Too Many Murders by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online Page A

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 theTom 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 allthree 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