Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

Carmine felt his hackles rise. Here was trouble .

The boy came to lean against his mother, standing to one side of her chair, and she turned her head to kiss his arm, smiling.

“Captain Delmonico, this is my son, Desmond.”

“Hi,” said Carmine, rising and extending his hand.

The boy took it, but fastidiously, with a faint moue of distaste around his red-lipped mouth. “Hi,” he said. Then, to his mother, “Is this about the Wicked Witch of Cornucopia?”

“About Erica Davenport, yes, dear. Some lemonade?”

“No.” He stood posed like a Praxiteles statue, oblivious to the fact that the visitor’s foot itched to kick some manners into the conceited little shit. “I’m bored,” he said.

“With all that schoolwork still to do?” she ventured.

“Since my I.Q. is two hundred, Mother, it’s scarcely a problem!” he said tartly. “I need a bigger library.”

“Yes, he does,” she said to Carmine ruefully. “I’m afraid that we’re going to have to move to Boston. The Cape suits me, but it retards Desmond.” Her head went back to her son. “As soon as the legal ramifications are disentangled, dearest, we’ll go to Boston. Just a few more weeks, Tony says.”

“I take it you’ve fully recovered from the chicken pox?” Carmine asked the boy.

He didn’t like the reference to a pedestrian childhood ailment, so he ignored the question. “Where’s Tony?” he asked, fretful and peevish.

“Here!” said Anthony Bera’s voice from the back door.

The change in young Desmond was both sudden and dramatic; he lit up, bounded to Bera and hugged him. “Tony, thank God!” he cried. “Let’s take the boat out, I’m bored.”

“Good idea,” Bera said, “but I have to talk to the Captain first. Why don’t you get things ready? We need bait.”

The boy went off, but not before a little more talk passed between him and Bera. Carmine smothered a sigh of mingled sorrow and disgust. Young Desmond had already been sexually initiated, but not by a woman. Bera was mentor in this area too. A few more Greeks flitted through Carmine’s mind.

“Did young Desmond exaggerate his I.Q.?” Carmine asked as soon as the boy was out of earshot.

“Some,” Bera said, laughing, “but it’s right up there in the genius range.” He frowned. “It’s rather narrow, however. His gifts are mathematical, not artistic, and he lacks curiosity.”

“A detached reading of someone devoted to you, surely.”

“There’s no point in being anything else,” Bera said, not perturbed by the fact that Carmine had realized what was going on between him and the boy.

“I presume you’ll contest the will now?” Carmine asked.

“I’m not sure it’s even necessary. Skeps’s will didn’t make any provision for Erica’s death. If a board of trustees is appointed and it’s impeccable enough to satisfy the children’s courts of New York State, I think things can be arranged minus any legal fuss,” Bera said easily. “The boy’s mother is a good guardian unfairly dealt with by a vengeful ex-husband. Can you see Phil Smith or the other Cornucopia Board members making life hard for Philomena now? As long as they’re among the trustees, things will be hunky-dory.”

A very superficial summary for someone he deems a legal ignoramus, thought Carmine, but it will probably work out that way in the end. And it answers my questions. Cornucopia will go on under the same management for at least another three or four years. After that, given young Desmond-who knows? He’ll probably have graduated from Harvard by then, and be a player. The kid’s homosexuality doesn’t worry me. What does is his patriotism. Is Ted Kelly certain of Anthony Bera’s loyalties in that respect? I’m sure going to ask him!

Rising to his feet, Carmine said his farewells. Philomena didn’t escort him to the Fairlane, Bera did, eyeing the car.

“You’ve put some miles on it coming here three times,” he said, holding the driver’s door open.

“Yeah, well, shit happens,” said Carmine, got in, and drove off with a wave.

A few minutes later he was in the air heading across Nantucket Sound.

“Is that Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard?” he asked as the water became a patchwork quilt land.

“Martha’s Vineyard,” said the pilot.

And so, after flying down I-95 on the Connecticut shore, he reached Holloman while the Fairlane would still have been negotiating the Cape itself. Ducking down as he left the chopper, Carmine resolved to buy Special Agent Ted Kelly a bottle of his favorite tipple. What a difference! Home again in time for a Malvolio’s lunch. The whole trip had taken less than three hours.

For want of something better to do, he went back to his least loved destination, Cornucopia, that afternoon.

Phil Smith had moved into Desmond Skeps’s offices but had not availed himself of Richard Oakes the male secretary, Carmine noted as he waited for Smith’s exquisitely turned out elderly dragon to announce him.

Erica’s decor was still in place, but subtly defeminized; the vases of flowers were gone, the pictures of dreamy country lanes had been replaced by starkly grim Hogarth etchings, and red kid had replaced sage green kid on the padded furniture.

“You need a few swastika flags,” Carmine said.

“Excuse me?”

“A lot of black, white and red in here. Very Nazi.”

“You, Captain, are fond of making incendiary remarks, but I am not rising to the bait today,” Smith said. “I’m too happy.”

“Didn’t like a woman boss, huh?”

“What man genuinely does? I could have stomached her sex, however. What made my gorge rise was her indecision.”

Perhaps aping mourning, Smith was in a black silk suit with a black tie closely covered in white spots; his cuff links were black onyx and yellow gold, his shoes the finest black kid. A sartorial wonder, thought Carmine, sitting down. In fact, Smith looked younger, even handsomer. Being el supremo of Cornucopia obviously pleased him mightily, just as he said.

“Where’s Richard Oakes?” Carmine asked.

Smith looked contemptuous. “He’s a homosexual, Captain, and I don’t like homosexuals. I banished him to Outer Mongolia.”

“And where’s that, in Cornucopia’s version of the globe?”

“Accounting.”

“It would be my Outer Mongolia too, I confess. The arctic wastes of numbers… However, I can’t agree with you about homosexuals. For some men, it’s a natural state of being, not to be confused with some of the sexual criminals I encounter.” To himself he wondered how long it was since Smith had set eyes on Desmond Skeps III-what a shock that was going to be!

The pretense of bonhomie disappeared; Phil Smith reverted to type. “What do you want?” he asked rudely. “I’m a busy man.”

“I want to know your whereabouts all day on the day that Erica Davenport’s body was put in my boat shed.”

“I was here, and I can produce witnesses to vouch for that from eight in the morning until six that evening,” Smith said. “Go and look somewhere else, for God’s sake! The only kind of murder I do is

Outer Mongolian. And yes, I would have dealt with Dr. Erica Davenport, but not by extinguishing her life. What kind of punishment is that? By the time I finished with her, she’d have been in a straitjacket.”

“I accept that, Mr. Smith. When you called her indecisive, what did you mean?”

“Exactly what the word suggests. Having a homosexual for a secretary was indicative, believe me. One of the ways Cornucopia stays on top is by absorbing smaller, independent companies, especially if they have clever ideas or find a niche in the market for a new product. Takeover negotiations have a form and a time span that Erica was ignorant of. We missed taking over four companies in fewer than four days, thanks to her. Three belonged to Fred Collins, one to me. We’d been performing the ritual mating dance for months or weeks, depending. But she dithered, the shortsighted fool, then ran to Wallace Grierson.”