Too Many Murders(25)
The boy did as he was told, but sulkily, and followed Carmine downstairs with dragging steps.
The cheese was grated, but the recalcitrant block of Parmesan had bitten back. Its crumbling tendrils were stained, and Selma was sucking her knuckles.
“Junior, get a Band-Aid,” Carmine commanded, inspecting the graze. “Lesson number one when grating: watch your hands when the cheese wears down.”
He sprinkled salt into the macaroni, teaching as he went, showed Selma how to make a tolerable cheese sauce, then made her mix half the Parmesan with breadcrumbs and sprinkle it on top of the macaroni and cheese. Into the oven it went, then, perched on a kitchen stool, Carmine found Cathy Cartwright’s copy of The Joy of Cooking and picked out half a dozen easy recipes for Selma to follow. She was displaying some enthusiasm, having just (with Carmine’s help) produced an edible meal on her first try. The princess was only skin deep.
“Did your mom have any enemies that you know of, Selma?” he asked, thumbing the pages of the cookbook.
“Mom?” The girl looked incredulous. “No!” The first sadness entered her eyes, and she blinked rapidly. “What time did she have for enemies, Captain?”
He put the cookbook down, slid off the stool and pressed her shoulder briefly. Then his gaze fell on Junior, about to disappear through the inside door; his lips tightened.
“And you,” Carmine said to her brother as he opened the back door, “are going to do your share of the chores in future. If Selma is the cook, you’re in charge of the laundry.”
Snap! The door closed on Junior’s outraged protests.
As he walked to his car, Carmine was grinning. It was rare for him to involve himself so personally in a family’s tragedy, but the Cartwrights were a special case. Not one but two murders, each by a different killer. They would survive, but thanks to Selma rather than to either Gerald. Though she hadn’t known how, she had already been trying to cook when he arrived. The tragedy had thrown her in at life’s deep end, but she was paddling bravely.
Carmine went back to County Services and a desk piled high, sat himself down and thanked his lucky stars for his secretary, Delia Carstairs, who happened to be Commissioner John Silvestri’s niece. One incidence of nepotism actually working, he thought as his gaze traveled over the neat piles. Delia was a treasure he had inherited along with his captaincy; mere lieutenants didn’t have secretaries, they availed themselves of the typing pool or their own typing skills, and they did their own filing. The odd thing was that she had belonged to Danny Marciano, his senior still, yet Danny had given her up with no more than a loud wail of anguish—and two secretaries to replace her.
She walked in from her tiny office, tiny only because all four of its walls were taken up by monstrous filing cabinets.
“About time,” she said, distributing another sheaf of papers on various stacks.
She was thirty years old, short, and dressed in a manner that she called smart but that Carmine privately called appalling. Today she wore a fussy suit of some multicolored, knobby fabric whose skirt barely reached her knees. Two utterly shapeless legs of the kind seen on grand pianos supported a tubby body and the weight of far too much massive costume jewelry. Her face was caked with makeup, her frizzy hair was an improbable shade of strawberry blonde, and her shrewd, twinkling, light brown eyes were surrounded by enough paint to satisfy a Cleopatra. The only product of a union between Commissioner Silvestri’s sister and an Oxford don, Delia had been born and raised in England.
Both parents despaired of her. But Delia required no parental guidance of any kind; she knew exactly what she was going to do and where she was going to do it. A course at a top London secretarial college saw her graduate at the head of her class; as soon as her papers and certificate were in her hands, she packed her bags and climbed on a plane for New York. There she went to work in the NYPD headquarters typists’ pool, and soon found herself the private secretary of a deputy commissioner. Unfortunately, the bulk of his work concerned social misfits, and it quickly dawned on Delia that she was actually too desirable to wind up where she wanted to be—in Homicide. The NYPD was just too vast, and she was too good at her job.
So she took a train to Holloman and asked Uncle John for a job. Since his phone had been ringing off the hook about her all the previous day, Silvestri ignored his dictum about nepotism and grabbed her. Not for himself, but for Danny Marciano, whose administrative duties were far heavier. What Delia didn’t know about police work could have been written on the head of a pin, but it didn’t occur to Uncle John that his niece craved blood and gore until Carmine was promoted to captain. Please, begged Delia, could she work for Captain Delmonico, the murder expert?