“Oh yes,” Mrs. Jackson said. “She did get up, of course. But I’m sure she’d never take more than she should, and the bottle was in a drawer that stuck. And she knew she shouldn’t exert herself, of course. Doctor had made her understand that.” She paused. “Particularly in warm weather,” she said. “The drawer sticking, I mean.”
“A maid?” Heimrich asked. “She could ask the maid to get the bottle for her. Or Mrs. Swanson?”
“Why would she?” Mrs. Jackson asked. “It’s not as if it was candy. Poor dear Penina did love candy, but this—”
Heimrich had no answer. He did not, further, have any real basis for the question.
“I don’t understand all this about the medicine anyway,” Mrs. Jackson said. “You sound as if—Heaven knows we all did everything for Penina. Just everything. You talk as if somebody had poisoned her.”
“Now Mrs. Jackson,” Heimrich said, but without his usual conviction. He did talk as if someone had poisoned Mrs. Saunders, and he talked so knowing no one had.
“If it was anything like that,” Mrs. Jackson said, “what was your Mr. Gates doing up there yesterday?”
Heimrich closed his eyes. He waited for some seconds.
“Mr. Gates?” he said. “Up there? In Mrs. Saunders’s room?” He spoke carefully, as if the words might break.
Gates had been upstairs the previous morning. Liz Monroe had brought him in for breakfast. She, in the absence of Mrs. Swanson, had prepared the breakfast. During the time he waited, Gates had gone upstairs. Mrs. Jackson had met him there. He had been looking for—for a place to wash his hands. He had been directed.
“Of course,” Mrs. Jackson said, “there’s a bathroom downstairs. Liz would have told him. All he had to do was ask.”
“He wasn’t in Mrs. Saunders’s room, actually?”
“I didn’t see him. He was in the hall when I saw him. Why don’t you ask him, Captain? I mean, when you find him. Oh dear. I’m so afraid something’s happened to Liz, because if it hadn’t she’d have known I’d be worried and telephoned. Wouldn’t she?”
“I will ask him,” Heimrich said. “Naturally. I wouldn’t worry about Miss Monroe, if I were you.”
“And I did so want to go to the Guild,” she said. “Mrs. MacFarland gives such wonderful reports.” She looked at Heimrich, who had closed his eyes. “On books, I mean,” she said. “It’s time to go now, but how can I, when I don’t know what’s happened to dear Liz?”
The Guild, to which books were reported, met in the library. The library was, Heimrich reminded her, after learning this, only two blocks away. If there was any news, but there wouldn’t be, he would see that she was told.
“You really think it would be all right?” Mrs. Jackson said, tempted. He continued to think it would. In the end, Mrs. Jackson put on a hat, which perched. She put on gloves. Although it was very warm, she put on a short black coat. She went, expectation of Mrs. MacFarland’s wonderful report on her pink, round face. Heimrich and Forniss went to the substation. The license number of the Packard, the names of its probable occupants, were put on the teletype. To be reported, not stopped.
There was no one at the police substation. Heimrich sat behind the desk in the little office, and Forniss sat near by. Heimrich closed his eyes. He looked tired, Forniss thought, and he could not remember when before he had seen the captain tired. He waited.
“I didn’t get anything, Sergeant,” Heimrich said. “Nothing tangible.” He told, briefly, what he had got. He waited.
“I poked around,” Forniss said. “Everybody for miles knows I poked around. We stick out here, you know.”
Heimrich nodded. “Like bumps on a log,” he said, and considered it. “About as useful, too,” he added. “We’re bogged down, Charlie. But go on.”
Forniss had gone places, he had talked to people—to people at the country club, to the druggist and the owner of the hardware store; he had talked to the Swansons. He had encountered some reticence, stemming from loyalty to the Saunders family, to all people who lived in big white houses on Main Street. He had encountered flippancy, and earnestness which was not, on the whole, much more rewarding.
Had Virginia Monroe conducted something like a campaign to belittle her sister? On the whole, Forniss thought she had. It had not been too overt; he had encountered no one who thought of it as a campaign. One man had said, “Well, she sort of had her knife in Liz, I guess.” A woman had said, “Not to speak ill of the dead and that sort of thing, but dear Virginia was a bit of a bitch, you know.” The club housekeeper—who turned out, a little unexpectedly, to be a second cousin of Penina Saunders—had said, “I do hate to say this, of course, but I’m afraid that Virginia wasn’t too well liked by a good many people. She was so—you know what I mean?”
Forniss had not. It did not appear that Mrs. Bush, the housekeeper, had either, when it came to that. Virginia had “rubbed people the wrong way.”
“Intentionally?” Heimrich asked then, and Forniss said he gathered that was it.
“It’s all pretty hard to put your finger on,” Forniss said. “She belonged here. She grew up here. You get the feeling she didn’t fit. You know what I mean?”
“Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “But yes, I suppose I do, naturally. Did you get anything specific?”
Charlie hadn’t, much. Virginia Monroe had been something of a mimic, apparently. She had mimicked a good many people—he suspected including Mrs. Bush. The intention had been satire, a pointing up of weaknesses, of idiosyncrasy in the victims. “They say she was particularly good at doing Mrs. Jackson.”
Heimrich nodded, without opening his eyes. The Mrs. Jacksons of life are fair game for the malicious. (Aunt Elizabeth had been fair game.)
“It would hurt Mrs. Jackson’s feelings,” he said. “If she knew about it, naturally. Did she mimic her sister, caricature her?”
Forniss had not heard of that. She had been, ostensibly, very fond of “poor little Liz.” But she had always managed somehow to suggest that Liz Monroe was inferior. Not like other people.
“Anything specific?” Heimrich asked. “Anything recent?”
“If there was, I didn’t find it.”
“The Kirkwood business? A couple of years ago?”
Forniss had found no one who took that seriously. Liz Monroe and Howard Kirkwood had been together a good deal, had “paired off.” Then, Kirkwood had “paired off” with Virginia, instead. But, to outsiders, it had not seemed that Liz was much upset at her abandonment, if that was what it had been. “She was just a kid,” somebody had told Forniss. “Younger than she really was, somehow.”
“Was that supposed to make it better?” Heimrich asked, of himself, of the air. “Not that she strikes me that way now,” he added.
“People like Liz,” Forniss said. “Maybe they do sort of feel—well, sorry for her, I guess is it. I don’t know why, come to think of it.”
“Neither do I,” Heimrich said. “Perhaps her sister managed to suggest a way people were supposed to think about her.”
“Maybe,” Forniss said.
“Maybe,” Heimrich said. “It’s a lot of maybes, Charlie. We’re bogged down, Charlie.”
“You’ll think of something,” Forniss said. “Something to get it moving. A catalytic agent, as you call it.”
Heimrich opened his eyes. He looked at Forniss, and shut them again.
“I thought of something,” Heimrich said. “Too soon, apparently. Too—completely. It’s depressing, Charlie. I’m like a kid who’s lost his candy.”
He paused.
“So many could have killed Mrs. Saunders,” he said. “The doctor. Liz. Mrs. Jackson. All profited. Kirkwood, perhaps. He handled her money. Perhaps there was a profit in that—perhaps there was too much profit. Now it seems that our young friend Gates was in the wrong place at the right time. The trouble is, she wasn’t killed, was she? She had a good doctor—up to date, ‘all those things from molds.’ The indicated medication in the proper—” He stopped.
After a moment, he reached for the telephone and dialed. He waited. Then he said, “Hello, Doctor. Heimrich.” He listened. “I know,” he said. “I do know, Doctor. About this hexamethonium.”
He waited again. Forniss could hear the rasp of Dr. Kramer’s voice, could pick up words. Kramer was not pleased.
“Now Doctor,” Heimrich said. “You say you’ve not used it personally. You say—” He was interrupted. “Good,” he said, “I thought you might. Could I understand, do you think?”
He listened, at first with his eyes closed, then with them open. At intervals, he made noises indicative of comprehension. But then he closed his eyes again and when he finally said, “I see, Doctor. Thanks anyway,” his voice was dulled. He replaced the receiver. He shook his head.
“Kramer went into it further,” he told Forniss. “He would, naturally. Talked to doctors who’ve used the stuff.”
“And?”
Heimrich shook his head. They were, he said, where they had been. Usually hexamethonium was given orally, as Kramer had told them. The indicated starting oral dose was three 125 mg. tablets a day. Often, as was true with many medicines, a tolerance was set up. The dosage was then increased.
“To five hundred milligrams three times a day,” Heimrich said. “Just what Mrs. Saunders was getting. Or was supposed to be.”
“What happens if she gets more?”
Heimrich shook his head.
“From all Kramer’s heard, it upsets her stomach,” he said. “She starts throwing up. So they reduce the dosage. It’s absorbed throughout the whole intestinal tract, Kramer says. I suppose that’s why it upsets the digestion.” He paused. “That’s about all.” Heimrich stopped. He closed his eyes. After a time he opened them.
“Come on, Charlie,” he said. “Let’s go through some motions. Let’s—”
He was standing by that time. He stopped in mid-breath.
“That list of figures, Charlie,” he said, and his voice was different; so different that Sergeant Charles Forniss jumped slightly. “You’ve still got it in your pocket?”
Forniss had, clipped into a note book. Heimrich took it from him, read it over, read it over again. He closed his eyes, then, momentarily. He said, “Well, I’ll be damned, Charlie,” and opened his eyes.
“Let’s take a walk, Charlie,” he said. “Let’s go through some motions.”
He moved toward the door.
“You’ve got it?” Charlie said.
“Now Charlie,” Heimrich said, still moving. “Now Charlie. I could have.” But then, at the door, he stopped. “I don’t know how we’ll ever prove it,” he said. “I don’t know that, Charlie.”
They started to leave, and met Sergeant Townsend coming in. He had a message for Heimrich. He gave it.
“Thanks,” Heimrich said. “We were just going there.”
Chapter XII
They had to ring the door bell only once. Dr. Paul Crowell came very quickly to the door. Under the overhead light in the hall his face was shadowed; perhaps it was the fall of light which gave an expression of anxiety to his handsome face.
“Good,” he said. “You got my message, then? I’ve been trying all afternoon to get you. Ever since—come in.”
They went in. Crowell took them into a big living room, comfortably enough furnished, by no means extravagantly furnished. Crowell motioned the two solid men to chairs, and chairs sagged a little under their weight. The webbing was beginning to give on his, Heimrich thought.
“Dr. Kramer telephoned me,” Crowell said. “But probably you know about that.”
Heimrich shook his head. Here, in the better light, the expression of anxiety on Crowell’s face was unmistakable.
“About the methonium compound,” Crowell said. “I supposed you knew.”
“He told me he had checked up with one or two physicians who had used it,” Heimrich said. “He didn’t give me any names.”
“I was one of them,” Crowell said. He had sat down. He leaned forward in his chair. “He wanted to know whether I’d encountered, or heard of, any particularly bad side effects. I said I hadn’t. That’s true. I haven’t. But—” He paused. “You thought Penina—Mrs. Saunders—was—well, poisoned?”
“Now Doctor,” Heimrich said. “I thought it possible.”
“I told you it wasn’t,” Crowell said. “Told you she’d died of natural causes. Hypertension, primarily. Senile degeneration, basically. The autopsy proved I was right.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Apparently it did, Doctor.”
Dr. Crowell stood up. He walked a few paces along the room. He turned to face Heimrich and Forniss.
“I’m not sure I was right,” he said. “I got to thinking about it after Dr. Kramer called. You know how one does? Somebody puts something up to you and you say, offhand, ‘No, that’s impossible.’ But afterward, you get to worrying. You think of all the possibilities. You think, maybe you spoke too quickly. You know how it is?”
“Yes, Doctor,” Heimrich said. “I do, naturally.”
“Hexamethonium reduces blood pressure,” Dr. Crowell said. “You realize that, of course? That’s what it’s for. With controlled dosage, and luck, you can reduce pressure and maintain it at a desired level. Say, in a case like Mrs. Saunders’s, a systolic of perhaps one-fifty, one-sixty. That would be the optimum, with good response. Well—she did respond. The systolic—that’s the higher pressure, you know? Opposite of diastolic?”
Heimrich nodded.
“At one time,” Crowell said, “her systolic pressure was over two hundred. Up to two-thirty at one time. That’s when I took her to the hospital, started the methonium treatment. She responded beautifully—a little too well, at first, but we straightened that out. Held it pretty stable where we wanted it on seven hundred and fifty milligrams a day for a while. Then she began to develop tolerance—nothing alarming—and I stepped the dosage up. Doubled it, in the end. But probably Kramer’s told you all this?”
“Not in detail,” Heimrich said.
“I feel you ought to have the background,” Crowell said. “She was responsive to the stuff—we had her at around one-fifty—one-sixty for weeks. The day before she died, at around noon, her pressure was one fifty-five over ninety. Then, apparently, it shot up—way up. And killed her. That was the clinical picture. The autopsy appeared to confirm it. I—”
“Why should it have shot up suddenly, Doctor?” Heimrich asked.
Dr. Crowell spread his hands.
“Excitement would do it,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t want her told about—about Virginia. When she died I supposed—well, I supposed she had learned about it somehow. Mrs. Jackson has a tendency—you’ve met Mrs. Jackson, haven’t you? She runs on. I was certain she hadn’t intentionally said anything but—well, I supposed something had slipped out about Virginia, that the shock had run Penina’s pressure up and that either the heart had stopped from the strain or she’d had a cerebral accident. Any physician would have made that assumption, I think, with the picture what it was.”
Heimrich waited.
“After Kramer called, I thought it over again,” Crowell said. He walked back and sat down. “The picture still looked all right. I hadn’t had an opportunity to test her pressure that day. I was just getting ready to go over when I heard. But obviously it had shot up, and killed her. And then, for no reason—no real reason—I thought, suppose it hadn’t? Suppose, instead, the pressure had dropped? Dropped catastrophically. You see, Captain, that fits the picture too.”
“Go on, Doctor,” Heimrich said.
“If the pressure gets too low—oh, down to eighty over fifty, say; perhaps a little lower than that—and a person stands up suddenly, so little blood may get to the brain, or the heart, that the patient simply—simply stops living. Well—Penina apparently had got out of bed quickly; just stood up and died, as Mrs. Jackson put it.” He leaned forward. “This is all only a theory, you understand,” he said. “If that happened, an autopsy wouldn’t show it—and the autopsy
on Penina didn’t. Just the ravages of age and the effects of high blood pressure on the cardio-vascular system. Then I thought—would a massive overdose of hexamethonium bring the pressure down that far?”
He had been looking down, as if seeking concentration in the pattern of the worn carpet. Now he looked up.
“Well,” he said, “there it is, Captain. Perhaps you and Dr. Kramer had—considered the possibility?”
Heimrich’s eyes had been closed. Now they opened.
“I don’t know about Kramer,” he said. “I’d—yes, I’d wondered, Doctor.”
Crowell nodded slowly.
“Understand,” he said, “I don’t know whether it’s possible. The system might just reject such a dose. I’ve never heard of the drug killing anyone. There’s nothing in the literature to suggest the possibility. Certainly, normal dosage—such as Penina was getting—has never resulted fatally. But—an additional dose of—oh, say, as much as two grams—what would it do? I don’t know. I’ll admit that frankly. I’m a small-town general practitioner, not a specialist. I can’t keep up with everything. I don’t know any G. P. who can. But—perhaps it is in the literature somewhere. Perhaps somebody found a precedent. Or—just experimented. You see, Captain, there was plenty of the drug in the house. I wrote a new prescription for a hundred tablets about a week ago. I was using the two hundred and fifty milligram tablets—that’s a quarter of a gram of hexamethonium in each tablet and—”
“Wait, Doctor,” Heimrich said. “You keep records, naturally? Of dates and the like? You say you wrote the last prescription ‘about’ a week ago?”
“Oh,” Crowell said, “that was a manner of speaking. Yes, I looked it up. A week ago Thursday. There were enough tablets—that would have been six—for that day. So Mrs. Jackson would have started on the new bottle the next day. At six tablets a day through last Wednesday—” He ticked days off with his fingers. “Five full days. Thirty tablets. Say she’s had two more the morning she died. There ought to be sixty-eight tablets left in the bottle.” He paused. He looked at Heimrich, and his dark eyes were intent. “You think there may be something to this, Captain?”
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