Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“You had recently purchased an eight-ounce canister of Cydonex.”

“I had,” Bridgewater said. “We had squirrels in the attic and I couldn’t get rid of the wretched little beasts. The branches of several of our trees are within leaping distance of our roof and attic windows, and squirrels have quite infested the premises. They’re noisy and filthy creatures, and clever at avoiding traps and poisoned baits. Isn’t it extraordinary that a civilization with the capacity to devise napalm and Agent Orange can’t come up with something for the control of rodents in a man’s attic?”

“So you decided to exterminate them with Cydonex?”

“I thought it was worth a try. I mixed it into peanut butter and put gobs of it here and there in the attic. Squirrels are mad for peanut butter, especially the crunchy kind. They’ll eat the creamy, but the crunchy really gets them.”

“And yet you discarded the Cydonex. Investigators found the almost full canister near the bottom of your garbage can.”

“I was worried about the possible effects. I recently saw a neighbor’s dog with a squirrel in his jaws, and it struck me that a poisoned squirrel, reeling from the effects of the Cydonex, might be easy prey for a neighborhood pet, who would in turn be the poison’s victim. Besides, as I said, poison’s a sneak’s weapon. Even a squirrel deserves a more direct approach.”

A narrow smile blossomed for an instant on Ehrengraf’s thin lips. Then it was gone. “One wonders,” he said, “how the Cydonex got into your wife’s system.”

“It’s a mystery to me, Mr. Ehrengraf. Unless poor Alyssa ate some peanut butter off the attic floor, I’m damned if I know where she got it.”

“Of course,” Ehrengraf said gently, “the police have their own theory.”

“The police.”

“Indeed. They seem to believe that you mixed a lethal dose of Cydonex into your wife’s wine at dinner. The poison, tasteless and odorless as it is, would have been undetectable in plain water, let alone wine. What sort of wine was it, if I may ask?”

“Nuits-St.-Georges.”

“And the main course?”

“Veal, I think. What difference does it make?”

“Nuits-St.-Georges would have overpowered the veal,” Ehrengraf said thoughtfully. “No doubt it would have overpowered the Cydonex as well. The police said the wineglasses had been washed out, although the rest of the dinner dishes remained undone.”

“The wineglasses are Waterford. I always do them up by hand, while Alyssa put everything else in the dishwasher.”

“Indeed.” Ehrengraf straightened up behind his desk, his hand fastening upon the knot of his tie. It was a small precise knot, and the tie itself was a two-inch-wide silk knit the approximate color of a bottle of Nuits-St.-Georges. The little lawyer wore a white-on-white shirt with French cuffs and a spread collar, and his suit was navy with a barely perceptible scarlet stripe. “As your lawyer,” he said, “I must raise some unpleasant points.”

“Go right ahead.”

“You have a mistress, a young woman who is expecting your child. You and your wife were not getting along. Your wife refused to give you a divorce. Your business, while extremely profitable, has been experiencing recent cash-flow problems. Your wife’s life was insured in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars with yourself as beneficiary. In addition, you are her sole heir, and her estate after taxes will still be considerable. Is all of that correct?”

“It is,” Bridgewater admitted. “The police found it significant.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Bridgewater leaned forward suddenly, placing his large and sinewy hands upon Ehrengraf’s desk. He looked capable of yanking the top off it and dashing it against the wall. “Mr. Ehrengraf,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, “do you think I should plead guilty?”

“Of course not.”

“I could plead to a reduced charge.”

“But you’re innocent,” Ehrengraf said. “My clients are always innocent, Mr. Bridgewater. My fees are high, sir. One might even pronounce them towering. But I collect them only if I win an acquittal or if the charges against my client are peremptorily dismissed. I intend to demonstrate your innocence, Mr. Bridgewater, and my fee system provides me with the keenest incentive toward that end.”

“I see.”

“Now,” said Ehrengraf, coming out from behind his desk and rubbing his small hands briskly together, “let us look at the possibilities. Your wife ate the same meal you did, is that correct?”

“It is.”

“And drank the same wine?”

“Yes. The residue in the bottle was unpoisoned. But I could have put Cydonex directly into her glass.”

“But you didn’t, Mr. Bridgewater, so let us not weigh ourselves down with what you could have done. She became ill after the meal, I believe you said.”

“Yes. She was headachy and nauseous.”

“Headachy and nauseated, Mr. Bridgewater. That she was nauseous in the bargain would be a subjective conclusion of your own. She lay down for a nap?”

“Yes.”

“But first she took something.”

“Yes that’s right.”

“Aspirin, something of that sort?”

“I suppose it’s mostly aspirin,” Bridgewater said. “It’s a patent medicine called Darnitol. Alyssa took it for everything from cramps to athlete’s foot.”

“Darnitol,” Ehrengraf said. “An analgesic?”

“An analgesic, an anodyne, an antispasmodic, a panacea, a catholicon, a cure-all, a nostrum. Alyssa believed in it, Mr. Ehrengraf, and my guess would be that her belief was responsible for much of the preparation’s efficacy. I don’t take pills, never have, and my headaches seemed to pass as quickly as hers.” He laughed shortly. “In any event, Darnitol proved an inadequate antidote for Cydonex.”

“Hmm,” said Ehrengraf.

“To think it was the Darnitol that killed her.”

Five weeks had passed since their initial meeting, and events in the interim had done a great deal to improve both the circumstances and the spirit of Ehrengraf’s client. Gardner Bridgewater was no longer charged with his wife’s murder.

“It was one of the first things I thought of,” Ehrengraf said. “The police had their vision clouded by the extraordinary coincidence of your purchase and use of Cydonex as a vehicle for the extermination of squirrels. But my view was based on the presumption of your innocence, and I was able to discard this coincidence as irrelevant. It wasn’t until other innocent men and women began to die of Cydonex poisoning that a pattern began to emerge. A schoolteacher in Kenmore. A retired steelworker in Lackawanna. A young mother in Orchard Park.”

“And more,” Bridgewater said. “Eleven in all, weren’t there?”

“Twelve,” Ehrengraf said. “But for diabolical cleverness on the part of the poisoner, he could never have gotten away with it for so long.”

“I don’t understand how he managed it.”

“By leaving no incriminating residue,” Ehrengraf explained. “We’ve had poisoners of this sort before, tainting tablets of some nostrum or other. And there was a man in Boston, I believe it was, who stirred arsenic into the sugar in coffee-shop dispensers. With any random mass murder of that sort, sooner or later a pattern emerges. But this killer only tampered with a single capsule in each bottle of Darnitol. The victim might consume capsules with impunity until the one fatal pill was swallowed, whereupon there would be no evidence remaining in the bottle, no telltale leftover capsule to give the police a clue.”

“Good heavens.”

“Indeed. The police did in fact test as a matter of course the bottles of Darnitol which were invariably found among the victims’ effects. But the pills invariably proved innocent. Finally, when the death toll mounted high enough, the fact that Darnitol was associated with every single death proved indismissable. The police seized drugstore stocks of the painkiller, and again and again bottles turned out to have a single tainted capsule in with the legitimate pills.”