Worst Case Scenario

by Michael Bowen

  He finished unpacking, reknotted his bow tie, washed his hands, and stepped into the corridor to knock on Quentin’s door. Quentin joined him immediately, and they walked downstairs together in search of alcoholic refreshment and female visual relief.

  With Michaelson’s professorial reserve and Quentin’s nervous, hustler’s energy, they stood out among the vacationing lawyers, executives, award-winning salespeople, and small-business owners populating the patio bar. Someone with binoculars in Room 615, for example, could have spotted them without difficulty.

  The hotel operator confirmed later that, in response to calls from a house phone rather than a room phone, she rang 202 and 204 twenty times each a few minutes after Michaelson and Quentin reached the patio bar.

  Three minutes after that, the lock on Room 204’s hallway door clicked and Marjorie Randolph heard the door begin to swing cautiously open. She was sitting fully clothed in the bathtub at the time, and had been feeling quite ridiculous. At the ominous lock-clicks a healthy fear replaced all other feelings, for she suspected that a murderer was about to pass six feet or so from her.

  From behind the shower curtain in the darkened bathroom, she heard the door close. The entrant walked quietly on thick carpet, and she heard only an occasional shuffle, not regular footsteps. Then, from well inside the room, she heard metal sliding on metal, followed by the kind of squeak that comes from a seldom-used hinge.

  She spent five seconds gathering her courage. After all, she told herself, she had a perfectly plausible explanation to offer the intruder, if she was discovered. Unless, of course, the intruder was Quentin. In which case, she thought, I can just kick his teeth in.

  She rose slowly and stepped barefoot onto the bathroom floor. The rustle of the shower curtain as she did so sounded to her like surf pounding on the shore. She stepped cautiously to the bathroom door and, after a heart-stopping pause, looked out in each direction. She couldn’t see anyone else in Quentin’s room. And the door joining it to Room 202 was open.

  Moving a bit more boldly now, she crossed to the adjoining door. She waited until she was sure the sound of movement through the doorway came from the closet area, well away from where she’d be standing.

  As quietly as she could manage, she slipped Room 204’s adjoining door closed and slid the metal lock home on its grooves. Scurrying to the phone beside the bed, she dialed a number that had been pounding her head for ten minutes.

  “Patio bar,” a genial Southern voice said after one ring. After inaudible mumbles the voice said, “You looking for someone named Michaelson?”

  “Yes,” Marjorie said.

  “Michaelson here,” was the next thing she heard.

  “Scramble,” she said. And hung up.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The first thing Michaelson saw when he opened the door to his room less than two minutes later was a look of sharp and unpleasant aggravation on Marciniak’s face. Marciniak was standing at the closed and stubbornly unyielding adjoining door at the time, so the expression was understandable.

  “How does that hoary old joke go?” Michaelson asked innocently. “‘No, madam, I am surprised. You are astonished.’ I’m tempted to feed you the straight line just so you can use the riposte on me.”

  “Side-splitting, tiger, just side-splitting,” Marciniak said. “All right, you got me. I wasn’t certain you were telling the truth when you said you didn’t have the order with you down here. I wanted to make sure before I gave you all weekend to cut a deal behind my back.”

  Michaelson stepped the rest of the way into his room, trailed by Quentin and Marjorie. Flipping the lights on as he came, he crossed all the way to a round work table by the windows. Quentin stayed in between Marciniak and the hallway door, while Marjorie perched primly on the edge of the bed.

  “You ought to be more careful with the keys to your room,” Quentin said to Michaelson.

  “No, you should be more careful with the keys to yours. It’s the locks I should be more careful with.”

  “You’re being elliptical, Richard,” Marjorie said. “Perhaps you should explain in more detail.”

  “When Dr. Marciniak registered for the room next door that you were destined to occupy,” Michaelson said to Quentin, “he asked for two keys. He kept one for himself and put the other one in a folder with my name on it. When I checked in for our rooms, the desk clerk gave me your folder and I passed it on to you. The end result was that you and he both had keys to your room.”

  “Yeah,” Quentin said, “but it’s your room he ended up in.”

  “Correct. During his rather passionate discussion with me earlier this afternoon, Dr. Marciniak positioned himself with his back to the adjoining door. By planting his back against the sliding tongue-and-groove lock and shifting position, he was able to unlock this side of that door without being obvious about it. Then, when you and I were safely off to the patio bar, he used the key he’d kept to get into your room. Once there, he unlocked your side of the adjoining door, came through that now completely unlocked door, and went about his business in here.”

  “If Richard and you hadn’t come in prematurely,” Marjorie interjected, “Dr. Marciniak would have finished up, relocked the adjoining door, exited through the hallway door, gone back into your room, relocked that side of the adjoining door, and gone back out again. At that point Richard’s room would look as if it had been completely locked during the entire time, and there’d be no apparent explanation for anyone without a key getting inside.”

  “Why go to all that trouble?” Quentin said. “As long as he’s registering for rooms, why not just register for yours as well as mine and take the extra key for that one?”

  “Registering for mine might have proven a bit awkward,” Michaelson said. “If the need arose, Dr. Marciniak wanted the desk clerk to tell the police truthfully that he’d never received a key to my room. That would imply that he’d had no access to it, and that any mischief done here should be laid at someone else’s door.”

  Looking at Marciniak, Marjorie spoke up.

  “You really could be forgiven for suggesting to Mr. Quentin at this point that he ought to be able to figure all this out for himself,” she said.

  Marciniak held his hands up in front of his chest in a gesture of semi-surrender.

  “All right already,” he said. “I already admitted that you got me. Caught me red-handed searching your room.”

  “Thanks to Marjorie relocking Quentin’s side of the adjoining door,” Michaelson said. “Otherwise you would have escaped into his room when you heard the key in my door, and we would have risked chasing each other around like characters in a French farce.”

  “That’s why you told me to let the lady into my room while Marciniak was chatting you up,” Quentin said. “I thought she was just sort of a lookout.”

  “Well, I’m duly traumatized,” Marciniak said. “It’ll probably take me years of therapy to get over this embarrassment. But if you’re all through having fun with me, I’ll go back to my room and start the therapeutic process with a couple of good, stiff drinks.”

  “You know,” Michaelson said musingly, “it must be going on eighty years since G. K. Chesterton first pointed out that all American hotels are identical. It’s even truer today than when he said it, of course. This Radisson at Hilton Head, to take an example at random, has exactly the same floor plan, layout, color scheme, carpeting, and furniture as the Radisson in Charleston, West Virginia. Everything’s the same, right down to the foil-wrapped chocolate mints on the pillows—the same here as in the place where Sharon Bedford was murdered.”

  “Hold it,” Quentin said. “I thought the idea was to smoke this quack out. Where are you going with this Sharon Bedford murdered crap?”

  “Dr. Marciniak had exactly the same reason to search Sharon Bedford’s room in Charleston as he had to search mine here,” Michaelson said. “He u
sed the same key-and-lock trick to get in. As he explained to Wendy Gardner in Charleston, his agency had signed for the oversized end-of-corridor room that some software company was using to demonstrate its products. He registered for that room, took two keys, gave one to the software manager, and kept the other. He had kindly arranged for Ms. Bedford to have the adjoining room.”

  “Baloney,” Marciniak hooted.

  “Time-out,” Quentin barked, making the fingers-on-palm sign familiar to every football and basketball fan. “That Sunday morning he came into Bedford’s room through the hallway door, when she let him in, the same way Pilkington and I did.”

  “Right,” Michaelson said. “That’s the way he came in before Ms. Bedford left for breakfast. Early on that Sunday morning, he knocked on her door, came in, and brought his usual intensity to a conversation with her. We’ll never know what they talked about, unless Dr. Marciniak chooses to tell us, but I suspect it had something to do with the unconscionability of handing a potentially explosive political document over to you, Mr. Quentin. His emphasizing that point by giving Ms. Bedford one of the praying-for-you-in-heaven cards and explaining its background would explain why the card was in her room.”

  “Keep it up,” Quentin said mordantly. “I’m thick-skinned.”

  “During this conversation,” Michaelson resumed, “Dr. Marciniak surreptitiously unlocked Ms. Bedford’s adjoining door, just as he did mine. Then, when she went to breakfast, he used his key to go into the software demonstration room, went through the adjoining door to Ms. Bedford’s room, and did successfully there what he tried unsuccessfully to do here.”

  “Lucky thing for me she went to breakfast,” Marciniak said.

  “I don’t think you left that to chance,” Michaelson said. “Her breakfast plans changed immediately after you left her room that morning. Almost as soon as the door had closed behind you, she canceled a room-service Continental breakfast order and went to the café instead. There she ate a breakfast beyond her means, and she used a complimentary meal voucher to pay for it. It’s hard to see why she would have been given such a voucher, whereas you, of course, with control over several registrations, would have been given several.”

  “Now you’re guessing,” Marciniak said with a shrug. “And what you’re guessing at is how I got into her room to search it. I haven’t heard anything about murder yet.”

  “When did you learn she was diabetic?” Michaelson asked.

  “I had no idea she was diabetic until I read the autopsy report,” Marciniak said.

  “Bosh. You used your agency’s resources to get your hands on her medical records well before the Charleston conference.”

  “How can you be sure of that?” Quentin demanded.

  “Put it this way,” Michaelson answered. “I’m as sure of that as Dr. Marciniak was that Sharon Bedford was a regular smoker.”

  “Look,” Quentin said impatiently, “I do sound bites, okay? Would you please put this shredder-fodder of yours in plain English?”

  “The Saturday night of the Charleston conference, Ms. Bedford saw you smoking and asked you for a cigarette so that she could have a few minutes of relative privacy with you while the two of you engaged in that currently unfashionable activity. But she wasn’t a habitual smoker, and it showed. A young woman I know named Wendy Gardner noticed instantly that Ms. Bedford’s technique was a bit unpracticed. Dr. Marciniak, however, looking at the same scene as Ms. Gardner, seemed morally certain that Ms. Bedford was addicted to tobacco.”

  “So the fuck what?” Quentin yelped, slapping his thighs with his palms in exasperation.

  “You took the words out of my mouth,” Marciniak said.

  “Dr. Marciniak’s misplaced certainty came from his review of Ms. Bedford’s medical records. Her blood tests showed nicotine levels consistent with regular consumption of cigarettes. Dr. Marciniak had no way of knowing that that was the accidental result of Ms. Bedford’s exposure to heavy doses of secondhand cigarette smoke in the office of the head paralegal at the law firm where she freelanced.”

  “Riiiight,” Quentin said, smiling as if he were trying to humor a demented half-wit. “And you’re telling me about diabetes because—why, for God’s sake?”

  “Because it’s the beginning of the answer to the elegant question you asked about her murder,” Michaelson said. “I telescoped things a bit in describing Dr. Marciniak’s actions that morning. After he left her room the first time, he hung one of the cards asking for early maid service on her door. He didn’t make his clandestine entry until after the maid had finished.”

  “Why?” Marciniak demanded.

  “So that you could replace the chocolate mint the maid left on Ms. Bedford’s pillow with one laced with toxic bufotenine. Knowing Ms. Bedford was diabetic and that diabetics habitually keep small pieces of candy with them in case they think their blood sugar needs a jolt, you figured she’d certainly take the mint, eat it sometime in the course of the morning—and die. That’s what she did.”

  “I had a chocolate mint prepared ahead of time?”

  “Of course not. You took the mint from your own pillow, poisoned it, and substituted it for the mint on Ms. Bedford’s pillow. Then you relocked the adjoining door and exited through the hallway door, which automatically relocked as it closed. After Ms. Bedford had come back from breakfast, had her chats with Pilkington and Quentin, and was drawing her bath, she ate the mint and poisoned herself. To all appearances, she was killed by something that had to have happened inside her locked room after the maid cleaned it—that is, at a time when you, unlike Pilkington, no longer had apparent access to it.”

  “You about done now, ace?” Marciniak asked. “I mean, is that it?”

  “Almost. The key point, you see, is that you used bufotenine instead of arsenic or strychnine or one of the other more traditional poisons. I’m told that bufotenine can be absorbed through the tongue and the insides of the lips. Your original plan included poisoning the filters of her cigarettes as well as her mint. That’s why you were so put out when you learned you were mistaken in your conjectures about her smoking habits. Of the three arguable suspects, you’re the only one in a position to have made that mistake. That’s why you have to be the murderer.”

  “Your whole theory is idiotic,” Marciniak said, his voice now coldly contemptuous. “I had nothing against Sharon Bedford.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Michaelson agreed in a tone that matched Marciniak’s chilly contempt with cold anger. “She was just collateral damage. She had to die because you couldn’t risk her giving a duplicate original of the coup d’état order to Quentin and thereby destroying the value of the one you had.”

  “And fortunately for me, I happened to be carrying a lethal dose of bufotenine around just in case I might want to waste anyone who got in my way.”

  “You came to the conference thoroughly prepared to murder Sharon Bedford,” Michaelson said. “You’d planned the murder well before either you or she got to Charleston.”

  “I had no reason to suspect she even had the order until she started advertising it during the conference,” Marciniak said.

  “You knew perfectly well that she had the order. Deborah Moodie told you. She was appalled at the prospect of Quentin getting the kind of power that that documentation represented. She begged you to keep that from happening by finding Bedford a job with significant political responsibility so that she wouldn’t have to turn to Quentin for one.”

  “You may not be aware of this,” Marciniak said, “but Deborah Moodie isn’t one of my biggest fans. She tried to destroy my career, and I ended up having to destroy hers. She’d rather scrub toilets the rest of her life than ask me for anything.”

  “You’re absolutely right about that,” Michaelson said, nodding. “Begging a favor from you must have been the hardest thing she ever did. She did it because her country was more important to her than her
feelings or her career. But she made that sacrifice in vain.”

  “Life in the big city, champ. You sound to me like you’re making the same mistake she did.”

  “You recognized the risk that no job you could give Bedford could compete in Bedford’s mind with what Quentin could offer her,” Michaelson continued. “So you came to Charleston prepared to kill her if you had to. Your fears were realized. She wasn’t tempted enough by your offer, so you murdered her.”

  “I have dedicated my entire life to medicine and the life sciences,” Marciniak said. Still the voice was quietly intense, and now a suggestion of smoldering anger had crept into it as well. “I mean since I was fifteen years old. Now, I’m as ambitious as anyone in Washington. I’d pull strings, leak stories, kiss butts, lie, cheat, or steal to get a position I wanted, and I’ve done all of those things and liked it. But for you to suggest seriously that I would murder a decent and completely innocent human being so that I could add one more title to my résumé is obscene.”

  “If ambition alone led to murder, the homicide rate for any square block of Constitution Avenue would be higher than for Washington’s entire drug corridor,” Michaelson said. “You didn’t kill Sharon Bedford because you were ambitious. You killed her because you thought you were indispensable. In your own mind, you’d become the only person in America who could save science and medicine from the corrosive, corrupting effect of politics—from the Quentins of the world. That’s what made Ms. Bedford’s murder a Washington crime. She didn’t die because of greed or hatred or lust. She died because of your delusion. She died because you talked yourself into believing your own press releases.”

  “How much of this can you prove?” Quentin demanded.

  Rising, Michaelson walked over to the bed and took the mint from the pillow.

  “If this turns out to be laced with bufotenine,” he said, “I’d say we can prove a good deal of it.”

  “Are you saying he’d pull the same thing again?” Quentin asked in astonishment. “Just so he could sell me that piece of paper instead of you?”