Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

Carmine smiled. “Attack?”

The dark eyes opened ingenuously wide. “Damn straight, attack! The day I show them my belly is the day I retire.”

After a much needed quarter hour spent discussing anything save murder, it was easier to return to the looming crisis.

“How do you want to run this, Carmine?” Silvestri asked.

“Apart from my supervisory role,” Carmine answered, “there are several of the cases I want to reserve for myself. Namely, the poisonings and the bear trap. Larry, you and your guys concentrate on the shootings and Dee-Dee Hall. The old lady, Beatrice Egmont, goes to Abe because Corey’s already on the rape victim.”

No one demurred, though the division of labor had seen their captain keep almost half the cases for himself. Nor did anyone ask what Carmine intended to do about Jimmy Cartwright, the Down’s syndrome toddler.

“How can I help?” Silvestri asked.

“Give us plenty of unmarked cars, and keep up the supply of drivers,” Carmine said instantly. “We’re going to generate scads of paperwork, and time in a car is paperwork time. So I want all of you in the backseat writing your reports.”

“You’ll get your unmarkeds and drivers,” Silvestri promised. “Danny, you’re liaison.”

From Adams Street the Cartwright house looked only moderately prosperous; it was at the back, or by those in the real estate know, that it was revealed as prime property. The style of the building was traditional white clapboard finished with dark green shutters, and it spread sideways on its extremely long three-acre lot on the river side of a very tall hedge. What was seen from the street was the width of the master bedroom upstairs, and the short axis of a reception room downstairs. The front door was around the corner on the west, shielded from the backyard by that tall hedge, in which was a locked gate that looked formidable.

Carmine knocked, feeling oddly abandoned. Ordinarily Abe and Corey would be with him, two extra pairs of eyes to scan the scene as minutely as his own, yet with different perspective. Well, today that wasn’t possible, he thought, waiting for someone to answer the firm tattoo he beat upon the door. A minute passed, then another. He was just about to repeat his demand to enter when the door opened a crack, and Gerald Cartwright peered around it.

“Mr. Cartwright?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Captain Carmine Delmonico, Holloman Police. May I come in, sir?”

The door opened wide; Gerald Cartwright stepped back.

He looked exactly as a man should look who had just lost his wife and youngest child by murder: shrunken, grief-stricken, bewildered, in a great deal of pain. A man in his early forties, of medium build and coloring, under normal circumstances he would probably have given an impression of pleasant welcome and considerable charm, as was fitting in the proprietor of not one but two restaurants, both successful. Before leaving for this interview, Carmine had gone into Gerald Cartwright’s background as closely as possible at such short notice; a desk sergeant back at County Services was continuing these enquiries, among others. Holloman’s hoods and jealous husbands were on a temporary back burner while twelve murders occupied nine-tenths of everyone’s time.

Interesting that Gerald Cartwright’s two businesses were so dissimilar, and that he wasn’t a chef. He owned a premier French restaurant, l’Escargot, in Beechmont, New York, and a diner, Joey’s, on Cedar Street in Holloman, adjacent to the rearing towers of Chubb’s Science Hill. Both did a thriving trade, the one catering for discriminating diners in search of new taste thrills, the other a highly successful pancake diner. Cartwright banked with the Second National, where he kept more than sufficient funds to cover his expenses; his real money was safely invested in a portfolio of stocks and shares with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith. Given the emergence of Motor Mouth, Carmine had looked for unusually large withdrawals, but none had been made.

He followed Cartwright into a sitting room furnished with good but not pretentious chairs and coffee tables, the kind of stuff prudent parents of four children would choose. Through double glass doors he could see into the huge reception room, far better furnished. Off limits to kids, he guessed.

Sitting down with a flop, Gerald Cartwright picked up a fat cushion and hugged it against his stomach.

“You weren’t home the night before last, Mr. Cartwright?”

“No!” said Cartwright on a gasp. “I was in Beechmont.”

“Where you have a restaurant.”

“Yes.”

“Do you stay overnight in Beechmont often?”

“Yes. I have family there, so does-did-my wife, and we keep a little apartment above the restaurant. I eat with my mother, usually. She lives two doors down.”

“Apart from the presence of family in Beechmont, what makes l’Escargot special enough to occasion frequent nights away?”

Cartwright blinked at Carmine’s use of the restaurant’s name; his color faded visibly. “It’s a French menu, Captain, and my chef, Michel Moreau, is very famous. He’s also a prima donna who throws temper tantrums. For some reason, I’m the only person who can handle him, and if I lost him, my business would go down the drain. People drive eighty miles just to eat at l’Escargot, there’s a three-month waiting list for reservations-it puts me in a terrible fix! So I stay twice or three times a week just to keep Michel happy. Cathy has always understood, even if it does make things hard for her. We have three kids at the Dormer Day School, and that costs a bundle.”

“So must the mortgage on this property, Mr. Cartwright.”

“Yes-and no.” He gulped, swayed, hugged the cushion harder. “We bought at a good time, got our mortgage at four percent. We knew we couldn’t lose. Given the size of the lot in this neighborhood as well as the river frontage, it’s worth five or six times what we paid for it. The house was in good condition, we haven’t had any massive repair bills.” The tears started rolling down his cheeks; he fought for control.

“Take your time, Mr. Cartwright. Can I get you anything?”

“No,” he said, sobbing. “Oh, it’s so awful! The kids knew something was up, but I came in before any of them went to see why Mom hadn’t come down yet. Or Jimmy. Before Jimmy they would have, but he-he kinda changed things.”

“The Down’s syndrome, you mean?”

“Yes. After he was born they told us she should have had an amniocentesis test, but no one suggested it when she found out she was pregnant. No one warned us of the dangers with parents in their forties! I mean, we’d had three healthy, normal kids.”

His indignation was helping him overcome the shock and grief.

Carmine sat and listened, prepared to insert a prompting word if it proved necessary.

“Jimmy took up so much of Cathy’s time, yet I couldn’t be here any more often than always. I tried hiring a manager for l’Escargot, but it didn’t work out. We didn’t have any choice, it had to be me went to Beechmont.” The tears kept falling.

“I take it that your wife’s real problem was the three other kids,” Carmine said gently.

Gerald Cartwright jumped, looked amazed. “How did you ever guess that?” he asked.

“It’s a common reaction in any family suddenly endowed with a handicapped child. The new arrival consumes every scrap of the mother’s time, yet the older kids aren’t mature enough to understand the true nature of the problem,” Carmine said dispassionately. “So they resent the new baby and, by logical progression, their mom. How old are yours?”

“Selma’s sixteen, Gerald Junior is thirteen, and Grant is ten. I’d imagined Selma would be her mother’s ally, but she was so… spiteful! Word got around school that she had a retarded baby brother, and she reacted badly. In fact, all three did.”