Too Many Murders(29)

Evan Pugh’s parents were on their way from Florida, where they lived in one of those grandiose mansions fronting on an artificial waterway; having made a bundle in retail electronics, Evan Pugh’s father had retired to enjoy the life of a lotus eater in a place where it never really got cold, let alone snowed. Evan was their only child, so life for the police investigating his murder was about to become a great deal less comfortable; the Pughs were bringing their lawyer with them.

Which left the one crime whose scene Carmine hadn’t yet had time to visit. There was no hurry, he knew. Desmond Skeps’s penthouse was sealed, its private elevator locked, the two sets of fire stairs barred and padlocked. Abe hadn’t wasted time going there; he’d worked from Skeps’s office as he gathered information about the tycoon’s subordinates and acquaintances. The grisly details of his murder Carmine knew from talking to Patsy. Like Bianca Tolano, Skeps had been tortured, though his was no sex crime, and like Cathy Cartwright and Peter Norton and Dean Denbigh, he had been poisoned. Yet which had true significance, the similarities or the dissimilarities?

There you go again, Carmine, assuming this is a single killer! You haven’t a shred of evidence to prove that—but then, you haven’t a shred of evidence about multiple killers either. In fact, the commissioned out-of-state killer feels right for maybe half of the victims, and that does suggest a mastermind, at least for those murders. Why not hired assassins for all of them? Is there anything to suggest a hands-on murderer? Yes, but only in two deaths—Desmond Skeps and Evan Pugh. These smack of personal enjoyment. And if Pugh’s blackmail concerned the killings, it makes sense, even to why there was no written legacy of its subject matter. All Pugh had to do was speak, and the brilliant eye of police investigation would be refocused in a direction the killer couldn’t afford to have illuminated. Which brings it back to Skeps himself as the main target. But why did the others have to die at all?

Time will tell, thought Carmine, more comfortable now with his theory. I’ve only just begun to start unpicking the pattern; then I have to knit it together again. Tomorrow I go back to my customary way: working each crime myself, with Abe and Corey in tow. Too bad if they don’t get any cases to work on their own! I’m like an amputee without Abe and Corey. I need three pairs of eyes, three pairs of ears, and three brains.

He glanced at the big clock above Delia’s door. Six thirty! Where did the time go? Her light was on, so he poked his head around the open door.

“Go home, otherwise some lustful cop will hit on you.”

“In a minute,” she answered absently, missing the joking compliment entirely. “I just want to collate these bank records. It took me all day to get them.”

“Okay, but don’t stay forever. And gather everyone for a conference in Silvestri’s room at nine tomorrow morning, please.”


Now, with Myron Mendel Mandelbaum in residence on East Circle, he’d better go home.

There were few men Carmine loved deeply. Pride of place was held by Patrick O’Donnell, but next on the list was his ex-wife’s second husband. Neither man had ended up loving the wife in common, Sandra, but both were completely devoted to Carmine’s and Sandra’s daughter, Sophia. Though Myron missed her with that awful hollowness of an empty house and absent laughter, he hadn’t even hesitated to send her east after Carmine married Desdemona, knowing her life in the relatively modest house on East Circle would be far better for her than to continue in his own replica of Hampton Court Palace, where her mother displayed no interest in her and Myron himself had calls on his time he couldn’t avoid without running the risk of losing everything he owned. A prenuptial agreement, uncommon in 1952, had ensured that Sandra would get no more than a few millions upon his death, but Sophia was his heir, and he wanted the girl to inherit a massive estate. Not for one moment did he think Sophia would fritter it away; his rooted conviction was that this beloved stepdaughter would do very well by it. Though she had been educated in all the acceptable disciplines from mathematics to English literature, he had also made Sophia privy to one of his business activities, the raising of funds to produce motion pictures and the overseeing of the picture’s finances from preproduction to in the can and theater distribution. By the time she was twenty-one, Myron had resolved, Sophia would be fit to wear the hat of a Hollywood producer, if such was her inclination, or else be well on her way to managing all of his many business activities.

Myron knew Carmine guessed at his plans for Sophia, but they had never spoken of them; Carmine was too sensitive of Sophia’s position to make the first overtures, and Myron was too cagey. If his dear friend Carmine had any real idea of the extent of his business empire, Myron knew he wouldn’t want Sophia burdened with a tenth so much. But the Sophia Carmine knew was a shadowy figure; it was Myron who had been to all intents and purposes her permanent father between her second and her sixteenth birthday, so it was Myron who knew her far better.