“I suspect there are answers, but that we haven’t located the right oracle yet,” Carmine said, smiling. “The man who can give us the answers is the old Head Scholar, Don Carter, who’s on my list of interviewees. In the meantime, I suggest you all just take the print run as more logical than it seems.”
“Okay,” said Buzz, and grinned wickedly. “Here’s another question, Carmine: Tinkerman’s pals the Parsons were influential enough to push M.M. into doing as he was told: why not put M.M.’s name on your board as a suspect?”
“I agree he should be a suspect, Buzz,” Carmine said with heavy irony, “but I for one do not have the intestinal fortitude to write Mawson MacIntosh on this blackboard. M.M. is quite capable of murder in defense of his beloved university, but his speciality is assassination — of your character first, and if that doesn’t work, of your very soul. Luckily he’s on the side of the angels, and his victims are always straight from hell.”
Buzz winced, lifted his hands in surrender.
Abe spoke. “I may be off the subject, folks, but has anyone seen Max and Davina’s baby? The famous Alexis?”
A question greeted by blank silence until Delia answered. “I haven’t, and I imagine that means none of you has. What do you suspect, Abe? I’m intrigued.”
“I guess I started out by wondering if there were something wrong with the baby. Then I progressed to wondering if there was a baby at all. I’ve had a couple chats with Emily Tunbull — a nasty piece of work, that one!— and she alerted me when she said she had never really seen Alexis, just a bundle so wrapped up it could have contained a doll,” said Abe. “Her theory is that Alexis is a figment of Davina’s imagination and does not really exist. Emily believes Davina’s tricked the family with Max’s connivance. Emily’s passion is her own son, Ivan, whom the arrival of Alexis dispossessed.”
“Aren’t families interesting?” Delia asked. “What any outsider sees is only what the family intends shall be seen.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, Delia,” Carmine said, “because you are going to examine the existing parameters of the Tunbull family, armed with what we now know about Davina and Uda. Talk to Emily. And demand to see the unswaddled baby.” He threw his head back and laughed. “I’d love to go to His Honor the Judge and ask for a warrant to produce an unswaddled baby!”
“He’s just persnickety enough to give you one,” said Abe.
Prunella, still in residence with her parents, had taken Julian and Alex for the day and night to give Desdemona a rare chance to be alone all evening with her husband. Carmine’s experience of weekdays had led him to pick Wednesday as his treat, on the theory that if it went as Wednesdays usually did, he would be home early. And he was right; the tetrodotoxin murders had indeed foundered, and he was through the door by five.
“How lovely,” said Desdemona, smiling as her eyes rested on him in his chair, free of a child, yes, but hampered by a big, fat, orange cat. “I admit that the pets are worse for you, as they crave to sit in your lap, but Frankie makes such a wonderful foot rest.” She rolled her bare heels and ankles across Frankie’s side, an activity that produced the dog’s awesome groans.
“Family life is always different from the life of lovers.” He sipped his drink, knowing he had the leisure to make it last and still have another couple of weakies before dinner. So he asked: “What’s for dinner?”
“One of your favorites. Saltimbocca alla Romana, with ziti in a plain tomato sauce on the side, and a green salad with walnut oil vinaigrette. After that, a deliciously smelly, runny cheese that cost a bomb.”
“I have died and gone to heaven.”
“Tell me about the case.”
He did so through that drink and the next; she listened intently, frowning occasionally. At the end she got him a third drink, then sighed. “Poor Millie,” she said obscurely.
“Why single her out, lovely lady?”
“She was so terribly young when she made her decision, and she’s far too stiff-necked ever to renege on it. Fifteen! The last of the gilt would have worn off the gingerbread by her mid-twenties, by which time all her friends from high school would have been married at least once, had a couple of children, and spent much of their time moaning over furniture Millie would have deemed palatial. What did Millie have, in her mid-twenties? A selfishly genius husband whose color had given her endless pain, a series of vile apartments full of Good Will furniture, a shared old car, hardly a dime in her purse, and not the faintest echo of children’s laughter — or tears.”