Poison Most Vial

by Benedict Carey

  “A femmebot?’

  “No, you know, like you see in stores—”

  “Avatar?”

  “No, I mean—”

  “Pod. Pod-person, alien pod, like in that invasion movie, with the exploding heads—”

  “Stop, no. Forget it.”

  “Femmebots, though, usually they’re not old ladies. I never seen that.”

  Ruby opened her mouth to answer and stopped. There, swinging from a bench across from where she and Rex sat, were the most severely annoying things in all of DeWitt Lab School.

  Laces. Shoelaces!

  Sharon Hughes, long black hair, gliding walk, and precious boots with paint splashed on them, all designerlike. Sharon and her laces. Two colors today, wound together and woven in a fancy macramé pattern that every kid would be trying to imitate by next week. Each day a new color, a new pattern: the most showy, prima-donna, trivial thing.

  Why do I even care? Ruby thought. Big deal, the girl is a footwear artist. The Shakespeare of shoelaces, the Van Gogh of high-tops. There are much bigger things to worry about. “Probably spent three hours on those things this morning,” Ruby heard herself say out loud.

  “What things?” Rex said, following her gaze. “Oh yeah, Sharon. Girl brought it all in today, how ’bout those laces? Skills. She got skills, a true fact.”

  Ruby rolled her eyes. What did he know? He liked practically everything, smiling with his tiny mouth and huge head. Rex the Jolly Jamaican Giant; T. Rex, everyone called him, short for Theodore Rexford and because of his size and short arms. He hated it, but it totally fit.

  The rest of the school day took forever, and with every endless minute in class Ruby became more convinced: She would have to knock on the Window Lady’s door tonight. At least make sure she got the note, if nothing else. The worst that could happen was that she’d be mean, or just say no. But she had to be less scary than the Medicine Man.

  “Moment of truth,” Ruby said to Rex; the two were making a last pass by 921 before dinnertime. “Let’s see if she’s still alive,” she said, raising her hand to knock.

  “Oh, Ruby?”

  She held up. “Oh yes, Theodore?”

  He was holding a slip of paper in his hand. A note! She grabbed for it. Rex held it out of reach—“’Scuse me, but who found it?”—and bolted toward the stairs.

  Ruby chased him all the way back up to the landing near thirteen, where Rex collapsed to the floor, laughing like it was all a fun prank.

  Ruby snagged the note and spread it open on the floor. There was her question—What is a monkshood cocktail?—and below it an answer, typed on an old typewriter.

  Monkshood is a tall plant with blue blossoms. Aconitum napellus to the botanist. Also called Friar’s cap or garden wolfsbane. Deadly poisonous, especially the leaves. “Cocktail” simply means that it was mixed with other things.

  I have been following this case, too. Get the coroner’s report. You may e-mail my friend at the coroner’s, Grady Funk (gradyf1138@tkko.com) and use my name. He will send it to you. Print it out and bring it to me.

  Sincerely yours,

  Clara Orfila Whitmore

  Ruby read through the note again, Rex now peering over her shoulder, panting like some huge hound. She turned the note over slowly, as if expecting it to self-destruct, and looked up at Rex. He took a step back.

  “We’re gonna have to go to the DeWitt Library,” Ruby said, “unless you’ve got a printer that works.”

  Rex shook his head. “Grady Funk. Now, how’s a man gonna live with a name like that? Grady’s bad enough, but you’d have to shower twice a day if—”

  “Rex, please. She wrote us back. And just look at this. She’s for real. You know what this means?”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “You’ve now had one good idea. How does that feel, Mr. Funk?”

  The DeWitt Science Library looked like some medieval fortress, and to Ruby the computer terminals, video booths, and digital scanners inside seemed tacked on, artificial, like a face-lift on an old dragon.

  She moved quickly to one of the open computers and clicked through to her e-mail. Mr. Funk, whoever he was (and however he might smell), had replied to her the night before, attaching the coroner’s report.

  “Whoa, he sent it to you right away? Lookit you, Mr. G-Funk,” said Rex.

  “I told you she was for real, the lady,” Ruby said. “Now, let’s see what this thing looks like.”

  “Excuse me, you really mean I told you.”

  “’Scuse me, you nearly wet yourself walking by her door. OK, here it is.”

  The screen blinked, filled, and the two of them took a half step back. There it was, in black and white.

  CASE 156724-1801

  NAME: Ramachandran, Vijay Sanjit

  Below were his address, his age, his medical conditions. Something about prescriptions he was taking for type 1 diabetes, for arthritis. Another page described tests run on the kidney, liver, brain; then more about the body being dissected and analyzed.

  “I’m sorry, but that right there is a horror movie,” Rex said. “The Toolbox Murderer, Part II. Seriously, I don’t know how people want to do all that to a body.”

  “Is The Toolbox Murderer the only movie you ever saw?” Ruby replied. “It’s the only one you ever talk about. Look, they’re forensic experts. It’s their job.”

  “Just be glad you never seen it, is my advice to you.”

  Rex ransacked his pockets and Ruby hers, finding just enough change to print out the eight pages of the report. Rex pulled the pages out of the machine, peering over his shoulder as if he were worried about being caught. He handed the report to Ruby—“Here, you hold these for a sec”—and turned to go.

  “Slow down, where you going?” Ruby said.

  “Bushes,” he said, using his word for the bathroom.

  “You’re kidding—now?”

  Rex found the men’s room on the main floor locked, with an OUT OF ORDER sign on the door. He found a librarian and asked if there were any alternatives. “Elevator three levels down, dear,” she replied, “then go left, and left again, then right, than angle left, finally right again. Can you remember that?”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Rex said, without really listening.

  Ruby followed him down. She did not want Rex getting lost beneath the library now that they had the coroner’s report and someone waiting to read it. And he would have, she saw that right away. The subbasement was a world removed from above. Dim hallways, exposed pipes along the walls, no signs or arrows pointing the way. From somewhere close came the drip-drip of leaking liquid.

  “Left and left again, and then right, and then . . . What did she say?” said Rex.

  “I’m not the one who talked to her,” Ruby answered.

  Some of the bulbs were out, and Ruby moved close behind Rex. The two left turns were quick and seemed obvious. The right turn was not. The hallway forked before one intersection and it was not clear whether they should take a hard right or the slanted one.

  “Oh no, three minutes and we’re lost,” Ruby said. “That’s got to be a record, even for you.”

  “Well, one of us is lost and in need. I’m about to get whatyoucallit, when scuba divers come up outta the water too fast—”

  “The bends.”

  “—my back teeth already floating.”

  Another turn, another dim hallway.

  “We’re gonna end up in the morgue, with bodies tumbling all over us,” Ruby said. According to DeWitt rumor, whispered by older kids to younger ones, the morgue was a cavern under the library where the forensics department stacked bodies.

  “Ruby, you take that back right now,” Rex ordered. “You’re gonna put a hex on us down here.”

  Finally, Ruby saw it: pretty much a hole in the wall with a male/female sign on the door. Hard to believe any librarian would send two kids down to this ruined-looking place. The woman must have messed up her directions. Or Rex had.

  Ruby waited as Rex bump
ed around inside like a chubby rooster trapped in a crate. “Looks like nobody cleans in here, Ruby. There’s toothpaste and things all over in here,” he called through the door.

  “Would you hurry up?” Ruby wanted to drop off the coroner’s report to the Window Lady, and fast. She wandered a little ways down the hallway, three steps and one, then noticed a heavy door marked EXIT.

  She stopped. To where? Where were they, exactly?

  “Ruby, where’d you go? Let’s get out of here,” came Rex’s voice from behind her.

  “How? You have any idea where we are?”

  “I been counting right and left turns, so yeah, pretty much.”

  “You mean like you figured out where the Window Lady lived? No way we can get back. I think we should just go out here. It says exit. Can you see anything through that hall window up there?”

  On his tiptoes, craning his neck, Rex peered up through a small barred window near the hallway ceiling. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s outside, it goes outside; looks like there’s a tree out there. I can’t tell.”

  “One way to find out.” Ruby pushed on the door—a fire exit, she saw—that opened easily to a flight of crumbling concrete stairs that went up and out of the building. She propped the door open, crept up the stairs for a better look—and stiffened.

  She called to Rex in a low voice.

  Underground hallways ran under the entire campus (or so Ruby had heard), connecting the library, the university buildings, the Lab School, all of it. And the forensics building, where her dad worked, was next to the science library.

  The crumbling steps led to a narrow alleyway between two buildings. To the left was what looked like a small courtyard; Ruby saw a couple of old flowerpots and a wooden bench. To the right, just a few steps down, was a thick window that Ruby knew very well from the inside: the main forensics lab.

  The crime scene.

  She moved to get a closer look. Rex wedged a stick between the door and the wall so they could get back in and followed.

  Through the thick window, the lab looked like it always did. Refrigerated cabinets banking the walls. Rows of work counters piled with the tools of forensics: racks of test tubes, circular centrifuges used to purify substances, pipettes; the hulking chromatographs, instruments that separated chemicals. There were lockers, too, where people hung their jackets and stored their lunches, and—straining now, looking at a steep angle through the glass—Ruby could make out the Toxin Archive, the large glass cabinet containing hundreds of poisons for research.

  She leaned forward to get a better look at it—and ducked.

  Occupied! Two men with thin latex gloves suddenly stood and came into view. Not regular police, either; older, much more serious-looking. Rex was down on the ground, staring up. What now?

  Ruby instinctively pulled her sketchbook out of her back pocket and opened to a blank page. She sketched the lab from memory.

  She counted three and one in her head several times, then peeked at Rex, who nodded. The two lifted their heads and had another look. The men had their backs to the window now. They appeared to be searching through a locker on the back wall that looked like it could be her dad’s.

  “Oh no,” Ruby whispered.

  The men’s movements seemed to slow down: They had found something, something small, and were handling it with their gloves; Ruby strained to see what. And then she knew. A glimpse of red between pale-green gloved fingers told her all she needed to know. Two of the small, red-tinted vials from the Toxin Archive.

  Ruby turned away. She assumed that the killer had gotten the poisons from the archive cabinet, and now these detectives, or whatever they were, had found two of them. In her dad’s locker? Now, why on earth would—

  “Ruby, they left—the men—in a hurry,” whispered Rex. She sensed rather than heard footsteps.

  “Move,” she said.

  Rex took three long steps and pulled on the door into the library. “Uh-oh,” he said. Hadn’t he propped it open? He looked down. The stick had fallen out.

  “You there!” came a man’s voice.

  This was crazy, Ruby thought. Busted before they ever got started, all because the rooster had to find the bushes.

  Rex pulled again, harder. The door swung open.

  Into the subbasement hallways, half running, staying in the shadows close to the walls. One left turn, another, then right and left again, and through a door well before they looked back. Nothing. Waiting. Listening. Only that steady dripping noise and their own breath.

  Casual now, like a couple of kids goofing off, Ruby and Rex wandered back in the direction of the elevator. Hours it seemed, strolling, moseying, wanting to run; and then there it was. Dumb luck, nothing else. Both took a step back when the doors opened, as if a policeman would lunge out. But it was empty, like most of the main library, yawning and sleepy as always.

  Neither felt safe until their feet were back on College Avenue and they had passed Trevor’s Tropical Corner Store, the two wig shops (House of Wig, and House of Wigs, plural), and the Orbit Room bar, and were stopped out front of Sister Paulette’s Bakery, where most everyone in the Terraces seemed to spend some part of their day.

  It was a miracle Rex did not stick his head into every one of those places, even the wig shops. He actually looked like—what was it?—like he was in a hurry. “This thing will take care of it,” he said.

  “What thing?”

  “The report. The lady’s gonna solve the crime so we can get our normal livelihoods back.”

  “Normal livelihoods? You mean, making fun of Simon and trying on orange wigs at the wig shops?”

  “They’re burnt orange. And you can hate the man, but why you want to go and hate a man’s livelihood?”

  “’Cuz that’s who I am,” said Ruby, now staring up at the window of 921, a mirror of gray light. “I just wonder who she is.”

  Looking through the other side of that window, a step back from her usual spot to avoid being seen, Mrs. Whitmore wished for a moment that she hadn’t responded to the children’s note. It was impulsive, with no thought of the possible consequences: very unlike her.

  Too late now; the children were almost back.

  “Why must they all walk in the middle of the street?” she said aloud, turning from the window.

  She removed an advertisement from her bulletin board—Emmet Sloane and Bernie Diaz, Attorneys at Law—and made a phone call. A recorded voice answered, followed by a tone.

  “Is this recording? Oh dear, I guess so. Bernie? Why, hello. It’s me, Clara. Clara Whitmore. I do hope you’ll forgive my dropping in on you like this after so many years. I so hope you are well. But I’m calling to send you a client. It’s someone who—”

  Beep. The machine cut her off.

  She redialed. “I am sending you a client, Bernie; I hope you don’t mind. You will know who it is the minute he walks in the door, and I can pay for your time, if needed. I hope we can catch up very soon.”

  She hung up. Not much time. She folded the ad in half, wrote For Ruby on it, and pushed it under the door. It disappeared instantly, replaced by a sheaf of papers coming the other direction—the coroner’s report.

  She swept the report off the floor and abruptly stood. She faced the door, light-headed. What was it? Nothing; nerves, maybe. They were kids, for heaven’s sakes. She had seen them a hundred times. They seemed perfectly nice, if a little scruffy. Surely she would think of something to say as soon as they knocked.

  But the knock never came.

  The office of Sloane and Diaz was in an old building downtown, a half-hour ride on the bus, during which Ruby studied her father while pretending to daydream. He looked pale, drained of all his humor. Dazed.

  He didn’t even argue when she’d shown him the ad; only asked where it came from, who the Window Lady was. Then he nodded and made the call—“The woman said to come in now; the office is open”—and off they went.

  The place sure didn’t look open. A grimy turnstile pu
shed into an empty lobby steeped in wasted brown light. No doorman, no information person, nothing but a stack of boxes in a corner. An old directory on the wall read LAW OFFICES #601.

  “Fat guy with a hat and a cigar,” Mr. Rose said on the way up in the elevator. “Chewed cigar, food stains on his tie.”

  “No—skinny, crooked glasses, stooped over,” said Ruby. “Mole on his forehead, hair coming out.”

  “You mean, pants pulled way up, that kind of guy? Let’s hope not.”

  Bernie Diaz was not a he but a she, a squat, dark woman with brown lipstick set off by a black outline. She was seated behind a large metal desk heaped with paper. Ruby couldn’t believe this woman was a lawyer at all. Didn’t lawyers look like—well, she didn’t know. Not like this.

  “Mr. Rose, I guess?” the woman said, coming from behind the desk. “I am Bernie Diaz.”

  The two shook hands, and Ms. Diaz turned to Ruby. “And this young lady is . . . ”

  “My daughter, Ruby,” Mr. Rose said. “She’ll make sure I don’t forget anything important.”

  Ms. Diaz looked ready to say something but only nodded, resting her flat eyes on Ruby for a moment. Ruby held out her hand stiffly. How could this goat of a woman with moles on her forehead possibly help her dad?

  “All right, have a seat, Mr. Rose,” the woman said. “Young lady, I’ll ask you to take a chair in the room next door and not to interrupt us. This is a confidential conversation. Do you understand that?”

  Ruby gulped. She found a hard wooden chair in the small room adjoining Ms. Diaz’s office, opened her sketchbook, and let her thoughts wander for a second. An early-morning scene filled her head: wooden fence, hardened by age, still damp. A footpath there, just behind a stile. A figure down the path, someone friendly: her pal Lillian, maybe?

  Ruby studied the scene, shaded each detail. She drew until her ears froze her hand. She looked up.

  “Describe, sir, your own relationship with the victim,” the woman was saying to Ruby’s dad in a soft voice, her face impassive.