The Prodigal Son

Tony Cerutti was of that East Holloman Italian American family that bred many cops, his degree of blood relationship sufficiently removed from the Commissioner and Carmine, both half Cerutti. Thirty years old and a bachelor, he was dark, handsome and charming in a slightly street-rat way; Abe always sent him after women suspects of a certain class. He was still learning to damp down the wilder side of his enthusiasm, but he was a good man, and absolutely attached to Abe, who awed him.

Carmine spoke first, outlining the disappearance of Dr. Millie Hunter’s tetrodotoxin.

“Because Paul acted so fast, both victims still had traces in their systems,” he said. “Each had a puncture wound in the left side of the back of the neck, into muscle and fat, not near bone. The injection would have been absorbed at an intramuscular rate. The dose was almost microscopic—about one half of one milligram. That makes it a hundred times more potent than cyanide. There’s no antidote and no treatment. Worst is that the victim is fully conscious until death.”

“Holy shit!” Donny exclaimed, face white. “That’s awful!”

“Very cold-blooded,” Carmine said. “Though it’s out of sequence, I’d like to continue for a moment about the poison. There must be at least five hundred milligrams left—a lot of death, though this doesn’t feel like a killer at the start of a spree, so the leftovers are more likely to go into storage. It seems that neither victim felt any pain on injection, yet we also know the killer didn’t use an ordinary hypodermic and syringe. So what’s the method of delivery, and how long before the first symptoms appeared?”

“I’ve seen Gus Fennell and Paul Bachman again this morning,” Abe said, “and they’ve been doing a lot of reading as well as done a better time line of the physical course of John Hall’s symptoms. An intramuscular injection had to have been administered inside Max Tunbull’s den, it couldn’t have been given before they went in. No one left the room, even on a bathroom call. Gus and Paul both insist no more than twenty minutes passed between the injection and death, and all six men were in Max’s den for thirty minutes. That means you’re right about the method of delivery, Carmine. No hypodermic and syringe.”

“The real stumbling block in our murderer’s plans was Millie Hunter,” said the pear-shaped voice of Delia Carstairs. “If she hadn’t reported the theft of her tetrodotoxin to her father, both these deaths would have been impossible to prove as murder.”

Carmine’s eyes rested on Delia with a smile in them. It was way below freezing outside and the wind was up, contributing a chill factor; Delia had dressed for it in outer wear of fake fur striped like a red-and-black tiger. The outfit underneath was also striped tiger fashion, but in pink-and-black, and it bore touches of bright blue because her heart craved color, color, and more color. She was way below regulation height and built like a barrel on grand piano legs, had no neck, and a huge head adorned with frizzy, brassy hair; there was so much mascara around her twinkling brown eyes that they always looked marooned in tar. Her bright red lipstick had a tendency to daub her slightly buck teeth as well as sneak into the pucker-wrinkles around her mouth, but no one’s smile was more genuine than Delia’s. Her nature was perfect for police work, since she was meticulous to the point of obsessiveness and she never gave up; no one could see more in a sheet of numbers or a floor plan, which made white-collar crime her most relished pleasure.

The blood niece of Commissioner John Silvestri on the Silvestri side, she was English, the child of a prestigious Oxford don, and despite her sartorial eccentricities she enjoyed a relatively high social position within the city of Holloman’s hierarchy (her posh accent assured it). Those who didn’t know her well tended to dismiss her as something of a fool. Wrong! thought Carmine. Having Sergeant Delia Carstairs was like being a closet dictator owning a secret ICBM.

“Expound,” said Carmine.

“I think I’ve already hit the nail on the head, chief. Our awareness of his murder method has ruined everything for him,” Delia said. “Not one, but two murders, both at banquets, yet of utterly opposite kinds. Nine suspects for the death of John Hall, seventy-two for Dr. Tinkerman. If one presumes that the only viable suspects attended both banquets, we have Max and Davina Tunbull, Val Tunbull, Ivan Tunbull, and Jim and Millie Hunter.”

“Not Millie!” said Tony Cerutti instantly.

“Why not?”

Carmine stepped into the breach with a glance at Tony. “I guess Millie’s a part of the clan,” he said calmly, “and I for one would be confounded were she to turn out the guilty one. We—we know her. But you’re right of course, Deels. She has to go on the list of suspects.”

“As far as I’m concerned, she and Jim head the list of suspects,” said Abe. “Who else could have brought that particular poison to the Tunbull dinner? The thief? How would any Tunbull have known about tetrodotoxin?” Abe looked grim. “My instincts say it isn’t Millie. That leaves Jim.”

“Who has good reason to want to kill Tinkerman, but why John Hall?” Liam asked.

“How do you know that?” Carmine asked.

“Easy. Everyone does. Dr. O’Donnell hasn’t been silent about Tinkerman’s attitude to Jim Hunter’s book,” said Nick Jefferson. “Gossip around County Services says Tinkerman hates Jim Hunter.” His handsome black face grew stern. “I believe someone stole the poison—and used it!—to implicate Dr. Jim.”

“Too many speculations on too little evidence,” said Carmine with a sigh. “We know murder was done on two different occasions using an instrument the killer thought undetectable. It’s surely logical to assume that the same hand is responsible for both the deaths. But motive? We have no idea. Is the thief of the toxin also the killer? We have no idea.”

“It’s dig time,” said Donny Costello.

He was the last of the sergeants, moved up from the pool a few months earlier, and he was eager, thorough, a trifle sideways in his thinking. A husky, chunky man just turned thirty-one, he had recently married, and existed in that happy haze of the newly wed husband: home cooked breakfasts, plenty of sex, a wife who never let him see her hair in curlers or her temper in tatters.

“Right on, Donny!” Abe cried. “Dig, dig, and dig again.”

“Who stands to benefit or profit?” Carmine asked. “What kind of link can there possibly be between a West Coast timber tycoon and an East Coast divinity scholar? Did they die because they knew each other, or because they couldn’t be let to know each other?” He frowned. “Candidly, Jim and Millie Hunter look suspicious in more ways than the rest put together.”

“It’s not Millie!” said Tony pugnaciously.

“Jim Hunter’s book is involved,” Carmine went on as if no one had interrupted.

Abe interrupted. “Max Tunbull told me that he and Val, his brother, made an executive decision just before Christmas and ran a twenty thousand first printing, though C.U.P. hadn’t authorized it. And Davina Tunbull printed twenty thousand dust jackets.”

“Delia, you interview Davina,” Carmine said.

“And what are you going to do, chief?” Delia asked.

Alone among them she called him “chief” or “boss”; recently Carmine had come to think this was part of her assumption of extra, entirely unofficial, power. If he didn’t adore her—but he did, with all his heart. His ICBM.

“I’m seeing M.M.,” he said. “Abe will decide who interviews whom apart from Davina. And don’t forget for one moment that Donny’s the new broom—you’ll have to dig hard to go deeper.”

M.M. was impenitent about one aspect of the Tinkerman murder. “It got the Parsons off my back,” he said, pushing the plate of fresh apple Danish at Carmine.

“Did they really blackmail you into Tinkerman, sir?”

“My fault. I should have kept the iron fist sheathed in velvet a little longer. But oh, Carmine,” said the President of Chubb, blue eyes fiery, “I was fed up with waiting for those holier-than-thou bastards to hand over Chubb’s collection of paintings! I don’t care about the Rembrandt or the Leonardo—well, I do, but you know what I mean—I wanted the Velasquez, the wartime Goyas, the Vermeer, the Giotto and the el Grecos! Who ever sees them? The Parsons! I want them hung where all of Chubb and however many visitors can see them!”

“I understand,” said Carmine, biting into a pastry.

“When that idiot Richard Spaight said they were going to hang on to Chubb’s paintings for another fifty years at least, I—I snapped! Hand ’em over within a month, or I sue! And I meant it,” said M.M.

“And they knew they couldn’t buy the court,” Carmine said.

“I am not without influence,” M.M. said smugly. “That’s their trouble, of course. They have billions, but they don’t cultivate the right people, whereas we MacIntoshes do—and we’re not short of a dollar either.”

“A pity the Hug folded. The Parsons were happy funding such important research, but it was fatal to hand administration over to a psychiatrist.”

“Why is that, Carmine?” M.M. asked, his famous apricot hair now faded to a pallid peach.

“Desdemona says psychiatrists with business heads are in private practice. The ones in research tend to be enthusiastic about loony projects or stuff so far out in left field you can’t see it. So the Hug folded. It’s better as it is, a simple part of the medical school rather than full of weirdos.”

“The Parsons hold me responsible, as far as I can gather just because I’m President of Chubb. The paintings? Sheer spite.”

“No, I disagree,” said Carmine, remembering a lunch with the Parsons in a blizzard-bound New York City. “They really do enjoy looking at the paintings, Mr. President. Especially the el Greco at the end of the hall. Greed tempted them to keep the lot—greed of the eyes. As for spite—it’s a part of the Parson persona.”

“Hence Tom Tinkerman. Nothing of interest would have been published during his tenure at C.U.P.,” said M.M. flatly. “I am really, really glad that he’s dead.”

Carmine grinned. “Did you kill him, M.M.?”

The determined mouth opened, shut with a snap. “I refuse to rise to that bait, Captain. You know I didn’t kill him, but—” A beautiful smile lit up M.M.’s face. “What a relief! The Board of Governors can’t be blackmailed a second time because there’s no Tinkerman left among the candidates. So soon after Tinkerman’s appointment, we’ll just slip in the one we wanted all along. I don’t think you know him—Geoffrey Chaucer Millstone.”

“Auspicious name,” said Carmine gravely. “Who is he?”

“An associate professor in the Department of English—a dead end academically, but he’s not professorial material. Too brisk and pragmatic. Hard on the undergrads and harder still on fellows of all kinds. Ideal for C.U.P.—no leisurely publication of abstruse treatises on the gerundive in modern English usage.”

“Darn! I’ve been hanging out for that. Is he good for things like science and Dr. Jim’s book?”

“Perfect,” said M.M. with satisfaction. “There’s no denying either that C.U.P. can do with the funds a huge best seller would bring in. The Head Scholar will have money to publish books he couldn’t have otherwise. C.U.P. is well endowed, but the dollar is not what it used to be, and these days alumni with millions to give think of medicine or science. The days when the liberal arts received mega-buck endowments are over.”

“Yes, that’s inevitable. A pity too,” said Carmine; he was a liberal arts man. “Last name Millstone? As in the Yankee Millstones, or the ordinary old Jewish immigrant Millstones?”