The Prodigal Son (21 page)

“She was too young,” Carmine said abruptly.

“At fifteen? No! Think of Romeo and Juliet, of teenage suicides. Don’t forget that Jim was only fifteen too. No seasoned seducer, he. I pity him even more than I do her — he is the black half. But what you must remember first of all, Captain, is the massive nature of their
shared
pain.”

Carmine flinched. “How long has Jim known the Tunbulls?”

“About four years. C.U.P. has published two works, one in 1965 and one in 1967. Both were learned tomes, if one can apply that phrase to biochemistry, which is more foreign to me than assembling a do-it-yourself nuclear submarine.”

“So he knew the Tunbulls
before
he came to Chubb?”

“Max, certainly. He wrote both while he was at Chicago, but I personally pirated him as an author — there were rumors of a future Nobel Prize even then. The second book came out right at the time Jim moved to Chubb.”

“And then he embarked on
A Helical God
. You imply that he hadn’t known Davina before it?”

“If he had met her, it would have been socially only, maybe a dinner. But
A Helical God
— Davina was in her element! Instead of having to reproduce diagrams and graphs, she had to find ways to illustrate cellular goings-on for laymen, and to gain the knowledge to do that she had to huddle with Jim. How they huddled! They got on like a house on fire.”

“Affair-type fire, sir?”

Dr. Carter blinked, then giggled. “She should hope! I do know the lady well, Captain, but I know Jim Hunter far better, and I don’t think she got to first base. Besides, she’s a cock teaser, not a man eater. I’d be willing to take a bet that Max has the only key can open Davina’s chastity belt.”

“I see. Tell me about the unauthorized print run.”

“I thought it was a good ploy, actually, in dealing with Tom Tinkerman. Pah! What a poseur! I’ve already told you that a small university press concentrates on the more unpublishable
scholars, but in 1969 no university press can ignore the sciences. Which is what Tinkerman intended to do. The man was such an unscrupulous liar that he even convinced Roger Parson Junior that C.U.P. never published treatises upon obscure philosophies and medieval Christianity. While I held the imprimatur, it did — often! I can forgive a man confabulations based in hunger to see his own pet projects favored above all others, Captain, but I cannot forgive a man who lies to achieve the suppression of other forms of knowledge. That was Tinkerman. Like Hitler, he was by nature a burner of books and ideas.” Dr. Carter’s face screwed up. “However, he had the Parson ears — all of them.”

“But the print run, sir?” Carmine persisted.

“As I said, a good ploy. Tinkerman wouldn’t have sued, he was too careful of his public image, and I dropped a little word in his ear about how the public Press could make a bigot look. I said I’d told Max to go ahead and print.”

“And had you?”

“No!”

Carmine rose to go. “Thank you, Dr. Carter.”

“Oh, one more thing,” said Dr. Carter as Carmine donned his coat. “One very important thing.”

“Sir?”

“Talk to Edith Tinkerman. A man’s widow is more honest than his wife can ever be.”

Carmine started the engine of his beloved cop Fairlane, but did not put the car in Drive. His notebook … Mrs. Edith Tinkerman,
in that limbo of widowhood without a body to bury until the Coroner deigned to release it … Yes, there it was. Dover Street in Busquash. Admittedly not the beachfront or the real heights of the peninsula, but a very good neighborhood even so.

The house was exactly what one might have expected Thomas Tarleton Tinkerman to inhabit: medium in size and price range, dove-grey aluminum siding that looked like board but kept the heat in during winter and the heat out during summer. It would have three bedrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, and a family room that undoubtedly functioned as a large study for the late Dr. Tinkerman.

Edith Tinkerman lived in the kitchen, which some merciful architect had made large enough to hold a dining table and chairs for everyday use; this was Edith’s personal property, littered with fabrics, spools, and an electric sewing machine.

“I take in dressmaking,” she explained, more comfortable when Carmine elected to sit at her work area rather than in the living room, which looked as if it were never used.

“For interest or income, Mrs. Tinkerman?”

“Income,” she answered immediately. “Tom was parsimonious, Captain, unless to spend money could enhance his position.”

Jesus! thought Carmine, this case is replete with poor little put-upon women! All neglected for the husband’s career! Don’t these guys realize that it’s like amputating a limb, to put the wife on an outer orbit, deny her a share of the spoils?

“Did he make a will?” he asked, refusing refreshments.

“Yes. It was in his desk, which he kept locked. Once I was sure he was really dead, I busted the lock and found it.” She
looked smug. “I get three-quarters of everything, though I’m sure Tom thought of it as an interim will only. He was sure he was going to live forever. I thought he would too.”

“Do you have children?”

“Two girls, one twenty, one twenty-two. Tom was very disappointed, but his budget didn’t allow for more children, so he has no son. On the other hand,” she went on dreamily, “having girls was good for his billfold. Education is for men, he said, so the girls went to secretarial college and are working.”

“Were you educated, ma’am?”

“Oh, no! I might have given him an argument. I too was a secretary — his. Though twenty-four years of marriage to Tom gave me plenty of big words to use when I feel like it.”

“Was your marriage happy?”

“No, but I never thought it would be. Marriage to a Tom is better than being an old maid, Captain, if you’re not really educated. I had a husband, he gave me two lovely girls, and I have managed to eke out my housekeeping allowance by sewing. Tom only had enough love for one person — himself.” Her plain face assumed a look of ineffable satisfaction. “I willed myself to have girls. There was no way in Creation I would have given him a son to ruin.”

“You’re very candid,” Carmine said, out of his depth.

“Why not? Tom is dead, he can’t hurt me now. As soon as his estate is probated, I intend to sell this property, cash in his stocks and shares, and divide the proceeds equally among Anne, Catherine and me.”

“What happens to the other quarter of his estate?”

“He left it to the Chubb School of Divinity.”

“Can you give me an estimate of the estate’s worth?”

“About a million dollars.”

“More than I imagined,” Carmine said.

“Captain, Tom still had the first nickel he ever earned on a paper route. This house was bought for cash, no mortgage.”

“How much contact did you have with him at the banquet?”

Her greying hair, Carmine noted, was home-permed, and not very well; even at nineteen, he decided, she would never have been a pretty woman, but she would have been exactly what the divinity scholar was looking for: a housewife with no appeal for other men.

Finally she answered. “Apart from walking in with him, I only had one contact,” she said. “Typical Tom! My dinner got cold. I had to give him his B-12 shot.”

Carmine sat up so suddenly that he felt his neck crunch — the turmeric still had a way to go, obviously. “B-12 shot?”

“Yes. Tom had no acid in his stomach, which made him a dreadful eater — none of this, none of that, on and on! Meat and shellfish were difficult for him, oils and fats too. In fact, he was happiest eating jelly sandwiches or toast. And he flagged because he couldn’t absorb B-12. It had to be injected into his muscle.”

“Achlorhydria,” Carmine said slowly. “Yes, I know it.”

“A shot of B-12 perked him right up,” said the widow. “I have bottles of it, but also some single-dose ampoules so I can put one in my purse with a TB syringe. He was nervous — this was a big occasion for him, I knew that, and B-12 was like a — well, I imagine like a snort of vodka to a drinker. When he gave
me the signal for a shot, I wasn’t surprised. He got up to go to the bathroom, and I followed. I went into the Ladies, broke the neck on the ampoule, sucked up the B-12, put the cap on the needle and the ampoule back in my purse.”

“Did no one see you?” Carmine asked incredulously.

“No one. The Ladies was empty and the main course was being served. As I said, mine got cold. Tom was waiting at the end of the passage in the corner, and was terribly annoyed with me because there was nowhere to put the injection. The more he hounded me, the more upset I got. In the end he snapped at me to put it in the back side of his neck — everywhere else was smothered in robes, coats, shirts, cuff links — I was in tears. He turned side on and bent down and I gave him the shot in the soft part of the back of his neck, just as he had instructed. The minute the needle was out, he went back to the table, while I tidied my face and put the syringe in my purse.”

“You threw nothing in a trash can?”

“Tom would have lynched me! I’m all too aware of law suits if a cleaner gets pricked or cuts herself on the glass. Tom was emphatic about it.”

“What color was the injection, Mrs. Tinkerman?”

Her brown eyes widened. “B-12 colored, of course.”

“And what color is B-12?” he asked patiently.

“A beautiful ruby-red,” she answered, bewildered.

“The color was the same as always?”

“Identical, as far as I could see in the light.”

And take that, you cop fools! Carmine told himself, driving away with mind whirling.
Edith Tinkerman
as an arch-poisoner? A sat-on academic wife deliberately chosen by an ambitious husband intent on ensuring that his children were his and that the dinner table would hold no conversational stimulation? No, it was not Edith Tinkerman. It couldn’t be! She was the poisoner’s patsy, nothing more. The administration of an injection of vitamin B-12, beautiful ruby-red cyanocobalamin.

He’d mixed his dose and colored it, then inserted it in the ampoule and melted it shut again. But had he really entrusted his plan to such a chance? How much of a chance was it? He must have known how atrociously Tinkerman bullied his wife, known too of his psychological dependence on a substance he deemed vital to his welfare, his ability to perform a task. Yes, this poisoner would have taken the chance, knowing it was no chance at all. And sure enough, Tinkerman and his wife left the table, returned with him elated and her flustered. The device Donny found in the trash was always a blind.

Abe saw Max Tunbull in his office at Tunbull Printing, a large and typically ugly factory-style building on the Boston Post Road not far from Davina’s firm, Imaginexa. A more attractive front had been tacked on to the printery, however, to tell people that it was too successful to take orders for wedding invitations or In Memoriams to commemorate funerals.

The office was fairly spacious and bore Davina’s hand in its color scheme of crimson and pale lemon yellow; Abe found
the combination disquieting, but apparently Max did not, for he gazed around his premises with obvious pleasure.

In the few days since his sixtieth birthday dinner and its shocking events, Max had visibly aged. A tall man with a good body, he and it had subtly sagged, and the mass of waving, brass-gold hair had suddenly dimmed. Given the short time, Max had gone astonishingly grey. His features were Slav, the face broad and slightly flat, the cheekbones inclining to the oriental; his determined mouth had lost some of its firmness. Only the eyes, Abe sensed, remained as they had been: yellowish in color, they were well opened and fringed with very long lashes. Under ordinary circumstances he would be called an attractive man.

“I would like you to tell me everything you know about your son John,” Abe said, having declined coffee. “We’re experiencing trouble learning anything about him, and while I know that his adoptive father, Wendover Hall, is on his way to Connecticut, I would still like to hear what
you
know before I see him.”

Max looked at where his hands lay in his lap, frowned, and put them on his desk, not linked together, but holding on to the desk’s edge as if to a float in an angry sea. “Frankly, Lieutenant, I thought John was long dead. As God is my witness, I searched for him and his mother for years,” Max said, voice husky. “As time wore on, I guess I abandoned hope. So when he called me up and said who he was, I plain did not believe him. Until he produced the papers and the ring — the opal zebra ring, one of a kind. Then I had to accept him.”

“What did he tell you about himself?”

“That his mom had been taken in by Wendover Hall, who married her and adopted John. Martita was calling herself and John by an assumed name, Wilby. Wendover sent John to the best schools and encouraged him to make his career forestry, which he did. John said he loved the work. But the name on the many transactions was either John Hall or John Wilby. He knew nothing about the Tunbulls until, on his thirtieth birthday, long after his mother’s death, Wendover Hall gave him a box from her that she had stipulated wait until John was thirty. Even knowing, he took over two years to decide to contact me and, as he put it, open up old wounds.”

“Given the birth of your second son by your second wife, sir, did John’s advent create testamentary problems for you?”

Max laughed, it seemed with genuine amusement. “None at all, Lieutenant! He was obviously well off, it showed in his clothes. Wendover Hall, he told me, had already settled millions on him. He said he wanted no part of my estate, and I believed him. Certainly I’ve made no new will since he came back into my life.” Suddenly Max looked extremely uncomfortable. “I just wish I could say the same for John! Yesterday a lawyer named Harold Zucker called me from Portland, Oregon, to tell me that John made a new will on the last day of 1968. It leaves everything he has to be divided equally between my son Alexis and Val’s son, Ivan.”

Boy, thought Abe, winded, that sure came out of left field! “A shock, huh?” he asked.

“You can say that again!”

“Have you informed anyone in your family yet?”