Delilah froze into a cold, clear-thinking cube of ice.
“It was the windshield glass that made my dear, dead husband bleed. And what is more,” she added, to restore the situation clinchingly back where it belonged, “I screamed my head off getting him help so that Dr. Dow could see to it that he got an immediate transfusion and his life be saved. Why should I move both heaven and earth to save him if I had been so foolishly cruel-hearted as to want him to bleed to death?”
“It was the transfusion that killed him,” Bill said. “It was the transfusion that was meant to kill him, Mrs. Brown.”
“Don’t say that!” Damon cried in horror, releasing Delilah for the second time that evening like a hot potato. “My blood—no, not the blood I gave—”
“Yes, Mr. Lang. It was your blood that killed him. Wrong type. Mr. Brown died from cardiac and cerebral embolism due to your blood corpuscles collecting into clumps. Dr. Dow recognized the symptoms during the transfusion, when he had got over his shock and thought back about it—skin turning blue—rapid pulse—labored breathing—death—happens most likely when the donor’s blood is type AB and the recipient’s type is O. Cases on record about it.”
“But Pythias’s blood was type AB too. Same as mine,” Damon said, drifting deeper into the horror of it all.
“No, his blood group was type O. Dr. Dow has just finished testing it.”
“Dr. Dow don’t know his blood-testing, or any other kind of testing, from horse feathers,” Delilah insisted inelegantly. “My husbands type was AB. It’s marked right on his driver’s license.”
Bill selected Delilah’s license from its cellophane folder in her wallet.
He studied with satisfaction the small box in its lower right-hand corner labeled BLOOD TYPE. A space provided on licenses by the State of Florida, for the operator to print in his own blood group, for swift use in case of an automobile accident when an instant transfusion would be required.
“I see that your type is B. Mrs. Brown. Did you print it in yourself?”
“I did and what of it?”
“Just that our handwriting expert will testify it matches the B you added on your husband’s license—after you had changed the original O into an A by drawing a line down on either side of it and straightening its curved bottom into a crossbar. Like they change the cattle brands out west. Showed up plain under Dr. Dow’s microscope, Mrs. Brown.”
Bill added—as Damon groaned in tortured horror, and as Mabel plunged for the vodka, and as Delilah changed into a shrieking female—“Weirdest murder weapon I ever came across in my life.”
1Word lore note: the term cracker in its Southern sense has nothing to do with a barrel or Nabisco. It derives from the early Florida settlers’ prima donna habit of cracking their whips over the flanks of their oxen, mules, or horseflesh—and sharp-eared little Susie, as a consequence, saying to her pea-shelling mother, “Hark, Ma, here comes a cracker,” and Mother understanding her perfectly.
The Second Pulp Crime Page 39