Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

“Thanks, Patsy,” he said, and left.

When Carmine phoned Beatrice Egmont’s home, Abe answered. He sounded down, didn’t have the usual note of optimism in his voice.

“Are you very busy with your case, Abe?”

“Anything but, Carmine. I’ve done the neighbors and her two sons, who live in Georgia but took the first plane north. So far it’s bleak,” said Abe. “Nothing’s gone from the house, not even a cheap ornament, and no one, including me, can find a motive for the poor old thing’s murder. She wouldn’t harm a fly.”

“There seems to have been a lot of that among the deaths-harmless people. But one or two stick out, and I could use some help, Abe. I can’t move on Desmond Skeps yet, but I need someone with your people skills to start ferreting out a list of possible suspects. A man that powerful has to have plenty of enemies, and he wasn’t famous for his tact and diplomacy either. If you’re satisfied that you can’t proceed with Beatrice Egmont unless you catch a break, would you mind looking into Skeps’s friends and acquaintances for me?”

The voice when it came was eager, enthusiastic. “I’d be glad to, Carmine. Is the file at Cedar Street?”

“I’m looking at it as I speak. But before you start, go talk to Patsy, who can fill you in on the way Skeps died. Diabolical!”

There. A little mending of fences had been done, but he’d have to hope that Dean Denbigh and Mr. Peter Norton didn’t mire him down. It was vital that he insert himself personally into Skeps’s murder as soon as possible, and Carmine had his own way of working, which did not include flitting between several cases. The two that stuck out were Evan Pugh and Desmond Skeps-theirs were cruel, detached killers.

Now to get Dean Denbigh out of the way.

Two Chubb colleges, he thought as he drove up the north side of Holloman Green. The huge park, bisected by Maple Street, was still populated by skeletal trees, but even bare, they were magnificent, for they were venerable copper beeches planted in clusters that ensured plenty of sun-drenched grass. Garden beds already planted out promised a wonderful showing in May, and daffodil shoots were poking above the grass blades, not long off their profligate blooming. Dogwood trees indicated that there would be a breathtaking, curiously oriental wealth of flowers at the end of the first week in May, when the Green would be thronged with visitors photographing madly. Holloman Green was a “must” for spring tourists.

The other side of North Green Street belonged exclusively to Chubb University, whose campus was Princeton’s only rival. In between gardens and grassy knolls stood the colleges, with the gothic cathedral bulk of the Skeffington Library dominating the far end. Most of the oldest colleges were at the top end of the Green, an orderly array of eighteenth-century buildings smothered in Virginia creeper. Here, along this side, were the frat houses and secret societies as well as the later colleges, some Victorian gothic, some the imitation Georgian so popular as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and some the modern wonders belonging to the twentieth century. He passed the sprawling X of Paracelsus College with a grimace, quite forgetting that two months ago he and Desdemona had stood admiring its austere marble façade and the Henry Moore bronzes flanking its entrance.

Dante College was old, its anonymous architect unconcerned with the prospect of immortality; he had built gables and a profusion of dormered windows, absolutely dying to have his work buried under Virginia creeper. However, it had been modernized with ruthless skill and now boasted a plethora of bathrooms, an adequate kitchen and in-college laundry facilities way above the usual. Its student rooms were not as large as Paracelsus’s, but they didn’t need to be; Dante’s rooms were all singles. As it was coeducational (the first of Chubb’s colleges to take the plunge into mixed bathing), Dean John Kirkbride Denbigh had decided to divide his accommodation by floor, and put the women undergrads in the attic.

“We have a hundred boys and only twenty-five girls,” said Dr. Marcus Ceruski, deputed to receive Captain Delmonico. “Next year we’ll have fifty girls and only seventy-five boys, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. There has been a huge reaction against women students among the alumni, as you can imagine, and what frightens us is a significant diminution in alumnus funding. Many just cannot stomach a coeducational Chubb after two hundred and fifty years of men only.”

Carmine listened as if he had never heard any of this before, wondering how Holloman’s Gown segment could be so divorced from Town that they automatically assumed no townies would be interested in this new social convulsion-or be aware of it.

“Paracelsus is due to take women next year,” Dr. Ceruski went on, “but they’ll find it easier, as they’re able to put half of the students upstairs and half downstairs.”

An arrangement that wouldn’t please the feminists, Carmine reflected; they wanted real integration, men and women on the same floor. Quite why, he hadn’t worked out, though he suspected the object of the exercise was to make life as uncomfortable for men as possible.

“I believe that Cornucopia has endowed the building of an allwomen’s college,” he said, straight-faced.

“Correct, though it won’t be finished until 1970,” said Marcus Ceruski, whose doctorate was probably in medieval manuscripts or something equally esoteric; Dante had a reputation for scholars of unusual bent. He opened a door, and they entered a large room paneled in some dark wood, most of its walls occupied by books in custom-made shelves-no higgledy-piggledy sizes in here! “This is Dean Denbigh’s study.”

“Where it happened,” said Carmine, gazing around.

“Correct, Captain.”

“Are the four students who were present here today?”

“Yes.”

“And the wife, Dr. Pauline Denbigh?”

“Waiting in her study.”

Carmine consulted a small notebook. “Would you send in Mr. Terence Arrowsmith, please?”

Dr. Ceruski disappeared with a nod, while Carmine prowled. The big leather host’s chair closest to the desk was clearly where Dean Denbigh had sat; the Persian rug around it was ominously stained, as was the chair seat and one arm. When the door sounded, he looked toward it in time to see the entrance of a genuine scholar-in-the-making: round-shouldered and stooped, thick-lensed glasses over pale eyes, a full-lipped crimson mouth, an otherwise nondescript face. His breath was coming fast, the hand on the door trembling.

“Mr. Terence Arrowsmith?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Captain Carmine Delmonico. Would you please sit down in the chair you occupied when Dr. Denbigh died?”

Terence Arrowsmith went to it dumbly, sat gingerly on its edge, and stared up at Carmine like a rabbit at a snake.

“Tell me everything as if I’m in complete ignorance of what happened. The whole story, including why you were here.”

For a moment the young man said nothing, then he licked his impossibly red lips and began. “The Dean calls them Monday Fortnight Coffee-we all drank coffee except for him. He drank jasmine tea from some shop in Manhattan, and he never invited us to share it, even if someone said they liked jasmine tea. The Dean said his was very expensive and we shouldn’t acquire a taste for it until we were at the very least senior fellows.”

Interesting, thought Carmine. The Dean rubbed his preference in as exclusive, and his student guests didn’t appreciate it. Though Terence Arrowsmith had scarcely begun his story, Carmine was getting an impression that the Dean hadn’t been liked.

“You have to be a junior or a senior to be invited,” the young man went on. “I’m a senior, and a fairly regular guest, which isn’t unusual. It was more like a coffee klatch for favored people. The Dean was an authority on Dante himself, and those of us doing Italian Renaissance literature were his pets. If you were studying Goethe or moderns like Pirandello, you didn’t get invited.”