Carmine was promoted to captain. Please, begged Delia, could she work for Captain Delmonico, the murder expert?
“There’s hours of reading here,” said Carmine to her.
“I know, but it’s all absolutely riveting,” said Delia in her polished Oxford accent. “Twelve murders in one day!”
“Don’t rub it in, you horrible woman!”
She laughed and tittupped out on very high heels, leaving her boss to stare at the surface of his desk. Where to begin?
With Larry Pisano’s cases, that was logical, the three shootings and the prostitute.
Three different handguns, all silenced. Now why had it been done that way? What about the victims dictated the use of three different firearms? The answer kept coming back to nothing, which didn’t make sense. Silencers indicated professional killers, not the style of shooting common in the Hollow and in the Argyle Avenue district. And that spoke of big money to take out three harmless blacks… What on earth could they possibly know to warrant such an outlay? Pisano and his team had burrowed assiduously, without results. The woman was elderly and inoffensive, both the youths fine types. Blood analysis on all three had found its way into the pile, to reveal no trace of any illicit substance either over time or on the morning of their deaths. They were just what they appeared to be, the kind of people who didn’t get killed by a deliberate act, by selection. Yet these three had been selected, had been deliberately killed, by men taking no chances, men who were professional assassins. The whole thing screamed of out-of-state to Carmine. Though Connecticut had its share of black militants, gangsters, and hoods, it didn’t run to hired assassins using silencers, men competent enough to pick their moment on the street when the victim wouldn’t be noticed going down in a heap until the getaway had been invisibly made.
Okay, thought Carmine, setting the shootings aside, I am going to presume that the perpetrators are out-of- state, and bring Larry and his boys onto fresh fields as soon as I make up my mind where the exhaustive investigations are going to yield fruit.
Next he went to Larry’s last case, the prostitute. Everybody knew Dee-Dee Hall, and not because she was always in trouble: far from it. Though she worked the street, she had her beat and never strayed from it. Her pimp was Marty Fane, part of the reason why she stayed out of trouble; he was easygoing for a pimp, and he valued Dee-Dee too highly to ill-treat her. Though she was now thirty-two years old, she had weathered her eighteen years on the street better than most and kept her striking good looks. The pity of it was that, had she only been a few years younger, Carmine reflected, she would have become a call girl rather than a streetwalker, but by the time call girls were a common phenomenon, Dee-Dee’s gloss was gone. At six feet, her height was in her shapely legs, and she still had a voluptuous body. Her hair was brassy, her eyes green, her skin the color of cafe au lait. All of which procured her plenty of johns, but was not the basis of her popularity. That lay in her ability to give a great blow job; it was said she had more suck than Eskimo Nell. This particular speciality also meant no unwanted pregnancies, hence her good health and the preservation of her figure. Her pimp, Marty Fane, pampered her by feeding her heroin habit and making sure her room with bath and kitchenette on the fringes of the Argyle Avenue ghetto had cleaning and laundry service. Dee-Dee was his top earner.
According to Larry, who had taken on Dee-Dee’s case personally, Marty Fane was devastated at his loss. No matter how intensively Larry questioned the denizens of that seedy world in which Marty and Dee-Dee lived, he could find no evidence of a falling out between pimp and prostitute. The two had been seen giggling together as they took a break somewhere around two a.m. Which made Marty the last person known to have seen her alive. Her beat lay behind the Holloman City Hall, where the neighborhood was far less salubrious than in front. It was an area of parking lots, workshops, warehouses and blue-collar offices, deserted after dark save for those who cruised looking for a little sexual action, like Chubb students, commercial travelers and night workers.
Bitter at her murder, even grief-stricken, Marty Fane was quick to yield up the names of her regular johns insofar as he knew them, which had led to some embarrassing interviews with men foolish enough to deny their connection. The young Chubbers tended to be rather thrilled until it dawned upon them that they were suspects in a murder, whereupon those with powerful daddies suddenly demanded to see their lawyers and tried to say nothing. Once the lawyers were persuaded that their clients were more a source of information than suspects, they cooperated, but to no avail. Dee-Dee’s death remained shrouded in mystery.
Zilch, said Carmine to himself, adding the prostitute to the three shootings. Whoever had done it was as cool as Dr. Pauline Denbigh, though he doubted it was her. Not an out-of-stater either; the killer knew exactly where to find the hapless victim. Maybe someone to whom she’d given one of her fabled blow jobs in the past? Weep your heart out, Marty Fane! It will be a very long time before you find another Dee-Dee Hall.
Cathy Cartwright, killed before her handicapped child made a mess in his diaper. Like Desmond Skeps, yet unlike him. The drugged glass of bourbon-sad, to think that the poor woman had to go to bed in order to have a civilized drink. When she felt the effects of the chloral hydrate she probably didn’t try to fight them, deeming herself bone-weary and looking forward to a few hours of peaceful sleep, wondering when Jimmy would wake her demanding to be changed. Patrick thought the pentobarbital had been injected immediately; she was perhaps the first of the night’s victims to die, very quickly and without any pain. The vital centers in her brain stem had gently ceased to function, and she slipped away. What about her had prompted mercy? It said the killer felt kindly about her, regretted the necessity.
Carmine, Carmine! He sat up straight, conscious of the sweat trickling down the back of his neck, running between his shoulder blades. You’re thinking as if there’s only one murderer! But there can’t be. Too many crimes in too many different places at close enough to the same time. Unless some of the murders were commissioned? But that calls for huge amounts of money, and a mastermind. Look at it dispassionately, and you’ll see how wrong you are… About the only reason for such an orgy of killing at more or less the same moment is a spirit of mischief, which is ridiculous. Manifestly ridiculous! Think of the risks! Anyone intelligent enough to hatch a plot like that would be too intelligent to contemplate its hatching.
Confess it, Carmine, the idea only entered your mind after you learned that Desmond Skeps was among the dead. How brilliant, to conceal the importance of his murder under a landslide of other murders! An idea that might have held water, had there been fewer murders. But
Unless… unless, Carmine, all those people had to die. Unless between March twenty-ninth and April third something happened that forced this particular solution. Only, what? Oh, Carmine, Carmine, don’t complicate your job so crazily! And don’t you dare voice this suspicion to anyone, even John Silvestri.
Aware that the worm, having been born, was wriggling inside his brain and lighting every hidden, darkened cranny, Carmine put Cathy Cartwright on the “seen” pile and took Corey’s file on Bianca Tolano.
Bianca, twenty-two years old, had come to Holloman from Pennsylvania ten months ago. A graduate in economics from Penn State, she wanted to get an MBA at Harvard Business School, Corey had deduced from her correspondence and other papers in her apartment. But at present she lacked the money, so she had secured a job as an executive assistant at Carrington Machine Parts, one of the many Cornucopia companies dotted around Holloman. It paid well and she was a success at it; her savings account with the Holloman National Bank was growing fast. The top floor of a three-family house on Sycamore Street, her apartment was less than a block from his wife’s old apartment, Carmine discovered with a shudder. Back came the memories of Desdemona’s ordeal there, and the garotted cop supposed to be guarding her front door. A respectable neighborhood. Then Desdemona. And now this.
Her landlord had noticed her open front door, called out, and, receiving no reply, entered to find her naked body on the living room floor. According to Patsy, she had been tortured, including with a pair of pantyhose tightened and loosened around her neck a number of times; she had been burned with a cigarette, cut with scissors, pinched with cruelly wielded tweezers, and killed with a broken bottle rammed into her vagina. Apart from the temporary asphyxiations, she was conscious throughout; there were no drugs in her bloodstream.
Interviews with her colleagues had revealed that she kept to herself but was not shy. Her relationship with her boss, James Dorley, was pleasant and friendly in a professional way. As she was attractive, she had had offers of dinner or a movie, and had accepted several without any romantic consequences. The men were at pains to explain that Bianca had proven aloof, didn’t offer a guy any encouragement. Her landlord, an inquisitive old man, said he’d swear on a stack of Bibles that she hadn’t had any male visitors. Quiet, that was Miss Tolano. The women she worked with gave Corey no leads either. She’d participate in a coffee klatch, do her share of giggling, but gave the
