The Convivial Codfish (17 page)

Establishment. That made Max think. Where was the greenhouse? He was wondering about Whet and his wolfbane when the maid came back with a decanter of sherry and a plate of biscuits on a silver tray.

“Mr. Whet says he’ll be with you in a few minutes, if you’d care to wait. He’s getting up now. I’ll have coffee ready soon, if you’d prefer that to sherry.”

“Sherry will be fine, thank you.”

This appeared to be Offer-Bittersohn-a-Drink Day. He might as well take this one before the maid changed her mind as Ashbroom’s Miss Moriston had done. The decanter, he noticed, was Waterford. Sarah had Waterford decanters, too. She’d used them at the boarding house to distract her lodgers’ minds from the cheapness of the sherry. That wasn’t the case here. Like everything else of the Whets’, the sherry was quietly expensive and in excellent taste.

He was tired. He hadn’t realized how tired, until now. The superb wine, the serene room, the comfortable chair, the noise of the traffic on Storrow Drive that penetrated this well-insulated fastness only as a far-off, steady roaring like the waves on the beach back at Ireson’s Landing; all these were well on their way toward lulling him to sleep when Gerald Whet appeared, freshly shaven and moderately rested, very much the master of the house in a brocaded robe over an open-necked shirt and dark trousers.

“So you’re Jem Kelling’s nephew?” he remarked as they shook hands. “Max, eh? I’ve been trying to place you.”

“Husband of Sarah who’s the only begat of the late Walter,” Max told him. He was damned if he’d call her “relict of the late Alexander.” “My name’s Bittersohn, actually. I filled in for Jem last night as your wife’s escort to the Tolbathys’ party, because Jem had a fall and broke his hip in case you haven’t heard. Your wife started introducing me around as Jem’s nephew and that made it easy for people to fit me in, so we just kept doing it. They all knew Jem, of course.”

“I should think so! Good Lord, how did they manage to hold the party without him? What happened, Max? Did he slip on the ice?”

“No, he fell downstairs rushing out to buy himself a false beard for the party.”

Gerald Whet laughed. “That sounds like Jem. Where is the old coot? Phillips House, I suppose. The Comrades will have to send him an appropriate get-well message. You wouldn’t happen to know where we might find a stuffed octopus, for instance? A really big one? Jem’s not in too much pain, I hope?”

“He claims he is. I’ve just been to see him.”

“And he sent you here with a message for Marcia to rush over and sponge his fevered brow with a pitcherful of martinis, no doubt. I’m afraid I can’t tell you where she is at the moment. Haven’t seen her myself, as a matter of fact. She may have gone out on some errand or other, thinking I’d want to sleep off my jet lag. I only got back from Nairobi about three o’clock this morning. I was rather surprised not to meet her getting back from the party. What time did you drop her off? Or did she spend the night with Hester Tolbathy?”

“She and Hester both spent the night at Bexhill Hospital, I’m afraid,” Max told him.

“What do you mean? Was there an accident to the train? Marcia isn’t badly hurt?”

“There was a contrived accident, but that’s not the real problem. Your wife, like almost everyone else on the train, got sick to her stomach from eating contaminated caviar. They were all hauled off in ambulances.”

“Caviar?” Whet shook his head. “I can’t believe it. How bad is she?”

“It’s a bad situation altogether.” Max wasn’t liking this. “Edith Ashbroom is dead. So is John Wripp, though he seems to have died mostly from shock and injuries he got in a bad fall when the train stopped short. Wouter Tolbathy is also dead.”

“Wouter? But he hates caviar.”

“That so? Nobody mentioned it before. However, Wouter didn’t die from the caviar. He died from’ a smashed windpipe.”

“My God,” gasped Whet. “You don’t mean that commando trick Obed Ogham—no, that’s impossible.”

“The police are calling Wouter’s death an accident. They haven’t yet come up with a plausible explanation of how such an accident could have occurred, as far as I know. I expect they’ll think of something if they get leaned on hard enough by the district attorney.”

Whet shook his head and murmured, “My God” again. “But you still haven’t told me how Marcia is.”

“Your maid tells me the hospital called early this morning to say she’d been put on the critical list, along with several others. Apparently there’s been no significant change since then, or the hospital would have let you know.”

“What’s the number out there? Do you have it?”

“No, and it wouldn’t do you any good. The switchboard isn’t accepting any calls. They are, however, letting immediate family members visit the patients, so I suggest you go out there in person. Have your maid fix you a quick bite, why don’t you, and throw on some clothes. I’ll get my car and pick you up in fifteen minutes.”

“Can you make it sooner? How could I eat with Marcia—oh, my God, what am I going to tell the children?”

“You’d better get the facts before you try to tell them anything, hadn’t you? They must have heard the story on the news already.”

“They can’t have, or they’d have been trying to reach me already. The whole crew are at our mountain lodge this weekend, skiing. We have no radio or television up there.”

“No newspapers either?” Not having the daily paper delivered was to Max the ultimate deprivation. He could never figure out why people who could afford every luxury were willing to forgo such a basic necessity of life.

But Whet shook his head again. “Oh, no, they wouldn’t bother. Max, if you mean it about driving me out to Bexhill, I’d be eternally grateful. I don’t keep a car in the city myself, and it’s a hell of a distance by cab.”

They couldn’t help it, Max had decided some time ago. It must come from eating all those fishcakes and baked beans. “I’ll be back as fast as I can,” he assured Whet. “My car’s just over on Charles Street.”

Max didn’t wait for the maid to let him out. She must be busy in the kitchen; he could smell coffee brewing. He hoped she’d manage to get a cup into her employer before Whet left the house. This wasn’t going to be any pleasure trip.

G
ERALD WHET SHOWED NO
sign of wanting to talk on the way out to Bexhill. His silence could have been due to depression or exhaustion, or to avoid the strain of having to keep up an act. Max was still keeping an open mind.

Whet had on a badly wrinkled and rather dirty Burberry, with a shapeless Irish tweed hat on his head. No doubt these were what he’d traveled in. They made him look exactly like a worn-out passenger who’s just come off a long plane ride, and Max would have liked to know whether Whet had had that thought in mind when he put them on again.

It could simply have been that the garments were ready to hand when he was rushing to get dressed, or that he’d got so used to wearing them on his prowls through the pyrethrum fields during the past few weeks that he’d donned them automatically. In time of stress some familiar garment can serve as a kind of security blanket. If Whet was really just off the plane from Nairobi, if he really loved his wife all that much, if he was really as worried and scared as he appeared to be, then maybe he’d needed to grab at any scrap of comfort he could find.

On the other hand, Whet could have worn the Burberry to keep Max Bittersohn from seeing him in a felt hat and city overcoat; because he knew perfectly well Max Bittersohn had been playing games all over Beacon Hill with a man dressed in that same conventional garb, and that Max had been led to Whet’s house by that same man.

Maybe the man had been Whet himself. Maybe it had been Edward Ashbroom. Maybe it had been Miss Moriston’s kid brother dressed in Ashbroom’s clothes. Who the hell knew. Maybe Max had been decoyed to Whet’s house simply because it was a handy place to lure somebody. Maybe Ashbroom had assumed Whet was still in Nairobi and therefore he wouldn’t be getting a Comrade into trouble if he used the place to shake Bittersohn. Or maybe Ashbroom had known Whet was there, and was deliberately trying to make trouble for him.

Maybe the guy in the overcoat had been reading Miss Moriston’s gas meter and galloped off to Whet’s next because he figured he’s cadge lunch off the maid. Bah, humbug. Max glanced over at Whet, who had his chin buried in the collar of the Burberry and his eyes fixed on the road.

“How was your flight from Nairobi?”

“Long, boring, uncomfortable.” Whet spoke without taking his eyes from the road. “As one would expect.”

“You traveled first class, I suppose.”

“What for? Both ends of the plane go to the same place.”

It was an argument Max himself would have used. He found himself liking Whet, though it wasn’t the professional thing to do. “What route did you take?”

“Cairo to London. We were late getting out of Heathrow, naturally. Then there was some kind of flap on going through customs and I had to kick around there for an extra hour or so.”

“Oh. I wondered how you managed to arrive at such an ungodly hour.”

“One can generally count on getting fouled up somewhere along the line. And what a homecoming! Wouter dead, Marcia poisoned on Hester’s caviar at Hester’s party. Max, I simply can’t believe this. Damn it, Tom Tolbathy practically goes over and catches those sturgeon himself. It’s just not possible Hester served bad caviar.”

“The official position at the moment is that the caviar was deliberately laced at the cannery with colchicine.”

“Colchicine?”

“It’s used to treat gout.”

Max repeated what Jem’s nurse had told him. Gerald Whet looked more interested than dismayed.

“Colchicine used to treat gout. That’s something I hadn’t known.”

“I suppose it’s a little out of your line.”

“Quite. Tomato worms don’t get gout. Nice if they did, I suppose.”

“Do you know of any plant poisons that would produce those same symptoms?”

“Plant poisons?” Now the alarm had been sounded. Whet was alert, and wary. “Why yes. Now that you mention it, I can think of several. Pyrethrum, for instance, though I should think one would have to take an enormous amount of it to do any real damage. There have been poisonings from insecticides containing pyrethrum, but those are generally caused not by the pyrethrum itself but the petroleum distillates used in the base. I suppose I should be thankful I was bucketing around on that damned plane instead of being at the party. At least I have an alibi, for what that’s worth. Though if Marcia—God, what a thing to come home to at Christmas!”

He fell silent again and didn’t rouse himself until Max had stopped the car in the hospital parking lot. Then he stirred, as though he might have been asleep.

“Are we there? You don’t know Marcia’s room number, I don’t suppose?”

“They’ll tell us at the desk. If we can get in,” Max added, looking at the guards around the various entrances.

Whet set his jaw. “We’ll get in.”

For such a bland-looking man, Whet could be remarkably forceful, Max found. He overpowered two guards with a few softly spoken words. The receptionist didn’t even ask for identification before she gave him Mrs. Whet’s room number.

“E-2, down this corridor and turn to the left. We’ve had to squeeze in the emergency patients wherever we could, but we’re monitoring them very carefully.”

“I should damn well hope so,” Whet answered, but he was already well on his way when he said it. Max tagged at his heels trying to look like an anxious son-in-law. In fact, he did feel genuine concern for the woman who’d been so jolly a companion, and he was surprisingly relieved when the floor nurse on E had somewhat reassuring news.

“Mrs. Whet’s showing a little improvement. We’ve taken her off the critical list and she’s able to take liquids by mouth.”

“What liquids?” Whet asked sharply.

“Just a little weak tea so far, but we’re going to try her on orange juice later. Mrs. Whet’s being a very cooperative patient. Right in here.”

A pathetic caricature of the buxom charmer Max had squired to the Tolbathys’ lay on the high bed with an intravenous tube in her arm. When Max caught the look on Gerald Whet’s face as he bent over his wife, he decided maybe he ought to go over and talk to the nurse for a while.

“Are you Mrs. Whet’s son?” the nurse asked him.

“No, I’m the guy who took her to the party.”

“You were on that train? Boy, are you the lucky one. That caviar must have been loaded. It’s a wonder everybody didn’t die. How come you aren’t sick?”

“I didn’t eat any caviar. Was it really that bad?”

“The lab reports were horrendous.”

“But why colchicine? That’s not a common poison, surely? I’d never heard of it before.”

“Neither had I, if you want the truth. I mean, not as a poison. Of course many drugs are dangerous if you exceed the prescribed dosage. And colchicine has an unusually narrow margin of safety, which is something else I hadn’t realized until the pharmacist put out the word. I suppose it was a case of using what was available, but don’t you think gout medicine was a funny thing to be kicking around a caviar cannery? Though I suppose they get rheumatism from the cold and damp. At least I should think it would be cold and damp. My aunt’s a sardine packer up in Maine, and she wears heavy socks and rubber boots to work all the time. She says it’s kind of fun when you get used to it.”

“Wearing rubber boots and heavy socks?”

“No, packing sardines. I guess there’s quite an art to it, like doing jigsaw puzzles. How the heck did I get off on sardines? Punchy, I guess. I went off duty yesterday at six o’clock. They called me back about ten last night when the ambulances began rolling in crammed to the tailgates, and I haven’t sat down since except for a cup of coffee now and then to keep me awake. This hospital’s not equipped to handle large-scale emergencies, but what could we do? You can’t dillydally around shipping poison cases off to other hospitals. They could be dead by the time they got there.”

“Couldn’t you have got some nurses in from another facility?”

“Where, for instance? They’re all understaffed, same as us.”

“You must be dead on your feet by now,” Max sympathized.