Recipe for Homicide, page 9
Quickly he rolled down the window to let in the morning. Pull up your socks, Gilmore, he told himself. Sure, Peggy’s death knocked you for a double loop, but the funeral’s over now. You’ve been to funerals before without getting hot flashes or cold occult premonitions. Be yourself, Gilmore. Take a deep breath.
He inhaled slowly, but he still did not turn the ignition key or press down on the starter. He still thought he smelled camphor.
He got out and walked around the car, looking at the tires. The tires were all right, not soft in the least. He lifted the hood to look at the engine—and his knees suddenly turned to flannel. An icy spasm gripped his viscera.
Fastened to the underside of the dash with black tire tape were three yellow-brown sticks of dynamite, neatly wired into the ignition circuit.
Gilmore closed his eyes involuntarily and breathed a wordless prayer of thanks for whatever subconscious perception had kept him from switching on the ignition and stepping on the starter.
As quickly as his shaking hands would permit, he closed the hood, rolled the window up again, and locked the car. Then on numbed legs, he walked to the corner to hail a taxi.
The smell of camphor seemed to follow him.
XI
Dr. Coffee was so preoccupied when he returned to the hospital that he didn’t seem to notice the hubbub and confusion in the pathology laboratory. Cans were piled everywhere—in gleaming pyramids on the floor, in orderly rows on one of the work benches, in truncated towers on the centrifuge and on Doris Hudson’s desk. Doris was busily affixing gummed labels to the cans and cataloguing the numbers in a card file. Dr. Motilal Mookerji was even busier, dividing his time between the battery of Bunsen burners over which bubbled the acidulated broth of a dozen Reinsch tests, whisking the tail of his pink turban out of reach of the pale flames as he bustled from beaker to beaker, and checking the Rube Goldberg arrangement of flasks and glass tubing in which the preliminary Marsh tests were being run. When the chief pathologist came in, he looked up from his labors.
“Five times greetings, Doctor Sahib,” the Hindu resident exclaimed. “Am sincerely wishing you are not excessively morose following funereal obsequies. Was Leftenant Ritter successful in apprehending homicidal wrongdoers?”
“Max has gone back to the station house empty-handed,” the pathologist said.
“Am somewhat regretful was unable to attend sad last rites,” Dr. Mookerji continued. “Am constantly amazed and bewildered by elaborate and expensive proceedings essential to disposal of dead bodies in America. In native Bengal final cremation ceremonies often economically accomplished at democratic fee of six rupees eight annas, current exchange value slightly more than one dollar, cash on barrelhead. Have frequently asked self if American custom is mere sentimental non-sense, or constitutes philosophical expression of doubt in immortality of soul which is unconcerned in such mundane high jinks. Am—”
“How is our toxicology getting along, Doctor?” Dan Coffee interrupted.
“With utmost scientifical precision,” the Hindu said, waving at the mountains of cans, “notwithstanding fact that laboratory is now resembling grocer’s shop during inventory season.”
“Anything come up this morning, Doris?” Dr. Coffee asked his head technician.
“Nothing much, Doctor. No frozen sections scheduled. Dr. Smith wants a blood-sugar estimation this afternoon. That suspected brain case died this morning, but the interns haven’t been able to talk the widow into an autopsy so far. Otherwise only routine.”
“Then maybe we’d better try to get today’s slides read before we’re completely swamped by tin cans,” the pathologist said.
He had barely settled himself at his microscope when he was interrupted by the entrance of Bob Gilmore, still pale and shaken.
“Hello, Doctor,” Gilmore said. “I’m looking for Ritter.”
“Why, Max isn’t—” Dr. Coffee glanced up from his microscope, took a second look, then arose from his chair. “Great stars, Gilmore, what’s happened to you? Did you see a ghost?”
“I damned near became a ghost,” Gilmore said. “Somebody booby-trapped my car while I was at the funeral. But for the grace of God—”
“Come in while I prescribe a few drops of aromatic spirits of Latonia.” Dr. Coffee ushered Gilmore into a small office just off the laboratory, and lifted a bottle of bourbon from the bottom drawer of his desk. “To be taken internally,” he said, “about fifty c.c.’s—straight. I think you need it.”
“I was on my way up here anyhow,” Gilmore said, as he put the bottle down, “to warn you that you’d probably have the reporters on your neck. The newspapers have got wind of something and when the reporters spotted Ritter at Peggy’s funeral, they smelled a page-one story. When it breaks, I guess I’ll be no longer connected with Barzac Soup.”
“You can count on Max’s discretion,” Dr. Coffee said. “And as for me, I’ve nothing to tell them. In fact, until this business with your car this morning, I was about ready to suggest that Miss Bayliss got her arsenic elsewhere than in Barzac’s kitchens. Where’s your car now?”
“It’s in Coolidge Lane, just off Third Street.”
“Doris, try to get me Lieutenant Ritter at the police station.” The pathologist pushed the bottle toward Gilmore. “Another thirty c.c.’s,” he said. “Why, I was about to say that we’ve tested cans from about forty batches that you folks sent over here, and so far we haven’t found a trace of arsenic in any of them. It’s damned queer.”
“How much longer do you think it will take?” Gilmore asked. “Because my interest in the case will probably be purely academic and unofficial after the afternoon papers hit the street.”
“Dr. Mookerji,” Dan Coffee called. “Mr. Gilmore wants to know how many more months it’s going to take you to finish running those Reinsch tests?”
The round brown face of the Hindu resident appeared in the doorway. “What impatience!” he exclaimed, wagging his big head twice to the left. “Am remarking that Americans are constantly obsessed with speed and haste-making, as if universe was exploding like atom at half-past noontime Thursday next. Hindus contrariwise possess great patience because they know universe will continue until end of present Kalpa.”
“What,” asked Gilmore, “is a Kalpa?”
“A Kalpa,” explained Dr. Mookerji, “is a day and night of Brahma the Creator, which may also be calculated as one thousand Mahayugas. At termination of said period, entire cosmos will be dissolved, thereby giving Brahma necessity of recreating same.”
“I know I’m ignorant, but just how long, in days and hours, is one thousand Mahayugas?” Gilmore asked.
“Readily admit that day and night of Brahma total somewhat longer than terrestial twenty-four hours,” the Hindu said. “In fact, exact time of Kalpa is 4,320,000,000 solar years—thus demonstrating great futility of hubbub and hurry. In India—”
“I hope,” interrupted Dr. Coffee, “that we’ll clean up those Reinsch tests before the end of the current Mahayuga.”
“Quite,” said Dr. Mookerji. “Was in fact on point of calling attention to interesting developments now in progress. Kindly approach work-bench, Doctor Sahib, and observe happenings in Beaker No. 4 and Beaker No. 7.”
Six long strides carried Dr. Coffee from his office to the laboratory. He poked a glass rod into one after another of the beakers of bubbling broth made from samples of the Army field rations, seeking the metal foil stewing ominously over the Bunsen burners. As Dr. Mookerji had predicted, the copper strips lifted from the fourth and seventh beakers were coated with a dull gray deposit.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Dr. Coffee said. “Why should we suddenly come across arsenic in samples from two batches when the first forty or so were negative? Do you have the identification on these two samples, Doris?”
“Yes, Doctor. They came from cans with the code stamps FR 15-8191 and FR 16-8191.”
“That mean anything to you, Gilmore?”
“Yes, it means that the cans were part of batches fifteen and sixteen made on the same day, the nineteenth of August, 1951. The FR is the plant symbol for field rations.”
“And how many cans to a batch?”
“About seven hundred.”
“Any way of telling exactly where on your third floor these particular batches were cooked?” the pathologist asked.
“Yes, I think that’s possible.”
Dr. Coffee carried the glass rod to the sink, rinsed his fingers, and pensively dried them. “You know,” he said at last, “we may be able to make some sort of pattern out of this yet, after we’ve run through all those cans. There are still a lot of things I can’t understand, but we’ve just started, after all.”
“Lieutenant Ritter on the wire,” Doris Hudson said.
“Hello, Max,” the pathologist said into the phone. “Got anything hot? … Well then, I guess you better go up to Coolidge Lane just off of Third Street, and look at Gilmore’s car parked there. It seems—You tell him about it, Gilmore.”
Gilmore told Ritter about the crude booby trap that had been wired into his ignition circuit and began to perspire all over again while talking.
“I’ll go right over,” the detective said. “Want to meet me somewhere in half an hour?”
“I’ll meet you right at the scene,” Gilmore said. “It can’t make any difference now. I’m going to get the sack anyhow.”
Gilmore dismissed his cab at the entrance to the blind alley that was Coolidge Lane. As he walked toward his parked car, he recognized Lieutenant Max Ritter, looking much like a very dark, half-starved St. Bernard without his brandy cask. Ritter was bending over the engine of the car, half hidden by the raised hood. On the other side of the police detective, also involved with the innards of the motor, Gilmore thought he recognized the broad bottom and shiny trousers’ seat of a plainclothes man named Brody.
As Gilmore approached, Ritter backed away from the car and turned his long, grease-smudged face in his general direction.
“Hi, Gilmore,” the detective said. “Just what brand of marihuana do you smoke?”
“I never touch the stuff,” Gilmore said. “I’m an old-fashioned De Quincey man myself. I chew opium. Why do you ask?”
“You have the damnedest beautifulest dreams,” Ritter declared. “Now this booby trap you were telling me about. The booby part I can guess easy enough. That’s me. But I’ll be damned if we can find the trap. Do you find any trap, Brody?”
The plain-clothes man withdrew his head from the visceral regions of Gilmore’s car, slid the back of a grimy hand across his nose to eliminate a drop of perspiration and left an intriguing cabalistic design in its place. He said something which sounded to Gilmore like “horse whip” and subsided into silence.
“Where’s this dynamite you told me about on the phone?” Ritter demanded.
Gilmore had no answer. The dynamite that had been wired into the ignition circuit was gone. So was the smell of camphor.
“It’s … I … Well, it seems to have been removed,” Gilmore said. “I … Well …”
“Yeah,” Ritter said. “If it was ever there.”
“It was there all right,” Gilmore said. “And it stank of camphor. A piece of the tire tape is still sticking to the underside of the dash. And look. The ignition wires have been spliced together again. Do you want me to step on the starter?”
“I don’t want you to step on nothing.”
“And look. If somebody was monkeying around inside here, why—”
“Keep your mitts out of there,” Ritter said, pushing Gilmore away from the car. “I’m away ahead of you. I’ve already sent for the fingerprint boys and I don’t want you messing things up. Anything else?”
“No,” Gilmore hesitated. “Except that if somebody baited the trap during the funeral, and then tried to tidy things up after he saw me back away from the bait, then there’s a chance that he must have been seen. Why don’t you try—?”
“Sure, I’ll try,” Ritter said, eyeing the two rows of threestoried buildings that lined Coolidge Lane. “It’s going to take me ten men and half a day, but we’ll try. Meanwhile, why don’t you go fishing or something?”
“Okay, so I give off a perfume like good ripe bait,” Gilmore said, “but I think I ought to tell you about a few strikes I’ve had before this one here that got away. Last night when I came home after Peggy died, the doors to my garage were closed, although I always keep them open. When I got out of my car, somebody socked me in the eye.”
“Who?” Ritter demanded.
“I don’t know. It was dark. But when I got inside, my mother said some man had called up to warn me that curiosity killed a cat.”
“Nobody recognized the voice, of course.”
“No. But I think we’ll have to consider the possibility of Peggy Bayliss’s ex-husband. I haven’t seen him since shortly after Peggy died. He wasn’t at the funeral this morning. But I think I told you that he’d warned me that I was headed for trouble.” Gilmore paused. He wondered if he should disclose the fact of Bayliss’s extracurricular visit the night before Peggy died. He decided against it on the grounds that it might incriminate him. Emile had apparently been removed from the picture without involving him.…
“I remember,” Ritter said. “You told me Bayliss called his exwife from Chicago the day before she died. Right?”
“Right,” said Gilmore. “He called from Chicago.”
“Well, it ain’t right. It’s wrong,” Ritter countered. “I checked the chief operator and all the little operators at the Barzac switchboard. I also checked the records, just in case some little gal don’t retain too well. And I find there was no Chicago call came through the Barzac switchboard that morning. There was just one long-distance call before noon, and it was from Washington, D.C. So either he was lying or she was lying.”
“I’ll be damned,” Gilmore said.
“And I’m inclined to think that he was the liar,” Ritter pursued, “because I been checking with Chicago and Bayliss ain’t been seen around the ten-bucks-a-week room he calls his home for the last week. So if you’re sure you saw Bayliss in Northbank—”
“I’m positive.”
“Then go fishing,” Ritter said, “but call me the minute you lay eyes on this guy Bayliss again. Urgent. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Gilmore, “but until you give me my car back, I don’t think I’ll do much fishing. I’ll stick to hunting—skunk.”
XII
The early edition of the Northbank Journal hit the streets at noon. Although the death of Peggy Bayliss had rated only ten lines on the obituary page the day before, Peggy’s funeral was a page-one story, with a two-column cut. The picture, of course, was of Peggy smacking her lips over Barzac’s epicurean creation for the Army.
The story was a masterpiece of sly innuendo. There was a low, sweeping obeisance to the laws of libel, naturally. There were no accusations, no controvertible facts, not even editorial conclusions couched in such libel-proof phrases as “it is alleged” or “according to the police.” But the juxtaposition of facts was so skillfully accomplished, the chronology of the gay tasting session marking the inauguration of Barzac’s production, of field rations, the symptoms of acute gastritis (described by an unnamed intern at Pasteur) and, finally, Peggy’s death, could lead the reader to only one possible implication. To punctuate the story, the last line read: “Among those present at the funeral chapel was Max Ritter, Lieutenant of Detectives, Northbank Police Department.”
Just in case anyone failed to get the point, the story was followed—through sheer accident of make-up, no doubt—by a short interview with a municipal councilman, announcing that he intended to introduce a resolution at the next session of the Council, calling for an anti-Communist oath to be taken by all employees of plants within the city limits of Northbank working on military contracts, “in order to demonstrate to the subversive elements in our midst that they cannot with impunity carry out their sabotage and anti-American activities in the staunchly patriotic city of Northbank.”
The journals story had obviously been picked up by the press association wires for relay eastward well in advance of the closing of the New York Stock Exchange. Because three o’clock newscasts over Northbank radio stations all carried some variation of the following: “And here is the Wall Street summary. The Stock Market closing was finn.… Rails and industrials were slightly higher.… Dow-Jones Industrial averages up thirty-two cents.… Only feature of a dull trading day was a sharp break in Barzac Soup during the last hour, closing at 46, off 9½.…”
The newscast ended at 3:05 p.m. At 3:10 Gilmore was summoned to the purple imperium of Mr. Eugene Evans. The chronology was as significant as the snide inferences of the Journal story.
Although the afternoon heat was stifling, the frosty atmosphere of the general manager’s office extended over a wide radius. The mail boy coming out of the office detoured sharply to avoid greeting Gilmore. The secretary of the outer sanctum barely nodded her permission to enter the holy of holies. The bald pate of Mr. Evans himself was spangled with perspiration, yet his thin lips seemed pinched with cold. On one side of him, his assistant, Mr. Quirk, hunched his narrow shoulders against some non-existent Arctic wind. On the other Bart Remington rubbed his fingers as though they were too stiff to make their customary verification of his bow tie. Only Barbara Wall, the crisp, eternally cool Barbara, seemed to wilt with the heat. Her retroussé nose was shiny; a wisp of honey-colored hair was attractively out of place and plastered to one temple by the August afternoon dampness; her eyes burned, not with ambition this time but with earnest concern. Never, Gilmore reflected, had she appeared so nearly beautiful.
