Poison Most Vial

by Benedict Carey

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carey, Benedict.

  Poison most vial: a mystery / by Benedict Carey.

  p. cm.

  Summary: “When a famous forensic scientist turns up dead and Ruby’s father becomes the prime suspect, Ruby must marshal everyone she can to help solve the mystery and prove her father didn’t poison his boss”

  —Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-0031-6 (hardback)

  [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Murder—Fiction.

  3. Neighbors—Fiction. 4. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C2122Poi 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011038222

  Text copyright © 2012 Benedict Carey

  Book design by Maria T. Middleton

  Published in 2012 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of

  Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.

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  Contents

  Statement to the Court

  1. The Poison Flower

  2. The Window Lady

  3. Friar’s Cap

  4. The Vials in the Locker

  5. Suspects

  6. Regular Honors

  7. Mrs. Whitmore

  8. Davenport Towers

  9. Password Hunting

  10. Badge Numbers

  11. Grilling Dad

  12. Whitmore Lab

  13. Simon

  14. The Past

  15. The Present

  16. Lab Memories

  17. The Glass Vial

  18. The Maze Map

  19. The Underneath

  20. The Evidence

  21. The Morgue

  22. The Courtyard

  23. Sister Paulette’s

  24. A Deadly Prescription

  25. Setting the Trap

  Statement to the Court

  STATEMENT TO THE COURT

  CASE 156724-1801: V. S. Ramachandran Murder

  Let the record reflect that this statement was taken over four hours on 11/4 and 11/5 at the home of Mrs. Clara Whitmore, the Garden Terrace Apartments, 1575 College Ave.

  Video deposition: Det. R. A. Cullen, interviewer

  INT: All right, ma’am. The tape is running. You may proceed. Please state your name first, for the record.

  SUBJ: Clara Orfila Whitmore.

  INT: Your age and occupation, please.

  SUBJ: (long delay) I am seventy years old, young man. Retired. I was a toxicologist. A forensic scientist, and I . . . I am retired.

  INT: You understand that you are under no suspicion in this case?

  SUBJ: Oh heavens, of course not.

  INT: You have waived your right to an attorney, is that correct?

  SUBJ: I have no need of an attorney, detective.

  INT: OK. Now, please explain how it is that you knew the two children involved in this case. Start by stating how you met the girl. The court is very interested in the girl. Where were you when you met her?

  SUBJ: (barely audible) I was dead when I met Ruby Rose.

  INT: I’m sorry?

  SUBJ: Oh, I don’t mean dead dead, detective. I mean numb. Numb, like you feel when a good friend turns away and you don’t know why. Cut off. Left behind, just . . . I don’t know. Playing out my days. That’s where I was when I met Ruby.

  INT: No, I meant—

  SUBJ: I laugh at it now, I do. At all the little girl did. How she and her friend Rex solved a murder case—the famous Ramachandran case, no less! But you cannot begin to understand how that happened, detective, without knowing why. You see, this girl had no choice. None. Her father was headed for jail, and he was all she had. She was cornered. Trapped.

  I have come to believe, over my many years, that the only time we face a problem directly and ruthlessly is when all other doors are closed. When there is no other way out. When our doubts about ourselves shrink in the shadow of some larger threat.

  Squirming her shoulders like a penguin, head down under a spray of yellow hair, Ruby Rose pushed through the tangle of legs, arms, and backpacks at the door and tripped down the steps of DeWitt Lab School, annoyed about something but not sure what it was.

  Which only made things worse.

  “School’s out, Ruby. Why you always want to be staring at the ground like that?”

  No need to look up. Rex. She could almost hear the lunatic smile on his huge face; he probably grinned in his sleep.

  “What do you mean always?” Ruby asked, studying her purple boots and keeping them in rhythm for luck: three regular steps and one long stride, three plus one, three plus one, three and one . . .

  “I mean, you’re so busy counting your steps that you’re about to miss Simon and his briefcase. Pick up your head and check this.”

  The briefcase—that was it: the annoying thing.

  Simon Buscombe, spidery with damp hair and a fake limp, strode along in front of them, carrying a briefcase that he’d recently started bringing to school instead of a backpack. A briefcase, for eighth grade! Simon being Simon, he’d been all pompous and secretive, making sure no one peeked inside the briefcase when he opened it in class and carefully removed a piece of paper.

  “Look. He got that thing handcuffed to his wrist!” Rex said. “Like he’s carrying nuclear secrets in there, CIA documents and whatnot. Don’t that beat all? And you know all’s he got in there is a bunch of them grimy headbands he wears.”

  “Hey, you do not want terrorists getting their hands on those,” Ruby said.

  “Aww, no, you do not, now. Drop one of those into the water supply, paralyze the whole city. Toxic onion rings. Weapons of mass putrification.”

  Ruby started to smile when a hissing sound came from behind and someone said, “Lookit there, the poison girl. Who’re you and your dad going to take out next?”

  Rex turned, his surprise hardening into a cold stare. He searched the scattering crowd: some high schoolers, others younger, too many kids chuckling and smirking to tell who it was. Another voice called out, “The Poison Rose!”

  Ruby clenched her fists. What a place, she thought. DeWitt Lab School, all these young geniuses, the sons and daughters of professors: “the little gods,” Rex called them. Didn’t even know you existed until they learned that your dad worked in the lab where a crime happened.

  What a crime, though! Dr. Ramachandran, the great genius of DeWitt Polytechnic University (which contained the Lab School), poisoned and dead on campus. Murdered. Right there in his office in the forensics laboratory where Ruby had been a hundred times, doing homework. The little gods should be begging her for details about the lab if they were half as smart as they thought they were.

  “Rex, c’mon, forget it,” she said, turning her friend around. “Let’s pull out of here.”

  Ruby started counting steps again. Oh, to describe all this to a real
friend—to Lillian from back in Spring Valley, Arkansas, where Ruby used to live. Rex and Spider Simon with his briefcase and the little gods: Lillian would scream out loud.

  Three plus one, three and one . . . The street from school—she’d describe that, too. College Avenue got stickier and dirtier as it approached their neighborhood, College Gardens, aka “the Gardens,” with its Caribbean stores, nail shops, wig shops, moldy bars with moldy people in them all the time. And here, smack in the middle, Garden Terrace Apartments, “the Terraces,” the rotting brick-pile tower where she lived.

  “What’s she always looking at?” said Ruby.

  Rex glanced up to the ninth floor where a woman’s head was barely visible behind the glare of a window.

  “The Window Lady?” Rex shrugged and turned to dash up the steps. “Maybe she got no TV—more later, Ruby.”

  The first thing Ruby heard when she pushed through the door of her apartment was a rhythmic sound. Pacing. Her father, in front of the table in their small living room. Pacing, serious, holding a letter, his face squeezed up.

  “Dad,” she said. “What?”

  “Nothing, Ru,” Mr. Rose said, folding and unfolding the letter, looking for a moment like a little boy, ten-year-old James Rose seeing his first bad report card.

  “Ruby, I need to tell you something,” he said.

  She waited. She could see the DeWitt crest on the letter. That couldn’t be good.

  “You know about Dr. Ramachandran, of course,” Mr. Rose began. He was her dad again. “And you know I was working that night, like normal. Well, Ruby, I’m—” His shoulders fell, and he turned away. “I have to go in for more questioning by the police.”

  Ruby had to force her words out. “Can’t you, you know, find out what really happened?”

  “How, Ru? I have to get a lawyer. I don’t even know how to do that.”

  “Well, can’t you investigate? Ask people at the lab, like they do on TV? You work there.”

  “Not anymore, Ruby. Not anymore. My security card was taken away. I can’t even get back into the lab. No one who worked there can. I need to talk to someone, I just—I don’t know. There’s a lawyer comes into Biddy’s a lot.”

  Ruby did not want her father going down to Biddy Runyan’s, not now. Biddy’s was one of the bars on College Avenue where the older neighborhood people went. Not the best place on earth to look for a lawyer. Her father often went there when he was upset and was worse when he returned.

  Ruby picked up the DeWitt Echo and reread the newspaper’s story on the Ramachandran murder. Found in his office at a minute before 8 o’clock last Friday. The only people there, other than her dad, were the school’s dean, a publicity person, and four graduate students—all of whom Ruby knew.

  The university police suspected that the professor had died “from the effects of a monkshood cocktail,” the article said. Some help that was. Ruby sneaked another look at her dad, who now seemed to be talking mostly to himself.

  “I don’t believe it,” Mr. Rose was saying. “These people at the university, they really think . . . ”

  She left him alone. Put a hand on his shoulder, then slipped out into the corridor to get some air, to move, to do something. In her old house in the country, Ruby could have wandered the fields out back, maybe found some empty dirt path, sat there with her sketch pad, and drawn until dark. Or walked the mile over to Lillian’s.

  Not here; there were only hallways and the constant need to watch for older kids, the dropouts and users, the kids who might come after you. In moments Ruby was up four floors, knocking on apartment 1113. A radio was on, voices and cooking smells radiated through the door.

  “Ruby, what you doing?” said Rex, holding the door half-open.

  “Rex, you coming out?” If she didn’t get him out in one second, his mom or dad would come to the door and she’d be invited into the chaos of that apartment, with Rex’s twenty brothers and sisters and Aunt Esther and Uncle Neville talking and eating and talking; it would be winter before she made her way out. “C’mon, quick.”

  Rex shouted something over his shoulder and escaped into the hall. “OK, OK, why you all dialed up?”

  “Need to talk to you for a second. Not here.”

  He led her down the hall, around one bend and another, up some stairs to a landing between floors thirteen and fourteen that had a view east over the city and was usually off-limits; a gang of older kids played cards and smoked on this landing most days. “Don’t you worry, they won’t be back up here till later,” Rex said. “What’s up, now?”

  “Trouble, that’s what,” Ruby answered. “My dad, I mean. I think they think it’s him. The university police—that he’s guilty. I never seen him so scared.”

  “But he didn’t do it—the police will find out, that’s their job. He just needs to tell the truth.”

  “I don’t know, though,” said Ruby. “He already talked to them once. I mean, what if you tell the truth and nobody believes you? My dad’s not exactly . . . He’s a janitor. They don’t really care what he says.”

  Rex put a hand on her arm. “Aww, now, don’t you look like that. It’s gonna be all right. Hey, wait. You know what? You should figure out what happened. Who really killed Dr. Rama. Do it your own self. You know everybody who works there, right?”

  Ruby was taking deep breaths. “I—yes, I do, but—Investigate how? I’m a kid; how do I even start?”

  “You’re asking me? I never had a good idea in my life. Seriously, not a one. But you could maybe—well, no, maybe not.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, really, what?”

  “It wasn’t a good idea.”

  “I don’t care, it’s something—tell me already.”

  “You could talk to the Window Lady, that’s all I was thinking. I heard she used to work as some crime investigator type of thing. A long time ago.”

  “What—how come you never told me?”

  “I just did. Besides, I’m not sure it’s even true. And I can’t—I probably shouldn’t go with you.”

  “What? We’ll just talk to her, that’s it.”

  Rex looked away. “Nah, it’s OK. You should do it, though.”

  “Huh?” Ruby studied him for a moment. “You scared? You are. I can tell. She’s, like, ninety. You worried she’s gonna ram you with her wheelchair or what?”

  “Look, Ruby, I never should’ve said anything. It’s nothing. I just heard she got a fake eye, that’s all. Like a marble up in there. I can’t be around that.”

  “What—where’d you hear that?”

  “Jimmy said it.”

  Jimmy, the youngest of the three Woods brothers. The Minister of Information, he called himself. Jimmy’s older (and much scarier) brothers were the Minister of Defense and the Prime Minister. Kids believed everything Jimmy Woods said, for some reason.

  “Rex, c’mon. Jimmy?”

  “I mean, Ruby, what if she sneezes or something? I don’t want to be there when that cue ball is rolling around on the floor . . . ”

  “Rex! Stop—this is serious.”

  Ruby paced in a circle, counting three and one, three plus one. Unbelievable. A fake eyeball. It’s something Rex himself would have made up. She pulled her sketch pad out of her back pocket and wrote something down.

  “OK, ninja warrior, I have a plan,” she said. “We’ll ask the Window Lady for help, and you don’t have to meet her. You won’t even have to see her if you don’t want to.”

  “Like how?”

  A minute later, kneeling beside Rex outside the door of apartment 925, Ruby wondered if she’d ever had a worse plan. She pushed a note under the door, knocked twice softly, and fled behind Rex down the hall to the stairwell.

  Peeking back around the corner, Ruby saw a light under the door blink once, twice; the note disappeared. “I feel like I’m in kindergarten,” she whispered.

  “Seriously,” Rex said. “I’m gonna jet up these stairs if she comes out.”


  But she didn’t. Strange, Ruby thought. You spend all day watching people from on high and don’t even look when someone knocks on your door. Maybe the Window Lady was scared of something, too.

  “Let’s walk past, all casual,” Ruby said, moving out into the hallway.

  She had a strong urge to knock again, harder. This lady was her only lead, her only hope right now, and—maybe it was just impatience for a stroke of luck on a bad day—she stopped and pounded on the door: one, two, three.

  Ruby turned to Rex—“There, that should wake her up”—as the door swept open and a man with no shirt and a long white beard towered over them.

  “Mr. Nelson, Mr. Nelson, we don’t mean nothing, sir!” Rex said. “We playing, is all.”

  Ruby couldn’t move or speak. The Medicine Man, people called him, the tallest, darkest, most savage-looking human she’d ever seen.

  “You play outside, not in the corridor. There’s people living in here, boy,” the man said. He gave them a wild, frowning stare, slammed the door, and turned the lock.

  “OK, Mr. Terraces Expert, that’s good work,” Ruby said when her breath returned. “So she lives in 925, huh?”

  “Yeah, I probably mighta got that wrong.”

  “Probably mighta? You almost got us eaten. Man probably drinks chicken blood in there.”

  “You sicker than I am, Ruby. I forgot about this here ninth floor; the apartment numbers don’t line up with the other floors.”

  “Good to know. Is there a door we can try where a native healer doesn’t pop out like a jack-in-the-box?”

  “I’m counting the windows in my head right now,” Rex said. “Don’t say anything to mess me up . . . It’s 921. Right down there.”

  “Oh no,” said Ruby. “You mean the one with the DO NOT DISTURB sign on it?”

  Disturbed Already, Ruby wanted to write beneath that sign.

  The Window Lady never responded to the note Ruby slipped under her door. The two of them had moseyed by the door dozens of times over the weekend, and it didn’t ever seem like anyone was home.

  “No sound, no movement, not even any light that I could see,” said Ruby as she and Rex ate in the school cafeteria on the following Wednesday. “Maybe she’s one of those fake people, you know? What’re they called—”