Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

It took less time than they had originally envisioned. If the batteries powering the controls were kept fresh, one press on a button could last as long as the thumb or fingertip doing the pressing. They became expert at standing in the center of a space and pressing, rotating slowly as they did so. Provided the signal beamed out above occluding furniture or objects, it was powerful enough to work in situations where a garage control would not have. Carmine began to understand the Long Island garage and the missile silo doors. Wow! That must have sent people back to the drawing boards! But what genius to trace the offending control! Kansas City was more captious by far.

They discovered a total of seven concealed compartments, only one of which was triggered by the folly control. That one yielded a metal box similar to three others found elsewhere, all fitted with padlocks. Each compartment was photographed, contents in situ, then contents removed, and contents themselves.

“When are you going to tell the FBI?” Abe asked, back at Cedar Street.

“Only after I’ve filtered out evidence of eleven murders,” Carmine said. “Once that’s done, they can have the espionage data and the controls. Knowing Special Agent Kelly, they’ll be there for months, and end in tearing the place apart stone by stone. Pity, but I can’t think anyone would ever want to live there again.”

Carmine kept Delia but liberated Abe and Corey to take new cases and go back over Smith’s murders.

His trove consisted of four locked metal boxes the size of a shoe box, a stack of ten thin children’s exercise books, five fatter leather-bound books, and a series of Holloman County property plans, including the Cornucopia Building, the County Services building, the Nutmeg Insurance building, and Carmine’s house and grounds on East Circle.

“These, we keep,” he said to Delia, putting the plans to one side. “None relates to his spying activities.”

The leather-bound books were all to do with his spying: codes, ciphers, a journal written in Russian Cyrillic script.

“We hand these over to the FBI,” he said. “If they need additional proof of espionage, here it is.”

“The microdots were proof enough!” Delia snapped.

“Ah, but he’s an embarrassment, you see. In the social pages of papers and magazines, object of articles in the Wall Street Journal and News -how terrible! What do we inspect next? The exercise books or the tin boxes?”

“The boxes,” Delia said eagerly.

“Pandora at heart.” Carmine picked up the one taken from the compartment triggered by the folly control. “If there’s tangible evidence of murder, this is the one.” He picked up a pair of double-action snips and broke the padlock’s U.

“Ohhh!” sighed Delia.

The box held an ampoule and a vial of two curares, six 10cc glass Luer-Lok syringes, a hypodermic needle, steel wire, a tiny soldering iron, an ordinary safety razor, and two small bottles fitted with thick rubber caps.

“Bingo!” cried Carmine. “We’ve got him for the murder of Desmond Skeps.”

“Why on earth did he keep all this?” Delia asked.

“Because it amused him. Or fascinated him. Or he couldn’t bear to part with it,” Carmine said. “Mr. Smith is a mixture.”

Two of the three remaining boxes contained money, each to the sum of $100,000 in mixed denominations.

“But Carmine, he doesn’t need money!”

“His cache for a fast getaway,” Carmine explained. “Once he got to Canada, it’s enough to hire a private jet to anywhere.”

The last metal box contained a 9mm Luger automatic with spare clips and assorted travel documents; among the passports was a Canadian one for a Philippe d’Antry.

“There are none here for his wife,” Delia said sorrowfully.

“Rats and sinking ships, I’m afraid. Just as I’ll bet he’s left her to fend for herself in this crisis. If she has any sense, she’ll have a cache of her own, and disappear.”

“Remain only the exercise books,” Delia said, handing them to Carmine.

“Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian,” he said as he tossed each of the top five onto the FBI pile. “Ah! We have English!” He read for a moment, then looked at Delia, his face puzzled. “It’s as if he has two personae. The spy thought, wrote and worked in Russian. The killer thought, wrote and worked in English. His entire life is compartmentalized! If ever a man was made to be two different men, it’s Mr. Philip Smith a.k.a. whatever his Russian name is.” He reached for the phone. “I’d better tell Desdemona I won’t be home early. With any luck, I’ll find out who his assistant is, maybe even his hirelings.” He held up five of the exercise books. “Straight down the middle. Five in Russian, five in English. And I can’t leave until I’ve read my five and digested their contents.”

He leaned over, took Delia’s hand and lightly kissed it. “I can’t thank you enough, Miss Carstairs, but your part in this is done. Go home and relax.”

“It was my pleasure,” Delia said gruffly, “but I’m not going home. First, I’m off to Malvolio’s to get you a snack and one of Luigi’s thermoses of decent coffee. A burger, a bacon roll or a roast beef sandwich?”

“A burger,” he said, crumbling. Two dinners wouldn’t hurt for one night, would they?

“Then,” she continued, “I’m going around to see Desdemona and Julian. I’ve been so busy since they got back from England that I haven’t had a chance to find out how my potty papa is.”

“From what I’ve been told, potty,” Carmine said.

The first exercise book contained the sketchy details of Smith’s occasional forays into crime during the first fifteen years of his tenure on the Cornucopia Board. The first entry of all, however, predated his appointment.

“The first Skeps has to go,” it said in part. “My orders are explicit, as the son will be much easier to fool. It will be perfect KGB-as much powder as will fit on the head of a thumbtack, made from the same plant my mother used as an aperient when I was a child. A smaller dose would do it, but the swifter the better. In the first teaspoonful of the caviar I buy him, old miser. He wonders at its quality.”

And then, some entries later: “The old man died, and the clock stopped, never to go again. A good song, I like it. The second Desmond Skeps has inherited, and Phil is there. Phil is always there. But I have refused to sit on the Board.”

Two more entries saw Smith on the Board, though the book made no mention of Dee-Dee and his daughter.

It was kept, Carmine was interested to see, as a kind of diary; each entry was dated as day, month, year, which was not the American way of month, day, year. Each entry spoke about the murder of someone who had gotten in Smith’s way, always dispatched by a dose of the magic powder developed by the KGB-a vegetable alkaloid of some kind, probably, unbelievably potent. Which plant? And why did none of his eleven victims of April third, 1967, die of it? Apparently it caused a total breakdown of the body’s systems akin to the death mushroom, and produced a diagnosis of nonspecific septicemia, etiology unknown.

There were no references to what secrets he stole, or when he stole them; these must be in the Russian diaries. What a feast the FBI was in for!

The second-to-last book contained the Maxwell Foundation banquet, but it also contained many ravings about the perfidies of Dr. Erica Davenport, whom Smith loathed.

“I curse the day Moscow foisted this idiot woman on me!” Smith said, his anger-rarely expressed until now-let loose. “A fool, a beautiful fool who has left a trail a kilometer wide for the Americans to trace. When she appeared ten years ago I inundated KGB with protests, only to be told that she had powerful Party friends out to bring KGB down. Said friends have put her here to report on my loyalty. She transmits my every move to Moscow! Ah, but she’s afraid of me! It didn’t take me long to establish ascendancy over her, to intimidate her, to make her cower and cringe. But fear of me does not prevent her reporting back to her Party friends in Moscow, I am perpetually aware of that. Of course I report on her to KGB: I complain of her, I criticize her stupidity. Her friends in the Party may defend her, but I have the ear of KGB, I hold high KGB rank, my power in Moscow is greater than hers.”