Too Many Murders(13)
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.