MURDER IN RETROSPECT (Allie Griffin Mysteries Book 5) (11 page)

              Soon she was back at her house, panting, and wishing it were all a dream.

              Dinah the cat was mewling and doing figure eights around her legs.

              "Oh, kitty," she said. "I can’t pet you now."

              A sudden text alert scared the life out of her.

              It was from Edward Teller:
swab results zinc gluconate

              It was a couple of minutes before she could feel her heart begin to settle down to a somewhat normal pace. Her laptop was still on. She did a search for zinc gluconate. One word jumped out of the article like it was on fire:
anosmia.

              She went into her bedroom to lie down. She had everything she needed. It was time to call Sgt. Beauchenne.

              She dialed his private number. This was no time to be hiding. No swordfish texts. A man was lying dead in the hospital parking lot.

              Dinah came scurrying in and shimmied her flabby body underneath the bed.

              Allie didn’t remember locking the front door behind her.

              She walked out into the living room. There was the tall man with the mustache, the slicked-back hair, and the air of importance.

              And there was the gun that had just killed Eddie Ganz.

              "Mr. DuBarry, I presume?" she said.

              The car ride was silent. DuBarry was in the back seat, jabbing a gun in Allie's side. And in the front seat, Cassandra Hawkes served as driver. No one said a word.

              Allie recognized where they were going. This worried her. Why would they not blindfold her? The answer was obvious: She would never get a chance to tell anyone about this trip.             

              They were headed toward a ritzy part of the town on the southwest side. They turned onto Verona Avenue and the car slowed. The houses here were few and far between. Vast stretches of farmland separated residences, and where there were no farmers, there were wealthy businessmen clinging to the solitude that only this part of Verdenier could bring them.

              They stopped at a bland house that looked like every other house on this road. DuBarry instructed Cass to park the car on the street.

              He pointed the gun into Allie's face. "Get out."

              Cass stayed behind and Allie and DuBarry walked toward the house. The air was thick and silent, and the single street light cast a sickly hue over the wet blacktop, concentrated here and there, filling potholes with amber pools.

              DuBarry led her into the house through a side entrance, and she found herself in a high-ceilinged foyer, beyond which was a sort of receiving room. Its languid postmodern decor left her anatomically fatigued, as if she were kicking rubber limbs through waves of honey. Then a few more steps and the room suddenly transformed into a Technicolor cartoon which vibrated at every turn with playful contradictions and self-deprecating humor. Here, a static web of iron grids jutted out close to the ceiling—painted virgin white—like a catwalk for some pristine steelworker. There she saw a painting of mostly blues and reds depicting, after some coaxing of the cerebrum, a sweaty saxophone player mid-solo dissolving into the smoky surroundings of a jazz club populated by cats and dogs; and the whole thing was lit with soft-orange bulbs in miniature plastic sconces obviously painted to look wooden. Arrows on the floor led in one direction and then curved and reversed themselves as if they'd changed their mind. Off to the side was a golden piece, thoroughly futuristic, though not so much as to be totally unidentifiable: a dwarf-sized commode.

              Then the house just ended. And Allie was led through empty rooms devoid of furnishings and even of color. Then, gradually, there was a resurgence of décor: wallpaper, paintings, sconces, and
objects d'art
. Then they passed through a door that opened to stairs leading to a basement.

              More rooms, and then a single narrow hallway, one-eighty-degree turns round corners, the ceiling here only inches from her head. Here and there were other rooms, empty, and devoid of life signs. But they were immaculate, as if they were maintained daily for public display. And she was always returning to that maddening, winding hallway. The air down there was cool and rocky. The floor beneath her was obviously concrete, padded over with a thin carpet that absorbed footfalls completely and did nothing to alleviate the sense that she was being led into the lair of a demon in some underworld space, a boundary of sorts on the edge of reality.

              Their walk terminated in a room off the hallway. It too was barren, save for a single metal chair facing the door, and a barstool in the corner. With a threatening gesture, DuBarry made Allie sit in the chair and then handcuffed her left hand to the bottom of it. The chair was bolted to the floor. He then shut the door.

              "Charming place you've got here."

              "I have eclectic tastes, I know." He stared at her for a moment. The sound of their breathing was like thunder in that tiny room. "You're too smart for your own good, Ms. Griffin."

              "You're pretty clever yourself. Although I suppose it's a little easier having an affair with a woman with such close ties to a hospital. You can get anything you want. Well, almost anything."

              "Keep talking," the man said with a malicious smile. "I want to hear this."

              "You were missing one thing: Stibine gas. Made from antimony. Hard stuff to obtain. But they do use it in the semiconductor industry. Poor Eddie Ganz had access to a treasure chest's worth of the stuff. I suppose it was pretty easy to manipulate him into doing what needed to be done: Outfitting that POC with the canister of the gas so that Hawkes would take a dose, get that fatigue and those flu-like symptoms, facilitating the need to go back and take more oxygen, getting another dose of the poison. All you had to do was to get Cass to convince Ganz that he was one hospital memo away from a prison sentence for conspiracy."

              "This is absolutely fascinating."

              "May I continue?"

              "I insist."

              "There was only one thing standing in your way. Stibine gas has a terrible smell. Sulfuric. Like rotten eggs. How to get rid of that smell? How to mask it? That was your problem. A little research is all it took. Zinc gluconate. Used for a short time in homeopathic nasal sprays. Recalled from the market for causing anosmia—the loss of the sense of smell. Anyone with access to a well-equipped hospital would have no problem mixing up a batch of zinc gluconate gel. Then all you had to do was to smear it on the inside of the product tank of the POC. The air would pass through the stibine canister, and then the stibine gas would flood the product tank and mix with the zinc gluconate. The one thing you didn’t count on was the fact that Robert Hawkes, for all his administrative despotism, was no idiot. He was a doctor, and a pretty good one. And he probably had the idea that something was up, even if it was too late. But it wasn't too late for him to scratch out a note for yours truly.
Marsh test
: It's what forensic toxicologists use to detect the presence of arsenic. It can also detect the presence of antimony."

              "Well now," said the man in a deep, unsettling voice, "that is adorable. Too bad you're going to die, Allie Griffin. It's a great story, one I helped Cass develop. It involves the silly little bumblings of a poor sap named Eddie Ganz. Ganz shipped defective parts to the hospital and your husband died as an indirect result. You went to the hospital and started meddling, as I hear you often do. Everyone saw you argue with Hawkes. It gave Cass and me an idea. This has all the earmarks of a revenge killing. Cass strangled the man's corpse, just to put the final touch on it all. Your last case was a strangling. You're quite educated in how to kill. Hawkes's strangulation had the telltale signs of a woman about your height and build, pulling that rope with all her might, with all the hatred she could muster up. That idiot Ganz was supposed to pick up the POC, but Cass and I agreed he needed to be removed from the picture altogether. It fits: You went after him too, once you found out about his involvement, and you shot him. With this gun. And then you went back to your house and shot yourself with it."

              "You're crazy," said Allie. "You can't fake a suicide like that."

              "Watch me," he said, inching closer.

              Allie struggled

              DuBarry walked slowly and steadily toward her, gun in hand.

              "One shot," he said, "and it will all be over."

              "Absolutely right," said Frank Beauchenne, pressing a gun beside the man's temple.

              Allie rolled her eyes. "I'm getting tired of you doing that."

              "You’re under arrest, DuBarry."

              "Seriously, Frank," said Allie. "I could have eluded him. He wanted to make it look like a suicide. I just had to keep moving and keep my head far enough away from him. He never would have shot me unless he got just the right angle to make it look like a suicide. Now I look like I need some big strong police guy to come and save the day for me. I'm stronger than that, you know.
And
I'm smarter than you."

              "Really?" said Frank Beauchenne. "You're doing this now? It can’t wait?"

              "No, it can’t wait."

              "Allie, do you mind doing the domestic thing later? I'd like to read this man his rights."

              Something about Frank Beauchenne arguing with her while pressing a gun to a man's temple made her giggle, then full-on break down into raucous laughter.

              Somewhere beyond her laughter—really a release of stress and tears and closure to a six-year-long mystery—she heard Sgt. Frank Beauchenne apologize to the lawyer and read the man his rights while another officer undid her binds.

              "So how you holding up?" said Sgt. Beauchenne.

              They stood in Allie's living room, where it had all begun for her, back in the day with that ill-fated book club gathering all that time ago.

              "Me? Oh, fine. Peachy." She disappeared into the bedroom, wanting to immediately rid herself of the clothes she'd been held captive in.

              "You sure?"

              "Sure," she yelled from her room. "Why wouldn’t I be? Stalked, threatened, bound, almost killed, and for the fifth time in just under a year. I'm doing just dandy."

              "Alright, we'll talk later."

              She emerged from the room in sweatpants and a Mad Hatter T-shirt. "Why later?"

              "Excuse me?"

              She leaned up against the wall, arms folded. "I said why in the name of everything holy would you want to talk later? What is it with men running away whenever there's something obviously wrong?"

              "Now, Allie, hang on a second."

              Her breath was heavy in her chest. Anger and frustration boiled in her veins. She came away from the wall and walked toward him slowly. "You have no idea what I've been through, Frank. You can’t possibly know."

              "I have an idea."

              "Oh really."

              "Yeah, really."

              "You know I actually had the nerve to consider going into private practice? Allie Griffin, Private Eye. A part of me really loves this stuff, Frank. I've got a good head for it. Deductive logic, problem solving, an eye for detail."

              "I don’t disagree with any of that."

              "But this life, Frank, I don’t know. The moment I was in that garage and heard those gunshots... I don’t know. I just felt like... I felt like running to you. I know that's ridiculous and I know I just blew up at you for—quote, unquote—saving me. But the truth is I'm angry at myself for needing you."

              Beauchenne looked as though something was brewing in his mind.

              "What?" said Allie, calling attention to the look.

              "Nothing. I better go."

              "Frank, what is it already?"

              He had a twisted smile on his face. "Oh man, I know I shouldn’t tell you this."

              "Tell me what?"

              He made a sound like the benevolent grunt of a German shepherd and reached into his coat pocket.

              Allie's eyes nearly popped from their sockets when she saw the card.

              "Tomlin can’t keep anything to himself," said Frank Beauchenne. "You should have known he couldn’t hold on to something like this without eventually waving it around in front of everyone's face."

              "Oh, good Lord..."

              "Hear me out, Allie Griffin. I know this was meant for me, and what's more, everyone else knows. No one was fooled for a second into believing this was meant for Tomlin—especially when it was discovered that you gave it to Billings. Not for nothing, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together there. You said something like 'give this to your boss.' Billings is a good kid, but takes everything a bit too literally sometimes."

              "Oh, God..." said Allie.

              "What?"

              "I don’t know. It's just that... I kind of feel worse now that you have that."

              Beauchenne chuckled. "Why?"

              "Don’t laugh. When I said you don’t know what it's like, I meant it. And what I said in that card about awkward moments, I meant that too. I tried to make you dinner and wound up poisoning you. I tried to write you a love letter and I botched that too. I even tried making myself prettier for you with makeup but wound up looking like a member of the Rocky Horror floorshow. So when all is said and done, awkwardness wins the day with Allie Griffin. And, after all that, what you could possibly want with a bumbling, unwifely woman like me is beyond the capacity of rational analysis."

              Beauchenne took her head in his massive hands. They were a tiny bit rough, and they smelled of gun oil. And he smiled at her, and he kissed her gently on the lips, and she melted into it.

              When he pulled away, he said, "I want you to hear something. You tried to win me over in so many ways. You tried to win me over through my eyes by making yourself attractive. You tried to win me over through my heart with poetry. You tried winning me over through my stomach with food. Am I missing anything? Ah yes, of course, the one thing you didn’t even have to try at: You won over my heart and soul with your mind alone. A thousand women can cook, and a thousand can express themselves with a card—and by the way, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever read in my life—and a thousand women paint themselves every day in order to achieve some standard of beauty that they think men are looking for. You never once thought, with that magnificent brain of yours, that there was someone out there who could fall for you and love you without your having to even lift a finger? You only had to debunk my ghost story to amaze the hell out of me, and you only had to pick up on 'Marsh Test' to win me over completely. So you can put that in your pipe and smoke it, Allie Griffin. Oh, and by the way, you make a mean grilled veggie sandwich, you write beautifully, and you happen to be damned attractive. So there's that too."

              Allie stared at him. For once in a situation like this, words didn’t fail her, and she said them out loud to him, and for him.

~ END ~