Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

It was close to lunch time. I walked down to La Llorona for a fish taco. The lunchtime crowd was heavy, so I didn’t chat with Mrs. Aguilar but ate my taco at one of the high tables in the corner while I finished glancing through the papers.

The taco was so good, and I was feeling so sorry for myself, that I took a second one back with me to eat at my desk. At Division Street, where Milwaukee changed abruptly from a neighborhood street to an extension of Yuppie Town, I stopped in one of the coffee bars for a cappuccino. Either protein or caffeine would revive me, or at least that was my theory.

While I was out, Freeman’s secretary had messengered over the toxicology report. Tessa had signed for it and taped it to my office door. I took it

in with me and laid it on my desk. I almost couldn’t bear to read it: I’d moved heaven and earth, or at least medical examiners in two counties, to get this document. If it told me nothing, I might he down and never get up again.

I finally took the report from the envelope and began reading. Callie had sent a photocopy of a ten-page fax, so it was blurry in places. The text bristled with “epithelial cells of the distal part of the renal tubules” and “immunocytochemical electron microscopy of the hepatocytes.” Fascinating, if you knew what it meant.

I slowly went through the whole ten pages. The analysis of Marc’s last meal (skinless chicken, broccoli, baked potato and a lettuce-tomato salad, consumed three hours before death, with a statistical variation of so much based on digestive whatever) was so detailed that I abruptly tossed the second taco into the trash.

The lab had found no trace of cocaine, diazepam, nordiazepam, hydrocodone, cocaethylene, benzoy-lecgonine, heroin ‘hydrochloride or marijuana metabolites in Marc’s urine. He had alcohol in the vitreous humor and phenobarbital in the blood plasma, discovered with “high-performance liquid chromatography.” The report gave the drugs in milligrams per liter, with the information that Marc had weighed eighty kilos, so I couldn’t tell how much Marc had drunk on top of the drug, but Vishnikov had provided a summary at the end: “… a six hundred milligram dose of phenobarbital taken with approximately two shots of bourbon would have depressed respiration and most likely killed him if he hadn’t first died of drowning.”

I leaned back in the desk chair. It wobbled badly; I needed to get a screwdriver out to tighten the castors.

All I knew about phenobarbital was that it was used to treat epilepsy. If Marc had epilepsy, he should have known better than to mix alcohol with his medication. He would have known better: by all reports he was a careful man; he wouldn’t have taken a drug without knowing its side effects. But maybe after years with the disease, he knew he could drink a modest amount without getting into distress with his medication.

The sinking feeling returned to my diaphragm; he had gone into that pond alone. Unless-a couple of shots of whisky wasn’t much for a man

who weighed-eighty kilos-I scratched arithmetic on a scrap of papera hundred seventy-five pounds. But I didn’t know how to evaluate the amount of phenobarb he’d taken.

Since I couldn’t ask Vishnikov to explain, I phoned Lotty, who was in her clinic today. Mrs. Coltrain, her longtime administrator, said Dr. Herschel was with patients and couldn’t be disturbed.

“All I want to know is how much of a dose six hundred milligrams of phenobarbital is. Can you ask her, or Lucy Choi?” Lucy was the advanced practice nurse who did a lot of the routine patient care at the clinic.

After a minute on hold, Lotty came to the phone herself. “Six hundred milligrams is a huge dose, Victoria. Did someone prescribe that for you? It could kill you if you took it all at once.”

“How long would it take?”

“This isn’t a game, is it? I don’t know. It moves fast into the system, depresses respiration. You might have an hour for someone to try to revive you, possibly only half an hour.”

“What if I weighed thirty pounds more than I do?”

“Still far too much. If someone prescribed that for you, don’t ever see her again.”.

She hung up. I looked again at the report. If Marc had epilepsy, he wouldn’t have taken such a lethal dose on purpose. Not unless he wanted to die. But then, why go into the Larchmont Pond? Why not stay in the comfort of his bed? Maybe he didn’t know he would die from it-maybe he thought it would just make him unconscious enough not to mind drowning. But why go all the way out to that foul pond at Larchmont instead of the welcome expanse of Lake Michigan? And then, his car-I shook my head, trying to stop the incessant buzzing: hamster on its wheel again.

My hand hesitated over my phone. Harriet Whitby had planned to move in with Amy after her parents left for Atlanta yesterday. If I phoned Amy’s apartment, would that get the law to monitor her calls, too? I shook my head angrily: I couldn’t live like this, second-guessing whether anyone was listening to me and my friends, or following me. And I wasn’t going to spend an hour on public transport just to make sure I talked to her unsupervised.

Amy answered, sounding relaxed: she and Harriet were enjoying a comfortable day alone together, she explained, without having to worry about Harriet’s folks. As she called her friend to the phone, I felt like a vulture, intruding on their light mood.

“Dr. Vishnikov sent me your brother’s autopsy report,” I told Harriet. “Would you like me to come to Amy’s so we can discuss it in person?” “Are you trying to prepare me for something awful?” she demanded. “Something I don’t want to know? Tell me now. This has been the hardest week of my life-I don’t want even a half hour of agony imagining things while I wait to see you.”

“Marc had a lot of phenobarbital in his system, but only one largish bourbon. Did he suffer from epilepsy, or have any history of seizures where he would have been taking this drug?”

“No,” she said blankly. “No, he’s always been-always was-really healthy. What does this mean?”

“I’m afraid it means what we’ve been saying all along: he really was murdered. Someone gave him a drug that knocked him out, and then put him in that pond to die.”

Saying it out loud brought me a sense of relief. The wheel stopped turning, the buzzing in my head ended. Murder. Not suicide. Not accident. I didn’t have to make a plaster cast of the wheel marks in the culvert: Mark’s killer had driven him to the pond in a golf cart.

Harriet became so quiet I thought perhaps she’d gone away, but at last she said in a dull, dead voice that sounded like her mother’s, “We’ve known this, anyway, all week. Not about the drug, but that someone killed him. It’s just hard to hear it finally said out loud. Marc wasn’t really healthy after all, was he? It didn’t matter that he attended the University of Michigan or was a prizewinning writer, or kept a healthy diet, did it? He still died from the black man’s disease.”

“I’m sorry?” I was confused-all I could think of was sickle-cell anemia. “Murder,” she hiccupped. “It doesn’t matter if you’re educated and live a decent life, it’s still going to get you.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, helplessly. “I’ll come to Amy’s right now if you want.”

“No, thank you. I know you’ve been working hard on my behalf-on

my family’s behalf. I know you’re only doing what I asked you to do. But I need to be alone with a sister for now.”

When she hung up, I felt embarrassed: the news that elated me had brought her distress. I got up and walked around the room. We’d found Mark’s bottle of Maker’s Mark when we searched his house last week. Bourbon and branch: his drink, Amy had told me. If there were fingerprints on his bottle-if the whisky had been doctored-I wanted to collect that Maker’s Mark and get it tested, even if I had to pay for the job myself.