by Thomas Perry
“I haven’t heard. I suppose they have, though. I know about five agents were put on this case today, and they’re on overtime as of two hours ago, so they’d probably at least do that much.”
Hart’s expression didn’t change. He sat back in the seat and said nothing.
The federal office building was a relic of the era when politicians liked to remind themselves and their constituents that this was, after all, the U.S. government. The building was huge, with lots of Corinthian columns that weren’t there to support anything except the public’s awe and reverence.
Elizabeth and Hart entered through the broad portal, expecting to see the place had been empty since five o’clock. It was true that the dozens of smoked-glass doors off the foyer seemed to be locked up for the night, but there were still people coming and going, and off to the left there were five men who were unmistakably reporters sitting on one of the massive oak benches.
At the far wall was a directory of offices. The FBI was on the second floor, so they walked up the marble staircase. Elizabeth identified what had been nagging at her since she’d seen the place. It was like the buildings in Washington, with everything on a scale larger than people. The railing was too thick for a human hand to grasp, the doorways were at least ten feet high, the benches in the foyer made the reporters look like lost children. It was as though someone had taken great pains to make it clear that this was an outpost of Washington, and by no means a minor one. When they reached the second floor there was no question where they should go next. The cavernous hallway was dark and empty except for a single lighted office at the end.
Inside the office there was a single desk where a receptionist sat during the day. Agent Turnbull ushered them through the outer office and opened the door to a small room with a long conference table, where three men in shirtsleeves were talking across open file folders. Behind her Hart said, “Hello, we’re Waring and Hart.” Elizabeth decided it sounded like a company that sold expensive clothes to British gentlemen.
The men stood up and shook hands while the one at the end of the table said, “This is Bill Greenley. And Joe Mistretta. I’m Mike Lang. Have a seat, and we’ll get you caught up. It won’t take much time, because we don’t know a whole lot yet. I think Bill can do it quickest.”
Greenley was a man in his middle thirties who sounded to Elizabeth to have spent some time testifying in courtrooms. He had seemed a little uncomfortable during the obligatory amenities, and now he launched into his recitation as though it had been prepared and rehearsed in advance. “We’ve placed the time of death between 0630 and 0800 today. There was no one with the deceased at the time, but the Senator’s legislative assistant, Mr. Carlson, came to meet him for breakfast at 0800 and found him dead. The preliminary report from the autopsy says the body temperature was eighty-six degrees at 1000 today, which would mean no more than four hours. Claremont was partially dressed at the time of death.” He added parenthetically, “As though he were getting ready to go to breakfast. The preliminary report contained the observation that the cause of death was heart failure. Not damaged. Just stopped.” Greenley set aside the sheet of paper he’d been looking at and took up another.
“The secondary report indicates that the Senator’s blood contained traces of an unidentified toxic substance, which was probably introduced orally.” Greenley paused to look at Elizabeth and Hart as though he wanted to let his statement blossom in their minds before he pushed on to the next level. “The toxic substance has been determined to be the probable cause of death.”
“Does it have any competition?” asked Hart.
“No,” said Greenley. “No lumps, bruises, cuts, or signs of a struggle. Heart and circulation okay for his age, according to the coroner.”
“Have you got a lab analysis of the substances found in the room yet?”
“They’re still working on it,” said Lang. “But if you mean a simple overdose, I think not. Here’s the list of the stuff they found. The only medicine was aspirin.” He handed a sheet from another file to Elizabeth, who held it so that Hart could read it too: “Rolaids, one roll, unopened. Listerine mouthwash, four-ounce size. Polident, one box, seventeen. Aspirin, Ascriptin brand, one-hundred-tablet size. Empty glass, probably from alcoholic beverage. Glass for soaking false teeth. Deodorant, Mennen stick.”
For the first time, Elizabeth spoke. “Who’s actually in charge of the case? The Denver police?”
“Right,” said Lang. “They knew we’d be interested, and so they called us in at the start. But at least for the moment it’s theirs.”
“What are the ground rules?” asked Hart.
“As close to full cooperation as we can make it. Right now all we’re doing is laboratory work, and they’re doing the rest of it. We’ve agreed to share all information both ways. If somebody finds something that points away from Denver we take over that part of it.”
“What if it turns out to be murder?” said Elizabeth.
“The unidentified toxic substance is making that look like a possibility,” said Lang. “I don’t like it, but there’s no use hiding from it, and that’s why we asked for reinforcements this morning.” Elizabeth and Hart exchanged glances, but Lang continued. “If that’s what it is, we take full responsibility. Assassinating a senator is a federal crime.”
Elizabeth sat quietly and felt a wave of weariness come over her. Ventura seemed to be far behind her now, receding into some impassable distance composed of complications rather than mere time and space. For a while the Ventura case had begun to look hopeful, she thought. No, not hopeful, really, but so peculiar that there had to be something to it. She promised herself she wasn’t going to forget about it. But now there was this. It would have to be gotten through somehow before she could start learning about her own killer. She was surprised to find herself thinking of him in those terms, but now that she had, she accepted it. That was what he was—her own. Her first.
“So WHAT WOULD YOU like us to do while we’re waiting for the lab work?” asked Hart.
“That’s one of the things we were trying to decide when you arrived. We’ve asked for everything Washington could send us on the Senator—friends, enemies, habits, even old news stories. It’ll take time for them to dig it out, though, and it probably won’t give us anything we didn’t get from Claremont’s assistant hours ago. The best we can do at the moment is probably to put together as much of the background as we can, and figure out what to do if that toxic substance turns out to be arsenic, say, or cyanide. It might be best if you just went to your hotel and got some rest. No use all of us sitting here.”
“Or maybe to the Senator’s hotel,” said Hart. “I suppose it’s still being held pretty close by the local police. Would we step on their toes if we went over to take a look?”
“No,” said Lang. “That’s part of the deal. Joe, can you take them over? I’ll call you if the lab work comes in.”
Hart and Mistretta waited at the doorway for Elizabeth to go first, but then Mistretta edged out in front, striding down the hallway and struggling into his coat. They followed him down the stairs and along an unfamiliar back corridor that opened on a parking lot with only about a dozen cars scattered at varying distances from the building, looking forlorn and stranded. A light snow had begun to fall.
As Mistretta turned out of the lot and drove down the side street toward the Constellation Hotel, Elizabeth said, “Joe, where do you think this case will end up? Murder?”
“When you see the room you’ll be able to make up your own mind, Elizabeth,” said Mistretta. “But I won’t hedge, because an hour from now you’ll have reached the same conclusion anyway. The door was locked from inside, the window was locked from inside, there is no reason to believe anybody saw the Senator from midnight until 8:00 A.M. I think before the night is over we’ll have a lab report that the toxic substance was some kind of poison you can buy over the counter. And I think tomorrow by noon we’ll have a confidential report from the Senator’s doctors at Beth
esda Naval Medical Center saying he had terminal cancer, or an even more confidential report that he was being blackmailed, or something of that sort. Because whatever happened to him, the chances are pretty good that he did it to himself. And if I have to make an early call, I’ll go with the odds every time.”
Elizabeth thought about this for a few seconds, and then Mistretta added, “And it was poison.”
“So?” she asked. “Unusual, I’ll admit, but it happens.”
“True,” he said. “But it’s hard to find a poison that doesn’t leave the victim feeling pretty awful for an hour or two before he dies. And if he doesn’t expect to feel that way he picks up a phone and calls somebody.”
The hotel room looked as though it had been the scene of some unusually messy kind of mechanical failure. Every smooth surface was covered with a thin film of greasy black dust. The bedclothes were churned into a pile at the foot of the bed. On the rug in the center of the floor was the chalked silhouette of a human form, caught in an attitude suggesting a grotesque dance.
Elizabeth found an empty spot in the room and stood, looking around without touching anything. It was hard to imagine what the place had been like when it was occupied by living people. The police had apparently looked at everything, dusted the whole room for fingerprints, taken everything that was movable back to the laboratory for study.
Her trained mind shifted into its analytical mode and concentrated on the elements before her. The absent cups and glasses were taken care of; the body; Claremont’s luggage. She looked into the closet. His clothes were gone too. All that was left, really, were the four walls and furniture, covered with fingerprint dust. She walked to the bathroom. The U-shaped trap was gone from beneath the sink; the drainpipe ended abruptly a foot below the fixture. Even the toilet had been tampered with: the tank cover was on the floor covered with the ubiquitous black dust.
“This isn’t doing me much good,” said Elizabeth. “It doesn’t look like a hotel room anymore.”
“I know what you mean,” said Mistretta. “If there ever was anything to find in here, it’ll turn up in the lab reports. The forensics people were in here for six hours. It looks like they’ve covered everything.”
“Do you mind if we try something else?”
“Why not?” said Mistretta. “Until the final autopsy report comes in, anything’s as good as anything else.”
“Then I’d like to see another room like this one. The best thing would be an empty one on this corridor,” said Elizabeth.
“Good idea,” said Hart. He had been silent the whole time, walking around the room making notes on a pocket pad, tearing off sheets, and stuffing them into his pockets.
“Take your pick,” said Mistretta. “They’ve closed off the whole floor for the time being. They’re all empty.”
They tried the next room, but it was torn up too.
“The assistant’s room?” asked Hart.
“Right,” said Mistretta, who closed the door and led them to the next one.
Inside, Elizabeth’s imagination felt comfortable again. The room was designed to be exactly the same as the Senator’s, but it still had that peculiar air of suspension that hotel rooms seemed to have, as though somebody had been there so recently that if you turned your head quickly some relic or remnant of their personal lives would be visible for an instant. She walked around the room, opening drawers, peering into the closet, finally, focusing her attention on the bathroom. Everything gleamed with a precarious expectancy that made her want to open the seals and move things around, like walking on fresh snow. But her mind moved for her, counting and calculating and remembering.
When she returned to the bedroom Hart was kneeling in the open doorway scrutinizing the locks. He said, to nobody in particular, “Not much to stop anybody if the deadbolt wasn’t in.”
Mistretta said, “No good. The assistant says their bags were with them from the time they left the airport, and they didn’t go out after they got here. When he left the Senator threw the bolt. In the morning they had to call the maintenance man with an electromagnetic gizmo to open it up. That didn’t work either because the fit was too tight, so they drilled it.”
Elizabeth wondered why she hadn’t seen that, but apparently Hart hadn’t either. It wasn’t much comfort, she realized, as she walked to the window.
Mistretta saw her fiddling with the latch and said, “That’s been checked too. There’s a little wear on the molding, but the lock is working perfectly. No prints on the inside handle, and no handle on the outside.”
Elizabeth went out onto the balcony. It was really night now and an icy wind clutched at her hair and the skirt of her coat. She looked around at the identical balconies, beside her and above and below. No, it was probably too farfetched. Four floors below her was the parking lot, where the cars were only shiny-colored rectangles with no depth to them. Somebody who wanted to kill a senator could do it in a thousand ways that didn’t involve swinging on a rope that high up in the cold. Might as well ask, anyway.
Elizabeth came in and shut the window. The air in the room seemed unnaturally still and quiet and warm. “What about the balcony?” she asked. “Any way to tell if anyone was on it?”
“Not much point to it, since the lock would have kept him in the cold anyway,” said Mistretta, “but they checked it. There wasn’t anything much. No prints on the railings, no rope marks, nothing on the glass except the usual smudges and a couple of spots where the maid had given it a quick swipe with a dustrag.”
Elizabeth said, “Wait a minute. Let’s go take a look.”
Mistretta shrugged and followed her back to the Senator’s room. Hart appeared to be unaware of them; he was now in the bathroom, kneeling beside the bathtub and studying the drain.
Elizabeth went directly to the Senator’s window, walked out to the balcony, and looked back into the lighted room. There was a thin film of dust over the whole surface of the glass, dappled with lighter dots where fingers had touched it. But in two places about two and a half feet apart, there were clean spots, where someone had brushed a cloth in a circular motion. She came back inside.
“Joe, the whole window is covered with prints and smudges and dust, except those two places. The one we were in before doesn’t have any clean spots.”
The telephone rang, and it startled her. “Hello?” she said, far too loud.
“Mike Lang here.”
“Yes, Mike,” said Elizabeth.
“I think it’s going to be a long night. The poison turned out to be curare, of all things. It’s in the glass where he soaked his dentures, in the dentures, and no place else. No container anywhere, either, and the Polident box is clean.”
“So it is murder,” said Elizabeth.
“I hate to pin it down that tight, but I’m damned if I see any other explanation. He couldn’t have carried curare in without a container, and a man doesn’t kill himself with his own false teeth. At least not if he’s got any sense of dignity.”
“No. But curare? Are you sure? It’s not exactly the American murderer’s favorite form of poison, is it?”
“Of course I’m sure. And I don’t have anything else to tell you that’ll make it seem sensible. But at this point I’d be willing to listen to anything anybody else has.”
“I think there’s a chance somebody came in from the balcony,” said Elizabeth. “We’re not sure yet, but it looks as though somebody had both hands on the glass, about chest high.”
“You mean they got prints on it?” asked Lang. “Terrific!”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “That’s just it. Somebody wiped the glass off. Nobody who works for a hotel would wipe two spots on a six-by-eight-foot window. They’d wash it or forget it. And no guest would wipe the outside of a window for any reason.”
“Is Mistretta with you?”
“Yes, he’s right here.”
“Then let me talk to him.”
Elizabeth handed the phone to Joe, who listened intently for a few seconds
and then said, “Yeah, it’s possible she’s right, but we’re still looking it over.”
He listened again, then said, “The police didn’t think so. No. Too obvious, I guess. The window latch was the first thing they went for after the corpse was moved. They said no indication of forced entry.”
He was silent for a moment. “Yeah, that too. Of course. We’ll keep you posted.”
Mistretta hung up and chuckled. “That’s something, isn’t it?” he said to Elizabeth. “We earn our pay on this one all right. Which do you want to work on first? Proving a man came in through the locked fourth-floor window because there are no fingerprints, or figuring out how he arrived at the idea of using curare on the old guy’s false teeth when he got here? I don’t suppose the MO file will help much on this one, unless it was a South American pygmy we’re looking for.” He shook his head and the false bravado began to fade.
Elizabeth wasn’t looking at him, though. She was standing before the window with both hands in front of her. “Pygmies don’t live in South America,” she muttered absently, staring at her reflection.
“I suppose we’d better get the forensics people back up here,” he said, picking up the telephone again.
Elizabeth didn’t turn, just said, “Yes. I’d like to be here when they come.” She’d never noticed that before, she thought. When you press your palms against a flat surface, the tips of your fingers are just exactly shoulder height. If you allowed for shoe soles, five foot ten? Six feet? They’d measure it, though. You could always count on them to measure.
Hart came into the room, bringing with him his notepad, still scribbling on it. He said, “I heard a phone ring. Was it the lab report?”
“That’s right,” said Elizabeth. “It was curare that was put into the glass where he soaked his dentures, believe it or not. Mixed with his Polident.”
“What’s the report on the rest of his stuff? Any curare or containers for it?” He seemed to Elizabeth to be hiding his surprise at the poison and it annoyed her a little. How could he not be surprised?
