Too Many Murders(33)
The downstairs foyer was sheathed in multicolored marble and adorned with lush palms in handmade marble pots; a closer inspection revealed that the palms could be lifted out holus-bolus in smaller, plastic pots. There was an enquiry desk and a visitor’s desk whose lone attendant’s job was to pin a tag on each visitor. Those who worked inside the building took no notice of anyone on their way in or out. One bank of elevators served floors two to nineteen, the other floors twenty to thirty-nine; the penthouse elevator stood alone at the blind end and had NO ADMITTANCE painted on a wooden stand in front of its shiny copper doors.
Armed with a key, Carmine triggered the doors, which opened onto an interior plush with squabbed tannish-pink leather, a rosso antico marble floor, and carved and gilded trims. The panel bore only two buttons: UP and DOWN. How arrogant, he thought, amused. At the top it opened directly into the apartment, which was huge. First was a foyer the size of most living rooms, then a living room the size of most houses, with glass walls on two sides; one overlooked North Holloman, and one Long Island Sound and the Harbor. Carmine could see his own home’s jetty clearly, and his square tower with the widow’s walk. A low-powered telescope on a tripod made him wonder what else Desmond Skeps had seen, and in more homes than Carmine’s. Mr. Skeps, he thought, I do not like you. Privacy is our last defense against the barbarian, and you are as big a barbarian as federal governments.
The decor was interior decorator beige, conservative and safe, nor were there any precious objects scattered around to suggest that Skeps collected art or even kitsch. The pictures on the walls were second-rate watercolors the decorator had probably passed off as first-rate, though in the bedroom this individual had gone for etchings torn out of over-sized Victorian books and framed. The bill had undoubtedly been astronomical, but Carmine spared no pity for a man who didn’t know second-rate when he saw it.
Skeps had been murdered not in his bed but on his massage couch, a taller, narrower item of furniture that would have suited his murderer’s intentions admirably. Either he had climbed onto it voluntarily, or the murderer was strong enough to lift him there bodily after his glass of single malt Glenlivet and chloral hydrate. Certainly he wouldn’t have consumed the Scotch lying flat out on what was to become his deathbed. A strong killer, Carmine said to himself, thinking of the bear trap. These two killings were done personally, and they argued great physical strength. Look for someone rolling in money and built like Mr. Universe and you won’t go far wrong. But what if no one was both? What if no one was either?
Patsy’s boys had been over the crime scene meticulously, so he didn’t bother going over it again. What he wanted was to get an idea of Desmond Skeps from his living arrangements.
He knew what the rest of the world knew already, and from the same sources: gossip magazines, columnists, an occasional serious article in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Skeps’s father, a successful manufacturer of automobile parts, had seen the war clouds gathering over Europe in 1938, and had not overlooked Southeast Asia either. He had founded Cornucopia (the name, he said, simply meant a horn of plenty) to manufacture artillery, then branched into airplane engines and machines of war. After Pearl Harbor his empire mushroomed, and it never ceased to grow. Now, in 1967, it manufactured surgical instruments and equipment, guns and howitzers, turbine engines, generators, atomic reactors, missiles, and small arms, and had branched into plastics, particularly those with military importance. Cornucopia had a huge research facility and was on the cutting edge of all it manufactured; it also held a large number of defense contracts for the armed services.
Skeps’s job was enormous, but not hands-on in any way. He had about fifty managing directors, and they didn’t lay their hands on much either; about three or four down the pecking order saw the first such men, Carmine guessed. Well, that was what happened in any conglomerate, and Cornucopia was a modest conglomerate. The physical description he had of Skeps was of a tall, thin, dark and ungainly man who was magnetically attractive to women. That was the power operating, of course, the same as with Myron Mendel Mandelbaum. Once married to a very beautiful woman, he had driven her away with his jealousy, and he had not married again. There was one child, a boy, now aged thirteen, who went to the Trinity Grey School. His name—no surprise—was Desmond Skeps III. His mother had full custody, which indicated Skeps had done something pretty bad to blot his copybook.
What Skeps thought of his son or the boy’s mother was hard to tell, as no photograph or portrait of either hung in the apartment. He would have to see the mother, of course, but that necessitated a trip to Orleans, on Cape Cod, where Philomena Skeps lived. So, at the moment, according to his information, did the boy, convalescing from some serious illness. He had been out of school already for five weeks and wasn’t expected back at school before Trinity Grey closed for the academic year. Which probably meant he would have to repeat. No fun, that.