Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

I wonder if he kept those blood-saturated clothes? If his hatred burned that hot, maybe he needed a souvenir. The razor? That, he will definitely have. Enshrined somewhere. Not as a remembrance. As an instrument of execution.

An image rose behind Carmine’s eyes so vividly that the hairs on his neck stood up. Jesus! I know where! I know where!

His steps slowed; he stopped, turned around and walked back to County Services at a steady pace, jubilation dying. Knowing was one thing; marshaling his forces to prove it was another. Doubting Doug would have reverted to normal; easier to get blood out of a stone than a warrant to search premises. Not that Ulysses would part with his mementos. In that respect there was no hurry. Strictly speaking, the urgency was not his affair, as it concerned the spy rather than the killer. Except that Carmine was an American patriot. It was his duty to foil the spy too.

By the time he gained his office his demeanor was as always. Delia, bursting on his gaze in green and orange paisley, gave him the kind of fright that only days ago would have provoked a smile. Today it was merely jarring.

“Abe’s down with Lancelot Sterling,” she said, “and Corey is skulking around the aerodrome. He said something about a new Lear jet, but I confess I was only half listening. I was on the phone to Desdemona.”

“I might have known,” he said, torn between an urge to tell Delia what was filling his mind and reluctance to burden her with his own frustrations.

“They’re safe here,” she said, smiling.

That decided him. “Sit down, Delia. I need to talk.”

By the end of it she looked horrified. Then she did a very un-Delia thing: she stroked his arm. “My dear Carmine, I fully comprehend your dilemma. But if Ulysses hated Dee-Dee with such passion, it must relate to some sort of ruination, and she must have been the instrument of it. I think it might pay me to make exhaustive enquiries into Dee-Dee’s background. That’s the trouble with prostitutes. No one bothers to look at them with a magnifying glass. Am I still empowered to act as a detective?”

“I haven’t rescinded the order, as you well know.”

“Then I’m going to see Dee-Dee’s pimp, her friends, enemies and acquaintances.” She paused, brows lifted. “It would be a lot easier if I had a badge,” she said.

“That far I won’t go, Delia. Don’t push your luck.”

The storm blew into Holloman on gale-force winds halfway through the night. Curled in bed with his front shielding Desdemona’s back, Carmine woke to the whipping roar of hard-driven rain on the windows, lifted his head to listen, then lay back with a sigh. No hope that this would last long enough to delay the Cornucopia expedition to Zurich. By afternoon the gale would be blown out.

“Mmf?” Desdemona asked.

Carmine cupped a breast. “Just the storm. Go back to sleep.”

“No damage, but the garden’s a mess,” Desdemona said the next morning, removing her rubber boots in the laundry. “I had high hopes for a weeping cherry, but a flying branch clobbered it. Too exposed to the elements, our dream home.”

“You can’t have it all, lovely lady.” Carmine shrugged his shoulders into his jacket and poked through the waterproofed coats hanging on pegs. “It’s going to rain all day, so don’t take Julian out. If you need groceries, call someone.”

A rather cold rain beating in his face, Carmine plodded up the path to their big garage, which had to be on East Circle itself and thus had no sheltered communication with the house, a good fifty feet lower. Inside the garage he shed his raincoat before climbing into the Fairlane; he’d park under the building and keep dry. As soon as he keyed the ignition he turned on the police radio and sat listening. Nothing much, just terse talk larded with the abstruse numbers and letters designed to keep police business the business of the police. If only it did! he thought as he rolled out into the aftermath of the night’s storm. Maybe I’ll take a detour and look at the Cornucopia jet. But I won’t announce my intention on the radio. Too many people make a hobby of tuning in, and they don’t need a radio shack.

Holloman’s little airport lay behind chain-link fencing on the west arm of the Harbor, which was part industrial wasteland and part working factories. Between it and the perpetually humming artery that was I-95 reared the clusters of tall cylindrical tanks holding every kind of petroleum-based fuel from aviation gasoline to diesel and heating oil.

Instead of using I-95 for such a short run, Carmine drove along the waterfront dockland, past the fuel farm, and so, finally, turned through the open airport gate onto a concrete apron used as a parking lot. He crossed it and swung around behind the upmarket shed that served Holloman’s commuters as a terminal, his eyes absorbing their first sight of a Lear jet. Disappointingly small, it sat not far from the shed in the glory of flawless white paint, the Cornucopia horn-of-plenty logo emblazoned on its tail.

A rap on his passenger-side window made Carmine jump. Corey opened the door and slid in, coat streaming.

“You’re wet, Corey!”

“ It’s wet, Carmine! Sorry, but I had to hide my wheels. No choice except to run through the rain. I figured you’d cruise by to take a look. What d’you think? Squeezing into that must be like going inside a tube of toothpaste. Doesn’t look as if they’d be able to stand up, though I guess they can in a central aisle. Give me a train any day.”

“It’s a power thing, Corey. They can spit on the peasants being herded like cattle. Have you been here all night?”

“Didn’t need to. They weren’t going anywhere in that storm. They mightn’t be going anywhere today if the rain doesn’t stop.”

“What do you hope to find?” Carmine asked curiously.

The long, dark, beaky face screwed up, the dark eyes narrowed. “I wish I knew! It’s just a feeling I have, boss. Something’s in the wind-or the rain, or the sea spray. I don’t know.”

“I’ll send someone over with a bacon roll and a thermos of coffee. In an unmarked, over by that hangar,” Carmine said. “Go with your hunches, Corey.”

And what do you think about that? he asked himself as he drove away. Corey’s found his own case. The fact that nothing’s going to come of it is beside the point. It should have occurred to me that the Cornucopia bunch are sneaky enough to aim for an earlier departure.

Two bacon rolls and a thermos of coffee were most welcome. Warm and relatively dry, Corey Marshall settled to spend a few boring hours of waiting. The windows of his car were cranked down just enough to prevent his windshield fogging up, and he was cunningly situated where he couldn’t be seen, yet could see in all directions. The rain had steadied, neither pouring down nor sprinkling, and it had been falling now for eight hours. The ground was hard even where it was exposed; between that, the big areas of concrete, and some patches of tar-seal, runoff was copious. On the road outside the airport gate a section of the bed had sagged and crumbled, plugging up a drain grating and causing the water to pool fairly deeply. Lovely weather for ducks, thought Corey, trying to find interest in everything. He had to stay awake, but more than that: he had to stay alert.

A great deal of his time was occupied in thinking about the lieutenancy and, he had come to realize with a sinking horror, a marriage that hadn’t panned out the way he had envisioned. Oh, he loved Maureen and more than loved his two children, who seemed to suffer from Maureen’s deficiencies even more than he did; he pitied them, an awful emotion for a father to feel. He understood that a person’s nature was a given, but he wished with all his heart that Maureen’s nature was less avaricious, less scratchy. His daughter, nine years old, had worked out how to keep out of trouble, mainly by effacing herself, whereas his son, now twelve, was beginning to inherit his mother’s frustrations at the world of men. Always in trouble for untidiness, loudness, poor grades at school. It had come to a head a couple of weeks earlier, and he had hoped that, recalled to a sense of her own imperfections, Maureen would let up on the two males in her home. And she had-for a week. Now it was drifting back to where it usually was.