Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

Dear God, thought Carmine, I don’t want to hear this. Take a break, Mr. Smith, sleep a while. Did you love your wayward daughter, or was she an embarrassing nuisance? I can’t tell.

Smith continued. “There was no difference between Dee-Dee and the heroin. Both were vital necessities to Anna, who moved out of Ron’s apartment and into Dee-Dee’s.” Another sinister chuckle. “But Ron refused to take his marching orders. The money Anna had lavished on him was now being lavished on Dee-Dee. You would think, Captain, wouldn’t you, that my daughter would have accepted my offer to house her and Dee-Dee in the lap of luxury on the West Coast? No, that would have been too convenient for her parents! She and Dee-Dee liked living in squalor! The heroin was easy to obtain, and what else mattered?”

“How long were Anna and Dee-Dee together?” Carmine asked.

“Two years.”

“And this was back in the very early 1950s?”

“Yes.”

“Then Dee-Dee wasn’t much older than Anna. Two kids.”

“Don’t you dare pity them! Or me!” Smith cried.

“I do pity them, but I don’t pity you. What happened?”

“Ron invaded Dee-Dee’s apartment with a cutthroat razor, intending to teach them a lesson. I am not conversant with the cant, but I gather that he was ‘off his face’ with drugs. So it was Anna used the razor. She cut his throat very efficiently. Dee-Dee called me at home and told me. I was obliged to deal with that nightmare just as my-my patriotic socialist duties at Cornucopia were commencing. Ron vanished-and don’t hope to find his body, Captain! It lies very far from Connecticut.”

“Where is Anna now?” Carmine asked.

“In a camp in Siberia where she has no access to heroin or sex or whores,” her father said. “She’s thirty-one years old.”

“And all these years later you took out your spleen on a poor, defenseless whore?” Carmine asked incredulously. “Christ, has it never occurred to you that you yourself might be to blame for some of it?”

Smith chose not to hear the second part. “Defenseless, nothing! Poor, nothing!” he shouted. “Dee-Dee Hall is a symptom of the disease rotting America’s stinking carcass! Women like her should be shot or put to hard labor! Whores-drugs-Jews-homosexuals-blacks-adolescent promiscuity!”

“You make me sick, Mr. Smith,” Carmine said evenly. “I don’t think you’re a patriotic socialist, I think you’re a Nazi. Marx and Engels were both Jews, and they’d spit on you! How long is it since you slid inside the original Philip Smith’s shell? He was a full bird colonel in the U.S. Army, but a shadow. He answered to no one, he did what he pleased, he went where he pleased, and everybody on his West German base assumed he was someone big with one of the secret services. How do I know this when the FBI thought you were CIA and dropped their enquiries? Easy, Mr. Smith! I spent the war in the military police-there’s nothing and no one I can’t learn about. In 1946, when he went on a secret mission, one Philip Smith was kidnapped and shot, and another Philip Smith took his place. That Philip Smith-you-returned from Germany to Boston early in 1947, complete with foreign wife, like so many of those Occupation guys. The hardest thing to conceal was the age of your marriage and your kids. But you did it the best way-you just appeared, a discharged colonel and his family, in Boston.”

Smith was listening impassively, his mouth shaped into a sneer. But the eyes, windows on a morphine-dulled brain, were confused and astounded.

“The aristocratic Boston millionaire adopted an aloof pose that enabled him to fill the shoes of someone never seen since 1940, when the original Smith, having no close relatives, joined the army way ahead of Pearl Harbor. You manufactured a blood kinship to the Skepses in the shrewdest way-simply say it to all and sundry, and sooner or later all and sundry will believe it. Including the Skepses. You joined the Board of Cornucopia in 1951, four years after your reappearance in Boston society. Having built that beautiful house, you moved to Holloman and became who you really are-a rude, arrogant, ruthless shit. People at Cornucopia, including the very young Desmond Skeps, accepted the fact that you adorned the Board but did no work. After all, what’s unique about that? Most members of boards do nothing except take fat fees.”

“Envious, Captain?” Smith asked with a purr in his voice.

“Of you? No way, Mr. Smith. I am consumed with admiration of the dedicated socialist agent doing his patriotic duty as he lives high off the hog among his ideological enemies. You’ve never lived in a cold-water walk-up flat on the sixth floor where the pipes freeze, and you never will. You, Mr. Smith, are far above ordinary people, and that won’t change, whichever country you live in, will it, huh? The USSR or the USA, you’ll still be in a limousine, still have servants to treat like dirt, still have all the perks of a rich and powerful party man. Here, it’s a capitalist party. There, it’s the Communist Party.

Makes no difference to you! Well, you’ve failed both masters. You’re of no further use.”

“What a romantic you are, Delmonico,” Smith said, lips distorted in an anger he couldn’t quite suppress.

“I’ve been accused of that before, but I don’t find it an insult.” Carmine leaned forward in his chair until his face loomed close to Smith’s. “You know what’s most romantic of all? That you were exposed for what you are by a capitalist toy like a sex-symbol sports car. You so nearly got away with it! That you didn’t is entirely your own fault. Think about that when you sit on your stinking toilet in your prison cell, staring at the stains on your hand-me-down mattress! They’ll have to isolate you because the most degenerate killer or child molester will deem you the pits-a traitor to your country. Oh, but you figure you’ll be imprisoned for murder, not treason, right? Rich guy, bribing the warden for special privileges? It won’t happen, Mr. Smith. Whichever prison is honored by your presence is going to know all about your treason. Your books will arrive covered in shit, your magazines will be torn to ribbons, your pens won’t work-”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Smith screamed, his face the color of his bedsheet. “You wouldn’t dare! The FBI and CIA won’t let it happen! They need names, they think I can give them names! I will be very comfortably housed, wait and see!”

“Who’s the romantic here?” Carmine asked with a grin. “They’ll leave you to Connecticut’s mercy until one of your names bears fruit, and none will. The only names you know belong to your own cell, all implicated in murder.”

“You’re wrong!”

“I’m right. You’ll never come to trial for treason, it’s too sensitive. Prison for murder suits everyone, Mr. Smith, and there won’t be any comfort.”

Smith’s free left hand flailed. “All this for a whore?”

“You bet your life it is,” Carmine said grimly. “Desmond Skeps found out about Dee-Dee and Anna, and brought Dee-Dee to the Maxwell banquet to flaunt her in your face. I’m guessing that he blamed you for the breakup of his marriage and then his affair with Erica-why, I suspect you don’t know any more than I do. He was a paranoid kind of guy, and you represented a bunch of things he envied. You wore your clothes as easily as you did your persona, while he was behind the door when God handed out the gifts. Among his other deficiencies, he lacked courage, so he fortified himself with booze that night. What he didn’t know was that you were Ulysses-but Erica did. She told him. Your good luck that he was too drunk to take it in. Yet that banquet was the start of your downfall.”

“Nonsense, all nonsense,” Smith said wearily.