“Terrible.”
“What’s going on, Daddy?”
“You know the rules, kid. No police business at home.”
On his way to bed an hour later Carmine visited the nursery, where his nameless offspring lay slumbering blissfully in his crib. Sophia had called him a bruiser, and it was an accurate description; bigboned and overly long, he had his father’s muscular breadth too, though no one could have called him fat. Just a bruiser. His thick, curly hair was black, and his skin a rich tan like Carmine’s. In fact, he resembled his father in all save his length. Feet and hands suggested way over six feet when mature.
It was then, with the Dean of Paracelsus’s words about wives ringing in his ears, that Carmine Delmonico saw the light. This boy could bear any first name with impunity; no one was ever going to intimidate him or mock him. Maybe he needed the brake of a slightly sissy name to rein in his power, his size.
So when Carmine slid into bed alongside Desdemona, he turned to her and took her fully into his arms, body to body, legs around legs. He kissed her neck; she shivered, turned into him even closer, one hand in his cropped hair.
“Julian,” he said. “Julian John Delmonico.”
She emitted a squeak of joy and began kissing his eyelids. “Carmine, Carmine, thank you! You’ll never regret it! Neither will our son. He can carry any name.”
“I’ve just realized that,” he said.
Commissioner John Silvestri’s office was large, though seldom called upon to accommodate as many men as gathered there at nine the next morning, April fourth.
Holloman, a city of 150,000 people, wasn’t big enough to have a homicide division, but it did have three squads of detectives to investigate the full gamut of serious crime. Captain Carmine Delmonico headed the entire division, with two lieutenants who were nominally under him but who usually followed their own lines of enquiry. Lieutenant Mickey McCosker and his team weren’t present; he was embroiled in a drug investigation the FBI was running, and couldn’t be spared for other work, a point that rankled with Silvestri and the Staties, bypassed. So Carmine and his two sergeants, Abe Goldberg and Corey Marshall, were joined by Lieutenant Larry Pisano and
Silvestri himself, a desk cop who had never fired his sidearm in the course of duty, much less a shotgun or a rifle, was never dismissed as a pantywaist; during World War II he had earned many decorations, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. But reinstalled in the Holloman Police Department, he had recognized his talents as administrative, and was one of the city’s finest-ever police commissioners. He was a dark, smoothly handsome man who could still pull the women, reminded people of a big cat, and was intensely loyal to his department, for which he would go to bat with anyone from the Feds to Hartford. So good a politician that he was generally held to be politically inept, Silvestri had a brilliant media persona and only two weaknesses. The first was his protege Carmine Delmonico. The second was his addiction to sucking and chewing on unlit cigars, whose slimy butts littered his wake like corks after a pleasure boat. Owning a streak of the diabolical, he had long ago realized that Danny Marciano loathed these cigars, and he always contrived to put the current one as close to Marciano as he could.
Under ordinary circumstances his striking face was rather expressionless during a conference, but this morning it was distinctly grim. As soon as Patrick O’Donnell came through the door and took the last vacant chair, Silvestri got straight down to business.
“Carmine, fill me in,” he commanded, champing on a cigar.
“Yes, sir.” Without referring to the sheaf of papers and folders on his lap, Carmine commenced. “The first call came at six a.m. yesterday, from the Chubb Rowing Club. Their premier eight had gone out for practice as soon as it was light enough-apparently conditions on the stretch of the Pequot River they use were perfect, so the coach dragged them all out of bed and put them on the river. They’d worked hard and were about to come in when two of the port oars struck an object just under the surface-the body of a small child. Patsy?”
Patrick took over almost in the same breath. “A toddler, about eighteen months old, dressed in top quality Dr. Denton’s and a super-thick diaper of the kind certain institutions sell to families with handicapped kids. The body showed the stigmata of Down’s syndrome. Cause of death-I prioritized the child-wasn’t drowning, but asphyxiation due to smothering with a pillow. There were contusions indicating that the child had resisted. Death occurred about four a.m.”
Carmine resumed. “The identity of the victim was a mystery. No one had lodged a Missing Persons for a Down’s syndrome child. Corey?”
“At eight-oh-two we got a call from a Mr. Gerald Cartwright, whose house fronts onto the Pequot River near the Chubb Rowing Club,” said Corey, striving mightily to keep his voice dispassionate and level. “He had just returned from an overnight trip out of state to find his wife dead in their bed and their youngest son, a Down’s syndrome, missing from the house.” He stopped.
Back to Carmine. “By this time several other things had happened. A prostitute we all know well-Dee-Dee Hall-was lying in an alley behind City Hall with her throat cut from ear to ear. That call came in four minutes before seven a.m., and was followed at seven-twelve by a call from the residence of Mr. Peter Norton, who died after drinking a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. So I left Abe to deal with Dee-Dee’s murder, Corey on the Cartwright affair, and went myself to the Norton house. I found the victim’s wife and two children-a girl aged eight and a boy aged five-basket cases, especially the wife, who behaved like she was demented. What details I got were from the little girl, who swore it was the orange juice. The glass was on the breakfast table, about half drunk. The wife squeezed it every morning, then went upstairs to wake and dress the kids, during which time-about ten minutes-the glass sat unobserved and unattended on the table. So there was a window of opportunity for an outsider to add something to the juice.”
“I have the remainder of the juice and the glass,” Patsy said, one hand propping his chin; he looked tired. “Though I don’t have any analytical results back yet, my guess is that Mr. Norton was poisoned by a large dose of strychnine.” He grimaced. “Not a pleasant way to go.”
“While I was at the Nortons’,” Carmine went on, “I was called to a rape and murder out on Sycamore. I sent Corey. Mrs. Norton needed a woman cop, and we’re short on those. Report, Corey?”
“The body was discovered by the girl’s landlord,” said Corey, managing his voice better. “Her name is Bianca Tolano. She was on the floor, naked, hands bound behind her back. She’d been tortured, and there was a pair of pantyhose around her neck. But I don’t think she died of strangulation, Carmine. I think she died from a broken bottle up the vagina.”
“Quite right, Cor,” said Patsy. “Autopsy is still pending, but I’ve made a preliminary examination. The pantyhose was an on-again, off-again form of torture.”
“Jesus!” cried Silvestri. “Are we under siege?”
“It sure felt like it yesterday, sir,” said Carmine. “I was still trying to get information out of Mrs. Norton when the call came about the shooting of a black cleaning woman and two black high school students-not gang related, according to the cop who phoned them in. They happened on his beat. I passed them to Larry here. Larry?”
A medium-brown man who had had an undistinguished but quite satisfactory career, Larry Pisano wiggled his brows ruefully. “Well, Carmine, it may have sounded ordinary enough, but believe me, it’s not. Ludovica Bereson is a cleaning woman-she does five houses between Mondays and Fridays. She’s well liked by her employers, doesn’t shirk, never gives cause for complaint. Likes a good joke and something hot for her lunch. Her employers didn’t mind the lunch because she was a good cook and always left enough for them to eat for dinner. She was shot in the head with a small-bore gun, and died instantly. No one saw it, but-and this is more interesting-no one heard it either. Cedric Ballantine was sixteen years old, a good student in line for a football scholarship to a top college. He works hard, has never been in trouble. He was shot in the back of the head by a medium-bore gun. Morris Brown was eighteen years old, an A student, no record of trouble. He was shot in the chest by a big old mother of a gun-a.45 or something like. No one saw or heard the boys gunned down either. All three victims had powder residue around the wounds, so they were shot at close range. Same beat cop, yeah, but Cedric and Morris occurred at opposite ends of
