Too Many Murders

by Colleen McCullough

  He had eaten his way through this speech while Ted Kelly watched, fascinated; anyone would think the guy hadn’t had any dinner! But, being a just servant of Justice, he nodded.

  “I concede all your contentions, Carmine. What we need are stiffer laws and penalties, and in that respect Ulysses is a good thing.” He smiled ruefully. “And I’m glad you looked into the filing cabinet. At least now I know it’s disappointing.”

  “Why? Where is it?”

  “Under armed guard en route to D.C. When it gets there, it will take weeks for news of the contents to get back to me.”

  “Well, the FBI is like the rest of our national capital—full of paper pushers who have to justify their existence.”

  The plate was absolutely clean. Carmine drank coffee and stared contentedly at Ted Kelly. “I want to know what you pinched out of Desmond Skeps’s penthouse.”

  “I didn’t pinch anything!”

  “Horseshit! You did, and before my Medical Examiner and his team reached the crime scene.”

  “You have no basis for saying that.”

  “I do. Otherwise, my friend, you wouldn’t have disturbed my crime scene ahead of the coroner. You know the rules as well as I do, and you know who has jurisdiction in a murder that doesn’t cross state borders or have concrete ties to juicy stuff like espionage. There was something inside Skeps’s penthouse that you didn’t want us provincial turkeys seeing, and I intend to find out what it was.”

  “I didn’t take so much as a paperclip! I just had a look at the body and walked around.”

  “Did you touch the body?”

  “No!”

  “Describe it.”

  “After more than twenty-four hours? Give me a break!”

  “Crap! You’re a trained observer. Describe it.”

  Special Agent Ted Kelly closed his eyes. “Skeps was lying on his back on his massage couch, the mark of an IV needle in his arm. It had dribbled a tiny drop of clear pink fluid, no blood. And yes, I used a swab to take a sample, which dried it up. Skeps was naked. Someone had done a rough shave of his body hair down to the base of his penis, but no farther, and his name was written in a burn. There were other burns as well. His nipples had been cut off with something blunt and heavy. There were ligature marks on his wrists and ankles. That’s all.”

  “God, you’re a liar, Kelly! Never touched the body, eh?”

  “I didn’t touch it! The swab did!”

  “How long was it between your leaving the penthouse and the arrival of Dr. O’Donnell?”

  “Half an hour.”

  “Did you remain in the vicinity?”

  “No, I went downstairs to Skeps’s offices.”

  “And you refuse to tell me what you pinched?”

  “I didn’t pinch anything.”

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned, Ted, the espionage is a goddamn nuisance. If you’d left things alone, we would have shared with you. It’s a pity that the pendulum only swings one way. I won’t be giving you any professional courtesies, be warned.”

  “Skeps was murdered by Ulysses, this is a federal case.”

  “Offer me some tangible evidence.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Or won’t, more like.”

  “Honestly, Carmine, my hands are tied!”

  “Luckily mine aren’t.” Carmine got up. “Comforting to know that all cafeteria coffee is lousy, isn’t it? If you want a good meal and good coffee while you’re in a pint-sized state full of eccentrics, Ted, eat at Malvolio’s Diner. It’s right next to County Services.” He stopped. “Are you married?” It seemed the question people hated answering.

  “Used to be,” said Kelly, looking sour. “She hated the fact that I was away from home so often, thought there was another woman.”

  “Did they ever put you undercover?”

  “At my size?”

  Carmine grinned and resumed his progress out. “Good to know that someone at the FBI has a brain. See you around.”

  “The IV wound shouldn’t have had a droplet of any kind,” Patsy said when Carmine told him what Ted Kelly had done. “I know we were late, but Skeps had been dead too long by the time he was discovered to be oozing liquid Kelly could soak up on a swab. Incidentally, it means he came armed with specimen jars, tubes, swabs, the whole nine yards. He must have swabbed every orifice, put a magnifying light over what he could see of the body. I bet no one there even noticed if he had equipment.”

  “I’m going to subpoena the FBI for their analytical results, especially the droplet,” Carmine said. “Judge Thwaites will love it! A Longfellow eccentric indeed! Kelly didn’t even know Longfellow was a poet, the ignorant shit. Though sometimes I wonder how much of his act is an act.”

  “I’m still fretting about the liquidity,” Patsy said.

  “Heparin?”

  “Why, for God’s sake? Skeps was immobilized. If the IV came out, there were other veins. Unless our murderer isn’t an expert jabber. Maybe he got lucky on his first vein and decided not to risk failure later on. Hence, heparin. I’ll swab the area myself.” He looked unhappy. “What this does show me beyond a shadow of a doubt is that I need to go back to Skeps’s body for a second look. I wasn’t thorough enough.”

  “Patsy, Skeps was one of twelve cases.”

  “I know, and that’s what really scares me. How many of them got my best shot? The baby and his mother … I’m going back to nine out of the eleven, Carmine, and this time every last one of them will get my best shot.”

  There was no point in arguing; Patrick’s mind was made up. “Then start with Evan Pugh,” Carmine said.

  “The most important, you think?”

  “Not think. Know.”

  “Evan Pugh it is. By the way,” Patsy said a little too casually, “I hear that Myron’s moved out of East Circle?”

  “How the hell does the word get around?”

  “The East Holloman grapevine, which has a particularly large tendril wound around the cops. Aunt Emilia is livid.”

  As Aunt Emilia was Carmine’s mother, he gave a very Italian shrug. “Then you know as much as I do.”

  “More, probably. He’s taken the entire top floor of the Cleveland Hotel and is planning to introduce his darling Erica to all of Holloman who matter.”

  “Wow! He is serious.”

  “I just hope she is.”

  “My hope is she’s innocent of murder.”

  “Is she high on your list?”

  “No. Just about halfway up.”

  Carmine left Patrick assembling his forces for another attack on Evan Pugh and went to his office, where a small stack of single sheets of paper awaited him. Most were memos, some more formal letters, but they had leaped out at Delia because they were neatly typed, neither signed nor initialed, and gave no hint of their origins.

  “Sir,” said the top one, a memo, “this is to remind you that you agreed to meet me to discuss the suggested improvements to our atomic reactor design. The usual place and time, please.”

  All fifteen—four letters, eleven memos—had the same fishy smell to them, Delia said.

  “They look as if they’ve all been typed on the same machine, but that’s a lot harder to establish if your firm uses IBM golfball machines whose letters haven’t worn or warped, and it seems to me that all the executive secretaries have new or nearly new typewriters. The carbon ribbon is used only once and there are no mistakes, which suggests a very good typist. I hate to say it, Carmine, but I think Mr. Kelly should look at the executive secretaries, not the executives. I don’t know of a managerial sort who can type for tuppence.”

  “What about a woman executive?” Carmine asked.

  “Unless she started as a secretary, I’d say the same applied to her. And Dr. Davenport has never been a secretary. In college she paid a typist to do her papers and theses.”

  “I suppose that’s a relief.” Carmine thought of Myron.

  “Have you had your invitation yet?”

  “Invitation to what?
”

  “Mr. Mandelbaum is giving a reception and buffet dinner at the Cleveland Hotel on Saturday night. Uncle John’s been asked, so has Danny, and so have I,” said Delia.

  “Then I daresay Desdemona, Sophia and I will see you there. In the meantime, is there anything else from the filing cabinet I should tackle, or can I leave it with you?”

  “I think I can safely burn the rest of the contents.”

  “Then let’s not do Ted Kelly’s work for him, the lying son of a bitch. We’re going back to our murders. Today is Thursday, but it’s too late to drive to Orleans and get back again by dinnertime, so Mrs. Skeps can wait until tomorrow. Let her know I’ll be coming, would you? Where are Abe and Corey?”

  “In the newspaper morgue, reading. Shall I phone them?”

  “No need. I’ll pick them up on my way through.”

  The public library had its own premises farther down Cedar Street, but the newspaper morgue was inside County Services, where it was handier for everyone from the police to the fire departments. The public used it too, and there were several habitual browsers in residence, dreamily turning the vast broadsheet pages of ancient copies of the Holloman Post, always full of interesting local news. It was slowly being converted to microfiche, and Carmine wondered how the browsers would like peering at a screen, white on black. They’ll hate it, he concluded, wiggling his brows at Abe and Corey.

  “Progress,” he said apropos of nothing to his bewildered henchmen as they left, “can kill a lot of the fun.” Then, as they left the building, “Find anything?”

  “A fair amount on the Denbighs, who are into good causes. Mrs. Dr. Denbigh is a literacy nut. The Dean was into anything about the Renaissance. They both supported children’s disease charities. Mrs. Dr. Denbigh is also a women’s libber, big time. Desmond Skeps got a lot of press, we expected that. We noted articles that mentioned him and photocopied the ones that featured him. There wasn’t a lot about the divorce, a bit strange.”

  “Well, it was out of state, and Cornucopia would have tried to play it down.” Carmine smiled at Corey, who had given the report, but made sure to include Abe—that lieutenancy was a pain, and when he’d tried to get off the panel, Silvestri said he stayed on it.

  “Where are we going?” Abe asked as they headed up South Green Street toward Maple.

  “The Cleveland Hotel, where we have to meet the Pughs. They’re here to identify the body, but they don’t intend to go home until they can take the body home too. Their lawyer is with them.”

  “Trouble, Carmine?”

  “I don’t think so. Danny Marciano took the call, and he says they sounded like decent people.”

  The Pughs had been placed in a suite on the floor below the top, overlooking the red stone outcrop of North Rock. With the trees just coming into leaf, the forest that spread around Holloman looked as if a wispy, translucent chartreuse veil had been thrown over it, but Carmine knew that David and Enid Pugh would not notice.

  They were in their mid-forties, tanned and fit, dressed in the bright colors that betrayed the climate they lived in, and they were far handsomer than their son. If ever there was evidence for a changeling, it was in the form of Evan Pugh, so conceited, self-absorbed and amoral. The Pugh parents were none of those things, five minutes in their company showed that, and the lawyer was there only to help them with any legal formalities they might encounter. Their grief was private, enclosed, yet unmistakable. How had they produced Evan? They insisted upon being told the entire story of his murder, a painful business for Carmine, who hated to shatter their illusions.

  But, “Yes, he would do that,” said Mrs. Pugh sadly. “Evan liked to pull the wings off butterflies. We tried every remedy known to man, Captain Delmonico, but none of us could do a thing to humanize him. The psychiatrists called him a psychopath and said there was no treatment. Davy and I just hoped and prayed that when he became a grown man, he would humanize himself. He was so brilliant! A perfect SAT score … When he chose Chubb, we had to let him go—we wanted him somewhere closer, but he was set on Chubb. The best pre-med and medical school. Medicine was the only choice as far as he was concerned.” She sighed. “Davy and I have been waiting for something like this to happen for a long time.”

  “I am so very sorry, Mrs. Pugh, Mr. Pugh,” Carmine said.

  He didn’t speak again until he and his sergeants were safely in the elevator. “I suppose some of them have to have model parents.”

  “The Pughs are my first,” said Corey.

  “And mine,” said Abe.

  So when they encountered Myron escorting Erica Davenport through the Cleveland’s foyer, Carmine felt caught. Dr. Davenport was wearing a purple suit today that turned her eyes violet and, he was amused to note, shoes with lower heels; Myron wasn’t tall. Wait until she meets Desdemona! he thought, nodding to his team to go ahead.

  “How is Sophia?” was the first thing Myron said.

  “Desdemona seems to think that if you take her to lunch—solo—and buy her the peridots she’s been hankering for, you stand a chance of getting back in her good books,” said Carmine.

  “It will be done tomorrow, since school’s out.”

  “That’s another thing, Myron. In spite of what you said to her about Erica, Sophia got it into her head that you were really coming to entertain her while I worked a heavy case. She adores her baby brother, but he takes up most of Desdemona’s time.”

  Myron groaned. “Oh, Carmine, I’m really, really sorry!”

  “Tell her, not me.”

  “I’ll buy her diamonds!”

  “You will not! Desdemona says the peridots are suitable for a sixteen-year-old, and I trust her judgment a hundred percent.”

  He nodded again to Erica Davenport, who hadn’t said a word, then followed Abe and Corey out.

  “Who is Desdemona?” came her light, crisp voice.

  Whatever Myron answered was lost, but Carmine had a fair idea that he would laugh, look mysterious, and tell her to wait and see.

  “They’re all talking about her and Myron,” said Abe.

  “No wonder she’s wearing diamonds,” said Corey.

  Yes, no wonder, thought Carmine. How long has Myron known her, and how can we continue to be friends when I detest the woman? She’s a harpy, feasting on living men.

  The rest of the day passed fruitlessly, so when Friday dawned bright and clear, Carmine breathed a sigh of relief. He needed a break from routine. Driving himself, he headed out on I-95 for Cape Cod, a difficult destination because of the huge bites some geophysical monster had taken out of the coastline, Buzzard’s Bay being the biggest. Whichever way he went, it was a long way, so while he was in Connecticut he put his light on the Fairlane’s roof and used his siren to barrel along at well over the speed limit of 70 mph.

  Orleans occupied the first part of the Cape’s forearm after Chatham’s elbow, and was commonly held to be the prettiest of many very pretty villages, though at this time of year most of the compounds and cottages would be untenanted. The Cape was a summer resort. Its houses were usually made of cedar boards and shingles left unpainted for the sea to weather them silver, and in July were festooned in pink or white rambling roses. The arm-shaped peninsula, bent like a man displaying his biceps, hugged the placid waters of Cape Cod Bay, glassy smooth in summer, while its outer edge saw the full force of the Atlantic, on the forearm a spume-soaked mass of wave-pounded sand dunes.

  Carmine loved the Cape, and if he had an unfulfilled wish, it was to own a summer cottage anywhere on Cape Cod between Hyannis and Provincetown, the first place the Pilgrims made landfall.

  Philomena Skeps’s residence was at the end of a lane whose post-and-rail fences would be smothered in rambling roses by July. It was a traditional Cape Cod colonial in silvered cedar, with its share of rose trellises and enough land to say that the property was extremely valuable. It went down to the placid water of the sheltered side and had its own jetty and boathouse; someone liked messing around in boats. On the side w
all of the house toward the front was a fuel oil outlet that said the tenant lived here all year round. Gazing about in delight, Carmine trod up the crunchy pebbled path to the front door.

  Mrs. Skeps answered it herself. Hers was a dusky beauty, of thick black hair that curled, dark skin, black brows and lashes, dark green eyes.

  “Come in, Captain,” she said, leading him down a long hall to the back of the house, where an English-style conservatory had been added, all glass joined by graceful Art Nouveau iron struts painted white. It was stuffed with plants, some of them touching the transparent roof, but space enough had been left for a white-painted table and chairs and, in a different spot, two small white-padded settees. The pots, he noticed, were all painted white; Mrs. Skeps was a perfectionist. Green shall be the color of the room’s glory, white shall all else be.

  She had provided him with pastries. As he hadn’t stopped on the road for breakfast, he made short work of the dainty goodies along with several cups (no mugs!) of coffee. Only when he was done did he lead the conversation away from pleasantries.