Murder by the Book (23 page)

“You were surprised,” Jerry said, “that Dr. Piersal had been called in? Not the hotel physician? Doctor—” He looked at Jefferson.

“Townsend,” Jefferson said. “Were you, doctor.”

“I,” Dr. Upton said, “was a little surprised anybody had been called in. These attacks of hers made her damned uncomfortable. But they weren't serious.”

“This one was,” Jefferson said.

“Her heart gave out,” Upton said. “I keep telling you that. The autopsy will show that.”

“Would it show if she had taken an overdose of digitalis? Enough to end her life?”

“She'd been taking digitalis,” Upton said, his voice still weary, resigned. “I keep on telling you the same things over and over. As to the autopsy—no, probably not, in view of the maintenance doses she'd been taking. The recovery of digitalis from the organs is difficult.”

As, Pam thought, somebody just said. No—wait a minute. As I just read, in the same words. In the book with the long name, by so many doctors. It's as if Dr. Upton had just—

“When you talked to her, doctor,” Jefferson said, “how did she seem? I mean—depressed? Upset?”

“No,” Upton said. “She sounded a little sleepy. Dramamine, if that's what he gave her, would have that effect.”

“You told her?”

“To rest. To take her insulin when it was time for it. That I'd be back as soon as I could make it. That the operation I'd gone up to do had turned out a little more complicated than I'd expected, and that I would have to wait around a few hours. Be on hand if something went wrong.” He paused, looked at Jefferson intently. “If what you're getting at,” he said, “is did she sound depressed enough to take an overdose of digitalis, no she didn't. Of course …”

He paused.

“I thought she just sounded sleepy,” he said. “I suppose—I suppose it's possible—she was really deeply depressed. She had cause enough to be, poor Florence. The dullness in her voice—it might have been because nothing mattered to her any more and—” He broke off. He put his right hand over his eyes.

“About when was this, doctor? When you talked to her?”

“Around four o'clock. Some time between four and five.”

Jefferson looked at him for a moment. Then Jefferson picked up the telephone and, after a moment, said “Sally?” Then he said, “Good. Were you on the board Saturday afternoon? Trying to check out on something—get a time straight. You remember a call coming through for Mrs. Upton? Mrs. Tucker Upton?” He listened a moment. “I know there isn't,” he said. He covered the mouthpiece. “Says there's no record kept of incoming calls,” he said. “I—yes, Sally?”

He listened again. He said, “I see.” He said, “Well—yes, I can see how it would.” He said, “Thanks, Sally.” He hung up.

He looked for some seconds at Dr. Tucker Upton. Then he said, “Doctor. When you got back here, went to your room—to the suite you and Mrs. Upton had on the ground floor—was there a ‘Don't Disturb' sign on the door?”

Dr. Upton had taken away the hand which had shielded his eyes. He looked at Jefferson. There was no longer any dullness in his eyes.

“No,” he said. “I don't remember there was.”

There was no longer any dullness in his voice.

“Probably the maid will remember,” Jefferson said. “They like to start as early as they can, you know.”

“These trivial things,” Dr. Upton said. “All right. I said I didn't remember. It could have been there. I could be wrong about it.”

“Yes,” Jefferson said. “I'm afraid you were, doctor. About—about quite a few things, come down to it. You see, after Dr. Piersal saw her, he left word at the desk that she wasn't to be disturbed. By telephone calls or anything else.”

“I told the operator who I was,” Upton said. “Obviously, it didn't apply—”

Jefferson shook his head slowly.

“No, doctor,” he said. “Oh, I don't mean Sally—she's the girl on the board, you know—wouldn't have made an exception in your case. But, she's a very conscientious girl, doctor. Fixed in her mind not to put any calls through to your suite, you see. Made a special case of it, sort of. That's why she remembers, doctor. You see, the point never came up. Because there weren't any calls to put through, doctor. Not between four and five. Not any time.”

“She forgot,” Dr. Upton said. “Maybe she was relieved. Went off the board for a while.”

“Oh, yes,” Jefferson said. “One of the boys relieved her about six, for dinner. She told him not to let anyone bother poor Mrs. Upton. Everybody knew she wasn't well, doctor. Everybody was sorry for her. When she came back, he told her nobody had tried to bother poor Mrs. Upton.”

He stopped. Upton said nothing.

“Want to have another try, doctor?” Jefferson said. “Or—want I should? Like your wife's not having died yet when you got back some time in the middle of the night? To see if things were going as you planned? If she'd died yet? Telling you then that Piersal had been to see her. Like your having to wait until she did die, from the second overdose of digitalis you'd left for her to inject, telling her it was insulin? As you did in the morning before you left. Must have come as a shock to you, doctor, to find that a man like Piersal had examined her, not poor old Doc Townsend, who'd just have given her bicarb.”

Dr. Upton shook his head. He said that all this was preposterous; that, said before witnesses, it was slander. But he was tolerant. He realized Jefferson had to test out every theory, preposterous or not. He advised that Jefferson think this one through.

His tone was steady, reasonable.

“You see,” he said, “Dr. Piersal
didn't
diagnose digitalis poisoning. Oh, a possible slight overdose. But that only as an outside possibility. You hadn't thought of that, apparently.”

“Oh, yes,” Pam North said. “We did think of that, doctor. But—he would have a quite different idea after she died, wouldn't he? Knowing she hadn't died of an upset stomach. And that a second injection of digitalis, on top of what she'd had—even if that was only a slight overdose added to her regular intake—might well have killed her. If—if he'd been alive to have any ideas at all. But he wasn't, was he, doctor? You saw to that. How did you find him, doctor? Go to his room first and when he wasn't there, go out looking for him? See him out at the end of the pier and go out, with a fisherman's knife in the pocket of your jacket? What did you say to him, doctor? Thank him for treating your wife? Or just say, ‘Sorry, doctor. I guess you know too much'? Or didn't you say anything at all before you stabbed him?”

Upton put his hands on the arms of his chair and leaned forward as if he were about to stand up. But then he sank back into the chair. He said, “You're out of your minds. All of you. Out of your minds.” His voice again was dull, uninflected.

“Look at yourself, Dr. Upton,” Pam said. “At the way you're dressed. It's very suitable, isn't it? Suitable for a bereaved husband. But not for a place like this, is it, doctor? A—a fun place. A place for bright clothes.”

He looked at her. His lips parted as if he were about to speak, but he did not speak.

“Why did you bring these clothes when you came back here, doctor?” Pam said. “These suitable clothes? It was because you knew you'd need them, wasn't it, doctor? Knew you'd have a role to play—the grieving husband role. Because—”

“Shut up,” Upton said, and he spoke loudly, and did stand up now. “Damn you—shut up. I don't have to take this from some fool, meddling—”

But then he stopped speaking and looked at nothing, and spoke as if to himself.

“Why did he have to be here?” he asked the air around him. “Piersal of all the men in the world? Why the hell did he have to be here?”

The Norths, dressed for tennis, sat under an umbrella by the courts and waited. It was two-thirty on Tuesday afternoon. The opposition was somewhat late in arriving, but the Norths were in no special hurry.

“There's not much to take to court,” Jerry said. “Not even with this woman in Miami Jefferson found out about. A telephone call Upton claimed he made, and didn't make. Mrs. Coleman's insistence he was at the Sun and Surf when he was supposed just to have left Miami on his way down. She won't be an especially good witness, Pam. Not with her history. Her—her obvious flightiness.”

“His dark suit,” Pam said. “Which was what was on the tip of my mind all the time. It got mixed up with the Hippocratic oath the way things do in dreams—that maybe there was something in the oath about doctors wearing seemly clothes. There isn't, incidentally. But that was just a dream. The fact that he quoted a sentence from that poison book—quoted it exactly, as if he'd just looked it up and committed it to memory. And what he said at the end about Piersal. What we all heard him say.”

“An expression of regret at the misfortune of a distinguished colleague,” Jerry said. To which Pam said, with some vehemence, “Tommyrot.”

“The autopsy doesn't show Mrs. Upton was murdered,” Jerry said. “That he gave her an overdose of digitalis and arranged for her to give herself a second. The state certainly can't introduce the notes you and I and Jefferson concocted, dragging digitalis into it. We don't know that Piersal made that second visit. That was only our guessing.”

“Yes,” Pam said. “But a right guess, I think. Dr. Upton didn't deny it. He must have talked to his wife—learned that Piersal had been to see her—after nine o'clock. Since he was having dinner with this woman at the Columbus in Miami at eight. Mrs. Upton probably told him then that Piersal had made a second visit.”

“A lot of ‘probablys',” Jerry said. “I'd hate to be the prosecuting attorney. Try to convince a jury, for example, that Upton killed a man and then went on and had breakfast.”

“Where he wasn't known,” Pam said. “And he'd been up all night, waiting for his wife to die. Looked all over the place for Dr. Piersal, probably. Had a lot of other things to do—change into something he might have driven down from Miami in, be seen coming back into the hotel at the right time, act shock and bereavement. He needed to build up his strength. Also, you won't be the prosecuting attorney. And the defense will have some explaining to do.”

She stopped, and looked away across the courts, not at anything in particular. Jerry waited.

“More explaining than it will be able to do,” Pam said. “Oh—reasonable doubt. Perhaps. But—if anywhere, only in the minds of the jury, Jerry. Because they'll be responsible. But not in any other minds. Everybody will know, won't they? As we know. The county medical society, or whatever it is. And the hospital people. And—and all the people who might be patients. Oh—they may let him go on walking around. I doubt it, but they may. That'll be all he'll have left, won't it? Not really a doctor any more. Just—just a man let walk around.”

It seemed to Jerry that Pam shivered slightly, hearing her own words.

“The way Mr. Bradley is let walk around,” Pam said, and turned toward Jerry, and her eyes focused.

“Of course,” she said, “maybe he'll confess. He almost did last night—in a way he
did
last night.” She looked beyond Jerry. “Here they come,” Pam North said.

Mrs. Peter Coleman and Mrs. Anthony Payne did, indeed, look a good bit alike, seen from a distance. They walked on either side of a tall, blond man, and Rebecca looked up at him, laughing, her face bright. When she said, “This is Tony, my husband,” her voice was bright. “Isn't he beautiful?” Mrs. Coleman asked them and Tony looked down at her, and grinned, and said, “Cut that out, mother,” and was glad to meet the Norths. He seemed an easy and confident man.

They played family against family, and on the court Tony Payne was easy and confident. And Rebecca Payne was not the embarrassed, insecure girl of the Saturday before. She and Tony ran with glee, made cheerful chirping sounds of encouragement and admiration at each other.

Whatever it had been, it had gone now, Pam thought. Probably Rebecca had thought it was going to be like mother, like daughter. People—nervous, imaginative people—get absurd notions. Anyway, there wasn't anything really wrong with Mrs. Coleman. A little fey, perhaps. So—apparently a happy ending, Pam thought, putting what was meant to be a drop shot into the bottom of the net.

The Norths got clobbered.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1961 Frances and Richard Lockridge

Cover design by Andy Ross

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3146-2

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