Death in Detail
Page 10
“If you didn’t like your job, why didn’t you quit?”
“The thought crossed my mind a few times, but I need the money and I can’t guarantee that I’d find another job.”
“Did you live here at the house?”
“Live here? Oh no. I commute every morning. I take the bus. I think Ms. Agatha would have wanted us to live here if she thought she could have gotten away with it, but she seemed to understand that’s not done any more. She had Stephanie if she wanted anything in the middle of the night, too.”
“Do you remember the night of Ms. Agatha’s birthday?”
“Of course. I steered pretty well clear of her for most of the day because she’d been accusing me of stealing and threatening to fire me. I knew we had a dinner that night because we’d been told well in advance. We - meaning Jackie and me - have to stay late for the dinner, because the old woman expects us to wait the table. She had a big bell that she’d ring whenever she wanted anything, except of course she made Stephanie ring it for her. I remember because she and one of the family members, Henry maybe, got into an argument about it.”
“Do you remember seeing or hearing anything out of the ordinary?”
“No. Not beyond the family doing their normal arguing, that is. The old lady marched off and only her family was left at the table. They talked and drank for a while until it was very, very late. I think Hank - that’s Henry - and Jasper were the only ones left in the end.”
“Do you recall seeing anyone go near the medicine cabinet where this bottle was stored?”
“No. You have to pass by the kitchen, where we were waiting, to get at it. I think I’d have seen someone if they tried to steal it then. We were both eating dinner too, you see. We hadn’t had a chance to get dinner earlier because Gerald, the cook, needed our help in the kitchen.”
“Have you seen this object before?”
Felix handed her one of the room’s several small, smooth chess pieces.
“Yes. I’ve seen it, but it doesn’t mean anything special to me. It’s just a chess piece.”
Felix dismissed her with a brief thanks. The other maid, Jackie, entered the room shortly after Lisa left. Jackie was tall with brownish hair but otherwise dressed in much the same way as Lisa. Felix’s questions to her were short and direct.
“What is your full name?”
“Jackie Smith.”
“And how long have you been working here?”
“Too long,” she said with a sigh. “Probably about two years. I wouldn’t have stayed here, but-” she paused.
“-but?” Felix prompted.
“But that old woman was basically forcing me to stay here. Otherwise I would have left. I gather that her previous maids didn’t like her much and I don’t blame them. She was a very odd old woman at the best of times, and she often got worked up over nothing. I didn’t much like her.”
“How was she forcing you to stay here?” Felix asked.
“I had two problems. First, I was... seeing someone, except he was married. She threatened to make my life and his pretty difficult over that. Also, she knew my landlord. Actually, I heard about this job through him in the first place. He was an old family friend of hers, though he’s not quite as ancient as she is, of course. She threatened to have me chucked out if I quit.”
“I think you’ll find that’s quite illegal,” Alders said.
“Well, it doesn’t matter now that she’s dead. She paid me well enough. I can find another job, I think.”
“I take it you didn’t have a favorable impression of your employer,” Felix said.
Jackie scoffed. “No, I didn’t. She was a horrible woman. I don’t know how she knew things, but she did. She just had that sort of a weird power.”
“Do you remember her birthday, about two weeks ago?”
“Sure.”
“Did you notice anything unusual on that occasion?”
Jackie shook her head.
“Did you see anyone near the medicine box?”
Again, Jackie shook her head.
“And does this hold any special significance for you?”
He handed her a different chess piece, one of black’s knights.
She shook her head and handed the piece back.
“Very well,” Felix said. “Thank you.” And he ushered her too out of the room.
“The chess pieces were for finger prints?” Alders asked.
“Yes. I think I have everyone’s now, assuming I can get the cook’s off of some of the cookware in the kitchen. I’ll have to go back to the office to analyze them properly, of course. I have the equipment there. Ah, but first, we have a few stops to make. The pharmacy, the food bank, the coroner’s office if they’ve moved the body there, and I think, the library.”
“Why the library?”
“Because, Sam, as you so aptly pointed out, I have yet to succeed in stealing a computer for the office.”
“And the food bank? Why there?”
“I have a vague suspicion.”
Equally vague suspicions whirled through Alders’ mind at the mention of the food bank but he didn’t say anything else, instead waiting as Felix drove to and from each of the destinations in turn. About two hours later, they were sitting in the office, with a strange assortment of objects laid out on the table: a clock from the Duke of Baden, a golden globe, two separately labeled crystal glasses, the bottle of brandy, a spatula, two chess pieces, the diamond necklace, the picture locket, and, set well aside, the empty bottle of parabarbital and the mortar and pestle.
Felix had dug out an old projector, and extremely enlarged copies of ten sets of fingerprints were now dancing across one of the walls of his office.
“I know these are the family and the maids, but whose are these two?” Alders asked Felix.
Felix was scrutinizing the bottle of parabarbital under a large magnifying contraption. He answered Alders without looking up.
“They are from the pharmacists at the pharmacy. I asked around and there are only two pharmacists there. I managed to get a hold of their prints from a few bottles of medicine I convinced them to handle. I also got some very interesting information from them. They’ve had a number of break-ins from drug addicts and criminals, trying to steal addictive drugs they stock, but no one has ever stolen any parabarbital. Parabarbital is never sold on the black market, it seems, and they hardly ever distribute it, so the chances of someone having gotten an outside supply are very nearly nothing. The parabarbital that poisoned Agatha Bellinger must have come from this little bottle.”
He squinted at it, then at the ten colossal sets of finger prints, then at the bottle again.
“There are four sets of prints on here, and a fifth partial, not the three that I’d originally thought there were. One belongs to Ms. Agatha, one set belongs to Lisa, the maid, and one set belongs to Stephanie. The partial is one of the pharmacists. None of those are unexpected or unsurprising, as all of those people are meant to have handled the bottle. But the fourth set... Ah...”
Felix quickly brought the mortar and pestle, covered with the white fingerprinting powder, under the light. “And on the mortar and pestle as well. I think we’ve caught our killer. A stroke of good luck after all.”
“Who is it?”
“Ah, ah, Alders. Our deal, remember? You promised you’d let me keep my little secret.”
“You really are outrageous, you know that?”
“Relax. I won’t keep you in suspense long. Let’s go meet our murderer.”
Chapter 10
“What’s the meaning of this?” Henry yelled as Alders dragged him by the forearm into the living room. “Let go of me, you thug!”
Alders tossed him rather roughly into the nearest chair and sat down across from him.
“Mr. Henry Bellinger,” Felix said with false cheeriness. “So good of you to join us. Would you care for a drink?”
“No I would not! Why did you drag me in here? Tell your goon to stop manhandling me.”
Henry chafed. “Well, I don’t - I don’t know. I might have gone to the medicine cabinet for something, aspirin, for my headache, and touched it by accident.”
“Oh, for your headache,” said Felix, undeterred. “And then maybe you’d like to explain why your fingerprints were found on this?”
He drew away a cloth to reveal the mortar and pestle. Henry froze when he saw it.
“Well, that’s, that’s - I might have touched it -”
“The murderer wanted to find this mortar and pestle quite badly,” Felix continued. “He went through your aunt’s room on the night she died, looking for it. You know, Stephanie was holding a vigil outside her aunt’s room, but she happened to mention to us that you offered to take over for her on the night your aunt died, so you must have seen the murderer go into the room.”
“I ought to - you - I didn’t see anyone.”
“Nevermind that,” Felix said, cheerier than ever. “How’s the business going, Henry?”
“It didn’t have anything to do with the business,” he snapped, then went very white. “By which I mean...” No words came out of his mouth. Then, finally, he slumped back in his chair. “Fine,” he said. “I admit it. I killed her.”
“How?” Felix asked, his demeanor suddenly very grave. All traces of the false cheeriness had vanished.
“I had the idea on the night of her birthday dinner. After she stormed out of the room, Jasper said something about how with all these drugs she was on, she’d probably live forever. That’s when I thought to myself, those drugs could probably kill her too, if she just made a little mistake. And then I started to think that I might just poison her, and get rid of her forever.”
“It had nothing to do with the business,” he reiterated. “The business is doing well enough. We’ve had difficult straights, but we’ve recovered. It was because of what she’d said, about how I’d never live up to grandfather. Nothing was ever good enough for her. When I took over the business from father, it was on the verge of collapse. I put in some cash from my own pocket and I got it back on its feet, but it was never enough for Aunt Agatha. She wanted Bellinger to be a household name again, like it was in the time of her father, and I knew I could never make us that, so when she started shouting at us, I just sort of snapped.”
He took a deep breath.
“I drank a lot that night. Jasper and I stayed up late, talking. I waited for the maids and Jasper to go to bed, then I walked down the hallway to the medicine cabinet and started looking through her pill bottles. There was this one bottle, the parabarbital, that I remember thinking sounded vaguely sinister. One of its prescribed uses was a sleeping pill, and I knew you could kill people with sleeping pills. I went to the kitchen, where I looked for something to crush them with, and there was this little bowl with a ceramic stick. It’s the one you have there. I poured the whole bottle of pills into the bowl and I crushed them and ground them up into powder.”
Henry shot a terrified look at the mortar, then continued.
“Aunt Agatha had made tomato soup that night. No one else in the family really liked tomato soup, but she adored it. I think it’s because she grew the tomatoes herself. Anyway, I knew she would finish off what we hadn’t eaten that night. I found the leftover soup in the refrigerator in a big china tureen, and old one with a sort of flower pattern. I poured the powder into the bowl and stirred it a few times. Then I put the mortar and the empty bottle of pills back. Then I marched back down the hall to the portrait of Sebastian Virgil and tried to get it off the wall. I don’t know why I did. I was pretty drunk, and I couldn’t get it off, so I gave up. Then I just went to sleep. The next day I sort of forgot about it... convinced myself it hadn’t been real... but I started going into the kitchen every day, checking on the mortar and pestle, looking at the medicine cabinet... one day the mortar and pestle vanished and I knew Auntie must have it so I went into her room that night, but I knocked over a lamp in the dark... I ran before I found it. I didn’t realize she was dead.”
Alders jotted down the particulars of the confession with a vindictive smile, but Felix was frowning.
“You poured the whole bottle of pills into the soup.”
“Yes, the whole bottle.”
“There were none left when you finished?”
“None. The bottle was completely empty.”
“And was it full when you started?”
“Yes, I think so. It was pretty much completely full.”
“I don’t understand,” Felix said instantly. “Your aunt started preparing her own food the day after her birthday celebration. Did she ever drink this tomato soup?”
“She must have done, Felix,” Alders said, his own smile fading. “Otherwise how could she have been poisoned?”
“We need to find out for certain.” He opened the door and called, “Stephanie? Ms. Reins, in here, if you please.”
Stephanie stepped politely inside the room.
“Yes? Is Hank alright? He looks awfully pale.”
“I’m fine,” said Hank hoarsely, sinking even further down in his chair.
“Maybe he ought to have some of that brandy,” Stephanie advised.
Felix ignored this advice and instead fixed her with a piercing stare.
“Stephanie, was there leftover tomato soup from your grandmother’s birthday celebration?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said.
“What happened to it?”
“Auntie drank it.”
“When?”
“The day after. In the morning she asked me for tomato soup for breakfast and I had Gerald heat it up. Then I took it to her and she drank it.”
“All of it?”
“Oh yes, all of it. I watched her. Auntie loved tomato soup.”
Felix shook his head.
“I don’t understand.”
“What’s not to understand?” Alders asked. “She drank the soup, the soup had the drug in it, and she died.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense, Alders. She takes the entire bottle of pills, maybe a hundred, and dies two weeks later? A few hours, a day or two I could understand, but weeks?”
“So she lingered for a bit. Everyone said she was tough.”
“No, Alders, this doesn’t make sense. I am sure that Agatha was being poisoned, slowly, gradually, a few pills every day, with every meal. They made her worse and worse until they killed her. Death in Detail. If she had taken all the pills with the tomato soup then she would have died when she drank the soup. But then why didn’t she die?”
Stephanie shook her head. “I don’t see why auntie needed to take these awful sleeping pills anyway. She never had any trouble sleeping.”
“She wasn’t taking them as sleeping pills,” Felix said distractedly. “Your Aunt Agatha was taking parabarbital as anticonvulsant. Sleeping pills are taken on an as-needed -”
He stopped mid-sentence.
“Felix?” Alders asked.
“Of course,” Felix murmured, his expression suddenly dreamy. “The brilliant simplicity of it, Sam. It’s genius. You have your friend in the coroner’s office on speed dial, don’t you?”
“Yes, not that it’s something to boast about,” Alders said, then started when he saw his own cell phone in Felix’s hand. “Could you stop taking that without asking? I had to use the rotary phone last time because I thought I’d lost it.”
Felix ignored him.
“I don’t know how long I need, Alders. An hour or two at least. Get everyone together and keep an eye on Henry. He’s an attempted murderer regardless of whether or not he’s succeeded.”
Without stopping to explain himself, Felix pressed a button on the phone.
“Hello?” he said into the mouthpiece. “H
i. This is Felix Green, Sam Alders’ partner. Listen, how fast can you run a test?”
He walked out into the hallway as he talked. Alders saw him march over to the medicine cabinet and open it, taking out the box of pills. A few seconds later, Felix walked out the front door without another word, still talking on Alders’ phone, the box under one arm.
Stephanie and Henry both gave him questioning looks. Alders could only shrug.
Chapter 11
“Defeat in Detail,” Felix announced completely without warning as he marched back into the living room. The entire household was stuffed into the room. Henry hadn’t moved an inch since Felix had gone, his face as pale and white as a ghost. Jasper and Gloria were chatting in the corner, while Chester was sitting in a distant chair on his own, occasionally glancing at the room’s many clocks. Stephanie was engaged in hushed conversation with the two maids near the corner, but everyone looked up when Felix crashed through the door.
“Defeat in Detail,” Felix repeated, “is the military doctrine of accumulating a series of small victories rather than one large one to win the war. Your late Aunt Agatha scribbled the words Defeat in Detail on a piece of paper, found on the chess table. I believe this was a message to me, meant to convey her suspicions about how she was being poisoned. She believed that her killer had found a way to covertly slip her poison, one dose at a time, until she finally died. Until just a few hours ago, I believed that Henry was the murderer. He stole the parabarbital bottle from his aunt’s medicine cabinet after her birthday dinner and dumped the ground-up pills into his aunt’s soup, but failed to kill her. In doing so, he exposed a murder that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, a murder so cunning that it borders on genius. The next day, Agatha noticed that the bottle of her most powerful pills was missing and began to suspect that someone was trying to kill her.”