Too Many Murders (48 page)

“Your mama will come out of her conniption fit the moment she hears the villains have been caught. Though what will she hear, Carmine? How much of it will make the news?”

“Precious little. Smith will be written off as a maniac found fit to
stand trial. The information in the exercise books will never be used. He’ll go down on physical evidence—the razor for Dee-Dee and the killing kit for Skeps. His motive? Control of Cornucopia,” said Carmine without regret.

“How can that be stretched to encompass Dee-Dee?”

“The DA will allege that she tried to blackmail him as one of her customers.”

“He’ll hate that! He’s a shocking Puritan.”

“Then let him produce a better reason for killing her. One thing for sure, he won’t admit to treason. He’s convinced he won’t stand trial for treason.”

“Do you think he will?” Desdemona asked curiously.

“I have no idea,” Carmine said.

“He must be a very vain man.”

“Vain in every way,” Carmine said with feeling, “from his custom-made clothes to his custom-made house.”

“Not to mention his custom-made sports cars.” She unwound her legs. “Dinner.”

“What is it tonight?”

“Saltimbocca alla Romana.”

“Wow!” Carmine slipped an arm about her waist and walked with her to the kitchen.

“Myron’s bringing Sophia home,” she said, setting out the dishes and checking her ziti in tomato sauce. The frying pan was already sitting on the stove, the veal and its prosciutto waiting alongside a small bowl of minced fresh sage. “Fancy a sear of marsala liquor in the pan afterward?”

“Why not? Has Myron gotten over his depression?”

“The moment, I gather, you ripped him a new arsehole for making Sophia’s life hard.” She lit the gas under her pan, wiped it with a smear of olive oil. “Fifteen minutes and we can eat.”

“I can hardly wait.”

* * *

“Have you decided which one gets the lieutenancy?” asked the Commissioner.

“Sir!” cried Carmine, looking thunderstruck. “That’s not my decision to make!”

“If it’s not yours, whose is it, for crying out loud?”

“Yours and Danny’s!”

“Crap. It’s yours. Danny and I will go along.”

“Sir, I can’t! I honestly can’t! Just when I think one guy is it, the other one comes back stronger than ever! Look at their last two cases! Abe collars the mummy fruitcake in a brilliant piece of work. Right, he’s got Larry’s job. Then Corey collars Phil Smith’s papers in a brilliant piece of work. John, they’re both so good! It’s a crying shame that I have to lose one of them to another police department when he doesn’t get the job. Abe is intellectual, thoughtful, sensitive, calm and precise. Corey is clever, thinks on his feet, seizes the initiative, has enough logic to pass, and copes. Different qualities and different styles, but either of them would make a much better lieutenant than Larry Pisano, and you know it. So don’t go passing the buck to me, Commissioner! You’re the head of this department—
you
make the decision!”

Silvestri listened solemnly, temper unruffled. When Carmine ran down he smiled, nodded, and looked insufferably smug.

“Did I tell you that I had a call from J. Edgar Hoover this morning?” he asked. “He was mighty pleased at the solution to the Cornucopia mess, and very happy to have the FBI take the credit for what was Holloman Police Department work. Well, I played along all dipshit dopey local cop, then I struck a pretty neat deal with him. I wouldn’t contradict a thing, provided that he took Mickey McCosker and his team onto the FBI payroll. J. Edgar was delighted to oblige.” Silvestri huffed, immensely tickled by his own crafty thinking. “Therefore, Captain Delmonico, there are
two
lieutenant’s jobs going begging. One for Abe, and one for Corey. And I’ll have a proper number of detectives on my payroll at last.”

“I could kiss you!”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“You can have the honor of telling them, John.”

“Any idea who you want for your own team?”

“One certainty. Your niece Delia, if she’s willing to go to police academy and qualify.”

Silvestri gaped. “
Delia?
Honest?”

“Dead earnest. That woman is a brilliant detective, she’s wasted as a secretary,” Carmine said.

“She’s too old and too fat.”

“Depends on her, doesn’t it? If she makes it through, she makes it through. I’m betting she will—she’s got all of the Silvestri guile and brains. She doesn’t need to be Hercules, just capable of giving chase and tackling. If she can’t cross a foaming torrent hanging onto a rope by her arms, tough shit. She comes from the academy straight onto my team.”

“What about Larry’s men?”

“I’ll split them up. One to Abe, one to Corey. That way, we each have one experienced detective, plus one new. We’ll choose our second-stringers from the applicant pool.”

“It might earn Delia some enemies.”

“I doubt it. The most the pool will be hoping for are two men into detectives. Instead, there’ll be three.”

“No one will ever believe she’s a cop!” Silvestri cried.

“Ain’t that the truth?”

What fantastic news! Carmine left County Services in the Fairlane, a very happy man. Summer was almost here, though it rarely became hot until after Independence Day, six weeks away.

He picked up the winding, leafy domain of Route 133 and headed for Philip Smith’s property. It bore the scars of much frantic digging, he noted after he passed through the imposing gates and followed the curves of the drive to the house.

“Though,” Special Agent Ted Kelly had told him, “no one’s found
another secret compartment. You Holloman cops scooped us. Great stuff you found!”

One of the better outcomes, Carmine reflected as he pushed the bell, was the disappearance of the FBI back to their federal playground. No one would be more relieved than Wal Grierson.

Natalie Smith opened the door, then put her finger to her lips and led him back down the steps to an exposed position on the grass many yards away from the nearest FBI hole.

“They have put microphones inside,” she said.

“How did you know that what I have to say is better said without federal eavesdroppers?” he asked.

The impossibly blue eyes narrowed as the face smiled. “I know because you are the only one who really understands,” she said, her accent far less thick. “Philip found it impossible to believe that a local policeman could spoil his plans, but I knew differently.”

“The faithful Stravinsky,” he said.

Her eyes widened. “Stravinsky? Who is that? The composer?”

“You, Mrs. Smith. Stravinsky can’t be anyone else.”

“Are you arresting me?”

“No. I have no proof.”

“Then why do you say I am this Stravinsky?”

“Because your husband is a very rigid, puritanical man. He has strong feelings about women, wives, whores, the whole feminine half of the human race. Yet on the surface he seems to have abandoned you, his wife. That, Mrs. Smith, he would never do. Therefore he knows that his wife is capable of looking after herself. As would Stravinsky. Who else can the faithful Stravinsky be, except you? Who else shares Philip’s days, nights, thoughts, ideas, aspirations, plans? Who else could impersonate Joshua Butler going up the sophomore stairs at Paracelsus? And why couldn’t Stravinsky get rid of Erica’s body? Because he didn’t have the strength. Mounting a bear trap took every ounce of it. He could hold a pillow over an old woman’s face, or slip a needle into a drugged woman’s vein. His appearance can be so scary that he could walk the streets of Harlem looking
for professional gunmen in complete safety. You, Mrs. Smith, you! Don’t bother denying it. You’re a master of true disguise. You alter your appearance from inside your mind.”

She stared across the lawn, red lips compressed. “So what are you going to do with Stravinsky, my dear Captain?”

“Advise him to quit the country in a hurry. Not today, but certainly tomorrow. You must have your cache—money, a weapon, travel documents. Use them!”

“But if I choose to stay with Philip, what can you do?”

“Hound you, Mrs. Smith. Perpetually hound you. Do you think, because I can stand here talking to you as if you’re a human being, that I’ve forgotten you tried to murder my daughter? I haven’t. It burns my brain like a white-hot poker. I’d give a lot to kill you, but I prize my family too much.”

“You won’t stop my going?”

“I can’t.”

“I too am KGB,” she said, staring at North Rock.

“Stravinsky would have to be. I trust that fact will make you welcome in Moscow?”

“I will survive.”

“So will you go?”

Her shoulders hunched. “If I can say goodbye to Philip, I will go. He would want it.”

“I’m sure you’ll have plenty to tell them in Moscow when they debrief you.”

“You would indeed hound me,” she said slowly. “Yes, you would. I will go tomorrow.”

“Tell me how. I want to be sure you do.”

“I will send you a telegram from Montreal. It will say, ‘Stravinsky sends greetings from Montreal.’ Of course I could have someone else send it, but my patriotic duties in America are at an end. KGB will want me back.”

“Thank you, the telegram will be fine.”

* * *

A sorry conclusion, but the only one, Carmine thought as he drove away. Today Stravinsky will visit the hospital to see Smith, and say her farewells. He, good KGB agent that he is, will wish her well. Any federal tape recorders will inform those who listen that the grieving wife is simply telling her husband that her psychiatrist is putting her in a private hospital for a few days, and that it’s on the outskirts of Boston. She’ll catch the commuter plane from Holloman to Logan, but not to leave the airport. She’ll switch to the Montreal plane and be away, the faithful Stravinsky. A murdering bitch, but indeed a faithful one. That squat figure, that shapeless body, that rather terrifying face. But most of all, those spooky blue eyes. A contradiction, that’s Stravinsky.

There was still time to make his last call on this nasty case, a kind of valediction his so-called insatiable curiosity made imperative. Namely, a visit to some of the inhabitants of the Cornucopia Building.

He took an elevator to the thirty-ninth floor, and found Wallace Grierson occupying Desmond Skeps’s old office.

“Look what you’ve done!” Grierson said angrily.

“You’re in a suit and tie,” Carmine said mildly.

“And you don’t care, do you?”

“It’s not my fault. Blame Philip Smith.”

“Don’t worry, I do.” Grierson’s spurt of temper died. “I may have found a way out of my predicament, however.”

“May you? Who?”

“You’re quick, I’ll give you that. None other than Mr. Michael Sykes.”

“Ah, Michael Donald himself!” Carmine said, grinning. “He was promoted, but as Smith did the promoting, I wasn’t sure the rest of the Board would—er—come to the Party.”

“Ha ha, very funny! Actually Phil may have done us a big favor. Mickey turns out to be amazing.”

“Mickey?”

“That’s his diminutive of choice.”

“It fits.” Carmine held out his hand. “This is goodbye, sir. I won’t be haunting your corridors anymore.”

“Thank God for that!”

And why not? Carmine asked himself when the elevator came. He pressed 38, wondering which floor M. D. Sykes was occupying. Floor 38, it turned out. Richard Oakes was in the outer office and went so white when Carmine filled his gaze that he seemed likely to faint.

“Is your boss in?” Carmine asked.

“Mr. Sykes?” It came out as a squeak.

“The very one. May I see him?”

Oakes nodded, throat working. It was probably a signal to proceed, Carmine decided, and proceeded.

He found Michael Donald Sykes sitting at Erica Davenport’s lacquered desk, but it was hard to associate this person with the disgruntled denizen of a managerial limbo. Sykes actually seemed to have trimmed down in size yet grown in height, and wore a well-cut suit of Italian silk, a shirt with French cuffs and gold links, and a Chubb alumnus tie. No wonder he’d resented being passed over! He had the proper credentials. Carmine felt a rush of pleasure at the thought that Sykes had triumphed.

A cardboard box sat on the desk in front of him, spilling curly wood shavings, and about a dozen two-inch-high figures, exquisitely painted, stood freed from their packing: Napoleon Bonaparte and his marshals, all on horseback.

“Mr. Sykes, I’m very glad to see you here.”

“Why, thank you!” the not-so-little man exclaimed. “What do you think of my new acquisitions? I can afford to add Jena and Ulm to my battles! Aren’t these gorgeous? They’re made in Paris by the best militaria model maker in the world.” He picked up a splendid figure wearing a leopardskin hussar’s pelisse. “See? Murat, the great cavalry commander.”

“Wonderful,” said Carmine. He held out his hand. “This is definitely goodbye, Mr. Michael Donald Sykes.”

“Don’t tempt fate, Captain! Still, Cornucopia is safe now, and in excellent hands,” Sykes said.

He escorted Carmine to the elevators and saw him leave, then returned to his office and sat for a moment drinking in the sight of his new goodies. Inside his desk drawer was a powerful magnifying glass with a battery-operated light; Sykes switched it on and stared through it, his blue eye huge, its white shot with scarlet veins. Murat was close to hand; he lifted the figure and turned it over, looking for any impairment, any sign that Murat had been maimed. Then he sighed, smiled, and produced a dissecting needle. It went under the edge of the satchel Murat wore and pried a section of the paint away.

“Shostakovich will be pleased,” he said.