“I brought a sick dog over,” Heimrich said. “For the doctor to look at. It’s because Dr. Barton’s dead I’m still here. You work here, Roger?”
“Nights this summer,” Roger said. “Sort of—oh, keep an eye on the animals. Go up and get the doctor at the house if—well, if I think one of them needs him. And feed them in the morning if the doctor’s late. And change the cats’ toilet pans. This time of year, the dogs can go out to the runs if they want to. I suppose I’m sort of a night watchman, sir. What happened to—I mean, what killed—the doctor?”
“We don’t know yet, son. Possibly just heart failure. He seem all right to you when he spoke to you about Mrs. Cummins’s cat? And when was that, Roger?”
“Six thirty, maybe. About then. Yes, he seemed just like always, I guess.”
“That was after he had finished operating on the cat? Jenny? That’s the cat’s name, I take it. Pretty little cat.”
“Mrs. Cummins is selling her, way I get it, sir. To some people who don’t want to show her. Otherwise they wouldn’t have her spayed, of course. Anyway, she was beginning to show tabby markings, so she’d be no good as a show cat. Mrs. Cummins has a cattery, you know.”
Heimrich hadn’t known; he’d begun to assume.
“Linwood, she calls it,” Roger said. “Siamese mostly, according to Dr. Barton. He treats them when they need it. They are all fancy cats, Dr. Barton told me. I don’t know much about the cat fancy, Inspector. What they call it. ‘The fancy.’”
“More than I do,” Heimrich told him. “About six thirty Dr. Barton came out and told you Mrs. Cummins’s cat was ready for her to take home. He seemed to be all right then. Had you seen him earlier today?”
Roger King had not. He had himself come on duty at six, a few minutes earlier than usual. Usually, Miss Arnold stopped by his door and told him she was going up to the house. That he was in charge. Tonight she had not.
“Waiting for the doctor to finish operating, I suppose,” Heimrich said. “So she could tell him Mrs. Heimrich and I were bringing Colonel over.”
Roger didn’t say, “Huh?” He merely looked it.
“Colonel’s the dog,” Heimrich told him. “You can go back to your reading, son.”
“Studying, really,” the boy said. “Marine biology, sir. What I’m going in for, I think.”
He carried his book into his room. Heimrich walked the length of the hallway and looked out the door. The Bartons’ white house was about a hundred yards away. A big ash tree partly shaded it. There was no activity apparent in the house and no lights were on in it. Of course, dusk was only starting. Heimrich looked at his watch. Eight thirty. Make it eight thirty-two. Go up to the house and see how Mrs. Barton, newly widowed, was coming along? Not yet. Eventually, of course, if things developed so. Probably they wouldn’t; probably Adrian Barton had been the victim of cardiac arrest and only that; probably Heimrich had been precipitate in his call to the barracks. On the other hand, the lab squad from Troop K was not being precipitate at all. Neither was the police doctor, nor the others who attend homicides. Well, probably there was no homicide to attend. Probably he ought to collect his wife, and their dog, and go home.
Probably analysis of what remained in the hypodermic syringe carefully tissue-wrapped in his pocket would turn out to be what was left of insulin, 40 U.
He closed the outside door, the back way out of the hospital and went back through the wards. The glass oxygen compartment was empty now; one of the caged cats was washing himself. No, herself. The black tom woke up long enough to hiss at Heimrich, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it. The formerly alert seal-point Siamese lay with its creamy back to Heimrich and did not stir. In the canine ward, the dogs barked at him.
In the waiting room, Colonel was sitting up. He turned his head and looked at Heimrich. His eyes seemed even sadder than usual, and Heimrich thought there was a question in them. What are we doing in this place, which smells of hospital and of other animals? That probably was the question. Heimrich did not try to answer.
Susan, on the drab green sofa, was reading a small magazine. She put it down. “He seems to be much better,” Susan said. “Perhaps it was a false alarm. Maybe we could take him home.”
Heimrich shook his head.
“I called the barracks,” he said. “I’ll have to wait until the boys show up. Does he seem to be mobile?”
“Enough to sit up, anyway,” Susan said. “About getting in the car, I don’t know. You mean, if he can, I should drive him home and—well, get out from underfoot?”
It wasn’t the way he would have put it. Heimrich’s smile told her that.
“It’ll be jammed up when they get here,” he said. “Cops all over the place. Bodies being lugged around. One body, anyway. And I’ll be hung up for a while. Not for too long, I hope. Probably a false alarm all around.”
Susan stood and looked up at him. She looked for some seconds.
“You don’t really believe it is, do you, dear?” she said. “I can tell, you know.”
“Second sight, Susan?”
“Not second, Merton. Not even second thousandth. I’ve been looking at you for quite a while, Merton. So—say I’ve learned to see through you. You think Dr. Barton was murdered.”
“I don’t know, darling. But, well, I suppose I think he could have been. Without anything really to go on.”
“I’ll see if Colonel is up to it,” Susan said. “Otherwise you can carry him again, I suppose. But he’ll have to get out on his own. He’s too big for me to lug out at the other end.”
“Much too big,” Heimrich agreed. “If it comes to that, just leave him in the car. We’ll have to find another vet.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “A live one.” She walked toward the door. She said, “Come on, old fellow.”
Colonel stood up. He seemed, Heimrich thought, faintly surprised that he could. But when he followed Susan to the door and out of it, he moved reasonably well. And when Heimrich opened the Buick’s door, he hesitated only a minute. He did look around at Heimrich with what Heimrich thought was a “What, no help?” expression in his sad eyes. But he got into the car. He didn’t bound in, but he got in. Come to think of it, he hadn’t bounded in for some time. Colonel was getting to be an old, tired dog, past his bounding days.
3
After Susan had driven the Buick away, Heimrich stood and looked at the white house. There was still no activity in the house. On the side he faced, which was the west side, closed Venetian blinds obscured the windows. The last of the day’s sun rays glittered on the windows.
There was a garage next to the south side of the house. The garage door was open, and there were two cars in the garage—a small black car and one much larger and also black. One of them Latham Rorke’s? Probably. Dr. Rorke would hardly have walked up from White Plains.
Rorke and the pretty girl who was studying to be a veterinarian were certainly taking their time about it, it being telling a woman named Louise Barton that her husband was suddenly dead. Such things are not easy to tell, are best told gently. But how does one gentle such news, temper the harsh finality of such news? Heimrich himself had never found a way, although rather often the task had been his. Sorry, Mrs. Barton. Bad news, I’m afraid. The husband you were expecting home for dinner won’t be coming. He’s lying dead on the floor of his operating room. Not much good. What is good?
Perhaps Carol and the young man who had driven up hoping to take her to dinner had decided to eat the dinner Louise Barton had prepared for her husband. And for Carol? Apparently Carol was living in the Barton house. For the summer, anyway. Before she went back to Ithaca and the study of animal ailments. Odd profession for a very pretty young woman to choose.
Heimrich had taken a few steps toward the hospital when he heard a car coming up Barton Lane. The boys from the barracks, probably. Or the ambulance, complete with medical examiner, from Cold Harbor.
The car was a very red Volks. It went to the house and stopped in front of it,
and a woman got out. She was small and compact and, from her movements, middle-aged. Middle-aged and a little arthritic. But she moved quickly to the front door of the big white house and opened the door—without, so far as Heimrich could tell, ringing the doorbell. She went into the house. So, reinforcement for the bereaved.
Heimrich went on to, and into, the small animal hospital.
Nothing had changed there, except that Barton’s body presumably had stiffened further. And where the hell were Heimrich’s own reinforcements? If they hadn’t moved the Troop K barracks so far to the north, they would have arrived by now. And Cold Harbor was much closer. In a heat wave, everything slows down.
He went through the animal wards. The dogs barked at him. The black cat was asleep and didn’t wake up to hiss. The door of Roger King’s room was closed and Roger was typing behind it. A diligent student, apparently. Or, for all Heimrich knew, a boy typing a love letter to a girl. A boy not much interested in sudden death.
Heimrich opened the back door and stood in the doorway and looked at the white house. He was just in time. Carol Arnold and Rorke were just coming out the door. They were coming out merged, Rorke’s right arm firmly around the girl.
Not, Heimrich was reasonably sure, to support her, or for purposes of consolation. Well, they were a handsome young couple and Rorke had driven some miles from White Plains on a hot, humid evening, in the hope that he might take her to dinner. And there had been sharpness, almost animosity, in his voice when he spoke of Adrian Barton. So. And Rorke was a doctor. And he had known, or very accurately guessed, where Rorke kept his stethoscope. Mmm.
And Barton probably had died of cardiac arrest. Or, conceivably, in diabetic coma, whatever Ernest Chandler thought probable.
Carol and Latham Rorke saw him standing in the doorway as they walked toward the hospital. For half the distance, Rorke kept his arm around the girl. Then, very slowly, he removed it. The lingering removal was like a caress.
“Sorry we were so long, Inspector,” Carol said when they were only a few yards away. “We were waiting for Louise’s sister to come and be with her. It —it was an awful shock to Louise, of course. Lathe gave her a sedative, and we called her doctor and Mary.”
Who was, presumably, the sister.
“You did want to talk to me about it, didn’t you, Inspector? About what happened to Adrian. Because —well, you act as if you don’t think it was a natural death. Is that it?”
“When an apparently healthy man dies suddenly, without medical attendance, we always wonder a little, Miss Arnold. It’s a matter of routine.”
“Adrian wasn’t entirely healthy,” the girl said. “He had diabetes. Didn’t Lathe tell you that?”
Rorke had. And Barton’s own doctor had confirmed it. And termed it mild. And, yes, Heimrich did want to have a few words with Miss Arnold about the events of the afternoon. For example—
Heimrich did not get to his example. Cars arrived at the animal hospital. Tires scraped on gravel as wheels were braked. If Miss Arnold would wait for a while; probably not too considerable a while. Just until things became a little clearer. If she and Dr. Rorke wanted to go to dinner, it would be all right. As long as they were not too long about it.
“Louise had dinner ready,” Carol said. “But—it didn’t seem right to eat there. With poor Louise—” Funeral baked meats, Heimrich thought. Although that wasn’t, of course, entirely accurate. But, he told them, he understood entirely.
“Not the Bird and Bottle, I guess,” Rorke said. “Not a place to eat and run, exactly. The Tavern, Carol?”
There was a restaurant in Cold Harbor called the Tavern. It wasn’t, by a long stretch, the Bird and Bottle, but it was near.
“All right,” Carol said, and the two of them walked toward the white house and, presumably, the garage adjacent to it. After they had taken a few steps, Rorke put an arm about the girl again. She had changed out of her white uniform into a sleeveless pale green dress.
Heimrich did not wait until they reached the garage. He went to the front door of the hospital to greet his reinforcements.
They were numerous—Lieutenant Charles Forniss in one car and Corporal Purvis, in uniform, with him; the lab truck from the barracks; an ambulance from the Cold Harbor hospital. And, from the last car in line, a man with a black bag getting out. Forniss said, “Evening, M. L.” Purvis said, “Sir,” and saluted. Dr. James Marvin said, “Got a dead one, Inspector? Hot night for it.”
Heimrich agreed he had a dead one and added that, from the police point of view, it might be a false alarm. Marvin said, “Huh? Not shot? Not knifed? No blunt instrument?”
“Just suddenly dead,” Heimrich said. “The vet who runs this place, Doctor. Dr.—”
“Ad Barton,” Marvin said, and added that he’d be damned. “Hell,” he said, “Adrian and Louise were coming to our place for Sunday lunch tomorrow. Unless he had a dying dog or something. Or I had an emergency. Where is he?”
Apparently Marvin and Barton had been friends. Barton was still “he” to James Marvin, M.D. To medical examiners, cadavers quickly become “it.”
Heimrich took Dr. Marvin to Barton’s body, stiffening on the floor of his operating room.
“Dead a couple of hours,” Marvin said. “Rigor’s setting in. Just fell down dead, you think? Where he is now?”
“Apparently,” Heimrich said. “Oh, we moved him a little. This was partly under him.”
He took the wrapped syringe out of his pocket. He said, “Hold it just a minute, Doctor. Better have this printed.”
Forniss had come in with them. Heimrich handed the tissued syringe to Lieutenant Forniss, who said, “Yep,” and carried it out toward the lab truck.
Marvin knelt beside the corpse. He pushed back the closed eyelids, and closed them again.
“Just dead,” Marvin said. “Have to open him up to find out why. Could be a heart attack, from the looks of it. You closed his eyes, Inspector?”
“No. Closed when we found him.”
“We?”
“A young doctor from White Plains. Had come up to take his girl to dinner. Name of Rorke. Ever hear of him, Doctor?”
“Barton mentioned him once, I think. Said he was badgering Carol. Pretty kid, she is. Kind anyone would be likely to make passes at.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Barton used the word ‘badgered’?”
“Way I remember it,” Marvin said. “You want to take pictures of it before we take it away?”
Heimrich did want pictures taken. Forniss came back. The hypodermic syringe was now unwrapped. “One set,” Forniss said. “Where you’d expect them to be.”
“Probably Barton’s,” Heimrich said. “Better print him before they take him away.”
“They’re coming,” Forniss said.
Heimrich gave the syringe to Dr. Marvin.
“Empty,” Marvin said. “On the floor beside him, you say?”
“As if he’d dropped it as he fell, Doctor.”
“Adrian was a diabetic,” Marvin said. “Mild case. Apparently under control. Insulin.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Dr. Chandler told me that.”
“Good old Ernie,” Marvin said. “Still practicing. When I get to be his age, I hope I’m retired. Not that he isn’t a damn good man. So he was treating Adrian, was he? Mild case, way Adrian thought?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Probably forty units, then,” Marvin said. “Maybe before breakfast—blood glucose highest in the morning—or in the evening, half an hour or so before dinner. But injecting the stuff is a bit of a nuisance, even when you’ve got used to it. What time would he be having dinner, do you know?”
Heimrich didn’t. Probably Miss Arnold would know. Apparently she had her meals with the Bartons. When they had found Barton’s body, his dinner had been ready and waiting. Mrs. Barton had sent word to that effect, by Rorke.
“Times fit,” Marvin said. “What your lab boys will find a residue of in this syringe will be insulin, hund
red to one.”
“He’d operated on a cat just before he died,” Heimrich said. “Don’t vets anesthetize animals by injection?”
“Barbiturates,” Marvin said. “Dosage by weight of animal. So, nowadays, do we. Sodium pentothal, usually. For starters. You think maybe he injected himself instead of the cat? Not likely, Inspector. Not with the same needle, obviously. Thousand to one, your boys will find insulin was in this syringe. Maybe with zinc, more likely regular. You’re thinking of insulin shock?”
“Just wondering about the whole thing,” Heimrich told him.
“Have to take a good many times the normal dose,” Marvin said. “Not likely to. They get so measuring the prescribed dosage is pretty automatic. One c.c., usually. Forty units of insulin per one c.c., Marked on the syringe. See?”
Heimrich looked at the cylinder of the hypodermic. It was marked in cubic centimeters.
“Also,” Marvin said, “he’d be using the needle on a lot of animals. All sorts of medications by injection. Animals don’t like to take pills. Particularly cats, I gather.”
Marvin was damned right. Heimrich told him so with feeling. He had had, a year or so before, to give Mite pills. It had been arduous, although in the end successful. When the pills finally got into Mite they were accompanied by blood from human fingers. Cats do not approve of taking pills.
“Are there poisons of which one c.c., by needle, would be lethal, Doctor?”
“Sure. Dozens, possibly. You’re thinking maybe he got the stuff out of the wrong vial? Inspector, Adrian was a pro. Going to be damn sure what he shoots into himself. However, anything he might have used by accident would be in his refrigerator there. We can look.”
They looked into the small refrigerator set into the wall. There were a number of bottles and vials in it. They were arranged in racks.
“There’s his insulin,” Marvin said. He pointed to the racked small vials. All but one had red caps on them. The little vials were labeled, “Lilly, Iletin (R) 40 U. Regular.” They were also marked, “10 cc.”
23-The Tenth Life Page 3