Too Many Murders(129)

They started to read, Delia on the letters, Carmine on the reports. An hour went by in silent intensity.

“How extraordinary!” Delia said.

Carmine jumped. “Huh?”

“Hasn’t Mr. Smith always had a reputation for doing nothing?”

“So my sources have led me to believe.”

“Well, for someone who has coasted through the however-many years of his—er—emboardment—he’s kept a close eye on all sorts of people. Nor, it seems, is he happy to leave some of his observations behind during his absence. I’m reading a letter Mr. Smith apparently means to send to an M. D. Sykes, who bears the title of general manager of Cornucopia Central. I gather this means Mr. Sykes orders the stationery, checks the salaries and wages, looks after cleaning contracts and all sorts. Though from time to time over the years Mr. Sykes has had to substitute for men more senior than he.”

“Jumping Jehoshaphat!” Carmine exclaimed, careful of his expletives when ladies were present. “I wouldn’t have thought that Smith so much as noticed Cornucopia Central employed a general manager, let alone noticed it’s Sykes. But to notice what Sykes has done! Is the letter interesting?”

“Yes and no. It’s quite long. Mr. Smith lays out the feats Mr. Sykes has accomplished over the years when substituting for more senior executives, and praises his diligence and experience. Mr. Smith informs Mr. Sykes that, in his capacity as Chairman of the Board, he is promoting Mr. Sykes to the position of managing director, immediately under the Board. Mr. Sykes will now be responsible for overseeing all the Cornucopia subsidiaries on an executive level, and will answer only to the Board.”

“That’s a real bombshell,” Carmine said, grinning. “Michael Donald will be happy! I can understand why Smith wouldn’t want it lying around on his desk while he’s away, though I wonder why he didn’t just ship it off as internal mail before he went? A minor mystery. He plays Napoleonic war games.”

“Who, Mr. Smith?”

“No, Mr. Michael Donald Sykes. On his new salary, he’ll be able to stage his hero’s coronation in Notre Dame, complete with gold and jewels.”

“How odd!” Delia exclaimed, still on the letter to Sykes.

“What’s odd?”

“Mr. Smith’s system of tabulation—to which, by the way, he is much addicted. I’ve always preferred the letters of the alphabet to numbers when I tabulate because, provided one does not need more than twenty-six items, the tabulation column remains the same width. With numbers, once the number ten arrives, the column is one character wider, and to the left side at that. Most annoying! Whereas Mr. Smith neither enumerates nor eletterates—he uses a big, round black spot to tabulate—” She drew a hissing breath. “A big, round black spot!” she squealed.

Carmine scooted around the table on his wheeled chair and looked. “Holy shit!” he cried, forgetting ladies.

“There’s another thing, Carmine,” Delia said, voice shaking. “What machines can make a spot this size? A typewriter can’t, nor anything I can think of apart from a printing press setting type. These tabulation spots must have been applied by hand. If they’re not microdots, then Mr. Smith has gone to the trouble of using Letraset, and a man as fanatically tidy as that would be insane, even if he did force his secretary to do it.”

“One thing for sure, Delia, Mr. Smith is not insane,” said Carmine in grim jubilation. “I’ve got the bastard!”

“You mean he’s Ulysses?”

“Oh, I’ve known that for some time.”

He propelled himself across to a little table on which he had assembled a box of glass microscope slides, another of glass cover slips, some fine tweezerlike forceps, and a thin, pointed scalpel. Picking up the tray holding them, he returned to Smith’s letter to M. D. Sykes and, working very delicately, tried to get the tip of the scalpel under the edge of a spot. It slid in easily; the spot came away, balanced on the scalpel tip. Carmine transferred it to a slide and dropped a cover slip on top. He took a total of five of the eleven spots in the Sykes letter, chosen at random.

With five glass slides on a paper plate, he walked to the Medical Examiner’s department, Delia at his side.

“Tell me these aren’t Letraset spots,” he said to Patrick, giving him the plate. “Tell me they have typing on them, or schematics, or anything that shouldn’t be there.”

“You have found yourself a genuine, one hundred percent, twenty-four karat, first-water microdot,” Patsy said after examining the first slide. “A hundred-power—man, what a camera! What reduction ratios! Even so, it must have taken a dozen separate shots to get this down so small. No resolution has been lost, the definition’s perfect.”