by Ed McBain
Sandra looked around the room and her eyes seemed mournful again. But he decided it was in fact anger. She said icily, “You will he hearing from my litigation partner, Detective Simms. Shut the lights out when you leave, unless the county’s going to be paying the electric bill.”
∞
“I’m getting coffee, Boss. You want some?”
“Sure, thanks,” he told Shellee.
It was the next morning and Tal was continuing to pore over the material he’d collected. Some new information had just arrived: the Whitleys’ phone records for the past month, the autopsy results, and the handwriting analysis of the suicide note.
He found nothing immediately helpful about the phone records and set them aside, grimacing as he looked for someplace to rest them. There wasn’t any free space on his desk and so he stacked them, as orderly as he could, on top of another stack. It made him feel edgy, the mess, but there wasn’t anything else he could do, short of moving a table or another desk into his office—and he could imagine the ribbing he’d take for that.
Data plural. . . humping his calculator. . .
Tal looked over the handwriting expert’s report first. The woman said that she could state with 98 percent certainty that Sam Whitley had written the note, though the handwriting had been unsteady and the spelling flawed, which was unusual for a man of his education.
The garage is filled with dangrous fumes.
This suggested some impairment, possible severe, she concluded.
Tal turned to the autopsy results. Death was, as they’d thought, due to carbon monoxide poisoning. There were no contusions, tissue damage, or ligature marks to suggest they’d been forced into the car. There was alcohol in the blood, .010 percent in Sam’s system, 0.019 in Elizabeth’s, neither particularly high. But they both had medication in their bloodstreams too.
Present in both victims were unusually large quantities of 9-fluoro, 7-chloro-l, 3-dihydro-l-methyl-5-phenyl-2H-1,4-benzodiazepin, 5-hydroxytryptamine and N-(l-phenethyl-4-piperidyl) propionanilide citrate.
This was, the M.E.’s report continued, an analgesic/anti-anxiety drug sold under the trade name Luminux. The amount in their blood meant that the couple had recently taken nearly three times the normally prescribed strength of the drug, though, it did not, the M.E. concluded, make them more susceptible to carbon monoxide poisoning or otherwise directly contribute to their deaths.
Looking over his desk—too goddamn many papers!—he finally found another document and carefully read the inventory of the house, which the Crime Scene Unit had prepared. The Whitleys had plenty of medicine—for Sam’s heart problem, as well as for Elizabeth’s arthritis and other maladies—but no Luminux.
Shellee brought him the coffee. Her eyes cautiously took in the cluttered desktop.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
“Still lookin’ tired, Boss.”
“Didn’t sleep well.” Instinctively he pulled his striped tie straight, kneaded the knot to make sure it was tight.
“It’s fine, Boss,” she whispered, nodding at his shirt. Meaning: Quit fussing.
He winked at her.
Thinking about common denominators . . .
The Bensons’ suicide note too had been sloppy, Tal recalled. He rummaged though the piles on his desk and found their lawyer’s card then dialed the man’s office and was put through to him.
“Mr. Metzer, this’s Detective Simms. I met you at the Bensons’ a few days ago.”
“Right. I remember.”
“This is a little unusual but I’d like permission to take a blood sample.”
“From me?” he asked in a startled voice.
“No, no, from the Bensons.”
“Why?”
He hesitated, then decided to go ahead with the lie. “I’d like to update our database about medicines and diseases of recent suicides. It’ll be completely anonymous.”
“Oh. Well, sorry, but they were cremated this morning.”
“They were? That was fast.”
“I don’t know if it was fast or it was slow. But that’s what they wanted. It was in their instructions to me. They wanted to be cremated as soon as possible and the contents of the house sold—”
“Wait. You’re telling me—”
“—the contents of the house sold immediately.”
“When’s that going to happen?”
“It’s probably already done. We’ve had dealers in the house since Sunday morning. I don’t think there’s much left.”
Tal remembered the man at the Whitleys’ house—there to arrange for the liquidation of the estate. He wished he’d known about declaring 2124s when he’d been to the Bensons’ house.
Common denominators . . .
“Do you still have the suicide note?”
“I didn’t take it. I imagine it was thrown out when the service cleaned the house.”
This’s all way too fast, Tal thought. He looked over the papers on his desk. “Do you know if either of them was taking a drug called Luminux?”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“Can you give me Mr. Benson’s cardiologist’s name?”
A pause then the lawyer said, “I suppose it’s okay. Yeah. Dr. Peter Brody. Over in Glenstead.”
Tal was about to hang up but then a thought occurred to him. “Mr. Metzer, when I met you on Friday, didn’t you tell me the Bensons weren’t religious?”
“That’s right. They were atheists. . . . What’s this all about, Detective?”
“Like I say—just getting some statistics together. That’s all. Thanks for your time.”
He got Dr. Brody’s number and called the doctor’s office. The man was on vacation and his head nurse was reluctant to talk about patients, even deceased ones. She did admit, though, that Brody had not prescribed Luminux for them.
Tal then called the head of Crime Scene and learned that the gun the Bensons had killed themselves with was in an evidence locker. He asked that Latents look it over for prints. “Can you do a rush on it?”
“Happy to. It’s comin’ outa your budget, Detective,” the man said cheerfully. “Be about ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Thanks.”
As he waited for the results on the gun, Tal opened his briefcase and noticed the three letters Sandra Whitley had in her purse at her parents’ house. Putting on a pair of latex gloves once again, he ripped open the three envelopes and examined the contents.
The first one contained a bill from their lawyer for four hours of legal work, performed that month. The project, the bill summarized, was for “estate planning services.”
Did he mean redoing the will? Was this another common denominator? Metzer had said that the Bensons had just redone theirs.
The second letter was an insurance form destined for the Cardiac Support Center at Westbrook Hospital, where Sam had been a patient.
Nothing unusual here.
But then he opened the third letter.
He sat back in his chair, looking at the ceiling then down at the letter once more.
Debating.
Then deciding that he didn’t have any choice. When you’re writing a mathematical proof you go anywhere the numbers take you. Tal rose and walked across the office, to the Real Crimes side of the pen. He leaned into an open door and knocked on the jamb. Greg LaTour was sitting back in his chair, boots up. He was reading a document. “Fucking liar,” he muttered and put a large check mark next to one of the paragraphs. Looking up, he cocked an eyebrow.
Humping his calculator. . .
Tal tried to be pleasant. “Greg. You got a minute?”
“Just.”
“I want to talk to you about the case.”
“Case?” The man frowned. “Which case?”
“The Whitleys.”
“Who?”
“The suicides.”
“From Sunday? Yeah, okay. Drew a blank. I don’t think of suicides as cases.” LaTour’s meaty hand grabbed another piece of paper. He looked down at it.<
br />
“You said that the cleaning lady’d probably been there? She’d left the glove prints? And the tire treads.”
It didn’t seem that he remembered at first. Then he nodded. “And?”
“Look.” He showed LaTour the third letter he’d found at the Whitleys. It was a note to Esmerelda Constanzo, the Whitleys’ cleaning lady, thanking her for her years of help and saying they wouldn’t be needing her services any longer. They’d enclosed the check that LaTour had spotted in the register.
“They’d put the check in the mail,” Tal pointed out. “That means she wasn’t there the day they died. Somebody else wore the gloves. And I got to thinking about it? Why would a cleaning lady wear kitchen gloves to clean the rest of the house? Doesn’t make sense.”
LaTour shrugged. His eyes dipped to the document on his desk and then returned once more to the letter Tal held.
The statistician added, “And that means the car wasn’t hers either. The tread marks. Somebody else was there around the time they died.”
“Well, Tal—”
“Couple other things,” he said quickly. “Both the Whitleys had high amounts of a prescription drug in their bloodstream. Some kind of narcotic. Luminux. But there were no prescription bottles for it in their house. And their lawyer’d just done some estate work for them. Maybe revising their wills.”
“You gonna kill yourself, you gonna revise your will. That ain’t very suspicious.”
“But then I met the daughter.”
“Their daughter?”
“She broke into the house, looking for something. She’d pocketed the mail but she might’ve been looking for something else. Maybe she got scared when she heard we didn’t buy the suicide—”
“You. Not we.”
Tal continued, “And she wanted to get rid of any evidence about the Luminux. I didn’t search her. I didn’t think about it at the time.”
“What’s this with the drugs? They didn’t OD.”
“Well, maybe she got them doped up, had them change their will and talked them into killing themselves.”
“Yeah, right,” LaTour muttered. “That’s outa some bad movie.”
Tal shrugged. “When I mentioned murder she freaked out.”
“Murder? Why’d you mention murder?” He scratched his huge belly, looking for the moment just like his nickname.
“I meant murder-suicide. The husband turning the engine on.”
LaTour gave a grunt—Tal hadn’t realized that you could make a sound like that condescending.
“And, you know, she had this attitude.”
“Well, now, Tal, you did send her parents to the county morgue. You know what they do to you there, don’tcha? Knives and saws. That’s gotta piss the kid off a little, you know.”
“Yes, she was pissed. But mostly, I think, ‘cause I was there, checking out what’d happened. And you know what she didn’t seem upset about?”
“What’s that?”
“Her parents. Them dying. She seemed to be crying. But I couldn’t tell. It could’ve been an act.”
“She was in shock. Skirts get that way.”
Tal persisted, “Then I checked on the first couple. The Bensons? They were cremated right after they died and their estate liquidated in a day or two.”
“Liquidated?” LaTour lifted an eyebrow and finally delivered a comment that was neither condescending nor sarcastic. “And cremated that fast, hm? Seems odd, yeah. I’ll give you that.”
“And the Bensons’ lawyer told me something else. They were atheists, both of them. But their suicide note said they’d be together forever or something like that. Atheists aren’t going to say that. I’m thinking maybe they might’ve been drugged too. With that Luminux.”
“What does their doctor?—”
“No, he didn’t prescribed it. But maybe somebody slipped it to them. Their suicide note was unsteady too, sloppy, just like the Whitleys’.”
“What’s the story on their doctor?”
“I haven’t got that far yet.”
“Maybe, maybe, maybe.” LaTour squinted. “But that gardener we talked to at the Benson place? He said they’d been boozing it up. You did the blood work on the Whitleys. They been drinking?”
“Not too much. . . . Oh, one other thing. I called their cell phone company and checked the phone records—the Whitleys’. They received a call from a pay phone forty minutes before they died. Two minutes long. Just enough time to see if they’re home and say you’re going to stop by. And who calls from pay phones anymore? Everybody’s got cells, right?”
Reluctantly LaTour agreed with this.
“Look at it, Greg: Two couples, both rich, live five miles from each other. Both of ’em in the country club set. Both husbands have heart disease. Two murder-suicides a few days apart. What do you think about that?”
In a weary voice LaTour asked, “Outliers, right?”
“Exactly.
“You’re thinking the bitch—”
“Who?” Tal asked.
“The daughter.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m not gonna quote you in the press, Tal.”
“Okay,” he conceded, “she’s a bitch.”
“You’re thinking she’s got access to her folks, there’s money involved. She’s doing something funky with the will or insurance.”
“It’s a theorem.”
“A what?” LaTour screwed up his face.
“It’s a hunch is what I’m saying.”
“Hunch. Okay. But you brought up the Bensons. The Whitley daughter isn’t going to off them now, is she? I mean, why would she?”
Tal shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s the Bensons’ goddaughter and she was in their will too. Or maybe her father was going into some deal with Benson that’d tie up all the estate money so the daughter’d lose out and she had to kill them both.”
“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” LaTour repeated.
Shellee appeared in the doorway and, ignoring LaTour, said, “Latents called. They said the only prints on the gun were the Bensons’ and a few smears from cloth or paper.”
“What fucking gun?” he asked.
“I will thank you not to use that language to me,” Shellee said icily.
“I was talking to him,” LaTour snapped and cocked an eyebrow at Tal.
Tal said, “The gun the Bensons killed themselves with. Smears—like on the Whitleys’ suicide note.”
Shellee glanced at the wall poster behind the desk then back to the detective. Tal couldn’t tell whether the distasteful look was directed at LaTour himself or the blonde in a red-white-and-blue bikini lying provocatively across the seat and teardrop gas tank of the Harley. She turned and walked back to her desk quickly, as if she’d been holding her breath while she was inside the cop’s office.
“Okay. . . . This’s getting marginally fucking interesting.” LaTour glanced at the huge gold watch on his wrist. “I gotta go. I got some time booked at the range. Come with me. Let’s go waste some ammunition, talk about the case after.”
“Think I’ll stay here.”
LaTour frowned, apparently unable to understand why somebody wouldn’t jump at the chance to spend an hour punching holes in a piece of paper with a deadly weapon. “You don’t shoot?”
“It’s just I’d rather work on this.”
Then enlightenment dawned. Tal’s office was, after all on the Unreal Crimes side of the pen. He had no interest in cop toys.
You’re the best at what you do, statistician. Man, that’s a hard job. . . . “Okay,” LaTour said. “I’ll check out the wills and the insurance policies. Gimme the name of the icees.”
“The?—”
“The corpses, the stiffs . . . the losers who killed ‘emselves, Tal. And their lawyers.”
Tal wrote down the information and handed the neat note to LaTour, who stuffed it into his plaid shirt pocket behind two large cigars. He ripped open a desk drawer and took out a big, chrome automatic pistol.
“Get a P-I-I team and—”
“A what?”
“You go to the same academy as me, Tal? Post-Incident Interviewing team,” he said as if he was talking to a three-year-old. “Use my name and Doherty’ll put one together for you. Have ’em talk to all the neighbors around the Bensons’ and the Whitleys’ houses. See if they saw anybody around just before or after the TOD. Oh, that’s—”
“Time of death.”
LaTour gave him a thumbs up. “We’ll talk this afternoon. I’ll see you back here, how’s four?”
“Sure. Oh, and maybe we should find out what kind of car the Whitleys’ daughter drove. See if the wheelbase data match.”
“That’s good thinking, Tal,” he said, looking honestly impressed. Grabbing some boxes of 9mm cartridges, LaTour walked heavily out of the Detective Division.
Tal returned to his desk and arranged for the P-I-I team. Then he called DMV, requesting information on Sandra Whitley’s car. He glanced at his watch. One P.M. He realized he was hungry; he’d missed his regular lunch with his buddies from the university. He walked down to the small canteen on the second floor, bought a cheese sandwich and a diet soda and returned to his desk. As he ate he continued to pore over the pages of the crime scene report and the documents and other evidence he himself had collected at the house.
Shellee walked past his office, then stopped fast and returned. She stared at him then barked a laugh.
“What?” he asked.
“This is too weird, you eating at your desk.”
Hadn’t he ever done that? he wondered. He asked her.
“No. Not once. Ever. . . . And here you are, going to crimescenes, cluttering up your desk. . . . Listen, Boss, on your way home?”
“Yes?”
“Watch out for flying pigs. The sky’s gotta be full of ’em today.”
______
“Hi,” Tal said to the receptionist.
Offering her a big smile. Why not? She had sultry, doe eyes, a heart-shaped face and the slim, athletic figure of a Riverdance performer.
