Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

“You couldn’t get any more out of her?” Corey asked.

Carmine looked at him sympathetically; Corey’s wife wouldn’t let him rest, nagged nonstop. “She only remembers what suits her,” he said. “Corey, you’re on the Norton background. I want to know the name and the date of every function Mrs. Norton ever attended-well, modify that. Make it five years.” He turned to Abe. “Abe, you’re on the feminist angle. Use the good Dr. Denbigh as your starting point. She’s in the thick of the movement, and she fits Mrs. Norton’s description-no hairy legs or armpits for our Pauline. Incidentally, she told me she was frigid, but I doubt that very much. I know we’ve got her for the Dean’s murder, but her past still bears looking into. What was her reason for picking April third for the deed, huh?”

“You didn’t believe it had nothing to do with the other murders?” Corey asked, fretting that he wasn’t chalking up enough points.

“She’s a congenital liar. When she does tell the truth, it’s obliquely.”

He watched them leave his office, then put his chin on his hands and prepared for a think session.

“Carmine?”

He lifted his head, surprised; it wasn’t like Delia to interrupt a thinking boss. “Yes?”

“I have an idea,” she said, not sitting down.

“Coming from you, that’s encouraging. Explain.”

“The filing’s all up to date and you haven’t exactly snowed me under with letters lately,” she said delicately, looking at him with eyes that always reminded him of a kewpie doll-wide, ingenuous, impossibly painted.

“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.