Poison

CHAPTER 12

He sat alone in the living room. When he'd left for work this morning, she told him she'd be going first to Riley's loft—"To end it," she'd said—and then uptown to do some shopping. She said she'd be back at about one o'clock and she promised to call him at the squadroom then, to let him know how it had gone.

The clock on the mantel over the fireplace ticked noisily.

It was now a minute to one.

He kept thinking someone had ended it for Riley, all right, someone had laced his scotch with nicotine and sent him to join McKennon and Hollander. Three of her close buddies dead and gone now. Only Endicott left and she planned to meet him for a drink sometime next week, break the news to him. "End it" with him, too.

The clock chimed.

A single chime.

Ding.

Into the silence of the living room.

He kept waiting.

He heard her key in the latch at a quarter past one. She came in, put her shoulder bag on the table just inside the door and was starting for the stairs leading to the upper stories when she saw him sitting there.

"Hey, hi!" she said, surprised. "What are you doing home?"

"Riley's dead," he said.

Flat out, shoot from the hip and shoot to kill.

"What!"

"You heard me."

"Dead?"

"Dead. Tell me everything that happened there, Marilyn."

"Why? You don't think…"

"If you don't tell me, you'll have to tell Carella. He knows you were there. You left your cigarette lighter behind, and two blues have already described you."

"So now I'm a suspect again, is that it?"

"You never quit being one. Not on Carella's block."

"I didn't kill Nelson. For Christ's sake, I was only there a few minutes!"

"Who said he was killed?"

"You said he was dead, I'm assuming it wasn't a goddamn heart attack!"

"Tell me everything that happened. From the time you got there till the time you left."

Marilyn sighed.

"I'm listening," Willis said.

"I got there at a little past ten, it must have been."

"And left when?"

"Around… I don't know exactly. Ten-thirty?"

"That's a half-hour, not a few minutes."

"Yes, about a half-hour."

"All right, what happened in that half-hour?"

"He offered me a drink, we had some coffee, I told him—"

"What did he offer you to drink?"

"Scotch."

"Did you drink any of it?"

"No. It smelled awful."

"You smelled it?"

"Yes."

"You handled the bottle?"

"Yes. I took the cork off the bottle and smelled it."

"What'd it smell like?"

"Awful."

"What kind of a smell, Marilyn?"

"How do I know? How do you describe a smell? It smelled like scotch. Awful."

"Only like scotch?"

"Yes. I think so. Why? Was something in it?"

"What'd you do then?"

"I put the cork back on the bottle, and I put the bottle back on the shelf. Was Nelson poisoned? Was something in that bottle?"

"Then what?"

"Answer me, damn it!"

"He was poisoned, yes."

"Christ! My fingerprints are on that bottle! That gives your partner everything he needs, doesn't it?"

"If your fingerprints are in fact on the bottle…"

"Of course they are!"

"And if the contents test out poison…"

"You know they will!"

"Then the police will want to know a lot more about what you did with that bottle."

"All I did was… what do you mean the police? Your partner, do you mean? Or you, too?"

"I'm still listening," Willis said.

"I didn't put anything in that bottle!"

"You just picked it off the shelf…"

"Yes."

"… and took out the cork…"

"Yes, damn it!"

"… and sniffed the scotch."

"Yes!"

"Why?"

"Because Nelson said it was very good stuff. Twelve years old, he said. So I… wanted to… I was curious. I've never liked scotch, I thought maybe twelve-year-old stuff might smell better than what I'd had before. It always smells like medicine to me."

"But this didn't smell like medicine."

"I don't know what it smelled like! I told you! It smelled awful."

"Did it smell like tobacco?"

"I don't know."

"Think!"

"If I say it smelled like tobacco, then I'm clean, right? He was poisoned with nicotine, isn't that it? The same as Jerry. So if I say I smelled tobacco, then the nicotine was already in the bottle when I picked it up. But I'm telling you the truth! I don't know what it smelled like! I took a quick sniff and then put the cork…"

"Okay," Willis said, and sighed. "Then what?"

"We drank some coffee, I told him I wanted to end it."

"How did he react?"

"He didn't like the idea."

"You told him about us?"

"Yes."

Willis nodded.

"Then what?"

"He wanted me to go to bed with him."

"Did you?"

"No!"

"What did you do?"

"I kissed him on the cheek and left."

"Uh-huh."

"I said goodbye and left."

"And ten minutes later, twenty minutes later, he was dead."

"I didn't kill him!"

"How much time did you spend with that bottle?"

"A minute. Less than a minute. All I did was…"

"Get your bag."

"What?"

"Your bag. There on the table."

"Why?"

"I want to see what's in it."

"There isn't nicotine in it, if that's what you…"

"Get it."

She went to where she'd put the bag when she came in, carried it to where he was sitting and unceremoniously turned it upside down, dumping its contents on the floor near his feet.

"Have a good time," she said. "I'm going to have a drink."

She went to the bar and poured a hefty portion of gin onto three ice cubes. She took a good swallow and then walked back to where he was sifting through the stuff at his feet. Lipstick, eye liner, makeup brush, tissues, chewing gum, a red wallet, a checkbook, keys, some loose change…

"Find a vial of poison?" she asked.

He began putting the stuff back into the bag.

"Where'd you go when you left Riley's loft?"

"Uptown."

"To do what?"

"I told you I had some shopping to do."

"What'd you buy?"

"Nothing. I was looking for a pair of earrings, but I didn't see anything I liked."

"You shopped from ten-thirty till…"

"I shopped till about noon. Then I had a sandwich…"

"Where?"

"In a luncheonette off Jefferson."

"Then what?"

"I took a taxi and came home."

"Got here at a quarter past one."

"I didn't look at the clock. Do you want a drink?"

"No."

"It won't have poison in it, you don't have to worry."

Willis was silent for a long time, hands clasped, head bent. "Carella's gonna want a motive," he said at last, almost to himself. "Three of your close friends killed, he'll want to know…" He looked up suddenly. "Do I know everything there is to know, Marilyn?"

"From the minute I got there to the minute I…"

"I'm not talking about the time you spent with Riley. I'm talking about you."

She looked at him, puzzled.

"Did any of these three men know something about you that…"

"No."

"… you haven't told me?"

"I've told you everything. None of them knew anything about my past."

"How about Endicott? Does he know you used to be a hooker?"

"No."

"What does he know?"

"Only what I told the others. I lived in L.A., I lived in Houston, I traveled in Mexico, I lived in Buenos…"

"You never told me about Mexico."

"I'm sure I mentioned Mexico."

"No. What did they think you were doing in all those…?"

"I told them I had a rich father."

"Same as you told me."

"Yes. In the beginning. But then I told you everything. You know I did, Hal!"

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Because if you left anything out…"

"I didn't."

"… and it has some bearing on what happened to these…"

"No."

"… Carella's going to find out. He's damn good, Marilyn, and he'll find out."

"I told you everything," she said.

The room went silent.

"Everything you need to know," she said.

"What don't I know, Marilyn?"

She said nothing.

"What else, Marilyn? What about Mexico?"

She walked to the bar. She put more ice cubes in her glass, poured gin over them, and came back to where he was sitting.

"Why don't we go upstairs to bed?" she said.

"No," he said.

They kept looking at each other.

"Tell me," he said.

In Houston, the first job she got was dancing topless in a joint on Telephone Road. Part of the job was sitting with customers when you weren't onstage, getting them to buy you cheap champagne marked up high. You got a commission on each bottle. Occasionally, you let them cop a feel. Your thigh, your breast, keep them buying the champagne. When she'd been there a while, she learned that some of the other girls were doing handjobs in the back booths, ten bucks a throw. She started doing that, too.

There was a piano in the place, and this guy used to come in, sit down and play jazz every now and then. Nice guy, never took any of the girls to the back booths, just watched them dancing, played piano, had a few drinks at the bar, went on his way. Came in two, three times a week, she finally realized he had his eye on her. He got to talking to her one night, real shy guy, told her he used to play jazz in Kansas City, finally asked if she'd like to go out with him sometime. She dated him the next Sunday night, her night off. They had a real nice time.

She started going to bed with him, oh, it must've been on their third date. When they'd been seeing each other for three months or so, he told her she was losing a lot of money giving it away, said there were big bucks to be made in Houston, conventions coming in all the time, oil men, did she think she might like to try it sometime? Try what? she said. Try getting paid for it, he said, a hundred bucks a shot.

She thought it over.

She was making like two-fifty a week tossing her tits and her ass on the stage, maybe another hundred in commissions on the champagne, and another hundred doing the handjobs. The piano player told her she could make that much money in a single night, even after he took his commission for setting her up with guys who might be interested, he knew plenty of guys who might be interested.

So six months after she hit Houston, she got turned out by a sweet-talking piano player.

A month later, he got stabbed in a barroom brawl, and she hooked up with Joe Seward, who had a small stable, three girls, he wasn't a bad sort for a pimp. Never beat any of his girls, some pimps thought the way you got girls to behave was to knock them around like the beach bum in L.A. used to do to her.

The first time she got busted, she was scared to death.

In Texas, prostitution—if it's a first offense—is only a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by a fine not to exceed a thousand bucks, confinement in jail for a period not to exceed 180 days, or both. She was terrified she'd have to spend six months in jail. But the judge was a lenient one, who took her tender age into consideration—she was only seventeen—and Seward paid the five-hundred-dollar fine without a whimper, and she was free as a lark again. But still very scared.

She told Seward she needed a vacation.

He looked her dead in the eye—any other pimp would've beat the shit out of her—and he said, "Sure, Mary Ann, you take your vacation," but she could see in his eyes that he knew she was about to split and he'd never see her again.

She didn't know where she'd be going when she left Houston, didn't know where she might end up, so she applied for a passport in case she decided to go any place where she might need one, that was her biggest mistake, getting the passport. But she didn't know that at the time, got her passport in spite of the single 43.02 arrest, Mary Ann Hollis, black-and-white picture of a pretty seventeen-year-old blonde girl smiling at the camera. In the space where you were supposed to list your occupation, she wrote "Teacher."

Crossed the border from Eagle Pass to Piedras Negras, driving a car she'd rented in Houston. She'd put away some money, figured she'd spend a little while in Mexico, just driving around, taking it easy, Mary Ann Hollis, teacher. Didn't know where she'd go after Mexico, or what she'd do when her money ran out. She had something like a thousand dollars with her, she didn't know how far that would take her. She had it in her mind that she'd quit hooking. She had a passport, she could go anywhere in the world. She'd be eighteen years old in August, she had her whole life ahead of her.

Coming out of the Sierra Madre mountains, in the state of Guerrero, near the town of Iguala, she ran across a man who looked like a farmer but who was selling very good marijuana, what they called gold, selling at the time for twenty-two dollars a kilo in Mexico, something like three hundred, three-fifty a pound back in the States. She bought a kilo from the man, what the hell, only twenty-two bucks. Kept driving along, stopping here and there along the way, this or that motel, wherever she happened to be at sunset, drank tequila, smoked pot in her room, got a good suntan.

Life was good.

She felt terrific.

She was carrying only a big leather tote bag. In the tote, she packed her passport case with her passport and her money, and a plastic container with her diaphragm inside it, and a tube of jelly, and some panties and jeans and blouses and toilet articles, and buried under it all the steadily diminishing kilo of gold.

At the end of a blistering hot August, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she decided she'd had enough of Mexico. She drove back toward the American border one day, wearing sandals and panties and a white caftan she'd bought in a little shop in one of the towns, came through Saltillo, came some ten kilometers later to a little village called Ramos Arizpe, and had just passed through there when up ahead she saw a long line of cars stopped at a roadblock manned by uniformed Mexicans.

She didn't speak or understand a word of Spanish at the time but an American kid in the car ahead of hers told her they were checking for guns since there'd been rumors of some kind of trouble brewing, some revolutionary group, she never did get it straight because all at once she was scared to death again.

Not because she was carrying a gun in the car, which she wasn't.

But because what was left of the kilo of gold was in her tote bag.

They found the dope in three minutes flat, and then they—

"Do you really want to hear the rest of this?" she, asked Willis.

"Yes," he said.