Too Many Murders

by Colleen McCullough

  “What about Dee-Dee Hall?”

  “Throat cut with a cutthroat razor. No sign of it at the scene. She was cut twice—very cunning! The first slash went from ear to ear, just deep enough to sever the jugulars. No sign of a fight—no defensive wounds. She seems to have stood there pouring blood while her killer watched, then she fell to her knees and collapsed. When he figured she’d lost too much blood for her arteries to spurt, the killer moved in again cool as you please and cut her throat a second time, way deeper than the carotids. About all holding her head on was the spinal column.”

  “A cool killer indeed. Abe’s got it, right?”

  “No, you passed it to Larry Pisano and his boys. Abe’s got the old lady, Beatrice Egmont, and Corey’s got the rape girl, Bianca Tolano.”

  When Patrick frowned, Carmine stared at him in surprise. “What gives, Patsy? What did I say?”

  “Both your guys are applying for Larry Pisano’s lieutenancy when he retires at the end of the year. They’ve worked together a helluva long time, and they get along together fine, but they’re two very different men,” said Patrick in apologetic tones. “And I know you know all this, so I must sound as if I’m teaching my dear old granny to suck eggs, but sometimes it takes someone on the outside to see things clearly.” He paused to see how this was going down.

  “I’m listening,” Carmine said.

  “I think it has to be kid gloves for you between now and when the decision about who replaces Larry is made. Are you a member of the job panel, Carmine?”

  “Uh—yeah,” said Carmine, feeling the stirrings of unease.

  “Then get yourself removed from it, that’s first off. Only one of your guys can succeed, and to bring in an outsider for no better reason than to keep the status quo between them would be grossly unfair. Either of them would make a better lieutenant than Larry, as I’m sure you understand. But the rivalry has begun, and they’re looking sideways at each other. Every task you set them is judged in the light of how it measures up. So when you gave Abe his first case, you gave him a little old lady smothered with a pillow. Not much time has elapsed, but it’s sufficient to tell Abe that his murder isn’t going to be glamorous or juicy. Whereas you give Corey a sex murder! He’s got clues to work, an interesting crime scene, a list of possible suspects in the men who’ve dated the girl. As far as Abe is concerned, your scales are balanced in Corey’s favor. And, into the bargain, Abe is a Jew. Yeah, yeah, Carmine, I know you don’t have an anti-semitic bone in your body, and under normal circumstances Abe knows that too. But this is an Italian-Irish police department, and Corey’s roots are Irish. The fact that, of the two of them, it’s Corey looks like the Jew is suddenly irrelevant to Abe. He thinks you’re on Corey’s side.”

  Carmine gave a groan. “Shit!”

  “It’s not too late, but watch your step in the future, and make sure you display a keen interest in Beatrice Egmont’s murder—without treading on Abe’s toes. Don’t forget both men have wives at home to keep up the pressure and exaggerate the slights. There’s a big difference between a senior sergeant’s and a lieutenant’s pay and perks. You don’t have two people vying for the promotion, Carmine, you have four.”

  “Thanks, Patsy,” he said, and left.

  When Carmine phoned Beatrice Egmont’s home, Abe answered. He sounded down, didn’t have the usual note of optimism in his voice.

  “Are you very busy with your case, Abe?”

  “Anything but, Carmine. I’ve done the neighbors and her two sons, who live in Georgia but took the first plane north. So far it’s bleak,” said Abe. “Nothing’s gone from the house, not even a cheap ornament, and no one, including me, can find a motive for the poor old thing’s murder. She wouldn’t harm a fly.”

  “There seems to have been a lot of that among the deaths—harmless people. But one or two stick out, and I could use some help, Abe. I can’t move on Desmond Skeps yet, but I need someone with your people skills to start ferreting out a list of possible suspects. A man that powerful has to have plenty of enemies, and he wasn’t famous for his tact and diplomacy either. If you’re satisfied that you can’t proceed with Beatrice Egmont unless you catch a break, would you mind looking into Skeps’s friends and acquaintances for me?”

  The voice when it came was eager, enthusiastic. “I’d be glad to, Carmine. Is the file at Cedar Street?”

  “I’m looking at it as I speak. But before you start, go talk to Patsy, who can fill you in on the way Skeps died. Diabolical!”

  There. A little mending of fences had been done, but he’d have to hope that Dean Denbigh and Mr. Peter Norton didn’t mire him down. It was vital that he insert himself personally into Skeps’s murder as soon as possible, and Carmine had his own way of working, which did not include flitting between several cases. The two that stuck out were Evan Pugh and Desmond Skeps—theirs were cruel, detached killers.

  Now to get Dean Denbigh out of the way.

  * * *

  Two Chubb colleges, he thought as he drove up the north side of Holloman Green. The huge park, bisected by Maple Street, was still populated by skeletal trees, but even bare, they were magnificent, for they were venerable copper beeches planted in clusters that ensured plenty of sun-drenched grass. Garden beds already planted out promised a wonderful showing in May, and daffodil shoots were poking above the grass blades, not long off their profligate blooming. Dogwood trees indicated that there would be a breathtaking, curiously oriental wealth of flowers at the end of the first week in May, when the Green would be thronged with visitors photographing madly. Holloman Green was a “must” for spring tourists.

  The other side of North Green Street belonged exclusively to Chubb University, whose campus was Princeton’s only rival. In between gardens and grassy knolls stood the colleges, with the gothic cathedral bulk of the Skeffington Library dominating the far end. Most of the oldest colleges were at the top end of the Green, an orderly array of eighteenth-century buildings smothered in Virginia creeper. Here, along this side, were the frat houses and secret societies as well as the later colleges, some Victorian gothic, some the imitation Georgian so popular as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and some the modern wonders belonging to the twentieth century. He passed the sprawling X of Paracelsus College with a grimace, quite forgetting that two months ago he and Desdemona had stood admiring its austere marble façade and the Henry Moore bronzes flanking its entrance.

  Dante College was old, its anonymous architect unconcerned with the prospect of immortality; he had built gables and a profusion of dormered windows, absolutely dying to have his work buried under Virginia creeper. However, it had been modernized with ruthless skill and now boasted a plethora of bathrooms, an adequate kitchen and in-college laundry facilities way above the usual. Its student rooms were not as large as Paracelsus’s, but they didn’t need to be; Dante’s rooms were all singles. As it was coeducational (the first of Chubb’s colleges to take the plunge into mixed bathing), Dean John Kirkbride Denbigh had decided to divide his accommodation by floor, and put the women undergrads in the attic.

  “We have a hundred boys and only twenty-five girls,” said Dr. Marcus Ceruski, deputed to receive Captain Delmonico. “Next year we’ll have fifty girls and only seventy-five boys, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. There has been a huge reaction against women students among the alumni, as you can imagine, and what frightens us is a significant diminution in alumnus funding. Many just cannot stomach a coeducational Chubb after two hundred and fifty years of men only.”

  Carmine listened as if he had never heard any of this before, wondering how Holloman’s Gown segment could be so divorced from Town that they automatically assumed no townies would be interested in this new social convulsion—or be aware of it.

  “Paracelsus is due to take women next year,” Dr. Ceruski went on, “but they’ll find it easier, as they’re able to put half of the students upstairs and half downstairs.”

  An arrangement that wouldn’t plea
se the feminists, Carmine reflected; they wanted real integration, men and women on the same floor. Quite why, he hadn’t worked out, though he suspected the object of the exercise was to make life as uncomfortable for men as possible.

  “I believe that Cornucopia has endowed the building of an allwomen’s college,” he said, straight-faced.

  “Correct, though it won’t be finished until 1970,” said Marcus Ceruski, whose doctorate was probably in medieval manuscripts or something equally esoteric; Dante had a reputation for scholars of unusual bent. He opened a door, and they entered a large room paneled in some dark wood, most of its walls occupied by books in custom-made shelves—no higgledy-piggledy sizes in here! “This is Dean Denbigh’s study.”

  “Where it happened,” said Carmine, gazing around.

  “Correct, Captain.”

  “Are the four students who were present here today?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the wife, Dr. Pauline Denbigh?”

  “Waiting in her study.”

  Carmine consulted a small notebook. “Would you send in Mr. Terence Arrowsmith, please?”

  Dr. Ceruski disappeared with a nod, while Carmine prowled. The big leather host’s chair closest to the desk was clearly where Dean Denbigh had sat; the Persian rug around it was ominously stained, as was the chair seat and one arm. When the door sounded, he looked toward it in time to see the entrance of a genuine scholar-in-the-making: round-shouldered and stooped, thick-lensed glasses over pale eyes, a full-lipped crimson mouth, an otherwise nondescript face. His breath was coming fast, the hand on the door trembling.

  “Mr. Terence Arrowsmith?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Captain Carmine Delmonico. Would you please sit down in the chair you occupied when Dr. Denbigh died?”

  Terence Arrowsmith went to it dumbly, sat gingerly on its edge, and stared up at Carmine like a rabbit at a snake.

  “Tell me everything as if I’m in complete ignorance of what happened. The whole story, including why you were here.”

  For a moment the young man said nothing, then he licked his impossibly red lips and began. “The Dean calls them Monday Fortnight Coffee—we all drank coffee except for him. He drank jasmine tea from some shop in Manhattan, and he never invited us to share it, even if someone said they liked jasmine tea. The Dean said his was very expensive and we shouldn’t acquire a taste for it until we were at the very least senior fellows.”

  Interesting, thought Carmine. The Dean rubbed his preference in as exclusive, and his student guests didn’t appreciate it. Though Terence Arrowsmith had scarcely begun his story, Carmine was getting an impression that the Dean hadn’t been liked.

  “You have to be a junior or a senior to be invited,” the young man went on. “I’m a senior, and a fairly regular guest, which isn’t unusual. It was more like a coffee klatch for favored people. The Dean was an authority on Dante himself, and those of us doing Italian Renaissance literature were his pets. If you were studying Goethe or moderns like Pirandello, you didn’t get invited.”

  He’s meticulous, thought Carmine. He’ll give me the lot.

  “I’m writing a paper on Boccaccio,” said Terence Arrowsmith, “and Dr. Denbigh liked my work. He held his sessions on a Monday, every second week. The worst of it was that he ignored the time, so those of us who had a class straight after coffee break were sometimes so late we weren’t let in. If the lecture was important, it was terribly frustrating, but he’d never let any of us leave until he was finished with whatever he was talking about. He expected give and take, so we knew it was useless to try to speed him up by letting him have the floor.”

  “Was there anything different about yesterday’s session?”

  “No, Captain, not that any of us noticed. In fact, the Dean was in a really good mood—he even told a joke! The routine was strict. We’d come in on the dot of ten and go straight to the cart, pour ourselves coffee and take one pastry. While we did that, the Dean went to a cupboard and got out the little box that held his jasmine tea packets. I remember that he was annoyed to find only one packet in the box—he said there should have been three. But I guess we all looked blank enough to pass inspection, because he didn’t blame one of us. As we were sitting down, he took his packet across to the cart, where there’s a special carafe of boiling water for him.” Arrowsmith shivered, started trembling again. “I was watching him—after the business about the missing tea, I think we all were. He tore the packet open, dropped it on the cart, and put the tea bag in his mug.”

  “Is there any mistaking his mug?” Carmine asked.

  “Not a chance. For one thing, it’s made of fine china—the rest are ordinary thick pottery mugs. And for another, it’s got ‘The Dean’ on both sides in German Gothic script. I guess the writing of fifteenth-century Italy wasn’t florid enough, but his story was that his wife gave him the mug. He poured boiling water into the mug, carried it to his chair, and sat down. His smile was so—self-satisfied! We knew we were in for a long morning, that he’d found something fresh to discuss.

  “Sure enough, ‘I’ve found out something extremely interesting I wish to share with you, gentlemen,’ he said, and stopped to blow on the surface of his tea. Funny, how vividly I remember that! He snorted and said something none of us really heard—about the tea, we all think in retrospect. Then he lifted the mug to his mouth and took a series of little sips—it had to have been scalding hot, but he made a real production of those sips, as if he was telling us we didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to drink such hot liquid. Next I think was the noise, though Bill Partridge says the change in his face came first. I don’t honestly think it matters much either way. He started to make a strangling, gurgling kind of noise, and his face went a bright red. He seemed to stretch out from the top of his head to his toes, stiff and straight as a board. Foam gushed out of his mouth, but he didn’t retch like a vomit. His hands flailed about, his feet drummed on the floor, the foam flew around as his movements grew wilder, and we—we just sat there paralyzed and looked! It must have been close to a minute before Bill Partridge—he’s the most scientific of us—suddenly jumped up and shouted that the Dean had had a seizure. Bill ran to the door and yelled for someone to call an ambulance, while the rest of us backed away. Bill came back and checked the Dean’s pulse, looked at the pupils of his eyes, put his ear on the Dean’s chest. Then he said the Dean was dead! And he wouldn’t let any of us leave!”

  “A sensible young man,” said Carmine.

  “Maybe so,” said Terence Arrowsmith grimly, “but it sure destroyed a day of classes! The ambulance guys called the cops, and the next thing we knew, everybody was talking poison. Bill Partridge said it was cyanide.”

  “Did he, indeed? Upon what did he base that assumption, Mr. Arrowsmith?”

  “A smell of almonds. But I didn’t smell any almonds, and neither did Charlie Tindale. Two did, two didn’t. Not good enough,” said Mr. Arrowsmith.

  “Did Dean Denbigh say anything from the moment he began sipping his tea until he died?”

  “He said nothing, he just made obscene noises.”

  “What about the paper packet enclosing the tea bag? You said the Dean dropped it on the cart. Did anyone go near it?”

  “Not while I was in the study, sir, and I didn’t leave until the criminal pathology technicians came in.”

  “Did he simply drop it, or did he crumple it up?”

  “He ripped it open to get the tea bag, then dropped it.”

  Which marked the end of Terence Arrowsmith’s useful information. And, as it turned out, of the usefulness of all four students. Even Mr. William Partridge, the scientific one, could add nothing to Terence Arrowsmith’s admirably sedate description of events. All Partridge was concerned about was cyanide. So when Carmine was done with them, he breathed a sigh of relief and headed around the corner to the Dean’s wife’s study.

  She too was senior in the college; he had found that much out sitting at his desk in County Services. Wha
t he wasn’t prepared for was her absolute detachment. A tall woman whom a great many men would call extremely attractive, she had a mass of red-gold hair pulled into a soft bun on her neck, a creamily flawless skin that didn’t show her age, chiseled features that reminded Carmine of a Grace Kelly without the vulnerability, and a pair of yellow eyes. A lioness, if ever he had seen one.

  Her handclasp was firm and dry; she put Carmine into a comfortable chair and seated herself in what he assumed was “her” chair when she wasn’t behind her desk.

  “My condolences for your loss, Dr. Denbigh,” he said.

  She blinked slowly, considering his statement. “Yes, I suppose it is a loss,” she said in a light, clipped voice, “but luckily I have tenure, so John’s death doesn’t affect my career. Of course I’ll have to move out of the Dean’s apartment, but until Lysistrata College is finished in 1970—I’m in the running for Dean—I’ll live in a room upstairs among the girls.”

  “Won’t you find that confining?” Carmine asked, fascinated at where she was leading their conversation.

  “Not really,” she answered, composure unruffled. “John took up four-fifths of the space in our apartment. Most of my living is done here, in this room.”

  A twin of the Dean’s, and no less spacious. He gazed at the rows of books, which seemed to be mostly in German. “I believe you’re a great authority on the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Dr. Denbigh,” he said.

  She looked surprised, as if policemen townies were not supposed to know that name. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am.”

  “Under different circumstances it would be a pleasure to have a chat with you, as I’m a Rilke fan, but I’m afraid it’s the death of your husband that concerns me today.” He frowned. “From your manner, Dr. Denbigh, I might be pardoned for thinking that your marriage was a rather distant one?”