Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

“How exactly did they react, Mr. Cartwright?”

“Mostly by refusing to help Cathy, who didn’t have time to make their lunches for school, or snacks when they got home. It wasn’t so bad when Jimmy was a baby, but once he turned a year old, dinnertime often got delayed, and the menus became simpler, more monotonous. Cathy just didn’t have the time to cook anymore. When she told Selma to take over laundry chores, Selma had a tantrum in Michel’s league. Home life was a nightmare! The kids absolutely hated Jimmy, wouldn’t be in the same room as him.”

And you didn’t have the guts to give them a kick in the ass, thought Carmine. You had Beechmont to retreat to, home-cooked dinners with your own mom, a peaceful bed to sleep in. Michel’s temper tantrums must have seemed like manna from heaven, they got you out from under a situation you knew you shouldn’t let continue but couldn’t face dealing with. Your wife needed you home a hundred percent of the time. Okay, okay, there’s much-needed income involved, but you’re not in debt. Once you had your home predicament sorted out, you could have found another Michel and gotten l’Escargot up and running again.

He let Gerald Cartwright hug his pillow and weep, taking himself on a prowl through the big house to find those three older kids, see what they were like. But first, the master bedroom, fenced off with a police cordon.

It was charming, done in a beige the color of a potato’s skin with various widths of black stripes breaking up the beige of curtains, bedspread, one papered wall. The carpet was black, the wood of the furniture lacquered that same potato-skin beige. The only jarring note was a large, heavy crib just to what he presumed was Cathy Cartwright’s side of the bed. Its sides were overly tall, its thick posts close together; it looked like the cage of a dangerous animal. No one had disturbed its sheets and blankets, which were a tumbled tangle surmounted by a sheet. Nor had the king-sized bed been touched beyond forensic examination; it was neat by comparison with the crib, evidence that Cathy had not struggled. There was a postage-stamp-sized patch of browned blood on the bottom sheet about where her elbow would have rested.

Carmine knew that a glass of neat bourbon had sat on her bedside table, though it and what remained of its contents had gone to Patrick’s labs. The results had come through just before he set out. This last nightcap she ever took had been laced with chloral hydrate, so when the massive dose of intravenous pentobarbital had been administered she was too deeply asleep to resist, even if she had felt the needle. Patrick had put the time of her death at about two in the morning, which meant she had died well before her baby. Someone had murdered her, but was this person the same individual who had murdered the child?

The en suite bathroom was clean and tidy. Burdened with a handicapped child and three uncoöperative older children she might have been, but Cathy Cartwright had still managed to keep her house in reasonable condition. Poor woman! It must have seemed to her that no one among those she loved had sympathy or time for her plight.

He found the three older Cartwright children in the den, a big room that, together with an office/library, divided the children’s bedrooms from the master suite, thus completing the upstairs.

They were clustered around a big television set watching the cartoon channel; cable had just come to town, and Pequot River, a wealthy suburb, was first on the cable company’s list. As the children had cranked up the volume, they didn’t hear Carmine enter, which gave him ample opportunity to observe them with their guard down. Selma, he decided, was a typical Dormer Day School princess. His awareness of this creature had grown dramatically since Sophia had started at the Dormer, especially given her previous school in L.A., where booze and drugs were easier to buy than candy and where the students could write a check for the whole of Holloman without noticing. So to Sophia the Dormer was a poor imitation, mercifully free from booze and drugs, even if well populated by kids who considered themselves far above the hoi polloi. Secretly chuckling, Sophia had inserted herself into Dormer life as a glamorous West Coast import who knew carloads of movie stars and dressed to the teenaged nines when it came to fashion. What saved the Dormer was its fine academic record and some brilliant teachers, for most of the Chubb faculty sent their children here, and there were too many scholarly kids for the cheerleader/jock faction to exert its usual control of school and class activities. The Dormer was basically a nerdy place.

Selma must take after her mother, Carmine thought, watching her. Tall, a good figure, streaky blonde hair, a tanned skin. The air of hauteur, he decided, was hers alone. Gerald Junior was cast in the same mold, though he probably played basketball, not football. Only Grant, the youngest, took after his father-medium in size and coloring. While the other two maintained a lofty detachment from the

Tom and Jerry cartoons, Grant had buried himself in them, laughing a little too loudly.

Suddenly Carmine had a wish to go through their rooms before interviewing them; he slipped out of the den undetected and made his way to the four bedrooms at the far end of the upstairs.

One was clearly kept as a guest room, beautifully decorated, untouched. How lucky these children are! he thought, discovering that each bedroom had its own en suite bathroom. The three rooms belonging to the children were messes: unmade beds, gaping closets, all kinds of stuff spilling out of drawers or cluttering the carpets. Here at least Cathy Cartwright hadn’t succeeded in the kind of good housekeeping she probably aimed for, though perhaps before the advent of Jimmy these rooms had been considerably tidier. They screamed of protest, of attention seeking, of adolescent misery. Each child had a television set as well as shelves of books and toys. How recently had the televisions been added?

Young Grant’s room was the worst, and included such goodies as a slashed schoolbag, a Dormer placard ripped to tatters, some fifth-grade textbooks torn up. The eruption of this rage against his school had presumably happened on the day that news of Jimmy had gotten around there, which meant that months had gone by without anyone’s trying to clean the room up. Cathy Cartwright had given up the fight then and there.

Grant’s bathroom smelled sour. There were traces of vomitus, clumsily cleaned up, in the middle of the blue-tiled floor. When Carmine lifted the lid of the hamper he found a set of pajamas soiled and encrusted with vomitus; clearly they had been used to do the wiping up. There was probably a cleaning woman who did pretty much as she liked, and she hadn’t gotten around to Grant’s room yet, though when she did, her ministrations would be basic. Provided, that is, that she ever ventured in at all.

Time to go back to the den.

He knocked loudly. The three faces swung around, then all three children got to their feet. A stranger! And a cop. Selma turned the volume right down.

“My name is Carmine Delmonico, and I’m a captain with the Holloman Police,” Carmine said, pulling a straight chair to one side and sitting on it. “Swing your chairs around so you can see me, and sit.”

They obeyed, but sulkily. Under the veneer of bravado were layers of fright, shock at the death of their mother, terror at what might happen to them, and a certain quiet satisfaction that Carmine put down to the death of Jimmy, who would not be mourned.

“Did you see or hear anything the night before last, Selma?” Carmine asked the girl, who, he noted, bit her nails right down to the quick.

“No,” she said baldly.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes!” she snapped. “Yes, yes, yes!”