The Prodigal Son (28 page)

Edie wasn’t in the kitchen, the living room or her bedroom; best check the study, a room she didn’t associate with Edie in any kind of mood.

She was sitting in Tinkerman’s chair behind Tinkerman’s desk, her head down and resting with its brow on her hands, folded on the slab of blotting paper sheathed in a chased Morocco holder.

Death was in the room too. Delia felt its hairless leathery wings brush past her, flap away bearing its prize.

Even the sockets of her teeth crawled with horror; she stepped around the desk and looked down. Because Edie hadn’t tried to stem the floodtide of grey, the blood showed up clearly in the matted home-permed hair. Someone had shot her KGB style, a bullet through the base of the brain — over and done with in a split second. The blood had ceased welling but was still very fluid: no more than half an hour ago. Broad daylight on a Busquash street that would have been full of cars taking people to their places of work.

Her tears couldn’t be let fall. Delia leaped away quickly and groped in her bag, past her 9mm Parabellum pistol and her tiny .22 Saturday night special revolver to find her lace-edged handkerchief, sop up the grief. Oh, this wasn’t fair! Twice she had wept for women cut short. Oh, how dared he! To cheat this poor little woman of her hard-earned Arizona retirement — it didn’t bear thinking of.

“But at least he was merciful,” she said to Carmine minutes later as Gus and Paul went to work. “With any luck, she never even saw it coming. Her light would have just — gone out,
poof! Though the way she’s lying suggests to me that perhaps he went one step farther toward mercy by drugging her heavily.”

“What brought you here, Deels?”

“She said she had something to discuss.”

“Something to discuss with someone else as well. If she’d confined herself to you, she wouldn’t be dead.”

“Whoever it was, she trusted, saw no danger involved.”

“So whatever she had to say can’t have appeared significant to her beyond a niggle,” Carmine said. “Oh, Jesus, four deaths! He did this one himself, couldn’t cope with the thought that she might suffer. However he tricked her, I’m convinced she didn’t know it was coming. I wonder whose is the gun?”

“A .22 by the look of the entry wound,” Delia stated, still very upset. “Dainty little thing. No one would have heard the report.” She gazed around. “Why was she in Tinkerman’s chair? Carmine, Abe has to inspect this room. We missed something.”

“It has to be behind the icon — It’s so valuable I thought Tinkerman would never fiddle with it, so I put it off-limits for the search. Stupid! He had no respect for art, even worth mega-bucks.” Carmine’s eyes rested on Delia’s coat. “You look really delectable today, too. Promise me you won’t take against the coat — it’s fantastic.”

She cheered a little. “I promise.”

“Let’s get out of here and leave the experts to it.”

She lurched. “Good idea. My blood sugar’s down.”

Abe found the secret drawer behind the priceless icon, that was a given, but whatever it had contained was gone.

“No fingerprints or other hard evidence either,” Carmine said to Delia, sliding back into his Malvolio’s booth after a session on Luigi’s phone. “I asked Abe to inform the Tinkerman daughters’ lawyers that there is an immensely valuable icon must be incorporated in his estate. There’s no sticker says it’s on loan from the Parsons, so why shouldn’t those two poor girls enjoy the fruits of its sale? Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” He huffed in satisfaction.

Delia was looking better. “What do you think was in the secret drawer?” she asked.

“Hard evidence, that’s for sure. But it also suggests that Tinkerman was murdered for more than his appointment as the Head Scholar of C.U.P. He knew something about the killer that survived his death, that made the murder of his wife an urgent and immediate necessity.”

“I’m all out of ideas,” said Delia.

“Me too. It must be dynamite,” Carmine said.

“At least in scholastic circles, which were the only circles Tinkerman knew — or cared about. I am flummoxed.”

“Is that an English or an American word?” Carmine asked.

“What?”

“Flummoxed.”

“I really don’t know, except that my potty papa would probably say it derived from an English dialect.”

“North, not south.”

“Carmine, honestly!” Delia squawked. “What does it matter?”

“It doesn’t except it’s all in how you look at a thing.”

Delia groped for the right reply, found it. “I’m flummoxed.”

“Exactly.”

Gus Fennell was more forthcoming.

“A hollow-nosed bullet. Made soup of her brain stem.”

“Had she been drugged first?”

“A very large but non-lethal dose of Seconal. I’d say she had been asleep at the desk for hours when the bullet was fired.”

“Head on the desk, as we found her?”

“Yes. I think he stayed with her until he was satisfied she was virtually comatose.”

“Any evidence as to how it was administered?”

“Orally, but nothing containing Seconal was found. He must have removed the glass — a drink of some woman’s tipple is my guess. He would have drunk whiskey. But no glasses.”

“Painless, instantaneous, right?”

“Right,” Gus agreed.

“A killer with scruples,” said Carmine thoughtfully. “Thanks, Gus. Her daughters will apply for burial, probably in conjunction with their father. It isn’t often kids bury both parents at once.”

Abe, who had hovered on the periphery of Edith Tinkerman’s murder, had more to say. “Whatever was in the drawer filled it,” he said to Carmine at a general meeting later on.

“How could you tell that?” Carmine asked curiously.

“There was no high-water mark, if you get my meaning. When papers fill a space, they leave fibers and fragments behind clear to the top of the space. Like in this drawer, not a deep one at two inches. I had Paul run a 3-D microscope over its insides, and they displayed the same distribution of fibers, shreds, mites. The drawer wasn’t packed, but it was full. In terms of sheets of paper, the number would depend on the weight of the paper. Twenty-pound rag, about a hundred sheets to every fifteen millimeters brand new, unused. Eight- or ten-pound crap, about twice that. If the sheets were crumpled or creased or even used, fewer. I couldn’t even hazard a guess without knowing what was in the drawer,” Abe said in his usual calm tones. “However, the paper wasn’t high grade. Ordinary crap, judging from the fibers. If you pushed me to a guess, Carmine, I’d say about a hundred-fifty sheets of ordinary paper in non-mint condition.”

“Any other observations? Those are brilliant.”

“From Paul, one. The blotting paper bore impressions of a letter, several pages long, written in good grade blue-black ink with a fountain pen — or a nibbed pen, at any rate. Paul is working on the blotter, but doesn’t hold out much hope. The pages were blotted on top of each other and in no particular sequence. Dr. Tinkerman may have prided himself on his penmanship, but he didn’t care where he blotted what he’d written, and he was a frequent blotter. So Paul has the phrase ‘may not have meant’ free and clear, as well as ‘I cannot believe that he intended this to remain as is’ followed by many
sentences that cover each other up completely.” Abe shrugged. “Don’t hope to solve the case on a piece of blotting paper, Carmine.”

“Deeply appreciated, Abe, and convey my thanks to Paul.”

Tony Cerutti spoke up. “I have information on Emily Tunbull’s brother, Chester Malcuzinski,” he said, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

“Ah! The Florida businessman! Shoot, Tony,” said Carmine.

“I had an anonymous call from a guy with a Texas accent you could cut with a knife,” Tony said. “According to Tex, Emily Tunbull’s brother has a criminal history in New York state. He went by the name Chez Derzinsky — skee with a ‘y’— and was known in certain circles as the Pollack. He frequented New York City midtown between 1957 and 1964, and ran a scam using a really beautiful foreign woman as bait. Not prostitution, Tex says. Extortion. The girl, who was simply his pawn kept obedient by threats to harm her family, would batten on some rich old guy visiting town — conventioneers mostly — and tell him she was going to be kidnapped by a gang of Germans and forced into whoring. Chez pretended to be a German thug, and the old guy would cough up anything between five and ten big ones to buy her freedom. None of the victims would ever press charges, but Tex gave me the name of an NYPD Vice detective who would confirm the story.”

Everyone was sitting up straight, astonished at any kind of break in this damnable case.

“What did the Vice detective have to say?” Carmine asked.

“Tex’s story was true. Our Chester Malcuzinski’s prints match their Chester Derzinsky, who served a year in Sing Sing for fraud when he was twenty. His only conviction. Just when New York started to heat up, Derzinsky and the girl disappeared. Derzinsky reappeared a few months later in Florida as the realtor Chester Malcuzinski — his birth name. He
is
Emily Tunbull’s brother. The girl totally vanished, but she sounds a lot like Davina Tunbull,” Tony said triumphantly.

“Good work, Tony,” Carmine said. “Finally the pieces are beginning to fall into place.”

Still suffering the backlash of his stupidity in questioning Mr. Q.V. Preston, Tony glowed.

“If the girl’s Davina, how much does Max know?” Donny asked.

“He doesn’t suspect Davina,” Abe said positively. “It would kill him, I think.”

“Maybe not, if your wife has enough power over you to con you into printing twenty-thousand books without authorization,” Donny said quickly.

“I don’t think it affects C.U.P.,” Buzz said. “Tinkerman and what was in the drawer are more important by far. The longer the case goes on, the more the Tunbull deaths look like a detour on a highway, and that goes for John Hall as much as for Emily.”

“I agree that Tinkerman holds the answers,” Carmine said, looking suddenly brisk. “Certainly Emily posed no threat to the killer because her death is utterly divorced from Tinkerman’s. She threatened Davina, and it was Davina poisoned her. She got
the tetrodotoxin from our man, but she wouldn’t kill to protect him. Just herself.”

“You’re right,” Abe said, nodding, “though John Hall is a mainstream murder our man committed.”

“Emily’s just dust in our eyes?” Buzz asked incredulously.

“No! Emily represented a different threat to a different person — Davina,” said Carmine. “I have no idea what the threat was, but Davina knew it as dangerous to her welfare.”

“We need search warrants for the Tunbull premises, Carmine,” Abe said. “Printery, Imaginexa and home.”

“I’ll see His Honor today.”

Carmine met Judge Douglas Wilbur Thwaites upstairs in Commissioner John Silvestri’s eyrie at five o’clock. Jean Tasco had laid out plates of olives, cheese-and-pickle nibbles, and pâté thickly spread atop savory wafers. The drinks cabinet was full, the ice bucket was full, and the assortment of glasses were all of the thin, plain type the Judge was known to favor. Auspicious.

He was sitting with Silvestri and the Captain of Uniforms, Fernando Vasquez; the latter, Carmine had been thrilled to sense, was earmarked as Silvestri’s choice to replace him when he retired as Police Commissioner. As Carmine had feared he himself would be John’s choice, Fernando’s advent had come as an unexpected gift from heaven. No way Carmine wanted the pains, politics, predicaments and pussyfooting around that the Commissioner’s post involved. Fernando was a shoo-in.

Of course he was holding the floor, and speaking with fervor about his passion — paper.

“It’s not the same world, Judge,” he was saying earnestly. “With the hotshot defense attorneys taking more and more of the limelight and bigger legal staffs researching old cases, you as a judge have no idea what you might be hit with. Including flaws in police procedure or disruption of the evidence chain. I tell you, police procedure and method has to be more than just perfect — it has to be documented in quadruplicate.”

“Paper pusher,” said Carmine, going to the bar to pour himself a weak bourbon-and-soda, no ice.

His appearance had put a scowl on His Honor’s face. “Oh, it’s you, is it? I’m only here to be talked into dubious warrants.” Then he undid the impression of enmity this implied by patting a chair near him and smiling. “Sit here, Carmine. Dotty wants to know how Desdemona’s doing.”

“She’s well, Judge. Her cooking’s paradise. Before Prunella Balducci goes to L.A., I’ll give the kids to her for a few days and all of you can come to dinner. I know of no other way to prove my contention.”

“She needs days to prepare a meal?” His Honor asked.

“Sure. She makes one sauce that takes three days.”

“Let’s get the warrants out of the way, then we can all enjoy the drinks,” said Silvestri.

“What do you need, Carmine?” asked Judge Thwaites.

“A warrant for a full search of Max Tunbull’s house and business premises. That should include any part of the house
given, deeded or otherwise to any other person, including Uda Savovich.”

The Judge writhed. “Carmine, you know I abominate searches of a man’s private kingdom — his home. Fingers poking through his wife’s underwear — reading his private papers — and yes, I know all the arguments you intend to give me, how your searches are always legitimate and almost always yield evidence. So I’ll save time and grant the warrant. But strictly for evidence of your tetrodotoxin case. If you discover evidence that Tunbull is planning to blow up County Services or go on a shooting spree the next time the Holloman Huskies play at home, you may not act on it. Is that understood?”

As they went through this every time, Carmine nodded. “Yes, sir, it’s fully understood. I think County Services and the Holloman Huskies are safe.”

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 1969

F
or once Carmine caught Davina Tunbull off balance; when he and Abe Goldberg arrived with Donny and Tony to serve the warrant, Max was at the printery and Davina not long dressed.

“I suggest that you and Miss Savovich take the baby and join your husband at his place of work,” Carmine said. “From this moment on I can’t let you be inside this house without a member of the police force to watch you. It’s more sensible to leave, ma’am.”