Too Many Murders (37 page)

“So Ulysses tried to vary his murders, hoping we’d be as confused as we were snowed under,” Abe said thoughtfully.

“Exactly.”

A pause ensued; Corey terminated it. “There’s another thing puzzles me, Carmine,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Why wasn’t Bart murdered?”

Carmine looked uncertain. “The best I can come up with is that it’s possible Erica never even knew he was there. He was a silent man on the far side of a very fat guy, and he would have been invisible to her if she didn’t give the table her attention when she sat down. We know she didn’t, because she was drunk, and focused on Desmond Skeps. If she never realized Bart was there, Ulysses wouldn’t have been told. The other possibility is that she kind of noticed him, but he’s such an anonymous type that she forgot him a moment later. One thing I do know, guys—if Bart’s still alive, Ulysses either doesn’t know he exists, or he hasn’t been able to find out who he is.”

“We have to put a watch on Bart,” Corey said.

“And give his importance away? That’s why I had lunch with him openly, even walked him back to the Nutmeg Insurance building. We didn’t look like a detective and a witness, we looked like two old pals catching up. I used to live in the Nutmeg Insurance, and Ulysses will know that. So I must have friends there, right?”

“No watch,” said Corey, mentally deducting lieutenant’s points.

“What about Netty?” Abe asked hollowly.

They gazed at each other in dismay. Then Carmine shrugged.

“We’ll just have to hope that she heard something really tasty at Buffo’s wine cellar. There’s a good chance. It was a women’s lunch with plenty of libbers present. Pauline Denbigh on the menu?”

“One thing we
never
do,” said Corey. “Whoever sees Netty doesn’t so much as breathe Bart’s name.”

On the morrow Carmine, Danny Marciano and John Silvestri had to attend one of the Mayor’s “ceremonials,” as the Commissioner had
named them. Ethan Winthrop was a true Connecticut Yankee by birth, but he owned the temperament of a P. T. Barnum. His much loved mayoralty was as stuffed with pomp and circumstance as he could persuade his councilors to condone, which meant there was plenty; his councilors were thoroughly cowed and didn’t honestly care, so long as they could enjoy councilors’ perks. Thus Taft and Travis High Schools received fat subsidies for their bands, a benefit all around: Taft or Travis marched off with all the band trophies far and wide, while the Mayor could fill Holloman’s air with the sounds of brilliant brass during his ceremonials.

Having to attend these events irked the police chiefs, and was one of the few disadvantages Carmine suffered after his promotion to captain—lieutenants didn’t need to go, captains did. Worse than that, it meant digging out his uniform. Under normal circumstances only Danny Marciano was in uniform, as he headed the uniformed cops. Silvestri, a law unto himself, was prone to wear a black suit and a black polo-necked sweater. Carmine stuck to chinos, shirts without a tie, a tweed jacket with a Chubb tie in one pocket, and loafers. Neat and comfortable.

Since the police dress uniform for such senior cops was encrusted with silver braid and detail, it was navy blue rather than black, to avoid any Gestapo connotations. Women like Delia Carstairs, Desdemona Delmonico and Simonetta Marciano privately thought that the three senior officers looked terrific in dress uniform; all were trim-waisted, broad-shouldered and handsome. Netty had a full wall of photographs of her Danny in full dress uniform, with a few of Silvestri and Carmine to round them off. This view was not shared by the martyrs encased in the uniforms, which had high Chinesestyle collars that Carmine, for one, swore had been sharpened on a wheel.

However, needs must. Carmine, Danny and Silvestri attended on the Green while both high school bands played and marched, and the Mayor did his thing alongside M.M. of Chubb in all the glory of his President’s gown and cap. It was Town’s tribute to Gown
as the academic year drew to a close. Luckily the day was fine and calm; the Green was in bloom, the grass springy and still lush. Best of all were the copper beeches, back in leaf and towering over Mayor Winthrop’s celebration of an amity that sometimes had its fragile side.

They were bunched on or around a dais swathed in purple and blue, purple being the color of Chubb, blue of Holloman. On top of the dais the really important people stood, with the Mayor and M.M. in pride of place. The three police chiefs were three steps lower, their capped heads level with the knees of the dignitaries on the dais; the Fire Commissioner and his deputy, in lighter blue uniforms, flanked them.

“Typical Ethan,” said Silvestri to his opposite number, fire chief Bede Murphy, “posing us like fucking flowers in an arrangement.”

Carmine paid scant attention; his collar was simultaneously cutting him and choking him. He craned his neck, shifted his head from side to side, then tipped his chin up as far as it would go. Something flashed in the high branches of the closest copper beech. He stopped moving and stared, his face suddenly expressionless, an old reflex that went back to the lawless days during the war, when soldiers cracked and started shooting up hated figures like officers and MPs. There! Another flash as someone lying on a branch adjusted his weapon; it was the glass end of a telescopic sight catching the sun.

“Down!” he roared. “Everybody down, down, down!”

His right hand had cleared his long-barreled .38 from its holster, and out of the corner of his eye he saw John Silvestri doing the same, with Danny a little behind. The speeches had begun and the two bands were silent, kids sitting demurely on the grass as if they’d never heard of a joint or a hubcap.

It was not Carmine’s words that sent the dignitaries diving in a flutter of robes; it was the sight of three fancy-dress cops, weapons drawn, running like sprinters in the direction of the copper beech, Carmine in the lead. The kids were scattering wildly, girls shrieking, boys yelling, while the watching crowd vanished save for Channel
Six’s news crew, gifted with the best footage since that memorable day the year before.

Danny Marciano was down, clutching at his left arm, but Carmine and Silvestri were already too near for a long rifle, clumsy at close distance.

The sniper got off one last shot, useless, but no one heard the rifle, drowned in the much louder report of two revolvers as Carmine and Silvestri fired together, and again, and a third time. The smaller branches heaved and crackled as a limp body hurtled through them to lie motionless on the ground.

Sirens were wailing, flashing lights showing eerily on South Green Street; someone with a walkie-talkie must have radioed in almost as soon as Carmine moved.

“He’s dead,” Carmine said. “That’s a pity.”

“We couldn’t risk the kids,” Silvestri panted.

“Jesus, the gall!” Carmine looked up at Silvestri from a crouch. “How’s Danny? We need to cordon this off, John, right now, so get it done.”

Off came the silver-encrusted jacket; Carmine flung it to one side and knelt to examine his quarry. A total stranger, which was a disappointment: in his early forties, fit and trim in a brown sweat suit, his face streaked with brown greasepaint that would have made him all but invisible high in a coppery tree.

Silvestri returned. “Danny’s okay—winged, but the bullet missed anything vital. Who is the bastard?”

“No one we know.”

“Who did he mean to kill?”

“My guess is M.M. ahead of the Mayor, but probably as many on the dais as he had time to take out.” Carmine picked up the rifle, anchored by a lanyard to the assassin, who was too well versed in his job to let it accidentally fall. “A Remington .308 chambering five rounds. New firearm, I’ve never seen one.”

“Marine issue this year.” Silvestri followed such things. “How dare he?” The Commissioner swelled with a terrifying rage, his lips
peeled back to bare his teeth. “How dare anyone do this in my town?
My
town! Our kids were here—
our
kids! Someone is shitting all over us, someone who can get hold of a new weapon!”

“Someone we have to stop,” Carmine said. “One thing I can tell you, John—I’ll never bitch about this uniform again. My collar was giving me hell, so I was moving my head around. A ray of sun sneaked through the leaves and hit the lens of his sight just as I stretched my neck. I saw a flash, then another. It reminded me of a situation I had once at Fort Bragg. Know what? Danny’s always at me to switch to an automatic, but if I hadn’t been packing a long-barreled revolver—and the same for you!—we’d never have gotten the motherfucker.”

“Yeah, right, Carmine,” Silvestri said, thumping him on the back in what looked to Channel Six like a congratulatory gesture. “But Danny’s right, snipers aside, and we won’t get another of them. Time to go automatic.” He sighed regretfully.

“There’s nothing more we can learn here,” the Commissioner went on. “Let’s check out the turkeys in this shoot and make sure no one’s hurt.”

Dignity was sorely wounded, but nothing else except Henry Howard’s Tudor bonnet, which was used as a vomit bowl by several grateful men. The probable primary target, Mawson MacIntosh, was too enraged to think of his dignity or his skin. He stalked over to Silvestri and Carmine with the kind of look on his face that had congressional committees shivering well before his tongue cut them to ribbons. The only person he was known to be afraid of was God.

“What is the world coming to, gentlemen?” he demanded, his eyes snapping fury. “There were children here!”

“I’m sure you won’t feel like saying yes, M.M., but have dinner with me tonight at Sea Foam and I’ll tell you a long story,” Silvestri said. “Seven o’clock, no wives, and I don’t give a flying fuck about security clearances!”

The President of Chubb exchanged his furious look for a triumphant one. “I know enough to realize I don’t know nearly enough,” he said. “I’ll be there, John. And I want it all.”

“You’ll get it all.”

Carmine suppressed a sigh. Whatever Special Agent Ted Kelly and various heads of various departments in Washington might say, once Holloman felt itself invaded, the ranks closed against all outsiders. Even Hartford tended to leave Holloman alone.

And it was such a beautiful day, he thought as he walked back to Cedar Street and County Services, where the first thing he would have to do was lodge his sidearm with the duty sergeant. Just as well it hadn’t been a prolonged shootout; he didn’t carry spare rounds in a dress uniform. This hadn’t been a nasty case in that respect, either. His wife and son had suffered, but no one had tried to gun him down, even including on the Green this morning. Too insignificant a target? Well, Mr. Ulysses, you keep on thinking that way.

“The Commissioner will be lodging his .38 as soon as he comes in,” he said to Sergeant Tasco. “We don’t know whose round nailed the sniper, so both weapons will have to go to Ballistics for a test fire.”

“Sure thing, Carmine.” Tasco looked a little stunned. “After all these years, the Commissioner finally used his old long-barreled .38! I didn’t know you packed a long barrel too.”

“Better aim at a longer distance,” Carmine said. “Came in handy this morning.”

“How close were you?”

“About thirty yards.”

“But the sniper was farther away than that by far!”

“When under fire, Joey, run toward the guns, not away.”

He went upstairs on foot, to find Delia had already put chairs out for the meeting sure to happen; she was composed and efficient, apparently taking the threat to her boss and her uncle in stride.

Abe and Corey came in with the Commissioner; Carmine’s team were more rattled than Silvestri, who glanced at the wall where the wilted arum lily had hung.

“Thank God you got rid of it,” he said to Carmine as he sat down. “Mickey has a weird sense of humor.”

“I’m putting up pictures of Desdemona and Julian instead.”

They were all seated, including Delia, but no one seemed to want to open proceedings.

Silvestri spoke: “Is this a campaign of terror?”

“Ulysses would like us to think so, sir,” Carmine said.

“Are we any closer to catching the bastard? Do we even know who he is?”

“The who is still in the wind,” Carmine said seriously. “I have vague ideas, but nothing strong enough to send my other suspects home yet. However, I do think we’re closer. Why? Because the evidence is mounting. How’s Danny?”

“He can go home from the hospital in three or four days. Poor Netty’s the basket case.”

Abe and Corey exchanged a glance not lost on Carmine; it said, as if spoken aloud, that Danny’s winged arm would save Bart Bartolomeo’s life. Simonetta had bigger things to discuss than Bart and a charity banquet.

“I’m going to fill in M.M.,” the Commissioner said in his noarguments voice. “His security clearances are probably higher than the other President’s, but I don’t care anyway. Chubb is more important than Cornucopia in my book. It’s been around far longer and benefited the world one helluva lot more.”

“Yes, sir, no one would deny that, or your decision to fill him in,” Carmine said patiently. “Among other things, two of our murders were committed inside Chubb colleges. Chubb’s under attack too. There is an element of terror involved, and that fact gladdens my heart. It says that Ulysses is very worried. He’s trying to send us in a dozen different directions at once, like racked-up balls on a pool table. Imagine the chaos if the sniper had picked off M.M., the Mayor, Hank Howard and however many more he managed to get before someone found out where he was roosting. Shots echo, the leaves would disperse the sound, and a good marksman with a Remington .308 would have kept on plugging away. We’d have been inundated with Staties, Feds, you name it. The place would have boiled over,
and in the confusion Ulysses would have had time to smooth out the tracks Erica made him leave.”

“May I ask a question?” Delia ventured.

“Ask away,” Carmine said.

“I gather you think the sniper was prepared to die. Does that mean he’s a political assassin? A man prepared to die for an ideal? It does, doesn’t it?”

“A question needing to be asked,” Carmine said. “However, I don’t believe the Reds are so swimming in assets that they can afford to sacrifice good men for relatively nothing. I think of them as pretty much like us—scratching to make ends meet. The USSR is rich, but the USA is richer. Cornucopia is yielding them secrets, admittedly, and items with military applications must be at the top of their wish list. But it’s my opinion that the whole operation is entirely at the discretion of Ulysses—that Moscow’s interest is insulated from the realities Ulysses is facing. Erica Davenport had to be Moscow’s mistake rather than the KGB’s, so you can bet those in Moscow responsible are busy covering their asses. It’s up to Ulysses to remedy Moscow’s blunder, he’s aware of that. From what I know about him, he’d use his black arts to search the market for a professional assassin, a man without political ideals of any kind.”