Recipe for Homicide, page 5
The doorman came down the steps of the clubhouse, followed by the bantam boss of Barzac Canneries. Eugene Evans’s bald head seemed to reflect his glistening shirt front. Gilmore got out of his car, but he left his engine running. In his present state of mind, it seemed indecent to shut it off. The purr of the idling motor, the metronome beat of the windshield wiper, were part of his driving sense of urgency.…
“Well, Gilmore, what’s the trouble?” Evans asked.
“She’s dead, Mr. Evans,” Gilmore blurted.
“What? Who’s dead?”
“Peggy. She died half an hour ago. Peggy Bayliss.”
“Oh yes, Miss Bayliss. That’s our Home Economist. I heard she’d been taken ill today. Too bad.”
“What are you going to do about it, Mr. Evans?” Gilmore was surprised by the strident inflection of his own voice.
“Do? Why, we’ll take care of the funeral, of course, if the girl has no family. She’s been with us for some years, hasn’t she? You’ll arrange for the flowers, won’t vou, Gilmore? Don’t spare the expense.”
Evans pivoted to place one foot on the bottom step, as though he considered the interview at an end. Gilmore seized his arm.
“I didn’t come here to discuss flowers, Mr. Evans,” he said. “You know that.”
Mr. Evans sneezed. He produced a silk handkerchief with a flourish like a magician materializing a bouquet out of thin air. He patted his little mustache and sneezed again. Then he said:
“Look here, Gilmore, I’m catching pneumonia out here. Let’s talk about this in the morning.”
“It can’t wait till morning.”
“Why not?”
“Because this morning Peggy Bayliss ate half a can of our field rations. Because tonight Peggy is dead.”
Mr. Evans, who was about to furl his silk handkerchief with ceremony befitting the national ensign at sundown, paused to stare at Gilmore with strange, startled eyes.
“Because,” Gilmore continued, “when the Army hears about this—”
“I see your point, Gilmore.” Evans interrupted with a sudden, final flourish of his handkerchief. “I’ll get my hat and coat.”
As soon as Gilmore’s car was rolling away from the lights of the Country Club, Evans said: “Peggy was a close friend of yours, wasn’t she, Gilmore? You’re upset.”
Gilmore swung his car from the driveway to the highway with a savage twist of the wheel. “If I were in your shoes, Mr. Evans,” he said, “I wouldn’t be just upset. I’d be in a blue swivet. I’d be sweating ice water.”
“I don’t understand, Gilmore.”
“Until I knew whether or not Peggy Bayliss was poisoned.”
“That seems unlikely. Why would anyone poison Peggy? Besides, she’s been suffering from digestive disorders for a year—the occupational disease of the home economist, I suppose. The doctor says she probably had a perforated ulcer.”
Gilmore thought: So he has been worrying! He’s been asking questions. He knows that the death certificate reads, “Perforated viscus.”
“What doctor, Mr. Evans?” he asked.
“Why, the plant physician. When I heard she’d been taken to the hospital, I sent our man over to see if he could do anything.”
“Like signing the death certificate, Mr. Evans—so there would be no investigation?”
“See here, Gilmore, are you trying to stir up trouble?”
Stir up trouble? Gilmore thought. We’ve got trouble right now. “I was just wondering,” he said, “what I’m supposed to tell the press if the boys come around to accuse us of sending poisoned or tainted rations to the Army?”
“There’s no evidence that the rations are poisoned,” Evans insisted. “Just because one girl dies is no reason—”
“Then let’s get the evidence that the rations are not poisoned,” Gilmore said. “Let’s call back the carload that’s rolling toward the Pacific Coast.”
“Two carloads.” Evans sighed. “How would I explain the delay to the Army? What will G-4 think?”
Gilmore thought, This isn’t a case for G-4 any longer. It’s a case for G-2 now. A carload of poisoned rations could do more damage to a division in the field than a hundred jet planes. He said: “Hasn’t it occurred to you, Mr. Evans, that those rations may have been deliberately and maliciously poisoned as an act of war?”
“No,” said Mr. Evans, “it hasn’t.”
“Why don’t you call in the F.B.I., Mr. Evans?”
The general manager of the Barzac Soup Company seemed to be having a seizure of some kind. He exhaled loudly, his body stiffened, he had trouble in turning to face Gilmore as he said in a strained voice: “Good Lord, Gilmore! Be reasonable. Do you want to wreck the firm completely? Ever since the change-over, Barzac stock has been pretty shaky. And if the Army ever canceled our contract, the scandal would knock the pins right out from under us. The big stockholders would all unload and—”
“And you’d rather risk poisoning a thousand G.I.’s on some battlefield—and have vour scandal then?”
“No, of course not, Gilmore. But I should be hearing from the F.B.I. any moment now. I wrote them about another matter not long ago.…”
“Yes, I know. Chris Froley. It may all tie up. But why wait? Why not demonstrate that we’ve taken all precautions? Let’s impound every ounce of rations that ever left the can line. Let’s have it analyzed, batch by batch. Let’s have poor Peggy autopsied. Let’s be sure; one way or the other.”
“Well, possibly—if it could be done discreetly,” Evans said. “I’ll think about it overnight.”
“You’ll have to act now, Mr. Evans. Peggy’s ex-husband came down from Chicago tonight. He was at the hospital when she died. Once he claims the body, things will be a lot tougher to do quietly.”
“What do you suggest, Gilmore?”
“I’ve already got Bayliss to sign a permission for a postmortem, and I have it in my pocket. There’s a damned fine pathologist at Pasteur Hospital, a swell guy who also happens to be a brilliant scientist. His name is Dan Coffee, and I suggest you get him on the job at once—if he’ll take it.”
“Isn’t it rather an unusual hour to discuss a matter like this with a perfect stranger?”
“Let’s find out right now, Mr. Evans,” Gilmore said. He pulled up at the curb and shut off his motor. “Here’s where Dr. Coffee lives.”
VI
Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee, chief pathologist for Pasteur Hospital, sat propped up in bed, reading Manson’s Tropical Diseases. The blankets were thrown back, and the sheet made a tent over his angular knees directly opposite his jutting chin. He had just returned from dinner and bridge at the house of a surgeon whose wife had been trying desperately, by social means, to influence the pathologist to cease and desist from the criticism of her husband’s handiwork, which she had been told Dr. Coffee was not loath to make at staff meetings at Pasteur. Unfortunately, the surgeon’s wife was neither a good cook nor a good bridge player, so it was unlikely that Dr. Coffee’s opinion of the surgeon as a better businessman than a self-appointed diagnostician would be altered. Dr. Coffee loved good food and the sound, scientific practice of medicine. He detested mercenary physicians, surgeons, and bridge players.
“I was right, Julia,” he said to his wife, who was sitting in front of her dressing table, doing things to her mahogany-red hair. “Dr. Potter was cockeyed, as I suspected. I was right.”
“You were wrong, Dan,” said Mrs. Coffee, speaking around a mouthful of bobby-pins. “You shouldn’t have passed that Blackwood four no-trump.”
“The hell with Blackwood,” Dan Coffee said. “Potter was boasting about this strange new oriental disease he’d discovered in a G.I. just back from the Far East—something with a Japanese name—Odan-eki. From the jaundice and other symptoms I told him I’d bet it was the same as Weil’s disease. And it is. It’s caused by a spirochete.”
“You know, Dan,” said Julia Coffee, rubbing cream into the little folds under the corners of her jaw, “sometimes I think you should take up Canasta. You won’t have a friend left if you keep on passing a forcing two-bid while dreaming about microorganisms.”
“I’ll phone Potter in the morning and ask him to send me a blood sample. I’ll bet him a bottle of V.S.O.P. brandy that a dark-field microscope will show Leptospirae in the serum.”
“Dan,” his wife began, “if I were you—” The ringing of the doorbell interrupted her advice. “Who can that be at this time of night?” she wondered aloud.
“Probably the Fuller Brush man,” Dr. Coffee said. “Let’s pretend we’re not home.”
The bell rang again, long and loudly and with insistence. Julia Coffee wadded a bit of tissue and dropped it into the wastebasket. Then she stepped to the window and peered between shade and frame. She squinted through the rainy darkness at the coupé standing at the curb, then shifted her position so she could see the doorway. Three more long, clanging peals echoed through the house.
“There are two men at the door,” she said. “One of them looks familiar, but I don’t quite recognize him. The other one seems to be wearing dinner clothes. I guess you’d better go down.”
Dr. Coffee closed his book with an impatient snap. He gave his unruly straw-colored hair a cursory combing with his long, slender fingers. Then he groaned, got up, and put on his dark blue dressing gown.
The doorbell rang again four times while he was on his way downstairs. He opened the door a few inches with a curt, “Yes. What is it?”
“Sorry, Doctor, but we’ve got to come in,” said the man in the sports jacket, pushing against the door. He was a young man, but his tired smile, sharp rictus folds, and deep apologetic frown made him look old and wise and harried. Dr. Coffee liked his earnest, deep-set eyes and his square determined chin. There was something pleasantly familiar about them.
“I’m Robert Gilmore,” said the young man, “of Barzac Canneries.”
“Barzac Soup Kitchens,” said the gray little man in the dinner jacket, who stood at Gilmore’s elbow.
“You probably don’t remember me,” Gilmore continued, ignoring the interruption, “but we met at the plant just before Louise Barzac sold out her interests. You were called in when Stoneman, the general manager, got himself deceased.”
“Of course,” said Dr. Coffee. “That was the time that patent attorney tried to frame the paratroop officer who wanted to marry Louise.…”
“He married her,” Gilmore said, “but he refused to marry the cannery. Doctor, this is Mr. Eugene Evans, the present general manager at Barzac.”
Dr. Coffee nodded his acknowledgment of the introduction. Then he opened the door wide. “Come in,” he said.
“Good of you to let us disturb you at this hour,” Evans said. “But we may be in trouble.”
“Personally?” asked Dr. Coffee. “Or the cannery—again?”
“Well, we don’t know exactly,” Evans said. “We thought you might be able—”
“One of our people died at Pasteur Hospital tonight,” Gilmore broke in. “I think she was poisoned. Mr. Evans doesn’t. But he’s agreed to engage you to find out. Will you take the case?”
Dr. Coffee snapped on the lights in the living room. “Sit down,” he said, “and tell me more.”
Gilmore recited the details of Peggy Bayliss’s illness following the eating of the field rations. At Dr. Coffee’s request, he described the symptoms as best he could.
“You say the light hurt her eyes,” the pathologist said. “Did she find it difficult to keep her eyes open? Did the eyelids droop?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Was there any paralysis or constriction of the throat muscles? Did she have difficulty in swallowing?”?
“She complained of a sore throat,” Gilmore said. “She also said her legs hurt. She had cramps in the calves of both legs.”
“That may be indicative.” Dr. Coffee frowned thoughtfully. “Unfortunately, it is indicative of a number of things.”
“How long will it take you to find out the truth, Doctor?” Mr. Evans asked.
“That depends entirely on what killed Miss Bayliss. We’ll make cultures, of course, and some of them may have to incubate for three weeks before we can inject guinea pigs.”
“Three weeks!”
“On the other hand, the gross autopsy may give us a pretty clear picture. There may be characteristic lesions. For instance, we usually find tiny, scattered hemorrhages at the base of the brain and in the cord in cases of botulism.”
“Botulism?” Mr. Evans was shocked. “I’ll guarantee she didn’t die of botulism.”
“It’s true that death from botulism doesn’t usually occur quite so rapidly,” the pathologist admitted. “Still, in an atypical case—”
“I’ll guarantee that you can’t find a Bacillus botulinus in any food produced by Barzac—or any other reputable cannery in America.”
“You see, Doctor,” said Gilmore, quoting from a pamphlet he had written when the delegates to the State Medical Society convention had visited the Barzac plant, “we know there are twenty-odd types of spores that survive the heat of ordinary pasteurization. That’s why our products undergo extra sterilization by super-heated steam at twenty degrees above the boiling point. So—”
“I understand that, Gilmore,” Dr. Coffee interrupted. “But we must always consider the possibility of carelessness—or even of sabotage, since the food was intended for the Army. Suppose the heat was deliberately lowered below the safety point?”
“Exactly!” Gilmore beamed. “That’s why I was so anxious to get you on this case, Doctor. Will you take it?”
Dr. Coffee crossed his long legs and tugged pensively at the lobe of his right ear. “Why, yes,” he said at last, “I’ll take the case on two conditions. First, in addition to my own fee, you’ll pay Pasteur Hospital whatever laboratory charges are necessary, and they may be considerable. I say this because I know you have your own lab over at Barzac, and I insist on having all tests and analyses under my own direct supervision. And second, that if my findings are positive, there will be no hesitation about calling in the police.”
“Now wait a minute, Doctor,” Mr. Evans protested. “The reason we’ve come to you is that we don’t want the police in on this. There’s a strong possibility that there’s nothing sinister in this case at all. After all, Miss Bayliss did have occasional digestive disorders. The doctor who signed the death certificate said she had acute gastritis and probably died of a perforated something-or-other.”
“Perforated viscus?” Dr. Coffee supplied the word. “The autopsy will show that, of course.”
“Of course. That’s why we want you—not the police.”
“In that case, you’ll pardon me if I go back to bed,” the pathologist said, getting up. “You have a death certificate, so there’ll be no trouble. I thought you wanted the truth. Goodnight, gentlemen.”
“Don’t misunderstand me, Doctor,” Mr. Evans seized Dr. Coffee’s arm. “Of course we want the truth. But we don’t want to wreck the Barzac Soup Kitchens, do we?”
“Mr. Evans,” the pathologist said earnestly, “nobodv in Northbank wishes Barzac bad luck. You have a payroll of several thousand families. That means a lot to Northbank, and anybody with any civic sense—and that includes the police force—will go out of his way to protect you against malicious gossip and unfounded rumors. I think I can promise you that any official investigation will be conducted with discretion. But if you are going to try to cover up a possible case of sabotage against our armed forces—well, I’m only sorry you consulted me professionally. I’m going to have an awful tough debate between ethics and conscience.”
Mr. Evans seemed to be having an equally tough debate going on inside him. He was grayer than ever, his face was beaded with perspiration, and he appeared about to go into his sneezing routine. While his right hand whisked his silk handkerchief across his brow, his left seemed to be fumbling for his trusted inhaler.
Gilmore deemed that the time had come for intervention.
“Doctor, there’s no question about Mr. Evans trying to cover up if the case involves justice or national security,” he said. “When we came here tonight, he was decided to ask you to take the case—without strings. Right, Mr. Evans?”
“Naturally,” said Mr. Evans. “Will you help, Doctor?”
“I’ll be at the hospital at seven in the morning for the autopsy,” Dr. Coffee said. “I’ll want several cans of that suspected food at the same time. I’ll phone you as soon as I have anything to report.”
Gilmore drove Mr. Evans back to the Country Club in complete mutual silence. As he got out under the porte-cochère, Mr. Evans said: “Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Gilmore. You are quite right. It’s terribly important. And I know I can count on your discretion. Goodnight.”
“You don’t have to worry about me, Mr. Evans. Goodnight.”
As he turned his car around, Gilmore saw several people coming down the steps of the club. Out of the corner of his eye, he recognized Bart Remington, the model of an Esquire fashion plate, talking to Mr. Evans. He was not quite as sure of the identity of the woman in evening dress standing right behind Remington, but he was reasonably certain it was Barbara Wall.
Gilmore did not go home directly. He drove around for half an hour for no particular reason except that he wanted to think, and he thought well behind the wheel of a car, going nowhere.
When he finally rolled into his own driveway, he was puzzled to note that the garage doors were closed. He always left them open when he went to work in the morning. He set his emergency brake and started to get out to open the doors. Then he changed his mind. He was probably over-jittery, he told himself, but there was no good reason for him to walk boldly into the glare of his own headlights.
