Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

Gerald Cartwright went sheet-white, and bent his head over his books defensively.

Junior was glued to the giant television in the den next door; on his way past, Carmine beckoned imperiously.

“Come on, kid, turn it off. Until she gets some help, your sister needs a hand in the kitchen.”

The boy did as he was told, but sulkily, and followed Carmine downstairs with dragging steps.

The cheese was grated, but the recalcitrant block of Parmesan had bitten back. Its crumbling tendrils were stained, and Selma was sucking her knuckles.

“Junior, get a Band-Aid,” Carmine commanded, inspecting the graze. “Lesson number one when grating: watch your hands when the cheese wears down.”

He sprinkled salt into the macaroni, teaching as he went, showed Selma how to make a tolerable cheese sauce, then made her mix half the Parmesan with breadcrumbs and sprinkle it on top of the macaroni and cheese. Into the oven it went, then, perched on a kitchen stool, Carmine found Cathy Cartwright’s copy of The Joy of Cooking and picked out half a dozen easy recipes for Selma to follow. She was displaying some enthusiasm, having just (with Carmine’s help) produced an edible meal on her first try. The princess was only skin deep.

“Did your mom have any enemies that you know of, Selma?” he asked, thumbing the pages of the cookbook.

“ Mom? ” The girl looked incredulous. “No!” The first sadness entered her eyes, and she blinked rapidly. “What time did she have for enemies, Captain?”

He put the cookbook down, slid off the stool and pressed her shoulder briefly. Then his gaze fell on Junior, about to disappear through the inside door; his lips tightened.

“And you,” Carmine said to her brother as he opened the back door, “are going to do your share of the chores in future. If Selma is the cook, you’re in charge of the laundry.”

Snap! The door closed on Junior’s outraged protests.

As he walked to his car, Carmine was grinning. It was rare for him to involve himself so personally in a family’s tragedy, but the

Cartwrights were a special case. Not one but two murders, each by a different killer. They would survive, but thanks to Selma rather than to either Gerald. Though she hadn’t known how, she had already been trying to cook when he arrived. The tragedy had thrown her in at life’s deep end, but she was paddling bravely.

Carmine went back to County Services and a desk piled high, sat himself down and thanked his lucky stars for his secretary, Delia Carstairs, who happened to be Commissioner John Silvestri’s niece. One incidence of nepotism actually working, he thought as his gaze traveled over the neat piles. Delia was a treasure he had inherited along with his captaincy; mere lieutenants didn’t have secretaries, they availed themselves of the typing pool or their own typing skills, and they did their own filing. The odd thing was that she had belonged to Danny Marciano, his senior still, yet Danny had given her up with no more than a loud wail of anguish-and two secretaries to replace her.

She walked in from her tiny office, tiny only because all four of its walls were taken up by monstrous filing cabinets.

“About time,” she said, distributing another sheaf of papers on various stacks.

She was thirty years old, short, and dressed in a manner that she called smart but that Carmine privately called appalling. Today she wore a fussy suit of some multicolored, knobby fabric whose skirt barely reached her knees. Two utterly shapeless legs of the kind seen on grand pianos supported a tubby body and the weight of far too much massive costume jewelry. Her face was caked with makeup, her frizzy hair was an improbable shade of strawberry blonde, and her shrewd, twinkling, light brown eyes were surrounded by enough paint to satisfy a Cleopatra. The only product of a union between

Commissioner Silvestri’s sister and an Oxford don, Delia had been born and raised in England.

Both parents despaired of her. But Delia required no parental guidance of any kind; she knew exactly what she was going to do and where she was going to do it. A course at a top London secretarial college saw her graduate at the head of her class; as soon as her papers and certificate were in her hands, she packed her bags and climbed on a plane for New York. There she went to work in the NYPD headquarters typists’ pool, and soon found herself the private secretary of a deputy commissioner. Unfortunately, the bulk of his work concerned social misfits, and it quickly dawned on Delia that she was actually too desirable to wind up where she wanted to be-in Homicide. The NYPD was just too vast, and she was too good at her job.

So she took a train to Holloman and asked Uncle John for a job. Since his phone had been ringing off the hook about her all the previous day, Silvestri ignored his dictum about nepotism and grabbed her. Not for himself, but for Danny Marciano, whose administrative duties were far heavier. What Delia didn’t know about police work could have been written on the head of a pin, but it didn’t occur to Uncle John that his niece craved blood and gore until Carmine was promoted to captain. Please, begged Delia, could she work for Captain Delmonico, the murder expert?

“There’s hours of reading here,” said Carmine to her.

“I know, but it’s all absolutely riveting,” said Delia in her polished Oxford accent. “Twelve murders in one day!”

“Don’t rub it in, you horrible woman!”

She laughed and tittupped out on very high heels, leaving her boss to stare at the surface of his desk. Where to begin?

With Larry Pisano’s cases, that was logical, the three shootings and the prostitute.

Three different handguns, all silenced. Now why had it been done that way? What about the victims dictated the use of three different firearms? The answer kept coming back to nothing, which didn’t make sense. Silencers indicated professional killers, not the style of shooting common in the Hollow and in the Argyle Avenue district. And that spoke of big money to take out three harmless blacks… What on earth could they possibly know to warrant such an outlay? Pisano and his team had burrowed assiduously, without results. The woman was elderly and inoffensive, both the youths fine types. Blood analysis on all three had found its way into the pile, to reveal no trace of any illicit substance either over time or on the morning of their deaths. They were just what they appeared to be, the kind of people who didn’t get killed by a deliberate act, by selection. Yet these three had been selected, had been deliberately killed, by men taking no chances, men who were professional assassins. The whole thing screamed of out-of-state to Carmine. Though Connecticut had its share of black militants, gangsters, and hoods, it didn’t run to hired assassins using silencers, men competent enough to pick their moment on the street when the victim wouldn’t be noticed going down in a heap until the getaway had been invisibly made.

Okay, thought Carmine, setting the shootings aside, I am going to presume that the perpetrators are out-of-state, and bring Larry and his boys onto fresh fields as soon as I make up my mind where the exhaustive investigations are going to yield fruit.

Next he went to Larry’s last case, the prostitute. Everybody knew Dee-Dee Hall, and not because she was always in trouble: far from it. Though she worked the street, she had her beat and never strayed from it. Her pimp was Marty Fane, part of the reason why she stayed out of trouble; he was easygoing for a pimp, and he valued Dee-Dee too highly to ill-treat her. Though she was now thirty-two years old, she had weathered her eighteen years on the street better than most and kept her striking good looks. The pity of it was that, had she only been a few years younger, Carmine reflected, she would have become a call girl rather than a streetwalker, but by the time call girls were a common phenomenon, Dee-Dee’s gloss was gone. At six feet, her height was in her shapely legs, and she still had a voluptuous body. Her hair was brassy, her eyes green, her skin the color of café au lait. All of which procured her plenty of johns, but was not the basis of her popularity. That lay in her ability to give a great blow job; it was said she had more suck than Eskimo Nell. This particular speciality also meant no unwanted pregnancies, hence her good health and the preservation of her figure. Her pimp, Marty Fane, pampered her by feeding her heroin habit and making sure her room with bath and kitchenette on the fringes of the Argyle Avenue ghetto had cleaning and laundry service. Dee-Dee was his top earner.