Too Many Murders(86)

“What?”

“She’s down in black and white on the master guest roster as accompanying Mr. Desmond Skeps. See?” Delia thrust a sheet of paper at Carmine.

He grabbed it and read incredulously. “What the hell was he up to? Something nasty, I bet! Go on, go on!”

“That gave me four women—Cathy Cartwright, Bianca Tolano, Beatrice Egmont and Dee-Dee Hall—and four men—Desmond Skeps, Peter Norton, Evan Pugh and Dean John Denbigh. Eight people, all now dead. Which still left the Fourth National table rather lightly populated. Two of the ten chairs were unoccupied.”

Carmine shook his head. “No wonder I haven’t seen hide or hair of you for days! You didn’t get all of this off a list.”

“Well, no,” she confessed. “I had to speak to a lot of people on the phone and visit the Maxwell Foundation several times. At one point I actually thought my precious lists had been thrown out or burned, but I should have known better. Even charities are riddled with bureaucrats, and bureaucrats won’t discard anything that might imperil their parasitic existence.”

“Why do you hate paper pushers so much, Delia? You’re one yourself,” Carmine said slyly.

She rose to the bait instantly. “I am not a parasite! My work bears fruit, I am a cog in the necessary machinery of the constabulary! And you give me an instance of one police unit that has even enough paper pushers!” she said indignantly.

“Calm down, calm down! I’m pulling your leg. And you have just processed more paper with positive results than an entire government department,” he said. “Desmond Skeps! What was he doing arm in arm with a street whore? Not that she’d have looked like one. Dee-Dee could—could—”

“Tart herself up?” Delia suggested.

“Put on a nice dress and skate on the edge of respectability. She’d still have looked more street than home in the suburbs, but on Skeps’s arm she’d have been forgiven a lot. People can’t bear thinking that a man of Skeps’s wealth and standing might be taking the mickey out of them.” Carmine frowned. “Okay, that’s eight out of the eleven. What about the black victims?”

“They were present too,” said Delia. “The event was catered by Barnstaple Catering, a new name for affairs that size. It’s a firm that has previously concentrated on smaller affairs, but there is a contract with Chubb coming up to cater its banquets, and the Maxwell function was a dummy run for Barnstaple. In view of this, at least according to their general manager, Barnstaple agreed to take a smaller profit than it will be asking in the future. Maxwell had some conditions of its own, apparently having had bad experiences in the past. The thousand-dollar-table dinner dance was a new sort of venture, and they wanted the first one to be memorable, with the intention of having one each year. So Barnstaple had to provide a three-person wait team for each table. Cedric Ballantine, Morris Brown and Ludovica Bereson waited on the Fourth National table. The system worked a treat,” Delia went on, the excitement dying out of her voice now that the last goody was revealed. “People got their meals piping hot and very quickly, the liquor flowed uninterruptedly, and no one sat staring at a dirty plate for longer than two or three minutes.”

“Was there any method that assigned the three black victims to that table?” Carmine asked.

“No, beyond the fact that they all worked for Barnstaple at weekend functions, and had done for some time, including Cedric Ballantine, who put his age up to get the work. They didn’t check ages very stringently, and Cedric looked older than his years. If it had been a weeknight, the two boys wouldn’t have been able to work because of school. Mrs. Bereson probably wouldn’t have been interested either, after a day housecleaning. But it was a Saturday night, ideal.”

“If I were not a happily married man, Delia, I’d be waiting at your door determined to make you mine,” Carmine said, smiling. “I also doubt that we three men would have found out half as much. You’re a nit-picker, and if ever a job needed a nit-picker, this one was it. I can’t thank you enough.”

“Thanks are not necessary. I loved every minute of it.” She got up, but didn’t move to take her papers. “These should stay with you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll choofle off.”

As soon as she disappeared, Carmine was calling Desdemona. “What kind of flowers can I give Delia for some terrific work?”

“Brightly colored orchids,” said Desdemona instantly. “In a pot, not as a corsage. Cattleyas.”

“The big question is, why did Desmond Skeps sit at Peter Norton’s table?” Carmine asked Corey and Abe.