A Pinch of Poison

by Frances Lockridge

  “I suppose, though,” he added, “that I might have a look at your sister’s room. Just as a matter of routine.”

  He got up and Mullins got up. Then, in no hurry, Ashley got up and led the way upstairs. Mullins was impressed by the stairs. “Some joint,” he whispered to Weigand. “Duplex and everything. It musta set them back.”

  Weigand nodded. It certainly must have set somebody back. But he gathered Mrs. Ashley could stand it, married twice to men in commodities. It made him think of something.

  “By the way,” he said, “did your sister inherit money—from her father, that is? He had money, I suppose.”

  “Plenty,” Randall said. “Yes. Lois got most of it, except for a trust fund for Mother. When Mother dies Lois gets—Lois would have gotten—that too. Why?”

  “Well,” said Weigand, “we just like to know about such things. Who gets it now?”

  “I don’t,” Randall said, rather hotly. “If that’s what you mean.”

  Weigand said he hadn’t meant anything. He just wanted to know.

  “Well,” Randall said, “I don’t know. Except that she had made a will. You can find out from that, I suppose.”

  Weigand said he supposed he could.

  Randall led them down a short corridor on the second floor of the duplex and opened a door. Lois Winston’s bedroom was large, with French windows opening on a small terrace. It was done in soft tones of yellow and gray. Weigand noticed with an odd feeling that the bed had been turned back. He noticed a silvered thermos on the table by the bed and crossed to it, lifting the top. It was filled with water. The room, he thought, looked as if it had been lived in happily, and as if it had nothing to tell of unhappiness and death. Then he noticed, on the table beside the thermos, a heavy book—a volume, a glance told him, of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He lifted it idly. It was Volume 11, Gunn to Hydrox. Into the light-hued room it brought an inappropriate suggestion of weighty contemplation.

  “I wonder,” he said aloud, “what she had been reading in that?”

  Nobody answered. Weigand supposed to himself that it had nothing to do with him. But it was an anomaly, and faint curiosity still stirred.

  “Did your sister have a personal maid?” he asked Randall Ashley.

  “Yes,” Randall said. “At least, she and Mother shared Anna. Why?”

  “I’d like to see her,” Weigand said. Ashley looked about for somebody to send. Neither Weigand nor Mullins moved. Ashley went into the hall and called, “Anna!” Then he came back. Weigand crossed to a desk and opened it, looking at papers in pigeon-holes. A drawer was crowded with papers and photographs. All this would have to be gone through, but not now.

  “We’ll take this along,” he told Ashley. Randall Ashley nodded, indifferently. There was a knock at the half-open door and Weigand, turning, said “Yes?” to Anna. Anna was a tall, spare woman of forty, her face gray and drawn. But her voice was unshaking and quiet.

  “Yes, sir?” She said it to Randall Ashley, but Weigand answered.

  “I’m a police lieutenant, Anna,” he said. “I want to ask you a question or two.”

  “Yes, sir.” Anna’s voice was still quiet.

  “I want to know what Miss Winston did this afternoon and evening,” he explained. “When she came home, what she did, anything you remember she said.”

  Anna told him. Miss Lois had come home a little before six, spoken to Mr. Randall and his friends in the living-room and gone to her own room, after telling Mary that she wanted Anna. Then she had bathed and rested for perhaps an hour and then Anna had helped her dress to go out with Mr. McIntosh, who came for her about half-past seven. She remembered nothing of importance.

  “I wanted to talk to her, Anna, don’t you remember?” Randall said. “And she was dressing or something?”

  Yes, Anna remembered that. It was not, she indicated, of importance. And nothing else? She could think of nothing else. The last she had seen of Miss Lois was when the girl left the room to join Mr. McIntosh.

  “I stayed and—turned down her bed,” Anna said. Her voice hesitated for a moment as she spoke, but regained its soft steadiness.

  “You were very fond of Miss Winston, weren’t you, Anna?” Weigand said.

  “Yes, sir,” Anna said. She did not amplify, or need to.

  “By the way,” Weigand said, “this copy of the Encyclopædia. It wasn’t usually kept here, I suppose? Did she read it today, do you know?”

  Anna remembered and seemed surprised.

  “Why, yes,” she said. “She had me get it for her a few minutes after she came in. I had forgotten.”

  “Did she read it, do you know?”

  Anna thought she must have. It was lying on the bed, open and face down, when she straightened up after Miss Winston had left. Anna had picked it up and closed it, and put it on the table. Weigand said, “Um-m-m.

  “You didn’t,” he asked, “happen to notice what page it was opened to? Or what subject?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “It was open about the middle,” she said. “I didn’t notice exactly.”

  “No,” Weigand said. “There was no reason why you should. Probably it doesn’t matter.”

  He turned to Ashley.

  “We’ll be going, now,” he said. “I’ll send a man in for the papers in your sister’s desk—he’ll be right in. And I’ll want to see your mother when she gets in tomorrow. You’ve got in touch with her, I suppose?”

  Ashley had. He had persuaded her not to come in tonight, but to wait until morning. Weigand nodded, and led the way out of the bedroom. Downstairs, the maid who had admitted them waited in the foyer to show them out.

  “A drink or something?” Ashley said. Mullins looked hopeful, but Weigand shook his head.

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  Ashley turned into the living-room and the maid opened the door. But then she stepped through after them and closed it behind her, so that the latch just failed to catch. Weigand looked down at her. She was a slight, pretty thing, now pale and agitated.

  “Yes?” he said.

  She spoke rapidly, excitedly.

  “I’ve got to tell you,” she said. “You ought to know. They’re married. I heard them tonight when they thought I wasn’t around and they’re married. He said, ‘Now that we’re married.’”

  “Who is this?” Weigand said. “Mr. Ashley?”

  “Him,” she said. “Buddy. And that singer girl. They’re married, only nobody is supposed to know.”

  She spoke breathlessly.

  “I tell you they’re married!” she said. “And all the time he was—”

  She broke off and looked up at Weigand. She was obviously about to cry.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m glad you told me. But I wouldn’t worry about it—” He paused. “What is your name?” he asked.

  “Mary,” the girl said. “Mary Holden. But it doesn’t matter.”

  Then, while he still looked at her curiously, she was through the door and had closed it behind her.

  “Well,” Mullins said, “what d’y know?”

  “That Randall and his girl friend have hurried things a bit,” Weigand told him. “And that Randall stands to lose a lot of money if it comes out. And that there is a chance his sister knew about it. What do you know, Mullins?”

  “That this girl Mary is crazy about our Buddy,” Mullins told him. “Is, or was. Right?”

  “Right,” Weigand said.

  It necessitated a change of plan, Weigand decided, riding down in the elevator. He had planned to send the detective who had been trailing Randall Ashley to get the papers in Lois’s desk, and take them to Headquarters. But now he wasn’t sure; he thought it might be worth while keeping an eye on Ashley. He looked speculatively at Mullins, and nodded to himself. Mullins caught the nod and interpreted it.

  “Listen, Loot—” Mullins began. Weigand stopped him.

  “You’d better go back and get those papers, Mullins,” Weigand said. “Take them to
Headquarters and sit on them. We’ll keep Conroy on Buddy.”

  The elevator stopped at the ground floor. Weigand got out. Mullins looked resigned and stayed in, reascending. Outside, Weigand spoke a word to the loitering detective. Then Weigand, after a glance at his watch, found a telephone. He called Bellevue Hospital, asked for the Pathology Building and got it. He asked for Dr. Jerome Francis and, after a pause, got him.

  “Well,” said Weigand, “how’re you coming?”

  “Listen,” Dr. Francis said. His voice sounded tired. “Did you ever do an autopsy?”

  Weigand asked him what he thought.

  “Well,” Dr. Francis said, “did anybody ever tell you it takes time? Or that analysis takes time? Call me tomorrow afternoon. Or Thursday morning. Maybe I’ll have something.”

  “No,” said Weigand, “I can’t wait that long. What have you got now?”

  “She’s dead,” Dr. Francis said, with heavy sarcasm. “I cut her up and she was dead. Thirty minutes for the autopsy, which is damned fast going, if you want to know.” He paused. “Except for the head, of course,” he added, honestly.

  “What killed her?” Weigand wanted to know.

  “I’m telling you I don’t know yet.” Dr. Francis’ voice tried patience. “She didn’t die naturally, so far as I can tell. The organs are perfectly normal. Her pupils were dilated. So I think she got a parasympathetic poison—probably belladonna or atropine. But that’s what I told you before.”

  “I want to know definitely what killed her,” Weigand said. “Isn’t there any way you can tell? How long will a chemical analysis take?”

  “About two days,” Francis told him.

  “Any other way of telling?” Weigand wanted to know. Dr. Francis hesitated.

  “Well,” he said, “I can run a biological test. It won’t be decisive, but it will tell something. And I guess we can spare a guinea-pig. Call me in the morning.”

  “No,” Weigand said. “I’ll come down and see you. And the guinea-pig. And you can tell me what it means.” He hung up. Francis would be there; grumbling but there. Weigand got the Buick and rolled downtown toward Bellevue. He was thinking. He tried to tell himself he was thinking about the case, and tried really to think about the case. But Dorian kept coming in.

  At Bellevue he walked through the morgue, nodding to an attendant and not looking at the cupboards of the dead. In one of them, he supposed, was what remained of Lois Winston, who only a few hours ago must have been thinking of what she would do tomorrow. Francis was in the autopsy room. He was smoking a cigarette, gloomily. He wondered, audibly, if Weigand didn’t know that even doctors sleep.

  “So do detectives, when the chance arises,” Weigand told him. “How’s the test coming?”

  “I was waiting for you,” Francis told him. “Come along.”

  He led Weigand to the animal room but he ignored guinea-pigs, clustered softly in a cage. He went on, opened another cage and said, “Come on, kitty. Nice kitty.” The nice kitty, a formidable gray bruiser with one devastated ear, hissed at him. Francis looked into the cage, doubtfully, and closed it.

  “I think I’ll get some gloves,” he said. He got some gloves. “Andy doesn’t like experiments,” the doctor explained, opening the cage again. Andy emerged, well gripped and snarling.

  “I thought you said a guinea-pig,” Weigand said. “You can’t fool me, Doc. That’s a cat.” Weigand looked at Andy, who sneered. “Quite a cat,” Weigand said. “Do we have to kill a cat?”

  “Who said anything about killing it?” Francis wanted to know. “And as for the guinea-pig—that was metaphor. Andy, here, is a metaphorical guinea-pig.” He looked at Weigand, who regarded him questioningly. Francis seemed somewhat flustered. “Oh,” he said, “all right. I did think of using a guinea-pig. They’re always handy. But I checked up, and guinea-pigs won’t do.”

  “Why?” Weigand wanted to know. “I thought guinea-pigs always did.” Francis shook his head.

  “Not for atropine,” he explained. “Guinea-pigs eat it—thrive on it. In the wild state, anyway; we don’t feed them atropine here. But they normally eat plants which have a large atropine content and don’t turn a hair. They tolerate the poison so well, as a matter of fact, that it would take about as much atropine to kill a guinea-pig as it would to kill a man. And, of course, there’s another difficulty.”

  “Is there?” Weigand’s voice was mild.

  Dr. Francis nodded.

  “Human blood serum is almost as deadly to a guinea-pig as atropine is,” he said. “If we injected enough blood to carry a normally lethal dose of atropine into the pig, the pig would die of the blood first. The atropine wouldn’t make any difference. So I decided not to use a pig.”

  “I think you were very wise,” Weigand assured the doctor, who looked at him suspiciously and then grinned.

  “O.K.,” he said. “O.K. I just looked it up. I don’t carry everything in my head. Do you?”

  “No,” Weigand said. “How about the cat?”

  Francis had been holding Andy, who was still annoyed, pressed against the top of a laboratory table. He looked down at Andy, who looked up at him, balefully, the black pupils of his eyes large and indignant in the normally lighted room. Francis, keeping both hands on the cat, nodded toward the cat’s eyes.

  “See the pupils,” he directed. “It seems light enough in here to us, but the cat’s eyes know better. Out in the sun, the pupils would be slits. Now—here, hold him a minute.”

  Weigand held Andy down on the table and scratched behind a pointed ear. Andy seemed a little placated. Francis wheeled a hooded lamp over and turned it on. Powerful white light beat down on Andy and Weigand’s hands.

  “Look at his eyes,” Francis directed. Weigand looked. The pupils had narrowed to shut out the light.

  “Now,” Francis said, producing what appeared to be a medicine dropper, “I’ve got blood serum here, taken from Lois Winston’s heart during the autopsy. I’ll—hold that cat!”

  Andy, taking advantage of Weigand’s preoccupation, lurched under the detective’s hands. Weigand’s fingers closed, just in time, on departing hindquarters. Andy was rearranged.

  “Hold his head up a little,” Francis directed. Weigand got a finger under the cat’s chin and lifted.

  “Now,” Francis said. “I’ll put one drop of the serum in his right eye. Watch.”

  Francis, while Andy glared darkly at him, held the dropper over the cat’s face. A drop came out. It hit the cat’s nose, thanks to Andy’s quick movement. Francis steadied the cat’s head and dropped again. The second drop went into the right eye. Andy jumped under Weigand’s hands, which this time were ready. Andy yowled.

  “Watch the eye,” Francis directed. Weigand watched. For a moment nothing happened. Then the pupil began to widen. The pupil of the left eye remained contracted against the light. Francis switched it off.

  “No reason to blind the beast,” he said. “You saw how they were. Now look at the right one.”

  The pupil of the right eye, now, was almost fully dilated. Even with the flood light off, the pupil of the left eye had dilated only a little. Andy looked oddly lopsided.

  “O.K.,” Francis said. “There’s your test.” He lifted Andy and put him back in his cage. “All right, boy,” he told the cat. “It’ll wear off after a while.” He turned to Weigand.

  “There you are,” he said. “It was atropine, all right. There was enough atropine in the blood to dilate a cat’s eyes—and enough to kill a girl. Probably administered in the form of atropine sulphate. Which dissolves in almost anything.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “Good enough,” he said. “Tell me about atropine sulphate.”

  Dr. Francis told him. Atropine sulphate was a drug used in medicine—in ophthalmology, for example; internally to check secretions; sometimes in cases of surgical shock to stimulate respiration and circulation. It acted by stimulating the higher nerve centers, while at the same time paralyzing the peripheral endings of the ne
rves of the autonomic system.

  “Well, well,” Weigand said. “Think of that. What does it look like?”

  “It’s a powder,” Dr. Francis told him. “A white powder. No odor. No strong taste. At least, that’s what they say. I never tasted it myself. The dose is very small, normally from one-two-hundredth to one-one-hundredth of a grain. A grain ought to kill a couple of people.”

  “How quickly?” Weigand wanted to know. Francis lifted his shoulders. It depended on the dose. Since it wasn’t a custom to give lethal doses of atropine sulphate to humans, the data was incomplete. But from a few minutes to a couple of hours, depending on the size of dose, and other conditions.

  “I’d say your subject got quite a dose,” he added. “Probably about a grain.”

  It wasn’t satisfactory, Weigand decided. Lois might have got the poison before she left home; she might have got it at the restaurant table shortly before she collapsed. But that wasn’t, obviously, Dr. Francis’ fault.

  “How would you get it?” he asked. “I mean, just walk into a drugstore and say, ‘I’d like some atropine sulphate, please. About enough to kill a guy!’”

  “Well,” Francis said, “I’d requisition it. But—no, I don’t suppose you could get it at a retail store.” He thought it over.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “You could go to a drug supply house and say you were a manufacturer and wanted some atropine sulphate. If you looked all right, or went to the trouble of having letterheads printed or something, they’d sell it to you. There’s no law against it.”

  “What would I be manufacturing?” Weigand wanted to know.

  “What?” said Francis. “Oh—eyewash, of course. It’s used, in minute quantities, in several commercial eyewashes. Makes the eye bright and glowing. See advertisements.”

  “Really?” said Weigand.

  “Sure,” said Francis. “Doesn’t do any great harm, probably. Or much good, of course.”