Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

“I get your drift, Delia. Don’t tease, just go on!”

“One of the many Cornucopia tables was sponsored by the Fourth National Bank under the aegis of Mr. Peter Norton. Due to the vagaries of fate, it was far thinner of company than Mr. Norton could have expected. His wife, for instance, had the gastric flu that was going around at the time-I had it myself-and was too ill to attend. Dean Denbigh’s wife also had this flu and didn’t come. Beatrice Egmont came on a single ticket, no companion. Mrs. Cathy Cartwright’s husband was in Beechmont with the temperamental chef. Bianca Tolano came on one of the tickets given to her by her boss, Mr. Dorley, when he and his wife couldn’t go. It seems Bianca made no effort to find an escort; she was on her own. But she must have been a sensible girl, because she handed in her second ticket at the reception desk. How do I know? It had a number, and was sold at the door to a young man who had none-Evan Pugh. So in one sense he and Bianca substituted for the Dorleys, who one presumes had a lucky escape.” She shivered, switched into high drama. “But why,” she asked rhetorically, “didn’t Mr. Norton fill his table with his own friends? None of them even attended!”

Experience with Delia had taught Carmine that she would recount her doings in her own inimitable style, but that today’s effort was a tour de force she had planned as meticulously as the Maxwell Foundation had its banquet. He just had to wait.

“Put succinctly, Mr. Norton was too terrified to invite his own friends,” Delia continued, satisfied Carmine was on the edge of his chair. “Pride of place at the Fourth National table went to Mr. Desmond Skeps, who elected to sit at Mr. Norton’s out of all the many tables he could choose from. With him as his lady companion he brought Dee-Dee Hall.”

“What?”

“She’s down in black and white on the master guest roster as accompanying Mr. Desmond Skeps. See?” Delia thrust a sheet of paper at Carmine.

He grabbed it and read incredulously. “What the hell was he up to? Something nasty, I bet! Go on, go on!”

“That gave me four women-Cathy Cartwright, Bianca Tolano, Beatrice Egmont and Dee-Dee Hall-and four men-Desmond Skeps, Peter Norton, Evan Pugh and Dean John Denbigh. Eight people, all now dead. Which still left the Fourth National table rather lightly populated. Two of the ten chairs were unoccupied.”

Carmine shook his head. “No wonder I haven’t seen hide or hair of you for days! You didn’t get all of this off a list.”

“Well, no,” she confessed. “I had to speak to a lot of people on the phone and visit the Maxwell Foundation several times. At one point I actually thought my precious lists had been thrown out or burned, but I should have known better. Even charities are riddled with bureaucrats, and bureaucrats won’t discard anything that might imperil their parasitic existence.”

“Why do you hate paper pushers so much, Delia? You’re one yourself,” Carmine said slyly.

She rose to the bait instantly. “I am not a parasite! My work bears fruit, I am a cog in the necessary machinery of the constabulary! And you give me an instance of one police unit that has even enough paper pushers!” she said indignantly.

“Calm down, calm down! I’m pulling your leg. And you have just processed more paper with positive results than an entire government department,” he said. “Desmond Skeps! What was he doing arm in arm with a street whore? Not that she’d have looked like one. Dee-Dee could-could-”

“Tart herself up?” Delia suggested.

“Put on a nice dress and skate on the edge of respectability. She’d still have looked more street than home in the suburbs, but on Skeps’s arm she’d have been forgiven a lot. People can’t bear thinking that a man of Skeps’s wealth and standing might be taking the mickey out of them.” Carmine frowned. “Okay, that’s eight out of the eleven. What about the black victims?”

“They were present too,” said Delia. “The event was catered by Barnstaple Catering, a new name for affairs that size. It’s a firm that has previously concentrated on smaller affairs, but there is a contract with Chubb coming up to cater its banquets, and the Maxwell function was a dummy run for Barnstaple. In view of this, at least according to their general manager, Barnstaple agreed to take a smaller profit than it will be asking in the future. Maxwell had some conditions of its own, apparently having had bad experiences in the past.

The thousand-dollar-table dinner dance was a new sort of venture, and they wanted the first one to be memorable, with the intention of having one each year. So Barnstaple had to provide a three-person wait team for each table. Cedric Ballantine, Morris Brown and Ludovica Bereson waited on the Fourth National table. The system worked a treat,” Delia went on, the excitement dying out of her voice now that the last goody was revealed. “People got their meals piping hot and very quickly, the liquor flowed uninterruptedly, and no one sat staring at a dirty plate for longer than two or three minutes.”

“Was there any method that assigned the three black victims to that table?” Carmine asked.

“No, beyond the fact that they all worked for Barnstaple at weekend functions, and had done for some time, including Cedric Ballantine, who put his age up to get the work. They didn’t check ages very stringently, and Cedric looked older than his years. If it had been a weeknight, the two boys wouldn’t have been able to work because of school. Mrs. Bereson probably wouldn’t have been interested either, after a day housecleaning. But it was a Saturday night, ideal.”

“If I were not a happily married man, Delia, I’d be waiting at your door determined to make you mine,” Carmine said, smiling. “I also doubt that we three men would have found out half as much. You’re a nit-picker, and if ever a job needed a nit-picker, this one was it. I can’t thank you enough.”

“Thanks are not necessary. I loved every minute of it.” She got up, but didn’t move to take her papers. “These should stay with you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll choofle off.”

As soon as she disappeared, Carmine was calling Desdemona. “What kind of flowers can I give Delia for some terrific work?”

“Brightly colored orchids,” said Desdemona instantly. “In a pot, not as a corsage. Cattleyas.”

“The big question is, why did Desmond Skeps sit at Peter Norton’s table?” Carmine asked Corey and Abe.

“I don’t see how we’ll ever know,” Corey said gloomily. “Everyone attached to the table is dead.”

“What I want to know,” said Abe, “is why did four months elapse between this banquet and the murders?”

“I don’t think we’re going to find that out, so I propose we shelve it for the moment,” Carmine said.

“But we can find out the names of plenty of people who went and didn’t die,” Corey said. “We need to get a feel for the kind of function it was.”

“Silvestri!” Carmine exclaimed. “He was there, so were Danny and Larry.” He was halfway to the door in seconds. “I’ll talk to him, so don’t mention it to the others. For the time being, we sit on this.”

John Silvestri listened raptly, intensely proud of his niece and in a lightning moment resolving to write to his uppity Oxford brother-in-law to the effect that Delia would leave more of a mark on history than her father would. Then reality crunched down and he concentrated on Delia’s actual revelations. “Jesus H. Christ!” he said at the end of it. “What was that tricky bastard doing? There’s no use asking me, Carmine, I’m as much in the dark as you are.”

“Yes, John, but you were present,” Carmine said. “We’d just had Julian, and weren’t. Tell me what it was like, what went on. I need to get a picture of things.”