When he thumbed back the hammer, he closed his eyes, waited for the peaceful darkness to overtake him.
What’s dying like? he silently asked himself. Must be like turning the lights off in a windowless room. Must be like going to sleep.
Sleep. Peaceful, endless sleep. It’s all he wanted.
Sliding the pistol barrel back out of his mouth he coughed violently, painfully, before thumbing the hammer back into place.
“But not yet,” he spoke aloud.
38
NOT LONG AFTER SHE was gone, I washed down another codeine with a glass of water. Then I went back outside and parked the Mercedes in the garage. My dad might be dead and gone, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that he watched over me like a hawk—especially when I was using his things. Afterwards, I went back into the house and locked up. When I saw that two new messages had been recorded on the answering machine, I immediately thought of Lola.
Maybe she was on her way over. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part.
I tapped the PLAY button, listened for a voice.
A beautiful voice.
Instead I got only the sound of man’s breathing, then a shuffling noise followed by a quick hang-up.
As for the second call? Same deal.
Since my father’s thirty-year-old phone was not blessed with modern caller I.D., I deleted the non-messages then punched *69 into the handset.
When the operator gave me the number I quickly jotted it down and then dialed. I got a recorded message: “You have reached The Russo, Woodstock’s only traditional Russian restaurant,” said the man in a distinctive Russian-accented voice. Then he proceeded to recite the establishment’s hours.
I hung up and opened the cabinet that contained my Catskill Region phone book. I looked up The Russo in the yellow pages, found an address for the place on Main in Woodstock’s quaint hippy-filled downtown business area. Definitely a storefront joint.
I copied the address onto a Post-a-Note, slid it into my wallet. Then I slid into bed, laid myself down beside my old friend insomnia.
- - -
I finally gave up on the idea of sleep sometime around pre-dawn.
From on my back in bed, I stared up at the cracked plaster ceiling, and I heard the rain coming down outside. I swear every raindrop was calling out my name.
My head, it was growing tighter, the evil spirits pressing themselves against the backs of my eyeballs.
I knew I had to crawl out of the bed, get the old body moving, distract myself.
Downstairs I made the coffee and wondered why I wasn’t nearly as awake on my feet as I was on my back. I listened to the spatter the raindrops made against the kitchen windows when the wind blew hard. I wondered if it would ever stop raining in Stormville.
A few minutes later, I decided to call Lyons, leave him an update on his voice mail. I told the crime reporter I was working the case but that I’d still need more time before I could draw up some definite conclusions. Then I mentioned the cremation scheduled for that afternoon. But I also told him that if we met later that evening, I’d more than likely have his answers along with the supporting paperwork.
With that done, I poured another coffee and opened the front door to see if the paper had come yet.
It hadn’t.
But from where I stood I looked out onto the thick pines and oaks that separated my front lawn from Hope Lane. The rain was coming down steadily, collecting and running like a small river to the catch basin located at the south-east corner of the property.
I brought the cup to my lips. Once more I saw Scarlet’s face.
I saw the living face first and the dead face second.
Two entirely different people.
I was suddenly reminded of an old saying that was enscribed into a plaque that hung on the wall above my desk at the S.P.D.
“Let conversation cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living.”
I knew that if Scarlet was to delight in helping me at all, even in death, then she would do her best to lead me directly to her killer.
39
BY NINE O’CLOCK I’D jogged three miles in the rain, put in a full free-weight workout and three, three-minute rounds on the heavy bag inside my basement gym. Once showered, I treated myself to a pair of clean Levis.
With the Browning strapped to my chest, and the Beatle’s “White Album” spinning in the C.D. player, I drove the funeral coach across town to the chrome and tinted glass Stormville Medical Arts Center—a modern complex that occupied about four square downtown blocks. Having driven in through the entrance gates, I motored all the way to the far west end of the facility, past the morgue entrance, past the physical plant, to a series of three old four-storied buildings made up of brick facades and French paned windows. Turn of the twentieth century, Ivy League style buildings that long ago served as the original Stormville Medical Hospital, but that now were barely large enough to accommodate the labs.
I pulled into the broad parking lot that separated the old facility from the new and parked in a space that, according to a pole-mounted sign, was “Reserved for Dr. Norman Miner.”
I was no stranger to Toxicology, which meant I knew full well that Miner didn’t give a rat’s ass about his reserved parking space. So riddled was he with gout, that it pained him to even touch the gas and brake pedals of his old Volvo sedan with the tips of his swelled toes.
I entered the main building and breathed in the old familiar odor—a strange, intense mixture of chemicals, disinfectants and waste that emanated from the many lab animals confined to their stacked metal cages stored in the basement. So much for modern ventilation. But then, if you worked long enough in a place like this, I imagined your nasal passages got used to it.
Upstairs, I stood inside the open doors of the first of three tox labs. It was the usual scene. Dozens of men and women standing around an equal amount of free-standing marble islands with nearly every square inch of counter filled with beakers, clear pots, test tubes, Bunsen burners and laptop computers. Technicians and scientists so engrossed in their work, not a single one of them bothered to look up at me.
Stepping back out into the corridor, I nearly ran over him.
Dr. Norman Miner.
He was a short, squat, curly haired man who had served as the resident head of S.M.A.C.’s tox division ever since it had a tox division. The same man who had been best friends with my father which, in my mind, made him family.
I peered into his glass-blue eyes and grinned.
“You know why I’m here, old timer,” I said in my best imitation tough guy dick. “Whaddaya got for me?”
Miner raised his right hand, quick-slapped my butt.
He said, “Not here, dummy. We’ll address your emergency behind closed doors.”
It’s true, Norman was old. Even by retirement standards.
I watched him as he walked the narrow third floor corridor, a half dozen steps ahead of me. Waddled is more like it, with his terribly bowed, nearly stunted legs. He was a short man who had been a good two to three inches taller a good two to three decades ago.
Before age and gravity betrayed him.
Once inside his office, he took his place behind a mammoth wood desk, sat down hard in a leather swivel chair, released a very relieved breath. The place was as musty as it was cramped. It gave you the feeling that this one room had been left untouched for decades; that as the years passed, the hospital had simply built around it and the man who called it his home away from home.
Floor to ceiling bookshelves covered the walls with what I guessed were about a thousand volumes. So many books and magazines that not a single space of shelf went unused.
Miner ran sausage fingers over his weathered face, then ran them through his full head of stark white locks. I could tell by his stiff tight lips that he was in real pain. The deep set of crow’s feet carved into the corners of his eyes proved it. As soon as he got hold of his breath and his equilibrium, he
asked me how I was holding up, as if the state of my health were foremost on his mind. And to a man like Norman Miner, it was.
I said, “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
Miner smiled as best he could under the circumstances.
“It’s the damned gout again, Richard,” he said. “Getting so I cannot eat or drink a thing without my feet swelling up like balloons.”
I was well aware of the good toxicologist’s penchant for rich foods and fine wines. A fondness that at this stage of the life-game was pretty much killing him.
I sat down in the wood chair set in front of his desk.
“You should retire to Florida,” I said. “Take it easy like normal people your age.”
He exhaled a breath, looked me in the eye.
“Now let me ask you, Richard,” he said. “Just what the hell would I do with myself in Florida?”
I pretended to think about it for a minute, actually raising my eyes to the ceiling, scratching at the tip of my chin with index finger and thumb.
“You could chase women, for instance.”
“Not with these feet,” he said. “Besides, all the women in Miami are either too old, too married or too rich.”
I said, “Rich is good. And you’re mature in years yourself.”
“Never married,” he said. “Never had any kids, and despite appearances, I do not consider myself an old man.”
“What is it you’re trying to tell me, Doc?”
“I’m in full possession of my faculties—feet be damned. And, I’ve still got my first paycheck.”
He pulled out the top desk drawer, retrieved a manila folder, which he laid flat on his desk before flipping it open. From where I sat, I could see that his hands were shaking. Not a lot, but enough for me to notice.
Scarlet Montana’s tox report,” he said. “Per your and Dr. Robb’s request.”
He ran an index finger across a sheet of eleven-by-fourteen-inch computer-generated graph paper, pausing every second or two to whisper something indiscernible under his breath.
Looking back up, he said, “These are the facts of the matter: not only was the alcohol level in her blood high enough to put most men twice her size into a coma, but she also had a good amount of Curare floating around her veins and brain.”
“Curare,” I questioned.
He said, “That, Richard, is your smoking gun.”
I shook my head.
Miner’s blue eyes were still glued to mine when he let loose with a painful grunt as he shifted and repositioned sore feet beneath his desk.
“Stuff has been around for years and years,” he said. “Hospitals still keep it lying around in their closets for the occasional psychopathic patient that can’t be controlled.”
“Never heard of it before.”
He said, “It’s very rare. Or rarely used anyway. Forty-five years in the business and never once have I come across it until now.”
He explained that Curare was only lethal when injected directly into the bloodstream, but not when ingested orally, in which case it only caused a temporary total paralysis.
“Edgar Allen Poe suggested the use of Curare in his story, ‘The Premature Burial,’” he pointed out with a quick, over-the-shoulder glance to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf on his left. “The story is about being buried alive. Poe was petrified of it. With Curare you are unable to talk, blink your eyes or move your lips. You can hardly breathe. Yet the mind remains razor sharp, fully cognizant. That was Poe’s real fear: being fully conscious of your hopeless, suffocating situation underground.”
Miner also revealed that the Nazis had a nasty habit of administering a combination of Curare and mescaline on select Jews and Poles in Dachau during their horrible wartime mind-control experiments.
“The drug works quick,” he went on. “But then the paralyzing effects can disappear just as fast, depending upon the dosage. So too will all traces of the drug.” He shifted his gaze from the tox report to me. “Ten years ago, I never would have found it.”
“The miracle of technology,” I said. But what I was really thinking was this: it didn’t take a brain surgeon or even a toxicologist with forty-five years’ experience under his lab coat to make a clear determination on how Scarlet had been murdered.
“Somebody fed her the stuff,” I said. “Then proceeded to cut her up in a way that would make it look like a psychotic suicide.”
“As in self-mutilation. Which is, of course, more believable than if the cuts had been nice and neatly executed.”
“A last desperate act. That’s the theme the killer was after.”
Considering this new development, what I had to ask myself was this: how possible was it that I would have access, much less the means, to acquire a poison like Curare? The answer, of course, was impossible. But then what about Jake? Could he find a way to get the stuff? As the top Stormville cop, I knew it was very possible. Standing inside that musty old office, I was beginning to feel my sternum loosen up. For the first time in almost twenty-four hours, I was beginning to believe that I had absolutely nothing to do with Scarlet’s death. Sure there were the scratches on my hands. But that’s all they were.
Scratches.
“At this point,” Miner continued, “I’m beginning to think her heart may have given out even before her throat was cut. But then, here’s where things get even more interesting, Richard, my boy.” Once more, he stared down at the graph. “She also had ingested enough opiate and speed to jump start a Jake truck.”
I said, “Speed, as in amphetamines. Opiate, as in heroin, smack, shit.”
He sat back heavily in his chair.
“Precisely,” he said.
“What do you make of all this?” I asked. A question for which I was only just beginning to formulate an answer.
“My take is that the sadistic bastard who did this wanted her completely messed up on one hand—”
“Drunk and paralyzed,” I interjected.
“—but on quite another hand, he wanted her fully awake, fully cognizant.” He paused for a quick breath and a painful wince. “You see what I’m getting at here, Richard?”
I shook my head.
“What I’m trying to tell you is that the killer wanted to keep her fully immobile, but also fully conscious while he cut her up.”
The silence in the dark room suddenly seemed thicker than the dust that coated the furniture.
Until I raised the billion dollar question:
“Am I to conclude, Dr. Miner, that in your professional opinion, Scarlet Montana could not possibly have killed herself by slicing her own neck?”
He said, “The only thing she could have managed in her state, Detective Divine, was to die.” I sat up straight.
My heart was pounding. Or was it the arteries in my head?
“You be willing to act as an expert witness in a court of law, old friend?” I asked.
Miner made a cross over his heart with his right hand.
“So help me die,” he said.
A beat later, Miner had to excuse himself before hobbling to the bathroom down the hall outside his office. I used the break as an excuse to pull the thick volume of Poe off his bookshelf. Sitting back down I thumbed through the collected works until I came to the story I was looking for:
“The Premature Burial.”
Alone, inside that dimly lit room, I began to read.
What I learned is that Curare could indeed be a very helpful tool for the person who wanted to fake their own death. It could also prove instrumental for the creep who required his victim to become completely incapacitated while remaining fully awake, fully aware. Even if said victim was about to be murdered in the most brutal of ways.
In the story, Poe recounts the real-life story of the wife of a prominent Baltimore Congressman who one day in the mid 1850s, without warning, was stricken with a “sudden and unaccountable illness.” Her doctors, not having the skills necessary to resuscitate, pronounced her dead.
Accordi
ng to Poe, “her face assumed the usual pinch and sunken outline. The lips were of the usual marble pallor. The eyes were lusterless. There was no warmth. Pulsation ceased.”
The supposedly dead woman was placed inside the family vault where she remained for three years until it was opened once again. It was then that the widowed husband got the shock of his life. Instead of discovering the decayed body of his wife inside her casket, he found her still clothed bones set beside the tomb’s door. Having become fully awake, the woman had somehow managed to escape her casket. At some point during her ordeal, she even managed to light an oil lamp. What she could not manage, however, was to gather anyone’s attention before she must have surely starved to death inside that lonely black tomb.
While Poe made no mention of murder or a murderer, it became obvious to me that the woman had been drugged with a substance that, while giving away nothing about how or who might have been responsible for administering the mechanism of death, made her appear very dead. Maybe the guilty party had been the woman’s politician husband, or maybe it was the woman herself. In any case, the point here was not whodunit, but whatdunnit.
Miner came back in.
I got up, replaced the volume back onto the shelf where it belonged.
“Pretty scary stuff,” he commented.
I said, “If you’re still hanging around when I go, promise me you’ll make certain there’s no gas left in the tank.”
“Don’t talk like that, son.”
“It’s one thing to be buried alive,” I said. “It’s another to be rendered paralyzed and then butchered like an animal.”
“Which do you think is worse?” Miner asked as he painfully slid himself back down into his chair, as if the question had an answer. He sat as far back as the swivel spring would allow without him dropping onto his back.
I asked, “Would you be willing to go public with your findings even before a trial begins?”
He twirled his thumbs. I knew the action helped him to think.
“How far in advance?”
“Today,” I said. “Scarlet Montana’s body of evidence is scheduled for a four o’clock cremation today. I might be able to legitimately stop it if you go public now.”
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