Poison Read online

"And the others?" Willis said.

  "What others?"

  "On the phone."

  "Acquaintances."

  "But not men you're dating."

  "No."

  "Was that Mr. McKennon's voice?" Carella asked.

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Yes," and lowered her eyes.

  Carella closed his notebook.

  "We may need to reach you at work," he said. "Is there a number you can let us…?"

  "I'm unemployed," she said.

  Willis thought his face registered blank, but she must have caught something on it.

  "It's not what you're thinking," she said at once.

  "What am I thinking?" he said.

  "You're thinking expensive, well-furnished town-house, you're thinking she's got a sugar daddy. You're wrong. I've got a real daddy, and he's an oilman in Texas, and he doesn't want his only daughter starving in the big, bad city."

  "I see."

  "Well, we're sorry to have taken so much of your time," Carella said. "You've been very helpful, though, and we…"

  "How?" she asked, and showed them to the door.

  Outside, the air was cold and the wind was sharp.

  CHAPTER 3

  In this city, they called it a 24-24. It applied to homicides and it referred to the importance of the twenty-four hours preceding a person's death and the twenty-four hours following it.

  The pre-mortem twenty-four hours were important because what a victim did, where he went, whom he saw, all might have bearing on his death. Officially Jerome McKennon was a victim, even if he'd swallowed the nicotine of his own volition. The post-mortem twenty-four hours were important only if someone had murdered McKennon because then the investigating detectives would be working against the clock, and as more and more time elapsed, the trail could get colder and colder, giving the killer an edge. It was a dictum in police work that if a case went beyond a week without a solid lead, you might as well throw it in the Open File. The Open File was the graveyard of investigation.

  There were only two detectives working the McKennon case. This wasn't a big-deal front-page murder. Nobody important had been slain, no exotic setting had been involved, this was just another garden-variety murder in a city that sprouted them like weeds. The poison was unusual, true, but even that wasn't something an aboriginal tribe might dip its arrows into. The media had more than enough sensational murders to shout about every day, and since this case lacked what the cops referred to as the Roman Arena Appeal, it got less than passing notice in the newspapers and on television. Only one of the Tuesday morning commentators—a man who'd been touting the evils of cigarette-smoking for the past six months now, ever since he himself had quit, there's nothing like a reformed whore—found the case an opportunity for mentioning how strong a poison nicotine actually was, but he was a voice in the wilderness.

  The case was important only to Willis and Carella, and then only because they'd happened to be "up"—on duty and catching—when the call came in. Neither of them enjoyed poisons that acted within minutes. Such a poison automatically started them thinking suicide. They were not paid to think suicide. The only reason a suicide was investigated as a homicide was that it might in fact be a homicide. But nicotine did work in minutes, sometimes seconds, and Jerome McKennon had died of nicotine poisoning and it was important now to get work on the 24-24 and to do it fast because if someone had dropped that poison in his beer or forced it down his throat, the edge was widening with every ticking second of the clock.

  There were only two of them.

  The pre-24 was going to be difficult; they had found no appointment calendar in McKennon's apartment. But Marilyn Hollis had told them he was vice president in charge of marketing at Eastec Systems on Avenue J, so Carella started there.

  Willis, working from the list of three names Marilyn had given them, set about trying to find the other men in her life. He was, in effect, working the post-24. She had told them that none of those other men even knew McKennon—"I don't make a habit of telling Tom about Dick or Harry." But a goodly number of the murders committed in this city were motivated by jealousy. Husband slays wife's lover. Woman slays own lover. Boyfriend kills girlfriend or girlfriend's boyfriend, or, generously, both. Boyfriend kills boyfriend or boyfriend's mother. The possibilities were limitless, the green-eyed monster exploding into violence at the slightest provocation.

  If Marilyn had three boyfriends in addition to McKennon, the possibility existed that one of them hadn't appreciated the relationship she shared with McKennon and had decided to put an end to it. The possibility was a slim one, and Willis knew it. But in the post-24, all you were looking for was a place to hang your hat.

  The first name on the list was Nelson Riley, Marilyn's weekend playmate. But if Riley had been away with Marilyn, he couldn't have been here in the city poisoning McKennon; nicotine worked within minutes. The detectives had only Marilyn's word for her—and Riley's—whereabouts on the two days preceding McKennon's death. Willis called Riley, identified himself, and told him he'd be there in half an hour.

  Nelson Riley was a man in his late thirties, Willis guessed, six feet two or three inches tall, with a shock of red hair, a red handlebar mustache, green eyes, massive shoulders, a barrel chest, and the big-knuckled hands of a street fighter. He was not a street fighter—at least not by chosen profession. He was an artist, and his studio was in a loft on Carlson Street downtown in the Quarter. Huge canvases lined the wall of the loft, illuminated by a skylight that poured a cold wintry light into the room. A shoulder-height divider-wall separated Riley's workspace from his living quarters. Beyond the edge of the wall, Willis could see an unmade waterbed.

  The paintings against the walls were all representational. Cityscapes, nudes, still lifes. One of the nudes looked remarkably like Marilyn Hollis. The painting on the easel depicted a watermelon. The colors on Riley's palette, resting on a high table alongside the easel, were predominantly red and green. Riley's jeans and his faded blue T-shirt were covered with paint, as were his enormous hands. Willis kept thinking he would not ever like to run into Riley in a dark alley on a moonless night. Even if he had the soul of an artist.

  "So what's this about?" Riley asked.

  "We're investigating an apparent suicide," Willis said, "a man named Jerry McKennon."

  He watched the eyes. The eyes told a lot. Not a flicker of recognition there.

  "Do you know him?"

  "Never heard of him," Riley said. "You want some coffee?"

  "Thanks," Willis said.

  He followed Riley to behind the divider-wall, where the waterbed shared an eighteen-by-twenty space with a dresser, a sink, a refrigerator, a wall cupboard, a floor lamp, a kitchen table with chairs around it, and a hot plate on another paint-spattered table. The fierce March wind outside rattled a small window near the foot of the bed. Riley filled a kettle with water and put it on the hot plate.

  "It's instant," he said, "I hope you don't mind."

  "Instant's fine," Willis said.

  Riley went to the cupboard and took down two paint-smeared mugs. "You did say apparent, didn't you?" he asked. "The suicide?"

  "Yes."

  "Meaning maybe it wasn't suicide?"

  "We don't know yet."

  "Meaning what? Murder?"

  "Maybe."

  "So how am I in this? What's this got…?"

  "Do you know a woman named Marilyn Hollis?"

  "Sure. What's she got to do with it?"

  "Were you away with her this past weekend?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Where'd you go, Mr. Riley?"

  "What's that got to do with somebody's suicide? Or murder."

  "Well, this is just routine," Willis said.

  "It is, huh?" Riley said, and raised his eyebrows skeptically.

  The window rattled with a fresh gust of wind.

  "Mr. Riley," Willis said, "I really would appreciate it if you could tell me where you went with Miss Hollis, what time you left the city, and what time you returned. Please understand…"

  "Sure, sure, this is just routine," Riley said. "We went up to Snowflake to do a little spring skiing. Some kind of spring skiing, I'll tell you. The mountain was a solid block of ice."

  "Where's that, Snowflake?"

  "Vermont. I take it you don't ski."

  "No, I don't."

  "Sometimes I wish I didn't," Riley said.

  "And you left the city when?"

  "I picked up Marilyn around five-thirty. I like to get a full day's work in. Lots of people, they think artists just paint when the mood strikes them. That's bullshit. I put in an eight-hour day, nine to five, every day but weekends. I used to be an art director at an ad agency before I quit to paint full time. I used to paint at night and on weekends. Once I made the break, I promised myself I'd never again work at night or on weekends. So I don't." He shrugged. "Must be different for you, huh?"

  "A little," Willis said, and smiled. "So you left the city at five-thirty on Friday…"

  "Yeah, about then."

  "And came back when?"

  "Yesterday afternoon. I know what you're thinking. I tell you I work nine to five, five days a week, and here I don't get back to the city till around four yesterday afternoon." He shrugged again. "But I just finished that big mother against the wall, and I figured I was entitled."

  The big mother against the wall was a street scene in downtown Isola, one of those crowded little cobblestoned Dutch lanes near the Lower Platform, a narrow canyon admitting feeble wintry light, a dusting of snow underfoot, men in bulky overcoats hurrying past women clutching coat collars to their throats, heads ducked, a lone newspaper flapping on the wind like a lost seagull. You could almost feel the bite of the wind, hear the click of the women's high-heeled
boots on the sidewalk, smell the sauerkraut steaming at the hotdog cart on the corner, umbrella tassels dancing in the wind.

  "I used to work out of a precinct down there," Willis said.

  "Near the Old Seawall?"

  "Yeah. Nice precinct. Dead as a doornail at night."

  "Where do you work now?" Riley asked.

  "The Eight-Seven. Uptown. Near Grover Park."

  The kettle whistled. Riley spooned instant coffee into each of the mugs, and then poured hot water into them. "You take cream or sugar?" he asked.

  "Black, thanks," Willis said, and picked up one of the mugs. "So you never met this Jerry McKennon, huh?" he asked.

  "Never heard of him till a few minutes ago."

  "Miss Hollis never mentioned him?"

  "No. Why? Did she know him?"

  "Yes."

  "Mmm. Well, I'm sure Marilyn must know a lot of people. She's a very attractive woman."

  "How long have you known her?"

  "Must be six months or so."

  "How would you define your relationship, Mr. Riley?"

  "How do you mean? On a scale of one to ten?"

  Willis smiled again. "No, sir. I meant in terms of involvement… commitment… whatever you'd want to call it."

  "Marilyn doesn't get involved. She doesn't commit, either. Maybe she doesn't have to. Lots of girls in this town, they're looking for a breadwinner. Marilyn's got a rich father in Texas, she doesn't have to worry about money. She sees a man because she has a good time with him. I'm not talking sack time now. That's a given. If a man and a woman don't get along in the sack, they don't get along anyplace else, do they? I'm talking about being with a person. Talking, sharing things, laughing together."

  "That's involvement, isn't it?" Willis said.

  "I call it friendship."

  "Is that what Marilyn calls it?"

  "I like to believe she considers me a very good friend."

  "Do you know any of her other friends?"

  "Nope."

  "Never met any of them."

  "Nope."

  "Man named Chip Endicott?"

  "Nope."

  "Basil Hollander?"

  "Nope."

  "How about her father? Ever meet him?"

  "Nope."

  "Do you know his name?"

  "Jesse, I think. Or Joshua. Maybe Jason. I'm not sure."

  "Do you know where he lives in Texas?"

  "Houston, I think. Or Dallas. Or San Antone. I'm not sure."

  "Mr. Riley, where'd you stay when you went up to Snowflake?"

  "A place called the Summit Lodge. I can give you the number if you plan to check."

  "I'd appreciate having it," Willis said.

  "This wasn't any suicide, was it?" Riley said. "This was murder, plain and simple."

  Willis said nothing.

  He was thinking it wasn't so plain and it wasn't so simple.

  Vice President in Charge of Marketing for Eastec Systems.

  You visualized a giant corporation on the order of IBM or General Motors. You visualized an executive with area maps all over the walls of his enormous office, different colored pins marking the hordes of salesmen in each territory.

  Sure.

  In this city, where a garbage man was a Sanitation Engineer and a prostitute was a Sex Counselor, Jerry McKennon was Vice President in Charge of Marketing for what appeared to be a two-bit operation.

  Avenue J was in a part of the city the cops used to call Campbell's City, in reference to the alphabet soup marketed by that company, but which over the years had come to be known as the Soup Kitchen. Tucked into a downtown poverty pocket that rivaled any in Calcutta, the lettered avenues ran east-west for a goodly stretch of Isola, and north-south from A through L where the Soup Kitchen ended at the River Dix. Across the river you could see the smoke stacks of the factories in Calm's Point.

  At the turn of the century, the dingy tenements in this area had been inhabited by immigrants flocking to America to mine the promised gold in the streets. They found instead the manure dropped by horses pulling ice wagons, milk wagons, lumber wagons, and streetcars. Upward mobility and a strong will to survive took them farther uptown into ghettos defined by their countries of origin, and finally out of the inner city itself into the relatively suburban areas of Riverhead, Calm's Point, Majesta, and Bethtown.

  In the Forties and Fifties, a new wave of immigrants—who were nonetheless bona fide citizens of the United States—moved into the tenements, and the sound of Spanish replaced that of Yiddish, Italian, Polish, German and Russian. The Puerto Ricans who came seeking the same gold the earlier settlers had sought found not horseshit but instead a withering prejudice that equated anyone Spanish-speaking with criminal activity. There had been prejudice in this city before. Prejudice against the first Irish who came here to escape the potato famine, prejudice against the Italians who were escaping the blight on their precious grape crop, prejudice against Jews escaping religious persecution, prejudice—always and for any number of rationalizing reasons—against the blacks who inhabited the Diamondback slum uptown. But the prejudice now was deeper, perhaps because the Puerto Ricans steadfastly clung to their old traditions and their native tongue.

  It was therefore a matter of high irony when the Puerto Ricans themselves turned so vehemently against the flower children who moved into the tenements—many of them abandoned by then—in the mid-Sixties and early Seventies. It was not uncommon back then for pot-smoking kids to look up in astonishment when a band of Soup Kitchen natives (by now they were natives, though scarcely thought of as such by other Americans) burst into an apartment to rob—ah, yes, the old self-fulfilling prophecy—and rape and occasionally to murder. "Peace," the flower children said, "Love," the flower children said while their skulls were being opened. The hippies eventually vanished from the scene. They left behind them, however, a legacy of drug use, and nowadays the alphabet avenues were a happy hunting ground for pushers and junkies of every stripe and persuasion.

  Eastec Systems had its offices in a dilapidated building on the southern side of Avenue J. A nail-filing, gum-chewing receptionist looked at Carella's shield and ID card in something close to awe, pressed a button on the base of her phone, and then told him that Mr. Gregorio would see him at once. Carella walked down a corridor to a door with a black plastic name plate on it: RALPH GREGORIO, PRESIDENT. He knocked. A man's voice said, "Come in." He opened the door. Green metal furniture and filing cabinets. Dusty Venetian blinds on the windows fronting the street. Behind the desk, a chubby man in his early forties, shirt-sleeves rolled up, cheeks flushed, wide grin on his face, hand extended.

  "Hey, paisan," he said, "what can I do for you?"

  Carella did not enjoy being called paisan. Too many Italian-American mobsters had called him paisan, usually in conjunction with a plea for a favor premised on a shared ethnic background.

  He took the preferred hand.

  "Mr. Gregorio," he said, "Detective Carella, Eighty-seventh Squad."

  "Sit down, sit down," Gregorio said. "This is about Jerry, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Terrible shame, terrible," Gregorio said. "I saw it on television, they gave him, what, thirty seconds? Terrible shame. He killed himself, huh?"

  "When's the last time you saw him?" Carella asked, ignoring the question.

  "Friday. End of the day Friday."

  "Did he seem despondent at that time?"

  "Despondent? No. What despondent? Jerry? No. I got to tell you, this comes as a complete surprise, him taking his own life."

  "He began working here shortly before Christmas, is that right?"

  "That's right, who told you that? Well, I guess you have ways of knowing, eh, paisan?" Gregorio said, and winked.

  "Did he ever seem depressed or despondent? During the past three months?"

  "No. Always a smile on his face. He used to go around here singing, would you believe it. We're the ones supposed to be the singers, am I right, paisan? Jerry was, what, Irish, English, who the hell knows? Singing all the time. The Pavarotti of the security business. We sell and install security systems, you know. Make it tougher for the bad guys. Help you guys out a little." He winked again.

  "What time did he leave here on Friday?"

  "Five-thirty. He was a hard worker, Jerry. Sometimes didn't get out of here till six, seven o'clock. We're a new company, you know, but we got a brilliant future. Jerry realized that. He was giving it all he had. What a shame, huh?"