Too Many Murders

“Honestly, Carmine, my hands are tied!”

“Luckily mine aren’t.” Carmine got up. “Comforting to know that all cafeteria coffee is lousy, isn’t it? If you want a good meal and good coffee while you’re in a pint-sized state full of eccentrics, Ted, eat at Malvolio’s Diner. It’s right next to County Services.” He stopped. “Are you married?” It seemed the question people hated answering.

“Used to be,” said Kelly, looking sour. “She hated the fact that I was away from home so often, thought there was another woman.”

“Did they ever put you undercover?”

“At my size?”

Carmine grinned and resumed his progress out. “Good to know that someone at the FBI has a brain. See you around.”

“The IV wound shouldn’t have had a droplet of any kind,” Patsy said when Carmine told him what Ted Kelly had done. “I know we were late, but Skeps had been dead too long by the time he was discovered to be oozing liquid Kelly could soak up on a swab. Incidentally, it means he came armed with specimen jars, tubes, swabs, the whole nine yards. He must have swabbed every orifice, put a magnifying light over what he could see of the body. I bet no one there even noticed if he had equipment.”

“I’m going to subpoena the FBI for their analytical results, especially the droplet,” Carmine said. “Judge Thwaites will love it! A Longfellow eccentric indeed! Kelly didn’t even know Longfellow was a poet, the ignorant shit. Though sometimes I wonder how much of his act is an act.”

“I’m still fretting about the liquidity,” Patsy said.

“Heparin?”

“Why, for God’s sake? Skeps was immobilized. If the IV came out, there were other veins. Unless our murderer isn’t an expert jabber. Maybe he got lucky on his first vein and decided not to risk failure later on. Hence, heparin. I’ll swab the area myself.” He looked unhappy. “What this does show me beyond a shadow of a doubt is that I need to go back to Skeps’s body for a second look. I wasn’t thorough enough.”

“Patsy, Skeps was one of twelve cases.”

“I know, and that’s what really scares me. How many of them got my best shot? The baby and his mother… I’m going back to nine out of the eleven, Carmine, and this time every last one of them will get my best shot.”

There was no point in arguing; Patrick’s mind was made up. “Then start with Evan Pugh,” Carmine said.

“The most important, you think?”

“Not think. Know.”

“Evan Pugh it is. By the way,” Patsy said a little too casually, “I hear that Myron’s moved out of East Circle?”

“How the hell does the word get around?”

“The East Holloman grapevine, which has a particularly large tendril wound around the cops. Aunt Emilia is livid.”

As Aunt Emilia was Carmine’s mother, he gave a very Italian shrug. “Then you know as much as I do.”

“More, probably. He’s taken the entire top floor of the Cleveland Hotel and is planning to introduce his darling Erica to all of Holloman who matter.”

“Wow! He is serious.”

“I just hope she is.”

“My hope is she’s innocent of murder.”

“Is she high on your list?”

“No. Just about halfway up.”

Carmine left Patrick assembling his forces for another attack on Evan Pugh and went to his office, where a small stack of single sheets of paper awaited him. Most were memos, some more formal letters, but they had leaped out at Delia because they were neatly typed, neither signed nor initialed, and gave no hint of their origins.

“Sir,” said the top one, a memo, “this is to remind you that you agreed to meet me to discuss the suggested improvements to our atomic reactor design. The usual place and time, please.”

All fifteen-four letters, eleven memos-had the same fishy smell to them, Delia said.

“They look as if they’ve all been typed on the same machine, but that’s a lot harder to establish if your firm uses IBM golfball machines whose letters haven’t worn or warped, and it seems to me that all the executive secretaries have new or nearly new typewriters. The carbon ribbon is used only once and there are no mistakes, which suggests a very good typist. I hate to say it, Carmine, but I think Mr. Kelly should look at the executive secretaries, not the executives. I don’t know of a managerial sort who can type for tuppence.”

“What about a woman executive?” Carmine asked.

“Unless she started as a secretary, I’d say the same applied to her. And Dr. Davenport has never been a secretary. In college she paid a typist to do her papers and theses.”

“I suppose that’s a relief.” Carmine thought of Myron.

“Have you had your invitation yet?”

“Invitation to what?”

“Mr. Mandelbaum is giving a reception and buffet dinner at the Cleveland Hotel on Saturday night. Uncle John’s been asked, so has Danny, and so have I,” said Delia.

“Then I daresay Desdemona, Sophia and I will see you there. In the meantime, is there anything else from the filing cabinet I should tackle, or can I leave it with you?”

“I think I can safely burn the rest of the contents.”

“Then let’s not do Ted Kelly’s work for him, the lying son of a bitch. We’re going back to our murders. Today is Thursday, but it’s too late to drive to Orleans and get back again by dinnertime, so Mrs. Skeps can wait until tomorrow. Let her know I’ll be coming, would you? Where are Abe and Corey?”

“In the newspaper morgue, reading. Shall I phone them?”

“No need. I’ll pick them up on my way through.”

The public library had its own premises farther down Cedar

Street, but the newspaper morgue was inside County Services, where it was handier for everyone from the police to the fire departments. The public used it too, and there were several habitual browsers in residence, dreamily turning the vast broadsheet pages of ancient copies of the Holloman Post, always full of interesting local news. It was slowly being converted to microfiche, and Carmine wondered how the browsers would like peering at a screen, white on black. They’ll hate it, he concluded, wiggling his brows at Abe and Corey.

“Progress,” he said apropos of nothing to his bewildered henchmen as they left, “can kill a lot of the fun.” Then, as they left the building, “Find anything?”

“A fair amount on the Denbighs, who are into good causes. Mrs. Dr. Denbigh is a literacy nut. The Dean was into anything about the Renaissance. They both supported children’s disease charities. Mrs. Dr. Denbigh is also a women’s libber, big time. Desmond Skeps got a lot of press, we expected that. We noted articles that mentioned him and photocopied the ones that featured him. There wasn’t a lot about the divorce, a bit strange.”

“Well, it was out of state, and Cornucopia would have tried to play it down.” Carmine smiled at Corey, who had given the report, but made sure to include Abe-that lieutenancy was a pain, and when he’d tried to get off the panel, Silvestri said he stayed on it.

“Where are we going?” Abe asked as they headed up South Green Street toward Maple.

“The Cleveland Hotel, where we have to meet the Pughs. They’re here to identify the body, but they don’t intend to go home until they can take the body home too. Their lawyer is with them.”

“Trouble, Carmine?”

“I don’t think so. Danny Marciano took the call, and he says they sounded like decent people.”

The Pughs had been placed in a suite on the floor below the top, overlooking the red stone outcrop of North Rock. With the trees just coming into leaf, the forest that spread around Holloman looked as if a wispy, translucent chartreuse veil had been thrown over it, but Carmine knew that David and Enid Pugh would not notice.

They were in their mid-forties, tanned and fit, dressed in the bright colors that betrayed the climate they lived in, and they were far handsomer than their son. If ever there was evidence for a changeling, it was in the form of Evan Pugh, so conceited, self-absorbed and amoral. The Pugh parents were none of those things, five minutes in