Too Many Murders

by Colleen McCullough

“I’m sorry, ma’am, she has to stay. She’s a chaperone, she ensures that I do nothing untoward.”

  “You’re a puzzle, Captain. One moment speech larded with colloquialisms, the next the speech of a well-educated man.”

  “But colloquialisms are wonderful, Dr. Denbigh! They prove that English is a living language, always moving on.” He sat down and turned the tape recorder on, gave it the details.

  “We found your cache inside a concealed cupboard in the Dean’s apartment kitchen, Dr. Denbigh.”

  The yellow eyes went wide. “Cache? Cupboard? I know nothing of either.”

  “Your fingerprints say differently, ma’am. They’re all over every printable item in the bag, as well as on the pipe and the door. We have you, Dr. Denbigh,” Carmine said.

  She didn’t cease to fight; rather, she changed her tactics. “After they hear my story, Captain, I don’t think there’s a jury alive would condemn my actions.”

  “You want a jury trial? That means pleading not guilty, but you’ve virtually confessed. Confession means no jury trial.”

  “I haven’t confessed to murder! I acted in self-defense.”

  Carmine leaned forward. “Dr. Denbigh, this was a premeditated crime! Carefully planned and executed. Premeditation negates self-defense.”

  “Nonsense!” she said with a snort of contempt for his density. “Fear for one’s life, sir, engenders different reactions in people because all people are different. Were I some battered housewife, I would have used a hammer or a hatchet. But I am an associate professor at Chubb University, and my husband, the source of my terror, was a dean of that same institution. Naturally I hoped that my participation in his death would not be discovered, but the mere fact that it was does not make me a cold-blooded murderer. I lived in fear for my life through every day of it because I was the only person who knew of John’s sexual activities. If I was plotting to save my life, Captain, he was plotting to end it! The story I told you just after John’s death was true, but it merely touched the peaks of mountains of sordid details and six—yes, six!—attempts my husband had made to kill me. A car crash, a skiing accident, three attacks of food poisoning, and a shotgun accident while we were in Maine. John liked to shoot hapless deer, then actually eat them!”

  Carmine stared at her, rapt, and thanked God that not many murderers were this smart, or this good-looking. At thirty-two years of age, she was in her prime. “I hope you can produce proof of these attempts on your life,” he said.

  “Witnesses, certainly,” she said coolly.

  “What made you decide on saving your life with a dose of cyanide in a tea bag?” he asked.

  “The cyanide, actually. I found it sitting on a shelf in the freshman common room. I’d gone hunting for one of my books I knew a freshman had borrowed—most irregular! He didn’t ask my permission, of course, but I suspected him because few in their first year are interested in Rilke. I removed the cyanide, of course—so dangerous! Then it occurred to me that I had found the ideal way to get John out of my life forever, provided I could find a way of administering it that did not imperil any other person. And that led to the jasmine tea at his idiotic Monday fortnight sessions. After that”—she shrugged—“it was easy. The shop was in Manhattan, but the place where the tea bags were made was in Queens.”

  “You haven’t made a satisfactory case against the Dean, Dr. Denbigh,” Carmine said.

  “Here? Now? Why should I even bother? I will plead my case in court. Mr. Anthony Bera will conduct my defense,” said the lioness, licking her chops. “And that is all I have to say before Mr. Bera arrives. I think it is very fair of me to—er—show my hand, so to speak. You know how I will plead, and what my defense will be.”

  Carmine stopped the tape recorder. “I thank you for your frankness, Dr. Denbigh, but I warn you, the prosecution will prove murder, and ask for the maximum penalty.”

  “Any bets she slips the net?” he asked Silvestri a few minutes later. “That’s one helluva smart woman, sir.”

  “Depends how well Bera picks his jury,” Silvestri said, his cigar rolling from one side of his mouth to the other. “He’ll ask that the case be heard in a different jurisdiction, and that’s in the lap of the gods. But it’s always been hard to get a conviction when the defendant is a looker. You’d think the women jurors would take against them, but they don’t, and the men are putty. So yeah, Carmine, you could be right.” His sleek cat face bore an expression of content despite the uncertain outcome of Pauline Denbigh’s trial. “Ask me, do I care? Not much. The important thing is that Dean Denbigh’s murder is one hundred percent solved.”

  “I don’t think the other ten are going to be that easy.”

  “Do you still go for the idea of one killer?”

  “More than ever. There’s no one else outside the pattern, chief,” Carmine said. He frowned. “And damn that woman! She threw me off with this self-defense nonsense so badly that I didn’t ask her the one question I intended to.”

  “Then go back and ask.”

  “With Bera present? He’ll direct her not to answer.”

  “Bail hearing is in an hour, Captain, so Dr. Denbigh can’t give you much time,” Bera said the next morning.

  “I am aware of that, Mr. Bera.” Carmine sat down and turned on the tape recorder. “Dr. Denbigh, how are you?”

  “Well, thank you,” she said, unaware that Judge Thwaites, who would be on the bench, thought her capable of anything.

  “There is one question I would like you to answer, ma’am. It doesn’t directly pertain to your own case or its defense, but it’s very important to the investigation of ten other murders.”

  “My client did not do murder,” said Bera.

  “Ten murders,” Carmine amended, swallowing his ire.

  “Ask your question, Captain Delmonico,” said Bera.

  “Was there any reason that you decided to preserve your life by terminating your husband’s life on Monday, April third?”

  His head to one side, Bera considered the implications, while Pauline Denbigh sat side-on, staring into his face.

  “Dr. Denbigh had a reason,” Bera said.

  Exasperated, Carmine shook his head. “That’s not the kind of answer I want,” he said. “I need specifics.”

  “You’re not going to get them, Captain.”

  “Let me try again. Whatever your reason might have been, Dr. Denbigh, was it in any way connected to—say, a rumor you’d heard that other deaths might occur?”

  “Claptrap,” Bera said disdainfully.

  “Was it to do with a pact, or an agreement, that other people should die? Or was it sheer coincidence that your decision to act on Monday, April third, happened to be the same day eleven murders happened in Holloman?”

  “Ohhh!” she exclaimed, ignoring Bera’s fierce grimaces. “I see what you mean! My reason for choosing that day will come out in court, Captain, but it had nothing to do with ten—or eleven—murders. It was sheer coincidence.”

  Carmine’s sigh of relief was audible. “Thank you, ma’am! I can’t do anything to help you, but you’ve just helped me.” He decided to press his luck. “Who knew you were afraid of your husband? That you feared for your life?”

  “If you answer that, Dr. Denbigh, I can’t help you,” Bera said ominously.

  She lifted her shoulders and smiled at Carmine ruefully. “I am in Mr. Bera’s hands, Captain. To answer you would damage my defense, I can see that for myself.”

  Which was, Carmine reflected as he left, a brilliant way of saying that yes, she had confided in at least one other woman. Now he had to find her best friend.

  Erica Davenport? Philomena Skeps? Or some unknown, unmet proponent of women’s liberation?

  He lurked outside until Anthony Bera left the interview room and detained him. “You shouldn’t have any trouble getting her acquitted,” he said affably.

  “So I believe.”

  “How can she afford your fees, Mr. Bera? Chubb isn’t famous for overpaying women
faculty.”

  “I’m acting pro bono,” Bera said shortly.

  Are you indeed? said Carmine to himself. Now why? I think I have to go back to the Cape and talk to Philomena Skeps again. She becomes more and more like the lady spider at the center of the web.

  He called a little conference in his office: Abe and Corey, Delia and Patrick.

  “Okay, we’re down to ten,” he said, not trying to conceal his pleasure. “We can forget the three shootings, that’s an absolute. But I’m putting them down as solved when we catch our mastermind, because they were definitely commissioned. That leaves us with six cases—Beatrice Egmont, Bianca Tolano, Peter Norton, Cathy Cartwright, Evan Pugh and Desmond Skeps. For the moment we shelve Beatrice Egmont as unsolvable. Okay, five dead people, and that’s where we begin. Everything we have we throw at the textbook rape murder of Bianca Tolano. Commissioned, yes, but after a bit of thinking I’ve realized you don’t shop for a sex killer. Money doesn’t interest them. Therefore he’s a local. Our mastermind found out about his fantasies, took him in hand and educated him. If we don’t get him, he’ll kill again, now that he’s had a taste of it. If the Ghost taught me nothing else, he taught me that sex killers can’t stop.”

  “How do we know what to look for?” Patsy asked. “That was our trouble with the Ghost—anonymity. How is this any different in that respect?” He glowered. “I thought you weren’t going to call the murderer a mastermind?”

  “I hate it, yes,” said Carmine patiently, “but it’s both accurate and convenient. Unless you want to go all FBI and give the guy a code name? How about Einstein or Pauling? Moriarty? No? Let’s just stick with what we’ve got. As to how this one is different, Patsy, it is because someone else—the mastermind—evicted the killer from his fantasy home, and our hermit crab isn’t comfortable yet in his new shell. Walking sideways still terrifies him, and he’s no Ghost. I have an idea where to look for him—the Ghost was fantastic training. Refresh us on Bianca, Patsy, please.”

  “She was found naked,” Patsy began, “wrists and ankles tied with single-strand steel wire. She was conscious throughout, except for brief periods of asphyxiation induced by a pair of pantyhose around her neck. Burned in twenty-nine places by a cigarette, cut in seventeen places by something like a Sheetrock knife. Particular attention was paid to the breasts and pubes. Multiple rape, but no semen was found in any orifice. Death was caused by a broken bottle shoved into the vagina; she bled out. There’s a case exactly like it in a book about sexual deviance that’s well thumbed by psych students.”

  “How old is the book?” Delia asked.

  “Published ten years ago to an outcry. It was felt to be too accessible to thrill seekers.” He looked wry. “Not like wading through Krafft-Ebing and wondering what frottage was—dictionaries didn’t give definitions of words like that in my day. I think the author was German and the book was translated from the German. Kaiserine Germans invented the sex vocabulary.”

  “Thank you, Patsy,” said Carmine firmly. “We know this guy. By that, I mean we must have seen his face several times, maybe even interviewed him. He’s undersized and unattractive, but I’m not sure of his age group.”

  “We go to Cornucopia,” said Abe instantly, “and we start with Dr. Davenport’s male secretary.”

  “What makes you say that?” Corey demanded, looking jealous and frustrated. Larry Pisano’s lieutenancy was never far from the forefront of his mind.

  “I remember the secretary,” Abe said. “He fits.”

  “When you said you weren’t sure of his age group, Carmine,” asked Delia, “did you mean very young, young, and older young?”

  “No, Delia, I meant young, middle, or elderly.”

  “What about his job?” she pursued, not having been there during the frantic days of the Ghost.

  “With sex killers, that’s a mystery, but in this case I’d say he was more used to taking orders than giving them. Otherwise the mastermind couldn’t have brainwashed him.”

  “That’s an interesting choice of verb,” Patsy said. “It’s to do with ideological conversion, I thought.”

  “Brainwashing? Don’t forget the FBI is sniffing for espionage on the perimeter of this case,” Carmine said. “But seriously, I think the term can be applied to any kind of conversion process that digs deep into the psyche.”

  “Especially,” said Abe, “if there’s a tendency already.”

  * * *

  Back they went to Cornucopia to begin with Richard Oakes, secretary to Dr. Erica Davenport, Chairman of the Board and now managing director of Cornucopia Central. She was outraged, but she couldn’t prevent Abe and Corey from subjecting the young man to an inquisition that lasted two hours. When he emerged he was in tears, shaking uncontrollably, and suffering the onset of a migraine aura that had his boss put him in an ambulance and ship him to Chubb-Holloman Hospital.

  “I’ll sue you for this!” she shouted at Carmine.

  “Rubbish,” he said scornfully. “He’s as nervous as a filly at a starting gate, is all. It wouldn’t matter who interrogated him for a suspected wrong, he’d react the same. Importantly for me, he’s cleared of the Tolano murder.”

  “What grounds have you got for believing him guilty?” she asked, stiff with anger.

  “They’re none of your business, Dr. Davenport, but I will inform you that I’ll be questioning some other men at Cornucopia, as well as in other places around Holloman, including Chubb.”

  She gave a mew of frustration, and flounced into her office.

  Hmm, thought Carmine. I begin to see why Wallace Grierson thinks she’ll run the Cornucopia ship aground.

  As if determined to produce an opposite reaction to Richard Oakes’s, Michael Donald Sykes entered into his interrogation with glee, aplomb, and faultless good humor. He was entranced with the idea that anyone could suspect him of sexual murder, and made Abe’s and Corey’s lives a misery interrogating them.

  “I believe you have fixated on me,” he said solemnly, “due to the fact that I do not have Gettysburg laid out in my basement. How can I, an American, prefer to lay out Austerlitz? And what, you ask, is Marengo, if not a recipe for chicken? Napoleon Bonaparte, sirs, as a military genius put Sherman and Grant and Lee in the shade! By blood he was an Italian, not a Frenchman, and in him the old Italian genius flowered again.”

  “Shut up, Mr. Sykes,” said Corey.

  “Yes, Mr. Sykes, shut up,” said Abe.

  But of course he didn’t. In the end they evicted him from their commandeered office, and he skipped off very pleased with himself. Passing Carmine, he stopped.

  “There’s a fellow in Accounting you should question,” he said, wreathed in smiles. “That was so refreshing! And to think that when you first appeared here a week or so ago, I was scared out of my wits. But no more, no more! Your devoted followers are gentlemen who accepted my dismissal of the Civil War generals as if they heard it every day. Very kind of them!”

  “Who in Accounting?” Carmine asked sharply.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard his name, but you can’t mistake him, Captain. No more than five feet tall, very thin, and walks with a heavy limp,” said Mr. Sykes.

  Shit! Carmine grabbed Abe with one hand and Corey with the other, hustling them to the elevator. “What floors are Cornucopia General’s accounting?” he asked.

  “Nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first,” said Corey.

  Which, which, which? “Twenty-one,” he said, diving into the elevator. “We’ll work our way down.”

  “Jesus!” said Abe as they emerged on the twenty-first floor. “Mrs. Highman’s carpenter!”

  But he wasn’t there, and the few people they encountered knew they’d seen him but had no idea where.

  “Conceited idiots!” said Corey as they went down a floor. “The peons are beneath notice.”

  How did I know it was too good to be true? Carmine asked himself as they emerged into a scene of controlled panic. Two ambulance medics came out of another
elevator wheeling a gurney and were pounced on by half a dozen anxious people, escorted into a huge room divided into chest-high cells. Using their badges, Carmine and his team followed.

  Too late, of course. The small, slight body was slumped over a desk, quite dead. It was Carmine who checked for signs of life, Abe and Corey who kept everyone else away.

  “You can go, guys,” Carmine said to the medics as he picked up a phone. “He goes to the Medical Examiner.”

  Within minutes the area was cordoned off. Patrick O’Donnell and his team walked in a little later. Patrick’s fair face was grim, but he didn’t speak until he had done his preliminary examination of the body.

  “Cyanide, I’m betting,” he said then to Carmine. “It seems to be the poison of choice, doesn’t it? I wonder how many hands that jar you found in Dr. Denbigh’s drawstring bag has passed through? Or how full it was? The lethal dose is very small.”

  “Could this have been Mrs. Dean Highman’s workman?”

  “Undoubtedly, unless there are two five-foot-nothings with the left leg three inches shorter than the right in Holloman,” Patsy said. “He wore boots with the left one built up, but the limp never really disappears. The knees are out of synch, and so are the ankles. The built-up boot keeps the hips level, helps ease lumbar pain. I won’t know until I get him on my table if it’s congenital or acquired.”

  “Well,” said Abe as they returned to County Services, “I guess Erica Davenport is our mastermind.”

  “I agree,” said Corey positively.

  “Not necessarily,” said a gloomy Carmine from the backseat. “Once we moved to interview undersized and unattractive males, the word could have gotten around faster than a fire in tinder. Mrs. Highman is a doll, but discreet she ain’t. Nor is Dotty Thwaites, Simonetta Marciano—sssh!—or Angela MacIntosh. Haven’t you noticed that this is a case full of women? I sure have. Suspects, victims, onlookers, witnesses—women, women, women! I hate cases like this! I’m out of my depth! I know two women with zippers on their mouths—one is my wife, the other is my secretary. Grr!”

  The two in the front seat took the hint and said no more.