The Prodigal Son (17 page)

“What, Mr. Preston?” Carmine asked.

“I heard that after she and Uda became citizens, she got herself mixed up with a shady guy named Chez Derzinsky — it had to do with fraud, I believe. There’s a police lieutenant in Brooklyn used to be in one of the Manhattan midtown precincts can tell you a lot more — Milton O’Flannery.”

Liam was already writing it down.

“But you never saw her again in person, sir?” Carmine asked.

“No. I never expected a nostalgic visit — she never looks back, that girl. But I would love to hear her Connecticut story.”

“I’ll take you to lunch at Malvolio’s before we drive you home, and you shall hear it. But first, what more can you tell us about Uda?” Carmine asked.

Q.V. Preston looked surprised. “I always thought that was one of Vina’s finest characteristics,” he said. “She never at any stage abandoned her damaged sister.”

“
Sister?
”

“What, isn’t that known? How amazing! They’re twins. The family is a very old one, and apparently much intermarried. Davina told me that in an effort to counteract the intermarriage her great-grandparents and grandparents and their siblings had contracted some peculiar unions — Chinese, Negro, you name it.”

“None of this is known in Connecticut, even, I suspect, to her husband and his family,” Abe said.

“With Davina, who knows?” Preston said. “She was the senior twin, and perfect. Uda was born looking strange, though it’s purely her looks. Her mind is as good as Vina’s, I reckon.”

Tony Cerutti had been deputed to return the immigration official to his home, but instead of lunch at Malvolio’s, he had to chew on a vicious lecture from Carmine.

“Dumb, Tony, downright, outright, unbelievably dumb! The man’s a very senior member of a much bigger organization
than the Holloman PD, and he gave up his day to come give us desperately needed information about two suspects in murder. And what do you do? Make him feel like a suspect with tactless questions! I swear I’m tempted to throw you back into uniform, Tony, if over a year in Detectives hasn’t honed your sensibilities better than this. You still get to drive him home, but God help you if you say one word out of line! I want him back in front of his TV feeling like he had a good day out. Now go away and bury yourself somewhere I can’t see you!”

After which, naturally, he had to hear the same lecture from Abe Goldberg, a sharper cut because from a kinder instrument.

Carmine raised a brow at Liam and Abe. “What sort of sister obeys a snap of the fingers?” he asked.

Liam grinned. “No kind my family ever heard of. If Sheila snapped her fingers at Pauline, you’d hear the fight in Stamford, Hartford and New London.”

“My sisters too. I suppose looking brain-damaged would affect how a sisterly relationship functioned, but Davina, I gather, really does treat Uda with contempt. Or maybe,” Carmine went on in a musing voice, “it’s all an act for our benefit.”

“And the benefit of the Tunbulls, who really do believe Uda’s some kind of slave,” said Abe, equally thoughtful. “We have to look at that pair as a pair more closely, Carmine.”

“Who do we put on it?”

“Delia,” said Liam instantly.

“Delia,” said Abe, turning it into a chorus.

“My feeling entirely. Delia, tomorrow morning. Pity she wasn’t here to meet Mr. Preston.”

Later that afternoon Carmine called a meeting in his office; the only one not present (apart from Nick) was the disgraced Tony, driving Q.V. Preston back to Queens. The news of his fall from grace had already spread out of the PD and into City Planning, Welfare, and a dozen other inhabitants of the County Services warren. No one ever knew how it happened; it just — did.

“We’ve hit the doldrums,” Carmine said, “in a case that’s going to be built on circumstantial evidence. Lucky for us that the other crimes needing our attention have been simple, with straight, hard evidence and witnesses. But this one is a swamp, not any place with a current. The pool of suspects is small and the motives are obvious. John Hall was killed because he knew something about someone concerned in the Chubb University Press publication of books, possibly the book known as
A Helical God
. Dr. Tinkerman was killed to remove him from his position as Head Scholar of C.U.P. Again, the book
A Helical God
springs to mind. However, we ought not to focus on this work as a given. It may be a blind, a red herring. The motive for both murders may lie in personal relationships having nothing to do with books as books.” He took a turn about his office, scowling slightly.

“The Tunbulls are the key. Whoever was present at Davina’s dinner is suspect for John’s murder, which evidence suggests
can’t have been committed by an outside agency of any kind. And all those suspects were present at the banquet where Tinkerman died.”

He wrote on his blackboard: “
James and Millicent Hunter
.
Max and Davina Tunbull
.
Val Tunbull
.
Ivan Tunbull
. And, let us not forget —
Uda Savovich
. Who wasn’t at the banquet.”

Down went the chalk. “That’s it. One of those people did double murder. On first glance I am inclined to dismiss Dr. James Hunter because the apparatus we found was too small for the size of his hand and fingers. However, a second glance reveals that the device could have been a deliberate plant by Hunter, who has another that fits his hand comfortably.”

He returned to the board after a quick stroll. “Paul’s report is in. The device Donny found has never held a drop of tetrodotoxin. Which leaves us in a cleft stick — was this the way the killer delivered his poison, or did he use something else? We may never know. Abe, what do you have?”

Abe stood up, face placid. “The influence of Davina on the Tunbull family is pronounced,” he said. “Decisions have been made that would never have been made had Davina not pushed. In the main, the twenty-thousand print run of
A Helical God
that C.U.P. didn’t authorize. Davina’s reason? That it would cement Dr. Jim’s chosen title, to which Tinkerman was opposed. He was all for
Nucleic Acids
— not a title to attract a bookstore browser. If the gossip is true, Tinkerman considered Dr. Jim’s book an affront to God, and was determined that the title should omit all reference to the Creator. His policy — and, stemming out of that, C.U.P.’s policy — was to decry the book
scholastically and ensure that it failed as a popular success. So I guess I’m harping on the book as a reason for murder.”

Delia huffed. “According to Davina, the print run was no risk at all. Uda had prognosticated Tinkerman’s future, which was to die at the banquet. Davina believed Uda’s vision implicitly — Tinkerman was going to die. Which is not the same thing as saying Davina — or Uda — killed him. Though I confess, boss, that the phenomenon of the unauthorized print run baffles me.”

“Me too,” said Buzz. “I mean, Max has been associated with C.U.P. for over twenty years. He’s sophisticated as well as a shrewd businessman. So why
did
he do that?”

“I suspect there are answers, but that we haven’t located the right oracle yet,” Carmine said, smiling. “The man who can give us the answers is the old Head Scholar, Don Carter, who’s on my list of interviewees. In the meantime, I suggest you all just take the print run as more logical than it seems.”

“Okay,” said Buzz, and grinned wickedly. “Here’s another question, Carmine: Tinkerman’s pals the Parsons were influential enough to push M.M. into doing as he was told: why not put M.M.’s name on your board as a suspect?”

“I agree he
should
be a suspect, Buzz,” Carmine said with heavy irony, “but I for one do not have the intestinal fortitude to write
Mawson MacIntosh
on this blackboard. M.M. is quite capable of murder in defense of his beloved university, but his speciality is assassination — of your character first, and if that doesn’t work, of your very soul. Luckily he’s on the side of the angels, and his victims are always straight from hell.”

Buzz winced, lifted his hands in surrender.

Abe spoke. “I may be off the subject, folks, but has anyone seen Max and Davina’s baby? The famous Alexis?”

A question greeted by blank silence until Delia answered. “I haven’t, and I imagine that means none of you has. What do you suspect, Abe? I’m intrigued.”

“I guess I started out by wondering if there were something wrong with the baby. Then I progressed to wondering if there was a baby at all. I’ve had a couple chats with Emily Tunbull — a nasty piece of work, that one!— and she alerted me when she said
she
had never really seen Alexis, just a bundle so wrapped up it could have contained a doll,” said Abe. “Her theory is that Alexis is a figment of Davina’s imagination and does not really exist. Emily believes Davina’s tricked the family with Max’s connivance. Emily’s passion is her own son, Ivan, whom the arrival of Alexis dispossessed.”

“Aren’t families interesting?” Delia asked. “What any outsider sees is only what the family intends shall be seen.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Delia,” Carmine said, “because you are going to examine the existing parameters of the Tunbull family, armed with what we now know about Davina and Uda. Talk to Emily. And demand to see the unswaddled baby.” He threw his head back and laughed. “I’d love to go to His Honor the Judge and ask for a warrant to produce an unswaddled baby!”

“He’s just persnickety enough to give you one,” said Abe.

Prunella, still in residence with her parents, had taken Julian and Alex for the day and night to give Desdemona a rare chance to be alone all evening with her husband. Carmine’s experience of weekdays had led him to pick Wednesday as his treat, on the theory that if it went as Wednesdays usually did, he would be home early. And he was right; the tetrodotoxin murders had indeed foundered, and he was through the door by five.

“How lovely,” said Desdemona, smiling as her eyes rested on him in his chair, free of a child, yes, but hampered by a big, fat, orange cat. “I admit that the pets are worse for you, as they crave to sit in your lap, but Frankie makes such a wonderful foot rest.” She rolled her bare heels and ankles across Frankie’s side, an activity that produced the dog’s awesome groans.

“Family life is always different from the life of lovers.” He sipped his drink, knowing he had the leisure to make it last and still have another couple of weakies before dinner. So he asked: “What’s for dinner?”

“One of your favorites. Saltimbocca alla Romana, with ziti in a plain tomato sauce on the side, and a green salad with walnut oil vinaigrette. After that, a deliciously smelly, runny cheese that cost a bomb.”

“I have died and gone to heaven.”

“Tell me about the case.”

He did so through that drink and the next; she listened intently, frowning occasionally. At the end she got him a third drink, then sighed. “Poor Millie,” she said obscurely.

“Why single her out, lovely lady?”

“She was so terribly young when she made her decision, and she’s far too stiff-necked ever to renege on it. Fifteen! The last of the gilt would have worn off the gingerbread by her mid-twenties, by which time all her friends from high school would have been married at least once, had a couple of children, and spent much of their time moaning over furniture Millie would have deemed palatial. What did Millie have, in her mid-twenties? A selfishly genius husband whose color had given her endless pain, a series of vile apartments full of Good Will furniture, a shared old car, hardly a dime in her purse, and not the faintest echo of children’s laughter — or tears.”

“Put like that, given her background, you paint a terrible picture, Desdemona.”

“Think of her in California! She wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t hankered for a better life, and California was the time she saw the pattern of her life unfolded beyond a shadow of a doubt. John Hall could not have appeared at a moment better suited for his purposes than sheer accident dictated — a very sad and disillusioned Millie, ripe for his attentions. Did she know the pearls were real, the rhinestones diamonds? It hardly matters. The important thing was that this personable, charming man noticed
her
, gave his gifts to
her
. Millie is terribly clever, but the biochemistry was a way to hew to Jim, a guarantee that they’d always have table and pillow talk when prosperity arrived. She had thought it would well before he earned his doctorate. In California she finally understood that it never would arrive at all.”

Carmine stopped stroking Winston’s head. “I’m getting out of my depth,” he said, brow wrinkling.

“Jim puts their money into his work,” Desdemona said, on her way to the kitchen.

Carmine tipped an outraged Winston on to the floor and followed her with a detour to the sink to wash his hands before he slid into the booth. “He can’t do that,” he said.

“Whether he can or not, he does. Jim sees some new piece of apparatus he can’t afford, and fiddles the books to buy it with his living money, or for her lab with her living money. It never occurs to Jim that in stripping both their grants bare, he denies Millie the dignity of her position.” Desdemona busied herself at the stove. “When finally they became salaried faculty here at Chubb, Millie was thirty. Now here she is, pushing thirty-three, living out on State Street.
Chubb faculty living out on State Street?
Come, Carmine! Everyone knows the really great universities pay in prestige, but they’re not on subsistence money. I mean, how can a man who possesses a whole floor of the Burke Biology Tower be living on a pittance? M.M. knows he’s a potential Nobel laureate, so I’d be willing to bet that Jim’s pretty well paid. Paying off student loans? They should have done that some time ago — including the sinus reconstruction money from John Hall, which I gather John never honestly expected to see paid back. No, Jim ploughs it all into his work with blind compulsion. I’d feel more sympathy towards that sort of drive were it not for the fact that Jim plunders his wife’s salary and grant money as if they were his own.” Desdemona struck her hands together. “Grr!”