I laughed. Who didn’t know the type? “Say, listen, Danny,” I said. “Did you know Laurie’s been in the hospital?”
“Yeah. Marina, my wife, went to see Stephanie—tried to get her to go out and get some air while she took care of the baby, but Stephanie wouldn’t budge.”
“I hear you drew up Gary’s and Stephanie’s wills.”
“Yeah. God, I never thought—poor little Laurie. They asked Gary’s sister to be her guardian—he hated his brother and Stephanie was an only child.”
“Guess what? Gary made another will just before he died, naming the brother as Laurie’s guardian.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it. I’ll send you a copy.”
“There’s going to be a hell of a court fight.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. The court, of course, wouldn’t be bound by either parent’s nomination. Since Stephanie’s will nominated Jeri as guardian, she and Michael might choose to fight it out, but given Michael’s apparent hesitation to take Laurie, I wasn’t sure there’d be any argument at all.
“Danny,” I said, “you were seeing a lot of him, right?”
“Yeah. We played racquetball.”
“Was he dealing coke? Or something else?”
“Gary? No way. You can’t be a dealer and be as broke as he was.”
The phone rang almost the minute I hung up. Rob had finished a round of calls to what he called “his law-enforcement sources.” He’d learned that Gary’s brakes hadn’t been tampered with, handily blowing my murder theory.
Or seemingly blowing it. Something was still very wrong, and I wasn’t giving up till I knew what the powder was. Mom asked me to dinner, but I headed back to the city—Rob had said he could get someone to run an analysis that night.
It was raining again by the time I’d dropped the stuff off, refused Rob’s dinner invitation (that was two) and gone home to solitude and split pea soup that I make up in advance and keep in the freezer for nights like this. It was the second night after Gary’s death; the first night I’d needed to reassure myself I was still alive. Now I needed to mourn. I didn’t plan anything fancy like sackcloth and ashes, just a quiet night home with a book, free to let my mind wander and my eyes fill up from time to time.
But first I had a message from Michael Wilder. He wanted to talk. He felt awful calling me like this, but there was no one in his family he felt he could talk to. Couldn’t we meet for coffee or something?
Sure we could—at my house. Not even for Gary’s brother was I going out in the rain again.
After the soup I showered and changed into jeans. Michael arrived in wool slacks and a sport coat—not even in repose, apparently, did he drop the stuffy act. Maybe life with Laurie would loosen him up. I asked if he’d thought any more about being her guardian.
It flustered him. “Not really,” he said, and didn’t meet my eyes.
“I found out the original wills named Jeri as guardian. If Stephanie didn’t make a last-minute one, too, hers will still be in effect. Meaning Jeri could fight you if you decide you want Laurie.”
“I can’t even imagine being a father,” he said. “But Gary must have had a good reason—” he broke off. “Poor little kid. A week ago everyone thought she was the one who was going to die.”
“What’s wrong with her—besides diarrhea?” I realized I hadn’t had the nerve to ask either of the grandmothers because I knew exactly what would happen—I’d get details that would give me symptoms, and two hours later, maybe three or four, I’d be backing toward the door, nodding, with a glazed look on my face, watching matriarchal jaws continue to work.
But Michael only grimaced. “That’s all I know about—just life-threatening diarrhea.”
“Life-threatening?”
“Without an IV, a dehydrated baby can die in fifteen minutes. Just ask my mother.” He shrugged. “Anyway, the doctors talked about electrolyte abnormalities, whatever they may be, and did every test in the book. But the only thing they found was what they called ‘high serum sodium levels.’ ” He shrugged again, as if to shake something off. “Don’t ask—especially don’t ask my mom or Stephanie’s.”
We both laughed. I realized Michael had good reasons for finding sudden parenthood a bit on the daunting side.
I got us some wine and when I came back, he’d turned deadly serious. “Rebecca, something weird happened today. Look what I found.” He held out a paper signed by Gary and headed “Beneficiary Designation.”
“Know what that is?”
I shook my head.
“I used to be in insurance—as did my little brother. It’s the form you use to change your life insurance beneficiary.”
The form was dated December 16, the day before Gary’s death. Michael had been named beneficiary and Laurie contingent beneficiary. Michael said, “Pretty weird, huh?”
I nodded.
“I also found both Gary’s and Stephanie’s policies—each for half a million dollars and each naming the other as beneficiary, with Laurie as contingent. For some reason, Gary went to see his insurance agent the day before he died and changed his. What do you make of it?”
I didn’t at all like what I made of it. “It goes with the will,” I said. “He named you as Laurie’s guardian, so he must have wanted to make sure you could afford to take care of her.”
“I could afford it. For Christ’s sake!”
“He must have wanted to compensate you.” I stopped for a minute. “It might be his way of saying thanks.”
“You’re avoiding the subject, aren’t you?”
I was. “You mean it would have made more sense to leave the money to Laurie directly.”
“Yes. Unless he’d provided for her some other way.”
“Stephanie had money.”
“I don’t think Gary knew how much, though.”
I took a sip of wine and thought about it, or rather thought about ways to talk about it, because it was beginning to look very ugly. “You’re saying you think,” I said carefully, “that he knew she was going to inherit the half million from Stephanie’s policy. Because she was going to die and he was the beneficiary, and he was going to die and his new will left his own property to Laurie.”
Michael was blunt: “It looks like murder-suicide, doesn’t it?”
I said, “Yeah,” unable to say any more.
Michael took me over ground I’d already mentally covered: “He decided to do it in a hurry, probably because it was raining so hard—an accident in the rain would be much more plausible. He made the arrangements. Then he called me and muttered about a premonition, to give himself some sort of feeble motive for suddenly getting his affairs in order; he may have said the same thing to other people as well. Finally he pretended to be drunk, made a big show of almost having an accident on the way to the hospital, picked up Stephanie, and drove her over a cliff.”
Still putting things together, I mumbled, “You couldn’t really be sure you’d die going over just any cliff. You’d have to pick the right cliff, wouldn’t you?” And then I said, “I wonder if the insurance company will figure it out.”
“Oh, who cares! He probably expected they would but wanted to make the gesture. And he knew I didn’t need the money. That’s not the point. The point is why?” He stood up and ran his fingers through his hair, working off excess energy. “Why kill himself, Rebecca? And why take Stephanie with him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I hadn’t a doubt that that was what he’d done. There was another why—why make Michael Laurie’s guardian? Why not his sister as originally planned?
* * *
—
The next day was Saturday, and I would have dozed happily into mid-morning if Rob hadn’t phoned at eight. “You know the sinister white powder?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Bak
ing soda.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s it. No heroin, no cocaine, not even any baby talc. Baking soda. Period.”
I thanked him and turned over, but the next couple of hours were full of vaguely disquieting dreams. I woke upset, feeling oddly tainted, as if I’d collaborated in Gary’s crimes. It wasn’t till I was in the shower—performing my purification ritual, if you believe in such things—that things came together in my conscious mind. The part of me that dreamed had probably known all along.
I called a doctor friend to find out if what I suspected made medical sense. It did. To a baby Laurie’s age, baking soda would be a deadly poison. Simply add it to the formula and the excess sodium would cause her to develop severe, dehydrating diarrhea; it might ultimately lead to death. But she would be sick only as long as someone continued to doctor her formula. The poisoning was not cumulative; as soon as it stopped, she would begin to recover, and in only a few days she would be dramatically better.
In other words, he described Laurie’s illness to a T. And Stephanie, the world’s greatest mother, who was there around the clock, must have fed her—at any rate, would have had all the opportunity in the world to doctor her formula.
It didn’t make sense. Well, part of it did. The part I could figure out was this: Gary saw Stephanie put baking soda in the formula, already knew about the high sodium reports, put two and two together, may or not have confronted her…no, definitely didn’t confront her. Gary never confronted anyone.
He simply came to the conclusion that his wife was poisoning their child and decided to kill her, taking his own aimless life as well. That would account for the hurry—to stop the poisoning without having to confront Stephanie. If he accused her, he might be able to stop her, but things would instantly get far too messy for Gary-the-conflict-avoider. Worse, the thing could easily become a criminal case, and if Stephanie was convicted, Laurie would have to grow up knowing her mother had deliberately poisoned her. If she were acquitted, Laurie might always be in danger. I could follow his benighted reasoning perfectly.
But I couldn’t, for all the garlic in Gilroy, imagine why Stephanie would want to kill Laurie. By all accounts, she was the most loving of mothers, would probably even have laid down her own life for her child’s. I called a shrink friend, Elaine Alvarez.
“Of course she loved the child,” Elaine explained. “Why shouldn’t she? Laurie perfectly answered her needs.” And then she told me some things that made me forget I’d been planning to consume a large breakfast in a few minutes. On the excuse of finally remembering to take Stephanie’s clothes, I drove to Gary’s house.
The family was planning a memorial service in a day or two for the dead couple; Jeri had just arrived at her dead brother’s house; friends had dropped by to comfort the bereaved; yet there was almost a festive atmosphere in the house. Laurie had come home that morning.
Michael and I took a walk. “Bullshit!” he said. “Dog crap! No one could have taken better care of that baby than Stephanie. Christ, she martyred herself. She stayed up night after night—”
“Listen to yourself. Everything you’re saying confirms what Elaine told me. The thing even has a name. It’s called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. The original syndrome, plain old Munchausen, is when you hurt or mutilate yourself to get attention.
“ ‘By proxy’ means you do it to your nearest and dearest. People say, ‘Oh, that poor woman. God, what she’s been through. Look how brave she is! Why, no one in the world could be a better mother.’ And Mom gets off on it. There are recorded cases of it, Michael, at least one involving a mother and baby.”
He was pale. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Let’s sit down a minute.”
In fact, stuffy, uptight Michael ended up lying down in the dirt on the side of the road, nice flannel slacks and all, taking breaths till his color returned. And then, slowly, we walked back to the house.
Jeri was holding Laurie, her mother standing over her, Mary Cooper sitting close on the couch. “Oh, look what a baby-waby. What a darling girly-wirl. Do you feel the least bit hot? Laurie-baurie, you’re not running a fever, are you?”
The kid had just gotten the thumbs-up from a hospital, and she was wrapped in half a dozen blankets. I doubted she was running a fever.
Ellen leaned over to feel the baby’s face. “Ohhh, I think she might be. Give her to Grandma. Grandma knows how to fix babies, doesn’t she, Laurie girl? Come to Grandma and Grandma will sponge you with alcohol, Grandma will.”
She looked like a hawk coming in for a landing, ready to snare its prey and fly up again, but Mary was quicker still. Almost before you saw it happening, she had the baby away from Ellen and in her own lap. “What you need is some nice juice, don’t you, Laurie-bear? And then Meemaw’s going to rock you and rock you…oh, my goodness, you’re burning up.” Her voice was on the edge of panic. “Listen, Jeri, this baby’s wheezing! We’ve got to get her breathing damp air….”
She wasn’t wheezing, she was gulping, probably in amazement. I felt my own jaw drop and, looking away, unwittingly caught the eye of Mary’s husband, who hadn’t wanted me to see the anguish there. Quickly he dropped a curtain of blandness. Beside me, I heard Michael whisper, “My God!”
I knew we were seeing something extreme. They were all excited to have Laurie home, and they were competing with each other, letting out what looked like their scariest sides if you knew what we did. But a Stephanie didn’t come along every day. Laurie was in no further danger, I was sure of it. Still, I understood why Gary had had the sudden change of heart about her guardianship.
I turned to Michael. “Are you going to try to get her?”
He plucked at his sweater sleeve, staring at his wrist as if it had a treasure map on it. “I haven’t decided.”
An image from my fitful morning dreams came back to me: a giant in a forest, taller than all the trees and built like a mountain; a female giant with belly and breasts like boulders, dressed in white robes and carrying, draped across her outstretched arms, a dead man, head dangling on its flaccid neck.
* * *
—
In a few days Michael called. When he got home to Seattle, a letter had been waiting for him—a note, rather, from Gary, postmarked the day of his death. It didn’t apologize, it didn’t explain—it didn’t even say, “Dear Michael.” It was simply a quote from Hamlet typed on a piece of paper, not handwritten, Michael thought, because it could be construed as a confession and there was the insurance to think about.
This was the quote:
Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.
I didn’t ask Michael again whether he intended to take Laurie. At the moment, I was too furious with one passive male to trust myself to speak civilly with another. Instead, I simmered inwardly, thinking how like Gary it was to confess to murder with a quote from Shakespeare. Thinking that, as he typed it, he probably imagined grandly that nothing in his life would become him like the leaving of it. The schmuck.
DETECTIVE: KINSEY MILLHONE
A POISON THAT LEAVES NO TRACE
Sue Grafton
AS THE DAUGHTER of mystery novelist C. W. Grafton, Sue Taylor Grafton (1940–2017) unsurprisingly became a detective novelist as well. She had two major inspirations: Ross Macdonald, the writer she admired more than any other, and her ex-husband, with whom she engaged in a bitter divorce and child custody battle that lasted six years. As the ugly war proceeded, she kept thinking of new ways to kill him and finally put them down on paper, unplanned research for future novels.
After graduating from the University of Louisville, the city in which she was born and raised, Grafton took jobs as a hospital admissions clerk, cashier, and medical secretary before turning to writing. After producing seven novels (only two of which were published)
and screenplays for television, either on her own or with her future husband, Steven Humphrey, she began the work that made her an international bestseller: the “alphabet novels” featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone, each book beginning with a letter of the alphabet in sequential order. The novels, beginning with “A” Is for Alibi (1982), were one of the major contributing elements of the boom of female writers producing tougher, more hard-boiled detective fiction that began in the 1980s.
Although Grafton has described her series character as “a younger, smarter, and thinner” version of herself, that is not entirely accurate. While Millhone is a loner who prefers not to have intense relationships, the relentlessly charming Grafton was married to Humphrey for nearly forty years. The series is set in Santa Teresa (a fictionalized Santa Barbara) as an homage to Macdonald, whose Lew Archer novels were also set there.
One of the most honored authors of her time, Grafton was given lifetime achievement awards by the Mystery Writers of America, the (British) Crime Writers’ Association, the Private Eye Writers of America, and Malice Domestic.
“A Poison That Leaves No Trace” was originally published in Sisters in Crime 2, edited by Marilyn Wallace (New York, Berkley, 1990); it was first collected in Kinsey and Me (Santa Barbara, California, Bench Press, 1991).
A Poison That Leaves No Trace
SUE GRAFTON
THE WOMAN WAS WAITING outside my office when I arrived that morning. She was short and quite plump, wearing jeans in a size I’ve never seen on the rack. Her blouse was tunic-length, ostensibly to disguise her considerable rear end. Someone must have told her never to wear horizontal stripes, so the bold red-and-blue bands ran diagonally across her torso with a dizzying effect. Big red canvas tote, matching canvas wedgies. Her face was round, seamless, and smooth, her hair a uniformly dark shade that suggested a rinse. She might have been any age between forty and sixty. “You’re not Kinsey Millhone,” she said as I approached.
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 147