Too Many Murders

by Colleen McCullough

  “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?”

  “The poisoning cases are all in,” Patrick said, but not in triumphant tones. “Peter Norton was dispatched with enough strychnine to kill a horse. It was in the orange juice. His blood revealed no other toxic tampering over a longer period of time, which tends to support Mrs. Norton’s likely innocence, as does the choice of poison. It’s a strong-stomached poisoner who can administer something as horrible as strychnine and then stick around to witness the dying.”

  “I agree, Patsy. It’s a good thing for her that she did go upstairs to get the kids ready for school.”

  “You’ve only got her word for it.”

  “I have the kids’ words as well. They’re a little young to be coached as accomplices. What brought them all downstairs was the noise their father made, and though Mrs. Norton did try to shoo the kids away, they both witnessed the death. I’m inclined to believe Mrs. Norton’s story that she squeezed the juice before going upstairs, and that she was up there for ten minutes before she heard her husband go down to breakfast, which he ate running.”

  “Poison is a woman’s weapon,” said Patrick.

  “Usually, yes, but not always. What makes you think this is not a female poisoner?”

  “That window of opportunity. Literally, as the juice could only be seen through the kitchen window, but not reached through it. Seizing an opportunity on the spur of the moment isn’t very female, yet that’s what this killer had to do. See the juice, go in the back door, add a hefty dose of strychnine to the glass, then leave. What if someone had come downstairs? He’d have been discovered, so he must have had a convincing story ready. No, this poisoner is a man.”

  “Chauvinist,” Carmine said slyly. “What about Dean Denbigh?”

  “Oh, that one’s up for grabs—and you know it! Potassium cyanide crystals mixed with jasmine tea leaves inside a perfect bag in turn enclosed inside a hermetically sealed paper packet that my technicians are willing to swear in court was opened only once—by Dean Denbigh himself. And the tea bag is machine stitched, not stapled—stitched only once, those swearing technicians again. All four of the students invited to his klatch were men.”

  “While Dr. Pauline Denbigh the wife held her own klatch around the corner in her study,” Carmine said with a grin. “Her guests were all women.”

  “‘Klatch’ is disrespectful,” Patrick said solemnly. “Granted, you can’t very well call morning coffee a soiree, yet I gather the function operated rather like one—poetry read out, and so forth.”

  “It should really be matinee, but that’s taken. How about a matutinal recitation?”

  “Spot on, Carruthers! Your Limey wife is showing.”

  “But you like her better now, Patsy, don’t you?” Carmine asked anxiously.

  “Of course I do! She’s ideal for you, and that alone makes me love her. I guess it was being towered over that set me against her, and that snooty Limey thing. But now I know she’s brave, and gallant, and very smart. She’s also sexy,” Patrick said, still trying to mend his fences. Carmine’s doubts were receding, but it was still a conversation they had from time to time. The trouble was, Patrick hadn’t read the signals correctly, hadn’t known just how deep Carmine’s feelings for the lady were. If he had, he would never have breathed a disparaging word about her. And Sandra she wasn’t, thank God.

  “Anything else in Denbigh’s blood?” Carmine asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “What about Desmond Skeps?”

  Patrick’s face lit up. “Oh, he’s a doozy, Carmine! He had no long-term drugs or toxins in his blood, but he got a cocktail the day he died.”

  “Day?” Carmine asked, frowning.

  “Yes, I think the process started well before the sun went down—maybe as early as four in the afternoon, when he took a glass of single-malt Scotch laced with chloral hydrate. While he was out, the killer put a Luer-Lok IV needle in his left intercubital fossa and taped it down. It stayed until he was dead.”

  “The same technique as Mrs. Cartwright?”

  “Superficially. The similarity ended with the introduction of the IV. Mrs. Cartwright was killed as soon as the needle was in the vein, but that wasn’t Skeps’s fate. He was intubated and given a medical curare that enabled the killer to inflict painful bodily harm on the poor bastard, too immobilized to fight back. He was bag-breathed, but if it was attached to a respirator I don’t know. The torture was burns, mostly, but never severe enough to interrupt pain pathways to the brain—he felt it all, believe me! That says the killer must have some medical knowledge. Third-degree burns aren’t felt; the pain pathways have been destroyed too.”

  “The instrument of torture?”

  “Some kind of soldering iron is my guess—a red-hot tip that could be manipulated. He even wrote Skeps’s name on his belly, after a sloppy dry shave of the body hair that left the skin grazed and raw. I photographed it extensively. Wouldn’t it be interesting to nail the sucker on a handwriting analysis?”

  “Pipe dreams, Patsy.”

  “While the curare was still concentrated enough to sustain the paralysis, the killer injected Skeps with a small amount of something dilute but caustic. The pain must have been terrible.”

  “Jesus, Patsy,” Carmine said, “whoever murdered Skeps hated him! The only other victim of outright torture was the rape case, Bianca Tolano.”

  “At some stage,” Patrick went on, “the killer brought Skeps out of his curare paralysis. The airway was removed and Skeps was bound at the wrists and ankles with single-strand steel wire about an eighth of an inch in diameter, tight enough that it would have hurt atrociously to struggle. Yet he struggled! The wire ate into his flesh, though the areas are too bony for deep penetration.” Patrick ceased, and looked enquiring.

  “The killer needed to interrogate Skeps, I’m guessing. Or, failing that, needed to hear the mighty tyco
on beg and plead like some peon at the bottom of the Cornucopia hierarchy. Under curare, he was mute, especially around an airway. That’s the most important thing you’ve told me, Patsy. A vocal Desmond Skeps was necessary to round out the killer’s purposes.”

  “The vocal period can’t have lasted more than an hour, if that long, Carmine. Then Skeps was re-intubated and got more curare—a stronger one. He would have been immobilized when he was finally killed with a solution of common drain caustic. Jesus! All in all, I estimate that from the Scotch to the Drano took twelve hours.”

  “And Cornucopia is without its owner-director,” Carmine said. “That alone is of national importance. One of the biggest engineering conglomerates in the world, leaderless overnight.” He huffed. “Any other information I should have?”

  “Nothing calculated to make your task easier, at any rate. The bullet boys have reported back on the three shootings, and I’ve managed to do the autopsies. Ludovica Bereson was killed with a .38, but we thought at first it was a smaller caliber because the bullet didn’t exit. It lodged in the mass of bone at the base of her cranium. Cedric Ballantine was killed KGB style, with a .22 bullet into the back of his head just below the inion. The bullet was inside. Morris Brown took a bigger caliber—a .45 to the chest. It exited his back but hit the spinal column squarely on its way out, so it didn’t travel as far as Pisano’s men assumed. I sent them back to the crime scene and they found the bullet where Morris fell. It was too mangled for markings, but intact enough to gauge the caliber. That means three different handguns.”

  “That no one heard,” said Carmine, growling. “The gunmen used silencers. But the guy who commissioned the hits must have asked for different calibers, otherwise I think the weapons would all have been .22s, everybody’s favorite for close-up work.”

  “Larry thinks the shootings are way out of Holloman’s league.”

  “He’s right. And the old lady out in the Valley?”

  “Smothered with her own pillow. She was a congestive cardiac failure who didn’t let it stop her, but her heart gave out very quickly under the pillow. The bedclothes were a little mussed, but she probably didn’t last long enough to suffer much.”