Marcia Talley - Dead Man Dancing

Colorless, odorless, tasteless, thallium rapidly deteriorates in the body after death. It’s such a perfect poison that some wag had nicknamed it ‘inheritance powder’.

The other day Jay had jokingly dismissed the idea that anyone would want him dead, but perhaps he was wrong. Should Jay be out of the picture, Kay would get everything, including the studio. But, when all was said and done, who knew how much the business was actually worth, and whether it would be worth killing for. Except maybe Chance…

‘Rat poison,’ Kay snapped, jolting me out of my reverie.

‘What?’

‘Thallium used to be an ingredient in rat poison, they tell me. Ant poison, too. It’s illegal now, but there might be some old cans of it lying around somewhere.’

I thought about the moldy boxes with unreadable labels cluttering the shelves of the tool shed behind my father’s house, about the dented, rusting cans stacked on the concrete floor in the basement, each containing who-knows-what, and said, ‘Did Jay garden?’

‘Are you kidding? Jay grew up in the desert. He wouldn’t know a geranium from a tulip.’

‘Hold on a minute, Kay. Even if you had a whole vat of contraband rat poison out in your garage, how would it have gotten from the vat and into your husband?’

‘That,’ Kay said, ‘is the million-dollar question.’

I pondered Kay’s comment with growing dread. It seemed to me there were three possibilities.

One: accidental ingestion. Easy to do with a chemical that’s colorless, odorless, and tasteless. I remember reading that attempts had been made to add bittering agents or ‘adversives’ to thallium products to make them less palatable and therefore safer, but it seems that rats had turned up their whiskers at bittering agents, too, so manufacturers had scratched that plan.

Two: somebody slipped the thallium to Jay, in which case we were looking at a particularly vicious case of murder.

Or, three: he took the poison himself.

But even if Jay had been suicidal – and I’d seen nary a sign of that – I couldn’t imagine him, or anyone, ingesting thallium on purpose. Swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, jumping off the center span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, shooting yourself in the head with an antique rifle, all would be quicker and less painful ways to bid ‘goodbye cruel world’ than going through the agonizing, long-term torture of thallium poisoning.

‘What do you think happened, Kay?’

Kay sighed, sounding weary, resigned. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Hannah. I’m so worn out, I can’t think straight.’

‘Go home and get some sleep, Kay. You must be exhausted.’

‘I am. Thank God Jay’s sister is flying in from Texas tonight to help out. We’ve never gotten along particularly well, but under the circumstances, I’ll just bite my tongue and put up with her fussiness.’

‘If you need me…’

‘Thanks, Hannah. I’ll remember that.’

A phone call after midnight is rarely welcome, even if it brings good news, so I wasn’t overjoyed when the bedside telephone jolted me out of a deep sleep at 2:17 the following morning.

Next to me Paul snorted, ‘I’ll get it,’ knocked the phone off the table with a flailing arm, then tripped over the handset when he swung his legs out of bed to look for it. While he answered with a bleary, ‘Hello,’ I checked the digital clock and groaned.

‘It’s for you, honey,’ Paul said, cradling the base of the phone in one hand and handing me the receiver with the other. ‘It’s Kay, and I don’t think it’s good news.’

I sat up, fumbled with the receiver, pulled my knees up to my chin, and took several deep, steadying breaths while trying to gather my thoughts. ‘Kay?’

A word here, a ragged gasp there. I could barely understand what she was saying, and then: ‘He’s gone. Jay’s gone.’

‘Oh, Kay, I’m so sorry!’

‘They started the treatment, but it was too late. All too late!’ she wailed.

Over the next five minutes, alternating between hysterics that segued into gasping hiccups, punctuated by two short conversations with Jay’s sister, Lorraine, I learned that by the time the antidote kicked in, the damage to Jay’s liver and kidneys had been too severe. His body gave out on him, he slipped into a coma and died of massive organ failure.

‘The sons of bitches have ta-ken Jay a-way!’ Kay sobbed.

I knew what that meant: an autopsy. The office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore was going to be deeply interested in exactly what had sucked the life out of Mr Jay Giannotti, dance instructor, of Annapolis, Maryland. And I would bet my new dancing shoes that Baltimore’s homicide detectives were already on the case, too.

‘Idiots! The doctors are idiots!’ Kay screamed. ‘They screwed around with test after useless test until it was too late, and now they won’t even tell me when I can bury him!’

In the background I could hear Lorraine’s soothing voice, trying to calm her sister-in-law whose rant now included the words ‘malpractice’ and ‘lawsuit’. Eventually Lorraine was able to pry the cell phone from Kay’s grasp, and I learned that funeral arrangements would be handled by Kramer’s, an Annapolis funeral establishment tucked away at the bottom of Cornhill Street in a grand Georgian mansion once belonging to a colonial tea merchant. I hadn’t been to Kramer’s since my friend, Valerie, died, and I wasn’t looking forward to visiting it again. Funeral services held in funeral homes always struck me as odd, like sending a loved one off to heaven from the lobby of a Holiday Inn, so I was relieved when Lorraine added that Jay’s funeral mass would be held at St Mary’s Catholic Church on Duke of Gloucester Street, ‘at a later date’. I thanked her, reiterated my offer to help out in any way I could, jotted down her cell phone number on my bedside pad, said goodbye and left Kay and Lorraine to mourn Jay’s passing together.

Then with Paul’s comforting arms around me, I buried my face in my pillow and bawled.

I was up early that morning, eyes red, lids puffy. Paul had already made coffee – fresh ground Columbian, I love that in a man – and I inhaled the first cup gratefully.

As I stood barefoot at the kitchen counter shivering in my pink-flamingo nightshirt, pouring cream into a second cup, Paul came up behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and nuzzled my neck. ‘I have to go to class, sweetie. Are you going to be all right?’

‘I’m going to lay low today and busy myself with a little research. Maybe some righteous indignation will keep the tears from coming back.’

Paul reached over my shoulder, lifted the mug out of my hand, turned me around and pulled me close, resting his chin against the top of my head in a way that always gives me goose bumps. ‘Promise me you won’t do anything dangerous or foolish.’

I promised. I didn’t plan to take the face I’d glimpsed in the mirror that morning out anywhere; it would startle the pedestrians or frighten the horses.

After the phone call, I had talked to Paul about my growing suspicion that Jay had been murdered, and in a cruel, calculated way. I could almost understand strangling someone, I’d said, or shooting them, or clobbering them with a baseball bat in a fit of jealous rage, but what kind of monster feeds someone a poison so lethal that it slowly, ever so slowly, shuts down all the body’s organs? So painful that even touching the hairs on the back of the victim’s hand can cause exquisite pain? Disfiguring, too, and by the time your hair falls out, and you go bald, it’s almost always too late. Even if you survive past that point, you can have paralysis or neurological problems for life.