Too Many Murders

The nondescript grey eyes opened wide. “Why should I?”

Carmine walked him back down the block to the Nutmeg Insurance building, shook him fervently by the hand, and then went in search of Abe and Corey.

His allusions to the espionage element in the case had been inadvertent or need-to-know, limited only because his team didn’t have security clearances.

“Well, fuck that,” he said in his new, much quieter office. “If either of you breathes a word, even to a wife, I’ll shell out your balls, so make sure you don’t. It’s my career on the line as well as yours. I trust you, guys, and that’s more than I can say for Ted Kelly.”

At the end of Carmine’s narrative, Corey and Abe exchanged glances of mingled relief and triumph; at long last they knew the ins and outs of this god-awful mess of a case.

“As soon as she was sober,” Carmine said, “Erica confessed what she’d done to her controller, who is Ulysses. That surprises you? You think that was a stupid thing to do? Catholics confess to a priest, right? Erica was as indoctrinated as anyone is to any religion. She didn’t fart without permission from Ulysses. As I see it, she told Ulysses exactly what had happened, and gave it as her opinion that no one had noticed, least of all Skeps. Ulysses will have known she was speaking the truth. She was utterly dependent on him, and he terrified her.”

“So okay, Erica broke her cover, and Ulysses knew it on, say, December fourth, the day after,” Corey said, struggling with behavior he found hard to understand. “But, Carmine, four months go by! Then everybody who was connected to table seventeen was murdered. Why did Ulysses wait so long?”

“Think about it, Corey-think!” Carmine said patiently. “The murder of eleven people is a massive undertaking. Even Ulysses needed time to plan it.”

“And time for the world to forget there ever had been a charity banquet,” Abe said, understanding. “Ulysses is a smart cookie-smart enough to know that murder produces different consequences from espionage. I don’t say spies don’t murder, but they do it covertly. The murder of civilians is overt. If what he planned was multiple murder, he must have known there would be cops crawling everywhere, and that some of them might be smart cookies too. Homicide cops are in-your-face guys.”

“I get it!” Corey said. “Ulysses didn’t want any murders, but if he had to, he would have preferred to kill his victims one at a time, spaced out. In a big city, no sweat. In Holloman? Impossible. Quite a few of his victims were pretty important, their deaths would have made the Post. He couldn’t be sure that a potential victim wouldn’t wake up to what was going down. They all knew where they were sitting on a certain night. He just couldn’t risk so many deaths strung out. If he had to kill them, he had to kill them all at once.”

“You’re both right,” Carmine said, smiling. “If they had to die, they had to die all at once, even the waiters. Not on the tail of the function, but maybe two months later, or three. So he waited for any consequences of Erica’s indiscretion, and he waited in vain. Nothing happened, nothing at all. I see Ulysses sitting back with a sigh of relief as the fourth month ended. He was safe, and he wouldn’t need to invite homicide cops into his little corner of the world. Then he got Evan Pugh’s letter on March twenty-ninth. In a way, Evan’s identity was manna from heaven. The one who’d woken up was another evil bastard.”

“Pugh didn’t send his letter to Erica?” Corey asked.

“No. Her drunken ramblings didn’t really matter, even the garbage about holding Joe Stalin’s hand and playing kissies with the Central Committee. If anyone had accused her, she would have laughed in their face and called it a fairy tale. It must have been something she hissed in Desmond Skeps’s ear later on. When she was talking about a traitor inside the Cornucopia gates. I think she spoke his name,” Carmine said.

“But if she did, why did Evan Pugh wait four months to act? I can see the logic of letting time go by,” Abe said, “but I can’t get my head around Evan Pugh’s four-month wait.”

On the far wall opposite Carmine’s desk hung Mickey McCosker’s only attempt at decoration: a cheap cardboard reproduction of a wilted arum lily in a vase. Suddenly it was too much to bear. Carmine got up, walked across, yanked at the picture, and pulled it down. He perched it on top of an empty wastebasket and brushed his hands together in satisfaction.

“I hate it,” he said to his stunned team. “Mickey said it reminded him of his wife on their wedding night, though he never said which one.”

He sat down again. “I believe the answer lies in Evan Pugh’s character,” he said. “Because it was sadistic, he got a kick out of the nasty vibes flying around after Erica arrived. But at the end of the evening he went back to Paracelsus and embarked on some other creepy mischief. He forgot about the events at table seventeen until he was reminded by one of those quirks of fate no one can predict. An issue of News magazine at the end of March featured a special article on the Communist leaders since the great purges of the late Thirties. It went on sale about March twenty-sixth, and Myron was carrying a copy when he came to Holloman to introduce us to his lady love, Erica Davenport. He was raving about the article, and begging me to read it. I didn’t have the time because we’d just had twelve murders.”

“My God!” Corey exclaimed. “Evan Pugh read it!”

“Yes, and whatever the journalist said about some of the Central Committee members tallied exactly with what Erica had said. After that, he must have remembered the things she hissed-a significant word from Bart Bartolomeo. Plenty of esses in her speech, I’m guessing. And think of our luck! We found Bart five months after the Maxwell banquet, and he’s the perfect witness! His profession disciplined him to notice things and remember them.”

“Erica told Skeps who Ulysses was,” Abe said. “Wow!”

“Yes, and Evan Pugh remembered.”

“Pugh recognized his name?” Corey asked.

“I doubt it,” Carmine said. “All he needed was the name. He was a pre-med who got straight As-he knew how to research. After News came out, he must have decided all his Christmases had come at once. A chance to tease and torment someone with far more to lose than mere money. He didn’t need money himself. That’s one of the strangest things about this case-no one needs the money.”

“He sent off his letter,” Abe said.

“And Ulysses was forced to kill everyone connected to table seventeen,” Corey added.

“Answer me this, Carmine,” Abe said, frowning. “Why didn’t Ulysses just hire an out-of-state gunman and mow each of them down? Why all the histrionics? Poison, injection, shootings, rape, knife, pillows. Is he laughing at us?”

“No, I think it was an attempt to make the killings seem unrelated,” Carmine said. “Yes, he’s got an ego the size of Tokyo, but it doesn’t rule him. This guy probably has colonel’s or even general’s rank within the KGB-he’s as cold as ice, he doesn’t posture like a politician. All he’s been trying to do since December third is patch up Erica Davenport’s mistakes. We have to assume that he’s never made a mistake himself, and it may be that Erica wasn’t his choice-more that she was the only sleeper Moscow had to front for Ulysses. Women have a weakness, guys. They fall in love differently from men, which makes them hard for men to control.”

“So Ulysses tried to vary his murders, hoping we’d be as confused as we were snowed under,” Abe said thoughtfully.

“Exactly.”

A pause ensued; Corey terminated it. “There’s another thing puzzles me, Carmine,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Why wasn’t Bart murdered?”

Carmine looked uncertain. “The best I can come up with is that it’s possible Erica never even knew he was there. He was a silent man on the far side of a very fat guy, and he would have been invisible to her if she didn’t give the table her attention when she sat down. We know she didn’t, because she was drunk, and focused on Desmond Skeps. If she never realized Bart was there, Ulysses wouldn’t have been told. The other possibility is that she kind of noticed him, but he’s such an anonymous type that she forgot him a moment later. One thing I do know, guys-if Bart’s still alive, Ulysses either doesn’t know he exists, or he hasn’t been able to find out who he is.”

“We have to put a watch on Bart,” Corey said.

“And give his importance away? That’s why I had lunch with him openly, even walked him back to the Nutmeg Insurance building. We didn’t look like a detective and a witness, we looked like two old pals catching up. I used to live in the Nutmeg Insurance, and Ulysses will know that. So I must have friends there, right?”