Too Many Murders Read online

  “Poor Gus! North Holloman is a dump.” Carmine resumed his progress. “Meeting in Silvestri’s office nine tomorrow, okay?”

  The lights of Holloman’s east shore were twinkling in and out of the wealth of trees for which Holloman was famous as Carmine parked his Ford Fairlane on East Circle shortly before nine that night. Strictly speaking, the vehicle was a police unmarked, with a souped-up V-8 engine and cop springs and shocks, but it didn’t look the part; since attaining captain’s rank, Carmine got a last year’s model every year, so it bore none of the stigmata of the usual cop unmarked. He took the sloping, curving flagged path down to his front door, tried the knob, and let himself in. Desdemona didn’t bother locking doors, correctly reasoning that it would be a very rare criminal who entered Captain Delmonico’s residence. Reasoning like that wouldn’t have held water in a larger city, but everyone in Holloman knew where Carmine lived, which had its disadvantages but also its advantages.

  His women were assembled in the kitchen, a large one permitting them to dine in it if they had no guests, thus saving the formal dining room and Carmine’s exquisite Lalique table with matching chandelier for more festive occasions. The kitchen was pure white and clinically clean; in the matter of domestic decor Carmine’s second wife had deferred to his taste as better than her own, and never rued that decision.

  She stood at the extra-high counter putting the finishing touches on a dish of lasagna, while her stepdaughter tackled the salad enthusiastically. The counters needed to be forty-six inches high, for Desdemona Delmonico stood six foot three in bare feet; that they were not even higher was a concession to Sophia, a mere five foot seven, and to the economics of offering something usable if ever the family decided to sell. Desdemona’s hair was a little tangled from running her hands through it, as she was a learner-cook who still suffered paroxysms of anxiety over her cuisine, though lasagna was fairly safe. Carmine’s mother and sisters had taken her in hand, so what she learned tended to be southern Italian. Very alien to Desdemona, English to her fingertips, but she had her occasional victories too. A visiting friend from Lincoln had taught her to make a traditional roast dinner and a Lancashire hot pot, both devoured by her husband and his family with great pleasure. Fancy never eating potatoes peeled and roasted around the joint! To Desdemona, it was a terrible omission. Not to mention gravy made on pan drippings.

  When she turned to greet Carmine it could be seen that she was rather plain of face, between the overlarge nose and the prominent chin, but when her face broke into smiles it lit up most attractively, and the eyes were truly beautiful, big, calm, the color of thick ice. Motherhood had endowed her with a bosom, all that had been lacking to render her figure splendid, if hugely tall. As her well-shaped legs were proportionately very long, men tended to think her rather dishy. Not a verdict they would have delivered during Desdemona’s days managing the Hug; marriage had done wonders for her.

  She went at once to Carmine and bent her face four inches to kiss him, while Sophia hopped from foot to foot, waiting her turn.

  At sixteen going on seventeen, his daughter was undeniably lovely; she took after her mother, Sandra, who had aspired to a Hollywood career. Sophia was naturally blonde, blue-eyed, fine-featured, and her figure was everything a young girl could have hoped for. But while her mother was a cokehead still living on the West Coast, Sophia had a brain, considerable ambition, and more common sense than either her father or her stepfather, the famed producer Myron Mendel Mandelbaum, had ever hoped for in Sandra’s child. She had moved from L.A. and the depressing influence of her mother when Carmine and Desdemona married nine months ago, and occupied a teenaged girl’s idea of heaven: a square tower three floors high complete with a widow’s walk. Shrewd enough to realize that its location made it nigh impossible for her to sneak people in or sneak out herself, Sophia had decided that its advantages far outweighed such minor stuff, for she was not by nature a rebel. Though her suite had a little kitchen, she was almost invariably to be found eating with her father and stepmother, with whom she got on very well.

  Desdemona enfolded in one arm, Carmine stretched out the other for Sophia, who came into it and kissed him smackingly.

  “Lasagna!” he said, pleased. “Are you sure you don’t mind eating so late? I’d be happy with a plate warmed on top of the stove, honest.”

  “Sophia and I are sophisticated women of the world” was his wife’s answer. “Eat too early, and one wakes up ravenous long before there’s a chance of breakfast. We have afternoon tea at four, and that lasts us.”

  “How’s What’s-His-Name?” he asked, smiling tenderly.

  “Julian is perfect,” said his mother. “Asleep, of course.”

  “Give in, Daddy,” said Sophia, contributing her mite. “Julian is a great name.”

  “It’s sissy,” Carmine said. “You can’t expect a son of mine to go to St. Bernard’s lumbered with a sissy name.”

  Sophia giggled. “Go on, Daddy! He’s such a bruiser that he’s more likely to get ‘Big Julie from East Cicero, Illinois.’”

  “Curse Guys and Dolls!” Carmine cried. “Sissy or gangstery, Julian isn’t suitable. He needs to have an ordinary name! I like John, after my grandfather Cerutti. Or Robert, Anthony, James!”

  The lasagna was being sliced; how did Desdemona know the hour he’d appear for dinner? Sophia had dished salad into bowls and was pouring the dressings of choice over them, then filling the wine glasses with a good Italian red, save for her own, which got a third of red on the bottom and then was topped up with sparkling mineral water. They sat down.

  “How about Simon?” asked Sophia in a spirit of mischief.

  Carmine reared back like a striking snake. “Sissy going on faggy!” he snapped. “Look, what passes for normal in England is one thing, but this isn’t England!”

  “You’re prejudiced against homosexuals,” said Desdemona, her sangfroid unruffled. “And don’t say ‘faggy’!”

  “No, I’m not prejudiced! But neither have I forgotten how miserable his classmates can make a kid with a fancy name,” said Carmine, still fighting valiantly. “It’s not about whether I’m prejudiced, it’s about the kids our son will associate with at school. Truly, Desdemona, the worst thing a parent can do to a child is lumber him or her with a stupid name, and by stupid I mean sissy or fancy or idiotic!”

  “Then Julian is the best of a bad bunch,” said Desdemona. “I like it! Listen to the sound of it, Carmine, please. Julian John Delmonico. It has a nice ring to it, and when he’s a famous man, think how good it will look on his letterhead.”

  “Pah!” snorted Carmine, and changed the subject. “This is a very good lasagna,” he said. “It’s better than my mother’s, and getting up there with Grandmother Cerutti.”

  She flushed with pleasure, but whatever she was going to say never was said; Sophia got in first.

  “Guess who’s arriving tomorrow, Daddy?”

  “When you speak in that tone, young lady, it can only be one person—Myron,” said her father.

  “Oh!” Sophia looked deflated, then cheered up. “He didn’t say so, but I know he’s visiting to keep me company. The Dormer is on midsemester break, and I did drop him a hint.”

  “Like a brick, huh? I’m kinda snowed under at work, so he couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Carmine, smiling.

  “Bad?” Desdemona asked.

  “Terrible.”

  “What’s going on, Daddy?”

  “You know the rules, kid. No police business at home.”

  On his way to bed an hour later Carmine visited the nursery, where his nameless offspring lay slumbering blissfully in his crib. Sophia had called him a bruiser, and it was an accurate description; bigboned and overly long, he had his father’s muscular breadth too, though no one could have called him fat. Just a bruiser. His thick, curly hair was black, and his skin a rich tan like Carmine’s. In fact, he resembled his father in all save his length. Feet and hands suggested way over six feet when mature.
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br />   It was then, with the Dean of Paracelsus’s words about wives ringing in his ears, that Carmine Delmonico saw the light. This boy could bear any first name with impunity; no one was ever going to intimidate him or mock him. Maybe he needed the brake of a slightly sissy name to rein in his power, his size.

  So when Carmine slid into bed alongside Desdemona, he turned to her and took her fully into his arms, body to body, legs around legs. He kissed her neck; she shivered, turned into him even closer, one hand in his cropped hair.

  “Julian,” he said. “Julian John Delmonico.”

  She emitted a squeak of joy and began kissing his eyelids. “Carmine, Carmine, thank you! You’ll never regret it! Neither will our son. He can carry any name.”

  “I’ve just realized that,” he said.

  Commissioner John Silvestri’s office was large, though seldom called upon to accommodate as many men as gathered there at nine the next morning, April fourth.

  Holloman, a city of 150,000 people, wasn’t big enough to have a homicide division, but it did have three squads of detectives to investigate the full gamut of serious crime. Captain Carmine Delmonico headed the entire division, with two lieutenants who were nominally under him but who usually followed their own lines of enquiry. Lieutenant Mickey McCosker and his team weren’t present; he was embroiled in a drug investigation the FBI was running, and couldn’t be spared for other work, a point that rankled with Silvestri and the Staties, bypassed. So Carmine and his two sergeants, Abe Goldberg and Corey Marshall, were joined by Lieutenant Larry Pisano and his two sergeants, Morty Jones and Liam Connor. Also present was the Deputy Commissioner, Danny Marciano, due to retire at the end of 1968. Despite his impeccably Italian name, Marciano, of northern blood, was freckled, fair, and blue-eyed. Larry Pisano was due to retire at the end of this year, 1967, which had led to some difficulties for Carmine, both of whose sergeants had seniority over Pisano’s men and were in line for the next lieutenancy. Since that meant a hefty raise in pay as well as greater autonomy, he couldn’t blame Abe or Corey for wanting to move up.

  Silvestri himself, a desk cop who had never fired his sidearm in the course of duty, much less a shotgun or a rifle, was never dismissed as a pantywaist; during World War II he had earned many decorations, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. But reinstalled in the Holloman Police Department, he had recognized his talents as administrative, and was one of the city’s finest-ever police commissioners. He was a dark, smoothly handsome man who could still pull the women, reminded people of a big cat, and was intensely loyal to his department, for which he would go to bat with anyone from the Feds to Hartford. So good a politician that he was generally held to be politically inept, Silvestri had a brilliant media persona and only two weaknesses. The first was his protégé Carmine Delmonico. The second was his addiction to sucking and chewing on unlit cigars, whose slimy butts littered his wake like corks after a pleasure boat. Owning a streak of the diabolical, he had long ago realized that Danny Marciano loathed these cigars, and he always contrived to put the current one as close to Marciano as he could.

  Under ordinary circumstances his striking face was rather expressionless during a conference, but this morning it was distinctly grim. As soon as Patrick O’Donnell came through the door and took the last vacant chair, Silvestri got straight down to business.

  “Carmine, fill me in,” he commanded, champing on a cigar.

  “Yes, sir.” Without referring to the sheaf of papers and folders on his lap, Carmine commenced. “The first call came at six a.m. yesterday, from the Chubb Rowing Club. Their premier eight had gone out for practice as soon as it was light enough—apparently conditions on the stretch of the Pequot River they use were perfect, so the coach dragged them all out of bed and put them on the river. They’d worked hard and were about to come in when two of the port oars struck an object just under the surface—the body of a small child. Patsy?”

  Patrick took over almost in the same breath. “A toddler, about eighteen months old, dressed in top quality Dr. Denton’s and a super-thick diaper of the kind certain institutions sell to families with handicapped kids. The body showed the stigmata of Down’s syndrome. Cause of death—I prioritized the child—wasn’t drowning, but asphyxiation due to smothering with a pillow. There were contusions indicating that the child had resisted. Death occurred about four a.m.”

  Carmine resumed. “The identity of the victim was a mystery. No one had lodged a Missing Persons for a Down’s syndrome child. Corey?”

  “At eight-oh-two we got a call from a Mr. Gerald Cartwright, whose house fronts onto the Pequot River near the Chubb Rowing Club,” said Corey, striving mightily to keep his voice dispassionate and level. “He had just returned from an overnight trip out of state to find his wife dead in their bed and their youngest son, a Down’s syndrome, missing from the house.” He stopped.

  Back to Carmine. “By this time several other things had happened. A prostitute we all know well—Dee-Dee Hall—was lying in an alley behind City Hall with her throat cut from ear to ear. That call came in four minutes before seven a.m., and was followed at seven-twelve by a call from the residence of Mr. Peter Norton, who died after drinking a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. So I left Abe to deal with Dee-Dee’s murder, Corey on the Cartwright affair, and went myself to the Norton house. I found the victim’s wife and two children—a girl aged eight and a boy aged five—basket cases, especially the wife, who behaved like she was demented. What details I got were from the little girl, who swore it was the orange juice. The glass was on the breakfast table, about half drunk. The wife squeezed it every morning, then went upstairs to wake and dress the kids, during which time—about ten minutes—the glass sat unobserved and unattended on the table. So there was a window of opportunity for an outsider to add something to the juice.”

  “I have the remainder of the juice and the glass,” Patsy said, one hand propping his chin; he looked tired. “Though I don’t have any analytical results back yet, my guess is that Mr. Norton was poisoned by a large dose of strychnine.” He grimaced. “Not a pleasant way to go.”

  “While I was at the Nortons’,” Carmine went on, “I was called to a rape and murder out on Sycamore. I sent Corey. Mrs. Norton needed a woman cop, and we’re short on those. Report, Corey?”

  “The body was discovered by the girl’s landlord,” said Corey, managing his voice better. “Her name is Bianca Tolano. She was on the floor, naked, hands bound behind her back. She’d been tortured, and there was a pair of pantyhose around her neck. But I don’t think she died of strangulation, Carmine. I think she died from a broken bottle up the vagina.”

  “Quite right, Cor,” said Patsy. “Autopsy is still pending, but I’ve made a preliminary examination. The pantyhose was an on-again, off-again form of torture.”

  “Jesus!” cried Silvestri. “Are we under siege?”

  “It sure felt like it yesterday, sir,” said Carmine. “I was still trying to get information out of Mrs. Norton when the call came about the shooting of a black cleaning woman and two black high school students—not gang related, according to the cop who phoned them in. They happened on his beat. I passed them to Larry here. Larry?”

  A medium-brown man who had had an undistinguished but quite satisfactory career, Larry Pisano wiggled his brows ruefully. “Well, Carmine, it may have sounded ordinary enough, but believe me, it’s not. Ludovica Bereson is a cleaning woman—she does five houses between Mondays and Fridays. She’s well liked by her employers, doesn’t shirk, never gives cause for complaint. Likes a good joke and something hot for her lunch. Her employers didn’t mind the lunch because she was a good cook and always left enough for them to eat for dinner. She was shot in the head with a small-bore gun, and died instantly. No one saw it, but—and this is more interesting—no one heard it either. Cedric Ballantine was sixteen years old, a good student in line for a football scholarship to a top college. He works hard, has never been in trouble. He was shot in the back of the head by a m
edium-bore gun. Morris Brown was eighteen years old, an A student, no record of trouble. He was shot in the chest by a big old mother of a gun—a .45 or something like. No one saw or heard the boys gunned down either. All three victims had powder residue around the wounds, so they were shot at close range. Same beat cop, yeah, but Cedric and Morris occurred at opposite ends of his territory, and Ludovica in the middle. I had Morty and Liam hunt for casings, but nada—and not because they missed them! I tell you, Carmine, it was one helluva smooth operation! And the victims? Three totally harmless black people!”

  “I doubt I’ll get to them today,” said Patrick with a sigh. “The poison cases take precedence.”

  “Poison cases?” Silvestri asked, eyes widening. “In the plural?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Carmine, nodding. “Mrs. Cathy Cartwright, the mother of the Down’s syndrome child, didn’t commit suicide. She was killed with an injection of something, and Patsy says she couldn’t have maneuvered a needle herself into the vein that was used. Then we have Peter Norton, who ingested strychnine. And Dean John Kirkbride Denbigh, of Dante College at Chubb, who drank a lethal dose of potassium cyanide in his jasmine tea. Not to mention el supremo of Cornucopia, Desmond Skeps.”

  The Commissioner was gaping. “Sweet Jesus! Skeps? Desmond Skeps is dead?”

  “Oh, yes. And don’t think it didn’t occur to me that all the other murders are simply a way of making Skeps’s death look less like the object of the exercise,” said Carmine, then scowled. “Had there been fewer, I might have inclined that way too, but not this many. Whatever way you look at it, twelve murders in one day are too many murders by far for a little city like Holloman.”

  “Let’s see,” said Silvestri, using his fingers. “The baby. The baby’s mother. The strychnine-in-the-orange-juice guy. The rape murder. The prostitute—poor old Dee-Dee! She’s been on the streets since I was a boy, it seems … Three blacks, shot. The Dean of Dante College with cyanide. The head honcho of Cornucopia … That’s ten altogether. Who else, for pity’s sake?”