Silver Bullets

by Douglas Greene et al.

  “You tossed the place hard? I mean, you looked everywhere, right?”

  “Nothing taped under the drawers, nothing behind the toilets, nothing in the heating ducts. We emptied out the flour barrels and dried beans, dumped spices out of the spice rack.” Thor grinned. “Doppler even went after the compost heap, raked the whole thing, and came

  up empty.”

  His grin faded as he recalled the assault on the little girl’s room. Dolls were slashed open, plastic toys broken against rocks, even the child’s quilt, obviously handmade by her mother, was ripped end to end. When he’d protested, Doppler had replied, “Hell, that’s where they’d hide the shit, knowing damn well a bleeding heart like you isn’t gonna rip up a kid’s stuff. Well, that’s the difference between you and me, buddy.”

  Difference or no difference, they’d left empty-handed, both knowing full well that the commune used drugs but finding no evidence, not even a residue-filled hash pipe. Somewhere on the property, perhaps in a hollow tree, they might find dope and works, but for now, they had nothing. No evidence, no reason to suspect the hippies of anything more than getting an inconveniently dead guest off their property.

  Even the tepee, fetid with the smell of sickness, had no telltale clues pointing to drug use, no roach clips, no hash pipe—nothing but sweat-stained blankets and a backpack filled with extra clothes.

  “Did you—did you see Bobbie?”

  Thor shook his head. “Mandy said she spends a lot of time out hiking, I suppose because Enid switched her attention to the dead man. She probably feels uncomfortable hanging around.”

  “I never should have named her Roberta,” Sam muttered, and it took Thor a minute to realize what he was getting at.

  “You think she’s the way she is because of her name?”

  Sam directs his gaze at the hunting scene on the back wall of his office. “Once her mother was gone, I just—I don’t know, I just raised her the way my dad raised me. Took her hunting, taught her to fish, let her go on those Boy Scout hikes with you. She seemed to like it. It never occurred to me she liked it too much, that she’d want to be a boy.”

  A hundred memories fought for dominance in Thor’s mind. Bobbie Tate at seven, adamantly refusing to wear a dress to church. Bobbie at ten, baiting her hook, tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth as she poked the metal through a wriggling worm. Bobbie at fourteen, outpacing Eagle Scouts up the slope of Mount Tremper.

  Bobbie at sixteen, walking down Tinker Street holding hands with a willowy blonde, her face alight with pride and pleasure and a sexual awakening he’d never seen before, a glow that can only come from crossing the threshold to adulthood.

  “She is who she is, Sam,” he said, knowing the words were inadequate.

  “I want her back the way she was before that bitch got to her.”

  Thor decided he wasn’t going to be the one to tell Sam he might never get that Bobbie back again.

  The first break in the case came two days later. “Guy was on some kinda mushroom shit,” Doppler said, the unfiltered cigarette dangling from his lip dancing in tune to his rhythm. “Fuckin’ hippies, always lookin’ for some new way to get high.”

  “Yeah, fuckin’ hippies,” Thor agreed. Backup singer to Doppler’s insistent pounding beat, the theme of which was always fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that. If it wasn’t fuckin’ hippies it was fuckin’ summer people, fuckin’ rich people, fuckin’ white trash, fuckin’ not-so-white trash, fuckin’ bosses—

  “They got a song about smokin’ bananas, the hippies,” Doppler continued. His eyes were flags: red, white, and blue, so raw they made your own eyes hurt just looking at them. “You heard it, Thor?

  Smokin’ fuckin’ bananas.” He shook his head, and a long block of ash dribbled to the ground, wind blowing it back onto his uniform shirt. “So we’re calling it an accidental overdose,” he said, suddenly sick and tired of Doppler’s shit.

  “Seems like,” Doppler said, stifling a yawn. He spat the butt onto the asphalt. Flecks of tobacco stuck to his thin, dry lips. His hand reached automatically for the soft pack in his shirt pocket, pulled out another, and shoved it into his mouth.

  “So why are we on our way to see this tox guy? Why not just call it an overdose, close the file, and move on?”

  Assistant Toxicologist Andy Grossmacher met them at the door. “Damndest thing you ever saw,” he said with a wide grin on his freckled face. “Guy got himself high on Psilocybe, but what killed him was amanita.”

  “Wanna try that in English?”

  “He was poisoned.”

  “I thought you said amanitas were everywhere.” Thor hoped he didn’t sound as whiny as he felt. Andy thought the use of local mushrooms pointed to the only local in the commune: Bobbie Tate. The thought of her deliberately giving someone deadly mushrooms had Thor’s stomach tied in knots. She couldn’t have turned into a killer before her eighteenth birthday.

  “Not these babies. This is Amanita verna, and it doesn’t grow west of the Cascades. Now, if they’d been pantherina,” Andy goes on, a fanatic’s glint in his eye, “then I could tell you what you want to hear. I still say they couldn’t have gotten into the guy’s stash by accident, but at least he could have brought them with him from the West. But verna, no, I’m sorry; those are Eastern mushrooms, they grow under beech trees, and they just happen to be out right now. I saw some myself last weekend on a hike I led up near Phoenicia. You know the trailhead just off—”

  “Tell me again about hallucinogenics,” Thor said, moving toward the window and gazing out on a perfect summer day that suddenly gave him no pleasure at all.

  Andy’s freckled face beamed with pleasure, almost as if the dead man had been murdered just to give him added fungus information. “He went for the best, I’ll say that for him. You can get high with several species, you know. Not just Psilocybe. Around here, there’s fly agaric, boletus—”

  “Cut to the chase, Andy. What did the guy have, and where did he get it?”

  The smile that split his companion’s face was the one that earned him his childhood nickname: Raggedy Andy. “He had Mexican, man. The Carlos Castaneda stuff. When I was in Santa Cruz, I turned on with cubemis. Not bad, but this was Psilocybe mexicana, and you get it in Mexico and nowhere but Mexico. So now you have another reason why those amanitas didn’t just wind up in his stomach by accident.”

  “If it wasn’t an accident, then whoever killed Quinn had to know something about poisonous mushrooms,” Thor said for the fifth time. He could barely look at his boss, knowing they were both thinking the same thing, and knowing Sam hated thinking it even more than he did.

  “Hell, Bobbie’s not the only person in this county who knows something about mushrooms, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Right, Sam,” Thor said with a nod. “But how many people in that commune know that Amanita verna grows on the north side of Slide Mountain during July and August?” He ran his big fingers through sun-lightened blond hair. “Hell, Sam, I took Bobbie on that hike with the mushroom guy from New Paltz. I was there when he showed her the destroying angels and told her how poisonous they were. You think anyone else in that commune knows that stuff?”

  “They might,” Sam replied, but he stared out the window at Tinker Street, not meeting Thor’s eyes. “It’s up to you to find out what they know. Dig until you get something.”

  He didn’t have to finish the sentence: Dig until you get something that proves my little girl didn’t kill anyone.

  “There were two mushroom trips, okay? One was with all of us, like a ceremony,” Scott said, taking charge of the gathering once Mandy had served iced herbal tea. “Quinn took his own trip two days later. Didn’t offer any to the rest of us, said he had to get his head straight.”

  “I thought ‘straight’ meant not taking drugs,” Thor was unwise enough to reply. Eyes were rolled.

  “Okay,” he conceded. “Quinn was the only one who took the mushrooms the second time. And that’s when he started getting sick.�
�

  “Right,” answered Scott. He seemed to have appointed himself spokesman for the group this time, odd since Warren had made such a point of being in charge before. “At first we thought it was normal. Most of us felt kind of weird after the mushroom feast.”

  “We didn’t throw up, though,” Mandy said quietly. “We should have known something was wrong.”

  “After Quinn got sick, what did you do?”

  “I made him soup,” Mandy said. “Vegetable broth. Sometimes I’d break an egg into it, stir it around, like Chinese egg-drop soup. That’s all he ate for—until he died.”

  “At first we thought he was getting better,” Warren said. “He threw up for a day or so, then got up and started walking around like he was OK. Then he had convulsions, went back into the tepee, and died two days later.”

  Thor nodded. That was precisely the pattern amanita poisoning took, according to Raggedy Andy.

  He turned to Bobbie, who sat on the floor at the far end of the room, trying and failing to look invisible. “I know you picked them, Bobbie. You brought them here. Did you deliberately put them in Quinn’s stash?”

  “No,” she said, her voice a sob. “I picked them. I—I don’t even know why. I thought about taking them myself,” she cried, staring hard at Enid, “but I didn’t, and I didn’t give them to Quinn, either. They were in my room, that’s all.”

  “In your room?” Mandy turned disbelieving eyes on the sixteen-year-old. “In Katie’s room, you mean. What if she’d found them? Are you crazy?”

  “I think I sort of was,” Bobbie admitted. “I had them wrapped in a bandanna on the top shelf of the closet, way in the back. I really didn’t want Katie to get them.”

  “Who else would know they were there?”

  “You don’t mean you believe her?” Warren burst out. “Man, I knew it. Just because her daddy’s a cop, you’re going to let her off the hook and find a way to blame one of us.”

  “I didn’t say I believe her,” Thor replied in an even tone. “I’m considering all the alternatives.”

  Bobbie looked at him with brimming eyes. “What do you mean, you don’t believe me? You think I killed Quinn?”

  “Bobbie, please, I have a job to do here. What I believe isn’t the question.”

  “It is to me. You—” She broke down, sobbing and hitting her thigh with an angry fist. “You were my best friend. You have to believe me.” Sam was right; he and Thor had both failed the little girl they loved so much. A teenager who called a thirty-year old detective her best friend wasn’t normal. Bobbie was breaking his heart, just as he was breaking hers.

  There was police work and there was friendship. He put his notebook on the floor, stood up, and walked over to where Bobbie sat huddled, all her energy consumed by racking sobs. He touched her hair, short, boyish, tomboy hair that curled slightly at the ends.

  “I believe you. As Thor your friend, I believe you. As Detective Thorsten Magnussen, I have to consider you a suspect. So let me get back to work, okay?”

  She nodded. Incredibly, even as she poured her entire soul into grieving for her lost innocence, she nodded.

  “Very nice,” Warren said, clapping slowly and ostentatiously. “The pig has a heart after all. Too bad she’s guilty.”

  “You’d better explain that remark.”

  “I saw her go into the tepee.” Warren cocked his head toward Bobbie. “After the mushroom feast and before Quinn went on his own trip. She looked around to see if anyone was watching, and then she crept inside. She was there a few minutes, and then came out.”

  Thor’s heart felt too big for his chest. He’d believed her, but now— what innocent reason could she possibly have for going into the dead man’s tent?

  “Bobbie?”

  She gasped for breath, sobs still shaking her body, tears still streaming down bright red cheeks. “I didn’t put mushrooms in,” she said brokenly, “I took some out.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Quinn went on a trip to get his head straight, and I really needed to get mine straight too, so I thought I’d take some and—”

  “You stole from Quinn’s stash,” said Enid. “I can’t believe you’d do that.”

  “I didn’t think of it as stealing,” Bobbie replied. “But I guess it was.”

  “Of course it was,” said Warren.

  “Well, it’s easily proved,” Patrice said. “Just show the deputy the mushrooms, and he can get them analyzed and tell whether they’re magic or poison, right?”

  Thor nodded, but Bobbie said in a small voice, “I took them already.”

  “Oh, that’s convenient,” Warren replied.

  “I went up to the mountain,” Bobbie said, her voice growing stronger. “Up near the monastery.” The Buddhist monastery, a fixture in Woodstock for many years, was a natural place for soul-searching, drug-enhanced or otherwise.

  “I lay under a birch tree and I—I became one with it. I was the birch and the birch was me, and that’s why my name is Birch now.” She gazed with newfound serenity into Thor’s eyes. “Call me Birch.”

  “Birch.” No one on the planet could look less like a slender birch tree than Bobbie Tate, with her volleyball player’s body and her

  Campbell’s Soup kid face. “It’s perfect.”

  She smiled a watery smile that had him believing now for good and all. She did not poison Quinn, she entered his tent to take mushrooms and not leave them—but there was still one more thing.

  “Bobbie, I mean Birch, you must have known he was poisoned.

  Why didn’t you get help?”

  “I did,” she said, giving Leo a quick, apologetic smile. “I asked Leo.”

  “How could Leo help?”

  “He was a medic in ’Nam. He used to work for the Free Clinic in the East Village. He knows a lot about drugs.”

  “Not much about mushrooms,” Leo replied. “But when Birch told me she thought Quinn might be poisoned, I gave him some ipecac, just to stimulate vomiting. It was all I could think of to do.”

  “Well, it worked all right,” Warren muttered. “Guy was throwing up day and night for a couple days there.”

  “So you suspected he’d been poisoned,” Scott said, “and you didn’t tell anyone?” It wasn’t clear whether his remarks were directed at Leo or Birch.

  “I wasn’t sure,” she said. “I went to look at the destroying angels, and it didn’t look like there were any missing, but they were all dried out so it was hard to tell. I didn’t think—I guess I wanted to believe he was sick from something else. But I told Leo, just in case.”

  “Who else knew there were poison mushrooms in the house?”

  “Everybody,” Bobbie answered. “I said so when we all got high.

  Remember?” She looked from one to the other. “I talked about destroying angels and white death and how there were mushrooms and mushrooms. I remember saying it when we were all still in the same room.”

  “Well, I don’t remember that,” Warren said loudly.

  “Was that what you meant?” Mandy was frowning. “I remember the white angel part, but I didn’t know you meant mushrooms.”

  “Everybody’s going to say they didn’t understand,” Patrice pointed out.

  “Who could have gone into the tepee without arousing suspicion?”

  “Any of the girls,” Leo said with a wry smile. “Quinn was balling

  every one of them at one time or another. Enid, Patrice, Mandy—”

  Thor raised an eyebrow and turned his attention to the woman in the patchwork skirt. “You and Quinn had something going?”

  “Not really,” Mandy replied, but her face was pink. “It was the mushrooms, that’s all. I did something crazy while we were high. I never went into the tepee after that night.”

  Thor glanced at Scott. Another motive heard from; he doubted that even this placid potter would take Mandy’s defection lightly.

  “Patrice went in,” Enid said, and her little teeth shone in the firelight. M
alice charged her voice. “Mandy made broth, and Patrice took it in to the tepee. Quinn wouldn’t let anyone else feed him when he got sick.”

  “Is this true?’’

  “Yes. I don’t know why, but he told me to keep everyone else out,” Patrice admitted. “I knew him from before, so I guess he trusted me.”

  “The real issue is who put poison into the stash, not who went to

  the tepee after he got sick,” Scott pointed out.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Bobbie—no, Birch—said in a faraway voice. “What if the mushrooms were okay? The ones Quinn took, I mean. What if the poison was something else instead?”

  “That’s crazy,” someone shouted.

  “You think I poisoned him with the soup?” Mandy said, her voice rising.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Warren pronounced.

  “She may be right,” Thor said thoughtfully. “Getting poison into the kitchen and putting in into the broth would be easier than sneaking into the tepee without being seen.”

  “The broth was for Quinn,” Mandy agreed with a slow nod. “I used it to make vegetable soup for everyone, but I saved the broth for Quinn. No spices, no big chunks—it was in its own special pot in the fridge.”

  “So anybody could have gone into the kitchen, dropped some amanitas into the soup, strained them out again, and left poison broth to

  be carried to Quinn?”

  “Pretty dangerous,” Scott pointed out. “Anyone might have eaten the broth. Katie might have—”

  Thor thought Mandy was going to faint. She swayed slightly in her chair, eyes rolling back in her head. Unless she was a powerful actress, Thor decided she hadn’t killed Quinn, and neither had Scott.

  Who had? If Bob—Birch was telling the truth, the amanitas weren’t in the stash of mexicana.

  What if—Thor looked directly at Leo, who lowered his eyes and gazed into the wood stove’s blazing fire.

  “You gave him the ipecac because he was vomiting,” Thor said. Leo nodded. “And you gave it to him because Bo—I mean Birch told you about the poison mushrooms,” he added.