Poison

CHAPTER 10

The round-the-clocks on Endicott and Riley proved advantageous in that no one tried to knock off either of them. But a week into the protective surveillance, Lieutenant Byrnes called Carella into his office and asked how much longer he thought they should keep the six fuck-ups on the job.

"Because you have to look at this two ways," he said. "Nobody's tried to kill them, that's true, but maybe that's because whoever our man is, he's tipped to the plainclothes coverage and is afraid to make a move. On the other hand, maybe our man's Endicott or Riley, who are covered day and night, and who aren't about to make a move, either of them, when they've got cops sticking to them like a dirty shirt, am I right?"

It was the eleventh day of April, a balmy Friday morning, almost three weeks since Jerome McKennon had been found lying in his own filth in his apartment on Silvermine Oval. Two weeks and four days was a long time to be working a case without any concrete results. That was what Captain Frick had told Lieutenant Byrnes first crack out of the box this morning. Frick was in command of the entire precinct. Byrnes rarely listened to him, but this time the captain had a point. The captain wanted to pull those six cops off the surveillance and put them back on post.

"Frick wants his people back," Byrnes said.

"Then let 'em go," Carella said.

"You think so, huh?"

"I think the only possible suspects we've got are Endicott, Riley, and the Hollis woman. If she's our man, she already knows from both of them that they're covered, and she'd be crazy to make another move. The other two have cops with them, you're right, so they can't possibly expose themselves."

"What troubles me is they're the ones who asked for the cops."

"Maybe to throw us off."

"How do you see this, Steve? Level with me. You said three suspects…"

"Three possibles, I said."

"Say it's the woman, okay? Just to noodle it. What's her motive?"

"I don't know. I checked with Probate. McKennon died intestate, and Hollander left what little he had to his sister. The Hollis woman claims the two victims were close friends of hers, and I believe her. So does Hal. And she's got alibis a mile long for where she was when…"

"Her alibis are your two other suspects."

"Don't I know it," Carella said, and sighed.

"You checked on everybody in McKennon's orbit?"

"I did. I don't see any possibles there."

"How about Hollander?"

"Virtually a loner, except for his relationship with the Hollis woman."

"An accountant, huh?"

"Yeah."

"How'd she meet him?"

"I don't know."

"Was he doing accounting work for her?"

"I don't know."

"Find out. Maybe there's something fishy in her books. Maybe she killed McKennon as a smokescreen. If Hollander was her real target, maybe he knew something she didn't want the IRS to know."

"Maybe," Carella said.

"It's a possibility, isn't it?"

"It is."

"You say she used to be a hooker, huh?"

"Just the one fall, Pete. In Houston, seven years ago."

"I never yet met a hooker with a heart of gold, did you?"

"Never."

"Where'd she come across all this money she's got? Your report says she owns a fancy joint on…"

"I don't know. I'll have to check with Willis. He's been doing most of the work with her."

"Check with him. And check with her, too. How'd Hollander spend Easter Sunday? Before he went back to his apartment?"

"He was with his sister. The one named in his will."

"Did you talk to her?"

"Yes."

"What'd he leave her?"

"Peanuts."

"I know people who'd slit your throat for a nickel."

"Not this one, Pete. She's married to a plumber, she's got two kids and another one in the oven. I don't see her…"

"Pregnant ladies can stab somebody the same as anybody else."

"She's eight months gone, Pete. Waddles around like an elephant. Besides, she was watching television with her nextdoor neighbor the night Hollander caught it."

"From what time to what time?"

"Went back home at about eleven."

"Neighbor corroborate?"

"Yes."

"What time did Hollander catch it?"

"M.E. says sometime late Sunday night or early Monday morning."

"Where was she at…?"

"In bed. And then up getting her kids off to school."

Byrnes sighed.

"Call the Hollis woman," he said. "Find out how she met him, was he working for her, and so on."

That was how Carella found out that Willis was living with her.

He called the number he had for Marilyn Hollis and a man answered the phone.

"Hello?"

Carella recognized the voice at once.

"Hal?" he said, surprised.

"I know I'm late," Willis said.

Carella looked up at the wall clock. A quarter past nine. Willis should have been in a half hour ago. But…?

"I must've dialed the wrong number," Carella said, and looked at the open notebook in front of him. Marilyn Hollis's number, no question about it. There was a long silence on the line. Then:

"I've been staying here," Willis said.

"Oh?" Carella said, and then, not really intending a pun, "Doing what? Undercover work?"

"I don't need wisecracks," Willis snapped. "I'll be there in an hour or so."

And hung up.

Carella looked at the receiver.

Well, well, he thought.

He put the receiver back on its cradle.

He kept staring at the phone for a long time.

Walter Johnson of the Food and Drug Administration called back at ten that morning. Carella had called him on the second day of April. Today was the eleventh. He'd almost forgotten he was expecting a callback. Carella had the kind of mentality that assumed people shared his own sense of responsibility. If he asked someone to do something, he put it out of his mind until his tickle file reminded him that the task had not been performed, the request not honored. In this city's bureaucratic morass, Carella normally allowed two weeks before getting on the pipe to holler a little. A call to Johnson was on his calendar for the sixteenth. In that respect, Johnson was early.

"I know I'm late," Johnson said.

Everybody knew he was late this morning. But Willis was not yet in the office.

"What have you got for me?" Carella asked.

"You wanted to know the commercial applications of nicotine."

"That's right."

"Why are you interested?" Johnson asked.

"We're investigating a nicotine poisoning."

"That's unusual, isn't it?"

"First one I've ever had."

"The victim didn't eat any cigars or cigarettes, did he?"

"We have no indication of that."

"Because that'll do it, you know. Your lethal dose is what, forty or fifty milligrams?"

"In there."

"Well, that'd be something like three cigarettes or two cigars. If your victim ingested them. But you say he didn't."

"We don't think so."

"So what you want to know is how your man could've got his hands on something with nicotine in it, is that it?"

"Yes."

"Well, I ran a data-base printout before calling you, got it right here in front of me. The EPA—the Environmental Protection Agency—has twenty-four pesticides registered in which nicotine is one of the major active ingredients. They've also got four registered in which an active ingredient is nicotine sulfate. And another two, dating from the Forties, where the active ingredient is tobacco dust."

"These are all insecticides?"

"Some of them are animal repellents—like your Dexol Dog Repellent which contains six percent nicotine in a mixture of wood creosote, phenol, pine tar and soap. Or your Jinx Outdoor Dog and Cat Repellent, which has a very low percentage of nicotine mixed in with dried blood, Naphthalene and Thiram. Your nicotine content in any of the pesticides varies from a low of 1 /700th of a percent to a high of ninety-eight percent. Some of the stuff is restricted, some of it's unclassified."

"Restricted how?"

"A pesticide company submits appropriate health and safety data to the EPA. The EPA studies the data, and then assigns a registration number. The company then has to register with the individual states before marketing a product in them. Some of the products are unclassified. This means the EPA hasn't yet determined whether they should be restricted or allowed for general use."

"Restricted to whom?"

"Certified applicators. Exterminators, lawn and turf people, forestry people… like that."

"How many of the products are unclassified?"

"Most of them."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning you can buy them over the counter in your hardware store or garden center. No restrictions. You take something like your Black Leaf 40 Garden Spray, it's registered in twenty-seven states, your home owner can just pick it off the shelf. It's got a nicotine content of forty percent. For anything over that, you have to be a certified applicator. Is it possible your man's an exterminator?"

"We don't know what he is," Carella said.

"Well, let's say he isn't. And let's say he wanted to convert Black Leaf 40—or any other solution with a forty percent nicotine content—to a free alkaloid. He'd add sodium hyroxide to it… well, you may know all this."

"No, I don't."

"Well, what he'd do… let me see if I can explain this to you. He'd put a PH-meter on the solution, and that'd tell him how acidic it was. Then he'd set about making it more basic and less acidic. Once he…"

"How would he do that?"

"Well, by adding the caustic soda, you see. To remove the sulfate group. He might get a reading of, say, nine or ten to begin with, I really don't know for sure, and he might be going for a three or a four, again that's a guess. He's going for the free alkaloid, you see. The nicotine. Separating it from the sodium sulfate. Once he's got his nicotine and water, he'll mix that in a separating funnel…"

"Mix it with what?"

"Well, ether, for example. It'd be soluble in ether, and the ether layer would be lighter than water. He'd drain some of the water off, add more ether, shake the mixture again, separate it again, do the same thing over and over again till he got the purity of nicotine he was looking for."

"That's a long process, isn't it?"

"It wouldn't be easy, that's for sure, unless your man had access to laboratory equipment. I don't know how many grams of the solution he'd have to titrate to get a single gram of pure nicotine. Your fatal dose, forty milligrams, is just a taste of the stuff."

The exact word Blaney had used. A taste. Carella suddenly remembered all the cigarette ads that touted either "taste" or "flavor."

"All this is assuming he knows how to separate pure nicotine from a forty-percent solution."

"Well," Johnson said, "I suppose he could do what my daddy used to do when I was a kid in Kentucky."

Carella was suddenly all ears.

"What was that?" he said.

"Used to make his own bug-killer. Used to mix cigarette tobacco and water in a coffee can, let it soak for a week or so, then boiled it. Made a sort of a tea, you know? Mixed that with soap suds so it'd stick to the leaf. Worked real fine in his garden. I suppose your man could have gone through the same process. Mix cigars or cigarettes in a can of water, distill the mash, extract the poison." He paused a moment, and then said, "Have you got a police lab?"

"Yes," Carella said.

"Call your people there. Ask them about distillation."

"Thank you," Carella said. "You've been very helpful."

"No problem," Johnson said, and hung up.

Willis came into the squadroom just as Carella was dialing the lab. Both men looked up at the clock. Ten-fifteen.

"Captain Grossman, please," Carella said into the phone.

"Sorry I'm late," Willis said again, and went to his desk.

Meyer Meyer, who'd been waiting an hour and a half for Willis to relieve, said nothing. He went to the coat rack, took his hat from it, lighted a cigarette, and walked out.

"When do you expect him?" Carella said into the phone. "Well, would you ask him to call Detective Carella, please? Tell him it's urgent."

He put the receiver back on the cradle.

"Want to talk about this?" he asked Willis.

"Talk about what?"

"Moving in with a suspect."

Willis glanced across the room to where Andy Parker was hunched over a typewriter, laboriously pecking out a report. Parker was in shirtsleeves, the window behind his desk open to a balmy breeze and the sounds of traffic below on Grover Avenue. Parker was what Brown would have called a "burnout" cop, a man who'd been coming to work with a beard stubble long before the cops on "Miami Vice" considered it stylish, but only because he thought the job was the pits and wouldn't dignify the work by dressing up for it. It normally took Parker two hours to type up a D.D. report, even if the perp had been caught redhanded at the scene. Parker figured the best way to put in a working day was to do as little work as possible. It was not advisable to discuss anything sensitive within Parker's earshot. To Parker, sensitivity was for hairdressers and interior decorators.

"Come on down the hall," Carella said.

"Sure," Willis said.

They walked through the slatted rail divider and down the hall into the Interrogation Room. Carella closed the door behind them. Both men sat on opposite sides of the long table. Behind Willis, there was a two-way mirror through which the room was visible from the room next door.

"So?" Carella said.

"So it's none of your business," Willis said.

"I agree. But it is the Department's business."

"The hell with the Department," Willis said. "I can live wherever I want to. With whoever I want to."

"I'm not sure that includes a suspect in a double homicide."

"Marilyn Hollis had nothing to do with either of those murders!" Willis said heatedly.

"I'm not convinced of that. Neither is the lieutenant."

"You've got no reason to believe she…"

"I've got no reason to believe otherwise, either. What the hell's wrong with you, Hal? You know she's a suspect!"

"Who says? In my book, if someone has an airtight alibi for…"

"You know what you can do with airtight alibis, don't you? Some of the best killers I've known had airtight…"

"She's not a killer!" Willis shouted.

The room went silent.

"What do we do here?" Carella said at last. "You're living with the woman, do we have to keep our thoughts on the case…?"

"I don't care what you do," Willis said.

"If we've got a situation here where anything we say in the squadroom goes straight back to…"

"I haven't said or done anything to jeopardize this investigation!"

The room went silent again.

"I want to talk to her," Carella said. "Do I arrange an appointment through you?"

"No one's telling you how to run your case."

"I thought it was our case."

"It is," Willis said. "We just have different ideas on who's a suspect and who isn't."

"Is she home now?" Carella asked.

"She was when I left."

"Then if you don't mind, I'd like to go over there."

"I suggest you call first."

"Hal…" Carella started, and then merely shook his head.

He left Willis sitting at the long table in the Interrogation Room, the two-way mirror behind him.

"What is it you want to know?" she asked Carella.

She was wearing blue jeans and a man's shirt. Carella wondered if the shirt was Willis's. They were in the paneled living room. The house was silent at eleven o'clock in the morning, thick walls insulating the room from the sounds of traffic outside. It was difficult to remember she'd taken a fall for prostitution. She looked like a teenager. Flawless skin, alert blue eyes, no makeup on her face, not even lipstick. But you could apply the Multiple Mouse Rule here. If you saw one mouse in your barn, that meant you had a hundred. If a girl took one fall for hooking, you could bet she'd already turned a thousand tricks.

"About Basil Hollander," he said.

"What about him?"

"How'd you happen to know him?"

"Biblically," she said, and smiled.

Hooker's trick. Take the curse off intimacy by joking about it.

"So you told us," he said drily. "How'd you meet him?"

"Why do you want to know this, Mr. Carella?"

"He was a friend of yours," Carella said. "He's dead. Another friend of yours is also dead. I know you'll forgive our curiosity…"

"I don't appreciate sarcasm," she said. "Why don't you like me?"

"I neither like you nor dislike you, Miss Hollis, I'm a cop doing…"

"Oh, please, spare me the cop-doing-his-job routine, will you? I got enough of that from Hal."

Hal. Well, of course. What else would she call him? Detective Willis?

"Why don't you like me?" she said again. "Is it because we're living together?"

Straight to the point. Never mind the other point, the fact that he'd asked her how she'd met Hollander, and she still hadn't answered him.

"Hal's business is Hal's business," he said. Which wasn't what he'd told Willis less than an hour ago. "My business is…"

"I thought you and Hal were in the same business."

"I thought so, too," Carella said.

"But you don't think so anymore, huh? Because he's living with someone who may be a coldblooded killer, isn't that right?"

"You said it, not me."

"But that's what you think, isn't it? That I may have killed both Jerry and Baz?"

"I have no evidence to support…"

"We're not talking about evidence here," she said. "The evidence indicates that I was nowhere near either of them when they were killed. That's the evidence, Mr. Carella. We're talking about gut feeling, aren't we? What's your gut feeling? You think I may have killed them, don't you?"

"I think my job is to…"

"Yes, here we go with your job again."

"Which you're not making any easier," Carella said.

"Oh? How so? By living with your partner?"

"No, by not answering a question I asked you five minutes ago."

"Has it been five minutes already?" she said. "My, how the time flies when you're having a good time."

"Why don't you like me?" he asked.

"I've met you before, Mr. Carella. You're every cop I've ever met. With the exception of Hal. You think if a person's ever been in trouble with the law, he'll always be in trouble with the law. A leopard never changes its spots, right, Mr. Carella? Once a hooker, always a hooker."

"If that's what you want to believe about me, fine. Meanwhile, how'd you meet Basil Hollander?"

"At a concert," she said, and sighed.

"Where?"

"The Philharmonic."

"When?"

"Last June."

"Just met accidentally?"

"During intermission. We started talking about the program, and I discovered we shared the same tastes in music. We hit it off immediately."

"And began seeing each other when?"

"He called me the next week. He had tickets to the opera. I don't particularly care for opera, but I went with him, anyway, and we had a marvelous time." She smiled and said, "Though I still don't care for opera."

Very refined tastes, he thought. Hookers in Houston naturally went to the Philharmonic a lot, but not the opera. He squelched the thought. Maybe she was right about him. Maybe he'd been a cop too long and was jumping to conclusions based on knowledge he'd thought entirely empirical. But he'd never met either a reformed hooker or a reformed armed robber. He'd never met an armed robber who attended symphonies, either. Or operas.

Out of deference to Willis, he did not ask her when she'd started sleeping with Hollander. This bothered him. He was already compromising the investigation. Ordinarily, the intensity of a relationship between a man and a woman was of prime importance in a murder case, especially one of the Boy-Meets-Girl variety. Instead, he said, "He was an accountant, is that right?"

"You know he was," she said.

"When did you learn this?"

"That he was an accountant?" she asked, looking surprised. "Of what possible interest…?"

"Did he ever do any accounting work for you?"

"No. What? Basil?"

"You do have an accountant, don't you?"

"I do."

"Who is he?"

"A man named Marc Aronstein."

"How long has he been your accountant?"

"I hired him when I came here from Buenos Aires."

"Buenos Aires?"

"I thought Hal might have mentioned it."

"No."

"I was hooking in Buenos Aires."

"I see," he said. "How long were you doing that?"

"Five years."

"And in Houston."

"Only a year. I left shortly after I got busted."

Longer history than he'd thought. Willis had picked himself a real winner.

"Went directly to Argentina from Houston?" he asked.

"No. I went to Mexico first."

"Were you hooking there, too?"

"No," she said, and smiled. "Just sightseeing."

"For how long?"

"Six months or so."

"How old are you, Miss Hollis?"

"You're the detective, I'll let you figure it out. I left home three months before my sixteenth birthday, went to L.A. where I lived for a bit more than a year before heading for Houston."

"Why Houston?"

"I thought I might apply for admission to Rice."

"But you didn't."

"No. I met a sweet talker who turned me out."

"Joseph Seward?"

"No, Joe was later."

"How long were you in Houston?"

"I told you. A year. Are you adding all this up? Then to Mexico for about six months, then to Buenos Aires for five years, and I've been here for fifteen months. What do you get?"

"Sixteen when you left home…"

"Almost."

"I get twenty-four."

"I'll be twenty-five in August."

"You've led a busy life," he said.

"Busier than you know," she said.

"You told us your father had set you up here…"

"No, that was a lie. I'm sure you know that. Don't test me, Mr. Carella, I hate dishonest people."

"How did you come by this place?"

"Didn't Hal tell you? I came here with close to two million dollars. The place cost me seven-five. I invested the rest. That's why I needed an accountant."

"Marc Aronstein."

"Yes. Of Harvey Roth, Incorporated."

"Here in the city?"

"Yes. On Battery Street. Near the Old Seawall."

"Ever discuss financial matters with Mr. Hollander?"

"Never."

"Ever been audited by the IRS?"

"Once."

"Any problems?"

"Only the usual."

"Like what?"

"T&E deductions."

"What's that?"

"Travel and Entertainment."

"Oh," he said. In his line of work, you didn't take deductions for travel and entertainment. "Ever discuss that audit with Mr. Hollander?"

"I told you I never discussed financial matters with him."

"Even though you knew he was an accountant?"

"We had other things to discuss."

"Did he know you'd been a hooker?"

"No."

"Did any of your other friends?"

"No."

"McKennon?"

"No."

"Riley? Endicott?"

"None of them."

"The night McKennon was killed…"

"I was away skiing at Snowflake."

"With Nelson Riley."

"Yes."

"And the night Hollander was killed…"

"I was with Chip Endicott."

"Both good friends of yours."

"Past tense," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Hal wants me to stop seeing them."

That serious, he thought.

"And will you?"

"I will." She paused, and then said, "I love him, you see."