Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

“What about jet lag, kid?” Carmine asked the baby.

“Don’t worry about it,” Desdemona said. “I’ve deliberately kept him awake for hours and hours. The rest of first class was not amused.”

“How did you get from JFK?”

“Caught the Connecticut limousine. I wasn’t game to tell Myron that I was coming home. He wouldn’t understand.”

And off she went with Julian, talking some nonsense in his ear. All the ghosts had vanished.

“We didn’t find a thing in all that darkroom and radio gear,” Ted Kelly said gloomily. “Not a goddamn thing!”

“Did you really think you would?” Carmine asked, still wrapped in the bliss of having Desdemona and Julian home.

“I guess not, but it’s a disappointment all the same. I will admit, Carmine, that you and/or the Commissioner were pretty clever over the sniper on the Green,” Kelly said, a trifle grudgingly. “We could never find an excuse to search the Cornucopia Board’s homes. Though you’re skating on thin ice. Those guys have the money to take the County of Holloman all the way to the Supreme Court.”

“We’ve apologized for acting overhastily in the stress of the moment. Do you honestly think they will sue us, Ted?” Carmine asked, smiling.

“No. Too much public fuss. They’re petrified that someone will tell Ed Murrow about Ulysses.”

“So thought the Commissioner and/or I.”

“You’re a cunt, Delmonico.”

“Step outside.”

“I take it back. How come everybody knows about Ulysses?”

“Blame yourself. With your voice, you don’t need a megaphone, yet you will persist in having your meetings right here in a cop diner. The ears flap like Dumbo.”

“I hate small towns!”

“This is a small city, not a town.”

“Same difference. You all know too much about each other.”

“Switch from your turkey to your eagle hat for a moment. Is it true that the entire Cornucopia Board is flying to Zurich in an attempt to acquire some Swiss company that makes transistors?”

“Who’s your source?” Kelly demanded suspiciously.

“Erica Davenport’s ex-secretary, Richard Oakes, who is now demoted to working for Michael Donald Sykes, yet another unhappy victim of top management,” Carmine said, toying with a plain salad. “Oakes and I went for a stroll this morning along the banks of the Pequot, where our words floated away on the breeze and our only witnesses were a flock of gulls. We must be in for a storm.”

“Why are we in for a storm?” Kelly asked, sidetracked.

“The gulls, Ted! Inland a bit?”

“Oh! What exactly did Oakes tell you?”

“That it’s more profitable these days to make transistors than cuckoo clocks, and that this Swiss company is onto something big. The word’s out, so everyone’s after the firm. Oakes said Cornucopia’s howling for the moon. Neither he nor Sykes can understand why the Board is going to Zurich.”

“But we know why,” Kelly said grimly.

“That we do. The trip enables Ulysses to take his purloined secrets with him. Which tells me, Mr. Kelly, that Ulysses hasn’t passed any to Moscow since sometime before April third. His briefcase must be full.”

“Tell me about it! There’s nothing we can do, Carmine! The bastard will depart the country smelling like a rose, safely hemmed in by his fellow Board members.”

Carmine felt like pacing, but that would rivet all eyes on them as well as all ears. Instead, he threw his hands into the air wildly. “But how did he talk the others into making the trip? They’re businessmen! If Sykes and Oakes know they’re howling at the moon, so must they! How did he bring them around?”

“That’s the easy part,” Kelly said ruefully. “The Board’s just taken delivery of a brand-new Lear jet-long-range fuel tanks, reclining seats, spare pilot-the works. I bet all of them are eager to see what color the sky is over Zurich. Even better, the wives will have to stay home. Not enough room with a three-man flight crew and a couple of hostesses.”

“When is this jaunt happening?” Carmine asked.

“Tomorrow afternoon. The jet’s on the tarmac here. Then they’ll fly down to JFK to get international clearance,” Kelly said, and sighed. “Yep, tomorrow afternoon all Cornucopia’s secrets fly away, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Ulysses is going to get away with it, Carmine thought as he walked back up Cedar Street to County Services. The fact that I know who he is beyond a shadow of a doubt is irrelevant; I have absolutely no proof. Just a cop’s instinct and the end result of myriad little facts and details coming together in my mind, some of those facts and details gotten with great pain and the calling in of favors.

Kelly doesn’t know, and I’m not inclined to tell him. Fate pushed him into being here, a behemoth, and there’s a message in that: he belongs to a behemoth. He’s not the problem, it’s his faceless bosses, the ones who’ll push the buttons, the papers and the people in that ponderous sequence of steps protocol dictates before the big guns are ready for firing. By the time the sixteen-inchers roar, Ulysses will have performed his conjuring trick and look squeaky-clean. Ulysses is one guy; it doesn’t take an army to catch him. In fact, an army can’t. No one would notice him slink off in the clouds of dust. Let Ted Kelly go his way; I’ll go mine because I know who and what I have to contend with, have known since the significance of Bart Bartolomeo’s words sank into my mind and the lightbulb lit up.

What I have to do is get Ulysses for murder. It’s neater and more final, if final can have a degree. My espionage facts and details paint a picture, but I don’t have an atom of proof; when Ulysses paints the same picture it will be more convincing. Whereas the murders he’s committed must leave a trail of hard evidence that I can find if I look in the right places.

He had long passed County Services and decided now to keep going for a while. The wind was whipping up a little, but it felt good snatching at his face. He glanced up at the sky to see mackerel cloud up there and found the time to file a resolution to make sure the shutters on his house were closed before he went to bed. Then it was back to Ulysses.

Think, Carmine, think! Who did Ulysses kill with his own hands? Desmond Skeps. Dee-Dee Hall, which flummoxes me. Why a whore who gives great blow jobs? No one else. His assistant killed Evan Pugh, Cathy Cartwright and Beatrice Egmont. Hired guns shot the three blacks-black hired guns, to blend into the neighborhood. The assistant impersonated a peddler of potions named Reuben to trick Peter Norton’s wife, and probably egged on Joshua Butler. It may have taken Ulysses himself to pierce Pauline Denbigh’s armor, but he didn’t kill the Dean. I don’t have the chance of a snowflake in hell to prove any of them. It has to be Skeps or Dee-Dee, or both.

What were his weapons?

Desmond Skeps… A hypodermic needle and several syringes, inexpertly wielded. Once upon a time he was shown how to use them, but the years have gone by since, and Skeps must have had tricky veins. Curare. An ammoniac household liquid. Drano. A tourniquet. Chloral hydrate in a glass of single malt Scotch. A safety razor. A midget soldering iron. Steel wire.

Dee-Dee… A cutthroat razor. Only a scalpel has that kind of edge apart from a razor, and even Patsy’s autopsy blades couldn’t inflict a wound like that on a standing woman by an assailant looking her in the face. It’s the way forefinger and thumb hold the junction of the razor’s shell and its-tang? Very close up, and very personal. Ulysses must have been drenched in Dee-Dee’s blood like a man under a running tap. He didn’t cut the carotid arteries until the jugular veins slowed to a trickle, then he got a second bath. Hate! This was done in absolute hatred fiercer by far than Desmond Skeps. Who escorted Dee-Dee to the banquet. That says Skeps knew why Ulysses hated Dee-Dee, even if Skeps didn’t know Ulysses was Ulysses. And what was it with Dee-Dee? She stood and took her death without a protest, according to Patsy. So she knew why Ulysses hated her, and admitted her guilt.