by Ed McBain
Anderson knew there had been an explosion of illuminating gas. He knew that the jets on the gas range in Fred Hassler’s apartment had been left opened. He looked at the bright cherry-red color of the body tissues, blood, and viscera and was willing right then and there to call it death by acute carbon monoxide poisoning. But he was being paid to do a job, and he knew that the most accurate and incontestable method for the determination of carbon monoxide in blood was the Van Slyke Manometric Method. Since his laboratory equipment included the Van Slyke apparatus, he went to work immediately on the blood of both victims. In both cases, he found that the carbon monoxide saturation was close to 60 per cent, and he knew that as low a saturation as 31 per cent could have caused fatal poisoning. He drew his conclusion. His conclusion was absolutely correct. Both Irene Thayer and Tommy Barlow had died of acute carbon monoxide poisoning.
Anderson knew that whisky bottles had been found in the apartment bedroom. He concluded, as he knew the detectives would have, that the couple had been drinking before they turned on the gas. But the detectives specifically wanted to know whether or not the couple had been intoxicated, and Anderson was grateful for the fact that the bodies had been delivered to him with reasonable dispatch. Alcohol is a funny poison. It feels very nice going down, and it can make you very gay and happy-but it is oxidized very rapidly in the system and will disappear entirely from the body during the first twenty-four hours after its ingestion. Anderson received both bodies almost immediately after Michael Thayer had identified his wife, less than twenty hours after the deaths had occurred. He realized this was cutting it dangerously close, but if the pair had been intoxicated, he was certain he would still find a sizable percentage of alcohol in their brains. Happily, the brain tissue of both bodies was intact and available for testing. If there was one aspect of toxicology (and there were indeed many) that produced the most heated controversy concerning method and results, it was the analysis of ethyl alcohol. The controversy ranged the spectrum from A to Z, and began with that portion or portions of the body which provided the most reliable biologic specimen for testing purposes. Anderson was a brain man. He knew there were toxicologists who preferred muscle tissue, or liver tissue, or even samplings from the kidney or spleen, but whenever a brain was available to him, he preferred that as a source for his tissue samplings. Two undamaged brains were available to him in the bodies of Irene Thayer and Tommy Barlow, and he used portions of those first to run a routine steam distillation test in an attempt to isolate and separate any volatile poisons in the bodies. There were none. Then, since he had already recovered alcohol during the distillation process, he used that same sampling for his quantitative determination tests. There were charts and charts and more charts relating to the percentage of alcohol recovered in the brain, and how much alcohol it took to make a man tipsy, or staggering, or reeling, or crocked, or downright fall-down, blind, stoned, inert, dead drunk. He had found only the faintest trace of alcohol in each of the brains, and he knew that whichever chart he used, neither of the victims would have come anywhere near to being drunk or even mildly intoxicated. But Anderson preferred using a chart based on the findings of Gettler and Tiber who had examined the organs of six thousand alcoholic corpses in an attempt to record degrees of drunkenness Dutifully, he looked at that chart now:
Dutifully, he decided that the answer to the second question posed him was a definite, negative, resounding NO. The couple had not been intoxicated prior to death.
As conscientious as he was, he didn’t even attempt to analyze the body fluids and organs for any traces of nonvolatile poisons. He already had his cause of death-acute carbon monoxide poisoning-and the isolation, recovery and identification of another, and unknown, poison in the bodies would have been a vast undertaking. Given even a small quantity of any particular drug, given even the tiniest clue to its existence in a corpse, Anderson, who was a competent toxicologist, would have consulted his texts and then chosen the best method of isolating that drug. But drugs, unfortunately, are not catalogued according to their properties. This means that if there is an unknown drug in a corpse, and if the toxicologist has no clue supplied either by the circumstances of the death or by a previous autopsy report, he must run every test he can think of in a catch-as-catch-can game of trying to isolate something toxic. The non-volatile organic poisons ranged from glucosides like oleander and scilla and digitalis, to essentials oils like nutmeg and cedar and rue, to aliphatic hypnotics like barbiturates and hydantoins, to organic purgatives like oleum ricini and cascara sagrada, and then into the alkaloids like opium and morphine and atropine… there were plenty, and Anderson was familiar with all of them, but he had not been asked to run such exhaustive tests, and saw no necessity for doing so. He had been asked to find out three things, and he already had the answers to the first two. He began work on the third immediately.
He couldn’t understand why the cops of the 87th wanted to know whether or not the victims had been making love before they died. He rather suspected the squad contained a horny bastard somewhere in its ranks, a latent necrophiliac. In any case, they wanted the information, and it was not too difficult to provide it. The situation might have been different if the bodies had reached him later than they did. Sperm, like alcohol, simply isn’t present after twenty-four hours have expired. He didn’t expect to find any moving cells in Irene Thayer’s vaginal tract because he knew this was impossible so many hours after her death. But he could hopefully find immobile spermatozoa even now. He took a wet smear, studied the specimen under a high-power microscope, and found no traces of spermatozoa. Not content to leave it at that (there were too many conditions which could explain the absence of spermatozoa in the vagina even following intercourse) he turned to the body of Tommy Barlow, irrigated the urethral canal with a saline solution, aspirated the fluid back into a syringe, and then studied it under his microscope for traces of sperm. There were none.
Satisfied with his findings, he concluded his report and asked that it be typed up for transmission to the 87th.
The report was couched in medical language, and it explained exactly why Anderson was answering his questions as he answered them, exactly what evidence he had found to back up his opinions. The men of the 87th waded through the language and decided that what it all meant was:
1. Gaspipe.
2. Sober.
3. Unlaid.
The report made them wonder where all that booze had gone, if neither of the victims had drunk it. The report also made them wonder why Tommy and Irene had taken off their clothes, if not euphemistically to “be together” for the last time. It had been a reasonable assumption, up to then, that the pair had made love, then dressed themselves partially, and then turned on the gas. If they had not made love, why had they undressed?
Somehow, the men on the squad almost wished they’d never received Anderson’s damn report.
* * * *
5
There is something about big women that is always a little frightening: a reversal of roles, a destruction of stereotype. Women are supposed to be delicate and fragile; everybody knows that. They’re supposed to be soft and cuddly and a little helpless and dependent. They’re supposed to seek comfort and solace in the arms of strong, clear-eyed resolute men.
The two men who rang the doorbell of Mary Tomlinson’s house on Sands Spit were strong, clear-eyed, and resolute.
Steve Carella was six feet tall with wide shoulders, narrow hips, thick wrists and big hands. He did not present a picture of overwhelming massiveness because his power was deceptively concealed in the body of a natural athlete, a man who moved easily and loosely, in total control of a fine-honed muscularity. His eyes were brown with a peculiar downward slant, combining with his high cheekbones to give his face a curiously Oriental look. He was not a frightening man, but when you opened the door to find him on your front step, you knew for certain he wasn’t there to sell insurance.
Cotton Hawes weighed a hundred and ninety pounds. He was six feet
two inches tall, and his big-boned body was padded with obvious muscle. His eyes were an electric blue, and he had a straight unbroken nose, and a good mouth with a wide lower lip. He carried a white streak in the hair over his left temple, where he had once been stabbed while investigating a burglary. He did not look like the sort of man anyone would want to challenge-even to a game of checkers.
Both men were big, both men were strong. And besides, they were each carrying loaded guns on their hips. But when Mary Tomlinson opened the door of the development house, they both felt slightly inadequate and seemed to shrink visibly on the doorstep.
Mrs. Tomlinson had flaming red hair and flashing green eyes. The eyes and the hair alone would have been enough to present her as a woman of force, but they were accompanied by height and girth, and a granite-like, no-nonsense face. She stood at least five feet nine inches tall inside her doorway, a woman with a large bosom and thick arms, her legs and feet planted firmly to the floor, like a wrestler waiting for a charge. She wore a flowered Hawaiian muumuu, and she was barefoot, and she looked at the detectives with suspicion as they faced her inadequately and timorously showed their shields.
“Come in,” she said. “I was wondering when you’d get to me.”
She did not deliver the cliché with any sense of unoriginality. She seemed not to know that “I was wondering when you’d get to me” had been spoken by countless fictitious heavies long before she was born, and would probably continue to be spoken so long as heavies existed. Instead, she delivered the line as if she were chairman of the board of General Motors who; having called a meeting, was irritated when some of her executives arrived a little late. She had been expecting the police to get to her, and her only question now was what the hell had taken them so long.
She stamped flatfooted into the house, leaving the door for Hawes to close behind him. The house was a typical Sands Spit development dwelling, a small entrance hall, a kitchen on the left, a living room on the right, and three bedrooms and a bath running along the rear. Mrs. Tomlinson had furnished the place with the taste of a miniaturist. The furniture was small, the pictures on the walls were small, the lamps were small, everything seemed to have been designed for a tiny woman.
“Sit down,” she said, and Hawes and Carella found seats in the living room, two small caned chairs in which they were instantly uncomfortable. Mrs. Tomlinson spread her ample buttocks onto the tiny couch opposite them. She sat like a man, her legs widespread, the folds of the muumuu dropping between her knees, her big-toed feet again planted firmly on the floor. She looked at her visitors unsmiling, waiting. Carella cleared his throat.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Tomlinson,” he said.
“I assume that’s why you’re here,” she answered.
“Yes,” Carella said. “To begin with…”
“To begin with,” Mrs. Tomlinson cut in, “I’m in the middle of preparations for my daughter’s funeral, so I hope you’ll make this short and sweet. Somebody’s got to take care of the damn thing.”
“You’re handling all arrangements, are you?” Hawes asked.
“Who’s going to handle it?” she said, her lip curling. “That idiot she lived with?”
“Your son-in-law, you mean?”
“My sow-in-law,” she repeated, and she managed to give the words an inflection that immediately presented Michael Thayer as a fumbling creature incapable of coping with anything more difficult than tying his own shoelaces. “Some son-in-law. The poet. Roses are red, violets are blue, let it be said, happy birthday to you. My sow-in-law.” She shook her massive head.
“I gather you don’t like him very much,” Carella said.
“The feelings are mutual. Haven’t you talked to him?”
“Yes, we’ve talked to him.”
“Then you know.” She paused. “Or do you? If Michael said anything kind about me, he was lying.”
“He said you don’t get along, Mrs. Tomlinson.”
“That’s the understatement of the year. We hate each other’s guts. The bully.”
“Bully?” Hawes said. He looked at Mrs. Tomlinson in astonishment because the word seemed thoroughly inappropriate coming from her lips.
“Always shoving his weight around. I hate men who take advantage of us.”
“Take advantage?” Hawes repeated, the astonishment still on his face.
“Yes. Women are to be treated with respect,” she said, “and cared for gently. And with tenderness.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t know. He’s a bully.” She paused, and then reflectively added, “Women are delicate.”
Hawes and Carella looked at her silently for several moments.
“He… uh… he bullied your daughter, Mrs. Tomlinson?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Bossing her. He’s a boss. I hate men who are bosses.” She looked at Hawes. “Are you married?”
“No, ma’am.”
She turned instantly to Carella “Are you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Are you a boss?”
“I… I don’t think so.”
“Good You seem like a nice boy.” She paused. “Not Michael. Always bossing. Did you pay the electric bill? Did you do the marketing? Did you do this and that? It’s no wonder.”
Again, the room was silent.
“It’s no wonder what?” Carella asked.
“It’s no wonder Margaret was going to leave him.”
“Margaret?”
“My daughter.”
“Oh. Oh, yes,” Carella said. “You call her Margaret, do you?”
“That’s the name she was born with.”
“Yes, but most people called her Irene, isn’t that true?”
“Margaret was the name we gave her, and Margaret was what we called her. Why? What’s the matter with that name?”
“Nothing, nothing,” Carella said hastily. “It’s a very nice name.”
“If it’s good enough for the princess of England, it’s good enough for anybody,” Mrs. Tomlinson said.
“Certainly,” Carella said.
“Certainly,” Mrs. Tomlinson agreed, and she nodded her head vigorously.
“She was going to leave him?” Hawes asked.
“Yes.”
“You mean divorce him?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me. How do you think I know?
Mothers and daughters shouldn’t keep secrets from each other I told Margaret anything she wanted to know, and she did the same with me.”
“When did she plan on leaving him, Mrs. Tomlinson?”
“Next month.”
“When next month?”
“On the sixteenth.”
“Why that particular day?”
Mrs. Tomlinson shrugged. “Is something wrong with that day?”
“No, nothing at all. But was there a special reason for picking the sixteenth?”
“I never stuck my nose in my daughter’s business,” Mrs. Tomlinson said abruptly. Carella and Hawes exchanged a quick glance.
“But yet you’re certain about the date,” Hawes said.
“Yes. She told me she would leave him on the sixteenth.”
“But you don’t know why the sixteenth?”
“No,” Mrs. Tomlinson said. She smiled suddenly. “Are you going to bully me, too?” she asked.
Carella returned the smile. Graciously, he answered, “No, certainly not, Mrs. Tomlinson. We’re only trying to get the facts.”
“I can give you all the facts,” Mrs. Tomlinson said. “The first fact is that my daughter didn’t commit suicide. That you can count on.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know my daughter. She was like me. She loved life. Nobody who loves life is going to take her own life, that’s for sure.”
“Well,” Carella said, “all the indications…”
“Indications! Who cares about indications? My daughter was vital, energetic.
People like that don’t commit suicide. Look, it runs in the family.”
“Energy?” Hawes asked,
“Energy, right I’ve got to keep moving all day long. Even sitting here, I’m beginning to feel fidgety, would you believe it? There are nervous types of women, you know. I’m one of them.”
“And your daughter was another?”
“Absolutely. Always on the go! Vital! Energetic! Alive! Listen, do you want to know something? Shall I tell you how I am in bed?”