Too Many Murders

“Me? No! According to the girl you love, I’m too insatiably curious, and she’s right. I’d spend all my time poking and prying into what shouldn’t concern me.”

“Are you eating with us, Myron?” Desdemona asked. “It’s a rib roast, and there’s plenty.”

He groaned. “I wish I could, but I have to get back to Erica.” The last of the Scotch disappeared. Myron rose to his feet and stood looking at them a little disconsolately. “I wish things could go on the way they used to,” he said wistfully, “but they can’t, can they?”

“That’s life,” said Desdemona, and laughed. “How’s that for corny? Never you mind, Myron dear. Things will settle down.”

“But they won’t,” she said to Carmine later, when some of the rib roast had been devoured. “If only I could like her! I can’t, you know. She’s so brittle, though brittle I could manage if it weren’t for the coldness. She’ll break poor Myron’s heart.”

“Maybe not,” said Carmine, feeling the optimism that went with a full stomach of good food. “I think he’s fascinated by all the things in her we dislike. He’s fifty years old, lovely lady, and ready for a bitch. Erica’s a phase.”

“Do you think so? Truly?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Is shepherd’s pie all right for the leftover roast?” she asked. “I got a big one because Sophia said she’d be in, and have two friends sleeping over.”

That irritation flared up again. Carmine scowled. “It may be high time to have a word with my daughter,” he said.

“No, Carmine, don’t! There will be a good reason, I’m sure of it,” said Desdemona.

As if on cue, Sophia burst through the front door wide-eyed and white. “Daddy!” she cried, going straight to him. “Someone locked me in the physics lab closet!”

See, what did I tell you? Desdemona’s eyes were saying, but Carmine held Sophia off and looked at her closely. She was a little disheveled, and her fright was genuine. “Do you know how it happened, honey?” he asked.

“No, that’s just it! It shouldn’t have! No one ever locks that closet!” She shivered, shrank against him. “I could hear someone on the other side walking up and down, and something thumping on the floor. Daddy, I don’t know why, but I was sure he was after me! I was on tidy-up duty, everyone saw me going back and forth to the closet. At first I thought it was a joke, then I heard the walking and I got this awful feeling!”

“Did he go away?” Carmine asked, conscious of a sinking in his belly. “How long were you in there?”

“About five minutes. I knew he was going to open the door and attack me as soon as the school quietened down, so I got out through a manhole in the roof. It led to the main fume duct, so I crawled for ages and came out in the fume cabinet at the other end of the lab. The lights were off, but it was still daylight outside, and I could see him-a little guy with a limp. I tried not to make any noise and kind of wriggled out of the cabinet onto the floor. Then I crawled for the door at my end and waited until he was walking the opposite way before I opened it a crack and wriggled through. Then I got to my feet and ran!”

Amazing, thought Carmine. She’s my girl, for sure. Gives a good report even if she is scared stiff. “Then you made it to your car and drove home,” he said.

She stared at him scornfully. “Daddy! If I’d done that, I would have been home ages ago! No, he must have opened the closet door and found nobody there. I ran and dived into the forsythia just in time-he was heading for my car. That’s how I know he was after me-not just anybody, me! So I hunkered down and waited until it was dark, then I sneaked up to Route 133 and hailed a cab. But I wouldn’t get in until I got a good look at the driver. He was black, so I knew I was safe. He’s up on the Circle now, Daddy. I didn’t have my pocketbook, and the fare’s humongous!”

Desdemona slipped out, money purse in hand, while Carmine led his doughty daughter into the sitting room and gave her a red wine spritzer.

“To use a phrase of the Mayor of New Britain’s, you done good, kid,” he said, bursting with pride.

That, plus gratitude to whatever power had looked after Sophia, carried him through giving her dinner-she was starving-and getting her to bed sedated with one of Desdemona’s “bombs.” Once the girl’s elation at escaping by her own efforts died down, she would sleep a sleep of nightmares unless her busy, clever brain was damped.

Then the reaction set in. He sat and shook as if in a rigor, twisting his hands together.

“The bastard! The fucking bastard!” he said to Desdemona, his teeth clenched. “Why couldn’t he come after me? Why a sixteen-year-old innocent, for crying out loud? The sweetest, nicest, kindest kid imaginable! I’ll rip his head from his neck!”

She cuddled in close and stroked his face. “You don’t mean that, Carmine. You mean a life sentence, marked never to be released. Are you sure it’s your murderer?”

“A little guy with a limp? It’s got to be. But why Sophia? He chose her deliberately-targeted her at school, had it worked out down to the last t crossed and the last i dotted. By rights her body should have been found tomorrow in the physics lab closet, maybe beaten to death if what he thumped on the floor was a baseball bat. The best club ever invented. What he didn’t count on was Sophia’s presence of mind in a crisis.”

“And the fact that she’s inherited your gut instinct, dear heart. Where any other victim would have assumed she was locked in by mistake, Sophia knew almost at once that she was in danger. So she concentrated on escape rather than waiting to be let out.”

He managed to find a smile. “Resourceful, isn’t she?”

“Yes, very. I don’t think you ever need worry about Sophia being one of life’s victims,” said Desdemona. “She’s going to pick life up and wring it dry.”

He got up feeling like an old man. “I don’t think I’ll be making a little brother or sister for Julian tonight, Desdemona.”

“There’s always tomorrow night,” she said cheerfully. “Now let’s break the rules and have a drink before bed. I can bomb Sophia and keep her out of school tomorrow, but I can’t do that to you. An X-O cognac is the answer for Daddy.”

“I’ll have to put a cop at the Dormer to keep an eye on our daughter,” he said, taking the snifter and warming it in his hand. “Concealed surveillance, but Seth Gaylord will have to know in case the duty sergeant puts a dodo on watch. Then tomorrow you’ll have to talk to Sophia and persuade her not to mention the incident to anyone, including Myron.”

Desdemona blinked. “Including Myron?”

“We can’t trust his tongue these days because I don’t know how discreet his lady love is. Tell Sophia it’s not a good idea to be marooned on her own at school or anywhere else right now. She’s to stick with a group and leave school along with everyone else. And that goddamn red Mercedes that Myron gave her goes into the garage! She can drive my mother’s Mercury clunker.”

Desdemona shivered. “It’s like the Ghost,” she said.

“Yes. That’s why I’m convinced our best weapon is Sophia’s ingenuity. If you talk to her frankly and don’t pull your punches, she won’t buck.”

The news about Sophia hit no one quite the way it did John Silvestri, whose daughter Maria had been savagely beaten some years ago. It had been a revenge aimed at Silvestri, who took it very hard. But Maria healed, married happily and moved on with her life; the perpetrator got a thirty-year sentence, twenty before parole. Knowing all this, Carmine told him in private of the attempt on Sophia; to see Silvestri weep was an ordeal and not for other eyes.

“Terrible, just terrible!” the Commissioner said, mopping his face. “We have to catch this bastard, Carmine. Anything you want, you got. Such a beautiful child!”

“I know it doesn’t really look that way,” Carmine said, sitting down, “but somehow I feel as if we’ve rattled his cage. It’s nine days since the twelve murders, and we’ve actually managed to solve some of them-Jimmy Cartwright, Dean Denbigh, Bianca Tolano-and catalogued the assassination of the three blacks as commissioned. There’s been a thirteenth death-the suicide of Bianca Tolano’s killer.”

“I think it’s impressive,” Silvestri said, composure restored. “Where to now?”

“Peter Norton, the banker who drank strychnine in his orange juice. An agonizing death.”

“So’s cyanide,” Silvestri pointed out.

“Yes, but cyanide is quick. As soon as enough of the blood’s hemoglobin is stripped of its oxygen, death ensues.