The Prodigal Son (31 page)

“Why did I what?” she asked, looking bewildered.

“It won’t wash, Millie. You know as well as I do. What made you report the loss of this incredibly esoteric poison?”

“I wanted to do the right thing.”

“Maybe, but that wasn’t why you reported it. And reported it so cleverly. Not to me, but to your father, who you knew would pass the information on to me, thus sparing you yourself from a series of questions you might have had difficulty answering. It was imperative to make the cops aware that the stuff was out there in the community, yet you didn’t know enough yourself to feel confident you could survive an interview with me.”

Her laugh was forced. “My goodness, you make it sound as if I were party to a conspiracy,” she said, voice trembling.

“No, I don’t believe that,” Carmine countered. “I think your reasoning went more like this: Thomas Tinkerman, plus a surefire bestseller suppressed to feed Tinkerman’s ethics and egotism, plus a livid husband who could unstitch the mysteries of tetrodotoxin as easily as he can any other complex molecule.” Carmine paused, watching her intently.

She was absolutely white, but her chin was up and the eyes guarded. “Go on,” she said.

“Since your fifteenth birthdays, you and Jim have been as glued together as two layers in a laminate. By this time, you hardly need to talk in order to transmit information. And you had isolated a very rare substance from its natural source, the blowfish. It was a small triumph, maybe, but one of sufficient caliber to make your husband sit up and take notice. You’d done what few had managed, and the pair of you would have discussed your feat — pillow talk, Millie, that’s where conjugal confidences happen. Undoubtedly Jim was already aware what you were trying to do, and why. For you, it was a tool rather than an end in itself, but one that saved you grant money
buying the stuff and represented a challenge to make. I’m sure the fish cost you a packet, but not as much as tetrodotoxin would have. And by making more than you needed, you could sell the remainder, make a profit. You can’t tell me Jim wasn’t interested.”

Millie looked wry. “There is a lot of pillow talk in our bed, Captain, but it’s entirely one-sided. Me! Jim’s head hits the pillow, and he’s asleep. The four hours after he goes to bed are his best sleep, as a matter of fact.”

“I don’t think you intended to make a lot,” Carmine went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “However, I’m going to speculate that you got your tank of blowfish cheaply, from a supplier to Japanese restaurants going out of business. Well, it’s not actually speculation, it’s the truth. Cops don’t twiddle their thumbs, they investigate everything. We prowl down all kinds of avenues, including what look like dead ends. So there you were, with a whole tank of blowfish that cost you next to nothing. Why waste them? Jim asked. Make some money, sell the leftovers! That’s why you reduced it to a powder — easier to cut, ask any cocaine dealer. A speck is easier to corral than a drop — smaller too.”

“Fascinating,” said Millie, still white-faced.

“Did you make the ampoules, or did Jim? No matter, they were made. And when your series of experiments was finished, you put the six remaining ampoules in the back of your refrigerator. When you found them missing, you knew Jim had taken them, and with what end in view. The murder of Thomas Tinkerman. You know Jim Hunter as only a
devoted wife of many years can know a man, and you knew he’d kill Tinkerman. That’s why you reported the loss. To let Jim know that the cops knew all about this weird, untraceable poison — that they had been furnished with the lab techniques able to detect it. You thought that would stop him. But Tinkerman died of tetrodotoxin poisoning. After John Hall did. Now you understood what you had started, and desperately rued your action. If you’d kept silent, none of the tetrodotoxin deaths would have been discovered for what they are, and Jim wouldn’t be our main suspect. You do know he is?”

“Yes,” she said, mouth stiff. “But he didn’t steal my tetrodotoxin, and he didn’t kill any of these dead people.” Her eyes were dry, tearless. “Jim is innocent.”

“Then give me a name, Millie.”

“I can’t, Captain. I don’t know one. Except that
someone
stole the poison, and it wasn’t Jim, it wasn’t!”

“Would the word tetrodotoxin mean anything to an eavesdropper?”

“I very much doubt it, unless they were interested in animal poisons — snake and spider venom, that kind of thing.”

“Is there such a person in Chubb Biology?”

“Bound to be, but don’t know a name, and no one has ever visited me to enquire about tetrodotoxin.”

“Does Jim have any personnel working for a doctorate?”

Millie looked appalled. “Jim? Jim can’t teach, and he’s the world’s worst thesis supervisor. People go to him
after
they’ve done their doctorates. His doctoral fellows belong to his
deputies and have about as much to do with Jim as the President does with his kitchen staff.”

“Interesting, that he can’t teach or supervise, yet he can write this great book for the layman. Isn’t that a contradiction?”

“Paper, Carmine, paper,” said Millie, smiling at some private memory. “What Jim can do on paper cannot be translated to the flesh. Besides, the book is his own output, it’s a part of his persona. Doctoral theses are lead weights tied around his neck.”

“You mean, I think, that his entire world from government grants to dean to wife conspire to spoil and indulge Jim Hunter. If he doesn’t like to do it, he doesn’t have to do it.”

A statement that made Millie laugh aloud. “You may have some basis in fact, Carmine, but you’ve exaggerated. Right at this moment I have a very rebellious husband indeed. He thought book publicity would entail a couple of days in New York, but now he’s discovered it means taking a month off work for a nationwide tour. He is
not
pleased.”

“I can see why that wouldn’t please him, but here’s a question really bugs me — how does everyone know that
A Helical God
is going to be a bestseller?”

“As I understand it from his editor Fulvia Friedkin, it’s possible to predict the fate of non-fiction. The publisher can estimate how many copies a work of non-fiction will sell down to a very few. Whereas the fate of fiction is in the lap of the gods — no one can predict the sales of fiction. Weird, yet apparently true,” said Millie. “Jim is certain to sell in the hundreds of thousands, which is how come our living
standard has suddenly risen.” She leaned forward, face earnest. “Carmine, I’m not getting any younger, and I want to start our own family. For the parents of so many girls, Mom and Dad are kinda short on grandchildren. As the eldest outside the walls of a nunnery, I want to remedy that.”

“I never did understand Lizzie’s vocation,” Carmine said, not averse to changing the subject.

“Considering how wild she was, nor did we,” Millie said with a laugh. “Nineteen, the world her oyster, and she enters the convent — the Carmelites, yet! Vows of silence, the works.”

“Well do I remember the fuss. How long has she been in now?”

“Seventeen years. But conventual living, even Carmelite, is pretty enlightened these days. Lizzie seems really happy.”

“I never saw a more beautiful girl. Silvestri in a totally feminine mold. She threw pure Cerutti.” Carmine sighed.

“I think Liz likes the peace and quiet.”

And so they left it.

Carmine dropped her back at her new house agog to continue with her renovations, and returned to County Services not much the wiser for a good lunch. It was true, however, that the O’Donnells had had a checkered career with their girls, none of whom fit any conventional ideal. Millie came closest in one respect, her science, but Annie, a pre-med student at Paracelsus College in the same year as her cousin Sophia, Carmine’s daughter, was a marked contrast to Millie. Annie was militant, aggressive and fanatically left-wing politically. Her fees were a big contributing factor to Patrick’s chronic shortage of funds,
but she showed not one scrap of gratitude for her parents’ sacrifices. Not unnaturally, she and Sophia loathed each other, not helped by Sophia’s beauty, popularity — or wealth.

“What Annie needs is a million dollars,” Sophia would say between her teeth. “All that left-wing crap would be forgotten in ten milliseconds.”

The case was drawing toward the end of its second week, and the arrest of Uda Savovich was all Carmine had to show for the days of dogged investigation. Because her defense attorney was the great Anthony Bera, she would probably be acquitted; the evidence was purely circumstantial in that no one had seen her commit murder. What an incompetent lawyer would have bungled, Bera would use brilliantly: her unprepossessing appearance, her servant’s status in her sister’s home, her sheer foreignness. The jury would go into their debate convinced that someone else had put those two damning tubes of paint there — how could a poor little soul with tiny, twisted fingers do it?

It always came back to Jim Hunter. Now Carmine and his team would have to interview every member of Hunter’s extensive laboratory world, probing for mentions of tetrodotoxin without ever actually using the name. A futile business.

Delia came in, a telex in her hand. “From Liam,” she said handing it to Carmine, “and no, I haven’t read it.”

“On the red-eye out of L.A. tonight,” Liam said, “and here’s hoping no hijackers on board to disturb my sleep.

“Not much to report, but I guess you expect that. First item is that John Hall was a simple depressive, no oscillations into mania. Gold Beach enquiries showed a withdrawn kid from early childhood, a science nerd in high school, and a real loner in college, all local. Good grades. Seems to have really loved Wendover, spent his spare time with the old man. A lot of stuff about trees and forestry, also paper manufacture.

“Caltech was his first time out of Oregon and his sphere. He started there a year earlier than the Hunters, September of 1957, but dropped out a month later. The halfway house in San Francisco dates to this time, not his teens. No one admits to having kept any records, but talking to a couple of long term helpers suggests a homosexual element in his depression. Not, as far as I could ascertain, that Hall was ever involved with a man. He just had the reputation.

“He went back to Caltech in September of 1958 and met the Hunters the first week. After that he never left their vicinity. According to a classmate, he was nuts on both the Hunters, but the general feeling in the classroom was that he was more taken with Jim than with Millie. Some of the implied homosexuality may be due to his phsyique and his face, neither a thousand per cent masculine, seems to be the consensus.

“After the Hunters went to Chicago he broke down again and spent some months in San Francisco being treated and staying in the halfway house. Then Wendover Hall brought him back to Oregon and put him into private full-time
hospitalization, which seemed to do more for him. Since 1963, he’s been more or less okay, though living with Wendover.

“Talk to you some more when I get home. Liam.”

“The poor young man!” said Delia, finished reading.

“It’s not the Hunter story, though, is it?” Carmine asked.

“I don’t agree. What Liam has garnered is hearsay, from observers on the outside. It’s a great trouble to young men of John Hall’s physical type — they tend to be labeled as homosexual whether they are or not,” Delia said, sounding passionate. “Don’t say it doesn’t happen in our own police force — it does! You and I both can name half a dozen men mistakenly labeled queer. As well as one or two super-masculine types who were anything but. We have a background for John Hall, and it’s a sad one, but it doesn’t say anything about his relationship with Jim and Millie Hunter.”

FRIDAY, JANUARY 17, 1969

A
t eight that morning, Carmine assembled his troops.

“By now you will have concluded that we’ve exhausted all our avenues of enquiry,” he said, standing. They were not neatly seated in rows, but rather scattered over the fairly large room with chairs turned at different angles; each body, however, was twisted so that its eyes could rest on Carmine in comfort.

“Here’s what we have: the murders of four people, three by an esoteric poison, tetrodotoxin, and one by a gunshot wound to the base of the brain. The first death, John Hall, was by tetrodotoxin subcutaneously administered to the back of his neck before the men went into Max Tunbull’s study. It could have been by any hand. The second death, Thomas Tinkerman, was by an intramuscular injection of tetrodotoxin to the back of his neck. It was administered by his wife in the belief that she was giving him his customary dose of vitamin B-12.”

Carmine straightened. “We were led on a merry dance that only became obvious after we learned of the B-12. There were home-made gizmos to confuse us, valuable time wasted chasing down leads that went nowhere, a web woven to deceive. Our first break consisted of two ampoules and one letter found inside tubes that had contained phthalocyanine green gouache paint, which is absolutely water-soluble and therefore easy to get rid of. Anyone care to comment at this stage?” Carmine asked.

Buzz lifted a hand. “Is the murder of Emily Tunbull part of this guy’s plans, or unconnected to him?” he asked.

“Possibly some of each, Buzz,” Carmine said. “I know this is all old ground, but don’t forget our guy likes to play. Not only with the cops, but with other people who may be victims, suspects, or both. Emily Tunbull definitely wasn’t a part of his master plan, but she confused things. The Savovich sisters now tell a story of being sent the ampoules and letter by mail, and at first not setting much store by it. So they just left the package on their artwork desk, a space they share. Just before Emily’s body was found, Davina discovered that one ampoule had been broken and emptied. It was lying on the desk in the open. Both sisters swear they didn’t use what had been in it. Abe has questioned each of them, I’ve questioned each of them, and Delia made it three of us. Delia, what do you think?”

“That they’ll never budge from that story,” said Delia with a sigh. “They claim their involvement is after the fact.”