In answer, Carmine looked at his watch. “Bed, Julian.”
This never provoked the storms it used to. Julian was one of those unfortunate human beings cursed with a night owl’s nature — he found it difficult to get to sleep and even harder to wake up. Prunella Balducci had explained that it was simply the way Julian was made, not an impulse to disobedience. So a TV set appeared in the nursery tuned permanently to a cartoon channel, and Julian lay in bed and watched; for some reason, this lulled him to sleep far earlier than a dark and silent room did. Carmine called it a part of his defense attorney persona, though his accompanying laugh was a little wry. Julian did have defense attorney characteristics, there was no denying it.
He came out of the bean bag lithely, as befitted such a tall and robust child. His beauty was still beauty, though it would transform into something more masculine long before he hit the playground of St. Bernard’s Boys’ School — dense black curls, black brows and lashes, topaz colored eyes with a dark ring around the iris that gave them a piercing look.
A kiss for Mommy, a kiss for Daddy, and he was gone, the book put tidily away on “his” shelf. Carmine’s son: order and method, a place for everything.
“What’s for dinner?” Carmine asked.
“Lasagna and salad, crisp bread rolls on the side.”
“Fantastic!” He got himself a second drink. “What happened today to upset you, Desdemona?”
“The Monday Julians, is all. After having you to help me with him over the weekend, Monday is always hard. I love him to death, God knows I do, but we weren’t fortunate with the personality of our first-born, Carmine. He’s a permanent handful, not because he’s nasty or malign, he isn’t. But he’s domineering and intensely driven. I just don’t have the strength I did before this wretched depression.” She flopped into her chair and stared at her drink, frowning. “No, love, don’t freshen it up. I have a strange feeling that I ought to limit myself to one drink at night and one glass of wine with the meal. I’m a huge person, so I can tolerate alcohol better than a basketball cheerleader, yet … I don’t have addictive qualities, but I know I can’t let myself get fuzzy in the head. It’s a feeling, that’s all.”
“Go with it. Gut instincts are valid, and you do seem to attract trouble from time to time,” Carmine said, voice tender. “Let’s talk about my case. You think it’s only early days?”
“Yes. This is one of your difficult cases, dear heart, and I’ve come to some conclusions about them.”
“Expound,” he said, watching her narrowly.
“There’s no concrete evidence, is that right?”
“On the knocker.”
“You have your suspicions?”
“More than suspicions. Convictions.”
“Oh, I see! That makes it far worse, of course. What I’ve noticed about the difficult cases is that the break, if and when it comes, is almost by accident.”
“A fall down a leafy bank,” he said musingly.
“Yes. But if no freak occurrence happens, the only way to solve the case is by confession. Which makes sense,” she said, warming to her theme. “Ordinary crimes are committed by ordinary people. They don’t think things through, they don’t plan for every move and every eventuality. Clever criminals do, and none is more subtle than the poisoner. This tetrodotoxin nearly put you back in Thomas Tinkerman’s Middle Ages, not so? When someone could slip aconite or cyanide into another’s food or drink, and who could tell? I would judge this killer so extremely clever that he — or she!— has successfully planned for every eventuality. It’s like the footprints of a complex dance pattern on a floor — left foot there, right foot here, a turn, a swirl, and who knows where the dance picks up again? This is a confession case, my love, I can see that, which means you have to force a confession not by trickery but by patience and stealth. This killer makes no mistakes.”
“A confession crime,” he said flatly.
“Yes. Consider! A very rare and unobtainable poison gets into the hands of people who were, if not instructed how to use it, at least pushed sufficiently in the right direction to use it. Look at poor Mrs. Tinkerman. All she did was something she’d done a hundred times before. She had no idea that her syringe contained the rare poison. However,” Desdemona said in a dreamy tone, “he didn’t kill Emily Tunbull. That one doesn’t fit, though I think he supplied the poison. John Hall and Thomas Tinkerman. Though Emily’s murder suits him. It muddies the waters, since she died by tetrodotoxin. Oh, he’s clever!”