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

He had me there. “Tell me about your midnight visit to the patient’s bedside.”

“Nurse O’Toole wanted to check his blood pressure and pulse before she went off duty. I guess that’s the standard procedure here. I went in with her and stood by the bedside. She asked if he needed anything and he said no.”

“He didn’t request a sleeping pill or anything like that?”

“No, and she gave him nothing. We were only in there about two minutes and we left nothing behind. I said good night to her and went back to my chair.”

“When were you due to be relieved?”

“Not till six a.m. I had the night shift.”

“Will you be leaving today?”

He nodded. “Most of my men have already departed. I want to get some sleep first before I drive up to Boston.”

“I’ll see you before you go,” I told him.

It was Sunday and I had no patients to see. By noon I arranged to be on Marcia O’Toole’s floor when she came on duty. “I just heard what happened to Mr. Fuchs,” she said when she saw me.

“That FBI man, Barnovich, says you two went in there at midnight and he was still alive.”

She nodded, her brown hair bobbing. “I checked his signs and asked if he needed more water but he said he was fine. I expected he’d be gone by today, but not like this.”

“Did Barnovich touch him or move him in any way?”

“Not while I was there. Why would an FBI agent want to kill him?”

“He probably wouldn’t,” I agreed, “but somehow he was poisoned, and I need to find out how.”

I decided I had to read up on cyanide in the hospital’s medical library, and I spent much of the afternoon there. Finally I knew what I had to do. I phoned Dr. Pryor and Sheriff Lens and asked them to gather the others in Pryor’s office at five.

Judd Francis and Nurse O’Toole were there when I arrived, and Sheriff Lens soon entered with Agent Barnovich. “I have to get back to Boston,” the agent told us, but I quieted him down.

“This will only take a few minutes, and I think you’ll want it to complete your report.”

“Go on,” Dr. Pryor told me.

“Well, this was an especially baffling locked-room problem for me, because the room wasn’t locked at all. The door to a hospital room is always unlocked, often open. The only question was how our mysterious patient obtained the poison that killed him. No cyanide or cyanide compounds are kept at the hospital, all food and drink was tasted before it entered the room, and by Agent Barnovich’s testimony the patient was absolutely alone for an hour or two before he was poisoned. My first suspicion, of course, was that he might have lied. But even though Miss O’Toole had gone off duty there were other nurses on the floor. If he had left his chair and entered the room after midnight, someone might have noticed and reported it after the body was discovered.”

“Thanks for believing me,” Barnovich said with a trace of sarcasm.

“Dr. Pryor and Judd Francis both visited the patient, as did Nurse O’Toole. Could they have poisoned him during their examinations, perhaps with the tip of a thermometer inserted into his mouth to take his temperature? No, because cyanide, you’ll remember, kills instantly. And none of them visited him after midnight, when Barnovich and O’Toole both swear the patient was alive and talking. Where does that leave us? Is there anyone who was in that room between the hours of one and two when Fuchs died instantly from cyanide poisoning? Most especially, was anyone in there who had access to the poison? I asked myself that, and I saw the only possible answer. The victim himself!”

“He had no cyanide,” Barnovich insisted.

“But he did at one point. I spoke to him yesterday about how he got here. He wouldn’t reveal his name, but he’d fallen out of favor with Hitler, who gave him two choices — a trial for treason or a cyanide capsule and a hero’s funeral. He chose cyanide and had the capsule in his hand when a friend whisked him away to a waiting aircraft. He had the tiny capsule in his hand!”

“Not when he arrived here,” Barnovich insisted. “And he sure didn’t swallow it or he’d have been dead.”

“I spent the afternoon at the library, reading books about cyanide poisoning. There were accounts of spies and high-ranking military officials who preferred suicide to capture and torture. One method was to carry a small cyanide capsule inside a hollow false tooth. Even if fettered, the prisoner could work the capsule free with his tongue and bite or swallow it.”

Barnovich’s mouth dropped open. “Do you think that’s what happened?”

“There’s no other explanation. He had the cyanide and he brought it with him. The man named Fuchs killed himself.”

“If Doc says it, I’m satisfied,” Sheriff Lens decided. “Far as I’m concerned, the case is closed.”

Dr. Pryor nodded. “I agree.”

I went back to my office and phoned April at home to tell her it was over. “That’s good,” she said. “With this damp weather we’re bound to start getting some flu cases.”

“I’ll be in tomorrow morning for the entire day.”

But there was one thing I had to do first. I went back into the hospital and sought out Marcia O’Toole. I found her without difficulty, caring for an elderly patient. She smiled when she saw me. “I’m so glad you were able to wind that business up. This place hadn’t been the same since he arrived.”

“Is there someplace we can talk, Marcia?”

“Why — I guess we could use the nurses’ lounge for a few minutes. What is it?”

I waited till we were alone before I answered. Then I looked her in the eye and asked, “Why did you poison Fuchs?”

For a moment she didn’t answer. Perhaps she was weighing her options. Then she said, quite softly, “Because my brother was killed in North Africa.” There were tears in her eyes. “How did you know?”

“There was no cyanide here at the hospital. It had to come from outside, and my explanation of the false tooth seemed the most likely. Fuchs couldn’t have known what sort of welcome awaited him here, so he kept the cyanide capsule and secreted it in a hollow tooth he wore for just that purpose. If we’d charged him with being a war criminal he’d have had a way out.”

“But he wasn’t charged with anything! The rumor was he’d be meeting the President, to be treated as some sort of hero.”

“Hardly! I’m sure he would have been held as a prisoner of war.”

“And then released at the end of the war! I wanted someone to pay for my brother. I wanted him to pay. The man I killed was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of the Afrika Korps.”

“I know. I think others in the hospital must have known too. The code name they gave him was Fuchs, the German word for Fox. Rommel was well known in North Africa as the Desert Fox.” Remembering my conversation with him, I added, “I think he found a bit of humor in the code name.”

“How did you know it was me?” she asked again.

“I came in to see him the other day and you were washing him and brushing his teeth. That was when you found the hidden capsule. You must have guessed what it was and you kept it. He was still a bit drowsy then and probably didn’t even realize you’d taken it. Once I suspected you of having the cyanide, I only had to determine how you could have managed to kill him with it. Then I remembered that Judd Francis asked you to bring him a glass of ice water last evening.”

“Agent Barnovich tasted it as he always did. And Fuchs drank some right away.”

“They tasted the water but not the ice cubes. You’d frozen that tiny capsule inside a cube of ice. When the ice melted during the night, the capsule was left floating there. Fuchs drank the rest of the water during the night and probably never noticed the capsule in the dark. By the time he realized it he was seconds from death.”