Too Many Murders (2 page)

He stood back while Patrick finished his examination, then the two men looked at each other.

“I’m going to have to take the whole thing,” Patrick said. “I don’t dare pry him loose inside this closet—that thing must have a spring capable of taking a hand clean off if it gets away on us halfway through being forced open. This ceiling is much lower than the room’s, but there’s got to be a beam. What fun!”

“It’s not screwed down, it’s bolted,” Carmine said, “so a beam there must be. Chain saw time? Collapse of building?” He saw the
plastic-wrapped packet and bent to inspect it. “Hmm … Curiouser and curiouser, Patsy. Unless the interior is blank paper, this is a lot of money. Bait for the greedy. The kid saw it, made a grab for it, and literally sprung the trap.”

Having ascertained that, Carmine’s eyes took in the rest of the closet, which would have been a dream come true to a student, he reflected. Fifteen feet long, three feet wide, one end a bank of built-in drawers, next to them a series of open shelves, and the rest of the space given over to the storage of boxes, unwanted junk, the usual student impedimenta. The bear trap had been fixed over clear floor, not hard; the owner of the closet was neat and tidy.

“The guy who put the bear trap up knew his construction,” he said. “The bolts must be fixed in a joist or beam. The thing didn’t move a fraction of an inch when it was sprung.”

“Well, at least it is sprung, Carmine. My guys will be able to detach it. Have you seen enough?”

“I guess so. But do you believe this, Patsy?”

“No. This one makes twelve inside eighteen hours.”

“I’ll see you in the morgue.”

Carmine’s cohorts, Abe Goldberg and Corey Marshall, were standing by Evan Pugh’s desk looking dazed.

“Twelve, Carmine?” Corey asked as Carmine joined them.

“Twelve, and almost all different. Though this one takes the grand prize, guys—a bear trap. The victim’s a skinny milquetoast, so it crushed him hard enough to kill him.”

“Twelve!” said Abe in tones of wonder. “Carmine, in all the history of Holloman, there have never been twelve murders in one day. Four was tops when those biker gangs had a shoot-out in the Chubb Bowl parking lot, and that was simple, not even much of a surprise. You cleared it up in less than a week.”

“Well, I doubt I’m going to do the same here,” Carmine said, looking grim.

“No,” said both his sergeants in chorus.

“Still,” said Abe, trying to comfort his boss, “not all the cases are yours. I know Mickey McCosker and his team can’t be spared from their drug investigation, but Larry Pisano is already working the shootings. That’s three down, only nine to go with this one.”

“They’re all mine, Abe, you know that. I’m captain of detectives. What it’s going to mean is that each of you gets one victim to work—you know my methods better than Larry’s boys.” He frowned. “But not tonight. Go home, have a decent home-cooked feed and a good sleep. The Commissioner’s office at nine in the morning, okay?”

They nodded and left.

Carmine dallied, taking in the relatively spacious student room, and the rather glaring disparity between his murder victim’s side and the side belonging to the young man who had found him.

Tom Wilkinson was waiting in a room set aside by the Dean as his temporary quarters; one of Patsy’s technicians had escorted him into his own digs once a sheet was up over Evan’s closet door, and supervised his selection of clothes, books, oddments. After a look at the technician’s list, Carmine went back to examining the room. The two young men may as well have painted a line down its middle, so different were the two sides. Tom was haphazard and untidy, including the interior of his closet, whereas Evan Pugh was an obsessive. Even the notes pinned to his corkboard were squared off and neat. A quick perusal of them betrayed no hint as to why he had been murdered; they were just reminders to pick up his dry cleaning on such-and-such a date, shop for stamps, new socks, stationery. The photographs were all of a warmer place than Holloman—palm trees, brightly colored houses, beaches. And a mansion outside which a man and woman in their forties stood, clad in evening dress and looking prosperous.

When the desk yielded nothing further, Carmine went to see Tom Wilkinson, sitting miserably on the side of his new bed. He was very different from Evan Pugh, a single glance showed that: tall, handsome in a blond way, athletic, with wide blue eyes that stared at Carmine in a mixture of fear, horror and curiosity. Not the eyes of
a bear trap killer, Carmine decided. The young fellow was cheaply dressed—no camelhair and cashmere here.

He tried not to babble his story of the blood leaking out of Evan’s closet, his calling to Evan, the lack of an answer, his opening of the closet door. After that he found it harder to be logical, but Carmine gave him time to recover, then learned that Tom hadn’t lingered to ascertain any details of the mess inside. Some pre-meds might have; a ghoulish tendency often went with the territory. If he had seen the money, he wasn’t admitting it, and Carmine was inclined to believe that he hadn’t. This pre-med student was scraping to find the money to stay at Paracelsus and would have been sorely tempted to filch the packet before anyone else knew it was there. He bore no blood on his clothes, and he had stepped around the puddle when he entered the closet. On his way out he hadn’t been as careful, but the path guy who escorted him back into the room had taken his sneakers, he explained, wriggling his toes through the holes in his socks. The sneakers were new, he’d miss them, so—um—? Carmine found himself promising to have the shoes returned as soon as possible.

“Did you like your roommate?” Carmine asked.

“No,” said Tom bluntly.

“Why?”

“Aw, gee, he was such a
weed!
”

“You don’t look like a judgmental type, Tom.”

“I’m not, and I could deal with a weed, Captain, if he was an ordinary weed. But Evan wasn’t. He was so—full of himself! I mean, he weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet and had a face like Miss Prissy out of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon. But he didn’t believe he looked weird! To hear him talk, you’d get the impression that guys who weigh ninety pounds soaking wet and have faces like Miss Prissy are just what the doctor ordered. He had a hide so thick a naval shell couldn’t dent it!”

“That’s thick,” said Carmine solemnly. “What was he like in class? Did he get good grades?”

“A-pluses in everything,” said Tom despondently. “He headed the
class, even drew better than the rest of us. We got sick of seeing his drawing of a dogfish’s cranial nerves or an ox’s eyeball being held up as examples of what anatomical drawing ought to be like! Man, he was a pain! It would have been okay, except that he rubbed it in, especially to guys like me on scholarship. I mean, I’ll probably have to go into the army or navy to get out from under debt, which gouges a hole in the years I’ll have left to practice for myself.”

“Did he socialize with his classmates?”

“Hell, no! Evan did weird things, like go to New York City to see an opera or some highbrow play. He never missed an avant-garde movie at the Chubb Film Society, bought tickets to charity banquets or those speech nights at country clubs when some kiss-ass politician was the speaker—weird! Then he’d bend our ears afterward as though the rest of us were peasants. I guess if anything surprises me, it’s that no one here at Paracelsus has ever beat the shit out of him.”

“Did he keep regular hours? Snore? Have unpleasant—er—personal habits of any kind?”

Tom Wilkinson looked blank. “No, but yes to the regular hours. Unless you call his conceit and bragging unpleasant.”

“What time did you discover him?”

“About six. I have a car because it means I can get back to college for lunch and dinner. Cafeteria meals on Science Hill are expensive, and my sister gave me her old clunker when she bought a better car. Gas is dirt cheap, and my meals here are part of my room and board. The food’s good too. I finished a physiology class in the Burke Biology Tower at five thirty, then drove home.”

“Are most of your classes on Science Hill?”

“Sure, especially for a genuine pre-med. We have a couple of—um—dilettantes in our sophomore year who take art history and crap like that, but they go elsewhere for classes as well. The closest thing to a classroom Paracelsus has is a lecture theater that the Dean saves for sermons on untidiness and vandalism.”

“Vandalism?”

“Oh, that’s just the Dean. The freshmen get a bit restive and do
things like chuck dirty old house bricks into Piero Conducci’s pebble gardens; they have to use a cherry picker to get them out. I wouldn’t call putting whore’s underwear on a nude lady’s statue vandalism, sir. Would you?”

“Probably not,” said Carmine, straight-faced. “I take it that all the students in your wing are sophomores, Tom?”

“Yes, sir. Four wings, one for each year. Evan and I have an upstairs room, but down below us are more sophomores.”

“So, given that the emphasis is on pre-med, that means the wing is deserted between lunch and around six in the evening?”

“Yeah, it is. If someone’s too sick to go to classes, he’s supposed to be in sick bay, where there’s a nurse. Sometimes a guy cuts classes to catch up on an important assignment, but there’s nothing like that on our schedule at the moment, sir.”

“What about mornings?”

“The same, only shorter. I think the Dean tries to get the tradesmen in during the morning, so he can keep a better eye on them.”

Carmine rose. “Thanks, Tom. I wish all my witnesses were half as candid. Go and have some dinner, even if you don’t feel like eating.”

From there it was off downstairs to see Dean Robert Highman. As Carmine descended the graceful but open staircase (he loathed stairs he could see through, like these), he stopped to take in the nucleus of Paracelsus College’s broad, squat X. Each wing was devoted to student accommodation, but the center contained the offices and apartments of the college’s senior faculty. The Dean and Bursar lived in commodious quarters here; though the four year Fellows each lived in a kitchenless apartment at the far end of the four wings, the four similar units adjacent to the nucleus were occupied by postdoctoral Fellows who had nothing to do with the college’s administration.

The offices were downstairs, the Dean’s and Bursar’s apartments upstairs. The foyer was relatively large and quite deserted at this dinner hour; the open counter where a clerk worked during office hours
was unmanned, and the offices clearly visible through glass walls were equally empty.

Resuming his descent, Carmine stopped short of the counter and debated how he was going to locate the Dean. A cheerful buzz emanated from the opposite side of the nucleus, where the dining room and common rooms were located. Sighing, Carmine girded his loins for a sortie into the midst of four hundred eating young men, but it never happened. A short, fussy man in a three-piece suit emerged from the dining side entrance, took Carmine in at a glance, and walked toward him. He had the gait of a duck, though he wasn’t overweight. Just knock-kneed. His face was round and ruddy, his brown hair scant but assiduously brushed to hide as much scalp as possible, and his dark brown eyes held a flash that told Carmine he was capable of cowing most of Paracelsus’s inmates. No one could have called him handsome.

“Dean Highman,” said Carmine, shaking hands. Good, firm grip.

“Come upstairs to my apartment,” the Dean said, lifting the flap of the counter and unlocking a glass door. Once through that, they ascended to the second floor in a tiny elevator, a smoother ride than tiny elevators usually gave.

“Dean Dawkins—Paracelsus’s first dean and my predecessor—was a paraplegic,” Highman explained as they floated upward, “but his qualifications outweighed both his handicap and the cost of installing this.” A soft chuckle. “Princeton thought it had him.”

“Eat your heart out, Princeton,” said Carmine, grinning.

“Are you a Chubber, Captain?”

“Yes, Class of Forty-eight.”

“Ah! Then you were one of the young men who defended our beloved country. But you must have started before the war.”

“Yes, in September of 1939. I enlisted straight after Pearl Harbor, so I lost my credits for the fall of 1941. Not that I cared. The Japs and the Nazis came first.”

“Married?”

“Yes.”

“Children?”

“A girl by a previous marriage, Sophia, now sixteen, and a son five months old,” said Carmine, wondering who was conducting this interrogation.

“His name?”

“Still undecided.”

“Oh, dear! Is that a serious marital contretemps?”

“No, more an ongoing, good-natured argument.”

“She’ll win, Captain, she’ll win! They always do.”

Dean Highman settled his guest in a leather chair and went to the bar cart. “Sherry? Scotch? Whiskey?”

“You didn’t offer me gin, Dean.”

“You don’t look or act like a gin man.”

“How right you are! Whiskey will do fine, thanks. Soda and ice, and drown it.”

“Still on duty, eh?” The Dean sat down with his own generous glass of sherry. “Ask away, Captain.”

“I gather from Mr. Pugh’s roommate, Mr. Wilkinson, that the college is deserted during class hours?”

“Absolutely. Any student found wandering the corridors during class hours is certain to be queried. Not that it happens often. Paracelsus was built and endowed specifically for pre-med students by the Parson Foundation.”

Carmine pulled a face. “Oh, that bunch!”

“You speak as one who knows them.”

“I was involved in a case the year before last that had to do with one of their endowed facilities.”

“Yes, the Hug,” said Dean Highman, nodding wisely. “I do sincerely trust that the murder of Mr. Pugh does
not
embroil Paracelsus in that kind of disaster.”

“I doubt it, Dean, beyond what leaks to the press and other media
about the circumstances of Mr. Pugh’s death. Rest assured that we’ll be trying to tone down our releases.”

The Dean leaned forward, his sherry forgotten. “I am smitten with fear, Captain. How did Mr. Pugh die?”

“Between the teeth of a bear trap rigged in his closet.”

The ruddy face paled, and the sherry stood in danger of slopping until the Dean lifted the glass to his lips and drank it off in a gulp. “Ye gods! Christ almighty!
Here?
In Paracelsus?”