Too Many Murders

“That we do. The trip enables Ulysses to take his purloined secrets with him. Which tells me, Mr. Kelly, that Ulysses hasn’t passed any to Moscow since sometime before April third. His briefcase must be full.”

“Tell me about it! There’s nothing we can do, Carmine! The bastard will depart the country smelling like a rose, safely hemmed in by his fellow Board members.”

Carmine felt like pacing, but that would rivet all eyes on them as well as all ears. Instead, he threw his hands into the air wildly. “But how did he talk the others into making the trip? They’re businessmen! If Sykes and Oakes know they’re howling at the moon, so must they! How did he bring them around?”

“That’s the easy part,” Kelly said ruefully. “The Board’s just taken delivery of a brand-new Lear jet-long-range fuel tanks, reclining seats, spare pilot-the works. I bet all of them are eager to see what color the sky is over Zurich. Even better, the wives will have to stay home. Not enough room with a three-man flight crew and a couple of hostesses.”

“When is this jaunt happening?” Carmine asked.

“Tomorrow afternoon. The jet’s on the tarmac here. Then they’ll fly down to JFK to get international clearance,” Kelly said, and sighed. “Yep, tomorrow afternoon all Cornucopia’s secrets fly away, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Ulysses is going to get away with it, Carmine thought as he walked back up Cedar Street to County Services. The fact that I know who he is beyond a shadow of a doubt is irrelevant; I have absolutely no proof. Just a cop’s instinct and the end result of myriad little facts and details coming together in my mind, some of those facts and details gotten with great pain and the calling in of favors.

Kelly doesn’t know, and I’m not inclined to tell him. Fate pushed him into being here, a behemoth, and there’s a message in that: he belongs to a behemoth. He’s not the problem, it’s his faceless bosses, the ones who’ll push the buttons, the papers and the people in that ponderous sequence of steps protocol dictates before the big guns are ready for firing. By the time the sixteen-inchers roar, Ulysses will have performed his conjuring trick and look squeaky-clean. Ulysses is one guy; it doesn’t take an army to catch him. In fact, an army can’t. No one would notice him slink off in the clouds of dust. Let Ted Kelly go his way; I’ll go mine because I know who and what I have to contend with, have known since the significance of Bart Bartolomeo’s words sank into my mind and the lightbulb lit up.

What I have to do is get Ulysses for murder. It’s neater and more final, if final can have a degree. My espionage facts and details paint a picture, but I don’t have an atom of proof; when Ulysses paints the same picture it will be more convincing. Whereas the murders he’s committed must leave a trail of hard evidence that I can find if I look in the right places.

He had long passed County Services and decided now to keep going for a while. The wind was whipping up a little, but it felt good snatching at his face. He glanced up at the sky to see mackerel cloud up there and found the time to file a resolution to make sure the shutters on his house were closed before he went to bed. Then it was back to Ulysses.

Think, Carmine, think! Who did Ulysses kill with his own hands? Desmond Skeps. Dee-Dee Hall, which flummoxes me. Why a whore who gives great blow jobs? No one else. His assistant killed Evan Pugh, Cathy Cartwright and Beatrice Egmont. Hired guns shot the three blacks-black hired guns, to blend into the neighborhood. The assistant impersonated a peddler of potions named Reuben to trick Peter Norton’s wife, and probably egged on Joshua Butler. It may have taken Ulysses himself to pierce Pauline Denbigh’s armor, but he didn’t kill the Dean. I don’t have the chance of a snowflake in hell to prove any of them. It has to be Skeps or Dee-Dee, or both.

What were his weapons?

Desmond Skeps… A hypodermic needle and several syringes, inexpertly wielded. Once upon a time he was shown how to use them, but the years have gone by since, and Skeps must have had tricky veins. Curare. An ammoniac household liquid. Drano. A tourniquet. Chloral hydrate in a glass of single malt Scotch. A safety razor. A midget soldering iron. Steel wire.

Dee-Dee… A cutthroat razor. Only a scalpel has that kind of edge apart from a razor, and even Patsy’s autopsy blades couldn’t inflict a wound like that on a standing woman by an assailant looking her in the face. It’s the way forefinger and thumb hold the junction of the razor’s shell and its-tang? Very close up, and very personal. Ulysses must have been drenched in Dee-Dee’s blood like a man under a running tap. He didn’t cut the carotid arteries until the jugular veins slowed to a trickle, then he got a second bath. Hate! This was done in absolute hatred fiercer by far than Desmond Skeps. Who escorted Dee-Dee to the banquet. That says Skeps knew why Ulysses hated Dee-Dee, even if Skeps didn’t know Ulysses was Ulysses. And what was it with Dee-Dee? She stood and took her death without a protest, according to Patsy. So she knew why Ulysses hated her, and admitted her guilt.

I wonder if he kept those blood-saturated clothes? If his hatred burned that hot, maybe he needed a souvenir. The razor? That, he will definitely have. Enshrined somewhere. Not as a remembrance. As an instrument of execution.

An image rose behind Carmine’s eyes so vividly that the hairs on his neck stood up. Jesus! I know where! I know where!

His steps slowed; he stopped, turned around and walked back to County Services at a steady pace, jubilation dying. Knowing was one thing; marshaling his forces to prove it was another. Doubting Doug would have reverted to normal; easier to get blood out of a stone than a warrant to search premises. Not that Ulysses would part with his mementos. In that respect there was no hurry. Strictly speaking, the urgency was not his affair, as it concerned the spy rather than the killer. Except that Carmine was an American patriot. It was his duty to foil the spy too.

By the time he gained his office his demeanor was as always. Delia, bursting on his gaze in green and orange paisley, gave him the kind of fright that only days ago would have provoked a smile. Today it was merely jarring.

“Abe’s down with Lancelot Sterling,” she said, “and Corey is skulking around the aerodrome. He said something about a new Lear jet, but I confess I was only half listening. I was on the phone to Desdemona.”

“I might have known,” he said, torn between an urge to tell Delia what was filling his mind and reluctance to burden her with his own frustrations.

“They’re safe here,” she said, smiling.

That decided him. “Sit down, Delia. I need to talk.”

By the end of it she looked horrified. Then she did a very un-Delia thing: she stroked his arm. “My dear Carmine, I fully comprehend your dilemma. But if Ulysses hated Dee-Dee with such passion, it must relate to some sort of ruination, and she must have been the instrument of it. I think it might pay me to make exhaustive enquiries into Dee-Dee’s background. That’s the trouble with prostitutes. No one bothers to look at them with a magnifying glass. Am I still empowered to act as a detective?”

“I haven’t rescinded the order, as you well know.”

“Then I’m going to see Dee-Dee’s pimp, her friends, enemies and acquaintances.” She paused, brows lifted. “It would be a lot easier if I had a badge,” she said.

“That far I won’t go, Delia. Don’t push your luck.”

The storm blew into Holloman on gale-force winds halfway through the night. Curled in bed with his front shielding Desdemona’s back, Carmine woke to the whipping roar of hard-driven rain on the windows, lifted his head to listen, then lay back with a sigh. No hope that this would last long enough to delay the Cornucopia expedition to Zurich. By afternoon the gale would be blown out.

“Mmf?” Desdemona asked.

Carmine cupped a breast. “Just the storm. Go back to sleep.”

“No damage, but the garden’s a mess,” Desdemona said the next morning, removing her rubber boots in the laundry. “I had high hopes for a weeping cherry, but a flying branch clobbered it. Too exposed to the elements, our dream home.”

“You can’t have it all, lovely lady.” Carmine shrugged his shoulders into his jacket and poked through the waterproofed coats hanging on pegs. “It’s going to rain all day, so don’t take Julian out. If you need groceries, call someone.”

A rather cold rain beating in his face, Carmine plodded up the path to their big garage, which had to be on East Circle itself and thus had no sheltered communication with the house, a good fifty feet lower. Inside the garage he