A Pinch of Poison (5 page)

Weigand looked down at the body and said she looked peaceful. Francis nodded. She might go that way, with some poisons, he said. According to Dr. Merton she had merely, quite quietly, stopped breathing. She was dead then, and dead on the arrival of the ambulance surgeon a few minutes later. The ambulance surgeon had talked with Merton, agreed with him, and added “suspicious death” to his “dead on arrival.” Then the wheels had started.

“Right,” Weigand said. “How soon will you know, definitely?”

Dr. Francis' shoulders were communicative. But they could hurry it up. If Lieutenant Weigand insisted, they might know something within a couple of hours.

“Depends on what we find when we get in,” Dr. Francis reported, matter-of-factly.

“Meanwhile,” he said, “and without quoting me, take it as poison. Belladonna, for a guess.” Dr. Francis snapped his bag. He asked whether Weigand wanted the body where it was, for any purpose.

“Why?” said Weigand, reasonably. “She wasn't killed here. She just died here. Pictures, of course, but what we want is the p.m. as soon as we can get it.”

Dr. Francis nodded. Leaving, he encountered Mullins at the door and said, “Uh!” Mullins, looking very official, said, “Telephone, Lieutenant.” Weigand raised his eyebrows and Mullins said, sadly, “Yeh. The Inspector.” Weigand picked up an extension telephone by the bed and found Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley at the other end of it. Weigand said, “Yes, sir.”

“So you finally got there,” Inspector O'Malley told him, unpleasantly. Weigand said he had; that he had been having dinner with friends and that the Telegraph Bureau had found him there.

“Well,” O'Malley said, “what does it look like? Anything in it?”

Weigand said that it looked like poison. O'Malley made sounds disapproving of poison, which he evidently regarded as unfair to policemen. Weigand spoke soothingly. Weigand admitted that it might be suicide. “Only,” he said, “it would be an odd place to pick.” Equally it might be murder.

“Well,” said O'Malley, relapsing into friendliness, duty between superior and subordinate having been discharged, “get on with it, Lieutenant. We'll go over your report in the morning.”

Weigand said, “Yes, sir,” without animus. It was natural for inspectors to sleep of nights, while lieutenants, even when acting as captains, toiled. O'Malley vanished from the telephone and Weigand cradled it and stood for a moment looking down at the body. Then he turned to Mullins and said, “Well?”

“Well,” Mullins said, “I had the boys get pix. D'you want them to print the joint?”

“Why?” said Weigand. Mullins looked around and said, yeh, that was right. Why?

“Right,” Weigand said. “What's the setup?”

Mullins told him. The girl had been having dinner with a guy. One David McIntosh. “We got him here,” Mullins said. They had sat at the table after dinner and had a drink or two. Then the girl had begun to act tight. She had stood and talked excitedly a moment, while those at other tables nearby looked at her in surprise, but knowingly. Then she had suddenly collapsed. McIntosh had carried her to the manager's apartment. “It looked like a pass-out,” Mullins explained. The idea had been to handle an unfortunate emergency as unobtrusively as possible. But the girl's quietness had frightened them and they had called the hotel doctor.

“Then she just died, I guess,” Mullins said. “Everybody was surprised, only the doc had said they'd oughta get a stomach pump.”

Weigand nodded and considered.

“Right,” he said. “Let's talk to McIntosh. We'll want the stenographer.”

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. He went to the door, nodded to the stenographer and said, “You!” to McIntosh.

McIntosh was a tall, broad, brown young man who looked like several good schools rolled into one. But his face was drained. Weigand was tall enough, but he had to look up at McIntosh. He did look up at him.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm Lieutenant Weigand, Homicide. Tell me about it.”

David McIntosh's voice was heavy and lifeless. His description of Lois's collapse at the table followed that of Mullins, amplifying it with McIntosh's own surprise and consternation, which had given place to anxiety and fear.

“But at first it looked merely as if she had—well, had had too much to drink?” Weigand asked.

McIntosh nodded.

“She seemed excited and incoherent,” he said. “Her face looked flushed. But she hadn't had anything to drink—not really.”

“What?” Weigand wanted to know. McIntosh told him. A cocktail before dinner. Coffee afterward. Then a Cuba Libre.

“Nothing before you met her, do you think?” Weigand asked. McIntosh was sure she had not, or not more than one drink at the outside.

“She drank almost nothing,” he said. “When she had a drink she usually showed it.”

Weigand nodded.

“And you had water with dinner, I suppose?” he said. McIntosh agreed.

“Was it something in what she drank?” he wanted to know. Weigand told him they didn't know. But presumably it was something she had taken by mouth, in liquid or food. And liquid was more likely. It would, obviously, be more difficult to administer poison in solid food, without the opportunity for advance preparation.

“And I gather you ordered at the table?” he said. “You hadn't ordered in advance, before you came, I mean?”

McIntosh said they hadn't. Until they were actually in the taxicab, he said, they had not made up their minds where they would have dinner.

“Could she have been given something, or taken something, before I met her?” McIntosh asked.

“Frankly,” Weigand said, “we don't know yet. This has to be merely a preliminary questioning, until we see where we are. Do you know of any reason why she should have taken her own life?”

McIntosh looked surprised.

“No,” he said. “That's absurd. She never would have. And even if that isn't true, she would never have come here, with me, and then drunk poison. It's—inconceivable.”

Weigand agreed it seemed unlikely. He said he gathered that McIntosh had known her a long time, and well.

“Yes,” McIntosh said. “Since—oh, for a long time.” He paused. “I wanted her to marry me,” he said, simply.

“I'm sorry,” Weigand said. “I know this is difficult. And she?”

“Sometimes, yes,” McIntosh said. “But she was tied up, somehow. Her family—her half-brother, you know—and this job of hers. And some odd notion about being useful. I don't know. But I think she would have married me, eventually.”

His voice was expressionless, strained. Weigand looked at him a moment. He felt compassion for McIntosh and his voice revealed it.

“All right,” he said. “That's all for now. Give one of the detectives outside your address, will you?”

McIntosh nodded. He went out.

“It's tough on him,” Mullins said, after McIntosh had closed the door. Weigand said it was. Very.

“Who else have we got out there?” he wanted to know. Mullins told him. The maître d'hôtel. A bloke who said he was Lois Winston's brother. Some dame with the brother. And—oh, yeh. A bus-boy.

“A bus-boy?” Weigand repeated.

Mullins, nodded. He looked a little embarrassed and uncertain. He said it was this way. Not more than five minutes had elapsed between the time Lois Winston had collapsed at her table and the time she died in the manager's suite. By the time she died, the hotel physician suspected poison. He had suggested that the table at which she had been eating be left as it was until the police arrived, and Nicholas, the maître d'hôtel, had agreed. He had gone out to see to it and found the table already cleared and reset.

“He said it was just routine,” Mullins said. “Seemed to think it was pretty smart of the bus-boy who did it. But I noticed when I got here that there were several tables around there that hadn't been cleared and I just sorta wondered—could the boy be in on something? So I thought—”

“Right,” Weigand assured him. “Probably it doesn't mean anything, but we'll have a talk with the boy. He does seem to have been pretty efficient.”

Mullins looked relieved. He wanted to know who the Loot wanted. Weigand decided on Nicholas.

Nicholas had little to add to the detail of Lois Winston's collapse at the table. He knew Mr. McIntosh well, since he often came there, usually with Miss Winston. And he knew who Mr. McIntosh was, naturally.

“Did you?” said Weigand. “Who is he?”

Nicholas looked surprised and a little shocked.

“Mr. McIntosh is the son of Mr. James McIntosh,” he said. “The Mr. James McIntosh.”

“Oh,” Weigand said. “So.” He could see the point of Nicholas's attitude. It was important, and not only in Nicholas's realm, to be the son of the Mr. James McIntosh. Nicholas noted the expression on the lieutenant's face with approval.

“So naturally,” Nicholas said, “when we got the reservation tonight we saw that Mr. McIntosh received just the table he asked for, down front, near the floor. Which made it all the more—obvious—when the young lady behaved so strangely. Whereas at their usual table …”

“Oh,” Weigand said. “Mr. McIntosh had made a reservation. By telephone?”

Nicholas nodded. Lieutenant Weigand thought it over.

“Was it Mr. McIntosh himself who phoned?” he asked.

Nicholas did not know, but he could try to find out.

“Do that,” Weigand instructed. “But what about this bus-boy?”

Nicholas looked perplexed. Then his face cleared. That would be young Frank Kensitt. The boy who cleared the table so quickly? Weigand nodded.

“But that was nothing,” Nicholas insisted. “We train the boys to be efficient at the Club Plaza. In the natural course he would have cleared the table at once.”

“Even,” Weigand said, “when he had no reason to be sure Mr. McIntosh would not return? He didn't know it was anything serious, remember.”

Nicholas pointed out that he had seen the young lady carried across the restaurant. He might naturally assume that something not entirely trivial was going on. Weigand nodded slowly. He said that Nicholas had better go back to his post.

“Oh,” Weigand said, “some friends of mine are out there, I think. A man and two young women, one of them with sort of reddish hair. See that they're well taken care of, will you?”

Nicholas, eagerly, would. Weigand drummed on the desk beside which he was sitting for a moment after Nicholas left. His face was abstracted, and Mullins waited.

“Let's have the brother,” Weigand directed. Mullins went to the door and said, “You!” at the brother. The brother was a dark, discontented, slight young man who looked more worried than grieved. He was Randall Ashley; Lois Winston was his sister.

“Half-sister, of course,” he amplified, sitting nonchalantly where Weigand indicated. “Her father was Clarence Winston, the oil man. Mine was Kenneth Ashley.” His tone was faintly supercilious.

“What kind of a man was he?” Weigand asked. Randall Ashley looked faintly surprised.

“What kind of—oh, copper,” he said. “Mother married Father about two years after Mr. Winston died.”

Then, Weigand discovered, Lois was about three years old. Randall had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Ashley a little over a year later. Lois was twenty-seven—had been twenty-seven. So Randall was twenty-three.

“Although you'd have thought, from the way Sis acted, that I was about thirteen,” Ashley put in, rather sulkily. Weigand looked at him without favor.

“You weren't here with your sister, I gather,” he said. “I mean, you had your own party.”

“I was here with a friend,” Ashley said. The word “friend” seemed faintly underlined.

“Were you?” Weigand said. “Who?”

“I don't see—” Ashley began. Weigand didn't either, exactly, but he felt like being stern.

“Who?” he repeated.

Young Ashley looked more sulky than ever. Then he submitted.

“Madge Ormond,” he said. “She's a singer.”

“Night club?” Weigand hazarded. Ashley frowned.

“Does that make any difference?” he wanted to know.

“No,” Weigand said. “As far as I know it makes no difference at all. I just wondered.”

“All right,” Ashley said. “She is. So what?”

Weigand said he would ask the questions. Where, for example, were Ashley and Miss Ormond sitting in reference to his sister and Mr. McIntosh?

“Most of the dance floor was between us,” Ashley said. He looked a little worried, Weigand thought, and was pleased to think. “Why?” Ashley added. Weigand said it was merely routine.

“Although,” he added, “it seems probable that somebody passed your sister's table and put something in her drink.”

“Listen!” Ashley said. He stood up. Weigand remained seated and looked at him. “If you're trying to—”

“Oh, go home, Mr. Ashley,” Weigand said. “Go home to Mama. Or home to Miss Ormond. We'll find you when we want you.”

Ashley hesitated a moment. Then he turned quickly to the door. Weigand nodded after his back and Mullins followed him into the living-room of the suite. Then, after a moment, Mullins came back.

“O.K.,” Mullins said. “He's got a tail. Why him?”

“I don't know, Mullins,” Weigand said. “I suppose merely because I don't like him.”

Mullins looked at Weigand a moment. Then he grinned.

“O.K., Loot,” he said.
“O.K.”

He thought a moment.

“What are you going to do about those people out there, Loot?” he inquired, waving in the general direction of the restaurant. Weigand regarded him and asked what he would suggest.

“Get their names and addresses?” Mullins suggested, doubtfully.

“Why?” asked Weigand. “They've been coming and going for—[he looked at his watch]—more than an hour since the girl died. If there was a murderer, and he was on the roof, do you suppose he has waited?”