Ed McBain: Poison

"Or suicide, as the case may be," Willis said. "How many?"

"Oh, please, none of my friends killed Jerry."

"How do you know that?"

"Because none of them even knew him."

"You're sure of that?" Willis said.

"Positive. I don't make a habit of telling Tom and Dick about Harry."

"How many Toms, Dicks and Harrys are there?" Willis persisted.

Marilyn sighed. "At present," she said, "I'm seeing three or four men."

"Which is it?" Willis said. "Three or four?"

"Four, counting Jerry."

"Then that makes it three."

"Yes."

"On a regular basis?"

"If that means am I sleeping with all of them, the answer is occasionally."

"May we have their names and addresses, please?" Carella said.

"Why? Are you going to drag them into this?"

"A man is dead…"

"I realize that. But neither I nor any of my friends…"

"We would appreciate their names and addresses."

Marilyn sighed again and went to a dropleaf desk in one corner of the room. She took her address book from it and started copying names and addresses onto a sheet of her stationery. When she handed it to Carella, he glanced at it briefly, put it into his notebook, and then asked, "Have you turned on your answering machine since you got home?"

"I was about to," Marilyn said. "But then the police started phoning every three minutes."

"Would you mind turning it on now?" Carella said.

She went to the equipment on her desk and pushed a button.

Willis opened his notebook.

"Hi, Marilyn," a woman's voice said, "this is Didi. Call me when you get a chance, will you?"

In his notebook, Willis wrote Didi.

A click, a buzz, another voice.

"Miss Hollis, this is Hadley Fields at Merrill, Lynch. Would you call me, please?"

Willis wrote Hadley Fields, Merrill Lynch.

A click, a buzz, and then…

"Marilyn, it's Baz. I have tickets for the Philharmonic on Wednesday night. Can you let me know if you're free? By Monday latest, okay?"

Willis kept writing as the tape unreeled.

"I hate your machine, Marilyn. This is Chip, call me, okay?"

A click, a buzz… and someone hung up.

"I hate when they do that," Marilyn said.

Another click, another buzz.

"Marilyn, this is Didi again. Where the hell are you?"

The parade of calls went on. A very busy lady, Willis thought.

And then, buried in the midst of the recorded messages…

"Marilyn… I need you… I'm…"

And a gasp…

And the sound of the telephone clattering onto a hard surface…

And the sound of someone retching…

A click, another buzz, and the recorded messages continued.

"Marilyn, this is Didi, I've been calling you all weekend. Will you please get back to me?"

Marilyn, this is Alice, this is Chip (and I still hate your machine), this is Baz (about the Philharmonic again), this is Sam, this is Jane, this is Andy…

Not a Tom, Dick or Harry among the male callers.

But a few more men than the three she'd listed for them.

Carella opened his notebook, unfolded the sheet of stationery on which she'd jotted down the names, addresses and telephone numbers, and said, "Are you sure these are all the men you're dating?"

"At the moment," Marilyn said.

"And the others?" Willis said.

"What others?"

"On the phone."

"Acquaintances."

"But not men you're dating."

"No."

"Was that Mr. McKennon's voice?" Carella asked.

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Yes," and lowered her eyes.

Carella closed his notebook.

"We may need to reach you at work," he said. "Is there a number you can let us…?"

"I'm unemployed," she said.

Willis thought his face registered blank, but she must have caught something on it.

"It's not what you're thinking," she said at once.

"What am I thinking?" he said.

"You're thinking expensive, well-furnished town-house, you're thinking she's got a sugar daddy. You're wrong. I've got a real daddy, and he's an oilman in Texas, and he doesn't want his only daughter starving in the big, bad city."

"I see."

"Well, we're sorry to have taken so much of your time," Carella said. "You've been very helpful, though, and we…"

"How?" she asked, and showed them to the door.

Outside, the air was cold and the wind was sharp.

In this city, they called it a 24-24. It applied to homicides and it referred to the importance of the twenty-four hours preceding a person's death and the twenty-four hours following it.

The pre-mortem twenty-four hours were important because what a victim did, where he went, whom he saw, all might have bearing on his death. Officially Jerome McKennon was a victim, even if he'd swallowed the nicotine of his own volition. The post-mortem twenty-four hours were important only if someone had murdered McKennon because then the investigating detectives would be working against the clock, and as more and more time elapsed, the trail could get colder and colder, giving the killer an edge. It was a dictum in police work that if a case went beyond a week without a solid lead, you might as well throw it in the Open File. The Open File was the graveyard of investigation.

There were only two detectives working the McKennon case. This wasn't a big-deal front-page murder. Nobody important had been slain, no exotic setting had been involved, this was just another garden-variety murder in a city that sprouted them like weeds. The poison was unusual, true, but even that wasn't something an aboriginal tribe might dip its arrows into. The media had more than enough sensational murders to shout about every day, and since this case lacked what the cops referred to as the Roman Arena Appeal, it got less than passing notice in the newspapers and on television. Only one of the Tuesday morning commentators—a man who'd been touting the evils of cigarette-smoking for the past six months now, ever since he himself had quit, there's nothing like a reformed whore—found the case an opportunity for mentioning how strong a poison nicotine actually was, but he was a voice in the wilderness.

The case was important only to Willis and Carella, and then only because they'd happened to be "up"—on duty and catching—when the call came in. Neither of them enjoyed poisons that acted within minutes. Such a poison automatically started them thinking suicide. They were not paid to think suicide. The only reason a suicide was investigated as a homicide was that it might in fact be a homicide. But nicotine did work in minutes, sometimes seconds, and Jerome McKennon had died of nicotine poisoning and it was important now to get work on the 24-24 and to do it fast because if someone had dropped that poison in his beer or forced it down his throat, the edge was widening with every ticking second of the clock.

There were only two of them.

The pre-24 was going to be difficult; they had found no appointment calendar in McKennon's apartment. But Marilyn Hollis had told them he was vice president in charge of marketing at Eastec Systems on Avenue J, so Carella started there.

Willis, working from the list of three names Marilyn had given them, set about trying to find the other men in her life. He was, in effect, working the post-24. She had told them that none of those other men even knew McKennon—"I don't make a habit of telling Tom about Dick or Harry." But a goodly number of the murders committed in this city were motivated by jealousy. Husband slays wife's lover. Woman slays own lover. Boyfriend kills girlfriend or girlfriend's boyfriend, or, generously, both. Boyfriend kills boyfriend or boyfriend's mother. The possibilities were limitless, the green-eyed monster exploding into violence at the slightest provocation.