Too Many Murders Page 8

  Cathy Cartwright, killed before her handicapped child made a mess in his diaper. Like Desmond Skeps, yet unlike him. The drugged glass of bourbon—sad, to think that the poor woman had to go to bed in order to have a civilized drink. When she felt the effects of the chloral hydrate she probably didn’t try to fight them, deeming herself bone-weary and looking forward to a few hours of peaceful sleep, wondering when Jimmy would wake her demanding to be changed. Patrick thought the pentobarbital had been injected immediately; she was perhaps the first of the night’s victims to die, very quickly and without any pain. The vital centers in her brain stem had gently ceased to function, and she slipped away. What about her had prompted mercy? It said the killer felt kindly about her, regretted the necessity.

  Carmine, Carmine! He sat up straight, conscious of the sweat trickling down the back of his neck, running between his shoulder blades. You’re thinking as if there’s only one murderer! But there can’t be. Too many crimes in too many different places at close enough to the same time. Unless some of the murders were commissioned? But that calls for huge amounts of money, and a mastermind. Look at it dispassionately, and you’ll see how wrong you are…. About the only reason for such an orgy of killing at more or less the same moment is a spirit of mischief, which is ridiculous. Manifestly ridiculous! Think of the risks! Anyone intelligent enough to hatch a plot like that would be too intelligent to contemplate its hatching.

  Confess it, Carmine, the idea only entered your mind after you learned that Desmond Skeps was among the dead. How brilliant, to conceal the importance of his murder under a landslide of other murders! An idea that might have held water, had there been fewer murders. But ten others? Jimmy Cartwright was a red herring, but the rest looked planned. Four other murders would have been ideal, and feasible. Ten others? Insanity!

  Unless … unless, Carmine, all those people had to die. Unless between March twenty-ninth and April third something happened that forced this particular solution. Only, what? Oh, Carmine, Carmine, don’t complicate your job so crazily! And don’t you dare voice this suspicion to anyone, even John Silvestri.

  Aware that the worm, having been born, was wriggling inside his brain and lighting every hidden, darkened cranny, Carmine put Cathy Cartwright on the “seen” pile and took Corey’s file on Bianca Tolano.

  Bianca, twenty-two years old, had come to Holloman from Pennsylvania ten months ago. A graduate in economics from Penn State, she wanted to get an MBA at Harvard Business School, Corey had deduced from her correspondence and other papers in her apartment. But at present she lacked the money, so she had secured a job as an executive assistant at Carrington Machine Parts, one of the many Cornucopia companies dotted around Holloman. It paid well and she was a success at it; her savings account with the Holloman National Bank was growing fast. The top floor of a three-family house on Sycamore Street, her apartment was less than a block from his wife’s old apartment, Carmine discovered with a shudder. Back came the memories of Desdemona’s ordeal there, and the garotted cop supposed to be guarding her front door. A respectable neighborhood. Then Desdemona. And now this.

  Her landlord had noticed her open front door, called out, and, receiving no reply, entered to find her naked body on the living room floor. According to Patsy, she had been tortured, including with a pair of pantyhose tightened and loosened around her neck a number of times; she had been burned with a cigarette, cut with scissors, pinched with cruelly wielded tweezers, and killed with a broken bottle rammed into her vagina. Apart from the temporary asphyxiations, she was conscious throughout; there were no drugs in her bloodstream.

  Interviews with her colleagues had revealed that she kept to herself but was not shy. Her relationship with her boss, James Dorley, was pleasant and friendly in a professional way. As she was attractive, she had had offers of dinner or a movie, and had accepted several without any romantic consequences. The men were at pains to explain that Bianca had proven aloof, didn’t offer a guy any encouragement. Her landlord, an inquisitive old man, said he’d swear on a stack of Bibles that she hadn’t had any male visitors. Quiet, that was Miss Tolano. The women she worked with gave Corey no leads either. She’d participate in a coffee klatch, do her share of giggling, but gave the other girls the impression that nothing was going to come between Bianca and that MBA from Harvard. They did tell Corey that her home in Scranton had not been a happy one, that she didn’t keep in touch with her family, and was very glad to be somewhere else. Did she ever go out? asked Corey. Sometimes, the women answered, usually because Mr. Dorley gave her tickets to the theater or to events he couldn’t manage to attend. The only one she didn’t take him up on was a charity ball—she didn’t have a stylish enough dress, she said.

  Another big fat zero, thought Carmine, adding Bianca Tolano to the “seen” pile. If Corey hoped Bianca Tolano would make him shine for the selection panel, he was wrong. His case was as bare as Abe’s.

  Abe had done his best with Beatrice Egmont: no stone was unturned, from the trash collectors to the sons to the neighbors. What stood up high above the level plain of her existence was her personality; everyone who knew Beatrice Egmont loved her. She didn’t intrude herself into other people’s lives or doings, but she was always there with some appropriate gesture, suggestion, gift. Nor did she live the life of a recluse just because she had been a widow for many years; she was invited to all the local parties, loved busing into Manhattan for dinner and a show, bought Girl Scout cookies and raffle tickets, was never missing from the guest list of Holloman charity affairs. She knew the Mayor well, which had led to enquiries from City Hall about her murder. As far as Abe could ascertain, nothing was missing from her house; her Ming vases and Flemish tapestries were untouched, and her Baume & Mercier watch was still on her wrist when she was found. She had not been drugged prior to retiring for the night, but her heart had given out too quickly for her to struggle. “I can find no reason whatsoever for her death,” wrote Abe.

  Goodbye, Beatrice Egmont, you poor old thing. Carmine put her file on top of the growing heap he had tabled. There remained his own cases: Dean Denbigh, Peter Norton, Desmond Skeps, Cathy Cartwright and Evan Pugh.

  Undoubtedly Dean Denbigh had courted disaster, but his wife was quite right: why a subtle death like cyanide administered in his study? He should have been shot, stabbed, beaten to death somewhere in the vicinity of Joey’s Pancake Diner—was the diner a link between him and Gerald Cartwright, who owned it? According to Patrick’s report, the packet enclosing the tea bag bore only one tear, that made by the Dean, and powerful microscopy hadn’t revealed oversewn stitch holes on the tea bag. The theft of two tea packets had forced the Dean to use the last one in his box; clearly he was destined to die on this day and no other, making his poisoning different from ordinary cases of poisoning. Some killers accepted a certain randomness, but not his killer. Thou shalt die today, the third day of April, and on no other day…. And why cyanide? To make absolutely sure that the Dean of Dante College would not survive.

  Peter Charles Norton was different. Though Carmine had managed to visit the Norton house only once, what he found there disposed him to dismiss the wife as a suspect, despite the fact that she had squeezed the glass of orange juice. He’d left them alone because the only adult witness, the wife, had been madly hysterical. Tomorrow he’d send Abe or Corey back expecting answers to his questions. However, he had made deductions, the first being that Peter Norton was the sole drinker of orange juice; a jar of cranberry juice in the refrigerator suggested that the wife and children drank that. All she squeezed was one glass, for a man who gulped it down and ate his toast going through the door. Carmine had a private bet that Norton had a second breakfast at Joey’s Pancake Diner. The toast and juice were sops to Mrs. Norton.

  On April third he had died, but only after long, excruciating agony. This said that the killer thought Norton should die with maximum visual effect. Was he punishing the husband, or the wife? That depended upon how soon into his dying Norton lost con
sciousness. There were no traces of any other substances in his blood, though his sugar was significantly elevated and his arteries were already showing signs of the burger-and-fries diet a cop on door-knock queries had noted he loved. Patsy had raced back and tested the sugar in a bowl and a larger container, since the blood evidence suggested Mrs. Norton sweetened the juice, and what if the kids put it on their cereal? But no poison of any kind was found in it. Good thinking, Patsy!

  Delia had left bank statements with the Norton papers—what a gem she was! The manager of the Fourth National Bank, Norton clearly had no financial worries. He lived within his means and had made no large withdrawals over the past year, which was as far back as Delia had gone for the moment. His Ohio family was a wealthy one, whereas Mrs. Norton came from a bluecollar family in Waterbury.

  He tossed the file in the direction of the rejects and stared down at Evan Pugh with a heavy frown. His instincts said this was the extraordinary murder, the one that differed from all the others. Who was Motor Mouth? And what had prompted such a bizarre method of killing? A bear trap! Not one of the dinky specimens designed to keep the bear in one spot until pleasure could be taken in shooting it; this was the man-trap kind, big enough to maim the bear, ensure it bled to death. A weapon of survival for man, extinction for the bear.

  Evan Pugh’s parents were on their way from Florida, where they lived in one of those grandiose mansions fronting on an artificial waterway; having made a bundle in retail electronics, Evan Pugh’s father had retired to enjoy the life of a lotus eater in a place where it never really got cold, let alone snowed. Evan was their only child, so life for the police investigating his murder was about to become a great deal less comfortable; the Pughs were bringing their lawyer with them.

  Which left the one crime whose scene Carmine hadn’t yet had time to visit. There was no hurry, he knew. Desmond Skeps’s penthouse was sealed, its private elevator locked, the two sets of fire stairs barred and padlocked. Abe hadn’t wasted time going there; he’d worked from Skeps’s office as he gathered information about the tycoon’s subordinates and acquaintances. The grisly details of his murder Carmine knew from talking to Patsy. Like Bianca Tolano, Skeps had been tortured, though his was no sex crime, and like Cathy Cartwright and Peter Norton and Dean Denbigh, he had been poisoned. Yet which had true significance, the similarities or the dissimilarities?

  There you go again, Carmine, assuming this is a single killer! You haven’t a shred of evidence to prove that—but then, you haven’t a shred of evidence about multiple killers either. In fact, the commissioned out-of-state killer feels right for maybe half of the victims, and that does suggest a mastermind, at least for those murders. Why not hired assassins for all of them? Is there anything to suggest a hands-on murderer? Yes, but only in two deaths—Desmond Skeps and Evan Pugh. These smack of personal enjoyment. And if Pugh’s blackmail concerned the killings, it makes sense, even to why there was no written legacy of its subject matter. All Pugh had to do was speak, and the brilliant eye of police investigation would be refocused in a direction the killer couldn’t afford to have illuminated. Which brings it back to Skeps himself as the main target. But why did the others have to die at all?

  Time will tell, thought Carmine, more comfortable now with his theory. I’ve only just begun to start unpicking the pattern; then I have to knit it together again. Tomorrow I go back to my customary way: working each crime myself, with Abe and Corey in tow. Too bad if they don’t get any cases to work on their own! I’m like an amputee without Abe and Corey. I need three pairs of eyes, three pairs of ears, and three brains.

  He glanced at the big clock above Delia’s door. Six thirty! Where did the time go? Her light was on, so he poked his head around the open door.

  “Go home, otherwise some lustful cop will hit on you.”

  “In a minute,” she answered absently, missing the joking compliment entirely. “I just want to collate these bank records. It took me all day to get them.”

  “Okay, but don’t stay forever. And gather everyone for a conference in Silvestri’s room at nine tomorrow morning, please.”

  Now, with Myron Mendel Mandelbaum in residence on East Circle, he’d better go home.

  There were few men Carmine loved deeply. Pride of place was held by Patrick O’Donnell, but next on the list was his ex-wife’s second husband. Neither man had ended up loving the wife in common, Sandra, but both were completely devoted to Carmine’s and Sandra’s daughter, Sophia. Though Myron missed her with that awful hollowness of an empty house and absent laughter, he hadn’t even hesitated to send her east after Carmine married Desdemona, knowing her life in the relatively modest house on East Circle would be far better for her than to continue in his own replica of Hampton Court Palace, where her mother displayed no interest in her and Myron himself had calls on his time he couldn’t avoid without running the risk of losing everything he owned. A prenuptial agreement, uncommon in 1952, had ensured that Sandra would get no more than a few millions upon his death, but Sophia was his heir, and he wanted the girl to inherit a massive estate. Not for one moment did he think Sophia would fritter it away; his rooted conviction was that this beloved stepdaughter would do very well by it. Though she had been educated in all the acceptable disciplines from mathematics to English literature, he had also made Sophia privy to one of his business activities, the raising of funds to produce motion pictures and the overseeing of the picture’s finances from preproduction to in the can and theater distribution. By the time she was twenty-one, Myron had resolved, Sophia would be fit to wear the hat of a Hollywood producer, if such was her inclination, or else be well on her way to managing all of his many business activities.

  Myron knew Carmine guessed at his plans for Sophia, but they had never spoken of them; Carmine was too sensitive of Sophia’s position to make the first overtures, and Myron was too cagey. If his dear friend Carmine had any real idea of the extent of his business empire, Myron knew he wouldn’t want Sophia burdened with a tenth so much. But the Sophia Carmine knew was a shadowy figure; it was Myron who had been to all intents and purposes her permanent father between her second and her sixteenth birthday, so it was Myron who knew her far better.

  Besides, Myron was still hale and hearty, and blithely expected to live for many years to come. Therefore he failed to see why he should take Carmine into his confidence while the girl herself happily pursued the life of a sixteen-year-old in a loving home and at a good school. What didn’t occur to him was that, newly deprived of his beloved child and inexpressibly lonely, he was ripe for someone enterprising to pluck him.

  Knowing himself always welcome at Carmine’s, he took a few days off every time he visited New York City and appeared at the house on East Circle. This visit, however, was a surprise; the latest film, featuring no fewer than three top stars, was still in a state of flux. His excuse was that the money for it was in New York, but to Carmine it rang false; the money was always in New York. No, Myron was here because the death of Desmond Skeps was making headlines.

  When Carmine walked in, Myron was seated in a large chair in the living room with a glass of Kentucky straight bourbon and soda near at hand, reading a copy of this week’s News magazine.

  At fifty, he was older than Carmine, and his famed ability to attract beautiful women was a by-product of the power he wielded rather than any remarkable good looks. He was bald enough to keep what hair he still owned cut very close to his scalp; his long and clever face had a firm mouth and greenish-grey eyes that, Sophia insisted, saw clear through to the soul. When he stood to give Carmine a hug, he was revealed as a short man with a slender body that bore no sign of the fleshpots he adored.

  The hug over, he brandished the magazine at Carmine. “Have you seen this?” he demanded.

  “Only in passing,” Carmine said, kissing his wife, who came to join them carrying her own tipple, gin and tonic. Sophia was on her heels and gave him a glass of bourbon made exactly how he liked it, diluted with soda but not drowned
.

  “You must read Karnowski’s article on the Reds,” Myron said, subsiding into his chair. “It’s been years since I’ve seen anything this good, especially on the historical side. He’s given detailed sketches of every member of the Central Committee who’s ever aspired to the secretaryship since Stalin died, and his portrait of Stalin himself is riveting. I’d love to know his sources—there’s material in here I’ve never seen at all.”

  “Under ordinary circumstances I’d be buried in it,” Carmine said ruefully, “but not at the moment. Too much on my plate.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Little pitchers,” warned Carmine, rolling his eyes at Sophia. “Which New York banker is holding you to ransom, Myron?”

  “No one you’d know.” Myron looked uneasy, then shrugged. “I guess I’d better get it off my chest right now,” he said, his tone defensive. “I’m divorcing Sandra.”

  “Myron!” Desdemona gave a gasp. “What on earth has the poor creature done after so many years?”

  “Nothing, really. I just got tired of her shenanigans,” said Myron, still sounding defensive.

  “What will Sandra do?” Desdemona asked, looking sideways at Sophia, who sat with an expressionless face and a glass of Tab she wasn’t drinking.

  “She’ll be fine, honest! I’ve settled twenty million on her, but in a way that means no money-hungry guy can grab it, even by marriage and community property. She gets to take the housekeeper and the maids, so her habit’s safe.”

  Sophia found her voice. “Daddy, why?” she asked.

  Carmine didn’t make the mistake of thinking the question was directed at him; Sophia called both men “Daddy.”

  “I told you, honey. I just got tired of her.”