undying love to our daughter.”
“You should do that yourself.”
“I can’t. I need to get away from here as fast as I can.”
And he was gone. Carmine stood listening to the sound of his footsteps retreating down the hall, and prayed that his most beloved friend would chance upon a greener feminine field in his own purlieu.
“But I think you can rest easy about your mother,” he said to Sophia that evening. “Divorce is not in the cards.”
“Then I forgive him for going,” Sophia said magnanimously. “That icy bitch would kill him.”
When Carmine came in on that Friday, April twenty-first, at eight in the morning, Delia was waiting for him. It was clearly some kind of red-letter day for her; she had dressed in her smartest outfit, a combination of purple and orange that hurt the eyes unless, like Carmine’s, they were inured to her palette.
“If you don’t mind,” she said, sitting on a chair across from his at the desk, “I would rather speak to you privately in the first instance. Is that permissible?”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
A rolled-up sheet of paper was laid reverently on the desk, together with several sheets of ordinary size. Carmine looked at them and then back at her, brows raised.
“I have found a function at which all eleven of the dead people were present,” she said, carefully excluding triumph from her voice. “It was held on Saturday, December third of last year, in the Holloman City Hall, and was given by the Maxwell Foundation in aid of research funding for long-term children’s disorders.” She stopped, beaming.
“Wow!” Carmine breathed, a better vocabulary knocked out of him. “And they were
“Yes. It was a dinner-dance for five hundred people, who were seated at round tables for ten people or five couples. Most of the tables were ‘bought’ by a company or institution of some kind-undoubtedly you and Desdemona would have been there at Uncle
John’s table if you hadn’t been new parents. It cost a hundred dollars a plate, which brought in a thousand per table. Most of the sponsoring companies and institutions donated a matched thousand per table. Cornucopia and its subsidiaries sponsored twenty of the fifty tables. Chubb sponsored ten tables, the Mayor had one, Police and Fire ended up sharing one, and so forth.” She paused again, eyes bright.
“Amazing,” said Carmine slowly, feeling some comment was called for, but having no idea what, beyond marveling.
“I am floored, Carmine, at how much planning goes into a function of this sort,” she said in tones of awe. “It’s worked out like a battle, though I strongly suspect that if most battles were worked out so scrupulously, the results would be different. Where a table sponsored by an organization should go, its relationship to other tables belonging to that organization, placement of tables to left, right, up, down, and sideways-I doubt Lord Kitchener ever devoted the same time to planning his bloodbaths! When the table master plan was finished, each table was given a number. Then came the business of seating the guests! Due attention had to be paid to those who came as a group of five couples, or wanted to sit at X or Y table, or asked to be seated with anything from one to three other couples. There were also guests who came alone or with a companion, who did not have any preferences, such as Beatrice Egmont. A small group of Maxwell volunteers dealt with all these logistics, and they did it truly magnificently. They even abolished that dreadful crush in the foyer when hundreds of people simultaneously try to see their names listed on a board. Six volunteers with lists sat at a reception desk to give each enquirer his or her table number.” She stopped.
“I get your drift, Delia. Don’t tease, just go on!”
“One of the many Cornucopia tables was sponsored by the Fourth National Bank under the aegis of Mr. Peter Norton. Due to the vagaries of fate, it was far thinner of company than Mr. Norton could have expected. His wife, for instance, had the gastric flu that was going around at the time-I had it myself-and was too ill to attend. Dean Denbigh’s wife also had this flu and didn’t come. Beatrice Egmont came on a single ticket, no companion. Mrs. Cathy Cartwright’s husband was in Beechmont with the temperamental chef. Bianca Tolano came on one of the tickets given to her by her boss, Mr. Dorley, when he and his wife couldn’t go. It seems Bianca made no effort to find an escort; she was on her own. But she must have been a sensible girl, because she handed in her second ticket at the reception desk. How do I know? It had a number, and was sold at the door to a young man who had none-Evan Pugh. So in one sense he and Bianca substituted for the Dorleys, who one presumes had a lucky escape.” She shivered, switched into high drama. “But why,” she asked rhetorically, “didn’t Mr. Norton fill his table with his own friends? None of them even attended!”
Experience with Delia had taught Carmine that she would recount her doings in her own inimitable style, but that today’s effort was a tour de force she had planned as meticulously as the Maxwell Foundation had its banquet. He just had to wait.
“Put succinctly, Mr. Norton was too terrified to invite his own friends,” Delia continued, satisfied Carmine was on the edge of his chair. “Pride of place at the Fourth National table went to Mr. Desmond Skeps, who elected to sit at Mr. Norton’s out of all the many tables he could choose from. With him as his lady companion he brought Dee- Dee Hall.”
“She’s down in black and white on the master guest roster as accompanying Mr. Desmond Skeps. See?” Delia thrust a sheet of paper at Carmine.
He grabbed it and read incredulously. “What the hell was he up to? Something nasty, I bet! Go on, go on!”
“That gave me four women-Cathy Cartwright, Bianca Tolano, Beatrice Egmont and Dee-Dee Hall-and four men-Desmond Skeps, Peter Norton, Evan Pugh and Dean John Denbigh. Eight people, all now dead. Which still left the Fourth National table rather lightly populated. Two of the ten chairs were unoccupied.”
Carmine shook his head. “No wonder I haven’t seen hide or hair of you for days! You didn’t get all of this off a list.”
“Well, no,” she confessed. “I had to speak to a lot of people on the phone and visit the Maxwell Foundation several times. At one point I actually thought my precious lists had been thrown out or burned, but I should have known better. Even charities are riddled with bureaucrats, and bureaucrats won’t discard anything that might imperil their parasitic existence.”
“Why do you hate paper pushers so much, Delia? You’re one yourself,” Carmine said slyly.
She rose to the bait instantly. “I am not a parasite! My work bears fruit, I am a cog in the necessary machinery of the constabulary! And you give me an instance of one police unit that has even enough paper pushers!” she said indignantly.
“Calm down, calm down! I’m pulling your leg. And you have just processed more paper with positive results than an entire government department,” he said. “Desmond Skeps! What was he doing arm in arm with a street whore? Not that she’d have looked like one. Dee-Dee could-could-”
“Tart herself up?” Delia suggested.
“Put on a nice dress and skate on the edge of respectability. She’d still have looked more street than home in the suburbs, but on Skeps’s arm she’d have been forgiven a lot. People can’t bear thinking that a man of Skeps’s wealth and standing might be taking the mickey out of them.” Carmine frowned. “Okay, that’s eight out of the eleven. What about the black victims?”
“They were present too,” said Delia. “The event was catered by Barnstaple Catering, a new name for affairs that size. It’s a firm that has previously concentrated on smaller affairs, but there is a contract with Chubb coming up to cater its banquets, and the Maxwell function was a dummy run for Barnstaple. In view of this, at least according to their general manager, Barnstaple agreed to take a smaller profit than it will be asking in the future. Maxwell had some conditions of its own, apparently having had bad experiences in the past.
The thousand-dollar-table dinner dance was a new sort of venture, and they wanted the first one to be memorable, with the intention of having one each year. So Barnstaple had to provide a three-person wait team for each table. Cedric Ballantine, Morris Brown and Ludovica Bereson waited on the Fourth National table. The system worked a treat,” Delia went on, the excitement dying out of her voice now that the last goody was revealed. “People got their meals piping hot and very quickly, the liquor flowed uninterruptedly, and no one sat staring at a dirty plate for longer than two or three minutes.”
“Was there any method that assigned the three black victims to that table?” Carmine asked.
