Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

“Couldn’t you override her?” Carmine asked curiously.

“Not the way Desmond structured his will-she had the yea or nay, holding Desmond Three’s majority,” Smith said sourly.

“Hmm. So there were advantages in being rid of her, even if your technique would not have involved murder.”

“Are you a fool too, Captain? Haven’t I said that?”

“No, Mr. Smith, I am not a fool,” Carmine said coolly. “I just like to be absolutely sure.” He got up and wandered over to the long wall, where the Hogarth etchings were hanging in mathematical precision. Depictions of a London long gone, a place of horrific suffering, starvation, dissipation, glaringly unwanted humanity. Smith watched him, puzzled.

“These are amazing,” Carmine said, turning to look at the seated figure behind the black lacquer desk. “Human misery at its most acute, and the artist walked through it every day. It doesn’t say much for the government of the time, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t, I suppose.” Smith shrugged. “Still, I don’t walk through it. Why the interest?”

“No reason, really. It just seems a strange theme for the office of a company director, particularly when the products are aimed at creating more human misery.”

“Oh, puh-lease!” Smith exclaimed. “Don’t blame me, blame my wife! I put her in charge of the decorating.”

“That would account for it,” Carmine said, smiled, and left.

From there he went to see Gus Purvey, Fred Collins and Wal Grierson, in that order.

Purvey was genuinely upset, and had flown to L.A. for the funeral. Like Phil Smith, his alibi for the day of Erica’s death was ironclad.

“Mr. Smith says Dr. Davenport was indecisive,” Carmine said to him, wondering if this was old news or new. Old, it seemed.

“I don’t agree,” Purvey said, wiping his eyes. “Phil and Fred are a pair of sharks, they bite everything in their path without stopping to think whether it would go down well or give them indigestion. Erica thought all four companies would wind up a liability rather than an asset.”

Collins repeated Phil Smith’s views, but Grierson came down on Purvey’s side.

“She had a natural caution,” he said, “that I think was why Des picked her to head Cornucopia. I do know, however, that she was in favor of Dormus buying out a small company with good ideas about solar power. That’s decades off, but I’m interested. So was Erica. I want to let the firm alone, just infuse some much needed capital into their infrastructure, and reap the benefits down the track. The same with distillation of fresh water from salt. You have to browse through the world of small companies, Captain, not gobble,” Grierson said, unconsciously echoing Purvey’s shark metaphor. “In that respect Erica’s indecision was great. Unfortunately, in most respects it was disastrous.”

“What’s going to happen now that Dr. Davenport is gone?”

“Phil Smith is bound to take over. Funny, that. For the last fifteen years he’s been inert, now all of a sudden he’s woken up and is behaving like a chief executive.” Grierson frowned. “Trouble is, I’m not sure his burst of energy will last. I hope it does. There’s no way I want the job.”

“What’s Smith’s wife like?” Carmine asked, thinking of the brown pancake hat.

“Natalie?” Grierson laughed. “She’s a Lapp-calls herself a Sami. Hard to believe she’s an Eskimo, isn’t it? Weird blue eyes, blonde hair. The Sami are fair, I’m told. Her English is awful. I like her, she’s-uh-jovial. The kids are real lookers, all blonde. A girl, then two boys. None of them wanted to follow Pop into the firm-amazing how often that happens. No matter how rich people are, their kids do their own thing.”

“No clotheshorses among them?”

“Just good workhorses, Natalie saw to that. She has some bug in her head about the homeland, so the minute each kid got through with college, off they went to the land of the midnight sun. They didn’t stay, of course. Scattered around the world.”

“The Smiths sound like an odd couple.”

This is fascinating, Carmine was thinking; I would never have suspected Wal Grierson of this kind of cozy gossip. Just goes to show. He’s best friends with a woman-his wife.

“The Smiths are absolutely orthodox compared to what the Collinses used to be like when his first wife was alive. Aki was Turkish-another blonde. Gorgeous in a weird way. Came from somewhere near Armenia or the Caucasus. Their sons are the best-looking kids-young men now, of course. One’s a Marine officer stationed in West Germany, the other’s a NASA scientist trying to put a man on the moon.”

“What happened to her? Divorce?”

Wal Grierson’s face sobered. “No. She died in a shooting accident at their cabin in Maine. Some fucking gun-crazy idiot mistook her for a deer and blew her face away. That’s why we put up with Fred’s bimbos. When Aki was alive, he was different.”

“That’s a real tragedy,” Carmine said.

“Yeah, poor old Fred.”

Strange pictures were forming in Carmine’s mind, but they wavered and quivered on the fringes of actual thought, like moving objects some sadistic ophthalmologist deliberately kept right on the margins of peripheral vision. They were there, but they were not there. Swing your head to focus on them, and they vanished-poof!

“Or am I going crazy?” he asked Desdemona, the scrambler on the phone engaged.

“No, dear heart, you’re stone cold sane,” she said. “I know the feeling. Oh, I miss you!” She paused, then added in a master stroke of guile, “So does Julian. He does, Carmine! Every time a man approaches with something like your gait, he starts jigging up and down-it’s adorable!”

“That’s an awful thing to say.”

“You have an idea who it is, don’t you?” she asked.

“No, that’s just it-I don’t. I should, yet I don’t.”

“Cheer up, it will come to you. Is the weather nice?”

He got his own back. “Perfect Connecticut spring days.”

“Guess what it’s doing here?”

“Raining. At fifty degrees of latitude, Desdemona, with a climate that mild, it has to rain a lot. It’s the Gulf Stream.”

When Simonetta Marciano barged into his office, Carmine was surprised at the intrusion, but not at the manner of it; Simonetta always barged, it was her nature. She had never grown out of the war-year 1940s, which had seen her greatest triumph, the marital catching of Major Danny Marciano, who had thus far escaped entrapment. Barely out of her teens, Simonetta had no use for the GIs in her own age group. She wanted a mature man who could keep her in good style from the beginning of their relationship. And, setting eyes on Major Marciano, Simonetta went after him with all the delicious ploys of youth, beauty, and high spirits. Now he was within a couple of years of retirement from the Holloman Police, while she was in her early forties.

Today she was clad in a button-down-the-front dress of pink with darker pink polka dots; it ended at her knees, displaying good legs in stockings with seams, and her shoes were pink kid with oldfashioned medium heels and bows on their fronts. Her dark hair was rolled back from her face in a continuous sausage, and on the back of her head she had pinned a huge pink satin bow. The fashion these days was for pink or brownish lipstick, but Simonetta wore brilliant red. All of which might have suggested to strangers that she was free with her favors, but they would have been mistaken. Simonetta was passionately devoted to her Danny and their four children; her baser qualities were all channeled into gossip, and there was nothing she didn’t know. She had feelers into the Mayor’s offices, Chubb, the clutter of departments that made up County Services, the Chamber of Commerce, the Knights of Columbus, Rotary, the Shriners, and many more places that might yield some juicy tidbit. Having Simonetta on your side, her husband joked, was like enjoying all the benefits of the Library of Congress without the hassle of borrowing.