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Too Many Murders(105)

By:Colleen McCullough

Rising to his feet, Carmine said his farewells. Philomena didn’t escort him to the Fairlane, Bera did, eyeing the car.

“You’ve put some miles on it coming here three times,” he said, holding the driver’s door open.

“Yeah, well, shit happens,” said Carmine, got in, and drove off with a wave.

A few minutes later he was in the air heading across Nantucket Sound.

“Is that Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard?” he asked as the water became a patchwork quilt land.

“Martha’s Vineyard,” said the pilot.

And so, after flying down I-95 on the Connecticut shore, he reached Holloman while the Fairlane would still have been negotiating the Cape itself. Ducking down as he left the chopper, Carmine resolved to buy Special Agent Ted Kelly a bottle of his favorite tipple. What a difference! Home again in time for a Malvolio’s lunch. The whole trip had taken less than three hours.


For want of something better to do, he went back to his least loved destination, Cornucopia, that afternoon.

Phil Smith had moved into Desmond Skeps’s offices but had not availed himself of Richard Oakes the male secretary, Carmine noted as he waited for Smith’s exquisitely turned out elderly dragon to announce him.

Erica’s decor was still in place, but subtly defeminized; the vases of flowers were gone, the pictures of dreamy country lanes had been replaced by starkly grim Hogarth etchings, and red kid had replaced sage green kid on the padded furniture.

“You need a few swastika flags,” Carmine said.

“Excuse me?”

“A lot of black, white and red in here. Very Nazi.”

“You, Captain, are fond of making incendiary remarks, but I am not rising to the bait today,” Smith said. “I’m too happy.”

“Didn’t like a woman boss, huh?”

“What man genuinely does? I could have stomached her sex, however. What made my gorge rise was her indecision.”

Perhaps aping mourning, Smith was in a black silk suit with a black tie closely covered in white spots; his cuff links were black onyx and yellow gold, his shoes the finest black kid. A sartorial wonder, thought Carmine, sitting down. In fact, Smith looked younger, even handsomer. Being el supremo of Cornucopia obviously pleased him mightily, just as he said.

“Where’s Richard Oakes?” Carmine asked.

Smith looked contemptuous. “He’s a homosexual, Captain, and I don’t like homosexuals. I banished him to Outer Mongolia.”

“And where’s that, in Cornucopia’s version of the globe?”

“Accounting.”

“It would be my Outer Mongolia too, I confess. The arctic wastes of numbers … However, I can’t agree with you about homosexuals. For some men, it’s a natural state of being, not to be confused with some of the sexual criminals I encounter.” To himself he wondered how long it was since Smith had set eyes on Desmond Skeps III—what a shock that was going to be!

The pretense of bonhomie disappeared; Phil Smith reverted to type. “What do you want?” he asked rudely. “I’m a busy man.”

“I want to know your whereabouts all day on the day that Erica Davenport’s body was put in my boat shed.”

“I was here, and I can produce witnesses to vouch for that from eight in the morning until six that evening,” Smith said. “Go and look somewhere else, for God’s sake! The only kind of murder I do is Outer Mongolian. And yes, I would have dealt with Dr. Erica Davenport, but not by extinguishing her life. What kind of punishment is that? By the time I finished with her, she’d have been in a straitjacket.”

“I accept that, Mr. Smith. When you called her indecisive, what did you mean?”

“Exactly what the word suggests. Having a homosexual for a secretary was indicative, believe me. One of the ways Cornucopia stays on top is by absorbing smaller, independent companies, especially if they have clever ideas or find a niche in the market for a new product. Takeover negotiations have a form and a time span that Erica was ignorant of. We missed taking over four companies in fewer than four days, thanks to her. Three belonged to Fred Collins, one to me. We’d been performing the ritual mating dance for months or weeks, depending. But she dithered, the shortsighted fool, then ran to Wallace Grierson.”

“Couldn’t you override her?” Carmine asked curiously.

“Not the way Desmond structured his will—she had the yea or nay, holding Desmond Three’s majority,” Smith said sourly.

“Hmm. So there were advantages in being rid of her, even if your technique would not have involved murder.”

“Are you a fool too, Captain? Haven’t I said that?”