Too Many Murders (36 page)

“Bart, how are you?” Carmine asked, sliding into his side of the booth and holding out a hand.

Yes, even his grip was ordinary: neither too limp nor too firm, neither too dry nor too moist.

“I’m well, Carmine,” Bart said with a smile.

It wasn’t necessary to offer him condolences a year and a half old; Carmine had been at Cora’s funeral. “Let’s have our lunch, then we’ll talk,” he said. “What’s your fancy?”

“Minnie says the special’s good—brisket. I think I’ll have that, and rice pudding to follow,” Bart said.

Carmine ordered a Luigi Special salad with Thousand Island dressing. With no Desdemona at home to cook ruinous dinners, he could revert to his bachelor meals.

They ate with enjoyment, passing the time as old East Hollomanites did. Only after Minnie had cleared the pudding bowls away did Carmine become serious.

“I had a visit from Netty Marciano this morning,” he said, “and she told me that you were at the Maxwell banquet. Is that right, Bart?”

“Yes, I bought a plate. It was real well organized, but I didn’t enjoy it much, at least at first,” Bart said.

“Take me through it, I need to know.”

“Well, I was supposed to be at a table of friends, but when I got there I found out the rest had canceled—the gastric bug. So they sat me with five dentists and four wives—the odd dentist was a woman who turned her back on me. I didn’t know one of them. They had a great time, I had a lousy time.” Bart sighed. “That’s the trouble with going anywhere on your own. And with being an undertaker. The minute people ask you what you do for a crust, they look at you as if you’re Boris Karloff.”

“I’m sorry,” Carmine said gently.

“When the dessert was cleared, I decided to look for a better place to sit,” Bart went on in his soft, anything but ordinary voice. “My first try was a flop—Dubrowski the lawyer and some lawyer pals from out of town. They all talked about business, whether the clients would tolerate a raise in fees, that kind of thing. I didn’t stay past telling them I was an undertaker and getting the Boris Karloff treatment.”

“Lawyers are the pits,” Carmine said with feeling.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Bart paused, furrowing an already furrowed brow.

“Where did you go next?”

“To a weird table—really, really weird! Four women and four men, but it was hard to believe that any of them were friends. One
guy was a Chubber who looked down his nose at all the others—I remember he called them Philistines. One guy was so fat—I thought it wouldn’t be long before he needed a funeral home. The same for an old lady who had breathing problems and a blue tinge under her nails. A few of them were drunk, I mean really drunk, especially a tall, thin, dark guy who sat with his nose in a glass of strong booze, drinking away. There was a pretty girl who looked out of her depth, and a woman who looked so tired I thought she was going to go to sleep with her head on the table. I don’t think she was drunk, just tired. I knew the fourth woman because everyone knows her—Dee-Dee the whore. What she was doing there, I can’t even imagine.”

Carmine listened enthralled, wondering whether to interrupt Bart’s narrative flow or hold his questions until Bart was done. No, let him continue, Carmine decided.

“The other man was very young, student age. He reminded me of the Chubber except that he was very plain in the face and the Chubber was handsome. I sat down between the fat guy and the Chubber in one of the two vacant chairs. The other one was on the far side of Mister Drunk, between him and the snooty kid. Just after I sat down, this woman came along and sat between the kid and Mister Drunk. She was drunk too, none too steady on her feet, and she looked as if she had a bone to pick with Mister Drunk.”

Time to interrupt. “How come, after five months, Bart, you remember every little detail?” Carmine asked. If he didn’t ask, some hotshot defense attorney sure would. Best to know now what answer Bart would give.

“It’s my job to remember every little detail,” Bart said with dignity, a trifle wounded. “Who’s sitting where, who’s not speaking to whom, what color the Mascetti family hates or what color the Castelanos hate—undertaking is a very delicate job. And I can’t forget everything the next day either. Death picks and chooses, no one can be sure when the same people will be back to bury the next family member.”

“How right you are, Bart! Can you describe the drunken new arrival at the table?” Carmine asked.

“Oh, sure. She was a really beautiful woman, much higher class than the four women sitting down. Blonde, with very short hair. Wonderful clothes, very pale blue. When the fat guy tried to act like a host, she cut him dead. In fact, I don’t think she even noticed the others, she was too intent on Mister Drunk. I guess he was someone important, from the way the fat guy and the Chubber and the young guy treated him—as if they were afraid of him but needed him. No, not the young guy. He was like Netty Marciano—ears flapping to get all the gossip.”

“Did he get any?” Carmine asked.

“Well, the beauty and Mister Drunk were lovers who’d just split up—that was what she was displeased about, if that’s the right word.” Bart smiled apologetically. “It’s not necessary now, but I’ve spent most of my life speaking in euphemisms. But I’ll say to you now, Carmine, she was pissed as well as pissed! Mister Drunk hardly noticed—he was too far gone, I think. She didn’t understand that.”

“Do you remember what they talked about? Was it all to do with the ending of their affair? Did she mention any names?”

Bart frowned. “She did, but I don’t remember any of them. They weren’t the names of people I knew. Except for one that caught my attention because it’s the name of a saint, Philomena, and I’ve never heard of a real woman called it. The people waiting on the table were really attentive, I think due to Mister Drunk’s importance. Their supervisor whispered in their ears, at any rate, and they hopped to refill glasses, keep the table neat, hand out clean ashtrays. So the beauty got drunker, and she started to ramble. Weird stuff! All about Russia and holding Stalin’s hand, kissing Khrushchev’s bald head—there was a lot of it. She started hissing in Mister Drunk’s ear about if only he knew what was going on inside his own company, and how someone was his enemy. She kept it up, a kind of hiss—it sounded real mean, vindictive. He’d all but passed out, so I don’t think he heard any of it.
The fat guy was trying to persuade both of them to have some coffee, and all three of the waiters were hovering.”

For the first time since the Ghost, Carmine felt the icy needles crawling through his jaw. He gazed at Joseph Bartolomeo in awe, wondering at his luck. “What happened next?” he asked.

Bart shrugged. “I don’t know, Carmine. I saw a table full of people I knew right against the back wall, and I got out of there. Brr!” He shivered. “I was never gladder than when I sat down among friends and started to have a good time.”

“Later on, Bart, you might have to testify to this in a court of law,” Carmine said, “so don’t forget any of it.”

The nondescript grey eyes opened wide. “Why should I?”

Carmine walked him back down the block to the Nutmeg Insurance building, shook him fervently by the hand, and then went in search of Abe and Corey.

His allusions to the espionage element in the case had been inadvertent or need-to-know, limited only because his team didn’t have security clearances.

“Well, fuck that,” he said in his new, much quieter office. “If either of you breathes a word, even to a wife, I’ll shell out your balls, so make sure you don’t. It’s my career on the line as well as yours. I trust you, guys, and that’s more than I can say for Ted Kelly.”

At the end of Carmine’s narrative, Corey and Abe exchanged glances of mingled relief and triumph; at long last they knew the ins and outs of this god-awful mess of a case.

“As soon as she was sober,” Carmine said, “Erica confessed what she’d done to her controller, who is Ulysses. That surprises you? You think that was a stupid thing to do? Catholics confess to a priest, right? Erica was as indoctrinated as anyone is to any religion. She didn’t fart without permission from Ulysses. As I see it, she told Ulysses exactly what had happened, and gave it as her opinion that no one had noticed, least of all Skeps. Ulysses will have known she
was speaking the truth. She was utterly dependent on him, and he terrified her.”

“So okay, Erica broke her cover, and Ulysses knew it on, say, December fourth, the day after,” Corey said, struggling with behavior he found hard to understand. “But, Carmine, four months go by!
Then
everybody who was connected to table seventeen was murdered. Why did Ulysses wait so long?”

“Think about it, Corey—think!” Carmine said patiently. “The murder of eleven people is a massive undertaking. Even Ulysses needed time to plan it.”

“And time for the world to forget there ever had been a charity banquet,” Abe said, understanding. “Ulysses is a smart cookie—smart enough to know that murder produces different consequences from espionage. I don’t say spies don’t murder, but they do it covertly. The murder of civilians is overt. If what he planned was multiple murder, he must have known there would be cops crawling everywhere, and that some of them might be smart cookies too. Homicide cops are in-your-face guys.”

“I get it!” Corey said. “Ulysses didn’t want any murders, but if he had to, he would have preferred to kill his victims one at a time, spaced out. In a big city, no sweat. In Holloman? Impossible. Quite a few of his victims were pretty important, their deaths would have made the
Post
. He couldn’t be sure that a potential victim wouldn’t wake up to what was going down.
They
all knew where they were sitting on a certain night. He just couldn’t risk so many deaths strung out. If he had to kill them, he had to kill them all at once.”

“You’re both right,” Carmine said, smiling. “If they had to die, they had to die all at once, even the waiters. Not on the tail of the function, but maybe two months later, or three. So he waited for any consequences of Erica’s indiscretion, and he waited in vain. Nothing happened, nothing at all. I see Ulysses sitting back with a sigh of relief as the fourth month ended. He was safe, and he wouldn’t need to invite homicide cops into his little corner of the world. Then he got Evan Pugh’s letter on March twenty-ninth. In a way, Evan’s identity
was manna from heaven. The one who’d woken up was another evil bastard.”

“Pugh didn’t send his letter to Erica?” Corey asked.

“No. Her drunken ramblings didn’t really matter, even the garbage about holding Joe Stalin’s hand and playing kissies with the Central Committee. If anyone had accused her, she would have laughed in their face and called it a fairy tale. It must have been something she hissed in Desmond Skeps’s ear later on. When she was talking about a traitor inside the Cornucopia gates. I think she spoke his name,” Carmine said.

“But if she did, why did Evan Pugh wait four months to act? I can see the logic of letting time go by,” Abe said, “but I can’t get my head around Evan Pugh’s four-month wait.”

On the far wall opposite Carmine’s desk hung Mickey McCosker’s only attempt at decoration: a cheap cardboard reproduction of a wilted arum lily in a vase. Suddenly it was too much to bear. Carmine got up, walked across, yanked at the picture, and pulled it down. He perched it on top of an empty wastebasket and brushed his hands together in satisfaction.

“I hate it,” he said to his stunned team. “Mickey said it reminded him of his wife on their wedding night, though he never said which one.”

He sat down again. “I believe the answer lies in Evan Pugh’s character,” he said. “Because it was sadistic, he got a kick out of the nasty vibes flying around after Erica arrived. But at the end of the evening he went back to Paracelsus and embarked on some other creepy mischief. He forgot about the events at table seventeen until he was reminded by one of those quirks of fate no one can predict. An issue of
News
magazine at the end of March featured a special article on the Communist leaders since the great purges of the late Thirties. It went on sale about March twenty-sixth, and Myron was carrying a copy when he came to Holloman to introduce us to his lady love, Erica Davenport. He was raving about the article, and begging me to read it. I didn’t have the time because we’d just had twelve murders.”

“My God!” Corey exclaimed. “Evan Pugh read it!”

“Yes, and whatever the journalist said about some of the Central Committee members tallied exactly with what Erica had said. After that, he must have remembered the things she hissed—a significant word from Bart Bartolomeo. Plenty of esses in her speech, I’m guessing. And think of our luck! We found Bart five months after the Maxwell banquet, and he’s the perfect witness! His profession disciplined him to notice things and remember them.”

“Erica told Skeps who Ulysses was,” Abe said. “Wow!”

“Yes, and Evan Pugh remembered.”

“Pugh recognized his name?” Corey asked.

“I doubt it,” Carmine said. “All he needed was the name. He was a pre-med who got straight As—he knew how to research. After
News
came out, he must have decided all his Christmases had come at once. A chance to tease and torment someone with far more to lose than mere money. He didn’t need money himself. That’s one of the strangest things about this case—no one needs the money.”

“He sent off his letter,” Abe said.

“And Ulysses was forced to kill everyone connected to table seventeen,” Corey added.

“Answer me this, Carmine,” Abe said, frowning. “Why didn’t Ulysses just hire an out-of-state gunman and mow each of them down? Why all the histrionics? Poison, injection, shootings, rape, knife, pillows. Is he laughing at us?”

“No, I think it was an attempt to make the killings seem unrelated,” Carmine said. “Yes, he’s got an ego the size of Tokyo, but it doesn’t rule him. This guy probably has colonel’s or even general’s rank within the KGB—he’s as cold as ice, he doesn’t posture like a politician. All he’s been trying to do since December third is patch up Erica Davenport’s mistakes. We have to assume that he’s never made a mistake himself, and it may be that Erica wasn’t his choice—more that she was the only sleeper Moscow had to front for Ulysses. Women have a weakness, guys. They fall in love differently from men, which makes them hard for men to control.”