Red, Green, or Murder pc-16

by Steven F Havill

  Torrez straightened up and continued his examination of Pat Gabaldon’s cell phone through the plastic bag. “Somebody stopped by Payton’s after that. Enough time to distract George for a few minutes with something, enough time to spike the wine. I mean, how long would that take? A few seconds?”

  “I have no brainstorms at the moment,” I said, and turned to Estelle. “Do you?”

  “No, sir. You were supposed to go over to his house, but didn’t. From the moment Ricardo delivered the food, at about 11:50, until Phil Borman found the body around one-thirty or so gives us a considerable window of opportunity.”

  “And that’s assuming that Phil Borman ain’t lyin’,” Torrez interjected.

  “The histamine could have been put in the wine at any time…not even today, necessarily.”

  “Come on,” I said, feeling miserable. “Maggie or Phil wouldn’t…” and I interrupted myself, knowing I was just talking to make noise. We all knew that there was no accounting for people’s motivations, no matter how affable, or good natured, or altruistic they appeared to their neighbors and business associates.

  The room fell silent, and I could hear the hum of the little electric clock on the wall above the phone.

  I broke the silence. “Where would I buy some of that?” I asked Louis, nodding at the histamine.

  “Well, you wouldn’t,” he said. “Someone with an appropriate license would buy it from a pharmaceutical supplier.”

  “Then where would I get it? Where would I steal it, if I had to?”

  Herrera hesitated, turning the bottle this way and that. “Well, I suppose it depends on how desperate you were. We…I mean here at the hospital…we store it in the compounding room behind the pharmacy. That’s secure, but it isn’t Fort Knox. There are times when someone could walk in. If they knew just what they were looking for, and where to look, it would only take a second to snatch the bottle.”

  He brightened at a memory. “In fact, I worked at a place when I was in college where a back door from the pharmacy opened right into the alley. Lots of times in the summer, they’d keep it open for the air.”

  “You use it often? That stuff, I mean.”

  “Ah, no. In all honesty, I haven’t used it since I started here. That’s a year and a half.”

  “But if you did…” I primed.

  “The only use that I’m familiar with is the compound where we mix histamine diphosphate with-well, basically, caffeine. Pharmaceutical caffeine, of course.” He grinned. “We don’t just dump a tablespoon of this into black coffee.”

  “And used for what?”

  “Well, it’d be helpful to talk with Doctor Guzman or Perrone, but basically it’s used as a treatment for multiple sclerosis patients. The histamine-caffeine combination acts as some sort of neural trigger.” He laced his fingers together around the little bottle. “That’s the theory, anyway. The compound somehow establishes the neural pathway that the MS destroys.” He shrugged. “I don’t think anyone actually knows how it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, the results can be pretty spectacular.”

  “Multiple sclerosis,” Estelle repeated.

  “Right.”

  “That’s all the histamine diphosphate that you have?”

  “That’s it.” He hesitated. “Here in Posadas, I’d think that there are only two places to get this. One is here. The other is over at Posadas Pharmacy. Gus Trombley would have some, certainly. You might want to talk with him. That’s kind of an old-fashioned store, and he’s an old-fashioned kind of guy.” He paused, and I wasn’t sure that he’d meant the comment as a compliment. “He doesn’t think much of us.”

  “That’s because you’re the new kid on the block,” I said. “He’s had Posadas County to himself for thirty-five years.”

  “And he’s had his way of doing things for that long, too,” the young man said diplomatically. He held up both hands helplessly. “I’ve told you the sum total of what I know about this stuff. Like I said, I’d be happy to do some more research on it. See what I can come up with.”

  “We appreciate that, Louis,” Estelle said. “Anything at all beyond what you’ve already told us.”

  He looked at his watch, and then heavenward. “If there’s nothing else…”

  Estelle reached across and extended her hand, shaking his warmly. “Thanks, Louis. Thanks for dragging out so late.”

  “I’ll survive,” he laughed. “Now that I’m here, what I should do is spend a few hours in my office. I’ve got a stack of inventory control forms about like this,” and he held his hand two feet off the floor. “Get a head start.”

  “We’d appreciate your keeping all of this confidential.”

  He frowned at her in good-natured reproof. “You don’t need to tell me that, ma’am.” He shook hands with Bobby and me, and closed the lounge door behind him as he left.

  “So we have the means,” I said. “That’s if the blood work corroborates the idea. Mix some histamine diphosphate in the wine, and there you go. That would take just a few seconds.” I took a deep breath. “And that means that someone is a real opportunist.”

  It would be midnight by the time we reached Guy Trombley’s pharmacy. He’d be grumpy but cooperative…and inquisitive at the odd hour. “Do you want to call Guy, or do I?” I said, looking first at Estelle and then at the sheriff. “Or do you want to wait for a few hours and catch him in a better mood? I don’t see much point in waiting, if you’re willing.”

  “I don’t care what mood he’s in,” Torrez said. “There’s things we need to find out.”

  “Absolutely,” Estelle agreed. “And another thing that can’t wait. If we’re right about all this, there’s likely a little bottle of histamine diphosphate floating around somewhere. I’d hate to see the top come off of that.”

  “That would put somebody’s garbage-raiding mutt into orbit,” I said.

  “That’s exactly it,” Estelle said. “What do we do with an empty bottle? We toss it in the trash.”

  “There’s not a lot we can do about that,” I said. “Everything ends up in the landfill.” Estelle’s eyebrows puckered in a frown, and I had visions of all of us, like a flood of rats, ransacking the heaps of garbage at the landfill, looking for one tiny bottle.

  “I’ll call Guy,” Torrez said, and pushed himself to his feet, headed for the end table where he rummaged through the phone book for a moment and then dialed. After half a dozen rings, he frowned and then looked at me with exasperation.

  “Guy,” he said, “this is Sheriff Torrez. Get back to me ASAP.” He rattled off his cell phone number and then hung up. “Damn answering machines,” he said, and mimicked a mechanical voice. ‘If this is an emergency, please dial 9-1-1.’”

  “You can’t blame him, Bobby. I bet it gets old with all the hypochondriacs calling for aspirin in the middle of the night.”

  Torrez yawned and gazed thoughtfully at the clock. “I’ll go over to his house and shake him out of bed,” he said. “Meet you at the drug store in a few minutes?” Before either of us had a chance to answer, a knuckle rapped on the door, and Torrez stepped across and opened it.

  Dr. Francis Guzman leaned against the door jamb, looking as tired as the rest of us.

  “Hey, guys,” he said. “We have an ambulance inbound from an accident east of here on the interstate. Before we get wound up with that, I wanted to let you know about Patrick Gabaldon.” He held his hand to the left side of his head. “He was hit twice, really hard…hairline skull fractures and some subdural hematoma and brain swelling that’s a worry. We have him stabilized now and are looking to airlift him to University Hospital as soon as we can.”

  “Is he conscious?” I asked, and Francis shook his head. “What about the neck wound?”

  “He lost a lot of blood, but whoever assaulted him didn’t work it just right.” The doctor held his left index finger on the angle of his own jaw, then drew a line along his jaw until he touched the point of his chin. “Ran right along his jaw bone
, but that protected the major vessels. Nasty, but manageable.”

  “So he can’t talk to us,” I said.

  “No. Not the way we have him sedated. It’s going to be touch and go. Whoever hit him really tagged him a good one. Twice. Really hard.” Francis patted the door jamb as he pushed himself upright.

  “Hit him with what? Any guesses?”

  “I have no idea,” Francis replied. “There were no distinguishable marks, and the wound is not really focused, the way being swatted with a lug wrench would be. You’re looking for something blunt, maybe kinda flat. That’s as good as it gets at the moment. Okay?”

  “You bet. Thanks.”

  “I saw Louis out in the hallway,” the physician said. “In the past ten years, I think I’ve treated half a dozen patients where I prescribed the H-C cocktail. It’s not common, by any means. Not here, anyway.”

  “We need a list of those,” Torrez said.

  “Not even with a warrant, Bobby. We just don’t do that.”

  The sheriff actually smiled. “I know you don’t,” he said affably. “I just said that was something we needed. Didn’t say we were going to get it.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I’d been inside Guy Trombley’s drug store a thousand times in the past three decades. With the passing of the years, chasing various health episodes had threatened to become a major hobby of mine. I’d never considered Trombley’s Posadas Pharmacy as particularly old-fashioned, any more than I thought of myself as aging-unless I looked in the mirror or started to push myself from a low-slung chair. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Louis Herrera, a youthful, progressive pharmacist, might regard Posadas Pharmacy and its long-time owner as relics.

  Comfortable is what the place was. All the aromas, most of them pleasant, mingled into a good, solid, dependable potpourri. I knew where I was when I walked into Guy’s place, even recognized most of the teenaged counter attendants. The floor was old-fashioned, well-oiled wood that squeaked a welcome.

  With construction of the Guzman/Perrone clinic, Trombley’s would no longer be the only retail pharmacological game in town. I doubted that he’d deign to lower his monopolistic prices with the competition.

  We stood quietly and watched while Guy fumbled with the keys for both the door and the alarm system. At one point, he stopped and twisted his tall, gangling form toward me. “I wouldn’t do this for just anybody,” he whispered, as if the streets had ears. He turned 180 degrees so Estelle could hear him. “Not just anybody.”

  “We appreciate it, sir,” she said.

  “I’m not even going to ask why all this can’t wait until a reasonable hour,” he said. His voice reminded me of a banjo. “But I’m sure that the sheriff has his reasons.” He grinned at me as the door clicked open. “Robert isn’t coming over? He was the one who called me.”

  “Ah, no,” I said. “He decided that the two of us could handle you all right.”

  Trombley barked a laugh. “Well, then, here we are.” He bowed and ushered us both inside. “My kingdom.” He closed the door behind him, clicked the dead bolt shut, and palmed a four-switch panel for the lights. The fluorescents tinkled and blinked into life. “Now what can I do for the minions of the law?” He held up a hand before either of us had a chance to answer. “You know, nothing would taste better right now than a cup of coffee. Do you mind if I take a moment to put on a pot?”

  “Oh, I never touch the stuff,” I said, and Trombley guffawed again.

  “Just herbal tea now, eh?” he chortled. “I know you’re not to be tempted,” he said to Estelle. “But I have Earl Grey, Oolong, and some other stuff that’s mostly chopped up flower beds if you’re in the mood.”

  “No, thank you, sir. But we really appreciate you coming down to meet us,” Estelle said.

  We followed him through the aisles, around a tall counter, and two steps up to the pharmacists’ work counter. From this spot, Guy could look out over his domain. In a moment, he had the drip brewer hard at work, and I was beginning to think that a hot bagel with cream cheese would go nicely. He rubbed his hands in anticipation. “Now, then.”

  “We’re interested in a particular chemical,” Estelle said. Trombley tilted his head back, locking her in focus through his half glasses, his ruddy, pocked face a mask of serious interest. “Histamine diphosphate.”

  Trombley’s head sank back down until his head rested on his chest, his eyes never leaving Estelle’s face. He watched as she consulted her notebook. “Histamine diphosphate,” she repeated.

  His sparse eyebrows raised, and he cocked his head. “That’s a little off the wall, sheriff.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, and let her explanation go with that. “I’d appreciate whatever information you can give us.”

  “You’ve talked to your husband, or to young Herrera?” He asked the question with enough tact that it sounded more self-deprecating than anything else.

  “Briefly.” Estelle didn’t elaborate.

  “I see.” Guy looked across at me, then back over his shoulder at the coffee pot. It was thinking, but hadn’t produced much. “I sincerely hope that’s not the new street craze, folks. If it is, you guys are going to be picking up a lot of dead bodies.”

  “We hope it isn’t,” I said.

  “Well, while we’re waiting for this pokey thing, let me show you where I keep ours. It’s back in the compounding area. Histamine diphosphate isn’t a drug, per se, you know. Your husband might have already told you all this, I suppose. It’s really just a chemical that is compounded into a treatment. Never administered by itself.”

  He moved past me toward the steps. “Follow me this way,” he said. “The drug you mention has been shown to be efficacious sometimes in the treatment of multiple sclerosis. That’s its major claim to fame.”

  “It’s ingested orally? The treatment, I mean?” I asked as we followed him through a narrow passageway to a tiny room in the back. Except for a touch of gray where dust touched unused flat surfaces, the place was tidy, with a gadget at one end that looked like a hi-tech bead-blasting chamber.

  Trombley shook his head. “Oh, no. Through a skin patch. Like those things you wear to stop smoking.”

  “So the histamine diphosphate is easily absorbed through the skin, then.”

  “Indeed it is,” Trombley said. “And that’s how we can keep the dose very small, and very controlled.” He ran a hand along a shelf, ticking off the jars and boxes. “It’s pretty squirrelly stuff, folks. Histamine is a natural chemical in the body, as I’m sure you’re aware. That’s what triggers the body’s response mechanism in allergies, for instance.” He turned his head to cough once into his cupped hand, a loud, racking ratchet that didn’t sound good.

  He continued his own personal guided tour of the shelves, working his way downward through the alphabet. “Ah, here we are,” he said, pulling a small bottle off the shelf. He handed it to Estelle. “Don’t open it.”

  She twisted it this way and that, scanning the label. “This says haloperidol powder, Mr. Trombley. Is that the same thing?”

  “Hardly,” he replied, reaching hastily for the bottle. He squinted at it, looked heavenward, and turned around muttering, “Don’t ever, ever get old, either one of you.” I knew exactly what he’d done. The eyes see the target, but the hand and the attention drift a bit. I did that very thing at the supermarket, sometimes arriving home with a truly puzzling substitution for what I’d intended.

  “It’s too late for me,” I said.

  “Lest you think the wrong thing,” Trombley said as he bent down to scan the inventory, “I do have a system of checks that would have prevented my mixing the wrong stuff in a batch for a patient. But…” and his voice trailed off. Estelle stood quietly in the corner, watching him.

  “What’s the haloperidol used for?” I asked.

  “It’s a heavy-duty tranquilizer,” he said, still looking. “Various psychotic disorders call for it by injection. Sometimes by caplet or tablet. Wouldn’t do much good in a patch
. Well, damn.” I heard the crack of his knee joints. “This is where the histamine diphosphate should be,” he said, “and I don’t understand why it’s not.” He tapped an empty spot on the shelf. He exhaled an irritated mutter, and I glanced at Estelle. Her face remained expressionless.

  “Okay,” Guy said, “Excuse me for a minute.” He slipped past me and headed back for his work bench. “Bill, the coffee’s ready.”

  “Perfect,” I said, and wandered after him, taking in the sights. Other than dark corners, mops, utility sink, and piles of boxes, there wasn’t much to see. I stepped up to his work counter. From here, he could look down on the tops of his customers’ heads. I wondered if the superior position was necessary for him.

  The pharmacist was bent over the keyboard, but without looking away from the computer’s screen lifted a hand to point at the coffee maker. “Cups are down below. Help yourself. Pour me one, too, if you will. No additives. I like to use the green cup with the sunflowers.”

  “Done.” As I stepped past him, I looked over his shoulder at the computer screen. He was scrolling down through what appeared to be an inventory list.

  “We don’t just run out of drugs,” he said, rapping keys and waiting with obvious impatience. “We just don’t. That’s supposedly one of the great things about these damn gadgets. When I invoice out a prescription, all of the information goes in and modifies the inventory list here, right then and there. Then the order list is modified for restocking.” He straightened up enough to take the cup I handed him. “Just like a hardware store,” he added. “Just as if we were card-carrying members of the twenty-first century.”

  He shifted his half glasses to bring the screen into focus, adopting that characteristic scrinched up, bared teeth expression that goes with trying to read fine print.

  “Huh,” he grunted. “The last time I compounded that’s the particular application that I use with histamine diphosphate and caffeine citrated…” He scrunched his face up some more, putting a finger on the computer screen to follow a line across. “The last time was May 10,” He stood back. “In the drug business, that’s ancient history.”Histolatum…