Too Many Murders

by Colleen McCullough

  Though the picture was black-and-white, it displayed most features clearly, provided they were not under the canopies of trees. A border of tall conifers surrounded Smith’s five acres. The house showed all its exterior features, from cornices to the radio shack, and the artificial lake proved to have a tiny isle in its middle joined to land by a Chinese bridge. The picture had been taken with the sun directly overhead—a necessity for a useful survey from the air.

  “The white or grey dots must be statues, and the fountains are self-explanatory,” Delia said. “The jumble behind the house must be garages, garden or equipment sheds, the usual appurtenances of a mansion on a fair-sized piece of land. See there? That’s a patch of dead or dying grass, so you should check it for a slab of concrete underneath. My papa insisted on building an atomic bomb shelter in our back lawn, and the grass was never the same over it. He still keeps it stocked with food.”

  “Well, I don’t think we should deal with the outside first,” Corey said firmly. “If I were Smith, I wouldn’t have my secret compartments anywhere I’d get wet. And what about a hard winter? Feet of snow!”

  “You’re right, Corey,” said Carmine. “We do the house first. Also the outbuildings and the immediate vicinity of the house. He has an army of Puerto Rican servants to clear snow away.”

  “There’s one more thing,” Abe said.

  “What’s that?” Carmine asked, enjoying listening.

  “The controls might trigger more than one door each.”

  “Depending on missile silo doors and Kansas City. What a bummer! Who can give us advice?” Carmine asked.

  “The new guy working with Patrick,” Corey said. “I had lunch with him the other day. He was the one told me about the missile silo doors—he used to be a master sergeant in the air force. This guy—his name is Ben Tucker—is a utility player. Photography, electronics, mechanics. I can ask him for tips.”

  “Do that, Corey.”

  “What about warrants?” Delia asked.

  “The Commissioner assures me that Doubting Doug will play ball,” Carmine said.

  “Huh! I’ll believe that when I see it,” Abe muttered.

  * * *

  Whatever Silvestri had told Judge Thwaites worked. When Carmine appeared in chambers the next morning, his warrant was already waiting for him.

  “Commie spies!” His Honor exclaimed, wearing the same face that saw him hand down a maximum prison term. “You nail this bastard to the wall, Carmine!”

  Their plan had been worked out: they would start as far from each other as possible, Carmine upstairs on the roof working down, Abe on the bottom floor working up, and Corey in the outbuildings. Each had a control, understanding that, having done it all, they would have to exchange controls and do it again, and yet a third time. For that reason, a system was mandatory, and each man was doomed to the same territory three times over.

  It took less time than they had originally envisioned. If the batteries powering the controls were kept fresh, one press on a button could last as long as the thumb or fingertip doing the pressing. They became expert at standing in the center of a space and pressing, rotating slowly as they did so. Provided the signal beamed out above occluding furniture or objects, it was powerful enough to work in situations where a garage control would not have. Carmine began to understand the Long Island garage and the missile silo doors. Wow! That must have sent people back to the drawing boards! But what genius to trace the offending control! Kansas City was more captious by far.

  They discovered a total of seven concealed compartments, only one of which was triggered by the folly control. That one yielded a metal box similar to three others found elsewhere, all fitted with padlocks. Each compartment was photographed, contents in situ, then contents removed, and contents themselves.

  “When are you going to tell the FBI?” Abe asked, back at Cedar Street.

  “Only after I’ve filtered out evidence of eleven murders,” Carmine said. “Once that’s done, they can have the espionage data and the controls. Knowing Special Agent Kelly, they’ll be there for months, and end in tearing the place apart stone by stone. Pity, but I can’t think anyone would ever want to live there again.”

  Carmine kept Delia but liberated Abe and Corey to take new cases and go back over Smith’s murders.

  His trove consisted of four locked metal boxes the size of a shoe box, a stack of ten thin children’s exercise books, five fatter leather-bound books, and a series of Holloman County property plans, including the Cornucopia Building, the County Services building, the Nutmeg Insurance building, and Carmine’s house and grounds on East Circle.

  “These, we keep,” he said to Delia, putting the plans to one side. “None relates to his spying activities.”

  The leather-bound books were all to do with his spying: codes, ciphers, a journal written in Russian Cyrillic script.

  “We hand these over to the FBI,” he said. “If they need additional proof of espionage, here it is.”

  “The microdots were proof enough!” Delia snapped.

  “Ah, but he’s an embarrassment, you see. In the social pages of papers and magazines, object of articles in the Wall Street Journal and News—how terrible! What do we inspect next? The exercise books or the tin boxes?”

  “The boxes,” Delia said eagerly.

  “Pandora at heart.” Carmine picked up the one taken from the compartment triggered by the folly control. “If there’s tangible evidence of murder, this is the one.” He picked up a pair of double-action snips and broke the padlock’s U.

  “Ohhh!” sighed Delia.

  The box held an ampoule and a vial of two curares, six 10cc glass Luer-Lok syringes, a hypodermic needle, steel wire, a tiny soldering iron, an ordinary safety razor, and two small bottles fitted with thick rubber caps.

  “Bingo!” cried Carmine. “We’ve got him for the murder of Desmond Skeps.”

  “Why on earth did he keep all this?” Delia asked.

  “Because it amused him. Or fascinated him. Or he couldn’t bear to part with it,” Carmine said. “Mr. Smith is a mixture.”

  Two of the three remaining boxes contained money, each to the sum of $100,000 in mixed denominations.

  “But Carmine, he doesn’t need money!”

  “His cache for a fast getaway,” Carmine explained. “Once he got to Canada, it’s enough to hire a private jet to anywhere.”

  The last metal box contained a 9mm Luger automatic with spare clips and assorted travel documents; among the passports was a Canadian one for a Philippe d’Antry.

  “There are none here for his wife,” Delia said sorrowfully.

  “Rats and sinking ships, I’m afraid. Just as I’ll bet he’s left her to fend for herself in this crisis. If she has any sense, she’ll have a cache of her own, and disappear.”

  “Remain only the exercise books,” Delia said, handing them to Carmine.

  “Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian,” he said as he tossed each of the top five onto the FBI pile. “Ah! We have English!” He read for a moment, then looked at Delia, his face puzzled. “It’s as if he has two personae. The spy thought, wrote and worked in Russian. The killer thought, wrote and worked in English. His entire life is compartmentalized! If ever a man was made to be two different men, it’s Mr. Philip Smith a.k.a. whatever his Russian name is.” He reached for the phone. “I’d better tell Desdemona I won’t be home early. With any luck, I’ll find out who his assistant is, maybe even his hirelings.” He held up five of the exercise books. “Straight down the middle. Five in Russian, five in English. And I can’t leave until I’ve read my five and digested their contents.”

  He leaned over, took Delia’s hand and lightly kissed it. “I can’t thank you enough, Miss Carstairs, but your part in this is done. Go home and relax.”

  “It was my pleasure,” Delia said gruffly, “but I’m not going home. First, I’m off to Malvolio’s to get you a snack and one of Luigi’s thermoses of decent coffee. A burger, a bacon roll or a ro
ast beef sandwich?”

  “A burger,” he said, crumbling. Two dinners wouldn’t hurt for one night, would they?

  “Then,” she continued, “I’m going around to see Desdemona and Julian. I’ve been so busy since they got back from England that I haven’t had a chance to find out how my potty papa is.”

  “From what I’ve been told, potty,” Carmine said.

  The first exercise book contained the sketchy details of Smith’s occasional forays into crime during the first fifteen years of his tenure on the Cornucopia Board. The first entry of all, however, predated his appointment.

  “The first Skeps has to go,” it said in part. “My orders are explicit, as the son will be much easier to fool. It will be perfect KGB—as much powder as will fit on the head of a thumbtack, made from the same plant my mother used as an aperient when I was a child. A smaller dose would do it, but the swifter the better. In the first teaspoonful of the caviar I buy him, old miser. He wonders at its quality.”

  And then, some entries later: “The old man died, and the clock stopped, never to go again. A good song, I like it. The second Desmond Skeps has inherited, and Phil is there. Phil is always there. But I have refused to sit on the Board.”

  Two more entries saw Smith on the Board, though the book made no mention of Dee-Dee and his daughter.

  It was kept, Carmine was interested to see, as a kind of diary; each entry was dated as day, month, year, which was not the American way of month, day, year. Each entry spoke about the murder of someone who had gotten in Smith’s way, always dispatched by a dose of the magic powder developed by the KGB—a vegetable alkaloid of some kind, probably, unbelievably potent. Which plant? And why did none of his eleven victims of April third, 1967, die of it? Apparently it caused a total breakdown of the body’s systems akin to the death mushroom, and produced a diagnosis of nonspecific septicemia, etiology unknown.

  There were no references to what secrets he stole, or when he stole them; these must be in the Russian diaries. What a feast the FBI was in for!

  The second-to-last book contained the Maxwell Foundation banquet, but it also contained many ravings about the perfidies of Dr. Erica Davenport, whom Smith loathed.

  “I curse the day Moscow foisted this idiot woman on me!” Smith said, his anger—rarely expressed until now—let loose. “A fool, a beautiful fool who has left a trail a kilometer wide for the Americans to trace. When she appeared ten years ago I inundated KGB with protests, only to be told that she had powerful Party friends out to bring KGB down. Said friends have put her here to report on my loyalty. She transmits my every move to Moscow! Ah, but she’s afraid of me! It didn’t take me long to establish ascendancy over her, to intimidate her, to make her cower and cringe. But fear of me does not prevent her reporting back to her Party friends in Moscow, I am perpetually aware of that. Of course I report on her to KGB: I complain of her, I criticize her stupidity. Her friends in the Party may defend her, but I have the ear of KGB, I hold high KGB rank, my power in Moscow is greater than hers.”

  Carmine leaned back in his chair, metaphorically winded. So that’s it! Stupid of me, to assume they were a team working together to steal our secrets. They turn out to be opponents in a game of surveillance, constantly watching each other for evidence of ideological disloyalty. Her Party bosses were appalled at Smith’s lifestyle, whereas his KGB bosses, pragmatists to the core, understood that his lifestyle was imperative for success. So Smith deemed Erica the spy, and Erica deemed Smith the spy. The mere smuggling of secrets was incidental to their political tussle. Only one of them could win in Moscow, and Erica knew she was losing. KGB rules, not the Communist Party.

  He read on. The date was the fourth of December. “The crazy bitch! I abominate obscenities, but she is a bitch—a stringy, fawning female dog. Six days ago she came to me in hysterical tears to tell me that Desmond had finished with her services as a fellatrix—he’s going back to Philomena. Oh, the tears! The grief! ‘But I love him, Phil, I love him!’ So what? was my answer. You continue to do your patriotic duty! You will be nice to him, you will feed him business inspirations that I have fed you, and he will be grateful, he will be impressed, he will advance you even higher. All that and more I told her while she shivered and howled, the stupid bitch.

  “Now she was here again with a new confession, hard on the heels of my witnessing last night with my own eyes Desmond Skeps arm in arm with Dee-Dee Hall! He brought that whore to the banquet! No wonder he chose to sit far from me and the other executives! ‘I know your secret, Phil,’ he said to me as he passed by. ‘I know what happened to your daughter. What would the world make of the pristine Phil Smith and a junkie girl?’ I pondered the answer to that question as I watched him at the fat banker’s table, Dee-Dee preening in skin-tight puce satin and white mink. It was she got him drunk, of course. Desmond can’t take a second drink. If he does, he keeps on drinking.

  “I saw Erica, drunk, weave her way to his table and sit there for a few minutes. Why can’t people govern their passions? Desmond was drunk because he’s missing Erica’s fellatio and unsure of Philomena, Erica was drunk because she’s in love with Desmond. Round and round they go, where they stop, only I will know…

  “Today I learned what transpired when Erica sat down with Desmond. She has confessed to me that, in the throes of her drunken state, she told Desmond that I am Ulysses. Confessed to me in floods of terrified tears! It is the weapon I’ve needed to fire at her Party friends in Moscow for ten years, so I made her write it out in Russian, and had Stravinsky witness it. ‘However,’ I said to the stupid bitch, ‘if you do as I order you, I won’t send it to Moscow.’

  “I am released from her! I have my lever! Desmond was too drunk to hear what she said. She swore it, and I believe her, having seen him with my own eyes. Now I have my lever, and I wait. I wait to see what will ensue. If the Ulysses story comes out, Erica has to deny it—convincingly. I have my lever!”

  What a world you live in, Mr. Smith, Carmine thought, the book dropped as he poured himself another mug of coffee. What a world you live in! Dog-eat-dog is too kind. Snake-eat-snake, more like. It’s Smith who is the financial genius, not Desmond Skeps, not Erica Davenport. They were his pawns, he used them to build that company ever upward. More and more secrets. And that’s how come he could finally dispense with Erica—a written confession for Moscow, himself the head honcho of Cornucopia. He didn’t fear her Moscow bosses anymore.

  His plans were made with KGB thoroughness.

  An entry on the tenth of December read: “Not a peep about Ulysses the master spy as yet, but I have been thinking, and thinking hard. If there is a peep, I must be ready to move as quickly as a bolt of lightning, and with the same devastation. It won’t be Desmond who makes the accusation—I’ve spoken to him many times since the banquet, and he suspects nothing. All he feels for me is gratitude that I gave him my special hangover cure. He doesn’t even seem to remember that he brought Dee-Dee Hall, and when I asked him why he had, he looked utterly blank. In the end he said it must have been a combination of booze and her ability to perform fellatio—he was missing Erica’s attentions in that department, but Philomena had insisted that Erica must go, and he was desperate to get Philomena back. I believe him on that point; he showed me a suite of pink diamonds he had bought her—a million dollars! Coming from Desmond, that’s desperation. He’s an inveterate miser. It must have been Dee-Dee who told him about Anna, and asked him to take her to the banquet just to torment me, the whore gone sanctimonious.

  “Erica won’t say anything, that is a given. Therefore the accusation, if it comes, will be from someone else at the table—someone not too drunk to remember. I do not believe Erica’s protestations that her voice was too low for anyone save Desmond to hear. However, were it to be made in a spirit of patriotic zeal, I think it would already have been made, and loudly. That it has not predisposes me to think it will come as blackmail, either to Erica or directly to me. I have alerted her, which terrified her anew,
the silly bitch. All I do is clean up the messes she makes.

  “Naturally I have observed all the people attached to the table, so I have a fairly good idea whence the blackmail will come, if come it does. Blackmail is a two-edged sword, and Stravinsky agrees with me there. We have concluded that, if a blackmail threat does arise, all eleven people will have to die.

  “If I commenced now, I could kill them one by one over time. The local police are surprisingly good, but not of KGB excellence. On the other hand, I confess that I am intrigued at the prospect of killing all eleven en masse. Such a coup! It would do more than merely confuse the local police—it would bamboozle them. And the exercise in sheer logistics is very appealing. Stravinsky demurs, but Stravinsky will obey orders. All good tools do, and Stravinsky is a good tool. A dream project! I am so bored! I need the stimulus of a completely new and novel project to lift me out of my doldrums, and this particular project is feasible. Stravinsky is forced to concur. Who would ever suspect one hand at the back of eleven deaths, if the way each person dies is utterly different? Oh, what a challenge! I am wide awake at last!”

  And there you have it, Carmine thought. Ulysses had his espionage work down to such a fine art that he was bored, needed a fresh stimulus. A nice backhanded compliment for the Holloman Police— we’re surprisingly good, though not the KGB. I thank whatever gods there are for that!

  “I’ve discovered that two of the men at the table have wives who can be tricked,” wrote Smith on the nineteenth of December. “Mrs. Barbara Norton is quite insane, but hides it well. Disguised as a bowler named Reuben, Stravinsky struck up a conversation with her. An empty gourd where her brain should be. Norton the fat banker terrorizes her, and she’s ripe for murder.

  “The same can be said of Dr. Pauline Denbigh, though I will appeal to her personally, as one snob to another. Her husband beats her sadistically—what scum! She showed me those of her wounds that can decently be exposed. A mind of her quality, scorned for adolescent sluts! I’ll leave her a jar of cyanide. She’ll do the rest without prompting, except that I’ll force her to act on the date of my choice. She’d resist all bribes except a Rilke original. I’ll let her see it, and arrange that she’ll have it after she’s acquitted. I’ll pay Bera a fortune—anonymously—on condition that he gets her off. He will!”