11
A freezing rain began to fall past midnight, and by morning the world was glass. I stayed in my house Saturday, my conversation with Al Hunt replaying in my mind, startling the solitude of my private thoughts like the thawing ice suddenly crackling to the earth beyond my window. I felt guilty. Like every other mortal who has ever been touched by suicide, I had the fallacious belief that I could have done something to stop it.
Numbly, I added him to the list. Four people were dead. Two deaths were blatant, vicious homicides, two of them were not, and yet all of the cases were somehow connected. Perhaps connected by a bright orange thread. Saturday and Sunday I worked in my home office because my downtown office would only remind me that I no longer felt in charge-for that matter, I no longer felt needed. The work went on without me. People reached out to me and then were dead. Respected colleagues like the attorney general asked for answers, and I did not have anything to offer.
I fought back in the only feeble way I knew how. I stayed in front of my home computer typing out notes about the cases and poring over reference books. And I made a lot of phone calls.
I did not see Marino again until we met at the Amtrak station on Staples Mill Road Monday morning. We passed between two waiting trains, the dark, wintry air warmed by engines and smelling of oil. We found seats in the back of our train and resumed a conversation we had started inside the station.
"Dr. Masterson wasn't exactly chatty," I said about Hunt's psychiatrist as I carefully set down the shopping bag I was carrying. "But I'm suspicious he remembers Hunt a lot more clearly than he's letting on."
Why was it I always got a seat with a footrest that didn't work?
Marino yawned voraciously as he pulled down his, which worked just fine. He didn't offer to exchange seats with me. If be had, I would have accepted.
He answered, "So Hunt would've been eighteen, nineteen when he was in the bin."
"Yes. He was treated for severe depression," I said.
"Yeah, well, I guess so."
"And what's that supposed to mean?" I asked.
"His type's always depressed."
"What is his type, Marino? "'Let's just say the word fag went through my mind more'n once when I talked to him," he said.
The word fag went through Marino's mind more than once when he talked to anybody who was different.
The train glided forward, silently, like a boat from a pier.
"I wish you'd taped that conversation," Marino went on, yawning again.
"With Dr. Masterson?"
"No, the one with Hunt. When he dropped by your crib," he said.
"It's moot and it doesn't matter," I replied uncomfortably.
"I don't know. Seems to me like the squirrel knew an awful lot. Wish like hell he'd hung around a little longer, so to speak."
What Hunt had said in my living room would have been significant were he still alive and not armored in alibis. The police had taken apart his parents' house. Nothing was found that might have linked Hunt to the murders of Beryl Madison and Gary Harper. More to the point, Hunt was eating dinner with his parents at their country club the night of Beryl's death, and he was with his parents at the opera when Harper was murdered. The stories had been checked out. Hunt's parents were telling the truth.
We bumped, swayed, and rumbled northbound, the train whistle hooting balefully.
"The stuff with Beryl pushed him over the edge," Marino was saying. "You want my opinion, he related to her killer to the point he freaked, took himself out of circulation, kissed off before he cracked."
"I think it's more likely Beryl reopened the old wound," I answered. "It reminded him of his inability to have relationships."
"Sounds like he and the killer are cut from the same cloth. Both of them unable to relate to women. Both of them losers'."
"Hunt wasn't violent."
"Maybe he was leaning that way and couldn't live with it," Marino said.
"We don't know who killed Beryl and Harper," I reminded him. "We don't know if it was someone like Hunt. We don't know that at all, and we still have no idea about the motive. The killer could just as easily be someone like Jeb Price. Or someone called Jim Jim."
"Jim Jim my ass," he said snidely.
"I don't think we should dismiss anything at this point, Marino."
"Be my guest. You run across a Jim Jim who graduated from Valhalla Hospital and now's a part-time terrorist carrying around orange acrylic fibers on his person, give me a buzz."
Settling down in his seat and shutting his eyes, he mumbled, "I need a vacation."
"So do I," I said. "I need a vacation from you."
Last night Benton Wesley had called to talk about Hunt, and I mentioned where I was going and why. He was adamant that it was unwise for me to go alone, visions of terrorists, Uzis, and Glasers dancing in his head. He wanted Marino with me, and I might not have minded had it not turned out to be such an ordeal. There were no other seats available on the six-thirty-five morning train, so Marino had booked both of us on the one leaving at four-forty-eight A.M. I ventured into my downtown office at three A.M. to pick up the Styrofoam box now inside my shopping bag. I was feeling physically punished, my sleep deficit climbing out of sight. The Jeb Prices of the world wouldn't need to do me in. My guardian angel Marino would spare them the trouble.
Other passengers were dozing, their overhead lamps switched off. Soon we were creaking slowly through the middle of Ashland and I wondered about the people living in the prim white frame homes facing the tracks. Windows were dark, bare flagpoles greeting us with stark salutes from porches. We passed sleepy storefronts-a barbershop, a stationery store, a bank-then picked up speed as we curved around the campus of Randolph-Macon College with its Georgian buildings and its frosted athletic field peopled at this early moonlit hour by a row of varicolored football sleds. Beyond the town were woods and raw red clay banks. I was leaning back in the seat, entranced by the rhythm of the train. The farther we got from Richmond the more I relaxed, and quite without intending to I drifted off to sleep.
I did not dream but was unconscious for an hour, and when I opened my eyes the dawn was blue beyond the glass and we were passing over Quantico Creek. The water was polished pewter catching light in laps and ruffles, and there were boats out. I thought of Mark. I thought of our night in New York and of times long past. I had not heard a word from him since the last cryptic message on my answering machine. I wondered what he was doing, and yet I was afraid to know.
Marino sat up, squinting groggily at me. It was time for breakfast and cigarettes, not necessarily in that order.
The dining car was half filled with semicomatose clientele who could have been sitting in any bus station in America and looked very much at home. A young man dozed to the beat of whatever was playing inside the headphones he wore. A tired woman held a squirming baby. An older couple was playing cards. We found an empty table in a corner, and I lit up while Marino went to see about food. The only positive thing I could say about the prepackaged ham and egg sandwich he came back with was that it was hot. The coffee wasn't bad.
He tore open cellophane with his teeth and eyed the shopping bag I had placed next to me on the seat. Inside it was the Styrofoam box containing samples of Sterling Harper's liver, tubes of her blood, and her gastric contents, packed in dry ice.
"How long before it thaws?" he asked.
"We'll get there in plenty of time, providing we don't make any detours/' I replied.
"Speaking of plenty of time, that's exactly what we got on our hands. You mind going over it again, the bit about this cough syrup shit? I was half asleep when you were rattling on about it last night."
"Yes, half asleep just like you are this morning."
"Don't you ever get tired?"
"I'm so tired, Marino, I'm not sure I'm going to live."
"Well, you better live. I sure as hell ain't delivering those pieces an' parts by myself," he said, reaching for his coffee.
I explained
with the deliberation of a taped lecture. 'The active ingredient in the cough suppressant we found in Miss Harper's bathroom is dextromethorphan, an analogue of codeine. Dextromethorphan is benign unless you ingest a tremendous dose. It's the d-isomer of a compound, the name of which won't mean anything to you-"
"Oh, yeah? How do you know it won't mean nothing to me?"
"Three-methoxy-N-methylmorphinan."
"You're right. Don't mean a damn thing to me."
I went on, "There's another drug which is the 1-isomer of this same compound that dextromethorphan is the d-isomer of. The 1-isomer compound is levomethorphan, a potent narcotic about five times stronger than morphine. And the only difference between the two drugs as far as detection goes is that, when viewed through an optical rotatory device called a polarimeter, dextromethorphan rotates light to the right, and levomethorphan rotates light to the left."
"In other words, without this contraption you can't tell the difference between the two drugs," Marino concluded.
"Not in tox tests routinely done," I answered. "Levomethorphan comes up as dextromethorphan because the compounds are the same. The only discernible difference is they bend light in opposite directions, just as d-sucrose and 1-sucrose bend light in opposite directions even though they're both structurally the same disaccharide. D-sucrose is table sugar. L-sucrose has no nutritional value to humans."
"I'm not sure I get it," Marino said, rubbing his eyes. "How can compounds be the same but different?"
"Think of dextromethorphan and levomethorphan as identical twins," I said. "They're not the same people, so to speak, but they look the same-except one is right-handed, the other left-handed. One is benign, the other strong enough to kill. Does that help?"
"Yeah, I guess. So how much of this levomethorphan stuff would it take for Miss Harper to snuff herself?"
"Thirty milligrams would probably do it. Fifteen two-milligram tablets, in other words," I answered. "What then, saying she did?"
"She would very quickly slip into a deep narcosis and die."
— *
"You think she would've known about this isomer stuff?"
"She might have," I replied. "We know she had cancer, and we also suspect she wanted to disguise her suicide, perhaps explaining the melted plastic in the fireplace and the ashes of whatever else it was she burned right before she died. It's possible she deliberately left the bottle of cough syrup out to throw us off track. After seeing that, I wasn't surprised when dextromethorphan came up in her tox."
Miss Harper had no living relatives, very few friends -if any-and she didn't strike me as someone who traveled very often. After discovering she had recently made a trip to Baltimore, the first thing that came to mind was Johns Hopkins, which has one of the finest oncology clinics in the world. A couple of quick calls confirmed that Miss Harper had made periodic visits to Hopkins for blood and bone marrow workups, a routine relating to a disease she obviously had been quite secretive about. When I was informed of her medication, the pieces suddenly snapped together in my mind. The labs in my building did not have a polarimeter or any way to test for levomethorphan. Dr. Ismail at Hopkins had promised to assist if I could supply him with the necessary samples.
It was not quite seven now, and we were on the outer fringes of D.C. Woods and swamps streamed past until the city was suddenly there, the Jefferson Memorial flashing white through a break in the trees. Tall office buildings were so close I could see plants and lampshades through spotless windows before the train plunged underground like a mole and burrowed blindly beneath the Mall.
We found Dr. Ismail inside the pharmacology lab of the oncology clinic. Opening the shopping bag, I set the small Styrofoam box on his desk.
"Are these the samples we talked about?" he asked with a smile.
"Yes," I replied. "They should still be frozen. We came here straight from the train station."
"If the concentrations are good, I can have an answer for you in a day or so," he said.
"What exactly will you do with the stuff?" Marino inquired as he looked around the lab, which looked like every lab I have ever seen.
"It's very simple, really," Dr. Ismail replied patiently. "First I will make an extract of the gastric sample. That will be the longest, most painstaking part of the test. When that is done I place the extract into the polarimeter, which looks very much like a telescope. But it has rotatory lenses. I look through the eyepiece and rotate the lenses to the left and right. If the drug in question is dextromethorphan, then it will bend light to the right, meaning the light in my field will get brighter as I rotate the lenses to the right. For levomethorphan the opposite is true."
He went on to explain that levomethorphan is a very effective pain reliever prescribed almost exclusively for people terminally ill with cancer. Because the drug had been developed here, he kept a list of all Hopkins patients who were on it. The purpose was to establish the therapeutic range. The bonus for us was he had a record of Miss Harper's treatments.
"She would come in every two months for her blood and bone marrow workups and on each visit was given a supply, about two hundred fifty two-milligram tablets," Dr. Ismail was saying as he smoothed open the pages of a thick monitoring book. "Let's see… Her last visit was October twenty-eighth. She should have had at least seventy-five, if not a hundred tablets left."
"We didn't find them," I said.
"A shame." He lifted dark, saddened eyes. "She was doing so well. A very lovely woman. I was always pleased to see her and her daughter."
After a moment of startled silence, I asked, "Her daughter?"
"I assume so. A young woman. Blond…"
Marino cut in, "She with Miss Harper last time, the last weekend in October?"
Dr. Ismail frowned and said, "No. I don't recall seeing her then. Miss Harper was alone."
"How many years had Miss Harper been coming here?" I asked.
"I'll have to pull her chart. But I know it has been several. At least two years."
"Was her daughter, the young blond woman, always with her?" I asked.
"Not so often in the early days," he answered. "But during the past year she was with Miss Harper on every visit, except for this last one in October, and possibly the one before that. I was impressed. Being so ill, well, it is nice when one has the support of family."
"Where did Miss Harper stay when she was here?" Marino's jaw muscles were flexing again.
"Most of the patients stay in hotels located nearby. But Miss Harper was fond of the harbor," Dr. Ismail said.
My reactions were slowed by tension and lack of sleep.
"You don't know what hotel?" Marino persisted.
"No. I have no idea…"
Suddenly I began seeing images of the fragmented typed words on filmy white ash.
I interrupted both of them. "May I see your telephone directory, please?"
Fifteen minutes later Marino and I were standing out on the street looking for a cab. The sun was bright, but it was quite cold.
"Damn," he said again. "I hope you're right."
"We'll find out soon enough," I said tensely.
In the business listings of the telephone directory was a hotel called Harbor Court, bor Co, bor C. I kept seeing the miniature black letters on the wisps of burned paper. The hotel was one of the most luxurious in the city, and it was directly across the street from Harbor Place.
"I tell you what I can't figure," Marino went on as another taxi passed us by. "Why all the bother? So Miss Harper kills herself, right? Why go to all the trouble to do it in such a mysterious way? Make any sense to you?"
"She was a proud woman. Suicide was probably a shameful act to her. She may not have wanted anyone to figure it out, and she may have chosen to take her life while I was inside her house."
"Why?"
"Perhaps because she didn't want her body found a week later."
Traffic was terrible, and I was beginning to wonder if we were going to have to walk to the harbor.
"
And you really think she knew about this isomer business?"
"I think she did," I said.
"How come?"
"Because she would wish for death with dignity, Marino. It's possible she'd premeditated suicide for quite a long time, in the event her leukemia became acute and she didn't want to suffer or make others suffer any longer. Levomethorphan was a perfect choice. In most instances, it never would have been detected-providing a cough suppressant containing dextromethorphan was found inside her house."
"No shit?" he marveled as a taxi, thank God, pulled out of traffic and headed our way. "I'm impressed. You know, I really am."
"It's tragic."
"I don't know."
He peeled open a stick of gum and began to chew with vigor. "Me, I wouldn't want to be tied down to no hospital bed with tubes in my nose. Maybe I would've thought like she did."
"She didn't kill herself because of her cancer."
"I know," he said as we ventured off the curb. "But it's related. Gotta be. She's not long for this world anyway. Then Beryl gets whacked. Next, her brother gets whacked."
He shrugged. "Why hang around?"
We got into the taxi and I gave the driver the address. For ten minutes we rode in silence. Then the taxi crept almost to a stop and threaded through a narrow arch leading into a brick courtyard bright with beds of ornamental cabbages and small trees. A doorman dressed in tails and a top hat was immediately at my elbow, and I found myself escorted inside a splendid light-filled lobby of rose and cream. Everything was new and clean and highly polished, with fresh flowers arranged on fine furniture, and crisp members of the hotel staff alighting where needed but not obtrusive.
We were shown to a well-appointed office, where the well-dressed manager was talking on the telephone. T. M. Bland, according to the brass nameplate on his desk, glanced up at us and quickly completed his call. Marino wasted no time telling him what we wanted.
"The list of our guests is confidential," Mr. Bland replied, smiling benignly.
Marino helped himself to a leather chair and lit a cigarette, despite the THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING sign in plain view on the wall, then reached for his wallet and flashed his badge.
Body of Evidence ks-2 Page 19
