“So did everyone else. I guess it was on the radio or something. And nobody liked him. The students at the Union really hated his guts. Some girl said he committed suicide and they shouted her down—said he didn’t have enough sense. Someone else said it was a student he flunked last year, getting revenge. I told them he just got sick last night and you saw it.”
“That’s true, Andrew, but it doesn’t really tell you much. The police didn’t mention suicide, but they’re looking into the possibility that he was murdered. Yoichi came by this morning and told me he thought George was poisoned with a Japanese fish.”
“Mom, that’s crazy.”
“He was very persuasive. But I think you’re right.”
“Wait’ll they hear that.”
“Not from you, I hope.”
“It’ll get around without me, don’t worry. Gotta go. Thanks for supper. See you late—I hope.” He leered at her.
“I don’t promise to wait up.”
“Good. New chick—no telling what time.” Twirling an imaginary mustache, he flashed her an expensively straight set of teeth and took the stairs two at a time, presumably to put on his shoes. From the look of him tonight, she thought he might even tie them.
She was still clearing the dishes when Nancy phoned to propose a movie. Joan jumped at the chance. She didn’t want to spend this particular evening at home alone. When she got into Nancy’s car, however, she found she wouldn’t escape so easily.
“Joan, I couldn’t believe it when I heard it on the radio!” Nancy greeted her, starting up with only one eye on the road. “I called Yoichi and he said it was all true.”
“What was?”
“The radio said George died of unknown causes, but Yoichi said he thought it was murder, and that you told him to call the police.”
“Not exactly. He felt terrible and I suggested that Sam might look into it for him.”
“But the police talked to him. And he said he mentioned you. Did they come to you, too?”
“Well, yes.”
“You see? And they’ll probably talk to Daniel. They always check on the family first. I wouldn’t blame that boy if he did kill his father. In fact, it wouldn’t be hard to blame anyone for doing George in.”
“Nancy!”
“You didn’t know him. I told you how he took over Daniel’s girlfriend, Lisa Wallston, and then dumped her flat. Did you realize that Lisa’s mother served the punch last night?”
“She did what?” Joan asked weakly, having heard it clearly the first time.
“She was handing out the punch. She and Evelyn. Don’t you remember? When Alex asked who knew Daniel—to call him—someone had the nerve to suggest Glenda Wallston. Talk about tactless.”
“Do you think she poisoned George’s punch?”
“Heavens, I don’t know. But she’d probably know how. She’s a nurse, you know.”
“No, I—”
“Yes. She works at the hospital—in OB, I think—but surely anyone over there could find out enough about poison to kill a man. And if there ever was a person who had reason to, Glenda’s the one. Lisa isn’t twenty-one yet, but the rumors flying around town have shot her reputation. I’ve heard she was sleeping with George and Daniel at the same time, that she was pregnant and had an abortion, that she didn’t have an abortion and gave up the baby for adoption because her mother wouldn’t let her bring it home. Even that she’s become a lesbian. You name it, somebody’s said it about Lisa.”
“You think gossip would make Glenda kill George?”
“Gossip—and ruining her daughter’s life. Of course, it might not be Glenda. There’s Daniel. Poor Daniel. His father gave him enough grief before all that.”
“He did?” More and more, she was regretting having mentioned Nancy and her gossip to Lieutenant Lundquist.
“George was such a snob. Wouldn’t you know he’d have a son whose ambition is to work with his hands. Daniel is a marvel with wood, but you’d never catch George recognizing anything but abstract academic ability. I think he looked down on engineers as mere technicians. Daniel can’t even have a shop at home. He has to sneak off to Isaac, the violin maker. I’ve seen him at the shop when I’ve done ads for it, and it looks to me as if he’s quietly apprenticed himself to Isaac. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen him look happy. You’d think a man would be proud to have a future Stradivarius for a son, but not George. I’ll bet he never knew what Daniel was up to, or he would have managed to stop it somehow. Well, he can’t stop it now.”
“Look, Nancy, someone’s pulling out of that space. Is it big enough?” To Joan’s relief, Nancy shifted her attention to the trick of parking a large car in a short parallel spot between two small ones. The movie that had seemed an welcome diversion failed to hold Joan’s attention. When they left the theater, she couldn’t have described the plot, but she was grateful that Nancy chose to dissect it on the way home. An occasional “uh-huh” was all that was required of her.
The light in Andrew’s window surprised her.
“Nancy, I’d ask you in, but Andrew’s home. I didn’t expect him so early. I’d better see if he’s all right.”
If Nancy saw through the deception, she put a good face on it. Upstairs, Joan called to Andrew, heard him answer, and fell asleep in less time than she would have thought possible.
It was morning before she learned why he had come home so soon. He leaned against the refrigerator and watched her wash up after breakfast.
“I thought I had a date, but it sure wasn’t much. We took a walk and she let me buy her an egg roll at Liu’s Place. Then she asked me to give her dad a ride home from work.”
“Night shift?” She tried to remember what he’d said about the girl.
“No, he’s a biology professor. We picked him up at his lab. Actually, it was pretty interesting. He showed us around and talked about what he was doing. Maybe that’s why Jennifer wanted me to go there. She’s a funny girl.”
“Should I ask?”
“Not weird, Mom, just hard to figure out. I mean, going to her dad’s lab to get rid of a date is a little extreme. All she had to do was say she wanted to go home.”
“Maybe her dad needed a ride.”
“Maybe, but this isn’t the first time.”
“I thought you just met her.”
“I did, but she told me she takes guys there all the time. I think she likes to show him off. She took Daniel Petris there on a date, too. She was talking about him some. She didn’t think he’d be all that broken up about his dad.”
“No one seems to be.” She drained the sink.
“Jennifer sure wasn’t. She plays oboe. I mean, she’s serious about it. She says that when the symphony’s youth concerto competition came around, Petris always judged woodwinds. He didn’t criticize her technique—I guess she’s so good you couldn’t—but he marked her way low on her tone and said she was unmusical, whatever that means. The other two judges told her they liked her, but she’s lost two years in a row, even though there was only one of him and two of them. She was afraid she wouldn’t get into music school if she couldn’t win again this year. She’s really relieved.”
Joan took a deep breath. “I think if I hear one more person isn’t sorry he died, I’ll … I don’t know what. Let’s change the subject, okay? Tell me about the lab.”
“Sure. You’re not squeamish about frogs, are you, Mom?”
“Frogs? No, I think you’re safe.”
“Well, Mr. Werner’s doing an experiment on how their olfactory bulb works—that’s the part of their brain in charge of smelling. He has tubes hooked up to jars full of smells, and he puffs air on what looks like the frog’s nostrils—it’s really the olfactory epithelium. Then he measures the frog’s reaction.”
“And the frog just sits there and lets him do that?”
“The frog doesn’t have any choice. Before he starts the experiment—this is why I asked how you felt about frogs—he destroys its brain and its spinal cord. It ca
n’t move. It can’t feel anything, either. It’s like brain death. It’s really a dead frog.”
“Then how can it be smelling?”
“It isn’t, exactly. Not the way a live frog does. Its olfactory bulb is separate from the rest of its brain—that’s why he chose frogs—and that bulb is still hooked up to the frog’s face, where the airs puffs hit. Mr. Werner is studying a certain kind of nerve cell this way. He uses a nerve poison called TTX to block out the impulses from the other nerve cells and leave him with just the kind he wants to study. It’s really interesting.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in that sort of thing.”
“Neither did I, until I started telling you about it. That’s funny.”
“You didn’t like biology that much when you took it, did you?”
“It was so dead. What I like is that he doesn’t know how it’s going to come out. And he says it could help us understand how nervous systems process information. That could be really important.”
She couldn’t remember this long a speech from Andrew in months. His eyes were alight, and he was running his hands through his hair as he talked, an old habit of his father’s.
“Does he use student assistants?”
“In the lab? I don’t know. I bet he doesn’t hire them, because he was talking about all kinds of places he cuts corners to save money. Oliver doesn’t exactly have a big research budget.” He paused and said slowly, “I wonder if he’d let me work for him for free.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a wasted date after all.”
“Maybe. And maybe if I worked in the lab, Jennifer would go out with me on a real one sometime. He probably stakes her out in the Union as bait to trap him a stable of lab assistants.”
“You have a conniving mind. That doesn’t mean he does.”
“He connived enough to get himself written up in the paper. Big feature story. Jennifer framed the article and hung it on the wall. I think it embarrassed him, though.”
“What’s he like as a person?”
“Not bad. You could tell he was excited about what he was doing, but he didn’t push it down your throat. He has a sense of humor, too. He showed us a couple of puffs on the frog he was finishing up, and when he packed up for the night and put the dead frog in the freezer, he said he hated to waste good frog’s legs but he didn’t want to do us in. That TTX is really powerful stuff. Maybe someone fed Petris a used frog’s leg or two.”
“Andrew!”
“Sorry, Mom. That wasn’t funny. And he didn’t say it. But you know, someone could have. Done it, I mean. Anyone could walk in there. The building was open when we got there at nine. His lab was unlocked, too. He was down the hall, and Jennifer just marched me upstairs and into the lab to wait for him. The whole town would know about the TTX. It was in that big article about him last year.”
“Lots of people have poisons.”
“I guess so. See you tonight, Mom. I’ll be home for supper and I don’t have a date. Jennifer can snare another guy for her dad tonight.”
9
Thursday’s paper had reported the sudden death of Professor George Petris. His obituary mentioned his novel—starting a minor flurry in both local bookstores (which hadn’t sold a copy for months), his temporary deanship half a dozen years before (the scars of which were just beginning to heal), and his membership in the First Methodist Church (which came as a surprise to a number of active Methodists). He was, it said, survived by one son, Daniel, of Oliver, and a daughter, Emily, of San Jose, California. Arrangements were pending at Snarr’s Funeral Home.
By the time Friday’s paper announced that the police were investigating the matter, most residents of Oliver already thought they knew more than the meager story told. Well acquainted with the crop of wagging tongues, Lundquist cultivated it for the occasional grain of truth among the chaff. He spent Friday morning answering and returning telephone calls from people who thought they could set the police straight.
Most were complaints about the murdered man and generous hints about other people who would be glad to have seen the last of him. He heard a number of versions of the story about Lisa Wallston and her relationships with the Petris men. A woman who sang in the church choir with Glenda accused her of keeping up her membership as a blind to conceal her murderous inclinations. An orchestra member who had heard the poison story was certain Evelyn Wade must have dropped something in Petris’s punch to get first chair for Sam. Sure.
Then he heard from Harold Williams. Williams wasn’t blaming anyone in particular.
“There was no love lost between us, but I didn’t kill him, and if someone did, I don’t want him to get away with it. Is it true that he was poisoned?”
“It’s possible.”
“I’ve been talking with Yoichi Nakamura. I run Aqua Heaven, the aquarium shop on North Rogers. We don’t have any puffer fish, but we do carry a salamander that contains the same poison. Actually, there are quite a few varieties of fish like that, but the Japanese puffer fish and our California salamanders share exactly the same poison. And I know it’s deadly.”
“Are you suggesting that someone used your salamanders?”
“It could be done.”
“Have you sold any recently?”
“Not many. Lisa Wallston came in a week or so ago and replaced her whole aquarium. Something had fouled the water and killed everything. She must have bought a dozen.”
“Oh?”
“Of course, it’s not very likely someone would do that, not when the straight poison is available.”
“The straight poison?”
“Well, sure. Over at the college. That’s the stuff Carl Werner is using in his experiments. There was a big thing in the paper about it last spring. That’s where I learned that the puffer fish poison and the poison in my salamanders was the same.”
Lundquist nodded. He’d remembered all along that he’d read something about puffer fish.
“Mr. Williams, you’ve been very helpful. I appreciate your call.”
“No trouble. Just hope you catch up with whoever did it.”
He sat for a moment, chewing his lip. Then he picked up the phone again and quickly confirmed what he’d begun to suspect. As he already knew, the preliminary autopsy results on Petris had showed nothing inconsistent with poisoning, but there had been no fish in the contents of his stomach and no trace of any poison. There were some signs of coronary artery disease. Heart attack was still the best guess. In the absence of Nakamura’s insistence, it would have been the only guess. The pathologist knew the poison in the fish. In its pure form the stuff was so lethal—more than a thousand times as toxic as arsenic, about a hundred times as deadly as curare—that the tiny amount needed to kill might very well all be metabolized in the short time before the victim died. Yes, he would try sending to a special lab for the toxicology, but it was a long shot. Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry might have a chance of finding something.
“Don’t hold your breath,” the pathologist warned. “You may not get the report for a couple of months.”
Lundquist leaned back in his swivel chair, anchoring his toes under a desk drawer against its tendency to tilt unexpectedly. He had no more real evidence than before and from the sound of it, he wasn’t likely to get any. In his heart of hearts, however, he’d just switched from a case of political babysitting to a homicide investigation. But for the coincidence of Nakamura’s uncle, no one would even be doing the babysitting. Petris would simply have died, and from what he’d learned so far, no one would have mourned him.
How did you go back to the mother and tell her that the baby had just passed puberty while in your care? And become impossible in the process, Lundquist thought wryly. It was all very well to make Wade look good with an investigation after which he could report to all the good citizens that no murder had existed and they were safe in their beds. He wouldn’t welcome a real murder he didn’t have the first chance of clearing up.
Lundquist had no desire
to face the prosecutor with his suspicion. Or his own supervisor of detectives, for that matter. He knew what they’d say about hunches. He could wait. The murderer (if there was one, he reminded himself) should be feeling safe. Anybody who knew enough to use that stuff must know enough not to expect it to be traced. Or would he? If the whole town knew about Werner’s lab, the murderer might not be an expert. He needed to see that article. Bob Peterson at the Courier would dig it up for him. Bob owed him for a story or two.
Daniel Petris met him at the door and took him down the hallway of a house that seemed to be insulated with books, past a door through which he glimpsed a desk his former wife would have itched to straighten.
Lundquist saw no flowers, smelled no baked meats, met no relatives.
They sat opposite each other in massive leather chairs before the cold fireplace in the living room, lined with books as the hall and study had been. Not the matched sets of a decorator, but the hodgepodge of a real reader. A slender young man not more than five-seven, Daniel was almost swallowed up in the upholstery. His calloused fingers were bitten to the quick and he nibbled at the sides of a thumb.
“I’m sorry to intrude,” Lundquist said formally. “I was hoping you could help me with a few questions about your father.”
“Like what?”
“The hospital told me that he had no personal physician. I wondered if that was correct, or if he was simply unable to tell them anything.”
“It’s probably true. The only time I remember hearing him mention a doctor, he called them all quacks. He never got sick and he had very little patience with people who did.”
“So you wouldn’t know whether he had a history of heart problems?”
“I never heard about any. He was big on aerobic exercise. Most mornings he’d either swim or run.”
“Did he seem his normal self that evening, before the rehearsal? I understand you ate together.”
“Yes. Look, I don’t understand why you’re here. Do the police always come when someone dies?”
“Not always. But we do when we’re not sure what happened.”
Murder in C Major Page 6