the Nutmeg building. Today should reinforce your confidence in yourself, not destroy it.”

  Finally she smiled and turned her gaze from son to husband. “Yes, I do see that.” She unwound, shivering. “Oh, but I was terrified! For what seemed an eternity I didn’t know how I could get away, then I looked at the water—really looked—and saw that the tide was right in. It’s a steep slope underwater there, I knew it was deep enough for me to disappear. Once I had my plan, I was all right. Poor little Julian!” Her eyes filled with wonder. “Oh, Carmine, do you realize that on both occasions I would have died if I weren’t so big? When I did all that vaulting on the Nutmeg, I was fit from lots of hiking, but today has made me realize that I need to get my fitness back. I’ve been lazy for over twelve months, and it showed today. It’s lucky the man gave up, because I was done when I crawled out. If Sam hadn’t been in his garden, we might have died.”

  “Hiking is no longer an option,” he said, pulling her into his chair and holding her across his knees. “How about joining a gym? One of these new fitness clubs?”

  “No, I’ll exercise in my own home, thank you very much. I know it’s silly, but I want to keep Julian with me,” she said.

  “As long as you don’t smother him when he gets a bit older. Overprotective mothers don’t do their children any service,” Carmine said.

  “I promise I won’t smother him later. Mind you, I probably couldn’t,” she said. “Half of him is you. And thank you for your kindness, dear heart. I feel much better. What else do you need to know?”

  “More about the man’s appearance.”

  “His face was hidden by a khaki balaclava.”

  “A what?”

  “A balaclava. A knitted thing that’s pulled over the head and has two holes for the eyes and one hole for the mouth. I never got very close to him—I was on the seat, and he came out of the little door on the side of the boat shed. What’s that, forty or fifty feet? I could see the flash of his eyes, but not their color or shape, and his brows were covered. He wore gloves.”

  “A ski mask,” said Carmine.

  “Yes, exactly! He was wearing camouflage—khaki, green, olive, dark green in patches like a Frisian cow—a closed jacket and rather baggy trousers stuffed into army boots. While I’ve been sitting watching Julian, I realized that his garb meant he’d come along the shore. He would have been hard to see if he was among the bushes.”

  “How quickly did you see the gun?”

  “At once. He was vigilant but quite relaxed, but the moment he saw me he lifted the gun. One thing I know, Carmine. He was an expert marksman. When I spoiled his aim by moving, he chose to aim for my head. At that distance and with a light weapon, he couldn’t afford to miss. You see?” she asked proudly. “I’m married to a policeman, I know the ropes.”

  “He must have been watching our house for long enough to think he knew our movements. That goddamn telescope in Skeps’s penthouse! It was focused on the East Holloman shore. After I found it, it disappeared. But someone kept right on using it.” Carmine hugged her, kissed her face. “I thought it was just a prurient interest—and it may have been, for Skeps. But someone else had a more practical use for a telescope.”

  “And whoever it was,” she said excitedly, “would never have seen anyone in our front garden! I’d been too pregnant for the slope, then I had Julian, and it was winter. Today was my first trip down to the water’s edge in yonks and yonks!” Suddenly she began to tremble. “Oh, Carmine, what if Julian had still been strapped into his stroller? We would have died!”

  He rocked her back and forth; he’d already been in this place himself. “Julian wasn’t, Desdemona! He was sitting on your knee. I guess that means that somebody up there likes you.”

  A good howl and a fit of the shakes helped get the shock out of her system. By the time it passed, she was beginning to return to the ordinary world.

  “I’ve got nothing for your dinner!” she said.

  “I brought pizza.”

  “Sophia! How could I forget Sophia?”

  “Patsy’s taking her to JFK. Myron wants her.”

  Whereupon Julian woke, hungry but otherwise himself.

  Carmine sat and watched his wife feed his son, battling to banish the demons. The trouble, he thought, was that Desdemona mistook her importance in his police scheme of things. Holloman was small enough for his wife to have her own presence, and she drew enmity to herself like a magnet drew iron filings. It was her size, the dignity that went with it, her air of invulnerability. If his enemies hated him, they also hated her, but in her own right. Desdemona was not a princess: she was sovereign.

  May 1967

  The death of Erica Davenport was the epicenter of a human earthquake; it shook people and their constructions to their foundations, from the chief executives of Cornucopia, through Carmine Delmonico and his family, all the way to the FBI.

  “But she’s Ulysses!” Ted Kelly insisted, seeking out Carmine in his office at County Services. “We’ve known that for two years!”

  “Then why didn’t you arrest her?”

  “Evidence! It’s called evidence? No matter where we went, no m
atter what we unearthed, we could never find a shred of evidence against her that would stand up in court. If we’d tried her, she would have walked, and in a blaze of publicity that would have harmed our image as much as it enhanced hers.”

  “That’s because she wasn’t Ulysses,” Carmine said. “I have actually heard of evidence, Ted, and it wasn’t there for the simple reason that Erica Davenport wasn’t Ulysses. I think she knew who Ulysses is, but that’s a far cry from being him. And you know what, Special Agent Kelly? I don’t like your attitude any more today than I did when I put your big ass on the ground. You’re as thick as two planks.”

  “She was Ulysses, I tell you!” Kelly smacked his fists on his thighs, beat them up and down in frustration. “We’d just finished planning the neatest sting operation in espionage history—she couldn’t have resisted the bait, she’d have gone to her drop and we’d have been waiting. Now—Fuck!”

  “You found out where her drop is?” Carmine asked, looking astonished and ingenuous.

  “This one,” Special Agent Kelly said in goaded tones, then embarked on a tutorial. “Spies have a list of drop sites, they never use the same one twice. Their list is coded and they work through it. They have signals to alert their contact that something is going to be dropped, usually in a deserted spot like woods or an abandoned factory—”

  “Or identical briefcases, or a package taped under a seat on a bus, or the fourth brick from the right seventeen rows from the top,” Carmine finished with a grin. “Come on, Kelly! All that’s horseshit, and you know it. The wad of money—the spy who can’t name his contact because he doesn’t know who his contact is—what a load of crap. First off, whoever’s doing this isn’t in it for the money or the intellectual thrill. He’s an ideologue, in it for the greater glory of Mother Russia, or Marx and Lenin—a Communist ideology, anyway. Secondly, the stolen item is passed openly, after a phone call or a fax from a number no one could know about. You can’t tap every phone in the country, or intercept every telex. No matter how fanatically you watch any individual, if he’s as smart as Ulysses he’ll pass his information right under your noses and you’ll never see or smell it. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that you and the FBI don’t know how important in himself Ulysses is! Which means he rides around big cities in a limo, uses private facilities when he has to go, has the run of five-star hotels, eats in places where you and I couldn’t afford the water in the finger bowls—how am I doing, Ted?”

  “Ulysses was Erica Davenport,” Kelly said stubbornly.

  “Ulysses is alive and well and slipped a noose around that poor woman’s neck,” Carmine said harshly. “Not, however, before he broke her arms and legs in two places each, to be sure how much she knew and whom she might have told.”

  The mask fell completely. In a second the clumsy, slightly dense, distinctly lower-grade FBI agent disappeared, to be replaced by a highly trained, highly professional, intelligent and capable man.

  “I give in,” Ted Kelly said ruefully. “They warned me you were hard to dupe, but I had to try. The last thing I need or want is anyone at Cornucopia thinking I might be in your league at sniffing out wrongdoers. I want Ulysses to think I’m a dumb official of a dumb institution, and so do my bosses. It’s okay for you, you’re hunting a murderer. You can get farther by spreading your tail and peacocking your skill, but my quarry’s different. I have to pretend I haven’t got to first base even when I’m stealing home. My man doesn’t make mistakes.”

  “He is these days,” Carmine said, leaning forward in his chair. “All of a sudden, Mr. Kelly, you and I are hunting the selfsame predator. I’ve known for some time that my killer is your Ulysses. No, it’s not a guess. It’s fact.” He glanced at his railroad clock. “Got a spare half hour?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then I’ll hang out the Do Not Disturb signs.”

  This consisted in closing his doors and routing all his calls through Delia. Then Carmine returned to his desk and told Ted Kelly why he knew that Ulysses had murdered eleven people who sat down to enjoy a charity banquet five months ago.

  “So you see,” he concluded, “it may end in our getting hard evidence not of espionage but of murder. Is that going to be a problem for the FBI?”

  “Anything but,” Special Agent Ted Kelly said. “Learning there are spies inside the city gates is very alarming for the general populace. You’re welcome to the glory. I’ll slink back to Washington happily looking like a fool. That way, I’m in good shape for the next traitor.”

  “I’m not after glory!” Carmine snapped.

  “I know, but if we catch the fucker, someone has to shine and it can’t be me. All I can say is, if you do catch him—no, when you catch him!—he can’t ever be let out of prison.”

  “He won’t have done anything to warrant a federal trial or a federal prison,” Carmine said, “and Connecticut is a liberal-minded state. None of us can predict what some fool parole board of the future might decide. They’re always stacked with idealists.”

  Kelly rose to his immense height and held out his hand to shake Carmine’s warmly. “I wouldn’t worry,” he said cheerfully. “His parole board will be stacked with believers in recidivism. I forgive you for calling me a cunt. I behaved atrociously.”

  “In public,” Carmine said, steering him toward the outer door, “we continue the pretense—flattened ears, bared teeth and snarls every time we meet. What, by the way, was on the film you took from the telescope camera?”

  “Nothing worth reporting on,” Kelly said. “Just Holloman Harbor’s shoreline from the Long Island ferry wharf clear to the point beyond East Holloman. Tide in, tide out. We figured it might have had something to do with a meeting or a drop.”

  There was no one in the hall; Special Agent Ted Kelly went down it in three long strides and vanished into the stairwell. As soon as he had gone, Carmine went to see Delia.

  “Our federal turkey is no turkey,” he said, grinning. “He’s an eagle, but if you catch sight of his wingspan while he’s in turkey mode, he’ll convince you he’s really a buzzard.”

  “A very strange bird,” said Delia solemnly.

  “Any news?” he asked.

  “Not a sausage. Abe and Corey have exhausted their lists of those who might have sat at Peter Norton’s table, without any responses. I daresay people simply forget. No, don’t go! The Commissioner wants to see you. Now, he shouted. I fear Uncle John is not in a good mood.”

  If the expression on Commissioner Silvestri’s face was an indication, “not in a good mood” was putting it mildly. Carmine stood to take his medicine.

  “What’s the bastard going to do next?” Silvestri asked.

  An innocuous question; he was going to be oblique. “That depends on whether he was in my boat shed himself or not.”

  “Why?”

  “The assistant is extremely valuable, yes, sir, but expendable nonetheless. My feeling is that he stayed in the Bat Cave and sent Robin to my boat shed.”

  “Slimy rodent! How’s Desdemona?”

  “No different than she was the last time you asked, sir.” Carmine looked at his watch. “That was an hour ago.”

  “And your mother?” Silvestri asked, squirming in his seat.

  “Ditto.”

  “I hear Myron’s managed to get Erica Davenport’s body out of police custody and is flying her to L.A. for burial.”

  Carmine eyed his boss curiously. “Where did you hear that?”

  A look of discomfort came over the Commissioner’s face. “I—uh—I was talking to him.”

  “Phone or flesh?” Carmine asked warily.

  “Phone. Sit down, man, sit down!”

  His wariness growing, Carmine sat. “Spit it out, John!”

  “That’s no way to speak to your superior.”

  “My patience is finite, sir.”

  “I guess you know how important Myron is?”

  “I do,” said Carmine, waiting for it.

  “The thing is, he’s buzzin
g around in Hartford like a wasp inside a pair of shorts.”

  “Angry, pushy and trapped.”

  “Those, plus a lot else. He wants Erica Davenport’s murder put as our number one priority, and the Governor thinks that’s appropriate, given the publicity.”

  “Myron leaked the story himself,” Carmine said.

  “Yeah, well, we all know that. But the Governor wants him buzzing somewhere far away from Hartford. He’s got this bee in his bonnet—”

  “Wasps, now bees. Just tell me!”

  “I’m sending you to London to investigate Dr. Davenport’s time there as a student.” Silvestri coughed. “An anonymous benefactor has donated funds to send your wife and baby with you because of the recent attempt on their lives. Hartford has made a special grant to fund your own trip,” Silvestri ended, shutting his eyes on the gathering storm.

  There were only two ways to go. One would ruin his entire day, the other would at least allow him to vent some kind of emotion. Carmine chose the other, and laughed until he cried.

  “Fuck a duck!” He gasped, clutching his sides. “I can’t go to London, I just can’t! The minute I’m away, all hell will break loose. Surely you can see that, John?”

  “Of course I can! And I said so! But I may as well have saved my breath. This investigation is being run as a political football, thanks to Myron Mandelbaum.”

  “He means well, but he should butt out of what he doesn’t understand. His trouble is that he tends to see life as a movie—everything happens at the speed of light and no one pauses to think. An odyssey to London won’t help me find a killer or a spy, but it might let him get away.” Carmine groaned.