Ed McBain: Poison

In the bathroom cabinet, they found several bottles with prescription drugs in them, none of which—judging from the descriptions on the labels—appeared deadly; they nonetheless bagged them for transfer to the lab.

They searched every drawer in the house and found no other medicines or drugs. They searched the kitchen cabinets for any insecticides or other household products that might contain poison. They found only a cockroach aerosol spray, but the plastic ring-seal on the can was unbroken.

"If he poisoned himself," Willis said, "what'd he use?"

In the bedroom, the techs were still busy.

"You finished with this phone here?" Carella asked.

"Yeah," one of the techs said, and Carella picked up the receiver.

"Who you calling, Steve?" Willis asked.

"M.E.'s Office. I want a fast comeback on this one." He hesitated a moment, looking at the base of the phone. "Redial feature on it," he said.

"Try it," Willis said.

Carella pressed the redial button. A dial tone, and then the phone began dialing out. One ring, two, three…

"Hi, this…"

"Hello…"

"… is Marilyn, I'm out just now…"

"Answering machine," he said to Willis.

"… but if you'll leave your name and number and the time you called, I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Please wait for the beep."

Carella waited for the beep, identified himself as a police detective, and asked her to call 377-8024, the number at the squadroom.

"Any name?" Willis said.

"Just Marilyn."

"Did she give the number there?"

"No."

"Any batteries in that thing?"

Carella turned over the phone and opened the battery compartment.

"Yes," he said.

"Then we better unplug it and take it with us," Willis said.

Before they left the building, they knocked on every door. This was boring, an essential part of investigative routine that numbed the brain. Half of the tenants they questioned didn't even know McKennon, which was not surprising for this city. None of them knew what line of work he was in. None of them had seen anyone entering his apartment either last night or this morning. The super told them that McKennon had been living there for alrnost a year now, an ideal tenant, never any complaints about him. They got back to the squadroom at a little befoe three, carrying with them McKennon's telephone and his personal directory. There was no one named Marilyn in that directory. Either he'd known her number by heart or hadn't thought she was important enough to list.

Most women in this city listed only their surnames and initials in the phone company's directory, hoping this would discourage obscene callers. This was no guarantees that the heavy breathers would be fooled; some of them looked specifically for surnames with initials. But Marilyn Whoever had positively identified herself as a woman living alone by saying " I'll get back to you." And to make matters worse, she had said, "I'm out just now," which for any enterprising burglar was a signal to run on over there and loot the joint.

In this city, she'd have been better off saying, "Hi, you've reached 846-0318. If you'll leave a message when you hear the beep…" and so on. A no-frills recording, unreadable for clues by obscene caller or burglar. No name-Just the phone number, which the caller would have known anyway, even if he was just running his finger down a page in the directory. No explanation for not coming to the phone. Leave the potential burglar to dope out whether the apartment's occupant or occupants were in the bathtub or asleep; the one thing any burglar dreaded was walking into an occupied apartment.

The detectives wished Marilyn had recorded her phone number, but she hadn't. As it was, all they had now was an unknown number buried in the phone they had taken from McKennon's apartment. If the call had been made to a local number, the phone company would have no record of it. On the off chance that it might have been a long-distance call, Carella spoke to a phone-company supervisor and discovered they had no record of any long-distance calls made from Jerome McKennon's apartment since March 13, eleven days ago. It seemed unlikely that this had been the last phone call McKennon had made—or tried to make. They tried the number, anyway, and reached a mail-order menswear company in California.

Willis had asked at once if there were any batteries in the unit because he thought taking the phone off the jack might automatically cancel whatever was in its memory; some of these new-fangled phones were very finicky and the batteries were preservation insurance.

They were dealing here with semi-sophisticated machines. McKennon's phone would automatically redial the last number called when you pushed the little REDIAL button on its base. Marilyn's telephone had an answering machine attachment, which meant that anyone calling got a prerecorded message when the machine was in its ANSWER mode.

The detectives had no doubt that the wizards at the lab downtown could retrieve Marilyn's number from the memory bank of McKennon's phone—but lab responses sometimes took weeks. Instead, they opted for an approach that was the equivalent of good old-fashioned legwork.

In the Clerical Office, they plugged in McKennon's phone and asked for a twenty-four-hour redial surveillance. The instructions to the clerk were to keep hitting the redial button until Marilyn herself, and not her machine, picked up. Under no circumstances was anyone to use that phone for any other calls that would wipe out the memory of the last call made by McKennon. The clerk wasn't too happy to inherit this job. Alf Miscolo, who ran the Clerical Office, wasn't too happy, either.

He was not normally a testy person. But he was trying to catch up on two weeks of filing, and there was an angry scowl on his face now. Wearing a sleeveless blue sweater over his uniform shirt and trousers, dark-eyed with a massive nose and bushy eyebrows, thick neck giving the impression of sitting directly on his shoulders, he looked almost menacing.

"We got plenty to keep us busy in here without having to do your work besides," he muttered, and glared malevolently at the telephone intruder.

"In here" was a small cluttered room on the second floor of the old building on Grover Avenue. The aroma of percolating coffee permeated the room. None of the detectives enjoyed Miscolo's experimental brews, but he kept the pot going day and night anyway, mixing Colombian with Viennese, decaff with regular. The detectives always asked him if he was a mad scientist searching for a potion that would keep him eternally young. Miscolo told them to go fuck themselves.

The coffee aroma drifted out of the open door, following the detectives down the corridor to the squadroom, where Carella immediately placed a call to the Medical Examiner's Office. When he hung up, he said, "They'll do their best."

"Which means by next Christmas," Willis said sourly.

He was wrong.

At twenty to four that afternoon, just as the shift was about to change, Paul Blaney called.

"How's this for service?" he said.

"What've you got?" Carella asked.

"And it wasn't easy, believe me," Blaney said.

Carella said nothing. Better to let Blaney do it in his own sweet time.

"Tough poison to recover," Blaney said.

Carella waited.

"The tobacco odor was the tip-off," Blaney said. "Though you don't always get that."

From where he sat at his desk, Willis raised his eyebrows questioningly. Carella shrugged. Across the room, Meyer Meyer was pushing his way through the gate in the slatted rail divider. He was wearing a short coat with a fake fur collar, a woolen watch cap pulled down over his bald head. "This is March?" he asked, blowing on his hands. "This is a week before Easter?"

On the phone, Blaney said, "Congestion and acute inflammation of the stomach and intestines. Indicates the poison was taken by mouth. All the organs congested, blood very dark, very fluid. I ran tests on the stomach contents, viscera and brain. Color reactions on the recovered samples were positive. Yellow with slight orange cast for the nitro-sylsulfuric acid. Yellow with brown cast for the concentrated sulfuric acid, no change on the Erdmann's or the Mecke's, pale orange with a brown cast on the Marquis' reagent. Wine-red on the Janovksy, magenta on the paradimethyl… well, you don't need to know all the color tests. I also got huge yellow crystals with the platinum chloride reagent, and an amorphous precipitation with the gold chloride. I'm pretty certain I've nailed it down."