Too Many Murders (24 page)

“That’s true, Delia, I’m the first one to admit it.”

“Well—ah—would you mind if I followed a hunch of my own? That is the right word, isn’t it?”

“For a gut feeling, yes. Sit down, Delia, please! I can’t bear watching a woman stand while I’m on my butt.”

She sat, pink with pleasure. “You see, most of these deaths have to be connected, don’t they? You’ve always felt that, but nothing has come to light to support it. What I’m wondering is, where could they all have been present at one and the same time? The only answer, I believe, is at either a public meeting or a function of some sort. You know what I mean—you sit in a row waiting ages for the curtain to rise or whatever, and you start talking to those around you. Or you sit at a table with strangers and strive to chum up—if you don’t, you have an awful evening. Most people are naturally gregarious, so they achieve this end. You do see what I mean, don’t you?”

“I love the English habit of ending every sentence with a question,” said Carmine, smiling. “But yes, Delia, I do see.”

“Then if I may, I’d like to use my spare time to find out how many public meetings and functions have been held within the city of Holloman itself over the past six months.”

“Just six months?”

“Oh, I think so. More time than that, and I believe the murderer’s crisis would not have occurred at all. Something happened that didn’t present as a threat at the time, but by the third of April, it did. If I can find an affair which all of our dead people attended, then we have one side of the equation.”

“Delia, it’s a huge undertaking,” Carmine said. “Sooner or later it might have had to be done anyway, but I was saving it for Corey and Abe and total investigative inertia.”

“I am aware of that, and I do not pretend to claim it as my own idea,” she said with dignity.

“Oh, Delia, don’t go all huffy on me!” he said, looking hangdog. “I didn’t mean to steal your thunder, honest!”

She softened at once. “Well, I know that, Carmine dear. But may I do it?”

He shook his head, defeated. “You won’t listen when I warn you. What else can I say except, go to it?”

She hopped up, beaming. “Oh, thank you, thank you! I have a protocol worked out,” she chattered on her way to the door. “I intend to concentrate on the affairs themselves first. Then, if I find one or more that fits, I’ll go to phase two.”

“Goodbye, Delia!”

A glance up at the railroad clock told him it was almost noon. He picked up the phone, and after several false starts was finally connected to Special Agent Ted Kelly of the FBI.

“Eaten yet?” Carmine demanded.

“No.”

“See you in Malvolio’s in a quarter of an hour.”

Though Kelly had to drive and find parking in the County Services underground facility, he was sitting defending a booth when Carmine walked in.

“You’d swear they knew who I was,” he said as Carmine slid in opposite him, “yet there’s not one cop in here I’ve ever set eyes on.”

Carmine grinned. “They can smell you, Ted. No, seriously, what do you expect in a place the size of Holloman? The whole department knows there’s a giant from the FBI in town.” He consulted the menu as if he didn’t already know what he was having. “A Luigi Special salad with Thousand Island dressing. Then I don’t need to waste space on vegetables tonight.”

Merele the waitress had filled their coffee mugs and stood poised. Kelly ordered a hot roast beef sandwich, then leaned back with a sigh. “You were right about Malvolio’s,” he said. “It’s the best thing about this fucking awful town.”

Kelly spoke sincerely, seriously. Carmine’s anger stirred at such
rudeness. Sit on it, Carmine, don’t say a word! “How’s the search for the elusive Ulysses going?”

“Nowhere. Tell me about Joshua Butler.”

Carmine looked surprised. “I sent you my report, Ted, but if you want it verbally, okay. He raped and murdered Bianca Tolano, then chewed a cyanide capsule rather than be taken in for it. The crime lacked spontaneity—by which I mean that Butler followed a rape out of a textbook to the letter.”

The FBI man gave a loud Bronx cheer. “Don’t be stupid, Delmonico! I want to know the other details.” He leered. “A little bird told me that he had peanuts for balls.”

“Which little bird?” Carmine asked, looking at Kelly through a thick red haze.

“You don’t need to know,” Kelly said smugly.

“Don’t fuck with me, you FBI cunt!”

Jaw dropped, the FBI man stared at Carmine incredulously. Then his outrage conquered his amazement and he stiffened in his seat. “Them’s fightin’ words,” he said, not joking.

“Then let’s step outside.”

The diner had grown absolutely quiet. Luigi flicked his fingers at Merele and Minnie, who scuttled behind the counter, and thirty assorted cops looked enthralled.

“You
mean
it? You actually mean it?”

“I’m fed up with being pissed on by a Fed!” Temper roaring in his ears, Carmine snarled. “Let’s step outside.”

“You gotta take that back! We fight, there’ll be rumbles from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine!”

“You’re still being clever, you big-city, know-it-all cunt! You piss on my town, you piss on my department—Eat shit!”

“We step outside,” Kelly said, scrambling to his feet.

It was very brief. The two men squared off, fists clenched, and Kelly swung a haymaker that didn’t connect. The next thing, he was sitting on the ground wondering if he’d ever be able to breathe again.
All he could see when he looked up were cops’ faces in Malvolio’s windows, and Carmine’s hand reaching down.

“I never so much as saw that coming,” he said after he got his breath back—a painful business. “But I refuse to be called a cunt. Forget lunch!”

“Refuse to eat with me after I put your ass on the ground and the rumbles will turn into real tremors,” Carmine said, his mood rejoicing. “It’s high time guys like you realized that you can’t shit on the locals.”

They walked inside and sat down again.

“Thanks for doing me no visible damage,” Kelly said sourly.

“Oh, I couldn’t reach your face, so it had to be your bread basket,” Carmine said, still enjoying the sweet victory. “Now who told you about Joshua Butler’s testicular endowments?”

“Lancelot Sterling, the head of Butler’s section.”

“What a lovely boss! Remind me not to apply to Cornucopia for a job. Why wasn’t I supposed to know
that
?”

“No reason, honest! I was—I was just being smart. But I never thought I’d hear you sticking up for a piece of shit like Joshua Butler.”

It was Carmine’s turn to display incredulity. “Jesus, Mr. Kelly, you are thick! It’s true that I abominate the kind of conduct in law enforcement that elevates gratuitous gossip to the status of need-to-know information, but I didn’t deck you on behalf of Joshua Butler. I did it for me and, man, it felt good! A kind of one-man Holloman Tea Party.”

But that Kelly couldn’t believe. In fact, Carmine wondered if he knew even now what the fight had really been about.

“You’re just evading the issue,” he said. “You stuck up for Joshua Butler, Delmonico.”

“If that’s going to be your written reason when you make your report to J. Edgar or whoever, you’ll probably avoid a rap on the knuckles, but luckily for me, my word is good enough for my boss.” Carmine pushed away his empty bowl. “That was one fine salad.
Goodness gracious me, Mr. Kelly, you’ve hardly eaten a thing! Tummy sore, huh?”

“You’re a sanctimonious prick!” the FBI man snarled.

Carmine laughed. “Since I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, can I have the FBI’s file on Erica Davenport?”

Ted Kelly looked suspicious, but after some thought he shrugged. “I don’t see why not. She’s one of your suspects in the death of Desmond Skeps, and it suits us. The more hands on the pumps, the better.”

“If you knew about boats, you’d know that the best pump of all is a frightened man with a bucket,” Carmine said.

“I’ll send the file over,” said Kelly, feeling his midriff.

“Tell me,” Carmine ventured in a conversational tone, “have your Cornucopia informants—or should I say, gossips?—mentioned anything about an attempt on the life of my daughter?”

Kelly stared. “N-no,” he stammered.

“Even Erica Davenport?”

“No.” Kelly regained his composure and looked genuinely concerned. “Jesus, Carmine! When did this happen?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Carmine shortly. “I can look after Sophia, but more important, she can look after herself. Good! Word of it hasn’t leaked, and I don’t want it leaking from you, understood? I asked because I needed to know, and you are the only one attached to Cornucopia whose discretion is even remotely reliable. Don’t prove my trust misplaced, Mr. Kelly.”

He was too intrigued to be insulted. “Intimidation?”

“I would think so, but he wasn’t just futzing around. I was supposed to find my daughter dead, and if she were an ordinary kid, she would be. Lucky for me and unlucky for him, she’s far from ordinary. She escaped. I didn’t know anything about it until it was all over.”

“She must be a nervous wreck!”

“Sophia? No! She missed a day of school, but as far as my wife
and I can ascertain, she bears no mental scars. It helps to have gotten yourself out. She feels a victor, not a victim.”

“I’ll keep my ear to the ground.”

“Good, as long as your mouth stays shut.”

Erica Davenport’s file was modestly thick, chiefly a series of statements taken from people who had known her at some time during her forty years. Phil Smith had—implied?—said?—that she came from a wealthy Massachusetts family, but nothing in her early history bore that out. If the Davenports had a Pilgrim ancestor, knowledge of it had disappeared by the time Erica was born in 1927. Her father was a foreman in a shoe factory, and the family lived in a neighborhood of mixed white- and blue-collar workers. Her straight As had been achieved in public schools, wherein, Carmine was interested to learn, she was never cheerleader material. The Great Depression had wrought havoc on the family; the father had lost his job when the shoe factory folded and became as depressed as the economy. He didn’t drink or otherwise fritter away what money there was, but he was no help either. The mother worked cleaning houses, was paid a pittance, and put her head inside the gas oven when Erica was seven. Care of Erica and two young brothers devolved upon an older sister, who preferred servicing men to cleaning houses.

Sordid, thought Carmine, staring into space; however, it was a typical Thirties story, a decade of horror for people of all classes and all walks of life. Until then, men had found a job, a trade or a profession in their teens and expected to fill it until retirement. The Thirties destroyed permanency, for the Davenports among millions of others.

How the hell did she get to Smith? The answer to that lay in a statement from the widow of the principal of Erica’s last high school. It was barbed, bitter and biased, yes, but it also rang true. Lawrence Shawcross had seen beyond the painfully thin and immature body of Erica Davenport, seen beyond the sharp features of her face, seen
beyond the cramped inexperience of her mind, and taken this child of brilliant promise in hand to see if he could breathe life into her. Though Marjorie Shawcross fought her coming with tooth and nail, Erica Davenport moved into the Shawcross house in September of 1942, when she was fifteen years old. The battle that ensued was a secret one, for if it became known that Shawcross’s wife was an unwilling participant, he would have lost his job, his reputation and his pension. So Mrs. Shawcross, caught, pretended she was delighted to do what she could for this child of brilliant promise. Erica had new clothes, was taught how to care for herself, eat daintily, use a napkin and all the right cutlery, speak clearly with good diction, and all the other things Lawrence Shawcross deemed vital if his Erica were to make her deserved mark on the world.

Teacher and pupil became lovers in 1944, when Erica was seventeen, according to Marjorie Shawcross. Frowning, Carmine considered it, and decided that while it was likely Erica had found a lover, he was not Lawrence Shawcross. One of the things this would-be Professor Higgins would have taught her was never to foul her own nest. And she, seizing on everything he said as gospel, would have seen the good sense of that advice immediately.

The straight As became A-pluses, but with the war ending and millions of servicemen coming home, Erica didn’t stand a chance of getting a place in a top university; it would have to be a women’s college. Despite a partial scholarship to Smith, things looked grim for Erica: extremely gifted students were a dime a dozen in 1945. And then, out of the blue, Lawrence Shawcross died. The cause of death was put down as a cerebral catastrophe by his doctor, treating him for high blood pressure. Mrs. Shawcross’s allegations of murder by Erica Davenport were dismissed as the ravings of a grief-stricken woman, though his will gave her some grounds—just not enough. The bulk of his estate went to his widow, but the sum of $50,000 went to Erica Davenport for her education and concomitant expenses.

Erica went to Smith and chose economics as her major, with
high grades in mathematics, English literature, and…
Russian?
Did Smith even teach Russian?

Back he went to her childhood, cursing himself for skimming some of the statements. But no, he couldn’t find a single thing. Davenport had never been Davenski, so much seemed sure. On he waded through the various schools she had attended—no luck there either. What about the mysterious lover during her last year in high school? Papers went flying. Then he thought of Delia and called her in.

“You have a better eye for the written word than I do,” he said, handing her the years Erica had spent living with the Shawcrosses. “See if you can find any reference to a Russian or the Russian language.”

Off she trotted, while Carmine sat with mind buzzing. The FBI knew this particular quarry had learned Russian, which surely put her at the top of their Ulysses suspect list. So why hadn’t they told him? “Because,” he muttered to the empty room, “you are a provincial nonentity, a dumb dago cop in a pint-sized place full of eccentrics! Next time I’ll punch the cunt’s lights out, even if I have to grow wings!”