Too Many Murders (28 page)

“There are no limits to your surprises,” he said, following her into the kitchen. “Did you wear a uniform?”

“We mostly all do. I went to a Church of England day school and wore a hideous navy blue tunic over a shirt and tie. My hat was held on by elastic under my chin to keep it from blowing off in a wind—hats were expensive. And I think,” she went on reflectively, bending to lift the roasting pan out of the oven, “that of all the indignities a uniform meant, that elastic under the chin was the worst.” Out came the roast onto a board. “Now it has to rest.” She rapped the beautifully bubbled skin. “Ah! Perfect! All-male schooling is very important for Julian,” she went on without pausing.

“Why him in particular?”

“Because he’s going to be tall, dark, and terribly handsome. If there were girls in the classroom and schoolyard, he’d never have any peace. It would also swell his ego. The St. Mary’s girls can worship from afar.”

“The St. Mary’s girls will find a way.”

Desdemona looked curious. “Is that the voice of experience?”

“What else?”

“You mean I married a high school heartthrob?”

“No, you married a man in his forties with arthritis.”

“Peter Norton’s death proves the existence of a mastermind,” Carmine said to the Commissioner, Danny Marciano, Patrick O’Donnell and his own men. Delia, pleading work, had declined to come.

“We now have four cases closed—Jimmy Cartwright, John Denbigh, Bianca Tolano and Peter Norton—with the three shootings
a given. Though we suspected the existence of a mastermind, he hadn’t shown his hand directly until Barbara Norton explained why she chose April third to kill her husband. We’ll never get a description out of her, and the name Reuben is a fiction. My guess is that Pauline Denbigh was conned with some highly sophisticated ploy; again, we may never get anywhere by questioning her. She’s aiming for an acquittal. Barbara Norton needed to be reassured that her husband would just go to sleep, whereas Pauline Denbigh didn’t care what her husband suffered as long as she didn’t have to watch. The cyanide evidence ceases with the murder of the Dean—we have the bottle. If there are to be more cyanide deaths, then the salts have already been taken out of the bottle. How much do you think is gone, Patsy?”

“If the bottle was full, about sixty grams—two rounded tablespoons,” Patrick said.

“You were right, Carmine,” Silvestri said. “One killer.”

“An adroit and ingenious killer. He used whatever tools were available to him—usually frustrated people. Barbara Norton and Pauline Denbigh both wanted to be free of domineering men without messy divorces and visualized persecution. Joshua Butler wanted to live his fantasies in the real world, but needed to be shown how.”

“What about the rest, Carmine?” Corey asked.

“More direct, if by ‘rest’ you mean Evan Pugh and Desmond Skeps. We can forget solving Beatrice Egmont, Cathy Cartwright, and the three shootings. An insurance company would call them collateral damage.”

“You don’t think that of Dee-Dee Hall?” Marciano asked.

“No, I think he killed her in person—why, I don’t know.”

“Okay, next phase?” Silvestri asked, parking his ashtray and its cigar under Danny’s nose.

“A general regrouping,” Carmine said, and sighed. “Oh, how I hate Cornucopia! But it’s back into the fray, guys.”

“Erica Davenport?” Corey asked hopefully.

“She’s involved, but she’s not the mastermind. I put her down
as—” He broke off, frowning. No, he couldn’t mention Ulysses. “I put her down as a red herring.”

“That wasn’t what you were going to say,” Silvestri said as everyone filed out of his office.

“Well, I couldn’t say it! That’s why I hate Cornucopia—too many secrets.”

Myron was waiting in his office, eyeing it appreciatively.

“You could do with a coat of paint and some new furniture” was his opening remark. “But it sure beats the previous premises.”

His friend was turning into an old man almost overnight; the eyes were red-rimmed, the cheeks sunken, the mouth slack, and his perky, straight-backed posture had sagged.

“No one touches it until I’m on vacation,” Carmine said, seating himself behind his desk. “A mug of cop coffee?”

“No, thanks! I’d like to live to see a lunch menu.”

“What can I do you for, Myron?”

“I’m flying west this afternoon.”

“Not before due time, I would have said in the old days. Now”—Carmine shrugged—“that’s debatable. Does Erica know?”

“Yes.”

“Have you proposed to her yet?”

“No,” Myron said unhappily.

“Why not, if you love her?”

“That’s just it—I do love her! But I don’t think she loves me. At least, not the way Desdemona loves you.”

Carmine sighed. “Myron, you have to remember that Desdemona and I are a special case. We shared a common danger, and that tends to forge a special bond. We started out disliking each other—Jesus, you can’t look at us and wish for the same relationship! That’s sophomoric.”

Myron went scarlet, compressed his lips. “Well, okay, I admit that. But how do I get inside the defenses of a woman I
know
isn’t the cold WASP princess she pretends to be?”

“I can’t help you,” said Carmine, bewildered. “What makes you think I could?”

“Because when she speaks of you, she has strong feelings! If it weren’t for you, I’d genuinely believe she doesn’t own any.” He waved his hands about wildly. “No, she doesn’t have the hots for you, so don’t start looking for the fire escape! I thought that maybe you had a cop technique…” He trailed off miserably.

“And that wasn’t what you meant,” Carmine comforted. “All you really mean is that something about me gets under her defenses, and you’re hoping I know what it is. But I don’t, Myron. Even if I did, I wouldn’t pass it on. You can pull women effortlessly. You pulled her. And actually you’ve gotten under her defenses enough for her to have confided in you. No one at Cornucopia knows she’s not a cold WASP princess, whereas you do. I’d call that major progress.”

“It’s chickenfeed,” Myron said despondently. “She lets me make love to her—she initiated our first time, I didn’t—but she goes away somewhere, Carmine. ‘Lie on your back and think of England’ might have been written just for her, except it’s not England she thinks of.”

“That’s not you, Myron. That’s her,” said Carmine, dying for the conversation to be over. “If I were you, I’d go talk to Desdemona.”

But Myron shook his head emphatically. “No, it was hard enough talking to you.” He got to his feet. “Give my undying love to our daughter.”

“You should do that yourself.”

“I can’t. I need to get away from here as fast as I can.”

And he was gone. Carmine stood listening to the sound of his footsteps retreating down the hall, and prayed that his most beloved friend would chance upon a greener feminine field in his own purlieu.

“But I think you can rest easy about your mother,” he said to Sophia that evening. “Divorce is not in the cards.”

“Then I forgive him for going,” Sophia said magnanimously. “That icy bitch would kill him.”

When Carmine came in on that Friday, April twenty-first, at eight in the morning, Delia was waiting for him. It was clearly some kind of red-letter day for her; she had dressed in her smartest outfit, a combination of purple and orange that hurt the eyes unless, like Carmine’s, they were inured to her palette.

“If you don’t mind,” she said, sitting on a chair across from his at the desk, “I would rather speak to you privately in the first instance. Is that permissible?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

A rolled-up sheet of paper was laid reverently on the desk, together with several sheets of ordinary size. Carmine looked at them and then back at her, brows raised.

“I have found a function at which all eleven of the dead people were present,” she said, carefully excluding triumph from her voice. “It was held on Saturday, December third of last year, in the Holloman City Hall, and was given by the Maxwell Foundation in aid of research funding for long-term children’s disorders.” She stopped, beaming.

“Wow!” Carmine breathed, a better vocabulary knocked out of him. “And they were
all
present? Including the three black victims?”

“Yes. It was a dinner-dance for five hundred people, who were seated at round tables for ten people or five couples. Most of the tables were ‘bought’ by a company or institution of some kind—undoubtedly you and Desdemona would have been there at Uncle
John’s table if you hadn’t been new parents. It cost a hundred dollars a plate, which brought in a thousand per table. Most of the sponsoring companies and institutions donated a matched thousand per table. Cornucopia and its subsidiaries sponsored twenty of the fifty tables. Chubb sponsored ten tables, the Mayor had one, Police and Fire ended up sharing one, and so forth.” She paused again, eyes bright.

“Amazing,” said Carmine slowly, feeling some comment was called for, but having no idea what, beyond marveling.

“I am floored, Carmine, at how much planning goes into a function of this sort,” she said in tones of awe. “It’s worked out like a battle, though I strongly suspect that if most battles were worked out so scrupulously, the results would be different. Where a table sponsored by an organization should go, its relationship to other tables belonging to that organization, placement of tables to left, right, up, down, and sideways—I doubt Lord Kitchener ever devoted the same time to planning his bloodbaths! When the table master plan was finished, each table was given a number. Then came the business of seating the guests! Due attention had to be paid to those who came as a group of five couples, or wanted to sit at X or Y table, or asked to be seated with anything from one to three other couples. There were also guests who came alone or with a companion, who did not have any preferences, such as Beatrice Egmont. A small group of Maxwell volunteers dealt with all these logistics, and they did it truly magnificently. They even abolished that dreadful crush in the foyer when hundreds of people simultaneously try to see their names listed on a board. Six volunteers with lists sat at a reception desk to give each enquirer his or her table number.” She stopped.

“I get your drift, Delia. Don’t tease, just go on!”

“One of the many Cornucopia tables was sponsored by the Fourth National Bank under the aegis of Mr. Peter Norton. Due to the vagaries of fate, it was far thinner of company than Mr. Norton could have expected. His wife, for instance, had the gastric flu that was going around at the time—I had it myself—and was too
ill to attend. Dean Denbigh’s wife also had this flu and didn’t come. Beatrice Egmont came on a single ticket, no companion. Mrs. Cathy Cartwright’s husband was in Beechmont with the temperamental chef. Bianca Tolano came on one of the tickets given to her by her boss, Mr. Dorley, when he and his wife couldn’t go. It seems Bianca made no effort to find an escort; she was on her own. But she must have been a sensible girl, because she handed in her second ticket at the reception desk. How do I know? It had a number, and was sold at the door to a young man who had none—Evan Pugh. So in one sense he and Bianca substituted for the Dorleys, who one presumes had a lucky escape.” She shivered, switched into high drama. “But why,” she asked rhetorically, “didn’t Mr. Norton fill his table with his own friends? None of them even attended!”

Experience with Delia had taught Carmine that she would recount her doings in her own inimitable style, but that today’s effort was a tour de force she had planned as meticulously as the Maxwell Foundation had its banquet. He just had to wait.

“Put succinctly, Mr. Norton was too terrified to invite his own friends,” Delia continued, satisfied Carmine was on the edge of his chair. “Pride of place at the Fourth National table went to Mr. Desmond Skeps, who elected to sit at Mr. Norton’s out of all the many tables he could choose from. With him as his lady companion he brought Dee-Dee Hall.”

“What?”

“She’s down in black and white on the master guest roster as accompanying Mr. Desmond Skeps. See?” Delia thrust a sheet of paper at Carmine.

He grabbed it and read incredulously. “What the hell was he up to? Something nasty, I bet! Go on, go on!”

“That gave me four women—Cathy Cartwright, Bianca Tolano, Beatrice Egmont and Dee-Dee Hall—and four men—Desmond Skeps, Peter Norton, Evan Pugh and Dean John Denbigh. Eight people, all now dead. Which still left the Fourth National table rather lightly populated. Two of the ten chairs were unoccupied.”

Carmine shook his head. “No wonder I haven’t seen hide or hair of you for days! You didn’t get all of this off a list.”

“Well, no,” she confessed. “I had to speak to a lot of people on the phone and visit the Maxwell Foundation several times. At one point I actually thought my precious lists had been thrown out or burned, but I should have known better. Even charities are riddled with bureaucrats, and bureaucrats won’t discard anything that might imperil their parasitic existence.”

“Why do you hate paper pushers so much, Delia? You’re one yourself,” Carmine said slyly.

She rose to the bait instantly. “I am not a parasite! My work bears fruit, I am a cog in the necessary machinery of the constabulary! And you give me an instance of one police unit that has even enough paper pushers!” she said indignantly.

“Calm down, calm down! I’m pulling your leg. And you have just processed more paper with positive results than an entire government department,” he said. “Desmond Skeps! What was he doing arm in arm with a street whore? Not that she’d have looked like one. Dee-Dee could—could—”

“Tart herself up?” Delia suggested.

“Put on a nice dress and skate on the edge of respectability. She’d still have looked more street than home in the suburbs, but on Skeps’s arm she’d have been forgiven a lot. People can’t bear thinking that a man of Skeps’s wealth and standing might be taking the mickey out of them.” Carmine frowned. “Okay, that’s eight out of the eleven. What about the black victims?”

“They were present too,” said Delia. “The event was catered by Barnstaple Catering, a new name for affairs that size. It’s a firm that has previously concentrated on smaller affairs, but there is a contract with Chubb coming up to cater its banquets, and the Maxwell function was a dummy run for Barnstaple. In view of this, at least according to their general manager, Barnstaple agreed to take a smaller profit than it will be asking in the future. Maxwell had some conditions of its own, apparently having had bad experiences in the past.
The thousand-dollar-table dinner dance was a new sort of venture, and they wanted the first one to be memorable, with the intention of having one each year. So Barnstaple had to provide a three-person wait team for each table. Cedric Ballantine, Morris Brown and Ludovica Bereson waited on the Fourth National table. The system worked a treat,” Delia went on, the excitement dying out of her voice now that the last goody was revealed. “People got their meals piping hot and very quickly, the liquor flowed uninterruptedly, and no one sat staring at a dirty plate for longer than two or three minutes.”