Poison Most Vial

by Benedict Carey

  “Well, ah, we’ve been coming in here, so . . . ” said Victor. “And I’ve been keeping my phone off.” He glanced back at the others. “We’re really not supposed to be in touch with anyone about this.”

  Keeping his phone off? Not Victor. He was asking her to leave, that’s what was happening. Unbelievable. Ganging up like this. What had she expected? One of these four was likely guilty, maybe all four.

  Turning to go, Ruby heard one of them whisper, “Maybe ask about the red vials?”

  “Ruby.” Victor again.

  “What?”

  “Um, could you—well. Could you ask your dad about the red vials? You know, the ones from the Toxin Archive?”

  Ruby got home from school just as her father was about to go out. She had no idea what he was doing with his days; the papers now called him a “person of interest” in the case, which seemed to mean that Mr. Rose was the prime suspect but hadn’t been arrested. Yet.

  “Dad.”

  “Ruby.”

  “One question for you.”

  “Uh, OK. I was heading out to Biddy’s. Can it wait?”

  “Biddy’s? Really? Now?”

  “Uh, yes, really. I need a break, Ruby. To laugh a little. I’m not a flight risk—I’m too slow on my feet, especially when trying not to spill a beer. And the Biddy’s gang don’t care whether I’m a suspect or not.”

  “Why, because they’ve all been in jail, too?”

  His eyes widened, and then he laughed like his old self. “Exactly, that’s why they look up to me. Now, what’s your question?”

  “Tell me about the red vials.”

  “That’s a question, is it? You sound like a lawyer. Back in Spring Valley, you used to ask me why crickets made that sound, whether the chickens slept lying down or sitting up. Which vials exactly?”

  “You know, those ones they kept in that archive cabinet, the little red ones—”

  “Yeah yeah, of course, that’s where the murderer got the poison, it looks like; and the police are very interested in those.”

  “Right, but I’m asking about the ones they found in your locker. Two of ’em.”

  Mr. Rose sat down at the small table where they ate and looked at his daughter. “Ruby, how do you know about that?”

  She gulped. “OK . . . oh yeah . . . well . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  Ruby explained about the coroner’s report and the library, how she and Rex stumbled on the lab scene, making it sound even more accidental than it was. “You know Rex. We got lost.”

  Her father put a hand to his forehead, stared at the table, and shook his head. Finally, he smiled. “OK, detective. Let us assume you are telling the truth about that. Yes, someone dropped a couple of those red vials from the Poison Archive into my locker. The police are all over me about it.”

  “When? That night?”

  “Must have happened between about 6:02, when I came in, futzed around, put stuff away, made the tea, and 7:59, when we found the body. Or maybe just after that, before the police came.”

  “Well, that narrows it down.”

  Mr. Rose stared at the ceiling. “Wait, take that back. I got some money out of the locker at around 7:15 to buy a pop and didn’t see anything. I would have seen something in there, I’m sure.”

  “So?” Ruby said.

  “So whoever it was, they did what they did to Rama sometime after 6:15, when I brought in the fresh tea. And they stashed the vials in my locker after 7:15. My best guess is they planted them right then, at 7:15, when I got the pop, because I wasn’t gone out of the lab other than that.”

  Ruby began to study her father, who was now by the window, as if she were going to draw him. “Well,” she said, “that main door was the only way into Rama’s office, right? You must have seen who went in.”

  Mr. Rose shook his head. “No, no, no. No. Rama had French doors installed last year that opened out back into a small courtyard. He has a little veranda out there—or had—you never saw that? That’s where the murderer had to come from.”

  Father and daughter looked across the room at each other for a long moment. “We’re not in Spring Valley anymore, are we, Ru?”

  Ruby felt a stabbing ache about Lillian, who was avoiding her e-mails and texts. Mr. Rose gave her a hug, told her to think about her homework for now, and took himself out to Biddy’s. “I’ll say hello to the ex-cons for you, Ru.”

  The red vials. She knew about them only by accident. Her dad knew from the police. But how did the grad students know? How could they, unless one had a connection to the police—or to the crime?

  It was time to visit a real crime investigator.

  “Why, hello,” said Mrs. Whitmore, opening her door.

  The young faces looked so different up close, she thought, and it seemed that the boy was more then merely anxious. He was searching her face so intently that she averted her eyes.

  “Welcome,” she said, stepping aside. “Do come in.”

  The untied sneakers, the shuffling way they walked, the shifting eyes; like no one had taught these children the proper way to carry themselves.

  “I made some cakes,” Mrs. Whitmore said abruptly. “Pudding cakes. Would you like some?”

  She disappeared into the kitchen and overheard the boy whisper, “It’s the left one, see how it bulges a little?”

  “No more than your big bug-eyes are right now,” the girl replied. “Jimmy’s pulling your chain. He’s got no idea.”

  Jimmy?

  “Ruby,” the boy said, “why do you think they call him the Minister of Information if— Oh, hello.”

  Mrs. Whitmore marched back in with a tray from the kitchen and nearly dropped it on the coffee table in front of the couch. A piece of cake tumbled to the floor and the boy—Tex, was it?—made to lunge for it and then recoiled, glancing oddly at her face and turning away, moving back toward the window.

  “This is real nice,” he said in an alto voice that surprised her. “You can see all the way past DeWitt through here.”

  “Yes, it’s quite a view,” Mrs. Whitmore said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a good view.”

  Silence held them in place until the girl—Ruby, with that pile of golden hair—said, “This is so much bigger than our little window. It’s like there’s a whole village down there.”

  Mrs. Whitmore smiled and felt the air return to the room. “So there is, dear, so there is. I see people come and go. The children, walking to school. The mothers, in Sister Paulette’s Bakery. The men who hang around Barber Neville’s. The shops, the people going into the bars at night. Sometimes I see them stumbling home in the morning, the poor souls. I see all of it.”

  “Ruby Rose,” said the girl, all business now, holding out her hand. “Apartment 723. Two floors below you.”

  “I’m pleased to know you, Ruby. I am Clara Whitmore. And you, young man?”

  “Yes, hello, ma’am,” said Rex, still standing at a distance. “I’m Theodore. Theodore Rexford, 1113. You could call me Rex, though. Everybody does.”

  “My pleasure, Rex,” the woman said. “Now do sit down, please, both of you.”

  By the time Mrs. Whitmore brought tea out from the kitchen and retrieved her copy of the coroner’s report, the two children were parked on the couch—Ruby on the edge like an eager student, Rex pushed way back—and the cakes were almost gone.

  “Are you . . . Were you . . . You’re a detective, or crime investigator, right?” Ruby said, between bites of cake that seemed far larger than her mouth could hold.

  “I was a forensic toxicologist, dear,” Mrs. Whitmore replied, settling in a chair opposite the couch. “I worked with crime scene investigation teams, the same as you see on TV. I’m the person in the lab who determined what people had in their systems. Usually it was alcohol or drugs; those are the most common companions of crime, you know. But sometimes we got a real poison case, like this one.”

  “So, uh, you can tell who did it, who killed Dr. Rama?” Rex
said.

  “Oh, I wish I could, dear. I wish I could. But no. Toxicology tells you what’s in a person’s blood, nothing more. On its own it can’t even tell you how much of the poison the person ingested.”

  Ruby’s chin dropped. “That’s all? I mean, we already know what Rama took, right?”

  “Yeah, they put all that in the newspaper,” Rex said. “Long as the paper got that stuff right.”

  “Yes, Rex,” said Mrs. Whitmore, pulling papers out of a manila folder and placing one on the coffee table. “It appears from the coroner’s report that the campus newspaper has reported correctly.”

  She pushed the coroner’s report toward them with a portion of the text circled.

  Toxicology studies show metabolites for several substances:

  a) monkshood (aconite)

  b) chokecherry (amygdalin)

  c) deadly nightshade (atropine)

  Cause of death appears to be accumulation of toxins (see full toxicology study).

  Rex shifted heavily on the couch. “The studies show metabo-what?”

  “Metabolites,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “Metabolites are what’s left after metabolism, which is the process in which the body breaks down what it consumes into chemical pieces. Food. Alcohol. Aspirin. That pudding cake you just ate. Metabolites are the chemical pieces. Breakdown products, some people call them. And we can detect them in the blood hours, days, even weeks later for some toxins.”

  “Then what are those words in parentheses?”

  “The chemical names of the active toxins. Monkshood, chokecherry, and deadly nightshade are the plants. DeWitt, as you may know, is renowned for its specialty in plant toxins, so the lab would have had all these toxins on hand.”

  Ruby shook her head. “But so what? That’s not telling us anything new, right? Besides, they found only two red vials.”

  “Who, dear? What vials?”

  “You don’t know about— Oops.” Ruby glanced at Rex, who was covered in crumbs, still averting his eyes from the conversation.

  “I’m listening,” Mrs. Whitmore said.

  After Ruby explained what she and Rex saw at the crime scene, Mrs. Whitmore sat back, took off her reading glasses, and looked them over. “Well, now,” she said. “That’s very good work. Very good. I daresay, that changes everything.”

  “How?” asked Ruby.

  “Listen carefully,” Mrs. Whitmore answered. “Toxicology tells you what toxins are in the blood. But if we know how much poison the person took, we can determine when it was taken—when the poisoning took place. Think about that for a second.”

  Mrs. Whitmore could all but hear the wheels turning in the girl’s mind. No one knew for sure exactly when Rama ingested the toxins. It might have happened before Mr. Rose ever got to work, absolving him of the crime.

  “Uh-oh, I know what that means for us,” Rex said. “Don’t tell me please we got to go down in there and find out how much poison was in those red vials. Unless you or your dad knows, Ruby.”

  “No, no way, he won’t know,” she said. “But there’s a big book where it’s all written down, right there on top of the Toxin Archive.”

  “You’ll never get in there, not now,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “And even if you do, you would be tampering with evidence, a crime to which I would then be an accomplice. No, I don’t think so.” Give explanations, not assignments, she told herself.

  “No?” The girl’s voice changed. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it’s one thing to think through a case based on the evidence that’s legally available. It’s altogether another to insert oneself into an ongoing investigation. That’s a gray area, and I could get us all into trouble.”

  “But—but—we already are in trouble,” Ruby said. “I sure am, anyway. They took my dad away yesterday. Arrested him.”

  “What?” Rex stood, staring. “When? You didn’t tell me that. He’s in jail?”

  “Yesterday, I just said. After school. I had to go down to the police station. That lawyer, Ms. Diaz, she got him out. She said they didn’t have enough evidence to hold him. Yet, anyway.”

  “Bernie? Why, I’ve heard nothing from her.” Mrs. Whitmore stood up to think. She paced to the window and back. The poison vials found in Mr. Rose’s locker: Yes, those were incriminating enough to make an arrest. It was a wonder Bernie got the man released so quickly; did she have to bail him out? “But, child, if he was picked up, where would you have . . . ?” she started, but stopped herself.

  Mrs. Whitmore sat back down and folded her hands. “Never mind all that. Listen for a moment. Here’s what I think: The records for the Toxin Archive must be stored electronically; everything is these days. The numbers will be on a computer file somewhere. In the lab’s database, accessible to anyone doing scientific work there.”

  “Not my dad, you mean,” said Ruby.

  “No,” Mrs. Whitmore replied. “But the students, yes. You don’t happen to know any of their passwords, do you?”

  The woman let that sink in. Questions, not assignments; that was the only way. Let the children move the investigation, see how determined they really were. She stood to get more tea, got a chill, and sneezed suddenly.

  Pandemonium. The coffee table flipped over, and the boy dove to the floor, scrambling to the far end of the room near the window.

  Mrs. Whitmore gasped. “What on earth—”

  “Rex!” Ruby cried. “Jimmy doesn’t know anything. He’s pulling your chain! Stop it.”

  The three of them glanced around the room at one another, then at their feet. Mrs. Whitmore put a hand to her head. Invite two strangers into your apartment and this is what you get. What was happening?

  “I’ll explain later,” Ruby whispered, and glared at her friend, who was now staring intently down into the street. The boy clearly needed help, maybe medication, Mrs. Whitmore thought.

  “Whoa—Ruby, come over here,” Rex said. “That Russian girl, the grad student—is that her? What’s she doing in the Gardens?”

  Ruby squinted out the window. Was it? It was. Lydia Tretiak, walking stiffly along College Avenue, very much out of place among the regulars, who moved around like ducks on a pond.

  “What, if you please, is going on?” Mrs. Whitmore said.

  “It’s a suspect,” Ruby said. “Walking right by here, way, way out of place.”

  “Well, then”—the older woman’s voice changed, Ruby noticed—“what are you doing up here? Are you investigating this crime or not?”

  Down they went, down the abandoned freight elevator at the back of the Terraces, down to the ground in about twenty seconds. Across the courtyard, through the lobby, over the front stairs so quickly that one of the Woods brothers half stood in surprise, fumbling his cell phone. “Dammit, Raoul, watch yourself!” (The Woods brothers called everyone Raoul, for some reason.)

  Lydia was still visible, barely. Ruby saw her lean figure just turn off the street, heading north, a half block past the wig shops. The only thing over that way was the James Davenport Towers, which most residents approached from the other side.

  “She’s taking the back way to the Davenport, looks like,” Ruby said, jogging with Rex just behind her.

  Though plainly visible from the Terraces, the Davenport was a foreign land. No one wandered over there, Ruby knew. No reason to, and plenty of reason to stay clear. The young men who sat out on the steps of the Davenport were wiry and hard, tattoo-covered chain-smokers every one, who whispered to one another in some unknown dialect.

  “OK, we just crossed Elinor,” Rex said.

  “Who?” Ruby said.

  “Elinor Street. The border. We’re in barbarian country now, not healthy for us civilized tribes.”

  Ruby knew what he meant: She might wander in Davenport country unnoticed for a while, but Rex, dark as he was, could not. She begged him to go back.

  “No, uh-uh, no way you’re coming in here alone,” he said.

  The pair kept their distance, staying about a block behin
d Lydia, who marched, head down, without looking around. All concentration and forward motion, she slipped in the back of Davenport Towers, into the courtyard area.

  “OK, you stay here, out of sight. We’ll meet right by this tree,” Ruby said, turning to cross the street.

  “Don’t you worry about me,” said Rex. “And you better don’t spend too much time in there, or I’m coming in.”

  At the back entrance, the guardians of Davenport were nowhere to be seen. Still, Ruby sensed that someone was watching, and she moved quickly through the narrow pathway between the towers and into the courtyard. Same as the Terraces: paved, picnic tables, graffiti; a few high school–aged kids were draped over one of the tables, smoking.

  Ruby slid by, doing the Davenport walk: hands in pockets and head down. She ducked through the nearest tower door before stopping for air, three normal breaths and one deep one.

  The place appeared identical to the Terraces on the inside, too, only dirtier. Empty soda cans huddled in one doorway; coffee cups full of cigarette ashes lined the hall between candy wrappers and pizza crusts. Mossy yellow light bled through the windows, and for a moment Ruby thought about the early evening summer light in Spring Valley; how she and Lillian, after a day playing in the fields, would head toward home at dusk, racing the darkness.

  From the fields of Arkansas to the wilds of Davenport. How on Earth was she going to find Lydia in here?

  A low mumble of voices and daytime TV filled the hallway. One voice seemed to rise above the rest, and Ruby moved toward it. Loud, angry. An argument down the hall. Her ears strained to hear. The angry voice seemed somehow familiar. She moved toward it, and the voice became louder, then fainter, then louder. Ruby stood in front of each door that she encountered, listening. The voice always seemed to be coming from the next apartment.

  Upstairs maybe? She knew that at the Terraces, sound from one apartment sometimes traveled back and forth in the hallways below. She had to risk it. She slipped into the stairwell at the end of the hall and, as Rex would have, put a hand on the steel frame of the stairs to feel for activity on the landing. All clear.