The Prodigal Son (14 page)

“You treat that poor woman like dirt, Davina.”

“She is my servant, bonded to me. This you know.”

“In Yugoslavia, I guess anything’s possible, but not here in America. Uda is free, not bonded.”

“The country makes no difference to a bond. Her family has provided mine with servants for five hundred years.”

“Lucky you,” said Emily dryly.

They sat then in an uneasy silence until Uda returned pushing a cart loaded with coffee, savory nibbles and pastries.

“There’s no need to go to so much trouble,” Emily said, her coffee cup in one hand and some kind of curryish bun in the other. She bit into it, nodded. “Very good! But unnecessary.”

“What are you here for, Emily?” Davina herself took black, unsweetened coffee and ignored the edibles.

“To clear up a few things I’ve noticed over the past year.”

Down went Davina’s cup. “What things?”

Emily took another tiny curry bun. “Oh, come now, Vina! Must I spell them out? You know very well what I’m getting at.”

Her answer was a sneer; then Davina shrugged. “When you start getting mysterious, Em, I become the Thomas who doubts.”

“You, doubt? Never!” said Emily with her own sneer. “It’s surprising what there is to see and hear, and how it all adds up.”

The white skin had lost its luster; Davina’s rather flat chest heaved on a breath. “You are just making mischief!”

“Max home, is he? I thought I didn’t see him drive out.”

“We expect the police.”

“You’ll suffer more if I open my mouth and tell Max.”

“Tell Max what? Your usual lies? You’re like the scum that rises to the top of anything left standing, you trouble-maker!”

“I want Ivan to inherit half of the business,” said Emily.

Recovered from her alarm, Davina inspected her long, red-lacquered nails. “Pah! You know nothing because there is nothing to know. This is how you drove Martita away, not so? The slurs, the innuendos … Always convincing her that you
said the truth. Well, I am no Martita. I am not a fragile depressive. I am not vulnerable either. You are a proven liar.”

“Perhaps I can prove I’m not a liar — this time.” Emily took a third bun. “You know what I’m driving at, Vina. These are delicious! May I have the recipe?”

“I will tell Uda to write out the recipe in ounces and pounds, yes?” Davina smiled. “Uda is a cook to die for.”

“Do we have a deal?” Emily asked. “Half to Ivan.”

“If you like,” Davina said, sounding indifferent. Then she raised her voice in a shout. “Max, dear! Coffee and company!”

The elegant Ivy Hall furniture had been moved to a pile at the back of the hall, the spot where it now rested having been thoroughly checked by Paul Bachman’s team. That left the vast remainder of the room to examine, including its trash. Donny and Delia represented Detectives; the bulk of the work fell to the Medical Examiner’s people.

Two forensics technicians had already done the worst job — going through the four cans used to receive food scraps. It was the only aspect of the work wouldn’t wait until this Monday.

So on Monday Delia and Donny, Paul and two others, clad in coveralls, bootees, gloves and caps, did the ordinary trash. This had been deposited in ordinary small metal containers of most ubiquitous kind, receptacles scattered in corners, against walls, down the corridors to entrance and toilets, the toilets themselves, and the kitchen.

They worked on a huge sheet of blue plastic, onto which each searcher emptied a container before inspecting the empty interior, complete with a flashlight, for anything that might have adhered or stuck in a seam. The trash itself was gone through meticulously, then thrown into a big drum.

“When the menu is smoked salmon, your choice of chicken breast or broiled scrod, and peach pie à la mode, why the hell would you bring these?” Donny asked, sitting back on his heels and holding up an empty Cheez Whizz packet.

“Not everyone likes good food,” Delia answered, head down and tail up. “I’ve found Twinkie wrappers by the score, as well as part of what looks like a theory of the universe written on a tatty piece of paper. It must have been wrong — the genius threw it out, anyway.”

“Who had a baby at this junket?” Paul asked, holding up a soiled disposable diaper.

“No one was supposed to. It must have been in a basket of rushes. Oh, the mysteries inherent in a nation’s trash!” Delia exclaimed, holding up a can of mosquito repellent. “At
this
time of year? Really!”

“I’ve found a book of crossword puzzles and five jigsaw pieces,” said one of Paul’s technicians, sniggering. “I guess some people come prepared for the boring speeches.”

They had nearly finished; it would be, they hoped, the least palatable job concerned with this case.

Donny yelped. “Hey! Found something, Deels!”

She scurried over on hands and knees and looked into the palm of his glove, the others crowding around too. It
held a metal saucer about a half inch in diameter and a quarter inch deep at its center. Underneath, soldered to the saucer’s center, was the business end of a fine bore hypodermic needle perhaps five-eighths of an inch long. It was plugged with a tiny cube of cork. On the top rim of the saucer a rubber cover had been stuck using a glue that partially dissolved the rubber, thus fusing it extremely efficiently to the steel saucer.

“Bingo!” Paul breathed. “I can’t believe he threw this out in the trash.”

“Carmine was right,” Delia said. “The killer didn’t know we stood no chance of getting warrants to search people before they left. So he ditched it at first opportunity.”

“He respects the poison, making sure that none could accidentally enter his own flesh as he carried it — a pocket of his jacket would have been ideal, but fiddling around to get it out — yeah, he might have pricked himself,” Donny said. “It was still risky, though. I wonder when he removed the cork? And why, having used the thing, didn’t he just drop it and kick it under the table? Except I don’t see how it was done.”

“Carmine has to see this right now,” Delia said, scrambled to her feet and made for a wall phone.

Ten minutes later he was there, leaving Buzz to continue grilling Dr. Jim Hunter. With him he brought a half gallon of distilled water, a ten cc syringe armed with a short twenty-gauge needle, some test tubes and a kidney dish.

“Okay, Paul, you get to do the rinsing,” Carmine said. “If there’s tetrodotoxin in this contraption, it’s potentially lethal until, Gus says, it’s been rinsed to death, which we do by pushing water into the saucer through the rubber diaphragm and collecting it in test tubes or, if worst comes to the worst, in the kidney dish.”

It was a painfully slow business, as the fine bore needle soldered on to the saucer’s base dripped the water at a dreary rate, but finally Paul pronounced himself satisfied, and rinsed the device’s exterior into the kidney dish.

“Do you know what?” Carmine asked, taking the device. When no one answered, he spoke again. “I reckon all our work has been for nothing. I don’t believe this thing has ever held a drop of tetrodotoxin.”

A gasp went up; everyone stared at Carmine, shocked.

Donny recovered first. “How does it work?” he asked.

“Like this, I think.” Carmine took the device and tucked the hypodermic end between the first and the middle fingers of his right hand so that the needle tip just protruded adjacent to his palm. This saw the saucer rest against the backs of the same two fingers. “The saucer is filled with tetrodotoxin and he holds the thing like so. Then he puts his hand, palm side down, on the side of his victim’s neck. The needle goes in as far as his fingers let it. Then he put the thumb of his other hand on top of the rubber diaphragm and pushes at it the way he’d push at an eyeball. That drives the poison out of the saucer, through the hypodermic and into the victim’s flesh. It’s done in literal seconds, and that left hand covering the right one completely obscures what he’s
actually doing. As soon as it’s done, the hands come down. He must have a way of being positive he can get the needle tip plugged with his cork before it floats free in his pocket. I’d say he practiced the whole operation until he could do it in his sleep. There would have needed to be an incident that diverted people’s attention — made everyone look to the wrong side, maybe. More important at the Tunbull dinner.”

Carmine shook his head, a dissatisfied look on his face. “At the banquet he would have been behind every man in the row of diners, there was no one to notice what he did with his hands apart from the women opposite, who saw hands on shoulders every time a man got up to go to the bathroom. Ingenious and effective.”

“Yet you don’t think it was used?” Delia asked.

The cork went into a tiny baggie; the device was put into a lidded jar, where it rolled around like a fallen top.

“How did he fill it?” Donny asked.

“The same way we rinsed it — injected the substance into the saucer with a hypodermic,” Carmine said.

“Then filling it was a bitch.”

“Speaking of filling things, Donny, aren’t you supposed to be doing homework on the Parsons? You see them at two.”

“I haven’t forgotten, Captain,” said the culprit hastily, before Delia could go to bat, “I read your Ghost case notes and sweet-talked a newspaper morgue librarian into searching all the Parson articles out. Looked to me as if all hands were needed at Ivy Hall, begging your pardon.”

Carmine grinned. “Forgiven, but get your ass moving now.”

“He’s a good man,” said Delia after he had gone.

“You are not wrong,” Carmine said.

She returned to the device. “I didn’t know you could solder stainless steel,” she said.

“Soldering is like most things, Deels. Be scrupulous in cleaning your surfaces — wipe them down with ether, say — and solder will hold for long enough.”

Paul and his technicians were packing up to leave; only Carmine and Delia stood at apparent leisure.

“Where did he get the saucer thing?” Delia asked.

“I have no idea, but it must be part of a piece of lab equipment,” Carmine said.

“Ah, the Hunters again,” said Delia.

“Or workshop people like printers,” said Carmine.

Only something vital would have dragged Carmine away from the interrogation of Dr. Jim Hunter, but when the Captain sent him a second wheel in the shape of a uniform cruising the pool of potential detectives, Buzz Genovese understood that he was to continue. Because Dr. Jim had already coughed up most of his guts on the sinus surgery, Buzz decided to settle the new face into Dr. Jim’s world by pressing for more details.

“There’s more to it than just a simple operation, Doctor,” he said as the uniform endeavored to disappear into the woodwork.

“
Simple
operation?” Hunter stared. “It was anything but, Sergeant. I was in the O.R. for eleven hours and unbeknownst
to me, Zimmerman the surgeon had brought in a facial plastic surgeon named — uh — Feinberg or Nussbaum or something. So when I came out of the O.R., I needed a new picture on my driver’s license — the pair of them had changed my face. Oh, I didn’t turn into Sidney Poitier, but I sure didn’t resemble a gorilla any more. Still ugly, but they gave me my
own
face. It didn’t remind anyone of anything.”

“Were you pleased?” Buzz asked.

“That’s putting it mildly! I was — I was very grateful. For that gift alone I could never lay a hand on John Hall. The surgeons insisted it wasn’t cosmetic surgery, just a full reconstruction of the sinuses that altered the exterior of my face, as apparently it does. If there was any genuine plastic surgery involved, it was to my nose. They gave it some shape and grafted me new nostrils.”

“How did your wife feel about all that?”

“She was delighted, especially when I lost most of the nerve pain. I went from several attacks a day pre-operatively to one every six months or so post-operatively. And my face felt — oh, kinda
light
. I could breathe properly, even in deepest sleep.”

“Remind me, when was the operation?”

“June of 1959. It was real pioneer surgery, so I got written up in a couple journals.”

Hunter had been in the room now for two hours, suffering the oft-repeated questions as most highly intelligent people did, in some bewilderment that his interrogators could be so dense, a sentiment that inevitably led to irritation. It is a rare genius who can continue to put up with the questions of fools
unruffled, a fact Carmine and Buzz were relying on. Though Jim Hunter had endured the slings and arrows of racial prejudice, he was also a campus idol. In his workplace he was the source of all knowledge, the boss of a whole team of “acolytes” as Dr. Millie called them, and universally adored. He was tolerant, humorous, forgiving and permanently afire with enthusiasm, which made him a wonderful research team leader; no one who worked for him would say or do anything that might incriminate Big Jim, as they called him. It was a sobriquet of total love.

Therefore let the questioning be repetitive, remorseless and, to a Jim Hunter, well-nigh senseless. His ego and his work had conditioned him to expect that his answers would be accepted the first time he gave them; now here he was, being jerked around by utter idiots.

An hour after Carmine had vanished saw Dr. Jim remove his tie; he was sweating, even though the room was chilly.

Every minute of the interminable interview since Carmine left had been devoted to his relationship with John Hall, with Dr. Jim sticking to his guns: he and Millie had known John in California, hung out with him, enjoyed marvelous conversations on subjects that ranged from the Big Bang to the mysteries of genetics and the hunger of the human race to ruin its habitats.

“C’mon, Doctor,” Buzz said with a sneer, “there had to be a down side because there always is a down side. Friendships aren’t static or idyllic! They go up and down like marriages and snotty brothers and pushy sisters. I mean, it sounds to me as if
your wife was very much the third wheel in this ideal give-and-take friendship between two men.”

When it happened, so suddenly that to Buzz it seemed to come out of the blue. Hours of calm, of understandable but well-controlled irritation, and now — wham! Hunter exploded!