Too Many Murders (5 page)

The Commissioner was gaping. “Sweet Jesus!
Skeps?
Desmond Skeps is dead?”

“Oh, yes. And don’t think it didn’t occur to me that all the other murders are simply a way of making Skeps’s death look less like the object of the exercise,” said Carmine, then scowled. “Had there been fewer, I might have inclined that way too, but not this many. Whatever way you look at it, twelve murders in one day are too many murders by far for a little city like Holloman.”

“Let’s see,” said Silvestri, using his fingers. “The baby. The baby’s mother. The strychnine-in-the-orange-juice guy. The rape murder. The prostitute—poor old Dee-Dee! She’s been on the streets since I was a boy, it seems … Three blacks, shot. The Dean of Dante College with cyanide. The head honcho of Cornucopia … That’s ten altogether. Who else, for pity’s sake?”

“A seventy-one-year-old widow in very comfortable circumstances who lives on two acres just outside of town. She was discovered by her cleaning woman—no connection to the dead one—in a
mussed-up bed with a pillow still over her face. And last, a Chubb pre-med sophomore who was blackmailing someone he called Motor Mouth,” Carmine sighed, looked frustrated. “Four poisonings, a sex crime, three shootings, a whore’s violent end, two pillow suffocations, and a bear trap.”

“A bear trap?”

Carmine was just concluding his description of the murder of Evan Pugh when the coffee cart arrived, a special one for the Commissioner that held fresh Danish and raisin bagels from Silberstein’s as well as distinctly better coffee. Everyone rose thankfully and stretched before descending on the cart like locusts targeting a lush green field after a season of burned stubble. Never having forgotten President Mawson MacIntosh’s advice given at a Parson board meeting, Carmine chose an apple Danish. Yes, still delicious!

Carmine took Silvestri to one side as soon as he could.

“John,” he began, voice low, “the press are going to wallow in this. How can we keep them off my back?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Silvestri said in equally low tones. “I figure we’ve still got a few hours before I have to feed them something. I have a couple of ideas, but I want some time before I decide my best line of attack.”

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.”

“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.