Items related to Too Many Murders
It's a beautiful spring day in the little city of Holloman, Connecticut. The year is 1967, and the world teeters on the brink of nuclear holocaust as the Cold War goes relentlessly on. But Holloman has other things to worry about--on April 3, 1967, twelve murders have taken place on one day. Suddenly Captain Carmine Delmonico, chief of detectives, has other, more important matters to occupy him than finding a satisfactory name for his infant son. With his cohorts Abe Goldberg and Corey Marshall giving him unfailing support, Carmine embarks on what looks like an insoluble case.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Mr. Evan Pugh April 3, 1967
Paracelsus College
Chubb University
Holloman, Conn.
Dear Mr. Pugh,
I concede defeat. Your $100,000 has been placed in your room at college, as stipulated in your letter of March 29th. I will ensure that my presence in college seems innocent if I am detected. Please do not attempt to obtain more money from me. My pockets are empty.
Yours sincerely, Motor Mouth
Evan Pugh’s hands were shaking as he read this missive, put in his pigeonhole in a plain white envelope bearing his name and address typed with a carbon ribbon, like the letter. The dark square aperture of his pigeonhole had been empty every time he looked between going downstairs for his breakfast and the end of lunch. Now, at two thirty, he had his answer!
The corridors were empty as he wended his way up one curving set of open stairs at his end of the foyer; Paracelsus was a new college, of gloriously clean and sweeping lines, and had been designed by a world-famous architect who was a Chubb alumnus. It suffered the bleak austerity of his style too: Vermont marble floors and walls, glass-enclosed pebble gardens too small to enter, white lighting, minimal ornamentation. Upstairs, where Evan’s dormitory was located, the white marble was replaced by grey-painted walls and a grey rubber floor—very practical, but airy and spacious. As were the rooms, for which reason Paracelsus’s inmates loved their architect dearly. Of course, he himself had suffered the horrors of sharing a cubicle in a college built in 1788, so he had endowed Paracelsus with big rooms and plenty of bathrooms.
Upstairs was deserted too. Evan sidled along the corridor and let himself into his quarters with a swift glance around to make sure that his roommate, Tom Wilkinson, was in class with the rest of the sophomores in this wing of a pre-med oriented college. You had to be sure: even earnest types like pre-meds sometimes cut class. But he was alone. He was safe.
Amazingly, the room wasn’t cluttered. Both young men owned cars, so no bicycles were in evidence, and the floor was free of the usual heaps of boxes students seemed to accumulate. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase separated their big desks, above which were the windows, and the oversized single beds stood one to either side of the entrance door. In each long wall was another door. Wilkinson, a joyous youth, had stuck posters of sexy movie stars on his walls, but Evan Pugh’s were bare save for a corkboard on which were pinned notes and a few photographs.
He went straight to his desk; its surface was exactly as he had left it all day. None of its drawers was locked. Evan opened each one in turn and went through it, debating how large the bundle of cash might be. That depended upon the denomination of the notes, he concluded as he closed the last drawer. No cash, no bundle of any size. He looked across at his bed, a tangle of sheets and blankets, then went to it and rummaged fiercely from top to bottom—no bundle of cash on it, in it, or under it.
Next he checked the bookshelves with the same result, after which he stood wondering how he had been such a fool. How would his quarry know which side of the room was his? Or even that there were sides? Tom was untidy, but a careful ransacking of every part of his side revealed no bundle.
Remained only the closets. This time Evan went through Tom’s first, without success. Then he opened the door to his own. In these walk-in closets the architect’s true genius showed best, for he was one of those men who never forgot any aspect of his past, nor failed to understand how much junk young men—and women!—could accumulate during the course of a year occupying the same room. The walk-in closets ran the full length of the room and were three feet wide; at one end were racks of drawers, then came open shelves, then, for a full half of the area, vacant space. Only in the matter of lighting were they poorly equipped, as a result of the Dean’s fear of fire in an enclosed area. Twenty-five-watt bulbs, no brighter! On springs, the doors closed after they were opened, yet another crotchet of the Dean’s; he abhorred disorder and deemed open doors and drawers a danger as well as a legal liability.
Evan flicked the closet light on and stepped inside; the door swung shut behind him, but he was used to that. He saw the bundle at once, hanging from the ceiling on a cord. He rushed to it eagerly, not surprised that his victim had chosen to secrete it inside an inside, nor that it hung in an area where there were no drawers or shelves. He didn’t look up at the ceiling; he looked no higher than the bundle, which even in the dim light he could see was bound tightly in Saran Wrap. The notes showed through clearly: hundred-dollar bills. They seemed new, their edges unswollen by the abuse of many fingers as they sat in a neat, flat brick.
Suddenly, his hands already grabbing at the brick, he stopped a moment to contemplate the magnitude of his coup, the triumph he couldn’t confide to anyone else as long as he wanted to blackmail Motor Mouth. Did he want to continue the blackmail? After all, he didn’t need the money; it was simply his choice of weapon. What he reveled in was the knowledge that he, Evan Pugh, a mere nineteen-year-old Chubb sophomore, had the power to torment another human being to the point of extreme mental torture. Oh, it was sweet! Of course he’d go on blackmailing Motor Mouth!
His movement resumed, he took hold of the plastic-wrapped packet. When it didn’t budge he yanked at it sharply, an impatient jerk that saw it come away, drop downward to his hips. His hands followed, unwilling to give up their prize.
In the same instant there was a loud sound incorporating both a roar and a swish. As the terrible pain invaded his upper arms and chest, Evan genuinely thought he had been bitten by a Tyrannosaurus rex. He dropped the brick of money and clutched at whatever was engulfing him, his fingers closing on cold steel fixed in his flesh—not one, but a whole row of daggers, deep in his flesh, down past the bone.
The shock had been too sudden for a scream, but now he began to scream shrilly, hoarsely, wondering why his mouth was full of foam, but screaming, screaming, screaming...
The noise percolated out of the closet into the room, but there was no one present to hear it. That it didn’t penetrate into the corridor was due to the architect, very much aware of soundproofing, and endowed besides with a bounteous budget. The Parsons wished something really first class if they had to part with a Rodin and some Henry Moores. Those couldn’t possibly be housed in or near rubbish.
It took Evan Pugh two hours to die, his lifeblood leaking away, his legs refusing to work, his breathing one distressed gasp after another. His only consolation as consciousness left him was that the police would find the money and Motor Mouth’s letter, still in his pocket.
* * *
“I don’t believe it!” Captain Carmine Delmonico exclaimed. “And the day isn’t even over yet. What time is it, for God’s sake?”
“Getting on for six thirty,” came Patrick O’Donnell’s voice from inside the closet. “As you well know.”
Carmine stepped through the door, with its spring now disconnected, and into a surreal scene that looked as if it had been posed for Major Minor’s waxworks horror museum. Patsy had put two small klieg lights in the closet to replace the gloom of the Dean’s twenty-five-watt bulb, and every part of the interior was ablaze. The body took his eye first, hanging limply from the low ceiling, its upper arms and chest cruelly gripped in the jaws of something akin to a great white shark’s business end, but made of rusting steel.
“Jesus!” he breathed, carefully walking around as much of the body as he could. “Patsy, have you ever seen anything like this! And what the hell is it?”
“A king-sized bear trap, I think,” said Patsy.
“A bear trap? In Connecticut? Except maybe for somewhere up in Canada or hillbilly country, there hasn’t been a bear this side of the Rockies in a hundred years.” He peered closely at the youth’s upper chest, where the teeth had sunk in clear to the metal giving rise to them. “Though I guess,” he added like an afterthought, “there might be a few people with one of these tucked away in a forgotten corner of a barn.”
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, espec...
Colleen McCullough (1937-2015) enjoyed worldwide renown, and her novels are bestsellers in a multitude of languages. She is the internationally acclaimed author of The Thorn Birds, Tim, An Indecent Obsession, A Creed for the Third Millennium, The Ladies of Missalonghi, The First Man in Rome, The Grass Crown, Fortune's Favorites, Caesar's Women, and other novels.
Charles Leggett is based in Seattle where he works onstage at Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Children's Theatre, ACT, Seattle Shakespeare Company, Portland Center Stage, The Empty Space, and Book-It Repertory Company, among many others. Charles' voice work is also featured in the video games Dungeon Siege I and II, and in Hoyle's Casino Empire.
Mr. Evan Pugh April 3, 1967
Paracelsus College
Chubb University
Holloman, Conn.
Dear Mr. Pugh,
I concede defeat. Your $100,000 has been placed in your room at college, as stipulated in your letter of March 29th. I will ensure that my presence in college seems innocent if I am detected. Please do not attempt to obtain more money from me. My pockets are empty.
Yours sincerely, Motor Mouth
Evan Pugh’s hands were shaking as he read this missive, put in his pigeonhole in a plain white envelope bearing his name and address typed with a carbon ribbon, like the letter. The dark square aperture of his pigeonhole had been empty every time he looked between going downstairs for his breakfast and the end of lunch. Now, at two thirty, he had his answer!
The corridors were empty as he wended his way up one curving set of open stairs at his end of the foyer; Paracelsus was a new college, of gloriously clean and sweeping lines, and had been designed by a world-famous architect who was a Chubb alumnus. It suffered the bleak austerity of his style too: Vermont marble floors and walls, glass-enclosed pebble gardens too small to enter, white lighting, minimal ornamentation. Upstairs, where Evan’s dormitory was located, the white marble was replaced by grey-painted walls and a grey rubber floor—very practical, but airy and spacious. As were the rooms, for which reason Paracelsus’s inmates loved their architect dearly. Of course, he himself had suffered the horrors of sharing a cubicle in a college built in 1788, so he had endowed Paracelsus with big rooms and plenty of bathrooms.
Upstairs was deserted too. Evan sidled along the corridor and let himself into his quarters with a swift glance around to make sure that his roommate, Tom Wilkinson, was in class with the rest of the sophomores in this wing of a pre-med oriented college. You had to be sure: even earnest types like pre-meds sometimes cut class. But he was alone. He was safe.
Amazingly, the room wasn’t cluttered. Both young men owned cars, so no bicycles were in evidence, and the floor was free of the usual heaps of boxes students seemed to accumulate. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase separated their big desks, above which were the windows, and the oversized single beds stood one to either side of the entrance door. In each long wall was another door. Wilkinson, a joyous youth, had stuck posters of sexy movie stars on his walls, but Evan Pugh’s were bare save for a corkboard on which were pinned notes and a few photographs.
He went straight to his desk; its surface was exactly as he had left it all day. None of its drawers was locked. Evan opened each one in turn and went through it, debating how large the bundle of cash might be. That depended upon the denomination of the notes, he concluded as he closed the last drawer. No cash, no bundle of any size. He looked across at his bed, a tangle of sheets and blankets, then went to it and rummaged fiercely from top to bottom—no bundle of cash on it, in it, or under it.
Next he checked the bookshelves with the same result, after which he stood wondering how he had been such a fool. How would his quarry know which side of the room was his? Or even that there were sides? Tom was untidy, but a careful ransacking of every part of his side revealed no bundle.
Remained only the closets. This time Evan went through Tom’s first, without success. Then he opened the door to his own. In these walk-in closets the architect’s true genius showed best, for he was one of those men who never forgot any aspect of his past, nor failed to understand how much junk young men—and women!—could accumulate during the course of a year occupying the same room. The walk-in closets ran the full length of the room and were three feet wide; at one end were racks of drawers, then came open shelves, then, for a full half of the area, vacant space. Only in the matter of lighting were they poorly equipped, as a result of the Dean’s fear of fire in an enclosed area. Twenty-five-watt bulbs, no brighter! On springs, the doors closed after they were opened, yet another crotchet of the Dean’s; he abhorred disorder and deemed open doors and drawers a danger as well as a legal liability.
Evan flicked the closet light on and stepped inside; the door swung shut behind him, but he was used to that. He saw the bundle at once, hanging from the ceiling on a cord. He rushed to it eagerly, not surprised that his victim had chosen to secrete it inside an inside, nor that it hung in an area where there were no drawers or shelves. He didn’t look up at the ceiling; he looked no higher than the bundle, which even in the dim light he could see was bound tightly in Saran Wrap. The notes showed through clearly: hundred-dollar bills. They seemed new, their edges unswollen by the abuse of many fingers as they sat in a neat, flat brick.
Suddenly, his hands already grabbing at the brick, he stopped a moment to contemplate the magnitude of his coup, the triumph he couldn’t confide to anyone else as long as he wanted to blackmail Motor Mouth. Did he want to continue the blackmail? After all, he didn’t need the money; it was simply his choice of weapon. What he reveled in was the knowledge that he, Evan Pugh, a mere nineteen-year-old Chubb sophomore, had the power to torment another human being to the point of extreme mental torture. Oh, it was sweet! Of course he’d go on blackmailing Motor Mouth!
His movement resumed, he took hold of the plastic-wrapped packet. When it didn’t budge he yanked at it sharply, an impatient jerk that saw it come away, drop downward to his hips. His hands followed, unwilling to give up their prize.
In the same instant there was a loud sound incorporating both a roar and a swish. As the terrible pain invaded his upper arms and chest, Evan genuinely thought he had been bitten by a Tyrannosaurus rex. He dropped the brick of money and clutched at whatever was engulfing him, his fingers closing on cold steel fixed in his flesh—not one, but a whole row of daggers, deep in his flesh, down past the bone.
The shock had been too sudden for a scream, but now he began to scream shrilly, hoarsely, wondering why his mouth was full of foam, but screaming, screaming, screaming...
The noise percolated out of the closet into the room, but there was no one present to hear it. That it didn’t penetrate into the corridor was due to the architect, very much aware of soundproofing, and endowed besides with a bounteous budget. The Parsons wished something really first class if they had to part with a Rodin and some Henry Moores. Those couldn’t possibly be housed in or near rubbish.
It took Evan Pugh two hours to die, his lifeblood leaking away, his legs refusing to work, his breathing one distressed gasp after another. His only consolation as consciousness left him was that the police would find the money and Motor Mouth’s letter, still in his pocket.
* * *
“I don’t believe it!” Captain Carmine Delmonico exclaimed. “And the day isn’t even over yet. What time is it, for God’s sake?”
“Getting on for six thirty,” came Patrick O’Donnell’s voice from inside the closet. “As you well know.”
Carmine stepped through the door, with its spring now disconnected, and into a surreal scene that looked as if it had been posed for Major Minor’s waxworks horror museum. Patsy had put two small klieg lights in the closet to replace the gloom of the Dean’s twenty-five-watt bulb, and every part of the interior was ablaze. The body took his eye first, hanging limply from the low ceiling, its upper arms and chest cruelly gripped in the jaws of something akin to a great white shark’s business end, but made of rusting steel.
“Jesus!” he breathed, carefully walking around as much of the body as he could. “Patsy, have you ever seen anything like this! And what the hell is it?”
“A king-sized bear trap, I think,” said Patsy.
“A bear trap? In Connecticut? Except maybe for somewhere up in Canada or hillbilly country, there hasn’t been a bear this side of the Rockies in a hundred years.” He peered closely at the youth’s upper chest, where the teeth had sunk in clear to the metal giving rise to them. “Though I guess,” he added like an afterthought, “there might be a few people with one of these tucked away in a forgotten corner of a barn.”
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, espec...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherWheeler Publishing
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 0007271859
- ISBN 13 9780007271856
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages371
- Rating
Other Popular Editions of the Same Title
Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace
Stock Image
Too Many Murders
Published by
Wheeler Publishing
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0007271859
ISBN 13: 9780007271856
Used
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: Good. Good condition. Like New dust jacket. Seller Inventory # P07L-00672
Buy Used
US$ 7.49
Convert currency
Stock Image
Too Many Murders
Published by
HarperCollins 01/04/2010
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0007271859
ISBN 13: 9780007271856
Used
Hardcover
Quantity: 2
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: Very Good. This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See all our books here, order more than 1 book and get discounted shipping. . Seller Inventory # 7719-9780007271856
Buy Used
US$ 4.42
Convert currency
Stock Image
Too Many Murders
Published by
HarperCollins
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0007271859
ISBN 13: 9780007271856
Used
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. All orders are dispatched the following working day from our UK warehouse. Established in 2004, we have over 500,000 books in stock. No quibble refund if not completely satisfied. Seller Inventory # mon0004565948
Buy Used
US$ 4.38
Convert currency
Stock Image
Too Many Murders
Published by
HarperCollins
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0007271859
ISBN 13: 9780007271856
Used
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Used; Good. Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover. Ex-library book with stamps on the first page, it is also likely to have a small shelf number sticker on the spine. Seller Inventory # CHL8777515
Buy Used
US$ 2.72
Convert currency
Stock Image
Too Many Murders
Published by
HarperCollins
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0007271859
ISBN 13: 9780007271856
Used
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Used; Good. Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover. Seller Inventory # CHL1104160
Buy Used
US$ 2.72
Convert currency
Stock Image
Too Many Murders
Published by
HarperCollins 01/04/2010
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0007271859
ISBN 13: 9780007271856
Used
Hardcover
Quantity: 2
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: Very Good. Shipped within 24 hours from our UK warehouse. Clean, undamaged book with no damage to pages and minimal wear to the cover. Spine still tight, in very good condition. Remember if you are not happy, you are covered by our 100% money back guarantee. Seller Inventory # 6545-9780007271856
Buy Used
US$ 4.42
Convert currency
Stock Image
Too Many Murders
Published by
HarperCollins Publishers Limited
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0007271859
ISBN 13: 9780007271856
Used
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: Very Good. Ships from the UK. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in excellent condition. May show signs of wear or have minor defects. Seller Inventory # 39301962-20
Buy Used
US$ 4.00
Convert currency
Seller Image
Too Many Murders
Published by
HarperCollins, London
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0007271859
ISBN 13: 9780007271856
Used
Hardcover
First Edition
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: As New. Dust Jacket Condition: As New. N/A (illustrator). First. HB DJ 1st Ed. See my pic. DJ not clipped. Black cloth boards, Dark red titles spine. 24 x 16cm. 371 pages. 1967, the world teeters on the brink of nuclear holocaust as the Cold War goes relentlessly on. Chief of Detectives, Carmine Delmonico walks into a prestigious university halls to find a corpse ensconced in a bear trap. This is just the beginning, 12 murders have taken place in one day. Condition: As new. Seller Inventory # 001904
Buy Used
US$ 16.08
Convert currency