AHMM, April 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Stamaty pulled a slip of paper from under the others on the clipboard and placed it on top. “The autopsy last night showed several bruises of various ages, not too unusual in an alcoholic. There were no head wounds and no external signs of an injury likely to cause death. When they opened him up they didn't find any internal injuries either. He had some inflammation of the stomach lining and an enlarged liver, probably due to his drinking, but there was nothing wrong with his heart or other vital organs."

  "The lieutenant said something about poisoning?"

  Stamaty threw up his hands in a colossal shrug of mock disappointment. “Just when I thought I had you on the edge of your metaphorical chair in suspense, I find out you already know everything."

  "Not exactly everything. What was the poison?"

  "A drug called picrotoxin. We'd all noticed that Sackler's pupils were dilated big time, and his skin had that lavender tinge you get with a fatal heart attack, so that's what we figured it would be. But after the forensic pathologist opened him up and found his coronaries were okay, he wondered about cocaine. He sent specimens of blood and stomach contents to the regional lab last night by courier, and they woke me up this morning to tell me that both specimens contained huge amounts of picrotoxin and smaller amounts of benzyl alcohol."

  "So what are they—the latest recreational drugs, or did he just OD?"

  "Neither one. Picrotoxin is a stimulant they once used to treat barbiturate overdoses, but it's been off the market for years because it was too tricky to use—caused convulsions."

  "And death?"

  "That too. But doctors used to give it by injection, and this stuff was in Sackler's stomach as well as his blood, so he evidently swallowed it."

  "You mentioned some kind of alcohol too?"

  "Benzyl alcohol. They think that was probably just a solvent for the other stuff, since picrotoxin doesn't dissolve very well in water."

  "Where would Sackler have gotten hold of anything like that?"

  "That's what I'm here to find out. Loretta Burleigh is pretty sure he wasn't into drugs and that he wasn't taking any medicine. I didn't find any medicine bottles yesterday, but I need to check further and take a better look around his workshop."

  "Didn't this guy have any family?"

  "Apparently not.” Stamaty looked at his watch and picked up his research case. “You ready?” Taking a bunch of keys out of his pocket, he led Auburn up the porch steps.

  "Where did the cops break in?” asked Auburn.

  "Kitchen door, around the back. One of them, Georgie Wales, is some kind of a carpenter. She borrowed some tools and hardware and a couple pieces of wood from the shop and secured the door from the inside."

  The rooms in Sackler's house were small and square, with narrow windows and high ceilings. The place was immaculately tidy but barren of ornament. Sackler had apparently bought nonperishable wares, from toothpaste and shaving cream to canned soup, in wholesale quantities. There was enough beer stockpiled in the basement to supply a Prussian cavalry regiment on a week's furlough.

  Auburn and Stamaty went from room to room, vying with each other in finding and pointing out clues to the personality and history of Dane Sackler. Stamaty took possession of a few opened containers of food in the refrigerator and on pantry shelves, sealing each in a plastic bag, which both he and Auburn signed. Neither in Sackler's bedroom nor in the solitary bathroom next to it, where his body had been found, were any prescription medicines in evidence. Headache and indigestion remedies, however, abounded, again in wholesale quantities, attesting to a life that was just one long hangover punctuated by binges. The wastebaskets contained lots of empty beer cans but no clues to the how or why of Sackler's demise. They spent a long time in the front bedroom Sackler had used as an office. An old desk and an iron filing cabinet, both unlocked, contained business records and correspondence, a savings account passbook, and several hundred dollars in cash in a worn manila envelope. The few personal papers provided no clues to any family ties, friendships, or enmities. An engagement calendar was virtually blank except for a dental appointment several weeks earlier. Sackler owned neither a computer nor an answering machine. They found no suicide note, no will, no life insurance policy, no lawyer's name, no book of personal phone numbers and addresses.

  "I think we've pretty well kicked this place apart,” said Stamaty as they were putting things back into the desk drawers.

  "And also pretty well scrambled any trace evidence that might have been here when we arrived."

  Stamaty chuckled. “That already happened yesterday. The cops and I were all over this place, not to mention the girlfriend, Burleigh. Not exactly standard protocol for managing a crime scene."

  "Is this a crime scene?"

  "That remains to be seen. Let's take a look at his shop."

  They went down the dark, narrow stairs, and Stamaty locked up the house before depositing his specimens and Sackler's cash and bankbook in his van. “I figure he went over to the house from here to use the bathroom,” Stamaty said as he fitted a key into the door of the shed, “and didn't expect to be gone more than a couple minutes—otherwise he would have locked up because there's a lot of expensive stuff in here."

  The rear section of the shed, to which the door gave admittance, was the workshop proper, while the front section, inside the overhead door at the end of the driveway, provided storage for dozens of pieces of furniture, antique and new, in various stages of construction or restoration. The building was equipped with fluorescent lighting and electric space heaters.

  Against the rear wall of the shop stood an immense and solid workbench with racks of hand tools and cabinets full of hardware and supplies. Around the other walls stood an impressive array of woodworking machinery—lathe, bandsaw, belt and disk sander, router, jointer, planer. A paint shop set up in a kind of recess formed by some of the equipment contained brushes, buffing equipment, and cans of stain, varnish, shellac, and furniture polish. Apart from the rows of grimy windows, which probably hadn't been opened for years, the shed was as clean and orderly as the house.

  "Look at this place,” said Stamaty. “Everything as neat as the queen's front parlor, except—” He pointed to the end of the workbench, where a number of hand tools lay strewn in disorder around a small cabinet that stood, open and empty, on the bench. “We figured this is where he was working right before he went over to the house for the last time."

  Auburn stepped closer and inspected the tools, which were smaller and more delicate than the kind used for woodworking. “What do you suppose these are, Nick? Some kind of manicure tools?"

  "Get your tongue out of your cheek. You know good and well that's a set of lock picks. Apparently, he didn't have a key to that cabinet. Anyway, we didn't find one anywhere."

  "Hmm. Maybe he did a little burgling on the side. What's all this junk?"

  At the extreme right end of the bench stood a sturdy plastic container, not unlike a small wastebasket, full of odds and ends—framed photographs, three worn and tarry pipes with a pouch of tobacco and a packet of pipe cleaners, bundles of yellowed papers. On top of them lay a small irregular scrap of freshly sawed white pine on which the name “Herv” was written in pencil.

  "Apparently stuff that came out of the cabinet. Look at the price tags on the tobacco and the pipe cleaners."

  Auburn, increasingly conscious of the need to preserve trace evidence, used his pen to rummage through the various articles in the container. “From Bourdon's downtown,” he said. “They went out of business when I was in high school."

  "Bingo!” exclaimed Stamaty abruptly. “Here's exactly what we're looking for. Missed it cold yesterday.” With a pair of tongs from his field kit he reached behind the cabinet and slid a wine bottle into view. According to its label, it was sweet vermouth. Only about two inches of dark fluid remained in the bottle.

  "Not his everyday poison,” said Auburn. “I didn't see any wine bottles in the house."

  "Not his everyday poison is r
ight,” said Stamaty. “Look how brittle and discolored the label is. This bottle is about twenty years old."

  "I thought wine was supposed to improve with age."

  "Not cheap rocket fuel like this stuff, as you'd know if you weren't a teetotaler."

  "I'm not a teetotaler, Nick. Beer gives me a headache, wine upsets my stomach—"

  "And the hard stuff makes you see triple. Like I said, you're a teetotaler. This bottle is just as old as the other stuff from the cabinet. And I'll bet my socks this is where he got the picrotoxin. Look at this."

  Stamaty pointed to a ring of stain that ran around the inside of the glass at an oblique angle, as if the bottle had remained in a slanted position for years, allowing the formation of a film of residue corresponding to the surface of the wine. When he tipped the bottle over to bring the ring into a horizontal position and then rotated it so that the ring lay parallel to the surface of the wine, it was evident that three or four ounces had disappeared from the bottle since the stain had formed.

  Auburn voiced the obvious inference. “Sackler must have bought this cabinet with all the junk in it, picked the lock, found the wine, and—"

  "Couldn't resist sampling it."

  "Which raises the question what an old wine bottle was doing in this cabinet laced with a lethal dose of poison."

  "And who it was originally meant for."

  "And whether the guy it was originally meant for is now dead, buried, and long forgotten."

  He helped Stamaty seal the bottle in a large specimen bag. Then they examined the materials in the plastic bin. The papers were faded photocopies of scholarly articles on naval history from various publications, all dated a couple of decades ago. There were three framed pictures—a portrait photograph of a young woman, another of a young man in naval uniform, and a less formal shot showing both of them with a boy of seven or eight. “Could this be a picture of Sackler when he was a kid?” asked Auburn.

  Stamaty squinted only briefly at the photograph before replying. “No. There's no way. Out in the van I've got the pictures of him I shot yesterday. You can look at them and judge for yourself. But I'd say that kid couldn't have grown up to be Dane Sackler. Are we done here?"

  "Did you check his truck yesterday?"

  "Couple tools, couple maps, lot of beer cans.” Stamaty showed him prints of the pictures he'd taken the day before. The man on the bathroom floor was stocky, with unkempt hair and a left little finger lacking the last joint, probably the result of a mishap with a bandsaw.

  Before leaving the scene they apportioned the spoils. Stamaty added the wine bottle to the specimens of food he'd taken from the kitchen. He turned over Sackler's driver's license to Auburn, but since the coroner's office had control of the decedent's personal property until the next of kin was found or a court decided on the disposition of his estate, he kept the money and the keys to the house and the shed. Auburn took possession of the plastic bin and its contents. Tracing the origin of the cabinet would be a police matter if the wine bottle had indeed been the source of the poison that killed Sackler.

  Before starting back downtown, Auburn called Loretta Burleigh on his cell phone and learned that she planned to be at home all afternoon. He followed Stamaty most of the way back downtown and then, breaking the peace of a Sunday noontide with a discreet farewell honk, he swung left on Victory Parkway to grab some lunch before proceeding to Burleigh's place.

  Business was slack at the fast-food restaurant where he stopped. From a quiet corner he called headquarters to inform Lieutenant Savage of the outcome of his rendezvous with Stamaty at Sackler's place. At Auburn's request, a clerk came on the line and read him the report filed by the Public Safety officers who had responded to Burleigh's call and broken into Sackler's house. By now a sketchy background probe had been completed on Sackler even though it was Sunday, and Auburn received that information also.

  He found Ms. Burleigh setting out bedding plants along the front walk of her small brick house. “I hope you don't mind talking to me out here,” she said, with a glance at the sky. “I want to get this done before it starts raining."

  "I don't think it's supposed to rain until after dark."

  "It isn't. But every time I start digging in the dirt, the waterworks begin.” She was a self-sufficient, down-to-earth woman of about fifty, with steel gray hair, a round flat face, a slow smile, and capable-looking hands. She wore no makeup and no rings, at least not while gardening. Auburn saw no tokens of grief for the late Dane Sackler, but then he didn't suppose she'd cried since the last time she fell off a tricycle.

  Her purely objective account of the finding of Sackler's body matched the information that Auburn already had. She expected some information in return. “Have they done an autopsy yet?"

  "Yes, ma'am. At this point it appears that death was probably due to poisoning, possibly accidental."

  "Poisoning? Not just an overdose of alcohol?"

  "When was the last time you saw Sackler alive?"

  "Oh, gosh, I don't know. Weeks. He came over for dinner one time in about April. What kind of poison?"

  "If you don't mind my asking, what was the nature of your relationship with Mr. Sackler?"

  "I don't mind your asking. We were just friends.” Period. She went on with her digging and planting in silence.

  "Would you say he was the sort of person to take his own life? Had he been depressed recently? Had you and he had an argument, broken up...?"

  "No. You're not going to pin this on me,” she said, good-naturedly but with conviction. “Depressed, yes. Suicide, maybe. But Dane and I never got very close. I felt sorry for him because he had this terrible drinking problem. He was a marvelous cabinetmaker when he was sober, but he couldn't hold a job."

  "Had he been through detox or rehab as far as you know? Did he go to AA meetings?"

  "I wouldn't know, but I doubt it. The first thing you have to do in AA is admit you have a drinking problem, and Dane never would."

  "And you're pretty sure he didn't have any family?"

  "He never talked about any family."

  "The coroner's office hasn't given his name to the press yet, pending notification of next of kin, but they can't hold off forever, and somebody will have to make funeral arrangements."

  "Well, don't look at me."

  "Would you know if any of his friends, or possibly a business associate, went by the name of ‘Herv'?"

  "Sure. Hervey Dorjack. He deals in antiques, mostly furniture. Dane used to do restoration work for him. His store is one of those funky little places in the Castlemaine district."

  "I think that's about all I need. Are you employed, ma'am?"

  "I run the sign shop for the Bureau of Streets. Plus I have the local franchise for a company called Medicinal Virtues, which sells herbal remedies. I set up at sales, festivals, flea markets. That's how I met Dane."

  "Did he take herbal remedies?"

  "No, and neither do I. I like some of the teas because they don't have any caffeine in them, but I don't have much faith in herbal remedies myself. Like my dad used to say, donkeys eat weeds."

  * * * *

  Surmising that the “funky little” shops in the Castlemaine district were just the sort of places to be open on Sunday afternoon, Auburn proceeded there without calling ahead. Hervey's Antiques and Uniques was indeed literally open for business, the front door propped wide to let in the warm afternoon breeze.

  As Loretta Burleigh had told him, Dorjack dealt mostly in furniture. Wardrobes, bureaus, armoires, desks, apothecary cabinets, chairs, couches, and bedsteads of all styles and periods stood cheek by jowl in the garishly lighted store. Interspersed among the furniture were racks and glass-fronted cases displaying smaller items—clocks, lamps, pottery, silverware, figurines, antique toys, and all the other flotsam and jetsam that turn up in an antique shop.

  "That fainting couch,” said a voice at Auburn's elbow, “came out of an opera house in Philadelphia, when they tore it down back in the seventies
.” He turned to see a middle-aged man with a long, bony face, straggling mouse-colored hair, and the relentlessly ingratiating manner of a man who lives by talking money out of other people's pockets and into his own. “They say Charles Dickens used to lie on it drinking champagne and eating oysters during the intermissions of his dramatic readings. ‘Course it's been reupholstered since then.” He started to back away. “I can make you a good deal on anything you see here. Take your time, look around. The furniture costs less if you haul it yourself."

  "Mr. Dorjack?"

  Auburn had foreborne to try stemming the tide of salesmanship. Now he produced identification.

  "Police,” said Dorjack, with a languid lift of the eyebrows. “If you're looking for something that's been stolen, I'll cooperate fully. Like I always tell you guys, I've got receipts or bills of sale on all my furniture. Smaller items I usually buy in lots, and once a lot is broken up I can't always tell from my records where a piece came from. But on anything that's been here less than three or four months, I'll remember.” Like his previous remarks about the fainting couch, all of this came across like a well-rehearsed spiel.

  "I'm investigating the death of Dane Sackler."

  Dorjack's jaw dropped momentarily, and his ebullient mood changed in an instant to one of solemnity. “Dane is dead? What'd he do, wreck his truck? I didn't hear it on the news."

  "He was found dead at his home yesterday. Do you remember when was the last time you saw him?"

  "Last Monday, right here. He did restoration work for me, repairing and refinishing damaged pieces. On Monday he brought back a couple of dining room chairs that he'd done over for me. I gave him another piece to work on. He drove away with it in his truck around two, two thirty Monday afternoon, and I never saw him again. What did he die of?"

  "Did you talk to him on the phone since Monday?"

  "No. He worked at his own pace—didn't like deadlines. And ... he drank. I never bugged him to finish a job because I always knew he'd turn up with it eventually."