Too Many Murders

by Colleen McCullough

  “A rather repulsive young man who tried to put his hand on my leg. The women were all bunched together, and I didn’t blame them. Even Dean Denbigh was unpleasant.”

  Carmine kept at her for some time, but learned nothing new. When he left, it was with a sense of failure.

  Before the elevator arrived, he was joined by the male secretary, Richard Oakes, in the company of a man at least ten years his senior. When they all got in and wanted the first floor, Oakes shivered and drew as far away from Carmine as he could.

  “Who’s your companion, Mr. Oakes?” Carmine asked.

  When Oakes proved too petrified to reply, the stranger did. “I’m not Mr. Oakes’s companion,” he said, sticking his jaw out. “I’m Lancelot Sterling of Accounting.”

  “Oh, the lovely boss! A tormentor as well as a gossip.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Forget it,” Carmine said, and rode down the rest of the way in silence. Sterling gave him several nasty glances, but the look on Richard Oakes’s face said aggression would be a mistake. No one at Cornucopia had talked, least of all Special Agent Ted Kelly, but somehow the story of the fisticuffs outside Malvolio’s had reached the executive floors. No doubt Accounting would be next, if Oakes’s expression was anything to go by.

  On the first floor Oakes and Sterling, heads together, went to wait for an elevator down to the parking levels. Carmine walked outside to his Fairlane, which no traffic cop would have dreamed of ticketing.

  Several days passed, during which Carmine, Abe, Corey and Delia strove to find a table hopper who had visited table 17.

  Coming up with nothing, Carmine went back to Silvestri.

  “I need one of your television news bulletins,” he said to the Commissioner. “Something to the effect that anyone who had contact with Mr. Desmond Skeps at the Maxwell Foundation banquet four months ago should come forward, as vital information might be forthcoming.”

  “Thank God it hasn’t leaked that everyone sitting there is dead. Don’t worry, Carmine, I’ll make it sound routine as well as vital,” Silvestri promised.

  He was as good as his word, but no one emerged from the woodwork, as he put it himself.

  “Thwarted,” said Delia.

  “Stymied,” said Abe.

  “Fucked,” said Corey.

  None of which made Carmine any easier to live with, Desdemona reflected as the fourth week of investigations wore on. So she tried to cheer him with tasty meals and as much exposure to Julian as possible. This latter was helped by the case’s inertia, as a thwarted, stymied, fucked Carmine was home much earlier than a busy, productive one.

  Though Julian was not yet six months old, she wanted another baby as soon as possible, believing that siblings closest in age stood a better chance of getting on together. It was a fallacy, her mother-in-law kept telling her, but Desdemona could be very stubborn, and in this case, she was. So the arrival of her period cast her into a bleak mood that exasperated Emilia Delmonico into a rare burst of temper.

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself!” Emilia snapped. “Take the baby for a walk and soak up some sun. He’s a Thanksgiving Day baby, he’s never felt a warm sun. Now it’s high spring, and a beautiful day outside. Enjoy it!”

  “But I want to make a bearnaise sauce,” Desdemona objected.

  “Carmine would eat steak with no sauce at all. Now go!”

  “I feel like an afternoon in my kitchen.”

  “You need to get out of your kitchen more often! What do you want, a fat Carmine with heart disease?”

  “No, of course not, but—”

  “But me no buts! Put Julian in the stroller and go for a walk, Desdemona.”

  “He’s too young for the stroller.”

  “Hogwash! He sits up straight and holds his head up fine. It’s good exercise for both of you. Now go! Go!”

  Since Carmine had fitted the stroller with straps, Desdemona ran out of arguments. Taking care that Julian was able to lie back if he felt sleepy, his mother set off. Truth to tell, she admitted, their land was too steep for the buggy, and Julian in the stroller sat up looking around, alert and interested.

  After a tour of East Circle her despondency began to lift; she even felt kindly toward her know-it-all mother-in-law. It was indeed a beautiful day of cloudless sky and zephyr breeze; May would come in perfect. At the top of the long, snaky path that led from the street down to the house, Desdemona decided that today Julian should have his first cognizant sight of an expanse of blue water: the harbor, never busy enough to be foul with detritus.

  Feeling her lungs open up, she pushed the stroller down past the house in the direction of their jetty and boat shed, rejoicing in the lush greenery all around her. The forsythia had done with blooming and now formed dense hedges, replaced along the water’s edge by salt-loving bushes. The property sat in a lee, and Connecticut was not usually hurricane country.

  Where the wife of the previous owner had put a park bench, the view from the path to the water had been cleared. Desdemona sat and gazed down at her baby to see how he was faring. He was drinking it all in, eyes wide between their lush lashes, silent witness to Emilia’s wisdom. Yes, less time in the kitchen, more walking with Julian. She undid his straps and lifted him out to sit on her lap, her cheek against his curls, inhaling his sweet clean smell. My baby, my Julian!

  The path here was sandy, and, true of many big people, Desdemona was light on her feet. Even after she and Julian sat, she made no sound, while he, a quiet child by nature, absorbed this new, wonderful experience. He will be a man of few words, she thought.

  Perhaps two minutes went by before Desdemona realized that there was someone in the boat shed, moving things around; the water slapped and sloshed suddenly, as if greatly disturbed. As she turned her head to look, the door opened and a man came out. He was clad in woodsy camouflage and had pulled what she called a balaclava over his head, concealing all save his eyes and mouth under its khaki wool. In his right hand he held an automatic pistol, his demeanor that of someone who didn’t expect to be discovered, but was prepared.

  With the baby, she would never make it up the hill, that was her immediate reaction. Even as she saw him, he saw her, and the gun came up. Sure of her, he took his time; he meant to get her with his first shot. Her wide blue eyes sought the apertures in the balaclava, gaze pleading for her child; she even extended the baby a little toward him, as if to show him the enormity of the crime he was about to commit. The gesture didn’t deflect him from his purpose, but moving the baby had spoiled his aim. He leveled the weapon again, going now for a head shot. That told the policeman’s wife all she needed to know: the man was an expert shot, he wouldn’t miss.

  In the same instant Desdemona slapped one big hand over Julian’s mouth and nose, and dived for the water twenty feet away in a vast double leap. She hit it holding the baby to one side, her big feet using the bank to push off before she dived again as deeply as she dared given the tidal slope. Her mind was racing—where to go? Julian was hugged against her now, but fighting her more strongly than she had expected; he couldn’t breathe, but he was determined to.

  The dive had taken her sideways in the opposite direction from the jetty, and she came up where salt-loving bushes grew thickly between the path and the water. When her hand released Julian’s face he sucked in a lungful of air preparing to bellow, but she clamped her hand down again as she sucked in her own air, and dived once more.

  The water was freezing. She knew she didn’t have much time before it slowed her down too much to resurface, but Julian was her baby, hers and Carmine’s, and she wasn’t about to let him die. Icy water or not, she had to get off their property and onto the Silberfeins’. These neighbors had built on a narrow lot too near the water, the old fogeys said. For Desdemona, salvation.

  By her fifth dive Julian was getting the hang of it, or at least that was what his mother thought; he would suck in the air, then push himself against her body without trying to fight her. But seven dives were as man
y as she could manage. If her enemy was waiting on the shore, she was done. She put the baby down on dry bank and crawled up beside him, exhausted. If the tide had not been in, the exposed bank would have been far wider, barnacled, slippery. No shot came. She hugged Julian to her again and dragged herself up the Silberfeins’ yard, calling for help. Over, it was over!

  Once he had assured himself that his wife and son were safe and relatively unscathed, Carmine banished the awful helplessness, the unmanning knowledge that Desdemona had had to save herself. Shock and horror insisted that he should have been there to defend her and Julian, but a wealth of experience and sheer common sense said that would be impossible nine times out of every ten. This was not the first time Desdemona had had to save herself; what he prayed was that it would be the last. Inside himself he would shake for days, weep the wakeful nights away, but that Carmine was not the Carmine he could show either to his world or to his wife. It was not a machismo issue; it was his heritage, his nature and his duty. Maybe, he thought, I have been blessed. I have been split open to the very firmament of my being by the knowledge that today I nearly lost my family. At last I realize exactly what they mean to me. Literally everything.

  His mother was in worse shape than Desdemona and Julian; she blamed herself for making them go walking. The house was milling with sisters, aunts and female cousins, so he turned her over to them and Doc Santini. Only time and a lot of arguments would eventually see her mend. Julian had come through his ordeal with his psyche apparently unscarred; that, at least, was what Doc Santini thought after the baby, his stomach full, went to sleep in his crib looking and acting not a scrap differently than always. Warm from a bath and wrapped in a thick robe, Desdemona seated herself in an easy chair beside Julian’s crib and refused to budge.

  Later, thought Carmine, walking down the same path to the jetty. Right now she’s hardly aware of me, and I’m not intruding my police presence between her and the sight of Julian.

  Patrick and his team were outside the boat shed, talking to Abe and Corey. Near them on a fairly flat piece of ground was a canvas enclosure.

  Erica Davenport’s twisted body had been pulled out of the water and lay inside the enclosure. The slope was too steep for a gurney; she would have to be stretchered up to the road.

  “Her legs and arms were broken a considerable time before she died,” Patrick said to Carmine, “and each in two places—tib-fib and femur for the legs, ulna-radius and humerus for the arms. Death was due to strangulation by what I guess was thin rope.”

  “Different again,” Carmine said.

  “How are the folks?” Patsy asked.

  “Unharmed, according to Doc Santini. Mom’s the basket case. She blames herself.”

  “You have a wife in a billion.”

  “I know it. I’ll be in to Cedar Street soon.”

  “We can manage,” Abe said.

  “That’s not an issue, it never would be. The fact is that I’m in the way here—my home has been taken over by two dozen women, all likely to tear Holloman apart if we don’t find who tried to kill a woman holding a baby,” Carmine said, meaning it. “I feel the same way myself. First my daughter, now my wife and son. We must be closer to the fucker than we know.”

  * * *

  The entire police segment of County Services was boiling; as Carmine came in, cops clustered around him, offering to do anything they could. Getting through the crush took time, but it gladdened his heart too. Despite the empty pit that yawned within him, he suddenly knew that the mastermind’s days were numbered. The man had lost his cool, gotten too arrogant. Of course he hadn’t planned on killing Desdemona and the baby, but he had decided to send Carmine a warning by stranding Erica Davenport under the water of his boat shed. In broad daylight! Something had happened at the Maxwell banquet, and for four months all had seemed well. Then Evan Pugh sent a blackmailing letter, and within four days every witness of the something was dead. So around about March twenty-ninth another something had happened—something that the killer was afraid would expose him for all the world to see.

  “We need a living witness,” he said to Abe and Corey when he made it in to his office.

  “To what went on at Peter Norton’s table?” Corey asked.

  “Yes, but we also need a living witness to whatever incident or event triggered Evan Pugh’s blackmail attempt. I think Erica Davenport knew, and now she’s dead. I could kick myself for not talking Myron out of flying home! When I saw her, I realized that she was laboring under some burden she couldn’t keep on carrying, and I wished for Myron. If he’d been here, it might have come out.” Carmine passed a hand across his face. “Now I have to tell him she’s dead.”

  “We’ll get out of your way,” said Abe.

  It was a long call. Though he wept, Myron wasn’t wounded to the core.

  “I guess I’ve been expecting something like this,” he said. “Maybe because I think she was expecting something like it. I can’t say her own death, but definitely something awful. She was so glad to see me go! Not like she was sick of the sight of me, more as if I was just another worry. The trouble was, I couldn’t get her to tell me what was making her afraid.”

  Carmine let him wander on, hating to make his suffering worse, but he had to be told how she died in case some fool in the know let it slip. Fools like Phil Smith or Fred Collins, constantly met in New York boardrooms.

  And finally, after all that, Carmine had to tell him about Desdemona and Julian.

  “Carmine, you’ve got to get them away!” he cried, real terror in his voice. “Listen, I was planning to ask if I could have Sophia for a while—she can finish her school year in L.A., it won’t set her back—”

  “You can have her, Myron,” Carmine said. “I’d rest easier if she weren’t here, I confess.”

  “Okay, okay, great, that’s great, but that’s not what I was going to say!” Myron yelled so loudly that Carmine had to hold the receiver away from his ear. “I’m sending some money to Desdemona, and you’re going to take her and Julian to London. And shut up, Carmine! I won’t take no for an answer!”

  “The answer has to be no, Myron. Number one, I’m a public servant and can’t take money from millionaires—nor can my wife, that’s implicit. Number two, I’m in the middle of a case I can’t leave,” Carmine said patiently, ignoring the squawks in his ear. “And why London, of all places?”

  “Because Desdemona wanted to live there before she married you, and because it’s the other side of the Atlantic from this killer,” Myron said.

  “I appreciate the gesture more than I can say, you old fart, but it’s impossible. Leave it there, please.”

  But it was a long call. By the time Carmine hung up, he was tired. Arguments were at the top of his pet hate list, whereas to Myron they were the food and drink of existence.

  Abe and Corey weren’t in their office. Carmine went to see Patrick, hankering for a friendly face.

  “You’ve told Myron?”

  “Yes. He took it well, all considered. The best part of it is that he’s taking Sophia for a while. She’ll be very happy to go, they’ll spoil each other rotten, and I won’t need to worry about her. I don’t think this motherfucking killer will bother hiring someone to murder her in L.A.”

  “Me neither. And, if it’s any consolation, I don’t think he would have tried to kill Desdemona if she hadn’t caught him in the boat shed. A pity, though, that she’s not from Montana or New Mexico—it would be good to have a place to send her.”

  “That’s what Myron says, except that his solution is for me to accept a large sum of money and take Desdemona and Julian to London for the duration.”

  Patrick laughed, then turned to his autopsy table. It was draped with a sheet. When he removed it, Carmine was forced to look at Erica Davenport’s naked body, its arms and legs grossly swollen, misshapen and discolored, its face blue-black with tongue protruding, its trunk so unmarred and proper that it did not look as if it belonged to the extremities.

>   “Poor woman,” Carmine said.

  “Poor indeed,” Patrick said, voice grim.

  “What, Patsy?”

  “At some time in her late teens or early twenties she was brutally raped, how many times I don’t know, but multiple. Anal as well as vaginal, devices as well as penises. The scar tissue would have prevented much cavorting in a bed—she must have been terrified that a lover would notice. Skeps must have, if his relationship with her was as long-term as Philomena Skeps says. I found out when I was washing her.”

  Carmine leaned against the tiled wall. “That answers so much, Patsy.”

  “I thought it would.”

  “When’s the full autopsy?”

  “I was going to do it now, but this discovery will make it a longer business, so first thing tomorrow morning.” Patrick’s vivid blue eyes had dimmed; he loathed posting rape victims. “Who will bury her, Carmine?”

  “Myron. He wasn’t as surprised as he ought have been, because she gave him her will before he left. He’s appointed executor. Her estate—I have no idea what it’s worth—goes to Women Against Rape. I add that she fooled Myron, he didn’t know she was a rape victim herself. Something else I have to tell him! As to Cornucopia, her guardianship of Desmond Skeps the Third, she made no mention. She must have known that if anything were to happen to her, Philomena Skeps’s case for total custody of her son would be much stronger. The mastermind must have known that too, which suggests that, whatever he’s all about, it’s not control of Cornucopia. My, won’t the dogs be snarling there!”

  “Go home, Carmine” was Patsy’s reply.

  Carmine went home.

  His house had emptied of the women, including his mother, but there were police patrolling the grounds and an air of urgency. News of what had happened had spread throughout East Holloman with even greater speed than usual. The Silberfeins, his closest neighbors, had risen to the emergency splendidly from the moment Sam Silberfein found Desdemona in their yard. Ordinarily he would have been at his dry cleaning business, but Sylvia hadn’t been well that morning, and he had stayed home. By the time Carmine arrived, an ambulance with a physician’s assistant on board had dealt with Julian, chilled to the bone but otherwise little the worse for wear. The problem had been Desdemona, who wouldn’t leave Julian even to get out of her wet clothes, and was blue with cold. It was Carmine who persuaded her to go home complete with Julian and the medic, Carmine who thanked the Silberfeins ardently, fervently, Carmine who peeled off Desdemona’s clothes and gave Julian a bottle of breast milk from his mother’s refrigerated reserves while she warmed up in a bath of tepid water.