Too Many Murders by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online

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 butcouldn’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 handicappedchild 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