She remembered the day she’d found it, read the label, had researched what it was and what it could do.
Paula stopped doctoring the food and drink for a few days so that Gregory would feel better and think he was cured, before starting again. Then she added a bit more to a creamy fish chowder and to a sparkling Riesling wine, and when Gregory toppled over after dinner she helped him into bed and called the doctor.
“I see,” she said, cell phone to her ear. “A stomach flu going around? But he’s been sick on and off for a few days. . . . Okay, I’m sure he’ll be fine too, doctor, but I’ll make sure he sees you when he’s stronger.” Her voice filled with concern for Gregory’s benefit and for the doctor’s. She wanted Dr. Silvershein to remember she had called, concerned and worried, but not that worried.
It was time.
A pot of tea she insisted Gregory drink, one cup, then another.
Now there was vomiting and diarrhea, quite unpleasant, and Gregory complaining that he felt as if his feet were on fire.
She offered sympathy and an ice pack for his feet.
For two days he was like that, in bed and out, limping, almost sobbing at one point. She said she would call 911 if it got any worse, though she never did.
It pained her to see him like this, his muscular body feeble, his beauty ravaged.
Then she told him. Wanted him to know what she was doing and why. It was too late now, the poison had already done its damage, no way he’d be able to repeat what she said to him.
“I know what you were trying to do,” she said. “Poisoning me with paints and solvents.”
Gregory struggled to raise his head. “W-what?” The word croaked.
“You’re after my house, my money. I know that, Gregory. I saw the proof. But I’ve stopped you.”
“I would—never.” His vocal cords constricted, every word like shards of glass in his throat, but he continued to speak, to beseech her. “I—love you, Paula. I—do. Don’t you—know that?”
“Ha!” she cried.
Gregory managed to sit up. He took several breaths. “Paula—what—have you—done—to me?”
For a moment, the image of that underdeveloped negative was back in her mind, now sharp and clear, even the words sounded familiar.
“You were trying to kill me,” she said, “so I’m killing you. It’s only fair.”
“You’re—crazy!” he rasped.
“Me? Crazy! Me?”
Something inside Paula snapped and exploded, spots before her eyes, a tingling as if ants were crawling up and down her arms. She leaned in close to his face and screamed—“You’re the crazy one! You! Not me!”—the picture burning in her mind along with those words—accident, failure, worthless—hammering inside her head. She reached out, hands, like claws, only inches from his neck, blind with rage, shaking with fury. Then she stopped, sucked in a deep breath then another. There was no reason for all of this fighting, this ugliness, it would all be over soon.
Gregory just looked at her, his face gaunt, his eyes rheumy. “How—could—you—possibly think I—would—ever . . . harm you?” Then his body shuddered and seized and his head fell back against the pillow, mouth twitching, a thin line of viscous drool sluicing over his chin.
When the heart failure came Paula was almost relieved; seeing her once beautiful and beloved Gregory suffering had not been much fun, no matter what he had done or tried to do.
When the emergency crew arrived and proclaimed him dead she cried real tears and wrung her hands until the ambulance drove away. Then she rid the house of the poison, threw away every plate, glass, cup, and utensil Gregory had eaten from, cleaned his bedsheets and threw away the towels she had used to mop up his vomit.
The Frank E. Campbell funeral home had been serving the city since the late 1800s, where such silent screen stars as Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo, politico Mario Cuomo, more recently the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman along with rap star The Notorious B.I.G., had been honored and eulogized in death.
Gregory, Paula decided, deserved to go out in style, the chapel choked with flowers, a blow-up of their wedding photo—Paula looking happy if plain, Gregory beaming and beautiful—framed by gladioli, greeted guests in the wide entryway.
Paula’s face, dusted with white powder, was as pale as the moon against her black designer dress, expensive but appropriately simple. She wore the mask of widowhood seamlessly, her tears falling quite naturally. She really did love Gregory, no matter what, and she found it easy to nod and sniff when people offered their condolences—an Oscar-worthy performance that made her regret she had not considered a career in acting rather than trying to compete with her artistic parents.
The reception continued back at her home, the brownstone vying with the funeral home for flowers, finger foods laid out, tuxedoed bartenders serving expensive white wine and Perrier.
She’d had the place professionally cleaned though a slight antiseptic odor still hung in the air.
Paula took comfort in seeing the friends who had never believed how someone like her could possibly have snared a man like Gregory, sad and upset for her, along with the relatives who shook their heads and told her she was brave for the third time in her life.
She was only partially surprised to see the cotton-candy-haired man, as he had treated Gregory for several years.
“I am so sorry,” the elderly doctor said, grasping her hand in his. “What a tragedy. Gregory was such an extraordinary young man, so talented and kind.” He paused. “They’re saying viral encephalitis, right?”
Paula nodded sadly. She knew that thallium poisoning was very often confused for the disease and, without sophisticated and specific laboratory instruments for testing the poison, would never be detected. Even so, she wasn’t taking chances. There would be no autopsy, and she had scheduled Gregory’s cremation for tomorrow.
“What a loss,” Silvershein said, shaking his head. “If only I’d come when you called.”
Paula shook her head too. “How could you have known? How could anyone have known it was so serious? You can’t blame yourself.”
“No,” he said. “But he was so young, so talented, his whole life ahead of him, and he loved you so much, Paula, he told me so on his last visit, only a few weeks ago.”
Paula wanted to scream at the doctor: It isn’t true—he was trying to kill me!—but she remained composed. “Did he?” The words spoken so soft as a memory played in the back of her mind like a movie: Christmas vacation, her last year of boarding school. She’d brought a painting home, one she’d done in art class, something she had worked on for weeks and weeks to impress her talented parents, something she was proud of, her best painting ever. She saw it now, propped against the wall in her mother’s large studio, her mother stepping close, then back, tapping her chin, striking a contemplative pose.
“It’s good, Paula,” she said, just a slight note of surprise in her voice.
Oh, the pride Paula had felt!
Then her mother moved in closer again, “But here and here”—she indicated areas of Paula’s painting—“could use some work.”
“How so?” Paula asked, though she’d wanted to yell, to howl and curse at her mother, who had already plucked a large brush from her palette and was mixing paint.
“This area here,” her mother said. “You see, it needs a bit more color.” And as she said so, added a brushstroke to the canvas. “And here—” She stopped, took up another brush, dragged it through a glob of paint on her palette, then dabbed it onto another spot of Paula’s painting.
“See how much better it looks?”
Paula just barely nodded.
Again and again her mother mixed pigment and added strokes to the picture, lost in the act, oblivious to Paula, shrinking beside her, until half of the original image was gone, smothered under a layer of wet paint.
“Voilà!” her mother cried out.
Paula twitched a smile, then picked up the painting, wet paint glazing her fingers, brought it
back to her bedroom, into the closet, and slammed the door. It was the last time she would ever show her mother anything.
But months later, Paula back home after the end of the school year, there it was, just where she’d left it, in the closet, exactly as she had painted it—not one of her mother’s brushstrokes in evidence.
But how could that be?
Paula lifted the painting closer and studied the surface inch by inch. There were no signs of paint having been scraped off, or any added. The painting looked precisely the way she had painted it in boarding school, nothing about it changed or altered.
Paula couldn’t believe it or figure it out, but then, as now, it no longer mattered.
“Oh yes,” the doctor was saying, and Paula, unsure of what he meant said, “Excuse me?”
“Gregory, how much he loved you.”
For a moment Paula was overwhelmed with grief and regret.
“It’s how your mother died, isn’t it?” the doctor said, “What?” Paula wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. “I think so,” she said, stifling a flinch. “I was away at boarding school when it happened.”
“I see. And your father’s death, coming just a few months later. What a shock that must have been for you.” He squeezed her hand.
Paula took her time before answering, forcing her eyes to tear up. “Yes,” she said. “I adored my parents.”
“Such talented people,” Silvershein said.
Paula’s uncle, her father’s younger brother, an aspiring writer, whom she hardly knew, who supported himself teaching junior high school, who had been standing close by, leaned in.
“They never really determined the reason for Anton’s heart failure. I don’t know why they put him in the ground so damn fast. Dead at forty-nine, my God.”
Paula offered the man a solemn nod, then turned back to Dr. Silvershein when he said, “I saw the body.”
“My father’s?” Paula asked.
“No, Gregory’s. As his internist all these years, the coroner called me out of courtesy, plus we’re old medical school buddies.”
“Oh?” Paula slid her hand from the elderly doctor’s surprisingly firm grip.
“Do you mind hailing a cab for me,” he asked.
“Of course not,” she said, allowing him to take her arm. They moved slowly through the dwindling crowd of mourners, whispering condolences and nodding, as they headed toward to the door and out onto the street.
“Have you read Agatha Christie?” the doctor asked when they were halfway down the path. “Oh, of course you have, you said so when I first saw you in my office. One of your favorite authors since you were quite young, isn’t that what you said?”
Paula opened her mouth but it took a moment to form the word. “Yes.”
“What’s the name of that Christie book, you know, the one where they think it’s black magic but it turns out to be poisoning?”
Paula shrugged then waved a little too frantically to an oncoming taxi, which swerved and stopped at the curb.
“The Pale Horse!” Silvershein snapped his fingers. “That’s it! Have you read it?”
“No,” Paula said, her heart fluttering. “I don’t think so.”
“I’m sure you’d have remember, if you had. Oh well.” He took hold of the cab’s door handle, then stopped and turned back to her. “By the way, and I hope you won’t mind, but I’ve taken the liberty of delaying Gregory’s cremation, it won’t be more than a day.”
“But—why?” Paula glanced up, down, anywhere to avoid the doctor’s eyes and when she looked back at the house it had suddenly gone dark, the sidewalk as well, though the sky was bright.
“Are you okay? the doctor asked.
“Oh—yes,” she said, her eyes darting from the bright sky to the darkened houses and back.
“There was something about Gregory’s nails,” the doctor said. “I’m sure it’s nothing but it’s where chemical compounds, often overlooked in normal testing, collect, in the fingernails.”
Paula’s mind was scrambling, searching. “Oh, it must be from his painting,” she said. “No matter how many times I told him not to, Gregory insisted upon using toxic paints, cadmiums and cobalts.”
“Really?” said Silvershein. “Well, that can be tested for as well, but they wouldn’t prove fatal unless Gregory ate a tube of the stuff. No, it can’t be that.” He stopped and scratched his head. “The coroner is performing some specific tests I ordered right now.”
Paula looked at the overhead clouds that cut across the daylight sky, then at the gaslight in front of her brownstone. It seemed to glow in the dark more intensely than ever.
JUSTIN SCOTT is the author of thirty-seven thrillers, mysteries, and sea stories including The Man Who Loved The Normandie, Rampage, and The Shipkiller, which made the International Thriller Writers list in Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads.
He writes the Ben Abbott detective series set in small-town Connecticut (HardScape, StoneDust, FrostLine, McMansion, and Mausoleum), and collaborated with Clive Cussler on nine novels in the Isaac Bell detective series.
The Mystery Writers of America nominated him for Edgar Awards for Best First Novel and Best Short Story. He is a member of the Authors Guild, the Players, and the Adams Round Table.
Paul Garrison is his main pen name, under which he writes modern sea stories (Fire and Ice, Red Sky at Morning, Buried at Sea, Sea Hunter, and The Ripple Effect) and thrillers based on a Robert Ludlum character (The Janson Command, The Janson Option).
Born in Manhattan, Scott grew up on Long Island’s Great South Bay in a family of professional writers. His father, A. Leslie Scott, wrote Westerns and poetry. His mother, Lily K. Scott, wrote novels and short stories for slicks and pulps. His sister, Alison Scott Skelton, is a novelist, as was her late husband, C. L. Skelton. Scott holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history, and before becoming a writer, drove boats and trucks, built Fire Island beach houses, edited an electronic engineering journal, and tended bar in a Hell’s Kitchen saloon.
Scott lives in Connecticut with his wife, filmmaker Amber Edwards.
PH-129 by Clyfford Still
BLOOD IN THE SUN
BY JUSTIN SCOTT
SUMMER, 1973
NEW YORK CITY
If you can fly, then this roof is as good as any,” Clyfford Still told Jimmy Camerano.
Jimmy was sitting on the edge of the parapet with one arm hooked around a masonry gargoyle and his legs dangling ninety feet above Tenth Street.
“Zoom from New York. Alight on a calmer island. Paint pictures undisturbed.”
Still was Jimmy’s hero, a unique painter, a founder of abstract expressionism, and a recluse who likened art galleries to brothels, museums to mausoleums, and most of his fellow artists to ambitious backstabbers. Tall, white-haired, and slick in a sharkskin suit, he stood inside the parapet, leaning on his elbows, peering down dubiously at Jimmy’s landing zone.
It was a hot, sticky night. The city had emptied out. The antique and furniture shops were shut, the sidewalks deserted, curbs empty but for a single parked car near the middle of the block. The cops had driven by once, but hadn’t noticed Jimmy overheard.
“If you can’t fly, then this roof is sufficient for a killing nosedive. But I say, emphatically, art is a force for life, not death. A painter has to live a long time.”
Jimmy was as low as he could ever remember. For all he knew he was falling already and didn’t care. Meeting his hero for the first time face-to-face made surprisingly little difference.
“Live long for what?”
“To know that art is a matter of joy.”
Easy for a god to say, thought Jimmy. In truth, he had known it himself, most of his life. Their eyes met and his mind flashed on an image of the older man wiping a dirty window with his handkerchief.
“For instance,” said Still. “That street . . .”
Jimmy followed Still’s gaze. He saw no joy in the dull light cast by a handful of windows and anemic street lamps.
A man left the telephone booth on the corner and its light went out.
“That street needs a horse.”
“What?” said Jimmy.
“What?” said Abby Whitlock, who had brought Still up to the roof and was standing beside him, safe inside the parapet.
Still said, “Jimmy, I see in your face I don’t have the words to talk you off your ledge. Abby, I’m sorry.” He turned abruptly and loped to the open stair hatch.
Abby called, “Where are you going?”
“I’ll try to show him, instead.” His crown of wild white hair floated down the steps.
Jimmy asked Abby, “Is it sheer coincidence that the god of the New York School, revered by Rothko, de Kooning, Pollack, Motherwell, and Newman—and worshipped by me since I was a kid—who split years before I hit town—shows up tonight of all nights on this roof of all roofs?”
“I called him,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I love you.” Abby reached across to touch his cheek. He flinched, thinking she would try to grab him, and flung both arms around the gargoyle. With a loud crack, it broke loose from the rotting cement, and rocked on the ledge, held in place only by its own weight.
Abby jumped back and opened both hands to show him she wouldn’t grab him. Jimmy caught his balance on the ledge. He often wondered what went through people’s minds when they fell from buildings. Now he knew. It would be all about context—suicides wondering why, murder victims still begging no, and sheer, heart-pounding disbelief for accidents.
“Why would Still come to you? He hates art dealers.”
“He knows I take care of my artists. Even the ones I don’t love.”
“What does he think about my work?”
“I would never ask. If I ever used him for business, we wouldn’t be friends.”
“What kind of friends?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“What did you tell him?”
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