by Medora Sale
“Yeah, go on,” Sanders muttered, looking down at the desk. “You didn’t find anything else in the room?” he asked. “This is it?”
“That’s it. I checked everywhere: in the plant pots, under the furniture, behind the radiators, everywhere except under the tiles. I didn’t have a chisel. You want to go over the room again?”
Sanders chose to ignore the implied insubordination and went back to the crowd in the dining room. “The conservatory is free,” he said from the hallway. “If you’d rather be in there. We’ll be out of the upstairs rooms by the end of the day, I imagine; the living room may take longer.” He turned to Klaus. “Don’t try to use your photo lab until further notice.”
Klaus nodded somberly. “I don’t think I’d feel much like using it right now, anyway,” he said. “Feel free.”
Sanders sat grimly in the study once more. Mrs. Theresa Milanovich had just stalked out the door, filled with righteous indignation. She had certainly not been in the kitchen, had not exchanged any cross words with her sister or any other person in the house, and was devastated that Sanders could suggest such things. And now Veronika von Hohenkammer was huddled in the leather armchair, her feet tucked under her, shivering.
“When did you take your mother’s tea out into the kitchen and pour it out?” said Sanders, looking up from his page of notes.
“Who told you that?” she said quickly. He could see that her hands were trembling; when she noticed the direction of his eyes, she thrust them quickly down around her knees.
“And then you replaced the tea you poured out with more from the pot, didn’t you? And what did you put in that tea, Miss von Hohenkammer?”
“Nothing,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse. “I didn’t put anything into the tea. I just poured more from the pot and put the cup back where it was on the table.”
“Why?”
Veronika stared at him, confused. “It was cold,” she said at last. “No other reason.”
He looked back down at his notes. “What were you and your sister quarreling about last night?”
Veronika pulled herself upright in her chair and looked steadily at him. “I believe that even in this country I don’t have to answer your questions unless I have a lawyer present to advise me. Is this not true?”
Sanders was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of exhausted irritability and stood up. “Yes, Miss von Hohenkammer, it is. But it’s a privilege innocent people don’t invoke,” he said, his voice heavy with threat. “In my experience. I’ll see you later. With or without your lawyer.” He turned to Dubinsky. “Let’s get the hell out of here before I fall asleep,” he muttered. “Don’t go anywhere, Miss von Hohenkammer,” he added, yawning.
Veronika headed straight for her bedroom. She sat down on the bed, reached under the night table, and took out the telephone book. After looking up a number, she picked up the receiver and began to dial.
Harriet Jeffries was sprawled in a comfortable chair, clutching a mug of coffee and staring out at the deck. When she had finally reached home that morning, the sky was graying in the east, and the first birds were chirping and grumbling themselves awake. Grimly, she had showered, changed, and set about finishing off the work that had to be delivered by morning. At seven-thirty, she had driven over to the architect’s office and dropped it all off. The rest of the morning she had spent in bed, in and out of sleep, dreaming lurid dreams of people dying in agony, spewing brilliantly coloured poison from their lips and clutching accusingly at her. It hadn’t seemed worth staying in bed, and now she was staring out the French door, the unread morning paper in her lap and the foulest cup of coffee she had ever tasted becoming tepid in her hand. The telephone rang.
As she set the receiver down again, she cursed softly. Stupid, stupid Harriet. Overwhelmed with work, sick and tired of other people’s problems, yet she had just promised to drop everything in order to solve all of Nikki von Hohenkammer’s life crises. Why, with a city filled with relations, with a downtown bursting with lawyers, and plenty of money to spend on them, did she decide she needed to confide in Harriet Jeffries? Because her Mamma trusted her, she had said. Bullshit! She was simply fastening herself on the first convenient object she found, like any other leech. No, that was unfair. Her sister was a bitch, her brother-in-law a jackal, and she wouldn’t trust that business manager unless she had him right under her nose. But why me? was Harriet’s silent wail. Why not someone who enjoys collecting waifs and strays? Another shower, another change of clothes, and she would go over to comfort the oppressed.
With fifteen minutes’ sleep, more coffee, and another shower behind him, John Sanders was sitting at his desk considering the probability that Clara von Hohenkammer had been killed by one of her daughters. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that the woman had had a lover who, enraged with jealousy, had done her in, but if that was the case, who was he? The business manager? Could a woman really take that posturing fool seriously? The doctor? Improbable, in spite of his lascivious air. And jealous of whom? Perhaps they should dig a bit. He stared at the pile of material in front of him, too tired to decide where to start. When Dubinsky came back into the office, he found him still staring, this time out the window at the hazy sky.
“I got them,” he said loudly.
Sanders dragged his head around from the window. “Got what?”
“The lab reports. Here.” He threw them down in front of him.
“You read them?”
Dubinsky nodded.
“Then how about just giving me the high points.” Sanders yawned.
“Sure. In simple English, it was potassium cyanide, a dose of probably 250 to 300 milligrams. There were traces of cyanide in the teacup and in that paper you found, but nowhere else. Her stomach was almost empty, consistent with a light supper six or seven hours before she died and nothing else but the tea. So the cyanide must have been carried up from the basement in that piece of paper and dumped into the tea.”
“Unless she had a cyanide pellet in her lower left molar,” said Sanders.
“Yeah, sure,” said Dubinsky sourly. “You want any more?”
“I’ll look at it later,” he said. He had just picked up the notes he had been going over when the door to their office opened again.
“Excuse me, Inspector.” The intruder looked vaguely familiar. “A reply on your call to Munich. You want it now?”
“You the translator?”
“Not a professional translator, sir, but I speak German.”
“This from that lawyer?”
The translator nodded.
“Well, get on with it, then,” said Sanders irritably.
He took out a sheaf of notes from his pocket and began to read from them in the awkward manner of someone who is half-reading, half-translating. “Peter Lohr, the lawyer for the deceased, telephoned to say that the estate is being divided more or less equally between the two daughters, with individual bequests of between thirty and a hundred thousand marks going to her sister, her nephew, her housekeeper, and her business manager. He will be arriving in Toronto on Monday and staying at the Plaza II until he has settled the most pressing affairs connected with her estate over here. He would like to meet you and requests that you leave a message at the hotel naming a convenient hour. He speaks perfectly good English. And he is sorry to take such a long time to reply, but he was out for the evening. It’s near midnight in Munich, sir,” added the translator, just in case.
“I realize that, Constable—”
“Bauer, sir.”
“Bauer. And we went to the trouble of finding an interpreter and having him do the calling when I could have just picked up the phone and talked to him. He didn’t give you any more details?”
“He said they were complicated and that he would prefer to discuss them in person with you.”
“Wonderful,” said Sanders with a prodigious yawn.
&n
bsp; “Well,” said Dubinsky. “That does it, doesn’t it?”
“Does what?”
“All that crap about not knowing what’s in the will and being sure that she had been left without a nickel to her name. She never got cut out of the will. So, do we pick her up?”
“Hang on,” said Sanders wearily. “She isn’t going anywhere. Wait till the lawyer gets here. But let’s ask her a few more questions.”
Whatever John Sanders had expected to see when he walked into Clara von Hohenkammer’s conservatory that afternoon, it had not been Harriet Jeffries, in jeans and a sweatshirt, curled up on one end of the elegant little couch talking cozily to his chief suspect.
“Ah, Miss Jeffries,” he said, glaring at her. “Could I have a word with you?” His tones were clear and precise. And hostile.
“Certainly,” said Harriet coolly. “Why not? We could go—”
“No,” said Nikki. “Use this room. I have to talk to Bettl, anyway, about dinner and things like that. And I should call my sister.”
Sanders looked around the room and with heavy-footed deliberation sat down as far from Harriet as possible. She gave him an inquiring look and then waited, silent. He remembered her formidable capacity for unembarrassed silence. “What in hell are you doing here?” he asked finally.
“I should have thought that was obvious enough,” she said. “I’m visiting a friend. Veronika von Hohenkammer. I believe you’ve met her.”
“You’re damned right I’ve met her!” he exploded. “Since when was she a friend? And what are you doing messing around with my investigation?”
“And I could just as well ask why you’re messing around with my life. What difference does it make to you what friends I have and when I visit them? What right do you have to interfere in what I choose to do?”
Sanders gritted his teeth. It was time to bring reason into the discussion. “Look, Harriet, I’m sorry about last night.”
“Whatever for? You didn’t do anything. Not that I can recall, anyway.” She drawled these last few words, and he winced.
He rubbed his hands over his temples in a gesture of despair, took a deep breath, and stared down at the rough tiles of the floor. “What I’m sorry about,” he said carefully, “is that last night we didn’t get a chance to talk about anything that I think . . . that I was hoping we might be able to say.” He looked up. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Nikki has asked me to dinner. I have accepted.” Her voice was still chilly. “She is twenty-two, and her mother has just died. It seemed a humane thing to do.”
“Shit,” he muttered. “No, don’t get me wrong. Of course you’re doing the right thing, except . . .”
“Except that you think she poisoned her mother. Deliberately and, as they say, with malice aforethought. Right? Using her cousin’s generous supply of potassium cyanide. Well, she tells me she didn’t. I think you should at least entertain that possibility. There must have been other people who wanted a crack at poor Clara’s money. Haven’t you even considered them?”
“They didn’t have a chance to put cyanide in Clara’s cup. Nikki did,” said Sanders flatly.
“But maybe—”
Sanders held up a hand. “Just a minute. I’m not trying to steer you away from who could have done what when, but . . . about that cyanide. One question. How reasonable is Klaus Leitner’s explanation for having all that cyanide downstairs? “
“I don’t know,” said Harriet. “You didn’t tell me what his explanation was.” In spite of the coldness of the words, he thought he could detect a slight liveliness behind her wide green eyes and deadpan expression. And that meant there was still hope for him.
“He said he used it in developing—”
“Not terribly likely,” she interrupted.
“—negatives,” finished Sanders.
“Possible. Just possible. Did he say why? Or did he just throw it in, as if everyone used cyanide? I certainly don’t use it myself. Or own any. And I assure you, I know what I’m doing.”
Sanders frowned. “Just a minute,” he said. “I think those pictures are still in the study.” He stalked out, returning in a moment with Klaus Leitner’s orange box. “It was these two prints on top,” he said, dragging a small table over in front of Harriet and spreading the two prints out in front of her. “This is what he took a picture of,” said Sanders, pointing to the long-legged nude, “and this is what it turned into after he dumped cyanide and God knows what else on the negative. Dubinsky has the explanation written down. I could find him for you if that would help.”
Harriet looked at the two prints and shook her head. “No, don’t bother. My God, what pretentious bullshit these kids turn out. But it’s all right. He was using it to intensify the negative, and yes, you use cyanide for that. As a process I think it’s garbage, but a lot of very respected people would disagree with me. Artistic, you know,” she added, her tone heavy with sarcasm. He was relieved; he had developed a profound respect for her abilities, and he was afraid she would like that picture. “Anyway, he didn’t buy the cyanide just to poison Clara.” She stacked up the two prints and dropped them back in the box. “He’s not a bad photographer, by the way. That nude was good before he started screwing around with the processing. He still could have done it, though.”
“Look, Harriet. Nikki poured fresh tea for her mother shortly before she drank it. As far as I can find out, she was the only person who went anywhere near that cup. Everyone else is accounted for.”
“But why did the poison have to be in the cup? Why not in the pot?”
“Think about it, Harriet,” he said reasonably. “If you make a pot of tea or coffee at a party and fill it full of cyanide, then God only knows who you’re going to poison. I mean, the person you’re after might decide to have another drink instead, or someone else might see the fresh pot of tea and think, Oh, goody, that’s just what I need right now. And old Auntie Maude pours herself a cup. Not only do you do in someone you’re not after, but you won’t get the right person. Who’s going to want tea after watching Auntie Maude writhing on the carpet? For chrissake, Harriet, you could have drunk that tea,” he said with some irritation.
“Not a chance,” said Harriet. “She drank the most godawful muck—some foul-tasting weed or other from the Alps. She was forever trying to foist it on people; she said it calmed the nerves and cleaned the bloodstream and helped you sleep and I don’t know what else. It might have worked for her, but no one else would even try it.” She yawned and stretched, completely unaware of the effect of her words.
He was sitting bolt upright now, staring at her. “Are you sure?”
“Sure of what?”
“That no one else would drink her tea? No one else at the party?”
“Well, I don’t know everyone who was at the party, but they all knew Clara, and if they knew her, they’d met that tea. She carried it around with her and used to get restaurants to make it for her. I tried it once, and that was enough. And I suppose everyone else did, too. If you dumped cyanide in the teapot, no one but poor Clara would drink it. Except maybe someone who didn’t know her.” She considered that for a moment. “Not even that. It smelled very strange. You’d have trouble getting it close to your face without noticing that it was very peculiar stuff. So, of course, the poison could have been in the pot, couldn’t it?” She sat up straighter. “And that lets out Nikki.”
“No,” he said. “But it does let in a few more people, like anyone else who could have been in the kitchen after the tea was made. Damn. That means going back over everyone’s movements. . . .” His voice drifted off, and he stood up. “I’m still talking to your friend before I leave. And you can tell her she’s under surveillance, in case she decides to bolt.”
Harriet yawned and picked up a magazine. “You tell her,” she said in a bored voice. “But go ahead. Talk to her all you like.”
&n
bsp; Chapter 7
At precisely midnight, Constable Peter Franklin drove up the circular drive in front of Clara von Hohenkammer’s house and parked behind another cruiser. He slid quietly out of the car and walked over to the drowsy occupant of the other cruiser. “Everything quiet?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Constable Strong. “It’s about time you turned up,” he went on, yawning. “This is boring as hell. The girl has gone to bed, I think. That’s her bedroom up there”—he pointed to the front right set of windows on the second floor—“and she turned the light out about ten o’clock. The doors are all locked; the gardener is around. He’s supposed to look after security, so you might see something of him. If you stick around here, you’ll be able to keep an eye on everything well enough. Have fun.” And with this vain wish, he drove gently off.
Franklin was resigned as he settled back in the car. Not that he enjoyed surveillance, but tonight looked easy. All he had to do was stay awake. The crickets chirped; the trees rustled occasionally. In this law-abiding neighbourhood there was no other noise. Then, suddenly, the sound of a door closing reverberated like a gunshot in the silence. Franklin tensed, turned his head in the direction of the noise, and waited, alert to every whisper in the air. Soon he heard footsteps, loud and steady, on a gravel surface. He reached for the door handle and peered into the darkness to see what he was dealing with. Without warning, he was blinded by a bright light in his eyes. A soft voice said, “Evening, Officer.” The beam of light moved down, and he blinked.
“Who are you?” Franklin barked, opening the door and stepping out. The man was almost as tall as he was, but young and slighter in build. His English was accented, and his face was mild and conciliatory.
“Sorry . . . Paul Esteban. I’m gardener here, and in charge of security. Or I was, before Doña Clara was killed.” He shrugged. “I suppose I still am, until things are finished up. I was just making my last round. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” It was difficult to tell if he spoke with a sardonic edge to his voice or if, perhaps, he meant what he said.