The Prodigal Son (16 page)
Authors: Colleen McCullough
“When did he start to write it, Millie?”
“Um —” She paused to consider. “As far as I remember, it was September of 1967, because he was through it and had a good manuscript by the end of 1967 — a year ago. The only one who’d seen it was me, and I was determined he should take it to a commercial publishing house that would know exactly what to do to market it.” She clenched her fists in frustration. “But Jim wouldn’t consider a commercial publisher. He wanted it to be a bestseller, yes, but he wanted the kudos of the Chubb
University Press imprimatur on it, same as his two textbooks. I couldn’t budge him, and look at the trouble it’s led to! All the idiocies of Head Scholars and the overall good of the House outweighing the income from a big bestseller — when we heard that Tinkerman had replaced Dr. Carter as Head Scholar, I think Jim would have done anything to get out of his C.U.P. contract. But he couldn’t. His own craving to maintain his academic laurels had tied him to C.U.P. no matter what.”
Carmine smiled. “Did you say, ‘I told you so!’?”
She giggled. “No, I did not. Otherwise murder would have been done, with me the victim. A cut-and-dried case.”
Lunch a memory, Buzz battled on with Dr. James Hunter, to no effect; he wasn’t about to lose his cool again.
Then Carmine sent in a note.
“Who gave you the idea for
A Helical God
?” Buzz asked.
Hunter blinked. “Idea?”
“Yes, idea. Whose idea was it to write that book?”
“Mine,” Jim Hunter said.
“And there are pigs flying everywhere …” Buzz taunted. “Dr. Hunter, bona fide scientists don’t get sudden inspirations to write popular books. People with a commercial axe to grind suggest them, maybe help push the project along. Who helped you?”
“Me, I, and myself.”
“No one so much as whispered the idea to you? You didn’t dream it in your sleep?”
“Absolutely no one contributed, even my sleep-brain.”
“Would you go on oath to say that?”
“What a ridiculous question!” Hunter said, but not angrily. “My book is not under suspicion of murder, Sergeant, so I fail to see why you bring it up.”
Carmine entered. “Dr. Hunter, a pleasure,” he said.
“I wish I could say the same.”
Reaching into his pocket, Carmine produced a small glass jar. “Would you participate in an experiment, Doctor?”
“With what object?”
“Possibly clearing you of suspicion of murder — or, if the contrary, making it highly likely that you did commit murder.”
“Captain Delmonico, I will gladly participate in any kind of experiment that might prove my innocence. Bring it on.”
“It’s not intimidating,” said Carmine, smiling as he took the lid off the jar. “Give me your right hand, please, palm facing downward, fingers extended but together.”
Hunter did as he was told; Carmine looked at the size of the hand with a lifting heart. The injection apparatus came out. “I need you to separate your fingers very slightly, Doctor, while keeping your hand extended and steady.”
Carmine positioned the steel saucer over the gap between the index and middle fingers, then, gently, making sure he didn’t catch the skin, he thrust the hypodermic between the fingers until the saucer rested on their backs.
“Tighten your fingers together to grip the tube I’ve just put between them,” Carmine instructed, and turned the hand over,
palm side up. There was no sign of the tip of the hypodermic.
“Keep your fingers tightly together while I fiddle,” he said, probing into the fissure between the two fingers. There! The tip of the hypodermic was a good three millimeters short of protruding out the palm side of Hunter’s hand.
“Okay,” he said, “now we’ll try the other fingers, then the other hand as well.”
Finally the tip of the hypodermic did barely show, between the right hand’s third and pinky fingers. Not enough control to do the job, Carmine decided.
“Thank you, Doctor. You may go home. Millie is here too, and we’ve finished with her as well. Go home together.”
Millie and Jim looked at each other, but didn’t speak until they were safely in their own car, driving out of the County Services parking lot.
“What a terrible day,” she said, not knowing where to start.
“How long were you there?”
“From noon.”
He grinned, trying to make light of it. “Beat you by three hours, kid.”
“We’re the main suspects, Jim.”
“Well, that was inevitable once they found out we knew John in California. We’re the missing link.”
“Since I know it wasn’t us, who was it?” she asked.
“I wish I knew. Whoever it is, the cops haven’t found him yet,” said Jim in a flat voice. His eyes slid sideways toward her,
flicked back to the road. “What did you say about John’s hitting on you in California?”
“I tried to make them see how unimportant it was, but it’s so hard trying to tell people who weren’t there what it really was like.” She squeezed his thigh. “You got the time wrong, was the worst. I could see their ears prick.”
“Oh, Jesus, did I? By much?”
“Not at all!” she said airily. “A mere six months. I tried to explain that was normal for you, but they found that hard to credit. Honestly, Jim! The day before we left for Chicago?”
“Wasn’t it? I thought it was, but a lot’s happened since.”
“How can we persuade them that it wasn’t the end of the world for us?” she asked.
“Don’t let it chew at you, honey. Everything sorts itself out sooner or later, so they’re going to find their suspicions fade away. There’s a big difference between suspicion and proof we were involved, because we weren’t involved.”
“It’s Davina Tunbull!” Millie cried.
“Has to be,” Jim agreed. “John Hall was a threat to her precious Alexis, and Tom Tinkerman to her prosperity. I mean, even if John told her and Max he didn’t want any part of Tunbull money, he may have lied. Davina’s got a shady past.”
“How do you know that?” Millie asked curiously.
“She drank a little too much champagne back when the book was in manuscript, and said a few things she shouldn’t have.”
I
t was barely dawn when Liam Connor double-parked on a street in Queens not far from JFK airport; he walked up five steps to a pale blue front door, found the sticker that said Q.V. Preston, and rang its bell. Clearly things had gone to plan; the door clicked and opened, though Liam didn’t need to enter. His quarry was coming out, rugged up for a winter ride to Connecticut.
“Freeze the balls off of a brass monkey,” said Mr. Q.V. Preston as he settled into the passenger seat and actually groped for a seat belt. That told Liam that he didn’t ride around in many cars; the seat belt advocates were having a hard time of it convincing the populace to buckle up, and cops were the worst offenders — too much like restraints.
“Car’s warm, Mr. Preston.”
“Are we allowed to stop for breakfast in this great little diner in Co-op City?”
“Sure,” said Liam, under orders to be nice.
The three-hour journey (with breakfast included) passed very pleasantly; Mr. Q.V. Preston was full of interesting stories, and the diner in Co-op City was superb. Liam earmarked it for future sallies to the Big Apple.
Most importantly, Mr. Q.V. Preston thoroughly enjoyed his outing, plucked from his everyday routines as he had been, he explained to Carmine, who welcomed him and put him into Delia’s office for his interview, as its chairs were more comfortable and it did indeed bear a woman’s touch, like vases of dried flowers. He would conduct the questioning, but all of his or Abe’s teams who could be here were, scattered casually around the room as for a nice chat.
They had had an extraordinary stroke of luck when Liam began enquiring from Immigration & Naturalization about a pair of Yugoslav refugees named Davina Savovich and Uda X: the man who had handled their case was still in the department, still working in New York City, and professed to remember them well.
His full name, he told the tape recorder, was Quinn Victor Preston, and eleven years ago he had been working with the Port of New York.
“The two girls had stowed away on an Italian freighter out of Trieste, and by the time they got to me, they were in a bad way. Davina spoke a little broken English — enough that I didn’t use an interpreter. They always screw meanings up, in my experience. Vina and Uda were Slovenes, which translates as the most western-oriented of the Balkan principalities that Marshal Tito combined under one government as Yugoslavia.
There isn’t a lot of love lost between the various principalities, especially the ones where Muslims and Christians are pretty evenly distributed. Not a problem in Slovenia, which loosely comprises the Yugoslavian alps — few Muslims, if any.
“Davina struck me as highly intelligent,” said Preston, warming to his story. “Her English actually improved with every sentence we exchanged — I could see her mind filing away its grammar, always the hardest aspect of English for an eastern European. She was as thin as someone out of a Nazi concentration camp — skin stretched over bones, maybe eighty pounds. Uda was just as bad. They had no papers, and literally threw themselves on my mercy — I was the head honcho there at the time. Now I’m on airlines, a different world.”
He sat back and sipped his cop coffee without complaint — I & N coffee must be equally bad, Carmine thought, unwilling to hurry him. A man nearing retirement age, apparently living alone, and not the kind of man widows hunted — too much fat around the midline, too little hair, too uninspiring in the face, too shabbily dressed. He probably had plenty saved up, just didn’t spend it on trying to be a ladies’ man when the TV set could offer him sports and his refrigerator beer. Yet the adolescent Davina Savovich had made an impression.
He put his mug down. “They’d walked across the mountains — real alps! — to Trieste, hiding by day, moving by night. Stealing food when they could. They discovered that the
Cavour
was sailing for New York, and somehow got aboard. The first thing I checked out was whether Davina had prostituted herself to achieve it, but she hadn’t. As time went
on, I understood better that sex was not how she preferred to attain her ends. I suspect she’d been gang raped somewhere, and it had turned her off sex, even as a tool.”
“It usually does,” said Carmine, topping up his mug.
“They asked for asylum in the United States of America,” Preston went on. “My rejoinder was to ask her how she intended to make a living if she was granted asylum. By working, she said, at whatever work she could find. Whatever she did, Uda would also do. Her plan was to go to one of the big hotels — as usual, the Park Plaza was the one she knew — and offer their services as cleaners. I knew the manager of a less famous hotel — the Grand Lion — and called him to see if his establishment could offer them employment. He — uh — jumped at them, thought they might be easier to discipline than Puerto Ricans.”
“Does that mean you ran a kind of racket, sir?” Tony Cerutti asked to freezing glares from many eyes — dumb, Tony, dumb!
It didn’t faze Mr. Q.V. Preston in the slightest. “I could only run a racket, sir, if I accepted kickbacks, and I did not,” he said calmly. “It is not, strictly speaking, the function of an I & N official to run an employment agency, but sometimes these things do happen through sheer accident. I had a friend. My friend had a hotel. I needed to reassure myself that any individuals to whom I granted visas would be honorably employed, and my hotelier friend had job vacancies. Hey, Preston!” He chuckled at his own little pun.
“But the girls were under age,” Tony objected. Tony, Tony!
“I knew
that
! However, they had no papers of any kind, and Davina swore she and Uda were twenty-one years old.” He
shrugged. “I had two choices. Deny them asylum, which meant sending them back to turbulence and penury that could well result in their deaths. I do that every day, gentlemen, but it is never something I relish. My other choice was to send Davina and Uda to my friend with the hotel as bona fide workers.” His face screwed up. “I had such a strong feeling about Davina! That she’d manage, and one day be an asset to this country. Something I can’t say about many of the refugees who appear at my desk.”
“So they got their papers and went to work at the hotel?” Tony asked, blithely unaware that this wasn’t an inquisition.
“Yes. I had a stern talk to Davina, warning her that I could remove her immigrant status any time I felt she wasn’t holding up her end of the bargain. So no prostitution and no theft. Davina promised they’d do it the hard way, and they did.”
“How can you be sure, Mr. Preston?” Abe asked courteously.
“I made the pair of them report back to me at the end of every six months. And of course I kept in touch with my pal at the Grand Lion.” A reminiscent smile crossed Mr. Q.V. Preston’s face. “The change when I saw them at the end of the first six months was incredible. They’d both put on weight and Davina had found time to visit a beauty parlor — she was just gorgeous! And Uda? Well, Uda stayed Uda, just fatter. They’d been put to work in the hotel kitchen and shamed the Puerto Rican kitchen hands so much that they’d been threatened. Davina wasn’t a tad intimidated. She laughed at them and said if they tried anything, she’d castrate them — everyone has to sleep, she whispered. Any other woman would have been
found with her throat cut, but Davina was
believed
. They thought her a witch.”
“I can imagine that,” said Carmine, smiling.
“When I approved of them, my friend put Davina in the restaurant as hostess — her English had improved in leaps and bounds. Uda went with her as her personal assistant.” Preston sighed happily. “Davina had been the hostess for almost six months when the proprietor of a model agency dined there and offered to put her on his books. I told her to go for it.”
“As easy as that,” said Carmine.
“Yes, it really was, but only after much suffering, never forget that, Captain.” His face saddened. “I only saw them once more, when Davina was on billboards and kicking her heels in TV bubble baths. There were more beautiful models, but Vina had an extraordinary gift — looking at pictures of her made you firmly believe that the product she was advertising simply
felt
better than its rivals. I closed my files on them with a note that they should be awarded citizenship at the earliest possible time, and that was the end of it. Or — almost.” He stopped.