Poisoned Dreams

by A. W. Gray

  If Bagheri had taken sides, he would have favored Big Daddy and the rest of the Dillards. For one thing, Sue, Mary Helen, Bill Jr., and the rest were right in line with Bagheri’s idea of what distraught loved ones should be. Ever since the Dillard clan had gathered at the hospital they had remained attentive and somber in the waiting room, existing on soft drinks, cookies, and sandwiches brought in by a seemingly endless host of friends, occasionally interrupting their vigil with brief trips inside the IC unit to sit beside Nancy when hospital rules permitted. Nancy’s husband, though, was an entirely different matter; for a number of reasons real and imagined, Dr. Ali Bagheri simply didn’t like the man.

  It was Bagheri who was to testify at Richard’s trial that his hospital attitude was somewhat flippant, and whether or not the doctor’s view was slanted is an interesting question. Richard Lyon can be a pushy guy, though his pushiness at the hospital is a perfectly normal reaction be his motive concern or cover-up. In his view, the hospital people simply weren’t doing much for Nancy, and given the circumstances, there’s nothing odd about his flying off the handle. While at Presbyterian, Richard stormed at doctors and nurses alike, demanding to know what they were doing for Nancy, and Bagheri himself more than once drew the brunt of Richard’s anger.

  Aside from Bagheri’s resentment of Richard’s raking the doctor over the coals, there is the matter of culture. The doctor recognized Richard’s dark Lebanese good looks to be of Middle Eastern origin like Bagheri’s own. Unlike Texas good old boys, who meet in a foreign country and embrace like brothers, Middle Easterners who are strangers are slow to buddy around together. Pakistanis dislike the Arabs, who dislike the Israelis, who can’t stand the Iraqis, who don’t particularly give a damn for anybody. Friendship between Middle Easterners doesn’t come easy, and although Richard had never been farther east than Boston, Dr. Bagheri was inherently suspicious of him.

  Also, people’s attitudes when seen through others’ eyes are after all a matter of perspective. Bagheri is a no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone type who studied like a Trojan to be a doctor, and who takes his profession as seriously as he does the strokes and heart attacks he treats. Taking his overall views into consideration, his opinion that Richard Lyon at the hospital acted more like a man on a lark than a husband with a gravely ill wife might be a bit of overkill. Nonetheless, in Bagheri’s eyes, Richard spent his time laughing and joking with the nurses—actually flirting, Bagheri thought—and the idea that Richard’s outward breezy attitude might be a front, a cover to keep him from going bananas with worry, cut no ice at all with Dr. Bagheri. Your wife is very likely dying, man, Bagheri thought, the least you can do is appear concerned.

  Such was Bagheri’s view when Big Daddy stopped the swarthy, handsome doctor in the hallway near the intensive care unit. Bagheri halted, his manner attentive; William Wooldridge Dillard Sr. is a man who commands respect. Bagheri waited patiently for more questions about Nancy’s condition.

  But when Big Daddy spoke, his tone was low and urgent. “Have you checked her for poison?” He glanced cautiously about to be certain that no one else was listening. Richard was visible inside the waiting room. Nancy’s husband had his back turned.

  The question stunned Bagheri. Toxic shock syndrome, yes, the staff had considered that, a jolt to Nancy’s system that could have come from a lot of different things. But the rash which normally accompanies TSS was missing from Nancy’s skin. Incredible as it may seem, Presbyterian does not routinely run poison tests on patients admitted in Nancy’s condition; nor, to be fair, do other hospitals in the Dallas area. Nancy’s blood sample—ordered by emergency unit personnel on her admittance—hadn’t even gone to an out-of-state lab for a toxology screen until 2:55 p.m. on January 9, fourteen hours after her arrival, and the result wasn’t available as Bagheri stood with Big Daddy in the corridor. In fact, the tox screen results wouldn’t arrive at Presbyterian until after Nancy had died, and, because of the speed with which arsenic works its way through the body, would reveal only minimal traces of the poison in her blood. So the answer to Big Daddy’s question was no, they hadn’t tested Nancy for poison, which of course wasn’t Dr. Bagheri’s fault. Residents only carry out orders. Resignedly, Bagheri shook his head.

  “Well, you need to test her,” Big Daddy said. “Nancy’s lawyer called, and her sister-in-law confirmed it to me. We’ve got reason to suspect that Nancy’s husband poisoned some wine and gave it to her. We think he may be trying to kill her.” The bombshell dropped, Nancy Lyon’s father waited for the doctor to speak.

  Bagheri was now in a dilemma. The seriousness of what his patient’s father was saying wasn’t lost on him, and neither were the possible consequences to the hospital and, for that matter, to the doctor himself. If Nancy’s husband had indeed poisoned her, it was up to the hospital to preserve records to turn over to the police. It was a situation the likes of which Bagheri had never before encountered, and prior to taking any action he wanted to talk the matter over with his superiors. For the time being, Bagheri would only listen. He bent his head nearer Big Daddy, and the two men engaged in a brief, hushed conversation. As they parted company and went their respective ways, Dr. Bagheri’s expression was rigidly grim.

  4

  By any set of standards, arsenic is nasty stuff. It’s one of the elements, bearing the chemical symbol As, and you can find it in the makeup of just about any surface rock lying about on the ground. Most of its known uses have to do with killing things, and that even includes a major industrial function: a small amount of arsenic increases the surface tension of molten lead so that it’s easier to mold the lead into bullets. Researchers have tried other things with arsenic; it’s been an experimental pesticide and even an ingredient in medicines. Neither trial use worked because the arsenic posed just as great a danger to those persons using the bug killer or medicine as it did to the insects or viruses. Other than its use in the manufacture of lead shot, arsenic has only one other purpose. It kills things. Combined with hydrogen, arsenic forms a poisonous gas; mixing one part arsenic with three parts oxygen forms a deadly liquid.

  Big jolts of arsenic kill quickly, within an hour or two, and rapid death is preferable for the victim. Those who take smaller doses survive over a period of as much as a week, and grow short of breath as the poison slowly paralyzes the respiratory muscles. Sores develop on the brain and the victim loses the ability to think clearly. The dizziness, excruciating stomach pain, and vomiting go on and on without interruption. The hands and feet burn as if on fire, and the skin grows so sore that the barest touch brings screams of agony. Flinching in pain, breathing in piteous gasps, Nancy Lyon clung to her life at Presbyterian Hospital for six torturous days.

  Once the Dillard family’s suspicion of Richard Lyon came to light, an odd game ensued. A game of pretend. No one wanted to alert Richard that he was the prime suspect, but at the same time, any scrap of food or drink in which Nancy could have gotten her fatal dose needed to be brought to the hospital and categorized. Since Richard lived in the duplex, bringing anything from the Lyon home without his knowing about it was going to be well nigh impossible.

  As it turned out, other than the coffee that Richard himself brought to the hospital—and which mysteriously disappeared—and some food, suspect items from the duplex were never examined. In fact, the police didn’t search the Lyon home for over a month. In the interim many things were to vanish from the duplex, and the source of Nancy’s poisoning was never found. While hindsight is roughly twenty-twenty, it’s easy to see why no one ransacked the duplex in search of tainted food or drink during those panicked January days while Nancy lay dying. A search of the Lyon household was deemed unnecessary because the Dillard family thought they knew what had poisoned Nancy, and one of the many strange twists surrounding the death of Nancy Dillard Lyon is that the source of her family’s belief was Nancy herself.

  One of the troubling stories that Nancy had told involved an event the previ
ous September. At the time, Richard and Nancy had been separated for over eight months, and he was living in an apartment in the far North Dallas suburb of Richardson. Although there are small differences in their telling, the memories of three women—sister, sister-in-law, and divorce attorney—regarding Nancy’s tale are essentially the same.

  According to Nancy, one warm September afternoon she returned from a shopping trip, parked in front of the duplex, and made her way across the lawn to the front porch. Near the porch she paused. Sitting side by side in front of her door were a tinted bottle of white wine and a large, tub-shaped plastic container. An envelope was attached to the neck of the bottle, secured by a ribbon. Nancy stepped up on the porch, undid the ribbon, and opened the envelope.

  The note and envelope are yet more items never found during the investigation, but according to Nancy the one-line message went something like this: “Nancy, you’re one great lady.” There was no signature. Nancy told no one whether the note was printed, scripted, or typed, but however the note was crafted, Nancy stood on the porch and read it over. Puzzled, she let the note and envelope hang loosely from her fingers as she bent to examine her other gift, the plastic container.

  The container was full of what Nancy assumed to be vitamin capsules; along with a large percentage of the rest of yuppie America, Nancy Lyon was a vitamin junky. Whatever their contents, the brown cylindrical objects inside the container were standard, inch-long gelatin caps. It was a strange present indeed, and just as strange was the anonymity of the giver. Had Richard left the wine and pills, possibly as a token of his love? Nancy hoped that the gifts were from him; she’d made no secret of the fact that she hated the idea of separation and liked the thought of divorce even less. But by this time, after eight months of loneliness, there were other men in Nancy’s life as well. Had some bashful suitor left the presents? She didn’t know. Still baffled, a smile of wonder touching her lips, Nancy Lyon picked up the bottle and the plastic container and carried them inside.

  By the following morning Nancy was no longer pleased with her gifts, at least as far as the wine was concerned. On the evening that she found the gifts on her doorstep, she poured herself a glass of the wine to have with her dinner. According to her, the taste was bitter, and when she’d finished the meal she became sick to her stomach. Her experience with the wine disturbed her enough that she called Mary Henrich the following day and told her lawyer what had happened from beginning to end.

  To hear her peers tell it, if Mary Henrich has a fault in the practice of law, her shortcoming is that she gets too involved with her clients. Mary would disagree; in anything so agonizingly personal as a divorce proceeding, the more a lawyer can fit into the client’s shoes, the more zealous the pursuit of the client’s best interests becomes. In the months that Mary had acted as Nancy’s divorce lawyer the two had become fast friends, and though they shared many feelings in common, they were at odds on one particular subject. While Nancy still professed a deep love for Richard and hoped against hope for a reconciliation, Mary Henrich would think no more of completely destroying Richard Lyon than she’d think of stepping on a revolting bug.

  Nancy Lyon may have been unsure of the source of the anonymous gifts, but the second Mary Henrich heard that the wine had made her client sick, she knew who’d left the items on Nancy’s porch as well as she knew her own name. The wine and capsule tale wasn’t the first troubling story that Mary Henrich had heard from Nancy. Moreover, even if Richard wasn’t the culprit, the suspect wine and pills were evidence that someone had attempted to harm Nancy. Mary’s advice to Nancy: bring the wine and capsules immediately to her office, and Mary would have them tested and examined for fingerprints.

  Surprisingly, Nancy refused. She said that she’d be embarrassed for anyone to know she suspected Richard, and that she’d dispose of the wine and pills herself. Mary Henrich was appalled that Nancy would let Richard—or anyone else—get away with the evil stunt, but the final decision was, after all, up to Nancy. So, grudgingly, Mary Henrich accepted her client’s decision.

  But on the bleak January day when she learned that Nancy was in the hospital, the wine and pill incident popped into her mind like a TV replay. Immediately she called the hospital to be certain that the Dillard family knew about the wine and pills, and that the doctors checked Nancy for poison. Her warning didn’t fall on deaf ears; both Susan Dillard Hendrickson and Mary Helen Dillard had heard the identical story from Nancy, and Mary Helen had related the tale to Big Daddy. So as the hospital staff and the Dillard family set about building a case against Richard Lyon, the suspect wine and pills were the main things on their minds. Moreover, the wine and container of capsules were in a place where they would be easy to get without sidestepping Richard to enter the duplex.

  The items were in fact in an auto-repair shop, locked in the trunk of a car. The car belonged to Lynn Pease, who’d been Nancy and Richard’s nanny for three years, and who was yet another party who could corroborate Nancy’s story. Lynn is a gentle New England girl, a professional nanny who’d come to the Lyons with references from several prominent families, and during the time she’d worked for Nancy and Richard, Lynn had become practically a member of the family herself. She adored the Lyon children, and though she’d resigned as the Lyon nanny for health reasons—Lynn suffers from multiple sclerosis—and also because Nancy no longer worked and was home full time, Lynn continued to call on Nancy and the children while the Lyons were separated. She often took the kids shopping and out to the movies. The Lyon girls, Allison and Anna, were crazy about Lynn as well, and loved to ride in her old heap of a car, which the kids had dubbed the Zoomobile. On one of her drop-in visits, Lynn had found Nancy in bed, so sick she could barely move, and on another occasion Lynn came by within a day or two after Nancy had found the wine and pills on her doorstep.

  “The pills were on a low table,” Lynn remembers, “just outside Nancy’s bedroom, great big capsules like horse medicine. I told her, ‘You know the kids might get into those,’ and that’s when Nancy told me where she’d found them. She said she thought Richard had given them to her. When I said, you know, about the children getting into them, Nancy picked up the box, container or whatever, and took me downstairs with her. The bottle of wine was on the dining room table. She carried the pills and I took the wine, and we went out to my car. Nancy asked me to hide them in my trunk, so that’s what I did.” Here Lynn flashes an infectious grin. “Guess it’s lucky I did that, huh?”

  Lynn was in the group who’d joined the Dillards at the hospital, and it was the items in her trunk on which the secret planners zeroed in. Any hesitancy on the part of the Dillard family to try to implicate Richard was gone now that Big Daddy had taken firm control of the situation, and it’s fortunate for the later police investigation that Big Daddy was in charge. In his business or in his private life, William Wooldridge Dillard Sr. never goes off half-cocked. While he shared—or personified, actually—his family’s feelings that if Richard had harmed Nancy, then he was going to pay for his crime, Big Daddy maintained the presence of mind not to zealously muddy the investigative water. If he was going to engineer a campaign against Richard Lyon, he was going to do it up right.

  No one involved will say exactly what was the source, but it’s obvious that from the outset the Dillards had help in building their case. After all, neither the hospital staff nor the Dillard family are criminal lawyers, but the careful manner in which these laymen went about dropping a noose around Richard’s neck reeks of legal assistance. Technically, the Dallas Police Department had no cause to get involved at that point because, first of all, the Dillards had no concrete evidence that any crime had occurred. Furthermore, the hospital didn’t have Nancy’s blood sample back from the lab as yet, so for all the police knew she could merely be having a bout of indigestion. But whether the cops supplied behind-the-scenes instructions to the Dillards—as is often the case when the police are without cause to investigate, but n
onetheless suspect foul play—or one of the many private attorneys at Big Daddy’s disposal furnished advice, it’s apparent that the private investigation which went on during Nancy’s final hours in the hospital wasn’t any amateur affair.

  There is a portion of every criminal trial through which spectators and jurors alike generally doze. This excruciating proceeding is known as chain of custody testimony, and consists of a seemingly endless string of witnesses—policemen, ballistics experts, forensics people, and private citizens—who take the stand, look at a gun, knife, or other article that the prosecutor shows them, and tell where they’ve seen the item before, how it came into their possession, and what they did with the item when it left their custody. It’s boring and rather silly, but chain of custody testimony is a vital part of the criminal justice system. Without precise knowledge of where each piece of evidence has been since its discovery, and through whose hands the evidence has passed, there’s no way to know whether the evidence has been tampered with, or indeed if the piece on display in the courtroom is the actual evidence at all. Defense attorneys do their damnedest to shoot holes in chain of custody testimony because unless the prosecution has done its homework, the evidence might not be admissible. Under Big Daddy’s guidance, and playing by the rules furnished by legal experts unknown, the Dillard family and hospital staff proceeded to build an evidentiary case against Richard Lyon that would be the envy of the finest professional investigator. It is somewhat ironic that the wine and pills—which everyone assumed at the time to be critical—were handled so carefully and expertly by amateurs, while the later police investigation allowed other evidence against Richard to slip between the cracks like so much hourglass sand.