“But the lady of the house was not only home, which was inconvenient, but dead—which was worse.”
“Especially for her,” Carolyn said.
“So you rang the bell,” I told Smith. “Maybe you rang it twice, just to make sure. And when it went unanswered, you used your key and walked into the house, and the first thing you saw was Helen Ostermaier lying on the carpet.”
Someone sobbed. Meredith, I think.
“A real burglar,” I said, “would have turned around and left. Only an amateur, addled by greed, would have stayed the course. But there you were, with Button Gwinnett waiting upstairs for you, and how could you resist?
“Besides, if the woman was dead, then her estate would have to be appraised. Would some sharp-eyed appraiser spot the Gwinnett portrait for what it was? And would you wind up in a pissing contest with Russians and Arabs? You were already here, you were already inside the house, you had the Constable substitute under your arm, and now you didn’t even have to worry about the lady of the house walking in on you. Because she was already there and she wasn’t going to be walking anywhere.
“So you got down to business. You snatched a portrait off the wall, hung the Constable in its place. You carried the portrait upstairs, switched it with Button Gwinnett’s likeness, and returned to the living room.”
“And left,” Boyd said.
“If only,” I said. “Because up to this point it would be difficult to make much of a case against Mr. Smith. We can say what happened, we can say when an intruder appeared on the scene and what he did and why, but how can we be sure it was Alton Ogden Smith and not someone else?”
“You can’t,” Smith said. “Because it wasn’t. Someone else must have found out about the portrait. Jackson must have shown his inventory of ancestor portraits to some other interested party.”
“If only you’d taken the portrait and left,” I said. “But you weren’t done, were you?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You saw something else,” I said, “and you couldn’t resist. You couldn’t bring yourself to leave there without it.”
Deirdre said, “I knew someone had been there. In fact I thought someone had broken in and killed Mother, and I wondered what he might have stolen. Was something else missing?”
“A button,” I said.
“When Mrs. Ostermaier came home from the opera,” I said, “she was wearing a coat. It was quite distinctive, a rich green shade with a fur collar.”
“A very smart coat,” Boyd said, “if it’s the one I’m thinking of. I believe it was from Arvin Tannenbaum.”
“That’s the one,” Deirdre said. “She’d taken it off, though. It was on the chair.”
“It was,” I agreed. “And I wondered how she’d have come to lay it out that way. Unless you moved it.”
Deirdre said she hadn’t touched the coat. “But you’re right, you wouldn’t take off your coat and lay it out like that.”
“She’d have hung it up,” Meredith said. “Unless, you know, she had that allergic reaction. But then wouldn’t it just drop onto the floor?”
“I don’t know,” Jackson said. “How much can you read into the position of a coat? If she was feeling woozy, she could have put it down any which way.”
“All the coat did was get my attention,” I said. “And when I took a good look at it, I saw it was missing a button.”
“A button,” someone said.
“The coat had very distinctive buttons,” I said. “Art Nouveau, I’d say, and they looked as though they might have come from Tiffany Studios.”
“They did,” Meredith said. “She’d bought the set on Madison Avenue, I forget where, and when she ordered the coat from Tannenbaum she had them use the Tiffany buttons.”
“She had such good taste,” Boyd said. “You said a button was missing?”
“There were five pairs of buttons,” I said. “Ten in all. And the lowest button on the right was missing. I took a look, and there were no bits of thread to show where it had been.”
“It came off,” Stephen suggested, “at the opera. Did you check her pockets? When I pop a button I put it in the pocket of whatever garment it came from, so I’ll find it later and remember to sew it back on.”
“There were no buttons in any of the pockets,” I said. “Ray, did you find a button in her purse?”
He hadn’t. Deirdre said the button might have been lost weeks ago, and that when her mother discovered its absence she’d have gotten rid of any unsightly thread ends.
“I think she’d have done more than that,” I said. “The button would be difficult to replace, if not impossible. And she was far too fastidious a woman to walk around with five buttons on one side and four on the other. But this is speculation, and it’s easier to deal in fact.
“And it’s a fact that the man who’d come for Button Gwinnett’s portrait saw a coat on the floor, where its owner had dropped it. The buttons caught his eye. He recognized them as Tiffany’s work, and he wanted one. He very likely wanted all ten, but would content himself with a single specimen.
“It wouldn’t have taken him long. A pen knife or a nail file would snip the thread; failing that, a sharp yank would get him the button. Then he’d conceal what he’d done by getting rid of any remnants of thread, and he’d leave the coat neatly laid out over a chair, and that would be that.”
“Facts,” Smith said. “Facts as opposed to speculation. Isn’t that what you said?’
“Something like that,” I allowed.
“Well, you’ve given us nothing but speculation, all on the basis of a coat that’s missing a button. If I took this button, where is it?”
“In your house,” I said. “In Brooklyn Heights. In a desk drawer, if I had to guess.”
“Which you may search to your heart’s content,” he said. “You will find no such button.”
I looked at Ray. “Hang on,” he said, and took out his cell phone. He punched in a number, spoke in an undertone to somebody, then clicked around some. “Ah, there we go,” he said. “Used to be you’d have uniforms hotfootin’ it all over town, snappin’ Polaroids, then breakin’ traffic laws deliverin’ ’em. Now a couple of clicks and you’re good to go.” He held up his phone, and my guests crowded around to get a look at the screen.
“That’s the portrait that was hanging over the safe,” Jackson Ostermaier announced. “I guess it’s Button Gwinnett, though all we ever knew was that he was somebody else’s ancestor.”
“And that’s the Great Seal of Gwinnett County hangin’ next to it,” Ray said. “Right after I picked up Mr. Smith here, I sent a couple of officers from Brooklyn South over to his house with a warrant. One of ’em took this here picture, and just now he sent it to me. Came out nice, didn’t it?”
“I explained how I came by my portrait of Button Gwinnett,” Smith said. “And if you had an eye for art, Jackson, you’d never mistake this image for the crudely wrought daub you showed me. And as for the putative button—”
“Right, the button,” Ray said, “though I don’t know where you get off callin’ it putrid. It looks okay to me.” He did some more clicking, held out the phone again. “How’s it look to you?”
It looked like a Tiffany button from Helen Ostermaier’s green coat, reposing in a drawer next to a piece of notepaper, on which someone had written the numbers one through four.
Smith just stared. I’d been hoping for another lightning-fast improvisation explaining what the button was doing in his desk drawer, in convenient proximity to the code for the burglar alarm. But of course he couldn’t explain it, since in point of fact he didn’t have a clue how a button he’d brought home and tucked away where no one could possibly find it had somehow transported itself through the ether to the drawer of his desk.
In the fullness of time, he might work it all out. A second button, snipped from the very same coat by a subsequent intruder, and planted in his drawer where someone with a warrant might find it. He was, after all, a brig
ht fellow, was Alton Ogden Smith, and sooner or later it would come to him.
But for now he was gobsmacked.
Ray nodded to the other two cops, and they moved in on Smith. Tom in plainclothes read him his rights, while O’Fallon cuffed him.
“Breakin’ in and swipin’ the portrait is bad enough,” Ray was saying. “And stealin’ the button off a dead woman’s coat is about as low as it gets, but standin’ around and lettin’ a woman die in front of you is tons worse.”
“She was already dead.”
“Thanks for sayin’ that,” he said, “after you got your rights read to you. But how’d you know that for sure? You bother to take her pulse? Check her breathin’? Call for an ambulance, so’s a couple of EMTs could see if she still had any life left for them to save? No, you were in a hurry to grab a paintin’ and get outta there. You had time to cut a button off her coat, but no time to call 911 and try to save a good woman’s life.”
The two cops left with Alton Ogden Smith in tow, and the room went awfully quiet when the door closed behind them. Carolyn picked up the last bottle of wine and went around filling glasses until it was empty. There was still plenty of cheese left. It’s funny how often the cheese outlasts the wine.
Nils Calder wondered what charges could be brought against Smith. “Besides those related to the theft,” he said. “Did he break any laws by not calling 911?”
Jackson suggested a few possibilities. Depraved indifference to human life, he said, might apply irrespective of the cause of death, or of his mother’s precise condition at the time. “It’s probably impossible to say with certainty whether she was alive or dead when he was there,” he said, “but Smith couldn’t tell, either, so I think a charge of depraved indifference might hold up.”
“How about accessory?” Ray said.
“Accessory to what?”
“Accessory after the fact.” he said.
“Accessory after the fact? After what fact?”
He shrugged. “What do you think, Bernie? How’s homicide?”
“Oh, right,” I said. “I was just getting to that.”
“At first,” I said, “it looked as though Helen Ostermaier had surprised a burglar, or been surprised by one. The absence of wounds ruled out homicide, but the confrontation might have brought on a heart attack.”
“Felony murder,” Jackson said.
“A possibility,” I said, “until evidence suggested that the burglar arrived after she’d collapsed and died.”
“Unless she was still breathing when Smith got there,” Boyd said.
“I just said that to get him goin’,” Ray told them. “She was gone by then. The medical evidence shows she was just about dead by the time she hit the floor.”
That was graphic enough to make Meredith shudder, and Deirdre looked a little pale herself.
“And the cause of death,” I said, “turned out to be anaphylactic shock.”
“Then it was natural causes,” Jackson said. “So it can’t be homicide.”
“It can if it was induced.”
“How do you induce anaphylactic shock?”
“It’s complicated,” I allowed. “But so’s explaining how a woman could die of an allergic reaction to peanuts without showing traces of the allergen in her stomach contents. Something had to trigger the reaction.”
“They stopped giving out peanuts on airplanes,” Meredith said, “because the smell alone can sometimes trigger a response.”
“It can,” I said. “and that’s what happened here. Every smell is particulate. I learned that from a Michael Connelly novel. In other words, if you smell something, you’re taking minute particles of it into your system.”
“Gross,” Stephen said.
“But that does explain it,” Boyd said. “Somebody must have spilled peanuts on her at the opera, and she had the smell on her clothes. You know, that must be why she left early.”
“You don’t think Wagner’s explanation enough? And getting peanuts spilled on you is a risk at Yankee Stadium or the Big Apple Circus, but how often does it happen at the Met? Anyway, that’s not how it happened. She wouldn’t breathe in peanut residue at Lincoln Center and feel the effects a mile away and half an hour later. She didn’t smell peanuts until she was home in her own house.”
“I don’t understand,” Jackson said. “She didn’t keep peanuts there.”
“No, she didn’t. But someone made sure she’d smell peanuts when she got home from the opera. And it must have been a good strong smell, because there was a trace of it in the air the next day. It was faint by then, and all I knew was that I smelled something and couldn’t quite identify it. Later, when I learned what killed her, I realized what I’d smelled earlier.”
Ray said, “Would that kill a person, Bernie? Just smellin’ a couple of peanuts?”
“Probably not,” I said. “But it would bring on a reaction, and Mrs. Ostermaier would have recognized the reaction instantly, just as she would have recognized the smell that caused it. And she’d have known what to do.”
“She’d give herself a shot,” he said, “of whatchacallit.”
“Epinephrine,” I said, “which she kept in her purse. It comes in a type of syringe they call a pen, designed to dispense multiple doses over a period of time. I believe you found an empty pen in her purse.”
“Right. First thing we thought, she took the last dose a while ago and never got around to gettin’ the prescription refilled.”
“But that wasn’t it, was it?”
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
“Well?” Jackson said. “Are you going to tell us what it was?”
“I was gettin’ there, Counselor. See, this consultant I brought in came up with an idea or two. One thing I did, I got the Medical Examiner to take another good look at the body. Turns out there was evidence of a recent injection in the thigh. So she did give herself a shot.”
“But if the pen was empty—”
“It wasn’t,” I said. “Not when she injected herself. Later, when the police found it in her purse, it had been emptied of its contents. But that was after she’d given herself a shot of the substance that killed her.”
“And what was that?”
“Peanut oil,” Ray said. “An intramuscular shot of peanut oil, which would account for her havin’ peanut allergens in her bloodstream but not in her stomach. She killed herself tryin’ to cure herself. The pen was empty, but it held traces of the peanut oil.”
“And that’s what makes it homicide,” I said. “Exposure to the odor of peanuts, through airborne peanut dust, could have come about accidentally. But it’s hard to conjure up an accident that would replace the epinephrine in a syringe with the substance it was meant to counteract.”
The hush that had fallen over the room earlier came back for another visit, and once again it was Jackson who broke it. “If someone deliberately sabotaged the syringe with peanut oil—”
“It would be hard to do it accidentally.”
“Yes, of course. But to do so intentionally could only be premeditated murder.”
“It doesn’t sound spur-of-the-moment,” I agreed.
“Nor is it an act that could have been performed by an outsider.”
I glanced around the room, and what I saw was a batch of people doing the very same thing, their eyes darting from one person to another.
“It would have to be one of us,” Jackson said.
“Oh, more than one,” I said.
“Four children,” I said, “and all of you needed money. Your mother was rattling around in a house far too large for her needs, and if she would agree to move it would sell quickly for a high price. But she wanted to live out her life in the house that had been her home for so many years.
“And her heart was bad, and what kind of life could she look forward to? Maybe there were already signs of mental deterioration. Maybe she was forgetting things, maybe she’d sometimes have trouble coming up with a name, or the right word.”
“In the right light,” I said, “easing her out of this world and into the next could almost be seen as an act of mercy. And done the right way it would be both quick and gentle—and, most important, neither Helen Ostermaier nor anyone else would recognize her death as what it was—an act of murder.”
The word brought a gasp or two.
“She’s alone,” I said, setting the scene. “She’s in the comfort of her own home, after an evening at a favorite venue, the Metropolitan Opera. In her living room, she sees a blue box, gift-wrapped. Perhaps there’s a note on it, something along the lines of For You, Mom! or Open Me Now!
“Well, who can resist a surprise? She opens the box, pulls at the tissue paper to see what it’s concealing. There doesn’t seem to be anything there, but a strong smell of peanuts rises from the tissue paper, and she feels the beginning of an allergic reaction that has become familiar to her.
“Fortunately she knows what to do. She shrugs off her coat, reaches into her purse, finds the epinephrine pen. She uncaps it and gives herself a shot. But instead of reversing the onset of anaphylactic shock, the injection heightens it exponentially. In no time at all, the woman is dead.”
“Oh, God,” Meredith said. “It sounds so awful. I never thought—”
“Stop,” Boyd told her. “This gentleman is telling us a story, and that’s all it is, a story. You shouldn’t be saying anything, Meredith. None of us should.”
“In fact,” Deirdre said, “we should probably leave. If we say anything at all—”
“It couldn’t be used in court,” Jackson said. “I haven’t heard a Miranda warning. No one’s read any of us our rights.”
“You probably know ’em,” Ray said. “You’re an attorney yourself, so you’d have to know your rights, and so would anybody who’s spent more than fifteen minutes in front of a television set. But you’re not gonna hear ’em from me, not tonight, on account of this is just an unofficial gatherin’ of family members and friends and a couple other interested parties.”
The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) Page 25