Poison

CHAPTER 3

In this city, they called it a 24-24. It applied to homicides and it referred to the importance of the twenty-four hours preceding a person's death and the twenty-four hours following it.

The pre-mortem twenty-four hours were important because what a victim did, where he went, whom he saw, all might have bearing on his death. Officially Jerome McKennon was a victim, even if he'd swallowed the nicotine of his own volition. The post-mortem twenty-four hours were important only if someone had murdered McKennon because then the investigating detectives would be working against the clock, and as more and more time elapsed, the trail could get colder and colder, giving the killer an edge. It was a dictum in police work that if a case went beyond a week without a solid lead, you might as well throw it in the Open File. The Open File was the graveyard of investigation.

There were only two detectives working the McKennon case. This wasn't a big-deal front-page murder. Nobody important had been slain, no exotic setting had been involved, this was just another garden-variety murder in a city that sprouted them like weeds. The poison was unusual, true, but even that wasn't something an aboriginal tribe might dip its arrows into. The media had more than enough sensational murders to shout about every day, and since this case lacked what the cops referred to as the Roman Arena Appeal, it got less than passing notice in the newspapers and on television. Only one of the Tuesday morning commentators—a man who'd been touting the evils of cigarette-smoking for the past six months now, ever since he himself had quit, there's nothing like a reformed whore—found the case an opportunity for mentioning how strong a poison nicotine actually was, but he was a voice in the wilderness.

The case was important only to Willis and Carella, and then only because they'd happened to be "up"—on duty and catching—when the call came in. Neither of them enjoyed poisons that acted within minutes. Such a poison automatically started them thinking suicide. They were not paid to think suicide. The only reason a suicide was investigated as a homicide was that it might in fact be a homicide. But nicotine did work in minutes, sometimes seconds, and Jerome McKennon had died of nicotine poisoning and it was important now to get work on the 24-24 and to do it fast because if someone had dropped that poison in his beer or forced it down his throat, the edge was widening with every ticking second of the clock.

There were only two of them.

The pre-24 was going to be difficult; they had found no appointment calendar in McKennon's apartment. But Marilyn Hollis had told them he was vice president in charge of marketing at Eastec Systems on Avenue J, so Carella started there.

Willis, working from the list of three names Marilyn had given them, set about trying to find the other men in her life. He was, in effect, working the post-24. She had told them that none of those other men even knew McKennon—"I don't make a habit of telling Tom about Dick or Harry." But a goodly number of the murders committed in this city were motivated by jealousy. Husband slays wife's lover. Woman slays own lover. Boyfriend kills girlfriend or girlfriend's boyfriend, or, generously, both. Boyfriend kills boyfriend or boyfriend's mother. The possibilities were limitless, the green-eyed monster exploding into violence at the slightest provocation.

If Marilyn had three boyfriends in addition to McKennon, the possibility existed that one of them hadn't appreciated the relationship she shared with McKennon and had decided to put an end to it. The possibility was a slim one, and Willis knew it. But in the post-24, all you were looking for was a place to hang your hat.

The first name on the list was Nelson Riley, Marilyn's weekend playmate. But if Riley had been away with Marilyn, he couldn't have been here in the city poisoning McKennon; nicotine worked within minutes. The detectives had only Marilyn's word for her—and Riley's—whereabouts on the two days preceding McKennon's death. Willis called Riley, identified himself, and told him he'd be there in half an hour.

Nelson Riley was a man in his late thirties, Willis guessed, six feet two or three inches tall, with a shock of red hair, a red handlebar mustache, green eyes, massive shoulders, a barrel chest, and the big-knuckled hands of a street fighter. He was not a street fighter—at least not by chosen profession. He was an artist, and his studio was in a loft on Carlson Street downtown in the Quarter. Huge canvases lined the wall of the loft, illuminated by a skylight that poured a cold wintry light into the room. A shoulder-height divider-wall separated Riley's workspace from his living quarters. Beyond the edge of the wall, Willis could see an unmade waterbed.

The paintings against the walls were all representational. Cityscapes, nudes, still lifes. One of the nudes looked remarkably like Marilyn Hollis. The painting on the easel depicted a watermelon. The colors on Riley's palette, resting on a high table alongside the easel, were predominantly red and green. Riley's jeans and his faded blue T-shirt were covered with paint, as were his enormous hands. Willis kept thinking he would not ever like to run into Riley in a dark alley on a moonless night. Even if he had the soul of an artist.

"So what's this about?" Riley asked.

"We're investigating an apparent suicide," Willis said, "a man named Jerry McKennon."

He watched the eyes. The eyes told a lot. Not a flicker of recognition there.

"Do you know him?"

"Never heard of him," Riley said. "You want some coffee?"

"Thanks," Willis said.

He followed Riley to behind the divider-wall, where the waterbed shared an eighteen-by-twenty space with a dresser, a sink, a refrigerator, a wall cupboard, a floor lamp, a kitchen table with chairs around it, and a hot plate on another paint-spattered table. The fierce March wind outside rattled a small window near the foot of the bed. Riley filled a kettle with water and put it on the hot plate.

"It's instant," he said, "I hope you don't mind."

"Instant's fine," Willis said.

Riley went to the cupboard and took down two paint-smeared mugs. "You did say apparent, didn't you?" he asked. "The suicide?"

"Yes."

"Meaning maybe it wasn't suicide?"

"We don't know yet."

"Meaning what? Murder?"

"Maybe."

"So how am I in this? What's this got…?"

"Do you know a woman named Marilyn Hollis?"

"Sure. What's she got to do with it?"

"Were you away with her this past weekend?"

"Yeah?"

"Where'd you go, Mr. Riley?"

"What's that got to do with somebody's suicide? Or murder."

"Well, this is just routine," Willis said.

"It is, huh?" Riley said, and raised his eyebrows skeptically.

The window rattled with a fresh gust of wind.

"Mr. Riley," Willis said, "I really would appreciate it if you could tell me where you went with Miss Hollis, what time you left the city, and what time you returned. Please understand…"

"Sure, sure, this is just routine," Riley said. "We went up to Snowflake to do a little spring skiing. Some kind of spring skiing, I'll tell you. The mountain was a solid block of ice."

"Where's that, Snowflake?"

"Vermont. I take it you don't ski."

"No, I don't."

"Sometimes I wish I didn't," Riley said.

"And you left the city when?"

"I picked up Marilyn around five-thirty. I like to get a full day's work in. Lots of people, they think artists just paint when the mood strikes them. That's bullshit. I put in an eight-hour day, nine to five, every day but weekends. I used to be an art director at an ad agency before I quit to paint full time. I used to paint at night and on weekends. Once I made the break, I promised myself I'd never again work at night or on weekends. So I don't." He shrugged. "Must be different for you, huh?"

"A little," Willis said, and smiled. "So you left the city at five-thirty on Friday…"

"Yeah, about then."

"And came back when?"

"Yesterday afternoon. I know what you're thinking. I tell you I work nine to five, five days a week, and here I don't get back to the city till around four yesterday afternoon." He shrugged again. "But I just finished that big mother against the wall, and I figured I was entitled."

The big mother against the wall was a street scene in downtown Isola, one of those crowded little cobblestoned Dutch lanes near the Lower Platform, a narrow canyon admitting feeble wintry light, a dusting of snow underfoot, men in bulky overcoats hurrying past women clutching coat collars to their throats, heads ducked, a lone newspaper flapping on the wind like a lost seagull. You could almost feel the bite of the wind, hear the click of the women's high-heeled boots on the sidewalk, smell the sauerkraut steaming at the hotdog cart on the corner, umbrella tassels dancing in the wind.

"I used to work out of a precinct down there," Willis said.

"Near the Old Seawall?"

"Yeah. Nice precinct. Dead as a doornail at night."

"Where do you work now?" Riley asked.

"The Eight-Seven. Uptown. Near Grover Park."

The kettle whistled. Riley spooned instant coffee into each of the mugs, and then poured hot water into them. "You take cream or sugar?" he asked.

"Black, thanks," Willis said, and picked up one of the mugs. "So you never met this Jerry McKennon, huh?" he asked.

"Never heard of him till a few minutes ago."

"Miss Hollis never mentioned him?"

"No. Why? Did she know him?"

"Yes."

"Mmm. Well, I'm sure Marilyn must know a lot of people. She's a very attractive woman."

"How long have you known her?"

"Must be six months or so."

"How would you define your relationship, Mr. Riley?"

"How do you mean? On a scale of one to ten?"

Willis smiled again. "No, sir. I meant in terms of involvement… commitment… whatever you'd want to call it."

"Marilyn doesn't get involved. She doesn't commit, either. Maybe she doesn't have to. Lots of girls in this town, they're looking for a breadwinner. Marilyn's got a rich father in Texas, she doesn't have to worry about money. She sees a man because she has a good time with him. I'm not talking sack time now. That's a given. If a man and a woman don't get along in the sack, they don't get along anyplace else, do they? I'm talking about being with a person. Talking, sharing things, laughing together."

"That's involvement, isn't it?" Willis said.

"I call it friendship."

"Is that what Marilyn calls it?"

"I like to believe she considers me a very good friend."

"Do you know any of her other friends?"

"Nope."

"Never met any of them."

"Nope."

"Man named Chip Endicott?"

"Nope."

"Basil Hollander?"

"Nope."

"How about her father? Ever meet him?"

"Nope."

"Do you know his name?"

"Jesse, I think. Or Joshua. Maybe Jason. I'm not sure."

"Do you know where he lives in Texas?"

"Houston, I think. Or Dallas. Or San Antone. I'm not sure."

"Mr. Riley, where'd you stay when you went up to Snowflake?"

"A place called the Summit Lodge. I can give you the number if you plan to check."

"I'd appreciate having it," Willis said.

"This wasn't any suicide, was it?" Riley said. "This was murder, plain and simple."

Willis said nothing.

He was thinking it wasn't so plain and it wasn't so simple.

Vice President in Charge of Marketing for Eastec Systems.

You visualized a giant corporation on the order of IBM or General Motors. You visualized an executive with area maps all over the walls of his enormous office, different colored pins marking the hordes of salesmen in each territory.

Sure.

In this city, where a garbage man was a Sanitation Engineer and a prostitute was a Sex Counselor, Jerry McKennon was Vice President in Charge of Marketing for what appeared to be a two-bit operation.

Avenue J was in a part of the city the cops used to call Campbell's City, in reference to the alphabet soup marketed by that company, but which over the years had come to be known as the Soup Kitchen. Tucked into a downtown poverty pocket that rivaled any in Calcutta, the lettered avenues ran east-west for a goodly stretch of Isola, and north-south from A through L where the Soup Kitchen ended at the River Dix. Across the river you could see the smoke stacks of the factories in Calm's Point.

At the turn of the century, the dingy tenements in this area had been inhabited by immigrants flocking to America to mine the promised gold in the streets. They found instead the manure dropped by horses pulling ice wagons, milk wagons, lumber wagons, and streetcars. Upward mobility and a strong will to survive took them farther uptown into ghettos defined by their countries of origin, and finally out of the inner city itself into the relatively suburban areas of Riverhead, Calm's Point, Majesta, and Bethtown.

In the Forties and Fifties, a new wave of immigrants—who were nonetheless bona fide citizens of the United States—moved into the tenements, and the sound of Spanish replaced that of Yiddish, Italian, Polish, German and Russian. The Puerto Ricans who came seeking the same gold the earlier settlers had sought found not horseshit but instead a withering prejudice that equated anyone Spanish-speaking with criminal activity. There had been prejudice in this city before. Prejudice against the first Irish who came here to escape the potato famine, prejudice against the Italians who were escaping the blight on their precious grape crop, prejudice against Jews escaping religious persecution, prejudice—always and for any number of rationalizing reasons—against the blacks who inhabited the Diamondback slum uptown. But the prejudice now was deeper, perhaps because the Puerto Ricans steadfastly clung to their old traditions and their native tongue.

It was therefore a matter of high irony when the Puerto Ricans themselves turned so vehemently against the flower children who moved into the tenements—many of them abandoned by then—in the mid-Sixties and early Seventies. It was not uncommon back then for pot-smoking kids to look up in astonishment when a band of Soup Kitchen natives (by now they were natives, though scarcely thought of as such by other Americans) burst into an apartment to rob—ah, yes, the old self-fulfilling prophecy—and rape and occasionally to murder. "Peace," the flower children said, "Love," the flower children said while their skulls were being opened. The hippies eventually vanished from the scene. They left behind them, however, a legacy of drug use, and nowadays the alphabet avenues were a happy hunting ground for pushers and junkies of every stripe and persuasion.

Eastec Systems had its offices in a dilapidated building on the southern side of Avenue J. A nail-filing, gum-chewing receptionist looked at Carella's shield and ID card in something close to awe, pressed a button on the base of her phone, and then told him that Mr. Gregorio would see him at once. Carella walked down a corridor to a door with a black plastic name plate on it: RALPH GREGORIO, PRESIDENT. He knocked. A man's voice said, "Come in." He opened the door. Green metal furniture and filing cabinets. Dusty Venetian blinds on the windows fronting the street. Behind the desk, a chubby man in his early forties, shirt-sleeves rolled up, cheeks flushed, wide grin on his face, hand extended.

"Hey, paisan," he said, "what can I do for you?"

Carella did not enjoy being called paisan. Too many Italian-American mobsters had called him paisan, usually in conjunction with a plea for a favor premised on a shared ethnic background.

He took the preferred hand.

"Mr. Gregorio," he said, "Detective Carella, Eighty-seventh Squad."

"Sit down, sit down," Gregorio said. "This is about Jerry, right?"

"Yes."

"Terrible shame, terrible," Gregorio said. "I saw it on television, they gave him, what, thirty seconds? Terrible shame. He killed himself, huh?"

"When's the last time you saw him?" Carella asked, ignoring the question.

"Friday. End of the day Friday."

"Did he seem despondent at that time?"

"Despondent? No. What despondent? Jerry? No. I got to tell you, this comes as a complete surprise, him taking his own life."

"He began working here shortly before Christmas, is that right?"

"That's right, who told you that? Well, I guess you have ways of knowing, eh, paisan?" Gregorio said, and winked.

"Did he ever seem depressed or despondent? During the past three months?"

"No. Always a smile on his face. He used to go around here singing, would you believe it. We're the ones supposed to be the singers, am I right, paisan? Jerry was, what, Irish, English, who the hell knows? Singing all the time. The Pavarotti of the security business. We sell and install security systems, you know. Make it tougher for the bad guys. Help you guys out a little." He winked again.

"What time did he leave here on Friday?"

"Five-thirty. He was a hard worker, Jerry. Sometimes didn't get out of here till six, seven o'clock. We're a new company, you know, but we got a brilliant future. Jerry realized that. He was giving it all he had. What a shame, huh?"

"Did he mention anything about his weekend plans?"

"No."

"Didn't say where he was going, what he planned to do?"

"No."

"Did he ever mention a woman named Marilyn Hollis?"

"No."

"Mr. Gregorio…"

"Hey, paisan," Gregorio said chidingly, and spread his arms and his hands wide. "What's with the formality? Make it Ralph, huh?"

"Thank you," Carella said, and cleared his throat. "Uh… Ralph… do you think I could have a look at Mr. McKennon's office?"

"Sure, it's right down the hall. What are you looking for?"

"Anything that might help us," Carella said.

He was looking for an appointment calendar, and he found it at once, on McKennon's desk and open to the month of March.

"Mind if I take this with me?" Carella said.

"It's no good to Jerry no more," Gregorio said.

"I'll make out a receipt…"

"Come on, paisan, you and me need receipts?"

"Well, it's required," Carella said, and began writing.

The second name on Marilyn's list was Chip Endicott. The name on his door was Charles Ingersol Endicott, Jr.

He was the one who hated her answering machine.

He was also an attorney with the firm of Hackett, Rawlings, Pearson, Endicott, Lipstein and Marsh. Willis wondered how the Jew had snuck in.

Endicott was in his late forties, Willis guessed, though it was really somewhat difficult to tell. A man in tanned good health, some five feet ten inches tall, no age wrinkles on his handsome, narrow face, dark brown eyes intelligent and alert, the only clue to his age was his white hair—but that may have been premature. He shook hands firmly with Willis, said, "This has to do with Marilyn, does it?" and then gestured toward a chair opposite his desk.

The law offices of Hackett, Rawlings, Etc., Etc. were on the twelfth floor of a Jefferson Avenue building, than which no real estate in the city came higher. Endicott's office was furnished in cool modern: a teak desk, a blue carpet, a sofa and side chairs upholstered in a darker blue, an abstract painting on the wall over the sofa picking up the predominantly blue color theme and splashing it with red as shocking as a blood stain.

"Miss Hollis gave us your name as one of her friends," Willis said.

"She's not in any trouble, is she?" Endicott said at once.

"No, sir, none at all. But we're investigating a case…"

"What case?"

"An apparent suicide."

"Oh. Who?"

"A man named Jerry McKennon."

Again, Willis watched the eyes.

Nothing in them.

And then, sudden recognition.

"Oh. Yes. Uptown someplace, wasn't it? I read a small item about it in the paper this morning."

A puzzled look.

Then: "I'm sorry, but how is Marilyn involved?"

"He was a friend of hers, too."

"Oh?" Endicott said.

"Had you ever met him?"

"No. Did Marilyn say I did?"

"No, no. I was just curious."

"I'm sorry, the name isn't familiar. McKennon? No."

"Did she ever mention him to you?"

"Not to my recollection." Endicott paused, and then said, "Are you investigating a murder, Mr. Willis, is that it?"'

"Well, not exactly, sir. But in this city we investigate suicides the same way we do homicides. Well, you're a lawyer, maybe you already know that."

"My specialty is corporate law," Endicott said.

"Well," Willis said, "that's the way we do it."

"And you say this man was one of Marilyn's friends?"

"Yes, sir."

"And she gave you my name as another of her friends?"

"Yes, sir."

"Mm," Endicott said.

"You are a friend, aren't you?" Willis said.

"Oh, yes."

"How long have you known her?"

"It must be almost a year now. We met shortly after she got here from Texas. Her father's a millionaire down there, oil or cattle, I forget which. He set her up in a town-house on… well, have you been there?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very luxurious, nothing but the best for his darling daughter. From the way she talks about him, he's a bit of a curmudgeon, but generous to a fault where it concerns his only child."

"Where in Texas, would you know, sir?"

"Houston? Yes, I'm sure she said Houston."

"And her father's name? Did she ever mention it to you?"

"If she did, I don't recall it."

"How'd you happen to meet her, Mr. Endicott?"

"I was going through a divorce… have you ever gone through a divorce?"

"No, sir."

"Ever been married?"

"No, sir."

"If marriage is purgatory, divorce is hell," Endicott said, and smiled. "Anyway, I went through the whole bit. Bought myself a hand-tailored wardrobe, starting using men's cologne, almost bought a motorcycle but sanity prevailed, started going to singles bars, took personal ads in The Saturday Journal—down there in The Quarter, you know…"

"Yes, sir."

"… and, most important for a newly divorced man on the prowl, started going to museums a lot."

"Museums?"

"Yes, Mr. Willis, museums. There are a great many available and generally higher-class women frequenting this city's museums on any given afternoon of the week. Especially the art museums. And especially on rainy days. That's where I met Marilyn. At the Fine Arts Museum uptown, on a rainy Saturday."

"And this was about a year ago."

"April, I think. Almost a year."

"And you've been seeing her ever since."

"Well, yes. We hit it off immediately. She's an extraordinary woman, you know. Well-bred, intelligent, inquisitive, marvelous fun to be with."

"How often do you see her, Mr. Endicott?"

"At least once a week, sometimes more often. Occasionally, we'll get away for a weekend, but that's rare. We're good friends, Mr. Willis. I'm fifty-seven years old…"

Willis blinked.

"… and I was raised at a time when men didn't have women as friends. All we were interested in was getting in their pants. Well, times have changed and so have I. I don't wish to discuss our personal relationship, I know Marilyn wouldn't, either. Anyway, that's not the important thing. The important thing is that we're friends. We can unburden ourselves to each other, we can totally relax with each other, we're very good friends, Mr. Willis. And that means a great deal to me."

"I see," Willis said, and hesitated. "Does it bother you that she may have other good friends?"

"Why would it? If you and I were friends, Mr. Willis, and you had other friends, would it bother me? You're thinking the way I used to think. That somehow it's impossible for a man and a woman to be true friends without all sorts of nonsense intruding on the relationship. Marilyn sees other men, I know that. She's a beautiful and intelligent woman, I wouldn't expect otherwise. And I'm sure she considers some of them to be friends. But does friendship have to be exclusive? And if she goes to bed with some of them—as well she may, I've never asked—don't I go to bed with other women? Do you understand what I'm saying, Mr. Willis?"

He was saying there wasn't a jealous bone in his body. He was saying he couldn't possibly have killed Jerry McKennon, whoever the hell that was, because he didn't know him and he wouldn't have cared if he and Marilyn were screwing day and night on the sidewalk in front of the police station.

"I think so," Willis said. "Thanks very much for your time."

McKennon's Week-at-a-Glance calendar for the better part of March looked like this:

Carella began cross-checking the appointment calendar against the personal telephone directories he had taken from McKennon's apartment and from his office at Eastec.

The frequently mentioned "Ralph," of course, was the president of Eastec and the many meetings with him were perfectly appropriate for a company that had "a brilliant future."

From McKennon's office directory, Carella learned that:

Eltronics was not a misspelling of Electronics. There was in fact an Eltronics, Inc. in Calm's Point, and it was a supplier of electronic equipment for digital systems.

Pierce Electronics was another supplier, this time in Isola itself.

Dynomat was a burglar-alarm company in Riverhead.

Karl Zanger, Paul Hopkins, Lawrence Barnes, Max Steinberg, Geoffrey Ingrams, Samuel Oliver, Dale Packard, Louis King, George Andrews, Lloyd Davis, Irwin Fein, Peter Mclntyre, Frederick Carter, Joseph Di Angelo, Michael Lane, Richard Heller, Martin Farren, Thomas Haley, Peter Landon, John Fields, Leonard Harkavy, John Unger, Benjamin Jagger and Axel Sanderson were all potential Eastec clients, listed as such in McKennon's directory. Some of the names were already crossed out. Either they had by then become active clients or else they were no longer interested.

From the Isola phone book, Carella learned—as if he hadn't already surmised it—that Mario's, The Coffee Shack, The Ascot House, Jackie's, Jonesey's, L'ltalico and Nimrod's were restaurants. He could find no similar listing for Harold's, where McKennon had dinner at 7:00 p.m. on March 8, so he assumed Harold Somebody was a personal friend, as probably were Hillary (the 8:00 p.m. party on March 15) and Colly (the 7:00 p.m. party McKennon would never attend on the thirtieth).

At this point, Meyer Meyer, smoking a cigarette and kibitzing while Carella was preparing his lists, casually mentioned that he shouldn't too easily chalk off the March 8 and March 15 parties as too distant in time from the poisoning. He reminded Carella that way back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, they had together investigated a poisoning in which a television comic named Stan Gifford dropped dead while performing live before an estimated forty million viewers. After autopsy, the M.E.—Paul Blaney in that case as well—reported that Gifford had ingested a hundred and thirty times the lethal dose of a poison named strophanthin, and that death would have occurred within minutes.

"Turned out the killer built himself a home-made spansule, remember?" Meyer said. "So maybe this is the same thing here."

"Maybe," Carella said.

But he knew that would be too easy.

Cross-checking nonetheless, he found a Harold Sachs and a Hillary Lawson in the personal directory he had taken from McKennon's apartment, and made a note to call them to ask about those parties. He also found a listing for a Nicholas Di Marino, whom he guessed was the Colly throwing the party this Saturday night, but he couldn't see much sense in calling him at this point.

The identical eleven o'clock appointments on March eighth, fifteenth, and twenty-ninth (another appointment McKennon would never keep) led Carella to suspect "Ellsworth" was either a doctor or a dentist. In the cross-check against McKennon's directory, he found a listing for a Ronald Ellsworth, DOS, with offices at 257 Carrington Street, here in Isola.

The Kreuger whose job was being installed was a Henry Kreuger in Calm's Point. Carella learned this from calling McKennon's boss. But Gregorio did not know either an Annie or a Frank, and there were no listings in McKennon's directory for either of them. Carella surmised that Frank Whoever had been in the hospital—hence the flowers—and that McKennon had called Annie Whoever to find out which hospital.

Carella did not enjoy movies with casts of thousands.

Neither did he enjoy cases where the possibilities multiplied geometrically.

Just once in his life, he would love investigating a case involving two men stranded on a desert island, one the victim, the other the obvious killer.

Just once.

Meanwhile, he was stuck with this one.