The Clairvoyant Countess

by Dorothy Gilman

  “Yes, the auto-body shop,” said Madame Karitska, nodding, and glanced at her watch. “I feel it’s important we go there. Will you take me right now?”

  The senior Joe Lister was a large, slow-moving man with a round, cheerful face. He turned off the sanding machine with which he’d been removing paint from a crumpled fender and wiped his fingers carefully on his jeans before shaking hands. His garage held two cars as well as the truck on which he was working, each in various stages of deshabille; there were more cars waiting outside. “Hey, Cas,” he shouted, “take over, will you?” His helper started up the sanding machine again and Lister beckoned them toward the rear.

  “Rush job,” he apologized. “We can talk better in here.” Behind a window set into the wall lay an untidy office with a desk. He opened the door and led them inside.

  “Yeah, the kids hang out here a lot,” he said in reply to Pruden’s questions. “It don’t bug me at all. Hell, kids like grease and dirt. Every once in a while somebody starts up a petition to get the shop off the street—usually somebody just moved here—but hell, a few weeks later they forget about it, they’re glad to know where their kids are. There’s a Coke machine out in the corner near the door to the yard, and there’s usually a pot of coffee going.… I don’t mind, I like kids. Got two myself.”

  “We met your son Joe,” said Madame Karitska pleasantly. “At the Dunlap house.”

  “At the house but I’ll bet not in it,” he said with a short laugh. “And that does bug me, Joe being as good as anybody on this street, and my shop being a place they all practically grew up in, but the girls on this block—Kathy in particular—look down their noses at him. Yeah, that bugs me,” he said. “I don’t like that.”

  “Does Joe mind?” asked Pruden.

  “Mind? Of course he minds. He’s nuts about that Dunlap girl and she plays him like a fish on a line. But what’re you going to do?” he asked with a shrug. “They have to learn the hard way.”

  Pruden nodded, his gaze moving around the office. “I wonder if you could tell me what chemicals you use here, or have stored in the building. Anything exotic? Anything you may have had for years and forgotten about?”

  It was stuffy in the office. Seeing Pruden take out his notebook, presumably to make lists, Madame Karitska excused herself, saying, “I’ll be outside, Lieutenant.”

  He nodded absently and she went out, closing the door behind her. Cas Johnson was leaning over the crumpled fender, the sanding machine still buzzing like an angry insect. Beyond him, on the street, she saw Mrs. Larkin talking animatedly to an elderly man with a cane. Madame Karitska turned to the right, toward the small door that led into the yard with its tall grass and rusting cars. Next to the door, just inside it, she saw the Coke machine that Lister had mentioned, and beside it, on a shelf, a hot plate, a water kettle already near the boiling point, several jars of instant coffee, and a bag of sugar. Still more interesting, she thought, was the bulletin board hanging over the coffee shelf. This more than any of Lister’s words spelled out the part which the auto-body shop played in the neighborhood. It was festooned with handwritten signs: KATHY, report home before your music lessons. Important, Mother. For Sale—one piano, see Larkins after 7 P.M. A family named Maraziti had three kittens free to anyone who could give them a good home. Birch Dunlap had a ukelele for sale, and Butch Jamison was ready to trade his Batman cards for some aggies.

  Madame Karitska wondered what aggies were.

  She walked out into the sun, vaguely inspected some of the cars waiting for repair, and then felt drawn to a shady corner with a bench at the side of the garage. She sat down and studied the sunny yard around her, her glance eventually falling on a thick growth of horizontal stalks which she recognized as a plant that grew thickly in Russia. Southern Russia, she remembered. Its name was … was …

  She was lost in thought when Pruden found her. “I thought you wanted to interview Joe Lister senior,” he said accusingly. “You stayed only about three minutes.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m beginning to wonder about Joe junior. Lister says—”

  “I heard,” she said, lifting one arm to point. “Over there.”

  “Over there what? You look strange.” “I think,” she said, “that I am staring at your poisonous plant.”

  “Here? Belladonna?”

  “Not belladonna. I’ve been trying to remember its generic name; it grows all along the coast of the Black Sea in Russia. Datura Stramonium, that’s it. In Europe it’s called thorn apple.” She rose and walked over to the horizontal stems. “It’s September and it’s in seed now,” she pointed out. “These look like berries but they’re seeds.” She plucked a stalk and brought it to him. “They’re fully as poisonous as belladonna. They produce giddiness, dilation of the pupils of the eyes.…”

  Pruden stared at the plant, thinking that he’d never seen anything so modest look so evil. Nature supplied most of her seeds with lavish colors—green, red, white, yellow—but these were dark brown, nearly black, a dozen of them to each stem, like tiny beads. There were no leaves, only the thin upright stalk and the slender sheath bearing this lacy frond of brownish-black seeds. He said abruptly, “I’ll call our lab man.”

  He turned—they both turned—at a sudden cry from the door. Mrs. Larkin stood there with her mouth open, a cup dangling from one finger. Her eyes looked huge and frightened, her lips framed words that the sanding machine behind her blotted out. With a look of astonishment she slumped forward and fell to the ground.

  Pruden rushed to her side and stretched her flat on the grass, pried open the lid of one eye and nodded. “Dilated.” He stood up and shouted “Lister!” and then rushed inside to silence the sanding machine.

  Madame Karitska was already hurrying along the path and through a gap in the board fence to the Larkin house. She walked into the kitchen, found the spices in a cabinet over the sink, and returned to the garage; it was the first time Pruden had seen her run.

  “Every minute counts,” she told him. “Tepid water and a tablespoonful of this powdered mustard. She’ll need a stomach pump, you’ve called an ambulance?”

  Pruden nodded. Lister was already bringing a glass of water. “Barely warm,” he said.

  “Spoon,” said Madame Karitska.

  Cas Johnson brought a spoon. They propped up Mrs. Larkin while Madame Karitska stirred the mustard into the water. Mrs. Larkin, opening her eyes, said very clearly and indignantly, “That green tiger is no good, I tell you, put it under the microscope and shrink it, it has to be done.” She opened her lips to the emetic, swallowed, gagged, gasped, and by the time they forced the rest down her throat the ambulance was pulling into the yard.

  Chapter 13

  They sat in Lister’s office, Pruden, Madame Karitska, and Jake Bellam from the police lab. “In America,” Bellam said, “thorn apple is more familiarly known as Jimson weed. It’s a narcotic. The kids fool with the leaves once in a while and occasionally you hear of a death, but it’s never received the publicity that LSD or marijuana have.

  “The seeds,” he continued, “are the really poisonous part of the plant, although you can get dilation of the pupils just from handling the leaves. The seeds you can boil and you can dry but nothing dilutes their poison.”

  He picked up the jar of instant coffee, poured some of it into his hand, and shook his head. “The other jar was only 30 per cent Jimson weed but this one—” He poured some of it into the palm of his hand. “As you can see, it’s pure Jimson-weed seed. This is the one Mrs. Larkin must have made her coffee with. I see maybe a few grains of instant coffee but most of it’s been replaced by the seeds.”

  Pruden shivered. “They look so much alike.”

  “Not really,” Bellam said, “but when you open up a jar labeled instant coffee you assume the grains in it are coffee. There’s a superficial resemblance but the instant’s coffee’s lighter brown. Your freeze-dried grains have the same weight, a shade chunkier perhaps, and with sharp ed
ges instead of round. Still, to the casual glance—even to a not-so-casual glance—it would resemble coffee.”

  “Random killings,” said Madame Karitska musingly, and lifted her glance to Pruden.

  “The worst kind,” Bellam said. “Aimed at no one in particular, which takes you into very deep psychological territory.”

  Pruden looked doubtful. “Unless a young child, a very young child—”

  “Always possible,” agreed Bellam. “Very young children fantasize—turn mud pies into real pies, make doll pillows out of thistledown and tea out of sugar and water. He or she could think these seeds are coffee and helpfully put them in a jar of coffee. But that’s your department,” he said rising. “You’ve rescued Mrs. Larkin in time, and you’ve found your poison. I’ll take this jar with me, Lieutenant, have it labeled and tucked away safely for you. All I can say is—good luck.”

  When he had gone Pruden looked at Madame Karitska and smiled wryly. “My work is just beginning but at least they can’t blame this one on Mrs. Trumbull. Any suggestions?”

  “Yes,” said Madame Karitska firmly. “Begin with those three young people who were sitting on the steps of the Dunlap house on Monday.”

  “The two Dunlaps and Joe Lister junior? I suppose one has to begin somewhere,” he said thoughtfully. With a sharp glance he added, “Any particular reason?”

  Her smile was dazzling. “There are always particular reasons but I am not a policeman. I find confusing threads here but perhaps you can explain them. First the motive, which is important, but there is also the astonishment to me that with this coffee so accessible there haven’t been more people poisoned.”

  “Lister pretty much explained that,” said Pruden. “He himself drinks Coke most of the time. Cas Johnson prefers tea and brings his own tea bags with him—except when he forgets. Lister says that really nobody drinks the coffee except when the Coke machine’s empty.” He added bitterly, “We’ve had unseasonably hot weather lately. The Coke machine ran out last weekend and delivery isn’t due until tomorrow, and then of course there were two instant-coffee jars to choose from.…”

  “Like Russian roulette,” mused Madame Karitska. “Very diabolical, actually. The person who could conceive of this deliberately would have no reverence for life at all, I think, since another human being means no more than the blade of grass he or she walks on. This person would be incapable of suffering.”

  Pruden stared at her. “Incapable of suffering? What a strange way to put it! Surely mad?”

  “Oh but my dear Lieutenant,” she said sadly, “a human being incapable of suffering is viciously crippled. We may reject suffering but just think what we would be without it! There would be no empathy, no compassion, no remorse, and above all no growth. To have feelings so blocked, to be lacking in any sense of tragedy—” She shook her head. “What is left but hatred?”

  “I’d still vote for insanity if this turns out to be premeditated murder.”

  “Insanity,” she said, “is only a word.”

  Pruden nodded. “Okay, I’ll accept that.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “School should be ending about now and in half an hour the neighborhood will be humming. I’ll begin by questioning those three young people and then I’ll—”

  Madame Karitska gently interrupted him. “If I might make a suggestion, there is, I think, a little experiment you might perform, a little drama you might play out that could get to the heart of the matter without any waste of time.…”

  The three sat on up-ended wooden crates just outside the rear door to the garage and regarded Pruden with varying emotions. Kathy Dunlap’s eyes were eager; Birch Dunlap looked sulky but undeniably curious; and Joe Lister junior suspicious. Pruden had caught them as they descended from the school bus; their schoolbooks lay beside them.

  “I asked for a few minutes of your time because I wanted to make an appeal to you three, as leaders in the neighborhood,” began Pruden, and turning over an empty barrel he sat down facing them. “I’ve just told you what happened to Mrs. Larkin. We have no idea how she came to be poisoned, or with what she was poisoned; we only know she stood in this doorway trying to frame the word Help, and she had pretty much the same reactions as you did, Kathy.”

  “Wow,” said Kathy, her eyes wide.

  “So we have to conclude that the poison’s somewhere in this neighborhood and we need your help.”

  “How, sir?” asked Birch. “You know we’ll do anything we can.”

  “Count me in too,” said Joe junior, nodding.

  “And me,” added Kathy.

  “We need—the Coke machine’s empty?” he said to Madame Karitska in surprise.

  “Yes, what a pity after you gave me all those quarters,” she told him. “But the water’s boiling for coffee, I’ll pour everyone some coffee instead. Three coffees coming up.”

  “Good, because we have to get down to brass tacks on this. We have to figure out a plan.”

  Young Joe Lister said uneasily, “Look here, you make it sound as if somebody could be going around doing this deliberately. I mean, that maybe it’s not an accident?”

  “Could be,” said Pruden judiciously. “Could be. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” He accepted a cup of coffee from Madame Karitska’s tray, added a spoonful of sugar and thanked her.

  “I don’t really like coffee,” Kathy Dunlap said, “but if you have lots of milk it tastes like coffee ice cream.”

  “There’s lots of milk,” Madame Karitska told her, handing her the milk pitcher, and moved on to Joe Lister junior.

  Joe hesitated, then reached for a cup and rejected sugar and milk.

  “Birch?” said Madame Karitska.

  He took a cup absently, his eyes on Pruden. “Is what Joe says possible?” he asked. “I mean, that it’s murder?”

  “You have here a pattern of random incidents,” said Pruden, “that add up to—” He paused to watch Kathy Dunlap lift the cup to her lips and drink. “Add up to more than coincidences, maybe. First you have illnesses, and then the tragic death of—Too hot for you, Joe?” he asked.

  Joe looked down at his coffee and said, “No, I was just listening to you.”

  “Have some.”

  “Sure. You mean Julie’s death.”

  “Julie’s death was rotten,” Birch said angrily. “If it turns out to be a murder then I’d sure like to get my hands on—”

  Pruden was staring incredulously at Joe Lister junior, who had just lifted his cup and was drinking down his coffee without hesitation. He said to Birch, “What did you say?”

  “I said, if you think it’s murder I’d sure like to get my hands on—”

  Pruden turned to him, glanced at the cup still in his his hands and said gently, “Drink your coffee, Birch.”

  Birch, too, looked down at his cup and then at Pruden. “I really don’t care for any, sir, I just took it to be polite.”

  “Drink it.”

  Birch looked startled. “I don’t want to.”

  “Drink it.”

  Birch whitened. He said curtly, “I told you, I don’t want to. I’m not going to.”

  Pruden moved swiftly: he took the cup from Birch’s hand and lifted it to the boy’s lips, pushing his head back with one arm and holding him with the other. “I said drink it.”

  “No!” shouted Birch, trying to squirm beyond Pruden’s reach.

  Pruden held him resolutely while the others stared in astonishment. “Then tell me why you won’t drink it, Birch, or I’ll force it down your throat.”

  “Damn you,” sobbed Birch. “Damn you, let me go!”

  “Why, Birch, why? Drink it or tell me why.”

  “Because it’s poison!” Birch screamed at him. “It’ll kill me, that’s why. Let me go, I want to go home!”

  “I’ll let you go,” said Pruden, and turning to the others said sadly, “It isn’t poisoned, of course, but he’s the only one who knew it could be. Yes it was murder, Joe, and I owe you an apology; I thought if it w
as any of you three it would be you. Kathy, you’d better run home and get your mother now … in a hurry, Kathy.”

  On Saturday morning the Dunlap house was shuttered and silent except for Kathy Dunlap sitting on the front steps talking earnestly and tearfully with Joe Lister junior. There were no bicycle riders on Mulberry Street this weekend, or children playing hopscotch. At quarter past ten a somewhat pale Mrs. Larkin carried a tray of sandwiches through the gate of Mrs. Trumbull’s house and joined a substantial number of people already inside the yard: children with grass clippers, a teenager with a power mower, and two men on ladders pruning vines away from the boarded-up windows. In the living room, from which a great number of boxes had been removed, Madame Karitska lay curled up on the couch asleep. She opened her eyes at Mrs. Larkin’s arrival and sat up. “It’s ten o’clock?”

  “Fifteen minutes past,” said Mrs. Larkin, offering her a sandwich. “Mrs. Trumbull ought to be here any minute. Lieutenant Pruden insisted we let you sleep.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “And Lieutenant Pruden asked me to tell you that he hung a sign on your apartment door saying you’d be back at one o’clock.”

  “Now that really is kind,” said Madame Karitska, smoothing her hair. “I’m afraid I’ve lost rather a lot of business these last few days.”

  Mrs. Larkin grinned. “Well, I’ll be one of your first clients when you go back,” she said. “After watching you at work yesterday and most of last night—”

  “My record, alas, was very poor,” sighed Madame Karitska. “It took so long—hours! I must have been very tired.”

  “We’re all tired,” said Mrs. Larkin, and abruptly sat down and put her head between her hands. “To think it was Birch, Birch Dunlap, of all people. Once in a while, Madame Karitska, once in a while I used to wish my two boys could be a little more like Birch. He was so self-contained, so polite. He never climbed trees so he could fall out of them, his clothes were always clean and tidy and his grades at school so marvelous. I used to wonder sometimes what I was doing wrong,” she said, and lifted a troubled face to Madame Karitska. “He was such a good boy.”