Too Many Murders Page 36

  When Carmine entered, only those eyes moved. Smith probably had to be turned and adjusted by a nurse, given his arm and shoulder. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a nurse in attendance.

  “I’ve been expecting you for several days,” Smith said.

  “Where’s your private nurse?”

  “Fool of a woman! I told her to wait at the station until I buzzed. I’m grateful for the attention when I need it, but I loathe gratuitous solicitude. Can I do this for you, can I do that for you? Pah! When I want something, I’m capable of asking.”

  Carmine sat in a padded lilac vinyl chair. “For what they charge, these should be covered in Italian kid,” he said.

  “So a visitor’s toddler can wee on them? Have a heart!”

  “True. Save Italian kid for boardrooms and executive offices. Where you’re going, Mr. Smith, there won’t even be vinyl. Just hard plastic, steel, mattress ticking and concrete.”

  “Rubbish! They’ll never convict me.”

  “Holloman will. Have you been interviewed by the FBI?”

  “Interminably. That’s why I’ve hungered to see your face, Captain. It has a certain Romanesque nobility the FBI faces have lacked. I think the only person who hasn’t made the journey from Washington to see me is J. Edgar Hoover himself, but I hear that he’s a disappointment in the flesh—soft and rather chubby.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving. Have you been charged?”

  “With espionage? Yes, but they won’t follow through.” Smith’s lips drew back to reveal teeth yellowed by his hospital stay. “I lost my luck,” he said simply. “It ran foul of yours.”

  “Men your age shouldn’t drive twelve-cylinder sports cars, more like. It was wet, the road was a mess, you were going way too fast, and you weren’t concentrating,” Carmine said.

  “Don’t rub it in. I must have driven that road a hundred times to board a hired plane. I guess it was the thought that this time I’d be boarding my own plane.”

  “I’m charging you with the murder of Dee-Dee Hall, Mr. Smith. We found your coveralls and the razor.”

  The hatred blazed; his body stiffened, battling to shed its restraints until the pain struck. He groaned. “That unprintable, unmentionable whore! She deserved to die as all whores should—cut from ear to ear! The scarlet yawn for a scarlet woman!”

  “I’m more interested in why Dee-Dee didn’t flee or fight.”

  “I need the nurse,” he said, groaning again.

  Carmine pressed the buzzer.

  “Now look at what you’ve done!” the woman chided, slotting a syringe into an outlet on his IV drip.

  “Speak not in ignorance, you moron!” Smith whispered.

  Bridling indignantly, she left.

  “I’d like to know the why of Dee-Dee,” Carmine said.

  “Would you indeed? The thing is, do I feel like telling you?” Smith asked, settling into his pillows gratefully as the pain ebbed. “Are we alone? Are you recording what I say?”

  “We are alone, and I am not recording us. A tape would not be valid evidence in a court of law without witnesses present and your consent. When I charge you formally, I’ll have witnesses, and remind you of your rights under the Constitution.”

  “So much solicitude, and all for me!” Smith mocked. His eyes clouded a little. “Yes, why not? You’re a cross between a mastiff and a bulldog, but there’s cat in there too. Curiosity is your besetting sin, Erica said to me, very frightened.”

  His lids fell, he dozed. Carmine waited patiently.

  “Dee-Dee—!” he said suddenly, eyes open. “I suppose you searched for my Peace Corps daughter?” he asked.

  “Yes, but I couldn’t find one.”

  “Anna wasn’t interested in good works,” Philip Smith said. “Her bent was purely destructive, and America suited her because here there are so few social brakes one can apply to headstrong children. She was the wrong age to make the move from West Germany to Boston and then Holloman—the bleakness of her old life was blown away on the gale of indulgence, promiscuity, infantile aspirations, undisciplined passions. The wrong age, the wrong place, the wrong child…” Smith stopped.

  Carmine said nothing, did not move. It would come out at Smith’s pace, and in chunks.

  “School? What was school, except a place to avoid? Anna played hookey so much that Natalie and I were obliged to give it out that we were teaching her at home. We were utterly impotent, we couldn’t control her. She laughed at us, she mocked us, she couldn’t be trusted with socialist enlightenment. From her fourteenth year onward, it was like having an enemy in the house—she knew we were hiding something. So Natalie and I agreed that she should have whatever money she wanted, and do whatever she wanted.” Came a sinister chuckle. “Since she hardly lived at home or acknowledged us, few people knew of her, isn’t that odd? We were able to continue our socialist duties by giving up Anna as a lost cause.”

  Another pause. Smith dozed, Carmine watched.

  “She acquired a boyfriend when she was fourteen. A twenty-year-old petty criminal named Ron David—a black man!” Smith shouted it; Carmine jumped. “Sex enthralled her, she couldn’t get enough of it or him, would rut with him anywhere, anytime, anyhow. He had an apartment on the edge of the Argyle Avenue ghetto— disease-ridden, rat-infested. Full of whores, including Dee-Dee Hall, who was a good friend of his. Ron introduced Anna to Dee-Dee, and Dee-Dee introduced Anna to heroin. Does that appall you, Captain Delmonico? Don’t let it! Save your horror for my next item of news: Anna and Dee-Dee became lovers. They were inseparable. Inseparable…”

  Dear God, thought Carmine, I don’t want to hear this. Take a break, Mr. Smith, sleep a while. Did you love your wayward daughter, or was she an embarrassing nuisance? I can’t tell.

  Smith continued. “There was no difference between Dee-Dee and the heroin. Both were vital necessities to Anna, who moved out of Ron’s apartment and into Dee-Dee’s.” Another sinister chuckle. “But Ron refused to take his marching orders. The money Anna had lavished on him was now being lavished on Dee-Dee. You would think, Captain, wouldn’t you, that my daughter would have accepted my offer to house her and Dee-Dee in the lap of luxury on the West Coast? No, that would have been too convenient for her parents! She and Dee-Dee liked living in squalor! The heroin was easy to obtain, and what else mattered?”

  “How long were Anna and Dee-Dee together?” Carmine asked.

  “Two years.”

  “And this was back in the very early 1950s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then Dee-Dee wasn’t much older than Anna. Two kids.”

  “Don’t you dare pity them! Or me!” Smith cried.

  “I do pity them, but I don’t pity you. What happened?”

  “Ron invaded Dee-Dee’s apartment with a cutthroat razor, intending to teach them a lesson. I am not conversant with the cant, but I gather that he was ‘off his face’ with drugs. So it was Anna used the razor. She cut his throat very efficiently. Dee-Dee called me at home and told me. I was obliged to deal with that nightmare just as my—my patriotic socialist duties at Cornucopia were commencing. Ron vanished—and don’t hope to find his body, Captain! It lies very far from Connecticut.”

  “Where is Anna now?” Carmine asked.

  “In a camp in Siberia where she has no access to heroin or sex or whores,” her father said. “She’s thirty-one years old.”

  “And all these years later you took out your spleen on a poor, defenseless whore?” Carmine asked incredulously. “Christ, has it never occurred to you that you yourself might be to blame for some of it?”

  Smith chose not to hear the second part. “Defenseless, nothing! Poor, nothing!” he shouted. “Dee-Dee Hall is a symptom of the disease rotting America’s stinking carcass! Women like her should be shot or put to hard labor! Whores—drugs—Jews—homosexuals—blacks—adolescent promiscuity!”

  “You make me sick, Mr. Smith,” Carmine said evenly. “I don’t think you’re a patriotic socialist, I think you’re a Nazi. Mar
x and Engels were both Jews, and they’d spit on you! How long is it since you slid inside the original Philip Smith’s shell? He was a full bird colonel in the U.S. Army, but a shadow. He answered to no one, he did what he pleased, he went where he pleased, and everybody on his West German base assumed he was someone big with one of the secret services. How do I know this when the FBI thought you were CIA and dropped their enquiries? Easy, Mr. Smith! I spent the war in the military police—there’s nothing and no one I can’t learn about. In 1946, when he went on a secret mission, one Philip Smith was kidnapped and shot, and another Philip Smith took his place. That Philip Smith—you—returned from Germany to Boston early in 1947, complete with foreign wife, like so many of those Occupation guys. The hardest thing to conceal was the age of your marriage and your kids. But you did it the best way—you just appeared, a discharged colonel and his family, in Boston.”

  Smith was listening impassively, his mouth shaped into a sneer. But the eyes, windows on a morphine-dulled brain, were confused and astounded.

  “The aristocratic Boston millionaire adopted an aloof pose that enabled him to fill the shoes of someone never seen since 1940, when the original Smith, having no close relatives, joined the army way ahead of Pearl Harbor. You manufactured a blood kinship to the Skepses in the shrewdest way—simply say it to all and sundry, and sooner or later all and sundry will believe it. Including the Skepses. You joined the Board of Cornucopia in 1951, four years after your reappearance in Boston society. Having built that beautiful house, you moved to Holloman and became who you really are—a rude, arrogant, ruthless shit. People at Cornucopia, including the very young Desmond Skeps, accepted the fact that you adorned the Board but did no work. After all, what’s unique about that? Most members of boards do nothing except take fat fees.”

  “Envious, Captain?” Smith asked with a purr in his voice.

  “Of you? No way, Mr. Smith. I am consumed with admiration of the dedicated socialist agent doing his patriotic duty as he lives high off the hog among his ideological enemies. You’ve never lived in a cold-water walk-up flat on the sixth floor where the pipes freeze, and you never will. You, Mr. Smith, are far above ordinary people, and that won’t change, whichever country you live in, will it, huh? The USSR or the USA, you’ll still be in a limousine, still have servants to treat like dirt, still have all the perks of a rich and powerful party man. Here, it’s a capitalist party. There, it’s the Communist Party. Makes no difference to you! Well, you’ve failed both masters. You’re of no further use.”

  “What a romantic you are, Delmonico,” Smith said, lips distorted in an anger he couldn’t quite suppress.

  “I’ve been accused of that before, but I don’t find it an insult.” Carmine leaned forward in his chair until his face loomed close to Smith’s. “You know what’s most romantic of all? That you were exposed for what you are by a capitalist toy like a sex-symbol sports car. You so nearly got away with it! That you didn’t is entirely your own fault. Think about that when you sit on your stinking toilet in your prison cell, staring at the stains on your hand-me-down mattress! They’ll have to isolate you because the most degenerate killer or child molester will deem you the pits—a traitor to your country. Oh, but you figure you’ll be imprisoned for murder, not treason, right? Rich guy, bribing the warden for special privileges? It won’t happen, Mr. Smith. Whichever prison is honored by your presence is going to know all about your treason. Your books will arrive covered in shit, your magazines will be torn to ribbons, your pens won’t work—”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” Smith screamed, his face the color of his bedsheet. “You wouldn’t dare! The FBI and CIA won’t let it happen! They need names, they think I can give them names! I will be very comfortably housed, wait and see!”

  “Who’s the romantic here?” Carmine asked with a grin. “They’ll leave you to Connecticut’s mercy until one of your names bears fruit, and none will. The only names you know belong to your own cell, all implicated in murder.”

  “You’re wrong!”

  “I’m right. You’ll never come to trial for treason, it’s too sensitive. Prison for murder suits everyone, Mr. Smith, and there won’t be any comfort.”

  Smith’s free left hand flailed. “All this for a whore?”

  “You bet your life it is,” Carmine said grimly. “Desmond Skeps found out about Dee-Dee and Anna, and brought Dee-Dee to the Maxwell banquet to flaunt her in your face. I’m guessing that he blamed you for the breakup of his marriage and then his affair with Erica—why, I suspect you don’t know any more than I do. He was a paranoid kind of guy, and you represented a bunch of things he envied. You wore your clothes as easily as you did your persona, while he was behind the door when God handed out the gifts. Among his other deficiencies, he lacked courage, so he fortified himself with booze that night. What he didn’t know was that you were Ulysses—but Erica did. She told him. Your good luck that he was too drunk to take it in. Yet that banquet was the start of your downfall.”

  “Nonsense, all nonsense,” Smith said wearily.

  “Not nonsense. Good sense. How you must have sweated! Though it looked as if you’d gotten away with it, you still made your plans in case you hadn’t. Four months went by. Four whole months! Then Evan Pugh fronted up to your office, bold as brass, and handed you a letter. By the time you’d read it, he was gone. But you’d set eyes on him, and you knew what he was. It takes one to know one. The plan swung into action.” Carmine stopped.

  “I’m tired, and in pain,” Smith said. “Go away.”

  “A bear trap!” Carmine said. “What was its significance?”

  “It had none because I have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s because of people like him that you’re persecuting me. Not because of a whore. Dee-Dee Hall doesn’t matter.”

  “She does to me,” Carmine said, and walked out.

  “It was unreal, John,” he said to the Commissioner later. “At first I thought Smith adored his daughter, but he couldn’t have. No one who loves would incarcerate the object of his love in a Siberian concentration camp. He could so easily have shut her away in some plush asylum—places like L.A. and New York must abound in them! No, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you know what I mean.”

  “I do.” Silvestri chewed on his cigar and grimaced, then threw it in his wastebasket. “Where did you find the time to do all the research?”

  Carmine smiled. “A bit here, a bit there. It seemed so far out that I couldn’t share it until I’d gotten it all straight. I think maybe Smith’s people in Russia were czarist aristocrats who switched camps in time to ride the Communist parade. Lenin was short of educated helpers in 1917 and probably willing to overlook the antecedents of some eager volunteers. Smith himself would have grown up under the system from his tenth birthday. We tend to forget that it’s only fifty years since the Red Revolution.”

  “A mere mote in history’s eye,” Silvestri said. “It runs so counter to human nature that I’m picking it only has another three or four decades to go before the greedies pull it down.”

  Carmine’s eyes danced. “I love it when you philosophize,” he said, grinning.

  “Any more remarks like that, and you’ll feel the toe of my regulation boot up your ass.” He changed the subject. “I’d feel happier if I thought we were any closer to catching Smith’s assistant, Carmine.”

  “Not a sign of the bastard,” Carmine said. “He’s lying low and waiting for orders. What I don’t know is if his orders will come from Smith or Moscow.”

  “I’m fed up with wars, especially cold ones.”

  “Insane, isn’t it? Smith’s not in a position to issue any orders at the moment. The FBI or CIA or whoever are tapping his phone.” Suddenly Carmine bounced in his chair. “Want to hear something weird, John?”

  “Weird away.”

  “Smith can’t bring himself to use the word ‘spy.’ When he came to a spot in his narrative where he had to say it, he went all melodramatic on me and called it his ‘patrio
tic socialist duty.’ I’ve never heard anything weirder than that, spoken by a sophisticated smoothie like him. For a minute I really felt as if I were in the pages of a Black Hawk comic book.”

  “In denial, I suppose,” Silvestri said.

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “When are you going back to Smith’s property to play with your garage controls? It might pay off.”

  “I agree, but give me a day or two, sir! The Judge can be very exasperating,” Carmine wheedled.

  It got him nowhere. “Tomorrow, Captain, tomorrow.” Then Silvestri relented. “I’ll call the persnickety old terror and beg him to be nice. Once he hears the story, he’ll play ball.”

  Abe and Corey were in their office, sufficiently bored to follow Carmine to his room with alacrity.

  “We have two controls,” Carmine said, “and five acres of landscaped gardens as well as a three-storey mansion to search.”

  “No, sir, three controls,” Abe said. “The one that opened the column might open another door out of signal range.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Corey said dubiously. “I heard that a garage door control on Long Island was opening the missile silo doors on a base in Colorado.”

  “Yeah, and we can all get Kansas City on our television sets if the weather’s right,” Carmine said. “Well, on this exercise we’re not going to worry about missile silo doors or Kansas City, okay? You’re right, Abe, we should use all three controls. What I want to do today is work out a plan.”

  “Delia!” said Abe and Corey in chorus.

  “Delia?” Carmine called.

  She came in quickly, the only one of his little task force disappointed at the solution of the importance of Dee-Dee Hall; her mission of exploration had fizzled as soon as Smith explained about his daughter.

  “Isn’t it lucky,” she said gleefully, “that I have aerial survey maps of Mr. Smith’s property? I got maps of all four suspects’ properties and had Patsy blow them up to poster size.”

  “One step ahead as always,” said Carmine.