A Pinch of Poison (9 page)

It wasn't satisfactory, Weigand decided. Lois might have got the poison before she left home; she might have got it at the restaurant table shortly before she collapsed. But that wasn't, obviously, Dr. Francis' fault.

“How would you get it?” he asked. “I mean, just walk into a drugstore and say, ‘I'd like some atropine sulphate, please. About enough to kill a guy!'”

“Well,” Francis said, “
I'd
requisition it. But—no, I don't suppose you could get it at a retail store.” He thought it over.

“I'll tell you,” he said. “You could go to a drug supply house and say you were a manufacturer and wanted some atropine sulphate. If you looked all right, or went to the trouble of having letterheads printed or something, they'd sell it to you. There's no law against it.”

“What would I be manufacturing?” Weigand wanted to know.

“What?” said Francis. “Oh—eyewash, of course. It's used, in minute quantities, in several commercial eyewashes. Makes the eye bright and glowing. See advertisements.”

“Really?” said Weigand.

“Sure,” said Francis. “Doesn't do any great harm, probably. Or much good, of course.”

Weigand thought it over.

“How much is a grain?” he asked. “I mean, as to bulk. A table-spoonful?”

Francis looked at him in surprise.

“The things you people don't know!” he said, sadly. “You could pick it up on the tip-end of an after-dinner coffee spoon. You could hold it between your thumb and forefinger.”

“So,” said Weigand gently, “the medical profession naturally refers to it as a ‘massive' dose. Very illuminating, Doctor.”

But the doctor, he decided as he left the Pathology Building, had been illuminating enough. He thought it wearily and looked at his watch. It was after one o'clock. He thought of things he might do tonight and thought he might do them, also, in the morning. He telephoned Headquarters and conferred with Mullins. The detectives who had questioned customers at the roof had made reports but Mullins thought there was little in them. Mullins was sitting on the papers. The laboratory had not reported on the contents of the glasses taken by young Kensitt from Lois' table.

“Well,” Weigand said, “call it a night. But get in early.”

He turned from the telephone and drove across and uptown to his apartment in the West Fifties. The telephone was ringing. Weigand scooped it up and said, “Yes? Weigand speaking.”

“Pam North speaking,” she told him. “I couldn't sleep and neither could Jerry. What? No, of course I won't.”

“Wait a minute, Pam,” Weigand said. “What won't you?”

“Jerry says to tell you the only reason he can't sleep is that I keep talking,” Pam said. “Only I won't, of course.”

“No, Pam,” Weigand said, “I wouldn't. What is it, Pam?”

“Well,” said Pam, “have you found out who?”

“No, Pam.”

“Or how?”

“Well,” Weigand said, “as to that, yes. Somebody gave her something called atropine sulphate. A parasympathetic drug.”

“Oh, yes,” Pam said. “Paralyzes the nerve endings of the sympathetic system. How awful!”

Weigand restrained his gasp.

“How—” he began, and thought better of it. “Somebody gave it to her in a drink,” he said. “It would only take about a grain, the M.E. says.”

“Well,” Pam said, “how would they carry it around in a restaurant?”

He had her there, Bill Weigand decided. He said he was afraid she didn't realize how small in bulk a grain of atropine sulphate would be. One could carry it, he told her, between thumb and forefinger.

“Oh,” said Mrs. North. “I see. You mean a pinch.”

“What?” Weigand said. He was too tired to keep up, he decided.

“A pinch,” Mrs. North told him. “Like a pinch of salt. Only in this case, a pinch of poison.”

7

W
EDNESDAY

8:45
A.M. TO
11:30
A.M
.

Routine awaited Lieutenant Weigand Wednesday morning at Headquarters. Mullins also waited, reading the morning newspapers. He held one up and shook it as Weigand entered.

“The Herald-Trib got your name wrong again, Loot,” Mullins told him. “I before E.”

“Well,” said Weigand, who was grumpy and whose mouth tasted of coffee and last night's cigarettes. “Well, think of that.” He spoke without pleasure. Mullins looked at him, and decided the point had better be waived.

“It's a very popular crime, Loot,” he said. “Very popular. Except the war sorta gets in the way, of course.”

“All right,” Weigand said. He looked at his desk, which held papers in neat piles. “All right, sergeant. What's here?”

There was, Mullins told him, a lotta junk. There were reports from the detectives who had asked questions of late diners at the Ritz-Plaza roof after the murder. “Nothing in 'em,” Mullins reported. There was the stenographer's transcript of the questions asked by Weigand himself. There was a copy of the formal, interim report, made by the offices of the Medical Examiner. Weigand knew more than it contained.

“And then there's the Inspector,” Mullins added, glumly. Weigand nodded. There was always the Inspector. He looked at his watch and decided the Inspector could wait, for a few minutes. He read the transcript of the questions he had asked McIntosh, Buddy Ashley, Nicholas and the rest. He read fast, knowing his way, but exactly, looking for things missed.

At one point he said, “Huh!” and made a note. Mullins, watching, made sounds of inquiry.

“Something we missed?” Mullins wanted to know.

“No,” Weigand said. “I got it at the time. I was just checking to see whether I was right. As I was, Sergeant Mullins.”

Weigand's voice was, Mullins decided, thawing.

“Yeh?” Mullins said.

“The reservation,” Weigand told him. “At the roof. McIntosh says he didn't have one—at least, that seems clear from what he said. He didn't know where he was taking the girl until they got in the cab. But the headwaiter says there was a reservation for McIntosh and the list shows it was made at”—he consulted the list—“six-fifteen that evening.”

“Screwy,” Mullins said. He thought. “Say,” he said, “this guy McIntosh ain't telling all he knows.” He paused and looked at Weigand hopefully. “Maybe we ought to bring him in, Loot?” he said. “You know. Just ask him some questions, sort of?”

Weigand shook his head, and said they didn't know enough. It was, Weigand pointed out, merely something to keep in mind. There might be a perfectly harmless explanation. Mullins looked doubtful.

“Like what?” he said.

Weigand shook his head.

“You think of it, Mullins,” he said. He went on through the transcript. It ran about as he remembered it. It was all clear enough, as far as it went—clear, at any rate, as to what people said had happened. But neither the people nor what they meant was entirely clear. Lois Winston was not entirely clear herself.

Weigand said, “Um-m-m,” thoughtfully, and the telephone rang on his desk. He said, “Yes?” and then, quickly, “Right, Inspector.” Mullins drew his face down dolefully and Weigand looked at him darkly. Then Weigand replaced the telephone, smiled.

“We've got to have them,” he said. “It's regulation. Now—”

Mullins was to get things rolling. He was to hurry the office of the City Toxicologist, in so far as was politic, for a final report on the poison which had killed the girl. The police laboratories, less diplomatically, were to be hurried in their reports on the contents of the identified flasks which contained the dregs of Lois Winston's glasses at the roof. And, because there was not really much doubt as to the poison, Mullins was to get men working on that. Briefly, Weigand told Mullins of the assistant medical examiner's guess about atropine sulphate, and his speculation as to how it might have been obtained.

“So,” Weigand said, “we'll have to cover all the wholesale drug houses. It may be a job. What we want is a list of atropine sulphate purchases in the past few days. Where a purchase was made by a man they didn't know, we want all the details we can get.”

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said.

“And,” said Weigand, “we want it this afternoon. So get them started.”

“Listen, Loot,” Mullins started, but stopped when the lieutenant looked at him. “O.K.,” Mullins repeated, with emphasis. “You want me to go along? Personally?”

“Why not?” Weigand said. “Only check in, in case I want you.”

Mullins went. Weigand summoned Detective Stein, who was a bright young man and came in looking it.

“I want you to get hold of the Encyclopædia Britannica,” Weigand told him. Detective Stein gulped, but kept on looking bright. “Not all of it,” Weigand reassured him, seeing the gulp. “Volume Gunn to Hydrox.”

“Yes, sir,” Detective Stein said, and waited.

“Start about a third through and make a list of general subjects,” Weigand instructed. “I don't want names, or descriptions of cities or historical data. I want something that a young woman of twenty-seven or thereabouts, with plenty of money and O.K. socially but working as a volunteer for a social work agency, would be reading a few hours before she got poisoned.”

Weigand looked at Stein, who looked rather baffled. Weigand smiled.

“I don't know what I want,” he admitted. “I don't even know if it bears on what we're after—the guy who killed the Winston girl. But maybe it does. Work from about a third of the way through the volume to about two-thirds of the way through.”

“Yes, sir,” Stein said. “She was reading it, you say?” Weigand nodded. “And left it face down somewhere, opened about the middle?”

“Right,” Weigand said. “So see what you can get me, Sherlock.” But this tone was amiable and, Detective Stein decided, approving. Detective Stein, looking brighter than ever, went out after Gunn to Hydrox.

Weigand looked after him, reached for the telephone and let his hand drop, and went in to see Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley. O'Malley looked as if he had had a long, comfortable sleep. He was all brisk alertness, and ready to hear all about everything. Weigand told him what he knew. O'Malley nodded.

“The brother,” he said, all having been made plain. “He figured the girl was going to tell their mother about the marriage. So he would have lost the money. He was there; he went to the table; he tells a thin story about a note, producing a note he probably wrote while he was waiting for you to come around. What do you want?”

“Well,” Weigand said mildly, “a little evidence wouldn't hurt. Like an identification of little brother buying poison.”

O'Malley was impatient.

“Sure,” he said, “we'll get that. We'll bring the kid in and ask him some questions and maybe he'll spill it. Then he'll tell us where he got the poison and we'll have the guy who sold it to him come around and identify.” O'Malley looked at Weigand, who seemed doubtful. O'Malley glared at Weigand, and said that Weigand looked to him like turning out to be one of the bright boys.

“Making things complicated,” he said. “Not seeing the noses on their faces.”

Weigand was mollifying. Probably the Inspector was right. Nevertheless—

“I want to dig around a bit yet,” he said. “I think there are some angles. Like McIntosh and the reservation he didn't make, for example. Buddy will keep; we're camping on him.”

It took some time, but the Inspector mollified. He didn't, he admitted, want Weigand to work them into a jam. “This kid's got money, I suppose?” he said. “I mean his mama's got enough so they know people with money?” Weigand assured him that the kid knew such people. “Yeh,” O'Malley said. “And they'd squawk.” So, O'Malley admitted, they'd better sew it up first. As a matter of form.

“Only,” he warned, “don't go losing sight of the kid. He's the guy we want, all right. We've just got to pin it on him.”

Weigand agreed, watched for a pause, and said he had to see some people. O'Malley let him go. O'Malley called in the Headquarters men from the newspapers, told them that he, directing the case, had identified the poison as atropine sulphate and that he expected to make an arrest very soon.

“Within twenty-four hours,” the man from the Sun helped him.

“Twelve,” said O'Malley, firmly. “An arrest is imminent.”

Weigand, thankful to get on with it, picked up the telephone when he was back in his own office. He got David McIntosh on the wire and told McIntosh what he thought McIntosh ought to know. Then he took up the reservation.

“No,” David McIntosh said, decidedly. “I didn't make a reservation at the roof.”

Weigand told him that, all the same, Nicholas had his name on the reservation list. McIntosh said he didn't know about that. Then he hesitated a moment.

“Come to think of it,” he said, “there was something about a reservation. Oh, yes—when Lois and I got there, Nicholas said he had ‘my table' and afterward Lois said I must have made a reservation. I told her that was merely Nicholas's way of getting good customers in ahead of outsiders who'd been waiting. But if there really was a reservation—well, I don't know.”

“Don't you?” Weigand said. “All right, Mr. McIntosh.”

It wasn't so all right, however, he thought as he hung up. There was something fishy about it. He drummed on the desk, filed the fishiness for reference, and picked up the telephone again. He called Mrs. Gerald North, and got Mr. Gerald North.

Mr. North said, “Hello, Bill.”

“I wanted to get Pam,” Weigand explained. “She knows the head woman—Miss Crane, isn't it?—at this place where the Winston girl worked. I thought she might call Miss Crane up and pass along the word I was coming around—sort of soften the old dame up. What do you think?”