“We don’t drink on duty,” the lean man said.
His plump partner blew his nose and said nothing. Marcia noted a slight tic in his left cheek.
There was a conversational lapse. Finally, the lean man said, “How’d you and your husband ever find this place, Mrs. Harmon? It sure makes a wonderful hideout.”
“It’s the summer home of a doctor at the State Mental Hospital,” Marcia said. “I’m connected with the hospital, you know.”
“Oh?” Minor said interestedly. “You mean you work there?”
“Yes, I’m on the staff. Dr. Peterson, who owns this place, is my department head.”
“It’s sure a fine hideout. We had trouble finding it even with directions. I didn’t know there was any place this isolated so close to the city.”
“It’s hardly close,” Marcia said. “It’s a good sixty miles and a little too isolated. We have to drive twenty miles for groceries.”
“Well, your troubles will be over tomorrow,” Minor said philosophically. Then he sniffed. “That spaghetti sauce sure smells good.”
“It’s only in case my husband and the sergeant fail to bring in any fish,” Marcia said. “If they do, it goes into the freezer and I’ll carry it home when we go in tomorrow. Unless you two don’t like fish. I’ll be glad to save enough out for you.”
“I’m not crazy about fish,” the lean man admitted. “I’d prefer spaghetti if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” Marcia said. “How about you, Mr. Tobin?”
The younger man was looking too miserable to have much of an appetite for anything. Marcia began to suspect she might end up with a bed patient, for he seemed to be getting worse by the minute. However, he said in a high voice, “Spaghetti’s about my favorite dish.”
“Then I’d better stir it again, or you’ll have burned sauce,” Marcia said. “Excuse me a minute.”
While she was in the kitchen stirring the sauce, the phone rang in the front room. Replacing the pot lid, she returned to the front room to find the lean man had answered it.
“Dr. Harmon?” he was saying into the phone. He glanced at Marcia questioningly. “I didn’t know your husband was a doctor.”
“He isn’t,” Marcia said. “He’s an architect. That’s for me.” Moving over to him, she took the phone from his hand. The man remained standing next to her, obviously with the intention of eavesdropping. She didn’t resent it, though. During the past few weeks she had become so accustomed to police supervision of her and her husband’s every move that she accepted it as a matter of course. She even held the receiver slightly away from her ear so that he could hear both sides of the conversation.
“Dr. Harmon speaking,” she said into the phone.
“Hi, Marcia,” came the voice of Dr. Frank Peterson. “Just checking to see how you’re making out. Who was that answering the phone?”
“Just one of the police officers. We have three protecting us now. Everything’s under control, Frank. The place is lovely. It’s actually more comfortable than our city apartment. We certainly appreciate your lending it to us.”
“It was only standing vacant anyway,” Dr. Peterson said. “With my blasted hospital schedule, I’m lucky if I can get down there two weeks out of the year. Jed testifies tomorrow, doesn’t he?”
“Yes. At ten a.m.”
“Then you’ll be coming back to work?”
From the corner of her vision Marcia was conscious of the plump George Tobin rising from his chair and going into the kitchen. Vaguely she wondered why, then dismissed it when she decided he probably was after a drink of water.
She said, “I’d like to hear Jed’s testimony tomorrow. How about coming in the next day?”
“I guess we can manage without you one more day,” Peterson said. “But work is piling up.”
“I’ll skip my vacation,” she promised.
When she hung up, John Minor said, “So you’re a lady doctor, huh? And you cook too.”
“Not very neatly, I’m afraid,” Marcia said, suddenly noticing her white apron was freckled with brown spots where an exploding bubble of sauce had sprayed her.
“It looks as delicious as it smells,” Minor said, grinning at the spots. “I don’t know if I can hold out until six o’clock.”
“I can serve you and Mr. Tobin early, if you like,” Marcia said. “It won’t be any more trouble.”
“Well, it’s kind of early yet. I’ll see what George has to say.”
Marcia ruefully examined her spotted apron again. “I’d better put this to soak before the stains set.”
She went up the central hall to the bathroom, tossed the apron into the tub and ran a couple of inches of water over it. Then she went on to the bedroom she and her husband shared and donned a fresh apron.
The house was laid out with the combination front room and dining room running across its whole front. The central hall divided the rest of the house, the kitchen and bath being on one side of it, the two bedrooms on the other. There were two inside doors to the kitchen, one from the front room, the other from the hallway. Instead of returning to the front room, Marcia turned into the kitchen from the hallway, meaning to check her spaghetti sauce again.
Plump George Tobin apparently had just turned off one of the surface burners of the electric stove, for it still glowed with heat. His coat was laid across a chair, exposing a shoulder holster with a heavy automatic in it, and his right shirt sleeve was rolled past his elbow. He held a spoon containing liquid in one hand and was drawing the liquid into a hypodermic syringe. He gave her a startled look.
“Just having a shot of insulin,” he said nervously. “I’m a diabetic.”
“Oh?” she said in a calm voice. “Can I help you?”
“I’m used to doing it myself, thanks.”
Setting the empty spoon on the table, he turned his back. Marcia watched quietly as he sank the needle into his forearm, her face suddenly pale, but her serene expression giving no indication of the thoughts which began flickering through her mind.
Opening one of the double doors beneath the sink, she tilted a waste can forward, probed in the trash and drew out a small round tin with a removable lid. The curtains of the window over the sink were drawn back on each side. She placed the tin in the far right corner of the sill, so that the hanging edge of the curtain on that side concealed it.
After a glance at the plump man, whose back was still to her, she opened the spice cabinet and took down a small box. Lifting the lid of the pot on the stove, she liberally sprinkled from the box, set it back in the cabinet and stirred the sauce.
By then the plump man had completed his self-medication. Glancing over his shoulder at her, he laid the hypodermic syringe on the table, rolled down his sleeve and slipped back into his coat. He took a small oblong box from his coat pocket, placed the syringe in the box and dropped it back into his pocket. Then he turned to face Marcia.
She continued stirring the sauce, paying no attention to him. After a moment of contemplating her, he moved into the front room.
Marcia tasted the sauce, pursed her lips, gave it one more stir and replaced the lid. Moving toward the front room, she halted a foot or two back from the door when she heard the plump man whispering to his partner. She couldn’t make out the whispered words, but she clearly heard the response.
“You damn fool!” the self-styled sergeant said in a low but carrying voice. “She’s a doctor! She knows you weren’t taking any insulin shot. Did you have to take a pop right now?”
Marcia walked into the room. Both men looked up at her. She gazed back at them steadily.
After a period of silence, the lean man said, “I guess you tumbled, huh?”
She nodded. “Insulin doesn’t have to be heated in a spoon. Heroin does. I realize now that Mr. Tobin’s perspiring and fidgeting were symptoms of addiction. It seems unlikely that a member of the district attorney’s staff would be an addict, so I assume you’re Mark Flager’s men.”
/> “You don’t seem to be very scared by it,” the man who called himself Sergeant Minor said slowly.
“I am,” she assured him. “It just happens to be necessary in my work to control my emotions. May I ask what your plans are now?”
“We don’t have any until six o’clock, Doc,” the plump man said. “We’ll just all sit around and wait until then.” He was no longer sweating, his manner was relaxed, and he had a smile on his face.
Marcia said, “I assume you mean to kill my husband. Since you can hardly afford to leave witnesses, I suppose you mean to murder Sergeant Cartwright and me too.”
The lean man said with a touch of regret, “We hoped to keep things friendly until the last minute. Now I guess we’ll have to tie you up, unless you want to behave.”
“How do you wish me to behave?” she asked.
“Well, if you sit down and stay quiet, we can still keep it more or less friendly.”
Marcia seated herself on the sofa and primly folded her hands in her lap. Glancing at her watch, she saw it was now a quarter after four.
Fifteen minutes passed in total silence.
Eventually the lean man said, “Ain’t it about time to give your sauce a stir?”
“Why should I bother?” Marcia asked. “Apparently none of us is going to live to eat it.”
The younger man said, “Me and my buddy eat, Doc. How soon’ll it be ready?”
“It’s ready now. It gets better the longer it simmers, though. Providing it doesn’t burn, which I’m hoping it does.”
The lean man checked his watch. “No point in letting good spaghetti sauce go to waste. We’ll have it at about five. Go give it a stir, George. And look out the kitchen window while you’re there. If the fish aren’t hitting, they may come in early.”
The plump man rose and entered the kitchen. He was gone about five minutes.
When he came back, he said, “There’s a boat way out there, but it ain’t heading this way. That sauce sure smells good. Full of meatballs too. I could eat any time.”
“You know how to cook spaghetti?” the pseudo-sergeant asked.
“I think you just put it in water and boil it.”
The lean man looked at Marcia. “Maybe we better let her cook it. How long’s the spaghetti itself take, Doc?”
“About ten minutes,” Marcia said. “The water has to be brought to a boil first, though, and that takes about ten minutes too. If you plan to eat at five, you had better start boiling water now. You’ll find pans in the lower cabinet to the left of the stove.”
“You must not have heard me right, Doc. I said you were going to cook it.” Marcia stared at him steadily until he smiled without humor. “You rather be tied up?”
“I suppose cooking for you two is the lesser of two evils,” she said, rising. She moved into the kitchen and both men followed. As she bent to remove a small roasting pan from the cabinet to the left of the stove, the lean man looked out the window.
“That their boat?” he asked.
Marcia’s heart leaped into her throat. But when she rose holding the pan, there was no visible emotion in her manner. Peering out the window, she saw a small boat in the distance slowly moving shoreward.
“I can’t tell so far off,” she said. “It’s moving too slowly to be coming in anyway. Looks like it’s trolling.”
Carrying the pan to the sink, she ran it half full of water, set it on a burner and turned the control to high. She sprinkled salt into it. The lean man continued to gaze out the window. Finally he moved back to seat himself at the kitchen table, where his partner was already seated.
“They’ll be a half hour to forty-five minutes getting in at that rate,” he said. “I guess we can relax.”
It was a quarter to five by Marcia’s watch when the water boiled. Turning the burner control to simmer, she opened a package of thin spaghetti and dropped it into the water. The lean man rose to look out the window again.
“Still a good quarter mile out,” he said. “I think they’re heading in, but I guess they’re gonna troll clear to shore. They’ll be a long time yet.”
He returned to his seat. Marcia got down two plates and set one before each man.
“You’re not gonna eat with us?” the plump man asked.
“I hardly feel much appetite,” Marcia said dryly.
“You’re certainly a cool one,” the lean man said admiringly. “Most women would be having the screaming-meemies by now.”
Without answering, she placed silverware and paper napkins alongside the plates, set a dish of butter and a shaker of grated Parmesan cheese in the center of the table, and got a long loaf of Italian bread from the bread box and began to slice it.
“Some of that beer you mentioned earlier would go good with spaghetti,” the plump man said.
After placing a plate of sliced bread on the table, Marcia silently got two cans of beer from the refrigerator, opened them and decanted them into tall, fourteen-ounce glasses. When she had served the beer, she tested the spaghetti with a fork, then turned off both the burner under it and the one under the sauce.
She let the spaghetti stand in its water while she lifted the sauce pot with a couple of pot holders and emptied it into a large bowl. She carried the bowl to the table and stuck a serving spoon into it. Then she placed a colander in the sink, dumped the cooked spaghetti in it and let it drain before transferring it to a second large bowl.
When she had placed the spaghetti bowl on the table with a serving spoon and fork in it, she asked sardonically, “Anything else?”
“I guess we’re set,” the lean man said. “Go ahead, George, while I take another look.”
He rose to peer out the window again. When he reseated himself, he said, “Still trolling. They’ll be a good half hour yet.”
Marcia stood leaning against the sink as the men served themselves heaping portions of spaghetti and flooded it with the rich, dark brown sauce. Each helped himself to four thick meat balls.
“Umm,” the lean man said after his first taste. “You make it better than the Italians. But you sure make it hot. I don’t mean just hot with heat. Hot with spice.”
“My husband likes it heavily spiced,” Marcia said. “He says if it doesn’t make you sweat, it isn’t good sauce.”
There was silence for the next fifteen minutes as the men ate. The lean man was the first to finish. Draining his beer glass, he pushed back his chair and patted his stomach.
“I guess it was good sauce,” he said. “I’m sweating like a pig.”
Rising, he went over to look out the window. “We sure timed that right,” he said. “They’ve given up trolling and are heading in wide open. They’re only about a hundred yards out.” The plump man finished his beer, walked over to the window and looked out too. Then he looked at Marcia and drew his automatic from beneath his arm.
“Guess we better put her out,” he suggested. “She might try to warn them by letting out a scream.”
“It wouldn’t be very wise to do that,” Marcia said in a steady voice. “You would be committing suicide. I’m the only doctor within twenty miles, and you would be beyond help by the time you drove that far.”
“What?” the lean man said with a frown. “What are you talking about?”
“Do you feel a slight burning in your stomachs?” Marcia asked. “And is your warm perspiration beginning to turn to cold sweat? Look at each other. That green cast to your skin is the first symptom of phosphorus poisoning.”
Involuntarily the two men swung to stare at each other’s face. Then, both glared at the woman.
“I don’t see no green cast,” the lean man said. “What you getting at, Doc? Spit it out fast.”
Reaching behind her, Marcia pushed aside the right-hand curtain and lifted the round tin from the sill. Opening it to show it was empty, she held up the label for them to see. In large red letters it said: RAT POISON.
“I realized that you were a couple of Mark Flager’s hired killers the moment I saw Geor
ge giving himself a shot,” she said. “While he was explaining to you that I’d caught him in the act, I seasoned the spaghetti sauce with this.”
The men gazed at the empty tin in horror. George began to bring up his gun.
“I can save your lives,” Marcia said quickly. “Providing you let me give you the antidote at once. In another fifteen minutes, no one will be able to save you.”
George squeaked in his high voice, “Get up the antidote fast, or I’ll blow your head off!”
Marcia’s face was as pale as the two men’s, but her voice remained serene. “You’ll do nothing of the sort, because you’re dead if you do. I’ll give you the antidote the moment you lay your guns on the kitchen table.”
The men stared at her. She said quietly, “The basic ingredient in rat poison is phosphorus, and every minute allows more of it to absorb into your bloodstream. By now your stomachs must be burning quite painfully and you’re experiencing slight nausea. Feel how clammy your skins have become? You don’t have time to quibble.”
The men turned to gaze into each other’s face, and what each saw in the other’s reduced him to panic. Each clasped a hand to his stomach, as though acute pain had suddenly gripped him there. With one accord, they tottered to the kitchen table. The plump man dropped his automatic upon it, the lean man dipped a hand beneath his arm and tossed a snub-nosed revolver next to it.
Marcia picked up both guns, quickly walked to the back door and tossed them outdoors.
Closing the door again, she said briskly, “The first step is to arrest the action of the phosphorus; then we’ll have to clear your stomachs.”
Opening the cabinet beneath the sink where the waste can was kept, she lifted out a quart bottle and poured about three ounces each into two glasses.
“This is nothing but turpentine,” she said. “It will form a hard, solid mass with the phosphorus and prevent any further absorption into the bloodstream. Drink it down.”
Both men obediently drank.
“You’re not out of the woods yet,” Marcia said in the same brisk tone. “Now you need an emetic.”
Lifting down two large glasses of the same size she had served the beer in, she ran them nearly full of warm water. Spooning dried mustard into the water, she began stirring it.
Women's Wiles Page 19