Too Many Murders

by Colleen McCullough

  “Did he keep regular hours? Snore? Have unpleasant—er—personal habits of any kind?”

  Tom Wilkinson looked blank. “No, but yes to the regular hours. Unless you call his conceit and bragging unpleasant.”

  “What time did you discover him?”

  “About six. I have a car because it means I can get back to college for lunch and dinner. Cafeteria meals on Science Hill are expensive, and my sister gave me her old clunker when she bought a better car. Gas is dirt cheap, and my meals here are part of my room and board. The food’s good too. I finished a physiology class in the Burke Biology Tower at five thirty, then drove home.”

  “Are most of your classes on Science Hill?”

  “Sure, especially for a genuine pre-med. We have a couple of—um—dilettantes in our sophomore year who take art history and crap like that, but they go elsewhere for classes as well. The closest thing to a classroom Paracelsus has is a lecture theater that the Dean saves for sermons on untidiness and vandalism.”

  “Vandalism?”

  “Oh, that’s just the Dean. The freshmen get a bit restive and do things like chuck dirty old house bricks into Piero Conducci’s pebble gardens; they have to use a cherry picker to get them out. I wouldn’t call putting whore’s underwear on a nude lady’s statue vandalism, sir. Would you?”

  “Probably not,” said Carmine, straight-faced. “I take it that all the students in your wing are sophomores, Tom?”

  “Yes, sir. Four wings, one for each year. Evan and I have an upstairs room, but down below us are more sophomores.”

  “So, given that the emphasis is on pre-med, that means the wing is deserted between lunch and around six in the evening?”

  “Yeah, it is. If someone’s too sick to go to classes, he’s supposed to be in sick bay, where there’s a nurse. Sometimes a guy cuts classes to catch up on an important assignment, but there’s nothing like that on our schedule at the moment, sir.”

  “What about mornings?”

  “The same, only shorter. I think the Dean tries to get the tradesmen in during the morning, so he can keep a better eye on them.”

  Carmine rose. “Thanks, Tom. I wish all my witnesses were half as candid. Go and have some dinner, even if you don’t feel like eating.”

  From there it was off downstairs to see Dean Robert Highman. As Carmine descended the graceful but open staircase (he loathed stairs he could see through, like these), he stopped to take in the nucleus of Paracelsus College’s broad, squat X. Each wing was devoted to student accommodation, but the center contained the offices and apartments of the college’s senior faculty. The Dean and Bursar lived in commodious quarters here; though the four year Fellows each lived in a kitchenless apartment at the far end of the four wings, the four similar units adjacent to the nucleus were occupied by postdoctoral Fellows who had nothing to do with the college’s administration.

  The offices were downstairs, the Dean’s and Bursar’s apartments upstairs. The foyer was relatively large and quite deserted at this dinner hour; the open counter where a clerk worked during office hours was unmanned, and the offices clearly visible through glass walls were equally empty.

  Resuming his descent, Carmine stopped short of the counter and debated how he was going to locate the Dean. A cheerful buzz emanated from the opposite side of the nucleus, where the dining room and common rooms were located. Sighing, Carmine girded his loins for a sortie into the midst of four hundred eating young men, but it never happened. A short, fussy man in a three-piece suit emerged from the dining side entrance, took Carmine in at a glance, and walked toward him. He had the gait of a duck, though he wasn’t overweight. Just knock-kneed. His face was round and ruddy, his brown hair scant but assiduously brushed to hide as much scalp as possible, and his dark brown eyes held a flash that told Carmine he was capable of cowing most of Paracelsus’s inmates. No one could have called him handsome.

  “Dean Highman,” said Carmine, shaking hands. Good, firm grip.

  “Come upstairs to my apartment,” the Dean said, lifting the flap of the counter and unlocking a glass door. Once through that, they ascended to the second floor in a tiny elevator, a smoother ride than tiny elevators usually gave.

  “Dean Dawkins—Paracelsus’s first dean and my predecessor—was a paraplegic,” Highman explained as they floated upward, “but his qualifications outweighed both his handicap and the cost of installing this.” A soft chuckle. “Princeton thought it had him.”

  “Eat your heart out, Princeton,” said Carmine, grinning.

  “Are you a Chubber, Captain?”

  “Yes, Class of Forty-eight.”

  “Ah! Then you were one of the young men who defended our beloved country. But you must have started before the war.”

  “Yes, in September of 1939. I enlisted straight after Pearl Harbor, so I lost my credits for the fall of 1941. Not that I cared. The Japs and the Nazis came first.”

  “Married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Children?”

  “A girl by a previous marriage, Sophia, now sixteen, and a son five months old,” said Carmine, wondering who was conducting this interrogation.

  “His name?”

  “Still undecided.”

  “Oh, dear! Is that a serious marital contretemps?”

  “No, more an ongoing, good-natured argument.”

  “She’ll win, Captain, she’ll win! They always do.”

  Dean Highman settled his guest in a leather chair and went to the bar cart. “Sherry? Scotch? Whiskey?”

  “You didn’t offer me gin, Dean.”

  “You don’t look or act like a gin man.”

  “How right you are! Whiskey will do fine, thanks. Soda and ice, and drown it.”

  “Still on duty, eh?” The Dean sat down with his own generous glass of sherry. “Ask away, Captain.”

  “I gather from Mr. Pugh’s roommate, Mr. Wilkinson, that the college is deserted during class hours?”

  “Absolutely. Any student found wandering the corridors during class hours is certain to be queried. Not that it happens often. Paracelsus was built and endowed specifically for pre-med students by the Parson Foundation.”

  Carmine pulled a face. “Oh, that bunch!”

  “You speak as one who knows them.”

  “I was involved in a case the year before last that had to do with one of their endowed facilities.”

  “Yes, the Hug,” said Dean Highman, nodding wisely. “I do sincerely trust that the murder of Mr. Pugh does not embroil Paracelsus in that kind of disaster.”

  “I doubt it, Dean, beyond what leaks to the press and other media about the circumstances of Mr. Pugh’s death. Rest assured that we’ll be trying to tone down our releases.”

  The Dean leaned forward, his sherry forgotten. “I am smitten with fear, Captain. How did Mr. Pugh die?”

  “Between the teeth of a bear trap rigged in his closet.”

  The ruddy face paled, and the sherry stood in danger of slopping until the Dean lifted the glass to his lips and drank it off in a gulp. “Ye gods! Christ almighty! Here? In Paracelsus?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “But—but—what can we do? I swear no one saw anything odd today! I’ve asked, I do assure you!” the Dean bleated.

  “I understand that, but tomorrow there will be detectives back to ask a lot more questions on the subject, Dr. Highman. For which reason, I’d like to make sure that every single member of your staff, including janitors, trash collectors, gardeners, maids and other nonfaculty be present all day. They’ll all have to answer questions. No one will be treated harshly, but every last one will be seen individually,” said Carmine, voice steely.

  “I understand,” said the Dean, sounding as if he did.

  “How well did you know Evan Pugh, Dean?”

  Highman frowned, licked his lips, and decided to pour himself another glass of sherry. “Evan Pugh was a difficult young man,” he said, back in his chair and sipping gratefully. “I am afraid that
no one either knew him—or, perhaps more important, liked him. I have dealt with youths and young men for many years, but the Evan Pughs of my acquaintance have been few. Very few. I am rather at a loss to describe his personality, except to say that it was—repugnant. I don’t claim to be au fait with modern science, but I have read of substances called pheromones. They are emitted, as I understand it, to attract others, particularly of the opposite sex. The pheromones Evan Pugh emitted repelled.” He shrugged, took a gulp of sherry. “More than that I cannot tell you, Captain. I didn’t really know him at all.”

  Carmine lingered until he finished his drowned drink, chatting with the Dean about his college’s endowment by the Parson clan, whose charities—amounting to millions upon millions—were always oriented toward something medical. Roger Parson Sr.’s choice of Piero Conducci as architect did not surprise him; had the younger members of the clan had their way, he was sure Paracelsus would have gone to a more conservative designer. It must have hurt them hugely to have to give up their edition of the Burghers of Calais, but yield it they had; it stood at the junior/senior end of the X nucleus, ensconced in one of Conducci’s glass-walled, pebbled gardens, and it looked as stunning as a Rodin should.

  “I imagine,” said the captain of detectives gravely, “that any cherry pickers in the vicinity of Paracelsus are stringently policed.”

  “They would be, had any materialized, but I’m delighted to say that none ever has. There are many other works of art at Chubb far easier to steal than our Rodin.”

  “And there’ll be still more, when the museum of Italian art goes up—lots of Canalettos and Titians will come out of the vaults. If, that is, the Thanassets can ever decide where their museum ought to go,” said Carmine.

  “A great university,” said the Dean ponderously, “should swim in works of art! I thank God every night for Chubb.”

  Thus it was a little after eight when Carmine strolled into the Medical Examiner’s segment of the County Services building on Cedar Street. The ME was his first cousin, though no observer would ever have picked up on the blood relationship from visual inspection. Patrick was blue-eyed and auburn-haired, with a fair, freckled skin; Carmine had dark amber eyes and black, waving hair that he kept disciplined by cutting it short. They were the children of the sisters Cerutti, one of whom had married an O’Donnell, the other a Delmonico. Though Patrick was ten years older than Carmine and the happily married father of six children, no difference could ever diminish the huge love that existed between them. An only son, Carmine had been rendered fatherless in his thirteenth year, the smothered darling of a widowed mother and four older sisters with no masculine leavening to help him survive until twenty-two-year-old Patsy stepped in to fill the breach. It was not a paternal relationship, however; they felt like brothers.

  Coroner as well as Medical Examiner, Patrick had managed to pile most of his court duties on the back of his deputy coroner, Gustavus Fennel, who loved appearing in court and conducted a running feud with His Honor Douglas Thwaites, Holloman’s cantankerous district judge. Patrick was completely enamored of the new science of forensics, and kept his department absolutely up to date on all advances made in that captious discipline, with its blood types, serums, hairs, fibers, anything that a criminal might leave behind as a signature. His perpetual headache was lack of funds to buy analytical equipment, but in the wake of the dissolution of the medical research center known as the Hug, the Parsons had given him an electron microscope, a Zeiss operating microscope, several other specialist microscopes, new spectrometers and a gas chromatograph. These, together with the latest centrifuges and other, more minor apparatus that found their way from the Hug to him, had enabled him to assemble the best criminal pathology lab in the state, and—a curious side effect—had predisposed Hartford to consent to demands for further equipment. To be dowered so lavishly by the Parsons obviously gained anyone brownie points with the Governor, was Patrick’s explanation.

  The morgue itself was stuffed with gurneys, something that happened only as a consequence of airline disasters or multivehicle road accidents. But not tonight. Each of these silent, still, draped figures was a murder victim. Added to them were the other bodies requiring a coroner’s attention: inexplicable deaths, those whose doctor refused to sign a death certificate, and any death the police considered warranted autopsy.

  There were a series of stainless steel doors in one wall, a total of sixteen altogether, and the room was a hushed hive of industry as two technicians worked to clear autopsied bodies out of the drawers while not confusing them with murder victims and others as yet uninserted into drawers. Outside on the loading dock, Carmine knew, there would be vans or retired hearses sent from funeral homes to pick up released bodies, their crews grumbling at the ME’s insistence that they come right now, at once, no delay!

  He walked through into the autopsy suite, where Patrick stood at the side of a long stainless-steel table fitted with a huge sink at one end and drain channels along either side. A pair of ordinary wholesale meat scales hung in a convenient spot, and several carts of covered instruments were arranged nearby.

  Evan Pugh had been freed from the bear trap; it lay on a marble-topped bench some distance away, fenced off by carts. Carmine went to it first and stood staring at it, too wise to touch it. If Patsy had erected a fence around it, then it was highly dangerous. Spread out, as it was now, it was fully two feet wide at its hinged base, its stained, terrible teeth a good two inches long. Not barbed, not serrated, just knife-sharp. The base, which had been bolted to the closet ceiling, was wide enough for a man to put his feet on, one to either side of the hinge—the usual way, Carmine concluded, for its user to pull it apart and set it. There were six bolt holes, three in either side plate, marking the middle and each end. These had not been a part of the trap when it was made but had been added very recently. Every other surface was well rusted, whereas the holes gleamed with fresh metal. The killer had reamed them out himself.

  “Don’t even breathe on it, Carmine,” Patrick said from the table. “It’s on a hair trigger, and I’m not exaggerating. Whoever cleaned it up for this exercise used naval jelly on the spring to remove the rust and adjusted the pressure on the plate to trigger it with any old kind of tug, even from a weakling like our victim. What fascinates me is the size of the killer’s balls, to handle his device so coolly that he was able to screw his bolts in all the way to their heads without setting it off. Jesus! I break out in a sweat just thinking about it.”

  Carmine moved to the table. “Any clues, Patsy?”

  “A couple of doozies, actually. Here, read this. It was in his pants pocket.”

  “Well, it sure answers a lot,” Carmine said, putting the clear plastic envelope back among Pugh’s other possessions. “Among other things, it explains the money. Have you opened the package? Does it contain a hundred grand?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I’d save that treat for you. I did wash the blood off it and remove the first layer of wrap, though I doubt I’ll find any prints on it apart from Pugh’s.”

  Carmine took the brick and a pair of utility scissors and sliced the food wrap’s many layers down to bedrock. Expecting blank paper beneath an outer layer of real notes, he was astonished to find that every note was a genuine hundred-dollar bill. There had been an outbreak of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills a year ago and he had been shown what to look for, but these were genuine. What kind of blackmail victim could afford to drop a thousand C-notes in the course of a murder?

  “The money only complicates matters,” he said, putting it in a steel dish and lidding it before peeling off his gloves. “There is a hundred thousand here, brand-new, but the numbers aren’t fully consecutive. I’ll have to hand it over to the Feds to find out its origins.” He leaned his rump on a wall sink and contemplated the money dish sourly. “Motor Mouth … I wonder what Motor Mouth said to warrant not only murder but the sacrifice of so much money? Whoever he is, he knew he had no hope of retrieving his outlay—or h
is letter. Which says he’s not worried, that he doesn’t think we stand a chance of discovering his real name or what the subject of the blackmail was.”

  “Blackmail aside, Carmine, one motive is hate,” said Patsy, inserting a probe inside one vicious chest wound. “The object here is physical agony, a slow death.”

  “But not a public lesson.”

  “No. A private vendetta. Motor Mouth isn’t concerned about the details of his crime becoming public, but all his spleen was directed at Evan Pugh. Whoever he is, he’s not an attention seeker.”

  “I’m guessing this was Pugh’s first attempt at blackmail. Man, I’d love to get my hands on Pugh’s letter of March twenty-ninth!” Carmine clenched his hands. “But Motor Mouth will have burned it. Say he got it on March twenty-ninth. That means he cooked up this incredible retaliation within four or five days. And he must know Pugh left no evidence of the blackmail behind. So it’s not pictures, letters, memos, anything visual or auditory. Pugh had no safety deposit key, even one he’d think was cunningly hidden. No bus or train station locker key either. Of course he might have sent something to his parents, but I’m guessing he didn’t.”

  “Oh, come on, Carmine!” Patsy objected. “Where blackmail is concerned, there’s always physical evidence, even if it’s no more than a written description of an incident.”

  “Not here,” said Carmine, straightening. “I’m convinced that Motor Mouth acted with total security. Now that Pugh’s dead, no threat remains. The blackmail evidence died with him.”

  “Cop instinct?” Patsy asked.

  Halfway to the door, Carmine paused. “How are you coping with the chaos?”

  “First off, no outside referrals for the moment. The last of our already autopsied cases will have gone to their funeral homes by ten tonight, and that will give us room to accommodate the murder victims plus whatever I couldn’t deflect,” Patrick said. “I’m sending Gus and his boys to the North Holloman labs to do outside cases there until my crisis evaporates.”