Poison Read online

  Poison

  Ed McBain

  CHAPTER 1

  "This is some mess in here," Monoghan said.

  "This is some stink in here," Monroe said.

  The two Homicide detectives peered cautiously at the dead body on the carpet, and then circled around Hal Willis, who was also looking down at the corpse, hands on his hips. It was pretty easy to maneuver around Willis, as small as he was. Monoghan and Monroe, built like mastodons themselves, were both thinking they would not like to be partnered with any detective as small as Willis, a thin, wiry squirt who barely would have passed the five-foot-eight height requirement back in the old days, although nowadays you could be the size of a fire hydrant and you couldn't be discriminated against because of fair-hiring practices. You got some cops in this city, you could fit them in your vest pocket.

  Monoghan and Monroe were both wearing dark suits with vests. They were wearing dark overcoats and dark fedoras. Their faces were ruddy from the bitter March cold outside. They were both holding handkerchiefs to their noses because of the stench of vomit and fecal matter in the apartment. It was difficult to take a step in here without putting your foot in a pile of vomit or shit. It was difficult to keep from vomiting yourself, in fact. Monoghan and Monroe hated sloppy cases. They preferred good old-fashioned stabbings or shootings. The place also stank of stale cigar smoke. There were butts in all the ashtrays, the victim must've smoked like a chimney.

  The victim was lying alongside the bed, on his back, in his own vomit and shit. He was wearing only undershorts. The phone receiver was off the hook. Probably been trying to call somebody when he cashed in, Monroe figured. Either that, or he knocked the receiver off the hook when he collapsed. His blue eyes were wide open, the pupils dilated. His face was extremely pale. The assistant medical examiner was kneeling over him, feeling his hands for body warmth. He didn't seem any happier than anyone else in the room. Maybe even more unhappy in that he was closest to the body and its various excreted and regurgitated fluids. Two techs from the Photo Unit were busy taking their Po-laroids of the crime scene. Monoghan and Monroe, like a couple of softshoe dancers, took several steps backward, away from the corpse. They still had the handkerchiefs to their noses.

  "Last time I saw something like this," Monoghan said, "this mess here, we had an old lady fell in the bathtub, starved to death there in the bathtub. There was shit all over the bathtub, the 911 boys had to scoop her out with a shovel."

  "That was a disgusting case," Monroe said.

  The assistant M.E. said nothing. He was thinking this one was pretty disgusting, too. He was wondering why he hadn't stayed in private practice out on Sands Spit. Frank O'Neill, M.D. He could still see the shingle in his mind, the neat white clapboard building behind it. Instead, this. Early Monday morning and a dead man lying in his own filth.

  "So what do you think?" Willis asked.

  "Poisoning?" O'Neill said, shrugging.

  "Or maybe a heart attack," Monroe said.

  "They drag us out the crack of dawn, some guy had a heart attack," Monoghan said.

  "No, it wasn't a heart attack," O'Neill said.

  It wasn't the crack of dawn, either. It was 9:20 A.M. by the victim's bedside clock. This was the first squeal Willis and Carella had caught today, an excellent way to start the week. Carella hadn't said much since he'd got here with Willis. The victim's cleaning lady had called the police when she came into the apartment to find her employer lying beside the bed in his own mess. The responding blues had phoned back to the Eight-Seven with a corpse. Carella and Willis had informed Homicide because at first glance and smell it didn't look like death from natural causes. In this city, homicides and suicides were investigated in exactly the same manner, and the appearance of Homicide detectives at the scene was mandatory, even though the case officially belonged to the precinct detectives. Carella still wasn't saying anything.

  He was a tall man with dark hair and brown eyes slanted slightly downward, giving his face a somewhat Oriental cast. Monroe guessed Carella had played high school baseball; he looked like a ballplayer, moved like one, too. Monroe liked him somewhat better—but not much—than most of the cops at the Eight-Seven. The bulls up here took things too serious. Carella had a very serious look on his face now, an almost pained expression, as he stared down at the dead man on the carpet.

  "So what do we say under cause?" Monoghan asked. "Poisoning?"

  "Cause unknown," O'Neill said. "Until we do the autopsy."

  "Cause is throwing up and shitting his pants," Monroe said, laughing.

  "Cause is lack of toilet training," Monoghan said, laughing with him.

  "Any idea when he died?" Willis asked.

  "Not until autopsy," O'Neill said, and snapped his satchel shut. "Enjoy yourselves, lads," he said pleasantly, and started out of the room.

  The black woman who'd discovered the body was clearly frightened. She had never had trouble with the police in her entire life, and she believed she had plenty of trouble now. None of it her doing, neither. She sat in a chair across the room watching the huddle of law enforcement officers around the body. Flashbulbs were popping everywhere. People with all kinds of equipment were going all over the room doing things. As the doctor—she guessed he was a doctor, he had a satchel—went out of the room, somebody said, "You through here?" and he nodded and waved his hand in dismissal. Somebody else began sprinkling some kind of powder around the body, outlining it.

  "Try not to step in the shit," Monoghan said. "It may be evidence."

  It was, in fact, evidence. The techs would be scooping it up, together with the vomit, for delivery to the lab on High Street. It was a messy case all around.

  "You don't need us anymore, we'll be breezing along," Monroe said.

  "You could maybe open some windows when the techs get through dusting," Monoghan offered.

  Both men shrugged, put away their handkerchiefs and started for the door, passing a pair of 911 cops who came in with a stretcher, a rubber sheet, and a body bag.

  "You got your work cut out for you," Monoghan said, and walked out.

  They were through interrogating the cleaning lady in five minutes flat, convinced that her role in this was entirely innocent and in fact praiseworthy; she had discovered a dead body and had immediately called the police. During the course of the interview, she had identified her employer as Jerome McKennon; now as the tech boys went around the room dusting for latent fingerprints, vacuuming for hairs and fibers, collecting the noisome body fluids on the rug, Willis and Carella began seaching for evidence to corroborate the identification.

  On the dresser opposite the bed, they found a wallet, a key ring, a comb and a handful of change. The wallet contained two fifty-dollar bills, a twenty, a five, and three singles. It also contained several credit cards and a driver's license which indeed identified the dead man as Jerome Edward McKennon. They searched the pockets of all the clothing hanging in the closet and found only a small penknife in the righthand pocket of one of the sports jacke'ts. They searched all the dresser drawers. There were no empty medicine bottles anywhere in the bedroom.

  In the several drawers of a desk in a small study off the master bedroom, they found checkbooks imprinted with the name JEROME EDWARD McKENNON and the address here on Silvermine Oval, plus stationery with the name, address and telephone number. There seemed no doubt that the man who'd been carried out of the apartment in a body bag was Jerome Edward McKennon. They also found, in the top drawer of the desk, a personal telephone directory which they leafed through cursorily and then pocketed for further study back at the precinct.

  In the bathroom cabinet, they found several bottles with prescription drugs in them, none of which—judging from the descriptions on the labels—appeared deadly; they nonetheless bagged them for transfer
to the lab.

  They searched every drawer in the house and found no other medicines or drugs. They searched the kitchen cabinets for any insecticides or other household products that might contain poison. They found only a cockroach aerosol spray, but the plastic ring-seal on the can was unbroken.

  "If he poisoned himself," Willis said, "what'd he use?"

  In the bedroom, the techs were still busy.

  "You finished with this phone here?" Carella asked.

  "Yeah," one of the techs said, and Carella picked up the receiver.

  "Who you calling, Steve?" Willis asked.

  "M.E.'s Office. I want a fast comeback on this one." He hesitated a moment, looking at the base of the phone. "Redial feature on it," he said.

  "Try it," Willis said.

  Carella pressed the redial button. A dial tone, and then the phone began dialing out. One ring, two, three…

  "Hi, this…"

  "Hello…"

  "… is Marilyn, I'm out just now…"

  "Answering machine," he said to Willis.

  "… but if you'll leave your name and number and the time you called, I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Please wait for the beep."

  Carella waited for the beep, identified himself as a police detective, and asked her to call 377-8024, the number at the squadroom.

  "Any name?" Willis said.

  "Just Marilyn."

  "Did she give the number there?"

  "No."

  "Any batteries in that thing?"

  Carella turned over the phone and opened the battery compartment.

  "Yes," he said.

  "Then we better unplug it and take it with us," Willis said.

  Before they left the building, they knocked on every door. This was boring, an essential part of investigative routine that numbed the brain. Half of the tenants they questioned didn't even know McKennon, which was not surprising for this city. None of them knew what line of work he was in. None of them had seen anyone entering his apartment either last night or this morning. The super told them that McKennon had been living there for alrnost a year now, an ideal tenant, never any complaints about him. They got back to the squadroom at a little befoe three, carrying with them McKennon's telephone and his personal directory. There was no one named Marilyn in that directory. Either he'd known her number by heart or hadn't thought she was important enough to list.

  Most women in this city listed only their surnames and initials in the phone company's directory, hoping this would discourage obscene callers. This was no guarantees that the heavy breathers would be fooled; some of them looked specifically for surnames with initials. But Marilyn Whoever had positively identified herself as a woman living alone by saying "I'll get back to you." And to make matters worse, she had said, "I'm out just now," which for any enterprising burglar was a signal to run on over there and loot the joint.

  In this city, she'd have been better off saying, "Hi, you've reached 846-0318. If you'll leave a message when you hear the beep…" and so on. A no-frills recording, unreadable for clues by obscene caller or burglar. No name-Just the phone number, which the caller would have known anyway, even if he was just running his finger down a page in the directory. No explanation for not coming to the phone. Leave the potential burglar to dope out whether the apartment's occupant or occupants were in the bathtub or asleep; the one thing any burglar dreaded was walking into an occupied apartment.

  The detectives wished Marilyn had recorded her phone number, but she hadn't. As it was, all they had now was an unknown number buried in the phone they had taken from McKennon's apartment. If the call had been made to a local number, the phone company would have no record of it. On the off chance that it might have been a long-distance call, Carella spoke to a phone-company supervisor and discovered they had no record of any long-distance calls made from Jerome McKennon's apartment since March 13, eleven days ago. It seemed unlikely that this had been the last phone call McKennon had made—or tried to make. They tried the number, anyway, and reached a mail-order menswear company in California.

  Willis had asked at once if there were any batteries in the unit because he thought taking the phone off the jack might automatically cancel whatever was in its memory; some of these new-fangled phones were very finicky and the batteries were preservation insurance.

  They were dealing here with semi-sophisticated machines. McKennon's phone would automatically redial the last number called when you pushed the little REDIAL button on its base. Marilyn's telephone had an answering machine attachment, which meant that anyone calling got a prerecorded message when the machine was in its ANSWER mode.

  The detectives had no doubt that the wizards at the lab downtown could retrieve Marilyn's number from the memory bank of McKennon's phone—but lab responses sometimes took weeks. Instead, they opted for an approach that was the equivalent of good old-fashioned legwork.

  In the Clerical Office, they plugged in McKennon's phone and asked for a twenty-four-hour redial surveillance. The instructions to the clerk were to keep hitting the redial button until Marilyn herself, and not her machine, picked up. Under no circumstances was anyone to use that phone for any other calls that would wipe out the memory of the last call made by McKennon. The clerk wasn't too happy to inherit this job. Alf Miscolo, who ran the Clerical Office, wasn't too happy, either.

  He was not normally a testy person. But he was trying to catch up on two weeks of filing, and there was an angry scowl on his face now. Wearing a sleeveless blue sweater over his uniform shirt and trousers, dark-eyed with a massive nose and bushy eyebrows, thick neck giving the impression of sitting directly on his shoulders, he looked almost menacing.

  "We got plenty to keep us busy in here without having to do your work besides," he muttered, and glared malevolently at the telephone intruder.

  "In here" was a small cluttered room on the second floor of the old building on Grover Avenue. The aroma of percolating coffee permeated the room. None of the detectives enjoyed Miscolo's experimental brews, but he kept the pot going day and night anyway, mixing Colombian with Viennese, decaff with regular. The detectives always asked him if he was a mad scientist searching for a potion that would keep him eternally young. Miscolo told them to go fuck themselves.

  The coffee aroma drifted out of the open door, following the detectives down the corridor to the squadroom, where Carella immediately placed a call to the Medical Examiner's Office. When he hung up, he said, "They'll do their best."

  "Which means by next Christmas," Willis said sourly.

  He was wrong.

  At twenty to four that afternoon, just as the shift was about to change, Paul Blaney called.

  "How's this for service?" he said.

  "What've you got?" Carella asked.

  "And it wasn't easy, believe me," Blaney said.

  Carella said nothing. Better to let Blaney do it in his own sweet time.

  "Tough poison to recover," Blaney said.

  Carella waited.

  "The tobacco odor was the tip-off," Blaney said. "Though you don't always get that."

  From where he sat at his desk, Willis raised his eyebrows questioningly. Carella shrugged. Across the room, Meyer Meyer was pushing his way through the gate in the slatted rail divider. He was wearing a short coat with a fake fur collar, a woolen watch cap pulled down over his bald head. "This is March?" he asked, blowing on his hands. "This is a week before Easter?"

  On the phone, Blaney said, "Congestion and acute inflammation of the stomach and intestines. Indicates the poison was taken by mouth. All the organs congested, blood very dark, very fluid. I ran tests on the stomach contents, viscera and brain. Color reactions on the recovered samples were positive. Yellow with slight orange cast for the nitro-sylsulfuric acid. Yellow with brown cast for the concentrated sulfuric acid, no change on the Erdmann's or the Mecke's, pale orange with a brown cast on the Marquis' reagent. Wine-red on the Janovksy, magenta on the paradimethyl… well, you don't need to know all the color tests.
I also got huge yellow crystals with the platinum chloride reagent, and an amorphous precipitation with the gold chloride. I'm pretty certain I've nailed it down."

  "What was the poison?" Carella asked.

  "Nicotine," Blaney said.

  Across the room, Meyer was lighting a cigarette even before he took off his hat and coat.

  "Nicotine?" Carella said.

  "Yeah," Blaney said. He sounded pleased. Carella could visualize him smiling. "Deadly poison," he said. "Couldn't have been a very pleasant death, either. Hot burning sensation in the upper digestive tract from the mouth to the stomach. Salivation, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, pain in the abdomen. Faintness, prostration, falling blood pressure, convulsions and then respiratory paralysis. Makes you want to quit smoking, doesn't it?"

  "I don't smoke," Carella said, and looked across the room to where Meyer was puffing like a locomotive. "What's the fatal dose?"

  "Depends on your source. Forty milligrams is usually cited as the minimum."

  "How fast does it work?"

  "The only thing faster is hydrocyanic acid."

  "And how fast is that?"

  "Cyanide can kill you in minutes. Seconds sometimes."

  "And nicotine?"

  "Convulsions within seconds, death within minutes. You looking for a post-mortem interval?"

  "It would help."

  "Everything else considered—body heat, lividity, stomach contents and so on—I'd say you have a relatively fresh corpse here."

  "How fresh?"

  "Sometime early this morning."

  "How early?"

  "He died at seven-twenty-four A.M.," Blaney said. "Actually, seven-twenty-four and thirty-six seconds."

  For a moment, Carella thought he was serious.

  "Give me a break, willya?" Blaney said. "Sometime early this morning is as far as I'll go."

  "And it was taken by mouth, huh?"

  "No question."

  "At least forty milligrams."

  "Forty would do it. Sixty would do it even better. Ninety would be better yet."

  "What's forty milligrams?" Carella asked. "Like a tea-spoonful?"