Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders (Carmine Delmonico)

ALSO BY COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH

The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet
Antony & Cleopatra
On, Off
Angel Puss
The Touch
The October Horse
Morgans Run
Roden Cutler, V.C. (biography)
The Song of Troy
Caesar: Let the Dice Fly
Caesars Women
Fortunes Favorites
The Grass Crown
The First Man in Rome
The Ladies of Missalonghi
A Creed for the Third Millennium
An Indecent Obsession
The Thorn Birds
Tim

A Carmine Delmonico Novel

Colleen McCullough

Simon & Schuster
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New York, NY 10020
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are products of the authors imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events
or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2009 by Colleen McCullough

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition December 2009

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Designed by Kyoko Watanabe

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

ISBN 978-1-4391-7747-1

ISBN 978-1-4391-7829-4 (ebook)

For WAYDE

loyal, loving, kind, generous

The best son a father was ever gifted with.

TOO MANY MURDERS

April 3, 1967

Mr. Evan Pugh
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 Pughs 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 Evans dormitory was located, the white marble was replaced by grey-painted walls and a grey rubber floorvery practical, but airy and spacious. As were the rooms, for which reason Paracelsuss 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 wasnt 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 Pughs 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 bottomno 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 Toms first, without success. Then he opened the door to his own. In these walk-in closets the architects 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 menand 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 Deans 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 Deans; 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 didnt 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 couldnt confide to anyone else as long as he wanted to blackmail Motor Mouth. Did he want to continue the blackmail? After all, he didnt 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 hed go on blackmailing Motor Mouth!