Too Many Murders (6 page)

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!”

“Greaser!” said Gerald Junior under his breath. Getting no reaction from Carmine, he spoke louder. “Damn greaser cop!”

So much anger! Carmine looked into Selma’s eyes, which were the color of a sunny sky, then into Gerald Junior’s identical orbs, and couldn’t get past that all-consuming rage.

“What about you, Gerald?” he asked.

“I’m Junior,” he said, suddenly less certain than his sister. “No, I didn’t see or hear anything. You don’t, at this end of upstairs, if the noise is down Jimmy’s end.”

Not down his mother’s end, or his father’s end. Down Jimmy’s end, as if Jimmy owned it.

“Does Jimmy make a lot of noise, then?”

“Yes,” Junior said abruptly, and shrugged. “Like a sheep or a goat. Maaaa!” He imitated an ovine animal, imbuing the sound with mockery. “He wakes up a lot, maaaa!”

One more kid to go. “What about you, Grant?” Carmine asked.

“I never heard nothin’.”

Interesting that the Dormer hadn’t yet managed to iron double negatives out of Grant’s syntax. Carmine cleared his throat and leaned forward. “But you were awake at some time. You got sick.”

Grant jumped, astonished. “How do you know that?”

“First, I could smell it. Secondly, I could see the remains of it. You used your peejays to clean it up, they’re still in your hamper. Doesn’t anyone ever do the laundry?”

“Hey!” cried Selma, stiffening. “You can’t poke through our things, you East Shore greaser!”

“You senior Cartwright children are much addicted to that term,” Carmine said gravely. “It’s not general at the Dormer, or my daughter would have informed me. She’s your age, Selma, she’d be in some of your classes—Sophia Mandelbaum.” He watched the girl go crimson and understood a little more about the pecking order at the Dormer. Selma was a would-be, his daughter was establishment. How amazing that it started so early.

He went on. “You must know that your mother and your baby brother were both murdered the night before last, so why are you so obstructive? You watch enough television, you must be aware of police procedure. In a murder investigation nothing is sacred, including laundry hampers. Just settle down and answer my questions in the comfort of your own home. Otherwise I’ll have to take you downtown and ask you the same questions in a police interrogation room. Is that clear?”

Resistance collapsed; the three children nodded.

“So, Grant, you got sick?”

“Yeah,” he said in a whisper.

Some instinct stirred; Carmine looked at Selma and Junior. “Thank you, the pair of you can go. But the lady policeman should have arrived, so ask her to come here at once. I can’t harm Grant if she’s here, can I?”

Obviously Selma wanted to stay, but she wasn’t quite game to say so. After a suggestive pause that Carmine ignored, she sighed and followed Junior out. The woman cop came in quickly.

“Sit down over there, Gina. You’re chaperone,” Carmine said, then turned to Grant. “Okay, Grant, tell me what happened.”

“I pigged out on Twinkies—dinner was so late!” The boy looked indignant. “Mom gets carried away with Jimmy all the time—we don’t get dinner regular anymore. Then it was”—he pulled a face—“spaghetti!
Again!
I filled up on Twinkies, and when they ran out, I found a Boston cream pie.”

How long was it going to be before these children realized their mother really was dead? That if dinner had been irregular over the past eighteen months, it was going to become far more so in the future? They were so wrapped up in themselves, in what they perceived to be intolerable injuries. Keeping his face impassive, Carmine pressed on.

“Did you sleep at all, Grant?”

“Oh, sure! I watched some stupid movie on WOR—black-and-white, yet!—and I must have gone to sleep around midnight with it still on. Then I woke up feeling sick, but I figured it would go away. It didn’t, it got worse. I raced to my bathroom, but I didn’t make it. Splat! All over the floor. I felt better after that, so I went back to bed and went to sleep.”

The boy’s demeanor had changed, become uneasy. All truculence had fled, and the brown eyes that had been fixed on Carmine moved suddenly away, refused to return. The truth had come out, but not all of it. And now, while a fraught silence persisted and Gina endeavored to melt into the wallpaper, Grant was trying to manufacture a story that a police captain might swallow. Unfortunately he’d had scant experience confabulating, which indicated a life spent out of real trouble; his lies to date had been simple ones, his parents trusting fools who believed him. Only, what was he hiding? What could he possibly have to hide that required a properly constructed fairy tale?

“Crap!” said Carmine, barking it. “You didn’t go back to bed and you didn’t go back to sleep. What did you do? The truth!”

All color leached out of the boy’s healthy skin; he gave a gulp, his
throat working convulsively. “I am telling the truth! Honest! I went to bed and I went to sleep.”

“No, you didn’t. What did you really do, Grant?”

It came out in a despairing rush; people didn’t usually set themselves against him, and he couldn’t—he
couldn’t
—dream up a story that convinced even himself. “I went to Mom’s bedroom to tell her I’d been sick on my bathroom floor.”

Ah! “What happened then?”

“The light was on—not a night light, the lamp on her table. Jimmy’d never settle down with a night light. The place stank of shit—I mean, it stank, really stank!”

Carmine waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “You can’t stop now, Grant. I want it all.”

“Jimmy was standing in his crib, yelling his head off. I saw Mom asleep in bed, so I went to wake her. But I couldn’t, sir! I shook her and yelled in her ear, but she went right on sleeping. Then I saw the glass on her table, and I knew she’d knocked herself out. She often did. Great, just great! Jimmy was screeching fit to bust, these real animal noises. I yelled at him to shut up, but the little creep didn’t even notice.
Gross!
He must have dumped tons of shit in his diaper, the stink was so bad.”

Carmine’s eyes encountered Gina’s; she looked a query, but was answered by a tiny shake of the head. A cold and nauseating presentiment had taken hold of Carmine, who drew in a long breath and forced himself to remain detached. “Go on, Grant, you may as well tell me the rest—I’ll find it out anyway. It will be better if it comes from you.”

The brown eyes turned back to him at last, resigned, full of tears. Grant lifted his shoulders as if to shed a burden. “I went to the crib and let down the side. I figured that if Jimmy was loaded with shit, it would maybe teach Mom a lesson not to knock herself out if she woke up in the same bed as shitty Jimmy. But the little creep hollered even louder. Then he swung a punch at me! Spat in my face! I punched him back. He fell over in the crib, and I don’t know what
happened next. Honest, sir, I don’t! All I remember are the screeches and howls, the spits—I mean, he spit on me! I put the pillow over his face to shut him up, but it didn’t. Even through it the noise hurt, but he couldn’t spit on me. I kept pushing the pillow against his face until he did stop yelling. Then I kept it there to make sure. Man, it felt good! The little creep spit on me!”

Oh, sweet Jesus! “Tell me the rest, Grant.”

The boy looked better, relieved of a frightful burden. Did his siblings know? Probably not, or Selma at least wouldn’t have left him. Carmine thought she had an inkling but hadn’t had time to follow up. Just as well. The death of Jimmy Cartwright would otherwise have masked the death of his mother.

“I switched on the central light,” said Grant, “and I saw that Jimmy was blue. Blue all over. No matter how I pinched him, he wouldn’t move. Then I realized he was dead. At first I was real glad, then I figured out that if I told, I’d go to jail—I will go to jail, won’t I?”

“Just keep on telling it the way it happened, Grant, and things will go better for you. Jail is for grown-ups,” said Carmine. “What did you do then?”

“I wrapped him in a sheet off his crib and took him down the stairs,” said Grant more easily. “I went out the back door and carried him down to the Pequot, then pushed him in. He sank right away, so I walked back home and put the sheet back in his crib, and checked up on Mom. She was still asleep. Only she wasn’t, was she, sir? She was dead too.”

“Yes, since before your first visit,” Carmine said. “What did you do when you reached your own bedroom?”

“Tried to clean up the bathroom floor, then got into bed and went to sleep. I was whacked.”

No qualms of conscience, thought Carmine. Nor may there ever be. Though he’s a smart kid. If his father finds him the right lawyer, he’ll prove a good student. By the time the social workers get to him, he’ll be oozing penitence, and by the time the courts get to him, he’ll have developed all the necessary memory lapses.

But what fools indeed these parents were! Which one was so frugal that no housekeeper was hired after Jimmy was born? If ever a woman had needed a full-time housekeeper, it was Mrs. Cathy Cartwright. They could afford the expense, in spite of three sets of Dormer Day School fees.

“It would never have happened if the mother hadn’t been overwhelmed,” Carmine said to Patrick. “Why do I feel the parsimonious one is Gerald Cartwright? Though Cathy must have been spineless where he was concerned, not to insist on help.”

“It also would never have happened if the mother hadn’t been dead,” said Patrick, arranging instruments on a cart.

“True. What set the kid off was the smell of shit—an indication that Cathy had already been dead for several hours when Grant went to find her, probably sometime after four. I knew he was concealing something when he didn’t admit to going in search of his mother, because all kids go in search of Mom if they’ve thrown up, especially if they’ve missed the toilet. I didn’t expect a confession of murder, but that fits too. The father is selfish and career-oriented, which has led to his spending a great deal of his time away from home, and the mother had suddenly been inflicted with a super-demanding child after waiting hand and foot on her first three. Poor little Jimmy was the inadvertent cause of much hatred and resentment.”

“Well, Jimmy’s murder at least might have been averted if the parents had been more aware of how their older children felt, but what about the mother’s murder?” Patrick asked.

“A different horse entirely. Thus far, no leads whatsoever. Gerald Cartwright may be unpardonably selfish, but he’s not an unfaithful husband or a bad provider. When he’s staying at the French restaurant in upstate New York, he’s surrounded by family—hers as well as
his. He’s regarded as a model husband, an image he took some pains to reinforce. As for Cathy herself—ask me where she’d find the time for extramarital affairs with four kids, and the youngest with Down’s syndrome?” Carmine scowled.

“Did she get out at all?”

“Very occasionally, according to Gerald, who likes a social life. They’d go to plays trying out at the Schumann, to movies that got good reviews, charity dinners, country club events. If the chef threw a tantrum and Gerald was called away, he insisted that Cathy go on her own. Probably not as bad as it sounds—they’re well known, she’d meet up with friends. The last time she got out was a solo expedition to a Maxwell Foundation charity banquet, something she didn’t want to miss because the Maxwells give generously to handicapped children’s research. I got all that at great length from Gerald, who managed to keep his act together if he could hug a cushion.” Carmine poured himself fresh coffee. “Any other news on the pathology front, Patsy?”