Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

“Coom on, mon, the lamp’s reekin’!” he cried, and hustled Carmine along like a teacher to a tardy child.

At least, that was what Carmine thought he said. Inside, the director hollered down a phone, then looked relieved.

“The lamp shoodna reek,” he said to Carmine.

“Excuse me?”

“There was smoke coming out of Peabody’s chimney.”

And so it went, though Carmine managed to translate most of what Dr. MacDougall said into plain English. It was impossible to fault his security measures, or see how he could improve them. Inside his time vault were a number of smaller safes, their size depending upon what they had to contain; blueprints went into big, flat safes with drawers inside, whereas papers went into the more usual kind of repository. There were guards, and they were as competent as well trained, and getting a document out of the vault was the most public of undertakings.

“I don’t think the thefts happen here, Dr. MacDougall,” he said at the end of a very comprehensive breakdown of procedures. “For instance, the new formulae for Polycorn Plastics and all the experimental scraps have never left this vault since Mr. Collins refused to take delivery. And I’d bet my bottom dollar Ulysses hasn’t gotten a whiff of them. I had some hard things to say about security in Cornucopia headquarters, but I don’t include this facility, sir. Keep it going like this, and you’ll always be squeaky-clean.”

“Yes, but that’s not good enough!” MacDougall said angrily. “So much great work comes out of Cornucopia Research, and no one who works here can stomach the thought that his or her ideas, energies and labor end up in Moscow or Peking.”

“Then we have to catch Ulysses, sir. You can do your share by making careful logs of exactly who handles sensitive material once it leaves you. You must have some notion of who the people in each division are as well as in Cornucopia Central. I’d really like to see what names you come up with.”

“As distinct from the FBI,” said Dr. MacDougall.

“Definitely,” said Carmine. “They don’t share much.”

“Och, aye, ye shall hae it!” the director said. Or something like that, anyway.

“No one understands a Scot except another Scot,” Desdemona said, dishing up veal scallops in a cream and white wine sauce made with mushrooms; she was getting very gastronomically adventurous now that Julian was turning into a human being.

“He might as well have spoken a foreign language.” Carmine eyed his plate with almost lascivious pleasure. Rice-ideal for sopping up sauce-and asparagus. This was definitely one of those occasions when he could thank his lucky stars he had amnesia of the stomach-after two hours it forgot it had eaten, so Luigi’s salad wasn’t even a memory.

He didn’t speak again until the scallopini were all gone. Then he grabbed his wife’s hand and kissed it reverently.

“Superb!” he said. “Better than my mother by far. Better even than my grandmother Cerutti, and that’s saying something. How did you get the veal so tender?”

“Beat the blazes out of it,” said Desdemona, delighted. “I am not a five-foot-nothing old lady from Sicily, Carmine, I’m a six-foot-three

Boadicea. I can actually reach the back burner of a stove without stretching.”

“Sophia missed a feast, serve her right. Pizza, yet!”

“She’s entertaining in her eyrie, my love. Much as I adore her, it’s nice to have you all to myself sometimes.”

“I agree. It’s just that someone should have been here to bear witness to your skill.”

“Enough about my skill. I won’t be able to get my head through the door. You look pleased about more than mere food tonight, so pray enlighten me.”

“I called FBI Kelly a totally unprintable word, he insisted we step outside-we were in Malvolio’s-and we had a fight.”

“Oh, dear,” she said, sighing. “Is he still alive?”

“Walking wounded. It wasn’t much of a fight-he’s no boxer. A Primo Carnera, trips over his own feet, they’re so big. It was nice, I enjoyed it. Saw the usual suspects. Felt sorry for poor old Corey-the wife’s on his back big-time. Stirred up a hornet’s nest or two, and set Delia the human bloodhound on a new scent. I wish I could give her the lieutenancy!”

He frets more about that wretched promotion than he does about his murders, Desdemona thought, watching him. One of them has to lose. I could kill John Silvestri for keeping him on the panel! It’s a sort of death knell, and Carmine knows it. The loser will seek promotion in another police department, and the old team will be gone forever. Maybe the state legislature will raise the retirement age and the crisis will disappear. No, it won’t. If anything, retirement age will go down, not up. I love him so much, and I know he loves me equally. We have a life together, even when we’re apart. We look forward to each other.

“Poor Erica Davenport!” she said suddenly.

“Huh?”

“The brains, the beauty, the bank balance. Her life is so terribly empty.”

“She doesn’t think so,” Carmine said, grinning. “In fact, she preached me a sermon about it this afternoon. Power, that’s the wellspring of her existence.”

“Pooh! Power over what? People’s jobs? People’s lives? It’s an illusion, it has the same substance as chessmen on a chessboard-very bright men play a game with inanimate pieces. Only one thing grants genuine power-the loss of personal liberty. That awful certainty that if one’s papers are not properly stamped or one is in a place one shouldn’t be, one will be put against a wall and shot. That one can be shipped off to a concentration camp without a word of explanation, and that there is no process of appeal. That where one lives, works, even goes for a holiday, is decided by someone faceless without consultation. Power turns human beings into beasts-tell that to your precious Dr. Davenport next time you see her!”

Whatever else she might have had to say on the subject was not said. Desdemona found herself flat on her back on the dining room floor, looking up into a pair of fiery eyes.

“Carmine! You can’t! What if Sophia… ”

“Then you have ten seconds to hit the bedroom.”

How far can the long arm of coincidence go?” Carmine asked Abe and Corey early the next morning.

Neither man had any idea what he meant, but both hesitated to say so: was this some kind of test?

Corey swallowed. “How do you mean, boss?”

“April third. Jimmy Cartwright was coincidental. So, we’re being led to believe, was Dean Denbigh. The thing is, could our fat banker also have been coincidental to April third?”

“That’s stretching it,” Corey said, relieved that he’d been frank. With Carmine, you never knew whereabouts his mind might go. Last night Corey’d had a bitter fight with Maureen that almost became knock-down, drag-out, but it had cleared the air, and this morning he felt as if the nagging and the whining might actually stop. She’d smiled at him and cooked him breakfast, and said not a word about the promotion.

“What makes you wonder, Carmine?” Abe asked.

“That window of opportunity. It’s so-convenient. I’d spend more time on Mrs. Norton, except for the date. April third! How can it possibly be her?”

“Is there anything else significant about April third?” Corey asked. “It’s a Monday. It’s the first working day of the month, which is the last month of quite a few financial years-”

“It’s a frustration because April Fool’s Day fell on a Saturday,” said Abe, grinning. “No pranks this year.”

“A source for the strychnine never turned up,” said Carmine.

“No,” said his team in chorus.

“Let’s look at things a different way, even if it does make us seem macabre.”