Too Many Murders (47 page)

“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!”

That would do it, Carmine thought. I doubt anything Smith has said in here would alter the jury’s verdict, either. It’s the mention of her wounds that will matter, not the date. A Rilke original! Man, the guy must have some contacts! Not that the jury would ever see this diary. Bera would find some way to have it struck from evidence.

And the feminism aspect fizzled out with Pauline Denbigh. Carmine abandoned it without much regret. All his enquiries had produced nothing that helped the case against Dean Denbigh’s wife, nor had it unearthed a lover. Perhaps she truly was a sexually frigid person. Perhaps all her energies were channeled into women’s causes and her love of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Bianca Tolano tore at the heartstrings. “I noted her at the table next to Dee-Dee the whore, and couldn’t tell the difference between them,” Smith said on the twenty-second of December. “A pair of
whores! One the brassy finished product, the other the demure, sweet whore-in-the-making. The one in the making reminds me of Erica, so I’ll visit the death on her that I long to give Erica. I’ve seen my tool. A sycophantic crawler named Lancelot Sterling drew my attention to him when I paid a visit to the twentieth floor of Accounting. A crippled runt named Joshua Butler. I admit I went there thinking Sterling might be my tool, but he’s a deviate, not a cripple. Scum! When Joshua Butler left work I loitered in my Maserati and offered him a ride home. He was enthralled! I ended by taking him out to my house—no one was home—and giving him dinner. Stravinsky waited on table and agreed he was perfect for our purposes. By the end of the evening he was so enchanted he would have done anything for me. Not that I mentioned what I wanted! I simply started peering into his more disgusting fantasies. He’ll do beautifully, though Stravinsky, stronger-stomached, will have to do most of the psychic exploration.”

Intermixed with Smith’s cold-blooded planning were touches of—mercy? Carmine wasn’t sure that was the right word. But he did seem to have compassion for two of the victims, Beatrice Egmont and Cathy Cartwright. Eventually Carmine concluded that Smith esteemed them as worthy matrons who did not deserve to die, so should die quickly, painlessly.

Evan Pugh, he was interested to see, was intended to get a dose of KGB powder and die of nonspecific septicemia. Not a pleasant death by any means, but not as payback as the death he did get. Nor as terrifying while the agony lasted. He would have been in the hospital, drugged to the limit and not really suffering the way the bear trap made him suffer.

The three black victims had their entry.

“The waiters will have to die too. Interesting, that for all their prating, white Americans still use black ones as their servants. And their
whores, witness Dee-Dee. Stravinsky will procure out-of-state assassins—three, one for each. I like the idea of three different guns, all American-made. With silencers, as in the movies. Stravinsky thinks I go too far, but the decisions are not Stravinsky’s.
I—am—so—bored!!!
These American fools can’t catch me, so what does it matter?”

Jesus, you supercilious bastard! You’re bored! Isn’t that a shame?

The entry for the twenty-ninth of March was fascinating.

“And to think I was convinced the threat was over! Now I find it isn’t. How stimulating! I am wide awake, alert and intelligent, as their advertisement says. Well, Mr. Evan Pugh, Motor Mouth is going to kill you differently than originally planned. The bear trap will be used, with Stravinsky doing an impersonation of Joshua Butler. The preparatory work has already been done, just in case. I have suspected for a long time that the blackmailer would be Mr. Evan Pugh, so the beam has been located and the bolt holes reamed out one size too small, no threads. Stravinsky has the proper tools, a strong right arm and sufficient height. You shall have your wad of money—a drop in the ocean to me! And you shall have a most painful death. Motor Mouth. So American. The bear trap is made in America too.”

The entry on the fourth of April concerned Desmond Skeps.

“Dead at last, Desmond Skeps, with your perpetual whinging about Philomena, your denial of your own guilt in driving her away. A very good woman, for an American.

“I did enjoy watching him die! I despise those men who obtain sexual pleasure from the suffering of others, but I confess that I was moved to an erection at the sight of Desmond Skeps trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey, eyes and brain alive, the rest of him as dead as a dodo. I played with him, I and my tiny soldering iron. How he tried to scream! But his vocal cords weren’t up to it. Just hoarse yowls. The ammonia in his veins really hurt, but the Drano at the end was inspired. What a way to go! I loved every minute of it. From the moment he told me that he’d appointed Erica as young Desmond’s
guardian, he had no further use. He was so enamored of her business acumen, never knowing that the acumen was mine. Bye-bye, Desmond!”

Of Erica’s murder he had nothing much to say; clearly it wasn’t necessary for him to dwell on her agony.

“Stravinsky broke the bitch’s arms and legs one bone at a time, but she gave nothing away except the names of her Party friends in Moscow. Had she had anything more to confess, she would have. Stravinsky especially enjoyed it. We agreed that it would have to be the hired assassin Manfred Mueller—as good a name as any—who got rid of her body. I wanted it put on Delmonico’s property, Stravinsky thought that a mistake. Of course I won the argument, so Mueller took the body there. My luck that the gigantic wife appeared. Not that it made much difference. Mueller got away cleanly. So, unfortunately, did the wife. A grotesque.”

The entry on the sniper in the copper beech was extremely interesting; Smith was very rattled.

“I have lost my luck,” he wrote. “The great Julius Caesar believed implicitly in luck, and who am I to contradict him? But the trouble with luck is not that it runs out—it doesn’t. Rather, it encounters another man’s luck that is stronger, and fails. As mine has. I have encountered Delmonico’s luck. Now all I can do is send him in a thousand different directions at once. Manfred Mueller is willing to kill as many of Holloman’s illustrious citizens as he can, and lay down his own life in the process. His price? Ten million dollars in a Swiss bank account in his wife’s name. I have done it. But Stravinsky says it will not answer, and I very much fear that Stravinsky is right.”

Interesting, thought Carmine. He said something like that to my face. About losing his luck because mine is stronger.

That was the last entry in the fifth book. Tired and sick, Carmine gathered his evidence together and put it in an old box he marked
ODDMENTS
—1967. Then he took it to the cage and saw it put among a dozen other equally grimy boxes. Even if the faithful Stravinsky donned the uniform of a Holloman cop and came asking, he would not get it.

Stravinsky… A code name, it had to be a code name. The exercise books had given absolutely no hint as to who Stravinsky was. The music? No, surely not! Any bets Stravinsky is Stravinsky because Stravinsky picked the name? Or the KGB bosses? He’s like Smith, KGB. And here I thought Desdemona had seen him when Erica’s body was dumped. Now I learn that the sniper dumped the body. Smith always spoke of Stravinsky as an almost-equal, as someone whose opinion he respected. Stravinsky was treasured, valued too much to confide his identity to the pages of these diaries of murder.

“I always feel let down at the end of a difficult case,” Carmine said to Desdemona that evening. “As usual, the end of it depends on the courts—anticlimactic, not high drama. Smith can’t escape conviction, but I strongly suspect Pauline Denbigh will, and as for Stravinsky, he won’t even be identified.”

“You don’t think he might be Purvey or Collins?” she asked.

“No, that feels wrong. This is master and apprentice, not a hierarchy.”

“What will happen to Cornucopia?”

“There’s only one hand strong enough to take the helm, and it belongs to Wal Grierson, who won’t like it one little bit. His heart’s at Dormus with the turbines, not spread across thirty different companies.” Carmine shrugged. “Still, he’ll do his duty—pray note that I do not include the word ‘patriotic’ in that! Meaningless cant, when it’s trotted out endlessly.”