Poison Most Vial

by Benedict Carey

  “Yep,” he said. “Creatures of habit, all of ’em.”

  “Rama, too?”

  “Him most of all. New pot of tea a quarter after every hour. Same kind, same pot, same cup. He drank it all every time.”

  “That’s a lot of tea.”

  “He lived on it.”

  “I never saw him come into or go through the main lab—did he ever?”

  “On a normal night, maybe once or twice. He would shove open the door and yell out at us when he wanted to say something. Mostly he holed up in that office, though, with the door closed.”

  Ruby pushed up from the table, went back to the window. She smiled at the DeWitt campus now, shaking her head slowly.

  “I have it,” she said, still gazing out the window. “I got it. Oh, it’s so stupid, it was right there the whole time. Of course.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  For most of the previous hours, Ruby had been tracking the lab workers in her head, alert for some out-of-the-ordinary act that had slipped under the radar. But what if the crucial act in this case was one so ordinary that people never thought about it at all—except and only when they themselves did it.

  “The bushes,” she said.

  “Come again?”

  “That’s what Rex calls it. The bathroom. Dad, he had to go. He had to. All that tea. He had to go to the bathroom. And if he didn’t come through the lab, then . . . ” She stopped. Snorted. “Oh, I don’t believe it.”

  “What? What are you talking about? Explain yourself, willya?”

  She did. The brilliant Dr. V. S. Ramachandran may have been brilliant, but he still had to use the men’s room. He didn’t cut through the lab and use the ones that everyone else did. He surely didn’t water the plants in the courtyard. He must have been using the very bathroom below the library that she and Rex had visited back in August. It was a short walk from his veranda, and the door had opened from the outside. A five-minute visit to the bathroom would have given Roman—or anyone else—plenty of opportunity to spike the tea.

  “Ain’t that something,” Mr. Rose said. “How could I not see that? I guess I bought into all the legend talk about him.”

  “Legends don’t pee,” Ruby said.

  He smiled. “Hard to look legendary when you got your forehead to the tiles and half of it’s going down your pants leg.”

  “Dad, please.”

  Her father sighed, shook his head, pushed his chair away from the small breakfast table. “One thing still bothers me, though. I mean, I always thought that those red vials, the poison vials, they were for research, right? I always thought there wasn’t enough there to kill someone.”

  “Yeah, Dad, but you didn’t know that for sure; and people react differently to poisons, that’s what Mrs. Whitmore says.”

  “Still—I mean, it can be noisy in that lab, but we heard nothing. I’m not saying he didn’t drink some poison; obviously he did. It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “Something’s way off, is what. You’re telling me Rama didn’t call out, didn’t make a sound, didn’t try to get any help? I know it’s Rama and all, but those poisons would not have killed him right away. They would have made him sick. After an hour or so, he had to be feeling terrible—yet he did nothing, as far as we can tell, anyway. It’s like he was acting like he had an antidote.”

  Coconut pudding, was it? Maybe bananas in there, or whatever you call them—plantains—and with fish, plus some spices?

  Ruby always had trouble figuring out what was being served at Rex’s place.

  “I’m over it, seriously,” Rex was saying between forkfuls. “Like the way I see it, this is just an injury, like a peg leg or whatnot, what they call that—a disability. No reason to be prejudiced about things like that, right, Ruby?”

  “Exactly,” she said as one of the Travises or Justins climbed on her knee.

  “I mean, it’s not her fault, musta been some kind of accident. Nobody wants to give up a marble just like that, you know.”

  “Yep, I sure do,” Ruby said. “What are you talking about?”

  “The fake eye. The technology’s so good, you don’t notice it. Like when you got a real good wig, you swear that’s the person’s hair up there, not some furry dish towel like what they got at House of.”

  “Rex, you still don’t think—”

  “Travis! Don’t you climb on the table,” said Rex’s mom, Mrs. Prudence, lifting the small boy from Ruby’s lap and handing him to Rex’s dad, a silent man everyone called Mr. Jeffrey. “I just think it’s wonderful that you two are visiting that woman. She never came out of that apartment before, and now I see her down on College sometimes, at the stores, even says hello to you.”

  “That’s something, moving around with a bum eye,” said Mr. Rose, who had almost finished the coconut-fish-custard thing. “I’ve had a patch on, and it’s hard to get used to.”

  “Dad, that’s just—”

  “What do you three talk about, Ru?” he said. “She’s a former forensics person; is she helping us out?”

  “Yeah—stuff—not a big deal.”

  “I just think she’s happy to have some company, I really do,” Mrs. Prudence said. “Justin—please pass the chicken down this way.”

  And so it went: more food, more dishes, more adult talk. It was forever before Ruby and Rex could excuse themselves and escape down to College Avenue like freed prisoners. The street was gray and empty, somber-feeling even for a Sunday evening.

  “So, one thing,” Ruby said, still out of breath. It was getting cold, the leaves mostly gone from the trees, brittle underfoot. “Did you see what she wrote on that folder?”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Whitmore. On that folder she has with Rama Jr. written on it. And now we know why it says Jr.”

  “Yeah we do. And I did see Ask Grady about glass vials.” Rex missed nothing, Ruby thought, ever. “What you think that is?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruby answered, “but she underlined it. Another thing. You remember when she said that the teacup was empty? How’d she know that?”

  “It wasn’t in the reports, you’re right. Grady, maybe?”

  “Probably. Or her old friend Ms. Diaz.” Ruby looked over her shoulder instinctively at the ninth-floor window. She dropped her voice. “Do you trust her, Rex? Mrs. Whitmore?”

  Rex stepped forward and kicked a bottle cap toward the opposite curb, watching to see whether it jumped over. It didn’t make it, hitting the curb and rolling under a car. His shoulders slumped.

  “I do, Ruby. I don’t know. She got her own things she’s working out, that’s a true fact. But probably so does everyone, you know?”

  “Thank you, Freud. And the bottle cap’s over there by that tire; I can tell you’re working through that right now,” Ruby said.

  “I am. Need to put at least one of those little suckers over or I won’t feel right, psychologically.”

  Ruby waited while Rex found another cap and kicked it over the opposite curb. “Guess it takes a boy’s brain to figure out that little ritual,” she said.

  “Deep down, we very complex.”

  “Well, deep down, I’m very superficial, so let’s review this case. At 6:15 P.M., my dad sees him alive.”

  “Check.”

  “At, let’s say, 6:22, the man goes out to that bathroom we found.”

  “Bushes pit stop.”

  “Roman’s waiting out in the courtyard, hidden. He ducks in there, pours the poisons into the tea—the nightshade and the chokecherry and the more potent one.”

  “Monkshood.”

  “Right. Then he slips back into the lab area, passes the red vials to Lydia, who stashes them in my dad’s locker either then or later, doesn’t matter. Now Rama comes back, drinks his tea, and—that’s the problem.”

  “What?”

  “He took no action. And as my dad said, he musta felt real, real sick. If you look up those poisons on the Internet, it says that they usually cause
symptoms within the first hour, for sure.”

  She stopped. They were at the foot of College Avenue, across from DeWitt’s main gate; broken leaves swirled around it in the cold, haunted wind. She could see Rama in her mind now, one gulp and another and empty.

  “Then what?” she asked out loud. “He goes into that bathroom sometime in there, we have to assume that.”

  “I sure don’t know, Ruby. But say we go down in that bathroom, see if we can find a glass vial. It’s all we got. There was all kinds of trash and stuff down in there.”

  “Any vials?”

  “No idea. I wasn’t looking, and we got no idea what they look like. You thinking of making a run now?”

  Ruby looked up at the great stone dungeon of the science library again. Risky. They’d have to break in. And the truth was that she was not sure they could find the little bathroom again, at least not quickly—or without help.

  “We should maybe just see if Sharon’s got an idea about it; it’s getting dark.”

  “Or Simon,” Rex said. Ruby waited for a crack about Simon, but it didn’t come. “Tomorrow, too. Before we start thinking about it too much.”

  It was a straight-ahead plan that got very twisted, very fast.

  In their free period, Ruby and Rex made straight for the library, where Rex again asked a librarian about the spare bathroom. He said the regular one was occupied and he couldn’t wait.

  “You’re going to have to go back into the school then, young man,” the librarian said. “Haven’t they told you? The entire area under the library has been declared part of the crime scene. Just this morning. The elevator is blocked. You aren’t allowed down there.”

  And that might have been that, except that Ruby did what she wished she’d done first thing in the morning. She asked for help.

  “I can get you into the computers, Ruby, but not down there,” whispered Sharon in the middle of the math lesson. “But”—she looked across the class—“I know who can.”

  At lunch, Simon Buscombe again joined the three of them, bringing his tray to their corner table in the cafeteria. He nodded, said nothing, and immediately bit into a bright orange hot dog with yellow mustard.

  “Can’t be anything like meat in them dogs; smells like hair spray. How do you eat those things?” Rex said.

  Simon shrugged. “I understand my expertise is again in demand.”

  “Uh, right,” Ruby said. “Well, we know you’re the maze expert. What we’re hoping now is that maybe you know something about the layout underneath the library and the science buildings.”

  Simon nodded, polished off the hot dog, and took a large swig from a giant cream soda. Burped.

  “The catacombs, Simon?” Sharon said.

  He nodded impatiently. “Observe,” he said, pulling a portfolio out of his briefcase. He cleared a space on the table and leafed through a stack of mazes and drawings, some of buildings, others of cars.

  “Whoa, stop,” said Rex. “Wait. Lemme see that other drawing, back up, right there. That one. Is that a ’69 Cougar XR-7?”

  Simon sat stone silent for a moment. He separated the car drawing and placed it in front of Rex. “How did you know that was a ’69?”

  “Headlights. See that detail right there?” Rex gawked at the drawing as if it were a real car. He was barely breathing. “Lookit that: ’69 is the best year for these. I someday probably might get one.”

  Simon still looked shaken. “Color?” he said.

  “Black cherry.”

  “Interior?”

  “I don’t know; between cream and that regular white—”

  “Are you kidding me?” Ruby said. “It’s a car. All right. A drawing of a car, I mean, and it’s good, let’s all agree on that. But we’re trying to do a job, remember? Simon?”

  Simon swung his head around as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Oh yeah. Right. Observe,” he said, pushing a fantastically intricate maze to the center of the table. It was all done in red pen, and Simon shooed the others’ hands away.

  “No touché pas,” he said. “This is a map of the catacombs beneath the library. Copied from the original layout, which I found in the architecture section of the library. The original construction is early 1800s, English Gothic, with lines I know and grace notes familiar to the era.” The car experience with Rex was long gone; he was back to being his pompous self again.

  “Where’s our bathroom?” Rex said.

  “The modern redesign they did twenty years ago ruined the personality of the place, in my estimation,” Simon continued, ignoring the question. “And it screwed up my map; this does not capture every feature. There are blank spots. Dead zones.”

  Ruby gaped at the drawing, so different from her work and yet she wanted to have it all to herself, just to look at for a while. “This is . . . amazing,” she said. “I never knew a mess of dank hallways could look so deadly cool.”

  “Well, the elevators are blocked, so no way to get down to that mess of hallways now,” Rex said.

  Simon gave him a fish-eye. “By my calculation, there are seventy-eight entrances to the catacombs. Maybe eighty-one, if you’re willing to use the sewers.”

  “Not happening,” Rex said.

  “No need for that, young man,” Simon said.

  Young man!

  Ruby, recovering from the hypnotic grip of the drawing, said, “When? We need to go today, before someone beats us to it.”

  “My schedule has been cleared,” said Simon.

  “After the bell,” said Sharon, sitting back, arms folded on her chest.

  “Where we meet, then?” said Rex, reaching for the drawing.

  Simon blocked his hand. “No one touches the reconstruction.” He looked at Sharon. “I cannot work with people who interfere. This is not a play maze.”

  “Relax,” Sharon said. “No one’s gonna mess up your map. Maybe you’d rather not come, Simon. We’ll find our way down ourselves.”

  The long, bony face jerked up, eyes glowing. “No. I’m in.”

  Sharon again folded her arms. “That’s what I thought. Let’s meet out in front of the science library.”

  The four lingered until well after the bell, waiting for most kids to clear out, and then proceeded to the far side of the library building. They followed Simon, squeezing between the stone flank of the science library and the now-dry hedges, the very same ones Ruby and Rex had crawled through days earlier.

  “Everyone is prepared, I’m going to assume,” Simon said. He was crouching by a small garden-level window with bars, looking back over his shoulder.

  Ruby hesitated. Rex shrugged. “Let’s not talk about it,” he said.

  Simon nodded. “Here’s our path, very simple,” he said, holding the map up to the light and tracing the path with his finger.

  “Everyone got that?” Nods all around. “OK.”

  Simon pulled the bars from the window easily. The bolts had long ago rotted. He lifted the pane up and slid in. The others followed, Rex last, struggling to fit his large body through.

  Ruby recognized the smell from the first time. Damp, swampy, with a machine-oil glaze. Blinking in the darkness, she saw shovels, hoes, a few old lawn mowers, rusting against the far wall. Sacks of something piled in a corner, turning to dust.

  They were in.

  “A simple garden shed,” Simon said. “At one time it would have opened to the outside. Maybe it still does, through there,” he said, nodding toward a thick wooden barn door.

  “What’s your map say? How far to the bushes?” Ruby said. “I mean, bathroom.”

  “Easy does it,” Simon said. He held his hand out, and Sharon passed him a tiny flashlight. Simon clicked it on and studied the maze drawing. “I will remind you that I have not drawn every corner. I don’t know exactly where every hole-in-the-wall whirligig is. I can get us close to the hallway where that bathroom is. I think. Then it’s up to you.”

  “Whirligig?” Ruby said.

  Simon led them out through a door and int
o a stone corridor. Ruby followed, then Sharon, then Rex. All OK so far. The corridor sloped down, turned, and seemed to slope up again. Patches of outside light leaked in, just enough for the four to see their way.

  “We going under the library now, I feel that,” Rex said.

  “Obviously,” said Simon.

  A clang and hiss of machine noise stopped Simon. He turned the flashlight on the left wall, looking for something. He settled on a small metal door, a half door, no more than waist-high. He pulled it open, and the noise filled the corridor.

  “Why don’t we just go straight there? Why we want to mess with this?” Rex said over the clanging.

  “Because that hallway turns, and by the time you get to the end, you’re way under the main school,” Simon yelled. “Now, are you following me or not?”

  Rex did not want to go through the door. Neither did Ruby, and she peeked over her shoulder to signal that she knew what he was thinking. By the time she turned around Sharon was gone—through the door. Ruby stood aside and let Rex push his way in, headfirst, like some pudgy old dog through a broken fence.

  She followed, and the four huddled for a moment on the other side, looking around. Hard to see anything much. A boiler room or something. Huge cylinders, hot to the touch. A tangle of pipes overhead. Nobody in sight.

  Simon didn’t consult his maze. He seemed to know where he was. He motioned them to follow, around one boiler and then another, hugging the dirty wall, until they’d crossed the room and reached another door.

  He put his hand up to stop. “OK. On the other side is where they’ve modernized. Where we might make visual contact with some random actor. Understood? We’ll need to move fast and use door wells, if there’s some security or whatever.”

  Simon dropped to all fours, cracked the door, and stuck his head out. He recoiled, pulling the door shut. “As I anticipated. Occupied. Footsteps out there. Ruby?”

  She crept forward on her hands and knees and peeked for herself. Bare bulbs bathed the hallway in wasted yellow light. She blinked once and held her breath. A security person of some kind was down at the right end of the passageway, about forty yards away, where it crossed another hall. Not a city cop, but university security, and now she saw another and another. Had they taken over the investigation?