Effigies (14 page)

The ER doctor looked like he thought he was way too busy to talk to the friend of a man who was going to pull through. Despite what Joe said, Faye found that she did not, in fact, like everybody.

“We’ve got to watch him a few more hours, so he’ll be here overnight.” He moved toward the door.

“Did he have a heart attack?”

“No.” Apparently deciding that, since she insisted on making him talk to her, then he would just whip out as many polysyllabic words as possible, he went on, “His hypotension and bradycardia have resolved. He responded well to atropine, and there’s no sign of pulmonary edema. We’ll have him on telemetry all night, then send him home tomorrow afternoon if everything checks out. My best guess is that he took an extra beta-blocker or two, since you say he was feeling ill this morning, but it’ll be a few days before we get the lab results to confirm that. It’s a good thing he’s on a fairly low dose, or the extra pill might have killed him. That drug is particularly dosage-sensitive, so taking extra was a bad idea, but it happens more than you’d think. Some people have the notion that if a little is good, then a lot is better.”

Having dismissed a powerful and educated man as someone who might have done something so dimwitted as taking an overdose of a dangerous drug, just on a whim, the doctor took his leave of her.

Chapter Fourteen

Tuesday

Day 5 of the Neshoba County Fair

“Mr. Judd’s wife was not pleased when I told her that the doctor thought he’d taken too much of his beta-blocker,” Faye asked Joe as she perused the breakfast buffet and settled, again, on a sumptuous pile of biscuits and gravy. “My husband is many things,’ she said, ‘but he is not an idiot.’”

“Doesn’t seem like one to me.”

“So, let’s say Mr. Judd took an extra pill or two. Where did it come from?” Faye speared a chunk of biscuit on her fork and twirled it around in the gravy.

“You didn’t find any other bottles in his room? Not even in the trash can?”

“Nope, and you and the paramedics all saw me looking. I tore that suite apart.”

Joe dug into a pile of eggs and sausage that would put him in need of beta-blockers of his own in about thirty years. “Maybe he took all the ones he had left in the box, one for every day of the week. That would have been six pills too many.”

“No, he couldn’t have done that. Davis said he saw beta-blockers in there. And the ER doctor must have seen some, too, because he knew the dosage. If there had been some missing—say, if the Tuesday and Wednesday slots didn’t have beta-blockers in them—then I think he would have said something definite like, ‘The man took two extra pills.’ Doctors are definite people. Since he said something vague like he thinks Mr. Judd took ‘an extra pill or two,’ then I’d say it’s because he doesn’t have a clue how many he actually took, and he won’t have a clue until the lab tests come back.”

“Maybe there’s nothing funny at all about the pills left in the box,” Joe said. He stopped to chew. “Maybe they’re just what Davis said they were—beta blockers and ibuprofen and stuff. One of each for every day of the week.”

“So do you think he just got sick for no reason?”

“Well, it’s possible. Even the doctor won’t be sure without those lab tests. But, no, that’s not what I meant.” His thought processes were interrupted by more chewing. “I was thinking that maybe those pills are fine, but there was something funny about one of the ones he took yesterday afternoon.”

“You think they were defective?” An unattractive thought surfaced. “Or you think somebody poisoned him.”

“Well, no, I hadn’t gotten that far in thinking this through. I was just crossing the other things off the list. We don’t think he took too many pills, because we can’t find the bottle they came out of. Also, because none of the pills in his day-of-the-week case was missing.”

“Right.”

“So that only leaves two things. Either he got sick for some reason besides the pills, something the doctors couldn’t find. And it seems to me like they would have looked pretty hard, since he’s famous and all. Or else something was wrong about the ones he took.”

“Well, let’s walk back through the day. I watched Neely put the pills in the box, right out of the prescription bottle…that was filled by Preston Silver. Now that’s a man who I wouldn’t want handling my drugs.”

“Maybe if he was wearing rubber gloves,” Joe offered.

“I don’t think rubber gloves would be enough to keep the Klansman contamination off. But let’s be fair. Chuck had his hands on that pill case, too, earlier in the day. We know Mr. Judd has a habit of leaving it in his glove box, so someone could have tampered with it earlier, and we wouldn’t know. And hotel personnel would have had access to his room, if he’d left the case unattended in there.”

Joe looked at her expectantly, as if there was one more suspect, but he wanted her to be the one who named him.

“Ross Donnelly,” Faye continued slowly. “He was alone in the room with Mr. Judd. He may even have been the last person to see him before his medical crisis.”

Joe nodded, with a facial expression that said he was proud of her.

“I’m still not letting Mr. Silver fill any prescriptions for me,” he said, heading back for seconds.

“Agreed. But I think we have time to stop by his pharmacy before we go to work.”

Silver’s Drugs was a throwback to a simpler time, a time before the nation was criss-crossed with big-box pharmacies that all looked alike. The floors were covered with black-and-white linoleum tiles laid in a diamond pattern. The worn tiles were waxed and buffed to a high gloss. Long, low display racks stretched across the room, and a scar on the floor showed where an old-timey lunch counter had once taken up space now devoted to over-the-counter drugs. High, modern shelving would have been a more efficient use of space, but these old racks apparently held enough of a selection to suit Preston Silver’s loyal customers. Though the store had just opened, there were already several people milling about, waiting for a chance to fill their prescriptions.

Faye checked her watch. She figured she had twenty minutes to kill before she and Joe were irredeemably late for work, so she busied herself perusing a selection of cut-rate pantyhose on the aisle furthest from the pharmacy counter. Within ten minutes of watching Preston Silver do business, she’d detected a pattern that she didn’t like. Eight people had approached the counter, which was staffed by Silver and a silver-haired African-American woman who looked as if her feet already hurt. Five of the customers were white, two were black, and one was Native American, probably Choctaw.

This was a reasonable approximation of the population of Neshoba County which, because of the reservation, had its own unique racial balance. During their project orientation, Dr. Mailer had been careful to call their attention to that balance—roughly 65% white, 20% black, and 15% Native American—which was an inescapable part of the local landscape.

It wasn’t the diversity of Preston Silver’s clientele that put a cold lump in the center of her chest. It was the way he treated them. As each person reached the front of the line, Silver either took the prescription from an outstretched hand, or he gave a curt nod at his assistant, who reached out a hand to take the slip of paper. It was impossible for Faye, who had been born biracial in the 1960s South, not to notice that Silver waited on all five white customers, handing the people of color over to his assistant.

Faye sat on her anger for five more minutes, watching Silver wait on three more white people, while his assistant deftly intervened to capture the two non-white customers before they had a chance to notice that the boss didn’t want to talk to them. She decided to use her last five minutes well.

Approaching the counter, she sidestepped the efforts of Silver’s assistant pharmacist to intercept her, presenting herself to the great man himself.

“My associate can take your prescription—” Silver began.

Faye wished she could do this without subjecting herself to the clammy aura that surrounded Silver, but she couldn’t, so she spoke up. “I don’t have a prescription. I just want to ask a question.” She held up a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. “I heard it wasn’t safe to take aspirin with this stuff. I took some last night. How long should I wait before I can have an aspirin?”

“My associate is well-versed in drug interactions,” he began again. “If you’ll just step—”

Joe, whose powers of observation exceeded even Faye’s, had seen what was happening and done precisely the right thing. When Silver tried again to shunt Faye aside, he found that Joe was already standing beside her, engaging the assistant in a spirited discussion of the relative merits of several cold remedies.

Faye looked expectantly at the cornered Klansman, brandishing the bottle of pink stuff, but he untied his apron, dumped it on the counter, and stalked away. She wondered if no one had ever challenged him and his ugly approach to business. Or maybe, like Neely Rutland had done just the day before, people simply bustled into the store, conducted their business, and left without noticing who waited on them.

She set the bottle of Pepto-Bismol on the counter, turned to leave, then thought twice. Retrieving the bottle, she handed it to Silver’s long-suffering assistant, along with a ten dollar bill. She’d faced down a dragon and won. Something inside her wanted to keep the Pepto as a trophy.

“Did we prove something, Faye?” Joe asked, eying the set of her jaw and the pink bottle in her hand. “I mean, did we prove something besides that he’s prejudiced and that we’re smarter than he is?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Faye liked the contrast between the pink stomach remedy and the light brown skin of her hand. She hoped her impertinence made Preston Silver so sick that he needed a few doses of his own stomach medicine.

“We went in there because we wondered whether Silver poisoned Mr. Judd. Did we learn anything?”

Faye set the bottle aside and cranked the car. “Not exactly. We already had ample evidence that he’s a racist. Now we’ve seen it with our own eyes. But that doesn’t mean he’s a killer.” She pursed her lips while her thoughts raced ahead of her ability to sort through them. “Wait. We did learn something slightly useful. I’d bet fifty dollars that Preston Silver waited on Neely yesterday. She
is
white, after all. Then, when he had to help her track down Mr. Judd’s prescription, he would have known he was counting pills for a black man. A rich famous black man with political views he vehemently opposed. A rich famous black man who just gave a public speech calculated to stir up the past. Would it be tempting for a man like that to slip in a pill that could kill the patient?”

“Poison?”

“It wouldn’t have to be something we’d think of as poison, like arsenic or strychnine. There’s lots of perfectly ordinary things that can kill you if you take it wrong, or if you take too much. Simple aspirin would do it. Even water. To kill with one of those ordinary things, you just have to convince the victim to poison himself willingly. I suspect it wouldn’t be that hard.”

She wondered whether Preston Silver had stood behind his pharmacist’s counter all these years, refining his plan for the perfect murder, waiting for his chance. Had Neely given it to him?

“I need to call the sheriff,” Faye said, thumbing open the address book on her cell phone.

“So Preston tried some of his stupid bigot’s tricks on you? I’ll bet you made him eat his pharmacist’s apron.”

“You know about it?” Faye wished she’d asked Joe to drive while she talked on the phone. This country road appeared to have been laid out along an old cow path. Navigating around another abrupt twist, she wondered whether the cows had been drunk. “Neely, his behavior’s illegal. You know that. It’s a throwback to the days when only whites could eat at lunch counters.”

“Why do you think Preston closed his lunch counter?”

“Because he didn’t want to be forced to serve the likes of me.”

Neely cleared her throat. “Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but yes. The law has pushed Preston and people like him into a corner. They push back in little ways, just to prove they can. He behaves when I’m in the store. He knows everyone on my payroll by name, so he’s not likely to screw up in front of them. I don’t doubt that he pushes his luck when none of us are in the store.”

“You’ve got my testimony…” Faye paused. “Wait. No, you don’t. Joe and I both got waited on. We were made a little uncomfortable in the process, but I’m not sure any laws were broken.”