Too Many Murders(137)

Carmine said nothing, did not move. It would come out at Smith’s pace, and in chunks.

“School? What was school, except a place to avoid? Anna played hookey so much that Natalie and I were obliged to give it out that we were teaching her at home. We were utterly impotent, we couldn’t control her. She laughed at us, she mocked us, she couldn’t be trusted with socialist enlightenment. From her fourteenth year onward, it was like having an enemy in the house—she knew we were hiding something. So Natalie and I agreed that she should have whatever money she wanted, and do whatever she wanted.” Came a sinister chuckle. “Since she hardly lived at home or acknowledged us, few people knew of her, isn’t that odd? We were able to continue our socialist duties by giving up Anna as a lost cause.”

Another pause. Smith dozed, Carmine watched.

“She acquired a boyfriend when she was fourteen. A twenty-year-old petty criminal named Ron David—a black man!” Smith shouted it; Carmine jumped. “Sex enthralled her, she couldn’t get enough of it or him, would rut with him anywhere, anytime, anyhow. He had an apartment on the edge of the Argyle Avenue ghetto— disease-ridden, rat-infested. Full of whores, including Dee-Dee Hall, who was a good friend of his. Ron introduced Anna to Dee-Dee, and Dee-Dee introduced Anna to heroin. Does that appall you, Captain Delmonico? Don’t let it! Save your horror for my next item of news: Anna and Dee-Dee became lovers. They were inseparable. Inseparable…”

Dear God, thought Carmine, I don’t want to hear this. Take a break, Mr. Smith, sleep a while. Did you love your wayward daughter, or was she an embarrassing nuisance? I can’t tell.

Smith continued. “There was no difference between Dee-Dee and the heroin. Both were vital necessities to Anna, who moved out of Ron’s apartment and into Dee-Dee’s.” Another sinister chuckle. “But Ron refused to take his marching orders. The money Anna had lavished on him was now being lavished on Dee-Dee. You would think, Captain, wouldn’t you, that my daughter would have accepted my offer to house her and Dee-Dee in the lap of luxury on the West Coast? No, that would have been too convenient for her parents! She and Dee-Dee liked living in squalor! The heroin was easy to obtain, and what else mattered?”

“How long were Anna and Dee-Dee together?” Carmine asked.

“Two years.”

“And this was back in the very early 1950s?”

“Yes.”

“Then Dee-Dee wasn’t much older than Anna. Two kids.”

“Don’t you dare pity them! Or me!” Smith cried.

“I do pity them, but I don’t pity you. What happened?”

“Ron invaded Dee-Dee’s apartment with a cutthroat razor, intending to teach them a lesson. I am not conversant with the cant, but I gather that he was ‘off his face’ with drugs. So it was Anna used the razor. She cut his throat very efficiently. Dee-Dee called me at home and told me. I was obliged to deal with that nightmare just as my—my patriotic socialist duties at Cornucopia were commencing. Ron vanished—and don’t hope to find his body, Captain! It lies very far from Connecticut.”

“Where is Anna now?” Carmine asked.

“In a camp in Siberia where she has no access to heroin or sex or whores,” her father said. “She’s thirty-one years old.”

“And all these years later you took out your spleen on a poor, defenseless whore?” Carmine asked incredulously. “Christ, has it never occurred to you that you yourself might be to blame for some of it?”

Smith chose not to hear the second part. “Defenseless, nothing! Poor, nothing!” he shouted. “Dee-Dee Hall is a symptom of the disease rotting America’s stinking carcass! Women like her should be shot or put to hard labor! Whores—drugs—Jews—homosexuals—blacks—adolescent promiscuity!”

“You make me sick, Mr. Smith,” Carmine said evenly. “I don’t think you’re a patriotic socialist, I think you’re a Nazi. Marx and Engels were both Jews, and they’d spit on you! How long is it since you slid inside the original Philip Smith’s shell? He was a full bird colonel in the U.S. Army, but a shadow. He answered to no one, he did what he pleased, he went where he pleased, and everybody on his West German base assumed he was someone big with one of the secret services. How do I know this when the FBI thought you were CIA and dropped their enquiries? Easy, Mr. Smith! I spent the war in the military police—there’s nothing and no one I can’t learn about. In 1946, when he went on a secret mission, one Philip Smith was kidnapped and shot, and another Philip Smith took his place. That Philip Smith—you—returned from Germany to Boston early in 1947, complete with foreign wife, like so many of those Occupation guys. The hardest thing to conceal was the age of your marriage and your kids. But you did it the best way—you just appeared, a discharged colonel and his family, in Boston.”