Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

“Cumbersome to remove, but feasible,” he said, picking up a crowbar and inserting it under the overlapping lip of the step.

He found the one that lifted on his fifth attempt. It was fitted as snugly as the others, but dislodged when levered and broke into jagged pieces.

“He doesn’t open the compartment with a crowbar, Carmine. See? The section actually slides outward on runners like an expensive drawer. I’ve broken it,” he ended with some regret. “Such nice work too.” Up went his shoulders in a shrug. “No use regretting. Where’s my camera?”

The Holloman PD used supermarket brown paper bags for large items of evidence, small brown paper bags, and little brown paper envelopes. Abe’s camera flashing blue under his eyes, Carmine flinched at the smell emanating from the compartment, then put both hands inside and withdrew a pair of coveralls akin to a boilersuit. Flash, flash from the camera. The garment was rigid with browned, dried blood, so much so that it took time to compress it into folds, reduce it to something that would slide into the bag. It had not been as carefully preserved as Lancelot Sterling’s souvenir; mold and mildew fuzzed and whiskered its crevices, and insects scurried for shelter.

“There’s nothing else inside,” said Abe, disappointed.

“Well, we photographed it in situ, withdrawn, the step, the sliding mechanism and everything else we can think of,” Carmine said, sitting back on his heels. “It’s enough, but I want the razor. Where is it?”

“You said enshrined, but you don’t enshrine anything you revere in the same space as you put your bloody clothes,” Abe said. “The Ghost, Carmine! Think adoration.”

“Then it’s somewhere else in here, Abe. In one of these columns. There must be a column drum with a compartment in it at about… head height. So he can look without touching.”

“Won’t happen,” Abe said pessimistically. “The marble will be too thick to sound hollow. There must be a spring that opens a door when pressed, but not manually. At the weight, given that the door will be the full length of one column drum, Smith must have electrically wired the spring. Wiring under the ground, under the steps and the floor, up inside the shrine column. All of them are probably hollow at their centers, but the shrine one much more so. I bet he triggers the door by an impulse from a wireless control he holds in his hand-he’s a ham radio nut, he must know every trick there is. If he wasn’t carrying the control to Zurich with him-and why would he?-then it’s lying in the open among the other junk in his radio shack.”

“Check the columns with a magnifier first, Abe. If there is a door, the joins must show.”

“Look at a column closely, Carmine-any column will do.”

“Shit!” said Carmine, peering. “A thin line runs down the middle of each flute.”

“We have to find his control. Either that, or demolish the whole temple.”

“Which would be a terrible shame,” Carmine agreed. “Okay, Abe, go look in the radio shack. Our warrant doesn’t extend to the house, but the shack’s in the open on the roof. Find the control, and it won’t matter-no, it does matter! Smith’s too rich for us to bluff the lawyers he’ll hire. Back I go to the Judge.”

Two hours elapsed before Carmine returned with a warrant to look in the radio shack. Judge Thwaites, horrified at the news that evidence had already been recovered implicating Smith in murder, made it a sweeping one. If they needed, they could search the house as well.

They didn’t need to. A search of the radio shack yielded three small switch panels of the kind people use to open their garage doors. The difference was that all three were homemade. The second opened the door hidden in one column.

Folded into its ivory shell, the razor was perched on two forked silver prongs arising from a stand worked in exquisite filigree; the whole cavity was lined with padded crimson satin.

“The stand isn’t silver,” Abe said. “It’s not tarnished.”

“My guess is chromium plating rather than platinum,” said Carmine, peering closely.

Using his clean handkerchief, he removed the razor, taking care not to smudge its surfaces. It hadn’t been washed, and dried blood coated it thickly, especially around the hinge. It went into a brown envelope, sealed and witnessed.

“I should have remembered to bring rubber gloves,” Patsy’s technician said regretfully. “Dr. O’Donnell is very keen to make them compulsory for gathering evidence.”

“It’s okay, we’ll manage,” Carmine said. “After all the fuss about this case dies down, the Commissioner and your boss are planning a think tank about evidence. It’s a headache.”

“If Smith’s prints are on that razor,” Abe said, packing up his camera, “we’ve got him cold.”

“Provided the prints are either in the blood itself or over the top of the blood,” Carmine said.

“They will be, Carmine, they will be!”

“What I’m wondering is what those other two garage door buttons open. Doubting Doug is going to murder me , but I think I have to have a warrant for this entire property, inside and out, and go around every room, statue, sundial, pillar and post until I open two other electrically controlled secret doors. I have a feeling it will pay me to do that,” Carmine said.

“You’ve already got warrants up the wazoo,” Abe objected.

“Yes, but the judicial climate is changing, Abe, and the cops who don’t go with it are fools. I want my new warrant to specify that I’m looking for what these two controls open.”

“Then make sure the batteries powering them are new.”

On Saturday the Delmonico couple piled into the Fairlane and set off for Orleans. Even though she knew she would have to wait elsewhere while Carmine quizzed Philomena Skeps, Desdemona was delighted at the expedition. She had never been to Cape Cod, and the prospect of a rare day out with Carmine thrilled her. In Holloman he was at the mercy of his huge family, and so by extension was she, not to mention the demands of his job. Now she was almost one hundred percent sure she had him captive for eight or ten hours. No one was going to walk through the door, no phone was going to ring asking for his police presence. Into the bargain, it was a perfect day on the cusp of summer.

Julian had been left with Aunt Maria and a tribe of girl cousins who would spoil him rotten, and Desdemona was not so doting a mother that she fretted when he wasn’t with her. This was a holiday, and she could see from the volume of traffic on I-95 that quite a number of other people had decided to take a drive Capeward on such a beautiful day. The only thing that blighted her mood was Carmine’s wearing a.38 automatic on his belt together with his gold captain’s shield. But when she opened the glove box to put a bag of candy inside and saw a second.38 nestled among spare ammunition clips, she gasped in horror.

“Oh, I don’t believe it!” she cried. “Where are we going, to Dodge City?”

“You’ve been watching television,” he accused, smiling.

“And you’ve been accumulating paranoia! Honestly, Carmine! Two guns? Extra ammunition? How can I be comfortable in the midst of an arsenal? Is Julian to see this sort of thing?”

“The spare is always in the glove box, Desdemona. You don’t normally open it, is all. I’d forgotten it was there.”

“Codswallop! You’d forget your own head first!”

“Well, maybe.” He grinned. “Without my sidearm I feel naked, and that’s the truth. When we go into a HoJo’s for some breakfast, I’ll be wearing my jacket and no one will know. John Silvestri suggested I take you, but don’t make me regret it, Desdemona. I have to see two suspects today, and while I don’t expect fireworks, it’s a stupid cop that isn’t prepared for them.”