Ed McBain - Poison

The law offices of Hackett, Rawlings, Etc., Etc. were on the twelfth floor of a Jefferson Avenue building, than which no real estate in the city came higher. Endicott's office was furnished in cool modern: a teak desk, a blue carpet, a sofa and side chairs upholstered in a darker blue, an abstract painting on the wall over the sofa picking up the predominantly blue color theme and splashing it with red as shocking as a blood stain.

"Miss Hollis gave us your name as one of her friends," Willis said.

"She's not in any trouble, is she?" Endicott said at once.

"No, sir, none at all. But we're investigating a case…"

"What case?"

"An apparent suicide."

"Oh. Who?"

"A man named Jerry McKennon."

Again, Willis watched the eyes.

Nothing in them.

And then, sudden recognition.

"Oh. Yes. Uptown someplace, wasn't it? I read a small item about it in the paper this morning."

A puzzled look.

Then: "I'm sorry, but how is Marilyn involved?"

"He was a friend of hers, too."

"Oh?" Endicott said.

"Had you ever met him?"

"No. Did Marilyn say I did?"

"No, no. I was just curious."

"I'm sorry, the name isn't familiar. McKennon? No."

"Did she ever mention him to you?"

"Not to my recollection." Endicott paused, and then said, "Are you investigating a murder, Mr. Willis, is that it?"'

"Well, not exactly, sir. But in this city we investigate suicides the same way we do homicides. Well, you're a lawyer, maybe you already know that."

"My specialty is corporate law," Endicott said.

"Well," Willis said, "that's the way we do it."

"And you say this man was one of Marilyn's friends?"

"Yes, sir."

"And she gave you my name as another of her friends?"

"Yes, sir."

"Mm," Endicott said.

"You are a friend, aren't you?" Willis said.

"Oh, yes."

"How long have you known her?"

"It must be almost a year now. We met shortly after she got here from Texas. Her father's a millionaire down there, oil or cattle, I forget which. He set her up in a town-house on… well, have you been there?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very luxurious, nothing but the best for his darling daughter. From the way she talks about him, he's a bit of a curmudgeon, but generous to a fault where it concerns his only child."

"Where in Texas, would you know, sir?"

"Houston? Yes, I'm sure she said Houston."

"And her father's name? Did she ever mention it to you?"

"If she did, I don't recall it."

"How'd you happen to meet her, Mr. Endicott?"

"I was going through a divorce… have you ever gone through a divorce?"

"No, sir."

"Ever been married?"

"No, sir."

"If marriage is purgatory, divorce is hell," Endicott said, and smiled. "Anyway, I went through the whole bit. Bought myself a hand-tailored wardrobe, starting using men's cologne, almost bought a motorcycle but sanity prevailed, started going to singles bars, took personal ads in The Saturday Journal— down there in The Quarter, you know…"

"Yes, sir."

"… and, most important for a newly divorced man on the prowl, started going to museums a lot."

"Museums?"

"Yes, Mr. Willis, museums. There are a great many available and generally higher-class women frequenting this city's museums on any given afternoon of the week. Especially the art museums. And especially on rainy days. That's where I met Marilyn. At the Fine Arts Museum uptown, on a rainy Saturday."

"And this was about a year ago."

"April, I think. Almost a year."

"And you've been seeing her ever since."

"Well, yes. We hit it off immediately. She's an extraordinary woman, you know. Well-bred, intelligent, inquisitive, marvelous fun to be with."

"How often do you see her, Mr. Endicott?"

"At least once a week, sometimes more often. Occasionally, we'll get away for a weekend, but that's rare. We're good friends, Mr. Willis. I'm fifty-seven years old…"

Willis blinked.

"… and I was raised at a time when men didn't have women as friends. All we were interested in was getting in their pants. Well, times have changed and so have I. I don't wish to discuss our personal relationship, I know Marilyn wouldn't, either. Anyway, that's not the important thing. The important thing is that we're friends. We can unburden ourselves to each other, we can totally relax with each other, we're very good friends, Mr. Willis. And that means a great deal to me."

"I see," Willis said, and hesitated. "Does it bother you that she may have other good friends?"

"Why would it? If you and I were friends, Mr. Willis, and you had other friends, would it bother me? You're thinking the way I used to think. That somehow it's impossible for a man and a woman to be true friends without all sorts of nonsense intruding on the relationship. Marilyn sees other men, I know that. She's a beautiful and intelligent woman, I wouldn't expect otherwise. And I'm sure she considers some of them to be friends. But does friendship have to be exclusive? And if she goes to bed with some of them—as well she may, I've never asked—don't I go to bed with other women? Do you understand what I'm saying, Mr. Willis?"

He was saying there wasn't a jealous bone in his body. He was saying he couldn't possibly have killed Jerry McKennon, whoever the hell that was, because he didn't know him and he wouldn't have cared if he and Marilyn were screwing day and night on the sidewalk in front of the police station.

"I think so," Willis said. "Thanks very much for your time."

McKennon's Week-at-a-Glance calendar for the better part of March looked like this:

Carella began cross-checking the appointment calendar against the personal telephone directories he had taken from McKennon's apartment and from his office at Eastec.

The frequently mentioned "Ralph," of course, was the president of Eastec and the many meetings with him were perfectly appropriate for a company that had "a brilliant future."

From McKennon's office directory, Carella learned that:

Eltronics was not a misspelling of Electronics. There was in fact an Eltronics, Inc. in Calm's Point, and it was a supplier of electronic equipment for digital systems.

Pierce Electronics was another supplier, this time in Isola itself.

Dynomat was a burglar-alarm company in Riverhead.

Karl Zanger, Paul Hopkins, Lawrence Barnes, Max Steinberg, Geoffrey Ingrams, Samuel Oliver, Dale Packard, Louis King, George Andrews, Lloyd Davis, Irwin Fein, Peter Mclntyre, Frederick Carter, Joseph Di Angelo, Michael Lane, Richard Heller, Martin Farren, Thomas Haley, Peter Landon, John Fields, Leonard Harkavy, John Unger, Benjamin Jagger and Axel Sanderson were all potential Eastec clients, listed as such in McKennon's directory. Some of the names were already crossed out. Either they had by then become active clients or else they were no longer interested.

From the Isola phone book, Carella learned—as if he hadn't already surmised it—that Mario's, The Coffee Shack, The Ascot House, Jackie's, Jonesey's, L'ltalico and Nimrod's were restaurants. He could find no similar listing for Harold's, where McKennon had dinner at 7:00 p.m. on March 8, so he assumed Harold Somebody was a personal friend, as probably were Hillary (the 8:00 p.m. party on March 15) and Colly (the 7:00 p.m. party McKennon would never attend on the thirtieth).

At this point, Meyer Meyer, smoking a cigarette and kibitzing while Carella was preparing his lists, casually mentioned that he shouldn't too easily chalk off the March 8 and March 15 parties as too distant in time from the poisoning. He reminded Carella that way back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, they had together investigated a poisoning in which a television comic named Stan Gifford dropped dead while performing live before an estimated forty million viewers. After autopsy, the M.E.—Paul Blaney in that case as well—reported that Gifford had ingested a hundred and thirty times the lethal dose of a poison named strophanthin, and that death would have occurred within minutes.