The Prodigal Son (27 page)

Edith Tinkerman was packing too, though not with such triumphant finality. Probate took time — she would ask Dean Wainfleet if he knew anyone could speed it up a little — so the house could not be sold. However, the Dean had put her in touch with a law firm that had freed up some of Tom’s staggering savings, so she wasn’t worried where the next meal was coming from.

In her opinion the police had been very kind — really, really considerate. They had been obliged to search the house, especially Tom’s study, but they had put everything back where it belonged. Anne and Catherine, who watched TV a lot, had thought they would create a terrible mess because the TV cops did. Well that was the difference between reality and what Tom had called the “boob tube”. Would a Delia Carstairs permit her colleagues to make a mess? The Holloman police were
civilized
.

Too civilized, as it turned out. Edith had forgotten to tell them about Tom’s secret drawer, and the cops hadn’t inspected that section of wall because it was covered by an ugly old Russian madonna and child Tom seemed to think far better than an Andrew Wyeth, and he was the best American painter living. In Edith’s view, a thousand years of age couldn’t turn bad art into good.

Now she stood, dismayed, in her husband’s study and debated what she ought to do. Look first, she decided, went to the really ugly painting, and lifted it down. The wall behind was just wall save for a thin crack that outlined a shallow drawer
whose handle was the picture hook. Understanding that the icon was worth more than the whole house, Carmine and Abe hadn’t touched it, reasoning that nor would Thomas Tinkerman.

The drawer was where Tom always kept work in progress. It wasn’t necessary to hide his efforts, he knew that well, but something in his constricted being took pleasure in pretending that his efforts were important enough to require hiding, if only from fellow scholars. Hence the drawer.

Edith pulled it out to find it stuffed quite full of loose sheets of paper, on top of which was a letter Tom himself had written using his gold Parker fountain pen. It was signed, therefore ready to be sent — why hadn’t he sent it? she wondered, gazing at its addressee. Probably something to do with the papers.

Police forgotten, she moved to the phone on Tom’s desk, and for the first time in her life sat in Tom’s beautiful leather chair. Best call the addressee and find out what to do next.

She picked up the receiver and dialed — no push-buttons for Thomas Tarleton Tinkerman!

One of Uda’s tiny hands reached for one of the baby’s tiny hands and their fingers clung while he gurgled gleefully.

“Alexis is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen,” Uda said huskily.

Black mop of unkinked hair glistening in the light, the baby’s head came forward; up went the green eyes to his mother’s face. Her heart caved in, it was all she could do not to
squeeze him to death. So much love! Whoever could have guessed the ecstasy of motherhood without experiencing it? I have killed to save myself and Uda, Davina thought, but only when nothing else would answer. Whereas I would kill for Alexis if anyone looked sideways at him.

“I have decided not to go ahead with my plans for Chez at this time,” she said to Uda, but not in English.

Uda blinked, lizardlike. “Is that wise? We can cope with him, we’re two against one,” she said, but not in English.

“Our unknown friend has let us down, and what should have been simple has turned into a mess. We must find another way.”

“He will make allegations, Vina.”

“That I, a very successful model, engaged in fraud and confidence tricks that I will try to blame on him — yes, we both know that,” Davina said. “It is ludicrous.”

Uda let Alexis’s hands fall. “Chez is stupid, Vina, and life has gone too well for him. If you feel the time is not right, we should get in first. I know the Holloman police have taken his fingerprints, but have they thought to check them with the NYPD? This country is very much organized as states, his printing was routine. Let us anonymously inform the Holloman police that this Chester Malcuzinski was once Chester Derzinsky and had a record in New York City years ago. It can’t hurt us, but it can switch Lieutenant Goldberg’s attention to him.”

“An excellent idea!” Davina stretched. “Yes, Uda, do it by the telephone, with one of your American accents.”

Uda went back to the baby, blowing bubbles to attract an admiring audience.

“You have disposed of the paraphernalia?” Davina asked, still not in English.

The black currant eyes flashed scorn. “It is safe.”

“You did not destroy it.”

“No one will find my bits and pieces, sister.” Uda took the baby from Davina and held him against her meager chest. “It is time for his bottle, and my turn to give it.”

Tonight there were no private moments with Desdemona; Carmine sat with his younger son on his lap, the cat wedged into the chair alongside him, while his elder son was marching up and down the little sitting room in imitation of a wooden soldier. Their house had been one of the first in East Holloman to get cable television; Desdemona wanted to search the channels for those she felt would not put ideas in Julian’s head about guns and shoot-’em-deads.

But the British children’s programs she had located had failed her; wooden soldiers in bearskin helmets marching up and down, wooden rifles over their shoulders.

“Julian, pipe down and read a book,” Carmine said when the performance grew irritating.

He could read. Emilia Delmonico had been a famous kindergarten teacher with a genuine skill for teaching children to read, and on Julian’s second birthday Desdemona had
crumbled, asked her mother-in-law to teach Julian. Who was too bright, too busy, too much of a handful.

What annoyed Desdemona was Julian’s tendency to obey his father as if he always obeyed every instruction or request given him: far from the truth. Though she had regained her ascendancy over him somewhat, Julian hadn’t forgotten how easy it had been to bully Mommy during his defense attorney phase. So now the kid smiled angelically and went to his bean bag with his book, curled up there and did as he was told.

“He never does that for
me
!” she snapped, and could have bitten off her tongue. Carmine’s amber eyes flew to her face, startled; he frowned.

“Desdemona, are you well?”

A question that made her even crosser. “Yes, yes, yes, of course I’m well!” she said angrily, sipping at her gin and tonic. “It’s just that Julian has the knack of getting under Mummy’s skin. He’s too clever for his own good, and I find it difficult to manage him.” Her hand flew out, the drink almost spilled. “It’s not
right
!” she exclaimed. “I should be managing better — I ran a whole research facility, for heaven’s sake! Now I can’t even run a house where someone else does the cleaning. I could spit chips!”

The cat went flying, Alex was lifted effortlessly as Carmine rose to his feet. “You, my son, are going to bed.” And off he went to the nursery, Alex looking a little stunned. At nine months he was crawling and jabbering; Desdemona was looking at life with another Julian to join the original model.

“Little pitchers have ears,” he said when he returned, and pointing at Julian. The cat had taken all of his chair, fat body
sprawled belly-up with paws sticking up. “Winston, go annoy Julian for a change,” he said, dispossessing the cat with one scoop of his hand. “Go on, shoo! Where’s Frankie?”

“In disgrace. Rolled in dead raccoon — I walloped him with a hollow tube and cleaned him off in cold water. Sooner or later he’ll get the message that the ecstasy is not worth the icy torment afterward.”

“My poor girl!” Carmine sat, his chair all to himself.

“It’s early days for this case, so cheer up,” she said, her own mood inexplicably lightened.

In answer, Carmine looked at his watch. “Bed, Julian.”

This never provoked the storms it used to. Julian was one of those unfortunate human beings cursed with a night owl’s nature — he found it difficult to get to sleep and even harder to wake up. Prunella Balducci had explained that it was simply the way Julian was made, not an impulse to disobedience. So a TV set appeared in the nursery tuned permanently to a cartoon channel, and Julian lay in bed and watched; for some reason, this lulled him to sleep far earlier than a dark and silent room did. Carmine called it a part of his defense attorney persona, though his accompanying laugh was a little wry. Julian did have defense attorney characteristics, there was no denying it.

He came out of the bean bag lithely, as befitted such a tall and robust child. His beauty was still beauty, though it would transform into something more masculine long before he hit the playground of St. Bernard’s Boys’ School — dense black curls, black brows and lashes, topaz colored eyes with a dark ring around the iris that gave them a piercing look.

A kiss for Mommy, a kiss for Daddy, and he was gone, the book put tidily away on “his” shelf. Carmine’s son: order and method, a place for everything.

“What’s for dinner?” Carmine asked.

“Lasagna and salad, crisp bread rolls on the side.”

“Fantastic!” He got himself a second drink. “What happened today to upset you, Desdemona?”

“The Monday Julians, is all. After having you to help me with him over the weekend, Monday is always hard. I love him to death, God knows I do, but we weren’t fortunate with the personality of our first-born, Carmine. He’s a permanent handful, not because he’s nasty or malign, he isn’t. But he’s domineering and intensely driven. I just don’t have the strength I did before this wretched depression.” She flopped into her chair and stared at her drink, frowning. “No, love, don’t freshen it up. I have a strange feeling that I ought to limit myself to one drink at night and one glass of wine with the meal. I’m a huge person, so I can tolerate alcohol better than a basketball cheerleader, yet … I don’t have addictive qualities, but I know I can’t let myself get fuzzy in the head. It’s a feeling, that’s all.”

“Go with it. Gut instincts are valid, and you do seem to attract trouble from time to time,” Carmine said, voice tender. “Let’s talk about my case. You think it’s only early days?”

“Yes. This is one of your difficult cases, dear heart, and I’ve come to some conclusions about them.”

“Expound,” he said, watching her narrowly.

“There’s no concrete evidence, is that right?”

“On the knocker.”

“You have your suspicions?”

“More than suspicions. Convictions.”

“Oh, I see! That makes it far worse, of course. What I’ve noticed about the difficult cases is that the break, if and when it comes, is almost by accident.”

“A fall down a leafy bank,” he said musingly.

“Yes. But if no freak occurrence happens, the only way to solve the case is by confession. Which makes sense,” she said, warming to her theme. “Ordinary crimes are committed by ordinary people. They don’t think things through, they don’t plan for every move and every eventuality. Clever criminals do, and none is more subtle than the poisoner. This tetrodotoxin nearly put you back in Thomas Tinkerman’s Middle Ages, not so? When someone could slip aconite or cyanide into another’s food or drink, and who could tell? I would judge this killer so extremely clever that he — or she!— has successfully planned for every eventuality. It’s like the footprints of a complex dance pattern on a floor — left foot there, right foot here, a turn, a swirl, and who knows where the dance picks up again? This is a confession case, my love, I can see that, which means you have to force a confession not by trickery but by patience and stealth. This killer makes no mistakes.”

“A confession crime,” he said flatly.

“Yes. Consider! A very rare and unobtainable poison gets into the hands of people who were, if not instructed how to use it, at least pushed sufficiently in the right direction to use it. Look at poor Mrs. Tinkerman. All she did was something she’d
done a hundred times before. She had no idea that her syringe contained the rare poison. However,” Desdemona said in a dreamy tone, “he didn’t kill Emily Tunbull. That one doesn’t fit, though I think he supplied the poison. John Hall and Thomas Tinkerman. Though Emily’s murder suits him. It muddies the waters, since she died by tetrodotoxin. Oh, he’s clever!”

“It’s the hydra-headed monster, isn’t it?”

“Yes. You have to aim for the heart, not cut off the heads.” She got up, extended her hands to pull him up. “But I haven’t told you a single thing you don’t already know,” she said, going kitchenward.

He went to wash his hands, laid the table and slid into his side of the booth as she loaded their plates.

“We don’t know enough about John Hall’s life before he turned up in Holloman, and the death of Wendover Hall was a bad blow,” he said, watching her. “Today I sent Liam Connor to the West Coast to find out what he can. There was some kind of psychiatric illness in John’s late teens involving a halfway house, and it’s always possible Liam will track down someone who was at Caltech at the same time as John and the Hunters. Wendover Hall didn’t employ a domestic staff except for a cleaning woman, but that’s not to say there aren’t people in Oregon who know all kinds of things about John Hall.”

“Concentrate on his links to Jim Hunter,” Desdemona said, putting his plate in front of him. “Hunter’s a secretive man.”

TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 1969

E
dith Tinkerman had left a message for Sergeant Delia Carstairs with the police switchboard to the effect that she had something further she wished to discuss: she would be at home on Tuesday.

The second bombshell! thought Delia exultantly, rather glad that she had worn this fabulous new coat of shaggy synthetic monkey fur with a glittering gold thread woven through it to match the thread in her mustard-and-orange suit. She drove out to Busquash to arrive around ten a.m. The correct hour in Mrs. Tinkerman’s mind for morning tea.

Surprised to find the front door a little ajar, Delia knocked on the jamb and called out. “Hello? Edie? It’s Delia!”

When no one answered after several successively louder calls, she pushed the door open and entered. No lights on; the hallway was dim, gloomy even, and the air was cold. As if the heat had not been turned up in the evening, when the outside temperature plummeted. A Tinkerman economy?