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Too Many Murders(123)

By:Colleen McCullough


“Why are we in for a storm?” Kelly asked, sidetracked.

“The gulls, Ted! Inland a bit?”

“Oh! What exactly did Oakes tell you?”

“That it’s more profitable these days to make transistors than cuckoo clocks, and that this Swiss company is onto something big. The word’s out, so everyone’s after the firm. Oakes said Cornucopia’s howling for the moon. Neither he nor Sykes can understand why the Board is going to Zurich.”

“But we know why,” Kelly said grimly.

“That we do. The trip enables Ulysses to take his purloined secrets with him. Which tells me, Mr. Kelly, that Ulysses hasn’t passed any to Moscow since sometime before April third. His briefcase must be full.”

“Tell me about it! There’s nothing we can do, Carmine! The bastard will depart the country smelling like a rose, safely hemmed in by his fellow Board members.”

Carmine felt like pacing, but that would rivet all eyes on them as well as all ears. Instead, he threw his hands into the air wildly. “But how did he talk the others into making the trip? They’re businessmen! If Sykes and Oakes know they’re howling at the moon, so must they! How did he bring them around?”

“That’s the easy part,” Kelly said ruefully. “The Board’s just taken delivery of a brand-new Lear jet—long-range fuel tanks, reclining seats, spare pilot—the works. I bet all of them are eager to see what color the sky is over Zurich. Even better, the wives will have to stay home. Not enough room with a three-man flight crew and a couple of hostesses.”

“When is this jaunt happening?” Carmine asked.

“Tomorrow afternoon. The jet’s on the tarmac here. Then they’ll fly down to JFK to get international clearance,” Kelly said, and sighed. “Yep, tomorrow afternoon all Cornucopia’s secrets fly away, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”


Ulysses is going to get away with it, Carmine thought as he walked back up Cedar Street to County Services. The fact that I know who he is beyond a shadow of a doubt is irrelevant; I have absolutely no proof. Just a cop’s instinct and the end result of myriad little facts and details coming together in my mind, some of those facts and details gotten with great pain and the calling in of favors.

Kelly doesn’t know, and I’m not inclined to tell him. Fate pushed him into being here, a behemoth, and there’s a message in that: he belongs to a behemoth. He’s not the problem, it’s his faceless bosses, the ones who’ll push the buttons, the papers and the people in that ponderous sequence of steps protocol dictates before the big guns are ready for firing. By the time the sixteen-inchers roar, Ulysses will have performed his conjuring trick and look squeaky-clean. Ulysses is one guy; it doesn’t take an army to catch him. In fact, an army can’t. No one would notice him slink off in the clouds of dust. Let Ted Kelly go his way; I’ll go mine because I know who and what I have to contend with, have known since the significance of Bart Bartolomeo’s words sank into my mind and the lightbulb lit up.

What I have to do is get Ulysses for murder. It’s neater and more final, if final can have a degree. My espionage facts and details paint a picture, but I don’t have an atom of proof; when Ulysses paints the same picture it will be more convincing. Whereas the murders he’s committed must leave a trail of hard evidence that I can find if I look in the right places.

He had long passed County Services and decided now to keep going for a while. The wind was whipping up a little, but it felt good snatching at his face. He glanced up at the sky to see mackerel cloud up there and found the time to file a resolution to make sure the shutters on his house were closed before he went to bed. Then it was back to Ulysses.

Think, Carmine, think! Who did Ulysses kill with his own hands? Desmond Skeps. Dee-Dee Hall, which flummoxes me. Why a whore who gives great blow jobs? No one else. His assistant killed Evan Pugh, Cathy Cartwright and Beatrice Egmont. Hired guns shot the three blacks—black hired guns, to blend into the neighborhood. The assistant impersonated a peddler of potions named Reuben to trick Peter Norton’s wife, and probably egged on Joshua Butler. It may have taken Ulysses himself to pierce Pauline Denbigh’s armor, but he didn’t kill the Dean. I don’t have the chance of a snowflake in hell to prove any of them. It has to be Skeps or Dee-Dee, or both.

What were his weapons?

Desmond Skeps … A hypodermic needle and several syringes, inexpertly wielded. Once upon a time he was shown how to use them, but the years have gone by since, and Skeps must have had tricky veins. Curare. An ammoniac household liquid. Drano. A tourniquet. Chloral hydrate in a glass of single malt Scotch. A safety razor. A midget soldering iron. Steel wire.