Dante's Poison

by Lynne Raimondo

  We stepped out of the Land Rover into a strong southwest wind that coughed up dust in our faces and traversed a pitted asphalt surface to the storefront, which Bjorn told me was dominated by offers of heavy discounts on everything from laptops to toasters. A bell jingled over our heads as we crossed the threshold.

  I took Bjorn’s elbow and followed him over to the sales counter.

  “What can I do for you fellows?” came the thin, sour voice I recognized from the hearing as Urquhart’s. Otherwise the store sounded empty.

  “My cousin here is interested in buying a camera,” Bjorn said, indicating me by his side.

  Urquhart paused as though not sure whether he was being made fun of. “Is that some kind of joke?” he demanded of Bjorn.

  “Which part—the camera or the fact we’re cousins?”

  “Both is what I meant,” Urquhart said. “What business would he have with a camera?”

  I always loved it when people referred to me in the third person. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I said, turning toward Bjorn. “I mean, I can probably get a better deal on Amazon and I won’t have to put up with any insults.”

  “Very funny,” Urquhart said. “And I don’t believe for a minute you two are cousins.”

  “I suppose he’s never heard of albinism,” Bjorn said to me.

  “Sure I have,” Urquhart said. “My mother’s father was Albanian. Hey, wait a minute. I know who you are. You’re the blind sonofabitch who testified at the hearing.”

  I was amazed at how long it took him to catch on.

  “I don’t have anything to say to you. Or to him,” Urquhart said, obviously meaning Bjorn. “My lawyer told me not to.”

  “Your lawyer is why we’re here,” Bjorn said coolly. “We know he engineered the order seeking exhumation of your uncle’s body.”

  “So?” Urquhart said.

  “So how did he know that the autopsy would turn up evidence of poisoning? Unless someone told him.”

  “Like I said,” Urquhart replied. “I’m not talking to you.”

  Bjorn pressed on while I stood by, eager to learn how a pro would handle the situation.

  “Come now, Mr. Urquhart. Let’s not play around. I’ll tell you what I think. I think you knew ahead of time exactly what the autopsy would show.”

  Urquhart didn’t flinch a bit. “That’s crazy. And I’ve got work to do.”

  “That’s funny,” Bjorn replied. “I don’t see any customers in here.” He nudged my arm. “You, Mark?”

  “Not a one,” I deadpanned.

  “Yeah, well,” Urquhart said. “Business has been a little down lately.”

  “So I gathered from your credit reports. You’re behind on your bank payments. And this store and everything in it are mortgaged to the rooftop.”

  “Again, so what?” Urquhart said, seeming not in the least perturbed. “I’ve got more bills than I’ve got money to pay them, like everyone else in this stinking economy.”

  “Bills that you’ll be able to pay off quite easily with your uncle’s insurance money,” Bjorn said. “You don’t really expect us to believe you were torn up over his death.”

  “Believe what you like,” Urquhart said in the same flippant manner. “And now, unless you’re planning on shopping for a camera for your pale-faced cousin, you can just take yourself off the premises. Or do I have to call the cops?”

  I figured it was time for the amateur to get involved. “Good idea. Bjorn, why don’t you go back out to the car and get the video. I’m sure the police will find it fascinating, along with all the other evidence you’ve collected.”

  “Wha—” Bjorn began. I stepped on his shoe as a signal. “Of course,” he recovered quickly. “The video. Right, it’s in the boot.”

  “What video?” Urquhart snarled. “What other evidence?”

  “The evidence that you and your uncle’s so-called fiancée were involved. You didn’t think anyone would find out? Bjorn here snapped some very interesting footage of the two of you. That plus the insurance money and the two of you conspiring to have his body dug up should make for a very interesting tale.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with him getting killed. It was that bitch of a lawyer,” Urquhart protested, finally starting to sound worried.

  “Sure it was. Except that the bitch, as you call her, didn’t go asking anyone to have your uncle’s body exhumed. You did. How else would you know what the ME would find unless you put it there yourself? Though I’ll allow it could have been Ms. Sparks who slipped him the pill.”

  “I . . . I can produce an alibi,” Urquhart bleated.

  I shook my head. “That’s not going to help you get around a charge of accessory to murder. See, the way I figure it is this: you and Ms. Sparks have been an item for some time. Maybe your uncle introduced you, or maybe Lucy cozied up to him after the two of you hatched your little plan. There was never any engagement to Gallagher, and I’ll bet when the police go looking for the receipt for that engagement ring, they’ll find your name on it. Which means Ms. Sparks was lying when the prosecution put her on the stand, and not just about the wedding bells. She testified that she made Gallagher breakfast that morning and didn’t eat any of it herself. It’s as good an inference as any that she poisoned him, and no one is going to believe she acted alone—especially with a million and a half in insurance money going to you when he died. You see how it all looks, don’t you? Once the police find out about you two, they’ll draw the only sensible conclusion. What do you say we go over and tell them right now, Bjorn?”

  “I’m for it,” Bjorn said, pulling his car keys from his pocket and giving them a shake. We turned in unison as if to go.

  “Wait, wait—you’ve got it all wrong!” Urquhart nearly shouted.

  “Which part in particular?” I said over my shoulder. “That you murdered your uncle or that you were having it on with his girl behind his back?”

  “She wasn’t his girl,” Urquhart said shakily. “Oh, all right, she slept with him from time to time after we got together, but it was just an act. We didn’t want him to find out about us. I was afraid he’d get pissed off and write me out of his will. We met at a barbecue at his place last fall. And yeah, it was me she was going to marry. But we never tried to kill my uncle, I swear.”

  I turned to face him again: “I’m having a hard time believing that after Sparks perjured herself.”

  “That was just to shore up the homicide claim. Gene Polanski explained it to me. I’d get double if my uncle was murdered, and it was in our interest to point the finger at another suspect. I always hated Barrett, so it was an easy decision to try to pin the blame on her. Stuck-up piece of pussy. I never understood what Rory wanted with her, but she had him twirled around her little finger. I thought it would kill two birds with one stone to get her in trouble, so we had Lucy go to the police with that made-up story. Lucy wasn’t even with Rory that morning. She was with me. We didn’t know for sure he’d been poisoned until after the body was exhumed.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said skeptically. “But then what made you think about digging it up in the first place? Or did a little bird just happen to come along and whisper in your ear?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Urquhart said. He opened a drawer behind the counter. “I got this.”

  “Two anonymous notes in one case,” Bjorn was saying on the ride back. “It’s like a Halloween prank.”

  “Or an Edgar Allan Poe story,” I said.

  What Urquhart had pulled from the drawer had knocked the wind out of both our sails: another note, identical in appearance to the one left for me:

  TSK, TSK YOU’VE BEEN A BAD BOY.

  AREN’T YOU CURIOUS ABOUT

  WHAT REALLY KILLED YOUR UNCLE?

  DO A LITTLE SPADE WORK AND FIND OUT.

  BUT DON’T TELL THE POLICE OR

  THERE COULD BE GRAVE CONSEQUENCES.

  According to Urquhart the note had arrived in his mailbox the day of Gallagher’s funeral, seale
d but without a stamp or a postmark. After contacting his lawyer, he and Polanski had determined not to show it to the police, since the opening line “You’ve been a bad boy” could easily be misinterpreted to suggest Urquhart had a hand in his uncle’s death. Polanski had put on his thinking cap and come up with the way to keep Urquhart’s name out of it by having Sparks sign an affidavit “on information and belief” that Gallagher was the victim of foul play, which Polanski then passed on to his ASA friend. In their haste to pin the murder on Jane, the police didn’t look past Sparks’s explanation that she “just had a feeling about Gallagher’s death,” and Urquhart begged us not to tell them the true story now. “It will just look like we did it,” he moaned abjectly. I almost felt sorry for him.

  “By the way, that was nice work you did back there,” Bjorn remarked from the driver’s seat. “How did you know Urquhart and the Luvabull were hot and heavy?”

  “I didn’t. But I thought her outpouring of grief at the hearing was bogus, and I figured if she was going out of her way to help Urquhart with an affidavit, they had to be more than just casual acquaintances.”

  “Do you think Urquhart was telling us the truth about Sparks being with him the morning Gallagher died?”

  “No. I think he was scrambling to construct an alibi for both of them. I’d bet my last dollar she and Gallagher were together, just the way she testified. And I think Gallagher knew about her affair with his nephew.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Go back to her testimony at the hearing. His remark to her—‘Lucy, I think it’s time you got everything you deserve’—sounds like he knew something was off. If so, I wonder what he was planning for her?”

  “The trouble with this latest development is that it puts a major dent in my theory,” Bjorn said morosely. “I mean, if Urquhart didn’t know about the poisoning ahead of time, he’s probably innocent.”

  It also punched a gaping hole in my surmise that Jane was the author of the note left for me. Both the tone—and, according to Bjorn, the appearance—of the two missives were identical, implying common authorship. But I couldn’t fathom why Jane would have pushed to get Gallagher’s body exhumed, especially if—as was looking increasingly likely—she had something to hide.

  “Do you think we should go to the police with what we have?” Bjorn asked.

  “Not yet. As you say, it’s sounding less and less like Urquhart was the killer, and if we go to them now it will just look like we’re spinning our wheels. It won’t help us later if we ever do find out who murdered Gallagher. I’d rather stay mum until we have proof of something concrete to show them.”

  Bjorn dropped me off at my home at 6:00 p.m. with promises to attack with renewed vigor the subject of Gallagher’s whereabouts after leaving Gene & Georgetti’s that night, and to see what further information he could coax out of Gallagher’s cardiologist—or her staff—concerning who else may have known of the journalist’s heart condition. I could have taken that job myself but figured Bjorn’s methods were better suited to the task.

  I arrived upstairs at my apartment feeling antsy and without any plans for the night except fretting over Hallie and Mike. Marta, my housekeeper, had been in that day and left a place setting out on the table as a signal that she’d cooked a meal, though I could have guessed it from the garlicky bouquet emanating from the oven. At least it meant I wouldn’t go hungry. I kicked off my shoes and trotted over to the kitchen, stuck on a pair of cooking mitts—oversized ones that went up over my elbows—and was gingerly maneuvering the casserole out and onto the stovetop when my landline began ringing. It was my building superintendent, telling me he had accepted delivery of an envelope for me that afternoon and asking when I’d like to come down to get it. Not another one, I thought pessimistically.

  It turned out to be from Klutsky, as I found out when I got back upstairs and put the first of five sheets on the scanner in the spare bedroom I used as an office. “Nothing on the server front yet,” he informed me in a thoughtfully typed note. “But I thought you might find these of interest.” I fed the rest of the sheets into the machine and went back to the kitchen to suss out what Marta had left for me, lifting a corner of aluminum foil from the casserole dish and sniffing. It was one of her specialties, a Venezuelan pasticho bubbling with tomatoes and cheese. I cracked open a bottle of beer and wolfed down half the pasta straight from the pan while the scanner did its wheeze-click, wheeze-click in the next room. When I was done with the meal, I decided it was high time I gave Marta another raise. I downed another of my pills, scraped the leftover food into a refrigerator dish, and put the pan in the sink to soak. Then I went to listen to the scanned report of what Klutsky had sent me.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something: Gallagher’s cell-phone records for the last month of his life. I guessed that Gallagher’s phone had been paid for by the Sun-Times and congratulated Klutsky on having thought of that angle while I considered what to do with the information. Bjorn could probably engineer a reverse lookup of the numbers, but that would have to wait until morning and would in all likelihood yield nothing but a list of names. In the meantime, I could get a head start on things. The list of outgoing calls was as long as my arm, but it was better than moping or trying to find something to distract me on TV. I took a swipe at my watch face. It was a little after 7:00 p.m. With most Midwesterners turning off their lights around eleven, I had a window of about four hours.

  The first thing I needed was an accessible list. I sent the scanned records to my Braille printer while I changed into a sweatshirt and jeans. I returned to the kitchen for another beer (for courage) and checked my phone to make sure its caller-ID function was disabled. When I returned to my printer it had obligingly produced a half-inch stack of pages with Gallagher’s outgoing calls arranged in a single column from top to bottom in order of recency. I cleared the surface of my desk of clutter and got out a Braille eraser—a wooden device shaped like a golf tee but slightly larger and sturdier—and a 3-D marker, another handy tool with ink that dried to leave tactile markings on paper.

  If you’ve ever wondered how it works, the Braille alphabet is based upon a “cell” consisting of six dots arranged in two side-by-side columns. The uppermost dot in the left column is numbered 1, the next one down 2, and the one farthest down, 3. The same pattern is repeated in descending order—4, 5, and 6—in the column on the right:

  1 4

  2 5

  3 6

  Not all the dots within a cell are raised. The ones that are identify a letter. For example, a raised dot at 1 is an a, raised dots at 1 and 2 are a b, and at 1 and 4 a c. And so on. The first ten letters of the Latin alphabet, a to j, use only the top four positions. The next ten are identical except for the addition of a raised dot at 3, and the letters after that pick up another raised dot at 6. The numerals one through ten are also identical to a through j except that they are preceded by a symbol shaped like a left-facing capital L, indicated by raised dots at 3, 4, 5, and 6.

  As you might imagine, the dots have to be very small to allow as many words as possible to fit on a page. Space considerations also dictate that the area between lines be kept to a minimum, making one of the principal challenges not getting lost in a field of text. I usually solved this problem by reading two-handed, deciphering letters with my right hand while using my left as a guide to the next line. But with such a long list of numbers, I couldn’t count on keeping track of my place. Hence, the eraser and marker.

  I started on the most recent calls first. I got no answer to the first two numbers I called, so I erased the backward L in front of them by flattening the dots as a signal to return to them later. The third number put me through to the answering machine of Gallagher’s dentist, so I drew a line through it using the marker. My fourth and fifth calls likewise produced no answers, so I checked them off with the eraser, too. On the sixth call, I got a human being.

  “Yeah?” said a curt male voice coming on the line.

  I lau
nched into the speech I’d prepared.

  “Hi, my name is Mark Halliday. I’m a paid canvasser for the Industrial Wellness Association. We’re doing a survey of workplace satisfaction, and I was wondering if I could take a few short minutes of your time . . .”

  Click.

  A few more clicks made me think I ought to sweeten the pot, so the next time someone answered—a tired-sounding woman with a child screaming in the background—I modified my approach.

  “Hi, my name is Mark Halliday. I’m a paid canvasser for the Industrial Wellness Association, and we’re offering a chance to win an all-expenses-paid cruise to the Bahamas to anyone willing to answer a few brief questions. The entire survey will only take five minutes of your time—”

  “What line?” the woman asked.

  “Excuse me?” I said in confusion.

  “I’m asking what cruise line. If this isn’t some kind of scam, you oughta be able to tell me.”

  I improvised. “Royal Starfish.”

  “Never heard of them,” she said, hanging up.

  Before the next call, I went on the Internet and selected the name of a popular cruise-ship company to use in my spiel if questioned. This time it worked, and I got to ask my questions:

  “On a scale from one to ten, with one being completely unsatisfied and ten being extremely satisfied, how would you rate your experience with your current employer?”

  “I dunno,” said the male voice on the other end of the line. His speech was slurred like he’d knocked back a few. “A four, maybe?”

  I continued in this way, asking after his satisfaction level with his workplace conditions, supervisor, employee benefits, and salary, before getting to the information I was really after.

  “And just to complete the survey, would you mind telling me your name and the name of your employer? I’ll need that information to enroll you in the cruise ship drawing. You can be sure that the answers you gave me earlier will be held in the strictest confidence.”