Too Many Murders (22 page)

“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.

At County Services they split up. Armed with details supplied by the head accountant, horrified at violence in the world of numbers, Abe and Corey went to the dead man’s apartment. Carmine, a ferocious look on his face, walked up to the autopsy room, unaware that people who saw him scattered.

“Joshua Butler, single, aged thirty-five,” said Patsy, who had the stripped body on his table already. “He’s one of those poor souls with a congenital pituitary syndrome that prevented hormonal maturity. His testes are undescended, he has no body hair, and he has the penis of a prepubescent boy. I doubt he could sustain an erection, let alone ejaculate motile sperm. So if he’s Bianca Tolano’s murderer, the rape was all done with an object, probably the bottle before he broke it. He didn’t act in a frenzy, as you remember—he cleaned up too well. The short leg is due to a break that was disgracefully treated at some time during childhood. I doubt a doctor saw it at all. I’ll find what I’m looking for inside the cranium, when I see the base of the brain and the pituitary. Histology will be very important. He might be a situs inversus as well—heart on the right side, some other organs reversed too. Cause of death? I’ve not changed my mind. It’s cyanide.”

Carmine sighed. “He could never have installed that bear trap in Evan Pugh’s closet,” he said. “I know strength can’t always be equated with size or even muscularity, but this guy is definitely a ninety-pound weakling. I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” said Patsy, itching to get on with his examination. It wasn’t every day that he saw a body like this.

So somewhere, Carmine thought, leaving Patsy to it, there is an exceedingly artful dodger capable of impersonating a runt like Joshua Butler. And capable of igniting a fire inside Joshua Butler hot enough to drive him to murder.

Not five minutes later Patsy called him.

“Carmine, the cause of death is definitely cyanide, but I don’t think it was murder. I found a capsule inside his mouth made of very thin plastic, and shreds of the plastic around his teeth. He committed suicide.”

“That makes sense,” said Carmine, beyond amazement. “Just like Dr. Goebbels, except that he wouldn’t have any kids.”

“Be of good cheer!” said Delia, trying comfort. “At least you’re chipping away at them. Bianca Tolano is sorted out.”

“Huh!” Carmine grunted. “All it goes to show is that if you turn over enough stones, you’re bound to find something horrible. We’re down to four that have real answers to our questions.”

“Go home,” Delia said sternly. “You need a dose of Julian.”

A dose of Julian did help, but then Myron ruined Carmine’s well-being by turning up on his doorstep angry enough to adopt a fighting stance. Carmine took one look and broke into fits of laughter.

“Myron, you dodo!” he said, throwing an arm around his friend’s shoulder and forcing him inside. “You look like a whippet squaring off against a Great Dane!”

Myron’s umbrage lasted a few more seconds, then he gave in. “At least you called me a whippet,” he said then. “I can count myself lucky I guess that you didn’t call me a chihuahua.”

“No,” said Carmine, rolling his eyes at Desdemona, “you’re not yappy. On the other hand, you’re not big enough to be a greyhound, though you do have a lot of the breed in you. Have a drink and tell me what’s bothering you.”

“Your—your
persecution
of Erica, that’s what’s bothering me! Why are you picking on her?”

“I am not picking on her, Myron.” Some women! he thought to himself. Why do some women always sweet-talk a poor, hapless schmo into fighting their battles for them? “She can’t have her cake and eat it too. Cornucopia is in a lot of trouble, and she is now el supremo—or la suprema. You’re a businessman, you know that kind of power has a price tag. If Erica can’t stand the heat, she’d better get out of the kitchen.”

The mood had utterly vanished; Myron could never sustain rage against a beloved friend, especially when his position was untenable. “Oh, Carmine,” he wailed, “how did I wind up in the middle? I love
the girl and I hate to see her badgered, but she made me promise I’d try to get you to ease up on her.” He looked doleful. “But I can’t, can I? You’re not a Great Dane, you’re a bulldog.”

“This conversation’s gotten far too doggy.” Carmine handed him a Scotch. “Has it occurred to you that Erica is petrified at being handed Cornucopia? I don’t think she expected it, and I do think she’s afraid she won’t make the grade.”

The Scotch was going down smoothly. Carmine kept good liquor, though it was not a boozy house. “There’s that to it,” Myron admitted.

“She’d believe you way sooner than me, so why don’t you tell her to cool her jets? It’s my experience of mighty undertakings like corporations and governments that they tend to run themselves. The problems start when people interfere with the running, you must know that. Cornucopia has rolled along for years and years, just like the river in the song. She should just let it keep on rolling.”

“You’d run it better than any of us,” Myron said.

“Me? No! According to the girl you love, I’m too insatiably curious, and she’s right. I’d spend all my time poking and prying into what shouldn’t concern me.”

“Are you eating with us, Myron?” Desdemona asked. “It’s a rib roast, and there’s plenty.”

He groaned. “I wish I could, but I have to get back to Erica.” The last of the Scotch disappeared. Myron rose to his feet and stood looking at them a little disconsolately. “I wish things could go on the way they used to,” he said wistfully, “but they can’t, can they?”

“That’s life,” said Desdemona, and laughed. “How’s that for corny? Never you mind, Myron dear. Things will settle down.”

“But they won’t,” she said to Carmine later, when some of the rib roast had been devoured. “If only I could like her! I can’t, you know. She’s so brittle, though brittle I could manage if it weren’t for the coldness. She’ll break poor Myron’s heart.”

“Maybe not,” said Carmine, feeling the optimism that went with a full stomach of good food. “I think he’s fascinated by all the things
in her we dislike. He’s fifty years old, lovely lady, and ready for a bitch. Erica’s a phase.”

“Do you think so? Truly?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Is shepherd’s pie all right for the leftover roast?” she asked. “I got a big one because Sophia said she’d be in, and have two friends sleeping over.”

That irritation flared up again. Carmine scowled. “It may be high time to have a word with my daughter,” he said.

“No, Carmine, don’t! There will be a good reason, I’m sure of it,” said Desdemona.

As if on cue, Sophia burst through the front door wide-eyed and white. “Daddy!” she cried, going straight to him. “Someone locked me in the physics lab closet!”

See, what did I tell you? Desdemona’s eyes were saying, but Carmine held Sophia off and looked at her closely. She was a little disheveled, and her fright was genuine. “Do you know how it happened, honey?” he asked.

“No, that’s just it! It shouldn’t have! No one ever locks that closet!” She shivered, shrank against him. “I could hear someone on the other side walking up and down, and something thumping on the floor. Daddy, I don’t know why, but I was sure he was after
me!
I was on tidy-up duty, everyone saw me going back and forth to the closet. At first I thought it was a joke, then I heard the walking and I got this awful feeling!”