Lisa Atkinson - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008

“Tell me who you are.”

He shook his head. “Call me Fuchs. My real name is unimportant.”

I held out my hand to shake his. “Good luck, wherever they take you.”

“I will remember your kindness, Dr. Hawthorne. We are all on this earth together. It is only politics that sometimes makes enemies of us.”

Those were the last words our secret patient ever spoke to me. I was awakened during the night with news that he was dead.

It was not yet dawn when I reached the hospital, but already Sheriff Lens was on the scene. I hadn’t been told the cause of death, and his presence alarmed me. “Are you here about the death of a man named Fuchs?” I asked.

“Guess so, Doc. The boss, Dr. Pryor, reported it as a possible poisoning.”

“I can’t imagine that. He was being guarded by a team of FBI agents.”

“We’ll see.”

The first person we encountered inside the hospital was Agent Barnovich, looking flustered and frightened. “It couldn’t have happened,” he told us. “No one could have poisoned him. We tested every bit of food and drink that went into that room.”

“We’ll want to talk with Dr. Pryor first,” Sheriff Lens told him.

We found the hospital administrator breathless in the corridor outside the room occupied by Fuchs. “What happened?” I asked.

“We don’t know. Dr. Francis was in the emergency room with an accident victim a little after three o’clock. He decided to stop in and see if Fuchs was sleeping well. Barnovich was outside by the door and they checked him together. They found him dead. There was an odor of bitter almonds—”

“Cyanide?”

“We’re doing an immediate autopsy. That’s what we suspect.”

Sheriff Lens turned to me. “What do you think, Doc?”

I turned to Agent Barnovich. “Were you on duty here all night?”

“I was.”

“Did you keep a log of everyone who entered the patient’s room?”

“Of course.”

“We’d better take a look at that.”

Dr. Pryor interrupted. “I want it known that no cyanide in any form is kept at Pilgrim Memorial. We have no medical need for it here. If someone killed Fuchs, he brought the poison in with him.”

“Let’s go in your office and talk this over,” I suggested. Pryor led the way to his office with Barnovich, the sheriff, and me following.

Within minutes Judd Francis joined us. “I can’t believe this could happen,” he said as he took a chair in the administrator’s office. “Who even knew he was here?”

“We’re working on that,” Sheriff Lens told him. “First I’d better know the identity of this mystery patient.”

“We don’t know,” Dr. Pryor insisted. “You’d better ask the FBI that question.”

The sheriff turned to Agent Barnovich, who held up his hands. “I only know he was an important German, flown out of there last Saturday night. Maybe he was a defector, like Rudolph Hess.”

“But no name?”

“No name, only Mr. Fuchs.”

“Have you notified Washington of his death?”

“Of course. They’re awaiting further news.”

“What sort of news?” I asked.

“I haven’t told them he may have been poisoned. I wanted to be sure of it first.”

He handed me the FBI log and I ran my finger down the list of everyone who’d visited the patient after I’d left. Dr. Pryor had been in to see him at a few minutes before six. “I wanted him gone from here as soon as possible,” the administrator told us. “His presence was disrupting the hospital routine, and since the entire matter was top secret we couldn’t even profit from the publicity.”

“Were you searched when you came to visit him?” I wondered, remembering the cursory inspection I’d received from the government agents.

“I was,” Pryor acknowledged.

“So was I,” Judd Francis told us. “I came by around eight o’clock and our patient seemed to be resting comfortably. His throat was dry and I had Nurse O’Toole bring him some ice water.”

Sheriff Lens raised his eyebrows but Barnovich quickly said, “I tasted it, just like we tasted every scrap of food and drink that he had. And after I tasted it he took a couple of swallows himself. Nothing but water.”

“No one else visited him?”

“The nurse came back to check his blood pressure around midnight but I was with her. He was half asleep then, and only wanted to know when he’d be out of here. I told him soon.”

“Did you kill him?” Sheriff Lens asked the FBI man.

“Me? Of course not! What motive would I have?”

“He was an enemy. A German.”

“But he was over here now. He’d left Germany.”

“Perhaps that’s why he was killed,” Dr. Pryor speculated. “To keep him from revealing Nazi secrets to our side.”

I smiled at the suggestion. “Do you think there’s a Nazi agent at Pilgrim Memorial Hospital?”

“Well, somebody killed him.”

I turned back to Barnovich. “Let’s go over this again, step by step. I assume Fuchs was carefully searched when he arrived here.”

“Right down to the skin,” the FBI man said. “They put their own hospital garments on him here. And he had no possessions at all with him. His own clothes had been taken away in England, before he was flown here, to avoid any trace of his identity.”

“And no one at Pilgrim Memorial had access to cyanide?”

“No one,” Dr. Pryor insisted. “Of course, cyanide is a gas. The solid state is usually potassium cyanide. It can kill almost instantly if swallowed on a empty stomach, where the stomach acids quickly turn it back into a gas.”

“Three seconds,” I murmured, remembering what Fuchs had told me. “And no one was in the room when he died?”

Barnovich shook his head. “I was on a chair right outside his door. No one entered the room after my midnight visit. I went back outside and partly closed the door to his room.”

“There are no other exit doors, of course, and no one was in the bathroom,” Judd Francis said. “Before I realized he was dead I took his water glass to the sink to refill it. The bathroom was empty.”

“We need to pin down the time of his death,” I decided. “That might help.”

Pryor nodded. “We’ll have the preliminary autopsy report by morning.”

Annabel was up with Samantha when I returned home and I told her what had happened. “Who do you think he was, Sam? Someone important enough he had to be murdered?”

“I have to see the autopsy report this morning and talk to some more of the staff.”

“How could anyone have gotten into the room to poison him, and why would they want to?”

“That’s what I need to find out.”

“Why you, Sam? The FBI is on the case.”

“The FBI is one of the suspects.”

I tried to get a couple of hours’ sleep, but I was up before eight and on my way back to Pilgrim Memorial. Judd Francis was waiting at my office with the autopsy results. “These are just preliminary, Sam, but it was cyanide as we suspected. He’d been dead about three to four hours when the coroner examined the body around five, which means he died somewhere between one and two, near as we can tell.”

“Thanks, Judd.” I glanced through the report and handed it back. “So the last people to enter his room were Agent Barnovich and Nurse O’Toole around midnight. I’ll have to talk with them.”

“Marcia doesn’t come back on duty until noon, and the FBI is calling back its guard detail now that Fuchs is dead.”

“I’d better try to catch Barnovich, then.”

He was indeed preparing to leave. “No reason to stay,” he told me.

“Isn’t solving this murder reason enough?”

He sighed. “Look, Dr. Hawthorne, guarding this man was an FBI assignment. Solving his murder is something for the local police, unless you can show me that a federal law was violated.”