Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

Desdemona enfolded in one arm, Carmine stretched out the other for Sophia, who came into it and kissed him smackingly.

“Lasagna!” he said, pleased. “Are you sure you don’t mind eating so late? I’d be happy with a plate warmed on top of the stove, honest.”

“Sophia and I are sophisticated women of the world” was his wife’s answer. “Eat too early, and one wakes up ravenous long before there’s a chance of breakfast. We have afternoon tea at four, and that lasts us.”

“How’s What’s-His-Name?” he asked, smiling tenderly.

“ Julian is perfect,” said his mother. “Asleep, of course.”

“Give in, Daddy,” said Sophia, contributing her mite. “Julian is a great name.”

“It’s sissy,” Carmine said. “You can’t expect a son of mine to go to St. Bernard’s lumbered with a sissy name.”

Sophia giggled. “Go on, Daddy! He’s such a bruiser that he’s more likely to get ‘Big Julie from East Cicero, Illinois.’”

“Curse Guys and Dolls !” Carmine cried. “Sissy or gangstery, Julian isn’t suitable. He needs to have an ordinary name! I like John, after my grandfather Cerutti. Or Robert, Anthony, James!”

The lasagna was being sliced; how did Desdemona know the hour he’d appear for dinner? Sophia had dished salad into bowls and was pouring the dressings of choice over them, then filling the wine glasses with a good Italian red, save for her own, which got a third of red on the bottom and then was topped up with sparkling mineral water. They sat down.

“How about Simon?” asked Sophia in a spirit of mischief.

Carmine reared back like a striking snake. “Sissy going on faggy!” he snapped. “Look, what passes for normal in England is one thing, but this isn’t England!”

“You’re prejudiced against homosexuals,” said Desdemona, her sangfroid unruffled. “And don’t say ‘faggy’!”

“No, I’m not prejudiced! But neither have I forgotten how miserable his classmates can make a kid with a fancy name,” said Carmine, still fighting valiantly. “It’s not about whether I’m prejudiced, it’s about the kids our son will associate with at school. Truly, Desdemona, the worst thing a parent can do to a child is lumber him or her with a stupid name, and by stupid I mean sissy or fancy or idiotic!”

“Then Julian is the best of a bad bunch,” said Desdemona. “I like it! Listen to the sound of it, Carmine, please. Julian John Delmonico.

It has a nice ring to it, and when he’s a famous man, think how good it will look on his letterhead.”

“Pah!” snorted Carmine, and changed the subject. “This is a very good lasagna,” he said. “It’s better than my mother’s, and getting up there with Grandmother Cerutti.”

She flushed with pleasure, but whatever she was going to say never was said; Sophia got in first.

“Guess who’s arriving tomorrow, Daddy?”

“When you speak in that tone, young lady, it can only be one person-Myron,” said her father.

“Oh!” Sophia looked deflated, then cheered up. “He didn’t say so, but I know he’s visiting to keep me company. The Dormer is on midsemester break, and I did drop him a hint.”

“Like a brick, huh? I’m kinda snowed under at work, so he couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Carmine, smiling.

“Bad?” Desdemona asked.

“Terrible.”

“What’s going on, Daddy?”

“You know the rules, kid. No police business at home.”

On his way to bed an hour later Carmine visited the nursery, where his nameless offspring lay slumbering blissfully in his crib. Sophia had called him a bruiser, and it was an accurate description; bigboned and overly long, he had his father’s muscular breadth too, though no one could have called him fat. Just a bruiser. His thick, curly hair was black, and his skin a rich tan like Carmine’s. In fact, he resembled his father in all save his length. Feet and hands suggested way over six feet when mature.

It was then, with the Dean of Paracelsus’s words about wives ringing in his ears, that Carmine Delmonico saw the light. This boy could bear any first name with impunity; no one was ever going to intimidate him or mock him. Maybe he needed the brake of a slightly sissy name to rein in his power, his size.

So when Carmine slid into bed alongside Desdemona, he turned to her and took her fully into his arms, body to body, legs around legs. He kissed her neck; she shivered, turned into him even closer, one hand in his cropped hair.

“Julian,” he said. “Julian John Delmonico.”

She emitted a squeak of joy and began kissing his eyelids. “Carmine, Carmine, thank you! You’ll never regret it! Neither will our son. He can carry any name.”

“I’ve just realized that,” he said.

Commissioner John Silvestri’s office was large, though seldom called upon to accommodate as many men as gathered there at nine the next morning, April fourth.

Holloman, a city of 150,000 people, wasn’t big enough to have a homicide division, but it did have three squads of detectives to investigate the full gamut of serious crime. Captain Carmine Delmonico headed the entire division, with two lieutenants who were nominally under him but who usually followed their own lines of enquiry. Lieutenant Mickey McCosker and his team weren’t present; he was embroiled in a drug investigation the FBI was running, and couldn’t be spared for other work, a point that rankled with Silvestri and the Staties, bypassed. So Carmine and his two sergeants, Abe Goldberg and Corey Marshall, were joined by Lieutenant Larry Pisano and his two sergeants, Morty Jones and Liam Connor. Also present was the Deputy Commissioner, Danny Marciano, due to retire at the end of 1968. Despite his impeccably Italian name, Marciano, of northern blood, was freckled, fair, and blue-eyed. Larry Pisano was due to retire at the end of this year, 1967, which had led to some difficulties for Carmine, both of whose sergeants had seniority over Pisano’s men and were in line for the next lieutenancy. Since that meant a hefty raise in pay as well as greater autonomy, he couldn’t blame Abe or Corey for wanting to move up.

Silvestri himself, a desk cop who had never fired his sidearm in the course of duty, much less a shotgun or a rifle, was never dismissed as a pantywaist; during World War II he had earned many decorations, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. But reinstalled in the Holloman Police Department, he had recognized his talents as administrative, and was one of the city’s finest-ever police commissioners. He was a dark, smoothly handsome man who could still pull the women, reminded people of a big cat, and was intensely loyal to his department, for which he would go to bat with anyone from the Feds to Hartford. So good a politician that he was generally held to be politically inept, Silvestri had a brilliant media persona and only two weaknesses. The first was his protégé Carmine Delmonico. The second was his addiction to sucking and chewing on unlit cigars, whose slimy butts littered his wake like corks after a pleasure boat. Owning a streak of the diabolical, he had long ago realized that Danny Marciano loathed these cigars, and he always contrived to put the current one as close to Marciano as he could.

Under ordinary circumstances his striking face was rather expressionless during a conference, but this morning it was distinctly grim. As soon as Patrick O’Donnell came through the door and took the last vacant chair, Silvestri got straight down to business.

“Carmine, fill me in,” he commanded, champing on a cigar.

“Yes, sir.” Without referring to the sheaf of papers and folders on his lap, Carmine commenced. “The first call came at six a.m. yesterday, from the Chubb Rowing Club. Their premier eight had gone out for practice as soon as it was light enough-apparently conditions on the stretch of the Pequot River they use were perfect, so the coach dragged them all out of bed and put them on the river. They’d worked hard and were about to come in when two of the port oars struck an object just under the surface-the body of a small child. Patsy?”