Dante's Poison

by Lynne Raimondo

  “And given Orin a pass? He killed two people, including his mother.”

  “If I heard correctly, she shot herself.”

  She waved this off. “He did everything but pull the trigger.”

  “Spoken like a true ex-prosecutor.”

  “You’d feel the same way if you’d tried some of the people I did. Orin was a sick boy, but he deserved everything he got. I remember when we tried Donald Tesma. You’ll never get me to say a monster like that shouldn’t get the needle.”

  I was impressed. Tesma was a notorious physician-turned-serial killer who’d murdered dozens of nursing-home patients by spiking their intravenous fluid with substances that mimicked natural death. He was eventually caught, convicted, and, if I remembered right, hanged himself in prison. “You tried Tesma?”

  “Not exactly. I was the junior lawyer on the team, so the only time they let me out of the library was to watch Jane’s closing argument.” I’d heard about Jane Barrett too. They’d met at the State’s Attorney’s office when Hallie was a rookie assistant and Jane was heading up the felony division. Hallie rarely gushed about anyone, but listening to her talk about Jane was like sitting through a reading from The Lives of the Saints. Each had since left the office—Hallie to start a white-collar practice at a big Loop firm, and Jane to head her own litigation boutique.

  “You should have seen the jurors’ faces,” Hallie was saying. “They were weeping as hard as if Tesma had done away with their own loved ones.”

  “But Tesma didn’t get the death penalty.”

  “Sadly, no. The handicapping back at the County Building was that the jury took pity on his son. The boy’s mother had run off years ago and Tesma was the only family he had. Kid was sixteen at the time and wept even harder than the jurors.”

  “How’d the jurors get to see him? Surely he wasn’t in the courtroom?”

  “Not only that, but they put him on the stand during the penalty phase to plead for his father’s life. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how he looked in the witness box.”

  I was horrified. “Now that’s what I call criminal. The poor kid shouldn’t have been within a hundred miles of that courtroom.”

  “Tell me about it. The defense team didn’t have a choice. We were told Daddy insisted on it. Like I said, a real monster.”

  “Still, even without the child there, I would have voted the same way.”

  “I didn’t know you were such a bleeding heart,” she said, amused.

  “I’m not. It’s just that there’s a growing consensus in my field that people like Tesma are born that way—without a conscience.”

  “That there’s such a thing as a murder gene, you mean?”

  “Maybe. Studies involving identical twins point strongly to an inherited component, possibly in as much as one percent of the male population. Female psychopaths are much rarer. The interesting thing is not all of them end up killers. Some who fit the diagnostic criteria end up as politicians or running big corporations. So there must be a nurture piece as well. Whatever the cause, it’s clear that psychopaths don’t feel empathy or remorse the way normal people do. We should be trying to cure them, not putting them to death.”

  Hallie laughed. “Spoken like a true psychiatrist. Next thing you know, you’ll be trying to rationalize away the Nuremberg Trials. But seriously, what does that say about our justice system—about any justice system? If people aren’t responsible for their crimes, doesn’t the whole thing fall apart?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. When we started out talking I was simply expressing the opinion that for most people the guilt from having ended another person’s life is its own punishment.” I was thinking not only of myself but of someone I’d put away recently, now languishing in a downstate prison. “That’s my real problem with what O’Neill was saying. If you ask me, the damned do cry—and sometimes the hardest.”

  “I’m the one who should be damned for suggesting that play,” Hallie said, reaching over to pat my knee in a conciliatory gesture. “I had no idea it would upset you.”

  “I’m not upset,” I said.

  “You’re also a terrible liar. I’m just glad you didn’t have to look at the Kabuki masks.”

  “Which no doubt would have sent me into fits.”

  I struggled with where to go next. We’d reached the point in the evening when it was time to say our good-byes, a parting ritual that was becoming increasingly strained. I made a show of flipping the crystal on my watch and fingering the dial. “It’s late. I should let you get home.”

  Hallie let out a sigh.

  I thought if there was ever a time when I should clear the air, this was it. “Hallie,” I began.

  She stopped me with a hand to my arm. “It’s OK.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Really. You don’t have to explain.”

  The dejection in her voice made me wince. I wanted to carry her upstairs, throw her on my bed, and screw her brains out. Instead, I went on with the speech I’d been mentally rehearsing for the better part of the evening. “Listen, I know you’ve been waiting for me to say something about, umm . . . us.”

  There. I’d gotten started.

  I continued with mounting confidence. “And I want you to know it’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “Of course it doesn’t.”

  “It’s me that’s the problem.”

  She laughed bitterly. “If I had a dime for every time a guy said that to me I’d be living in Kenilworth.”

  I could see this wasn’t coming out right.

  “That’s not what I meant. What I meant was—”

  She stopped me again. “Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t been turned down before.”

  I’m not turning you down, I wanted to shout. “No, wait. You don’t understand—”

  She put the key back in the ignition. “Like I said, no hard feelings.”

  I reached over to stop her. “Please. Please just listen for a moment.”

  “Okaaay,” Hallie said, drawing the syllables out. “I’m all ears.”

  Now that I finally had her full attention, I found it almost impossible to go on. My mouth had gone dry and my telltale knee was shaking. Fuck. I was losing it already. I swallowed hard and said, “You see, I’m not—”

  Right at that moment, Providence—or maybe it was another one of my bad genies—intervened. My lips were still forming the words what you think I am when a cell phone started ringing in the neighborhood of the dashboard. Hallie plucked it from the jack and scanned the caller. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I have to take this.” I listened while a series of low-pitched squawks came over the wire. “What?!” she said. “On what charge? . . . That’s absurd! Hold on a sec—”

  Hallie stopped and handed her handbag to me, whispering urgently. “See if there’s something in here to write with.” She turned her attention back to the caller. “Wait another minute while I get this down.”

  I fumbled open the clasp and began groping through the tissues, change, candy wrappers, and other unfathomable contents of a woman’s purse until I fell upon what felt like a lipstick container. I held it out to her. “Will this do? I can’t find a pen.”

  She yanked it from me and started writing squeakily on the driver’s side window.

  “Where do they have you now? Uh-huh. I’ll be there first thing in the morning.” She listened a few minutes more. “I know it will be hard, but try to get some sleep. We’ll get this straightened out. I promise. And you know the rules. Don’t talk to anyone.”

  When she rang off a few seconds later, she seemed dazed. “That’s odd” was all she said.

  “What is?”

  “I can’t believe we were talking about her only a few minutes ago.”

  I gave her a quizzical look.

  “That was Jane. You remember, my former boss.”

  “Was she in some kind of accident?” I asked.

  “No,” Hallie said, sounding even more perplexed. “She’s been pic
ked up by the police. For murdering Rory Gallagher.”

  Gallagher’s death was heating up to be one of the bigger news stories that month. A flamboyant, fifty-six-year-old reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times known for his hard drinking and headline-grabbing exposés of local government, he was almost as big a Windy City celebrity as Oprah. In Chicago, developing leads about back-room maneuvering and sleazy political deals isn’t especially difficult to do—they don’t call it “the Machine” for nothing—but Gallagher had racked up a series of journalistic coups that would have been the envy of Bernstein and Woodward had they set their sights on smaller fry and made enough enemies to fill the VIP section of Soldier Field on a warm Sunday in November. So when he suddenly keeled over and dropped dead while seated at his favorite table in the Billy Goat, his press buddies were quick to look past an apparent heart attack and hint at a more sinister explanation.

  According to the barkeep, who knew the regulars like the creases of his palms, Gallagher was sober but clearly not himself when he arrived at the Goat a little before 10:00 p.m. on a Friday in late August, ordering a double and careening over to join a group of cronies gathered in the famous “Wise Guys” corner. The atmosphere at the table was already grim—Tribune officials were hinting at yet another Chapter 11, and both the White Sox and the Cubs were trailing their divisions—but Gallagher’s arrival cast an even bigger pall over the festivities. Usually the life of the party, Gallagher said nothing while he downed several drinks in succession, seemingly sunk in a vicious train of thought. Several of the table’s occupants noted his pasty complexion and the strange appearance of his eyes, which darted from side to side as though he was unable to focus. One of his colleagues, a rival columnist at the Tribune named Orlando Brooks, was on the verge of saying, “Rory, you OK man?” when Gallagher abruptly rose, made a frantic clawing motion at his chest, and crashed to the floor, upsetting the table and half a dozen glasses of spirits as he went down. An hour later, he was pronounced dead on arrival at Chicago Kaiser.

  Given his age and lifestyle, the cause of Gallagher’s death was initially presumed to be a heart attack. The verdict probably would have stood there, except for the doubts of his reporter pals who, confronted with the brutal outcome of their own unhealthy habits, or else simply reverting to type, had almost immediately floated rumors of foul play, certainly a much better story than FIFTY-SOMETHING JOURNALIST FALLS VICTIM TO HIS OWN VICES. Their suspicions were vindicated when, only a few days after the funeral, an attorney for the state had shown up at the Daley Center with a sealed petition seeking exhumation of the body. The last I’d heard was that the corpse had been dug up and was awaiting analysis by the medical examiner.

  “I take it the ME found something?” I said to Hallie while we were still sitting in her car.

  “Yes. It was in the paper this morning. A drug used to treat mental patients—a second-generation something-or-other called Lucitrol.”

  “The antipsychotic?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. You know about it, I assume?”

  “Sure.” Lucitrol was another of Atria Laboratories’ biggest sellers. “They’re called second-generation or ‘atypical’ antipsychotics because they were developed to counteract some of the side effects of older medications like Haldol and Thorazine. The atypicals are controversial—no one knows yet if they’re really more effective or whether they’ll result in equally serious side effects over time. Was Gallagher under the care of a shrink, do you know?”

  “Not so far as it’s been reported.”

  “That’s odd. Usually antipsychotics are reserved for serious mental illness, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. So they’re saying she slipped him one?”

  “That’s what I’m guessing. Jane wouldn’t let them question her—she knows the routine—so she couldn’t tell me anything more than the bare-bones charge—first-degree murder in the death of Rory Gallagher. But how can that kind of drug be used to kill somebody?”

  “Depends on the person. The kind of medication we’re talking about is strongly counter-indicated for patients with, or at risk of, heart disease. Do you know what kind of shape Gallagher was in? The papers said he was a heavy drinker.”

  “And a pack-a-day man. He was still clinging, if barely, to his good looks, but I doubt he was competing in any marathons.”

  “First thing I’d do is subpoena his medical records, then. A fifty-year-old smoker with a drinking habit is a prime candidate for cardiac arrest.”

  “I will, but it won’t help. Legally, if you feed an otherwise-innocuous substance to someone with a special propensity—a peanut allergy, say—it’s the same as putting arsenic in their soup.”

  “I take it you’d have to know about the risk beforehand.”

  “That’s right. If you didn’t know it existed, there couldn’t be mens rea. It would just be an accident.”

  “And the likelihood of him accidentally ingesting a prescription antipsychotic isn’t high. But I still don’t understand why the police have zeroed in on your friend.”

  “That’s easy. The two of them have been an item for years.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t look at me like that. Just because a woman sleeps with a man doesn’t give her a reason to kill him.”

  “A lot of people, women included, would disagree with you.”

  Hallie laughed. “OK, I get your point. But Jane’s not like that. You’ll see when you meet her.”

  “I’m going to meet her?”

  “As soon as I can get her out of Cook County. I’m going to need your help.”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” I said, thinking of the confession I’d just been on the verge of making.

  “Please? You know all about these medications. What they’re used for, what the warnings say. I’m going to need someone to educate me about them in a hurry. I don’t think it will put much of a dent in your schedule. And I’m going to need at least one guy on the case who isn’t panting after Jane’s good looks.”

  “There are other ways of knowing when a woman is beautiful,” I said resentfully.

  “I know that. But I think I’ve guessed what you were trying to tell me a little while ago.”

  “You have?” I gulped.

  “Uh-huh,” Hallie said. “And it explains everything. Though I don’t know why you didn’t say something about it before. These days, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She sounded, I thought irritably, almost relieved. “But don’t worry. If that’s how you want it, your secret’s safe with me. I’m just glad we can stay friends.”

  It was better that way, I told myself. At least for the time being.

  After Hallie roared off, I entered my building and took the elevator up. The condominium stood just north of the Chicago River and was touted as a “luxury property” when I bought my unit. But it was the kind of cheap showpiece thrown up when times were good and developers were drowning in bank loans. Those times had changed. To the east, where yet another hotel complex had been planned, there was now a weed-infested lot. The building’s slipshod construction was revealing itself too, in walls that sprouted cracks where they’d been too hastily taped and floors that rattled underfoot like an O’Hare jetport.

  At nineteen I slipped my cane under my arm and walked the ten steps down the hall to my two-bedroom, unlocking the door and tossing my keys into a soup bowl on the stand just inside the door. The bowl had acquired a chipped rim in the dishwasher, and I’d been on the verge of putting it in the trash when I remembered the household organization tip I’d run across on a blind chat site. It was now the repository for all things that found their way into my pockets during the day: a fast-growing collection of change, spent cane tips, rubber bands, paper clips, charge receipts, and other junk I was too lazy to sort through when I got home. My cane joined my shoes in a heap of larger items on the floor.

  I padded over to the liquor cabinet and poured myself a bourbon, mentally surveying the room. It wasn’t a total man-cave—m
y housekeeper, Marta, attacked dust and dirt like a Navy Seal—but it wouldn’t have made the pages of Martha Stewart either: plain white walls hung with a few fading Tour de France posters, a poly tweed sofa I’d picked up at the floor sale when Marshall Field’s was being bought out by Macy’s, laminate shelves sagging under the weight of the cheap thrillers I’d tried to numb myself with after the divorce. I hadn’t always been this indifferent to my surroundings. Before my marriage I’d lived in a stylish prewar with custom built-ins to store all the serious reading that now sat in unopened boxes in my storage locker. It was only after my hurried exodus from the East that I discovered my inner frat boy. Now, imagining it with fresh eyes made me cringe, and I vowed to do something about it before too long.

  I showered and changed into pajama bottoms and an old bathrobe, poured myself another drink, and went out on the terrace—the apartment’s only decent feature—to think. A full moon hung like a dim flashlight over the Lake, and there was a bite to the air that hinted at the coming of fall. I settled into a lawn chair and put my bare feet up on the railing in spite of the chill. Urban night sounds floated up from the streets below. Glass shattering against a curb, the bap bap bap of a police siren on the far side of the Chicago River, a woman laughing tipsily at a companion’s comment. I sipped at my drink and shivered in the breeze and counted up all the reasons I should have begged off Hallie’s new case.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to work with her. But the closer we got, the more unfair it seemed to let her labor under a delusion. Though I hadn’t grown up in a large brood like Hallie’s, I knew the code only too well. Family was everything. Nothing—not even the God you prayed to on Sundays—was as sacred as protecting your loved ones. Somewhere along the way I’d lost sight of that cultural imperative, and now, in another of the ironies that seemed to rule my life, it threatened to keep Hallie and me permanently apart.