Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

And the feminism aspect fizzled out with Pauline Denbigh. Carmine abandoned it without much regret. All his enquiries had produced nothing that helped the case against Dean Denbigh’s wife, nor had it unearthed a lover. Perhaps she truly was a sexually frigid person. Perhaps all her energies were channeled into women’s causes and her love of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Bianca Tolano tore at the heartstrings. “I noted her at the table next to Dee-Dee the whore, and couldn’t tell the difference between them,” Smith said on the twenty-second of December. “A pair of whores! One the brassy finished product, the other the demure, sweet whore-in-the-making. The one in the making reminds me of Erica, so I’ll visit the death on her that I long to give Erica. I’ve seen my tool. A sycophantic crawler named Lancelot Sterling drew my attention to him when I paid a visit to the twentieth floor of Accounting. A crippled runt named Joshua Butler. I admit I went there thinking Sterling might be my tool, but he’s a deviate, not a cripple. Scum! When Joshua Butler left work I loitered in my Maserati and offered him a ride home. He was enthralled! I ended by taking him out to my house-no one was home-and giving him dinner. Stravinsky waited on table and agreed he was perfect for our purposes. By the end of the evening he was so enchanted he would have done anything for me. Not that I mentioned what I wanted! I simply started peering into his more disgusting fantasies. He’ll do beautifully, though Stravinsky, stronger-stomached, will have to do most of the psychic exploration.”

Intermixed with Smith’s cold-blooded planning were touches of-mercy? Carmine wasn’t sure that was the right word. But he did seem to have compassion for two of the victims, Beatrice Egmont and Cathy Cartwright. Eventually Carmine concluded that Smith esteemed them as worthy matrons who did not deserve to die, so should die quickly, painlessly.

Evan Pugh, he was interested to see, was intended to get a dose of KGB powder and die of nonspecific septicemia. Not a pleasant death by any means, but not as payback as the death he did get. Nor as terrifying while the agony lasted. He would have been in the hospital, drugged to the limit and not really suffering the way the bear trap made him suffer.

The three black victims had their entry.

“The waiters will have to die too. Interesting, that for all their prating, white Americans still use black ones as their servants. And their whores, witness Dee-Dee. Stravinsky will procure out-of-state assassins-three, one for each. I like the idea of three different guns, all American-made. With silencers, as in the movies. Stravinsky thinks I go too far, but the decisions are not Stravinsky’s. I-am-so-bored!!! These American fools can’t catch me, so what does it matter?”

Jesus, you supercilious bastard! You’re bored! Isn’t that a shame?

The entry for the twenty-ninth of March was fascinating.

“And to think I was convinced the threat was over! Now I find it isn’t. How stimulating! I am wide awake, alert and intelligent, as their advertisement says. Well, Mr. Evan Pugh, Motor Mouth is going to kill you differently than originally planned. The bear trap will be used, with Stravinsky doing an impersonation of Joshua Butler. The preparatory work has already been done, just in case. I have suspected for a long time that the blackmailer would be Mr. Evan Pugh, so the beam has been located and the bolt holes reamed out one size too small, no threads. Stravinsky has the proper tools, a strong right arm and sufficient height. You shall have your wad of money-a drop in the ocean to me! And you shall have a most painful death. Motor Mouth. So American. The bear trap is made in America too.”

The entry on the fourth of April concerned Desmond Skeps.

“Dead at last, Desmond Skeps, with your perpetual whinging about Philomena, your denial of your own guilt in driving her away. A very good woman, for an American.

“I did enjoy watching him die! I despise those men who obtain sexual pleasure from the suffering of others, but I confess that I was moved to an erection at the sight of Desmond Skeps trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey, eyes and brain alive, the rest of him as dead as a dodo. I played with him, I and my tiny soldering iron. How he tried to scream! But his vocal cords weren’t up to it. Just hoarse yowls. The ammonia in his veins really hurt, but the Drano at the end was inspired. What a way to go! I loved every minute of it. From the moment he told me that he’d appointed Erica as young Desmond’s guardian, he had no further use. He was so enamored of her business acumen, never knowing that the acumen was mine. Bye-bye, Desmond!”

Of Erica’s murder he had nothing much to say; clearly it wasn’t necessary for him to dwell on her agony.

“Stravinsky broke the bitch’s arms and legs one bone at a time, but she gave nothing away except the names of her Party friends in Moscow. Had she had anything more to confess, she would have. Stravinsky especially enjoyed it. We agreed that it would have to be the hired assassin Manfred Mueller-as good a name as any-who got rid of her body. I wanted it put on Delmonico’s property, Stravinsky thought that a mistake. Of course I won the argument, so Mueller took the body there. My luck that the gigantic wife appeared. Not that it made much difference. Mueller got away cleanly. So, unfortunately, did the wife. A grotesque.”

The entry on the sniper in the copper beech was extremely interesting; Smith was very rattled.

“I have lost my luck,” he wrote. “The great Julius Caesar believed implicitly in luck, and who am I to contradict him? But the trouble with luck is not that it runs out-it doesn’t. Rather, it encounters another man’s luck that is stronger, and fails. As mine has. I have encountered Delmonico’s luck. Now all I can do is send him in a thousand different directions at once. Manfred Mueller is willing to kill as many of Holloman’s illustrious citizens as he can, and lay down his own life in the process. His price? Ten million dollars in a Swiss bank account in his wife’s name. I have done it. But Stravinsky says it will not answer, and I very much fear that Stravinsky is right.”

Interesting, thought Carmine. He said something like that to my face. About losing his luck because mine is stronger.

That was the last entry in the fifth book. Tired and sick, Carmine gathered his evidence together and put it in an old box he marked

ODDMENTS-1967. Then he took it to the cage and saw it put among a dozen other equally grimy boxes. Even if the faithful Stravinsky donned the uniform of a Holloman cop and came asking, he would not get it.

Stravinsky… A code name, it had to be a code name. The exercise books had given absolutely no hint as to who Stravinsky was. The music? No, surely not! Any bets Stravinsky is Stravinsky because Stravinsky picked the name? Or the KGB bosses? He’s like Smith, KGB. And here I thought Desdemona had seen him when Erica’s body was dumped. Now I learn that the sniper dumped the body. Smith always spoke of Stravinsky as an almost-equal, as someone whose opinion he respected. Stravinsky was treasured, valued too much to confide his identity to the pages of these diaries of murder.

“I always feel let down at the end of a difficult case,” Carmine said to Desdemona that evening. “As usual, the end of it depends on the courts-anticlimactic, not high drama. Smith can’t escape conviction, but I strongly suspect Pauline Denbigh will, and as for Stravinsky, he won’t even be identified.”

“You don’t think he might be Purvey or Collins?” she asked.

“No, that feels wrong. This is master and apprentice, not a hierarchy.”

“What will happen to Cornucopia?”

“There’s only one hand strong enough to take the helm, and it belongs to Wal Grierson, who won’t like it one little bit. His heart’s at Dormus with the turbines, not spread across thirty different companies.” Carmine shrugged. “Still, he’ll do his duty-pray note that I do not include the word ‘patriotic’ in that! Meaningless cant, when it’s trotted out endlessly.”