He didn’t speak again until the scallopini were all gone. Then he grabbed his wife’s hand and kissed it reverently.
“Superb!” he said. “Better than my mother by far. Better even than my grandmother Cerutti, and that’s saying something. How did you get the veal so tender?”
“Beat the blazes out of it,” said Desdemona, delighted. “I am not a five-foot-nothing old lady from Sicily, Carmine, I’m a six-foot-three
Boadicea. I can actually reach the back burner of a stove without stretching.”
“Sophia missed a feast, serve her right. Pizza, yet!”
“She’s entertaining in her eyrie, my love. Much as I adore her, it’s nice to have you all to myself sometimes.”
“I agree. It’s just that someone should have been here to bear witness to your skill.”
“Enough about my skill. I won’t be able to get my head through the door. You look pleased about more than mere food tonight, so pray enlighten me.”
“I called FBI Kelly a totally unprintable word, he insisted we step outside-we were in Malvolio’s-and we had a fight.”
“Oh, dear,” she said, sighing. “Is he still alive?”
“Walking wounded. It wasn’t much of a fight-he’s no boxer. A Primo Carnera, trips over his own feet, they’re so big. It was nice, I enjoyed it. Saw the usual suspects. Felt sorry for poor old Corey-the wife’s on his back big-time. Stirred up a hornet’s nest or two, and set Delia the human bloodhound on a new scent. I wish I could give her the lieutenancy!”
He frets more about that wretched promotion than he does about his murders, Desdemona thought, watching him. One of them has to lose. I could kill John Silvestri for keeping him on the panel! It’s a sort of death knell, and Carmine knows it. The loser will seek promotion in another police department, and the old team will be gone forever. Maybe the state legislature will raise the retirement age and the crisis will disappear. No, it won’t. If anything, retirement age will go down, not up. I love him so much, and I know he loves me equally. We have a life together, even when we’re apart. We look forward to each other.
“Poor Erica Davenport!” she said suddenly.
“Huh?”
“The brains, the beauty, the bank balance. Her life is so terribly empty.”
“She doesn’t think so,” Carmine said, grinning. “In fact, she preached me a sermon about it this afternoon. Power, that’s the wellspring of her existence.”
“Pooh! Power over what? People’s jobs? People’s lives? It’s an illusion, it has the same substance as chessmen on a chessboard-very bright men play a game with inanimate pieces. Only one thing grants genuine power-the loss of personal liberty. That awful certainty that if one’s papers are not properly stamped or one is in a place one shouldn’t be, one will be put against a wall and shot. That one can be shipped off to a concentration camp without a word of explanation, and that there is no process of appeal. That where one lives, works, even goes for a holiday, is decided by someone faceless without consultation. Power turns human beings into beasts-tell
Whatever else she might have had to say on the subject was not said. Desdemona found herself flat on her back on the dining room floor, looking up into a pair of fiery eyes.
“Carmine! You can’t! What if Sophia… ”
“Then you have ten seconds to hit the bedroom.”
How far can the long arm of coincidence go?” Carmine asked Abe and Corey early the next morning.
Neither man had any idea what he meant, but both hesitated to say so: was this some kind of test?
Corey swallowed. “How do you mean, boss?”
“April third. Jimmy Cartwright was coincidental. So, we’re being led to believe, was Dean Denbigh. The thing is, could our fat banker also have been coincidental to April third?”
“That’s stretching it,” Corey said, relieved that he’d been frank. With Carmine, you never knew whereabouts his mind might go. Last night Corey’d had a bitter fight with Maureen that almost became knock-down, drag-out, but it had cleared the air, and this morning he felt as if the nagging and the whining might actually stop. She’d smiled at him and cooked him breakfast, and said not a word about the promotion.
“What makes you wonder, Carmine?” Abe asked.
“That window of opportunity. It’s so-convenient. I’d spend more time on Mrs. Norton, except for the date. April third! How can it possibly be her?”
“Is there anything else significant about April third?” Corey asked. “It’s a Monday. It’s the first working day of the month, which is the last month of quite a few financial years-”
“It’s a frustration because April Fool’s Day fell on a Saturday,” said Abe, grinning. “No pranks this year.”
“A source for the strychnine never turned up,” said Carmine.
“No,” said his team in chorus.
“Let’s look at things a different way, even if it does make us seem macabre.”
Carmine didn’t like using a blackboard, but occasionally it became necessary to tabulate things, and then a board was handy.
“There are gentle deaths and agonizing deaths.” He drew a line up the center, forming two columns. “On the gentle side are Beatrice Egmont, Cathy Cartwright, and the three black victims. I call them gentle because none of them saw it coming and all of them died very quickly. Okay, five gentle.”
He entered the left-hand side of his board. “Agonizing has to include Dean Denbigh, but we exclude him here because he falls outside our scope. Which leaves us with five agonizing deaths: Peter Norton, Dee-Dee Hall, Bianca Tolano, Evan Pugh, and Desmond Skeps. However, I want to write them down in order of magnitude-easiest to worst. Who had the easiest death?”
“Peter Norton,” Corey said. Man, he was flying today!
“Why?”
“Because he probably lost consciousness the moment the convulsions began. I know we can’t say that for sure, but I’m betting Patrick would say generalized convulsions interrupt the brain’s conscious pathways.”
“I agree, Corey. So we write Peter Norton down as easiest. Who next in this grisly catalogue?”
“Dee-Dee Hall,” said Abe. “She didn’t fight. She just stood and exsanguinated. A slow bleed from both jugulars, but slow is relative-the blood would have poured out like any liquid under pressure from a pump, and the heart’s a perfect pump. Her suffering would have been as much mental as physical, except that she didn’t move a muscle to defend herself or run. That might suggest that Dee-Dee wasn’t sorry her life was ending.”
Carmine wrote her name on the blackboard. “So we equate her as more or less equal with Peter Norton.”
“Evan Pugh next,” said Abe.
“You really think so, Abe?”
“I do too,” Corey said. “He died of trauma to the spinal cord and internal organs. It was slow, but it was
“Evan Pugh,” said Carmine, writing. “Next to last?”
“Desmond Skeps,” said Abe. “His death was diabolical, but most of the torture wasn’t half as bad-in my view, anyway-as what Bianca Tolano went through.”
“Abe’s right, Carmine,” said Corey firmly. “Skeps was a famous man, he knew he’d made a lot of enemies, and he must have known there was always a chance one of them would hate him enough to kill him. His torture was superficial, even the cut-off nipples. Whereas Bianca Tolano was an innocent who suffered the ultimate degradation. Skeps could only have equaled her if he’d been raped, and he wasn’t. His murderer-um-”
“Preserved his integrity as a man,” Carmine finished. “Yes, that’s important. None of the male victims was sexually tampered with, and only one female: Bianca Tolano.”
He wrote her name at the bottom of the right-hand column, and stared at the board. “We have to presume that the killer knew them all, so what was it about each one that decided their particular death?”
“Beatrice Egmont was a real nice old lady,” Abe said.
“Cathy Cartwright was a nice woman having a helluva bad time with her family and Jimmy,” Abe said.
“And the three black victims were so totally harmless,” Carmine said. “What about the agonizing ones?”
“The banker was a bully who sometimes abused his power,” Abe said. “And Dee-Dee was a hooker-a crime in
