Sue Grafton - I is for Innocent

"Morley really ate that? It doesn't sound like him," I said.

Dorothy laughed. "His doctor put him on a diet at my insistence- fifteen hundred calories a day. Saturday lunch, he had a little soup and a few bites of dry toast. He said he was a little nauseated and didn't have much appetite. By midafternoon, he was sick as a dog. He spent half the night with his head in the commode. We joked about taking turns if I started feeling worse. Sunday morning he was better, though he didn't look good at all. His color was terrible, but the vomiting had stopped and he was able to keep a little ginger ale down."

"Tell me about Sunday dinner. Did you fix it yourself?"

"Oh dear no, I don't cook. I haven't cooked for months. Do you remember, Loosie?"

"I made us a cold plate, poached chicken breast with salad," she said. From the kitchen came the piercing shriek of the kettle. She excused herself and headed off in that direction while Dorothy took up the narrative.

"I was feeling better by then so I came out to the table just to keep them both company. He did complain some of chest pain, but I assumed it was indigestion. Louise was concerned, but I remember teasing him. I forget what I said now, but I was sure it wasn't serious. He pushed his plate back and got up. He had his hand to his chest and he was gasping for breath. He took two steps and went down. He was gone almost at once. We called the paramedics and we tried mouth-to-mouth, but it was pointless."

"Mrs. Shine, I don't know how to say this, but is there any way you might consider having the body autopsied? I know the subject is painful and you may not feel there's any necessity, but I'd feel better if we were really sure about the cause of death."

"What's the nature of your concern?"

"I'm wondering if someone, uhm, tampered with his food or medications."

Her gaze settled on my face with a look of almost luminous clarity. "You think he was murdered."

"I'd like to have it ruled out. It may be a long shot, but we'll never know otherwise. Once he goes in the ground…"

"I understand," she said. "I'd like to talk it over with Louise and perhaps Morley's brother, who's arriving tonight."

"Could I call you later this evening? I'm really sorry to have to press. I know it's distressing, but with services tomorrow, time is very short."

"Don't apologize," she said. "Of course you may call. At this point, I don't suppose an autopsy would do any harm."

"I'd like to have a conversation with the coroner's office to alert them to the situation, but I don't want to do anything without your permission."

"I have no objections."

"To what?" Louise asked as she came around the corner with a fully laden tea tray. She placed the tray on the coffee table. Dorothy filled her in, summing up the possibilities as succinctly as she'd summed up the wrongful death suit.

"Oh, let her go ahead with it," Louise said. She filled a cup and passed it over to me. "If you discuss it with Frank, you'll never hear the end of it."

Dorothy smiled. "I thought the same thing myself, but I didn't want to say so." To me she said, "Go ahead and do whatever you think best."

"Thank you."

Detective Burt Walker, of the coroner's bureau, was a man in his early forties with receding auburn hair and a close-clipped beard and mustache in a blend of red and blond. His face was round, his complexion ruddy, his coloring suggestive of Scandinavian heritage. His glasses were small and round with thin metal frames. He wasn't heavyset, but he looked like a man who was becoming more substantial as the years went on. The weight looked good on him. He wore a brown tweed jacket, beige chinos, blue shirt, a red tie with white polka dots. While I detailed the circumstances surrounding Morley's death, he leaned an elbow on his desk and variously nodded and rubbed his forehead. I verbalized my suspicions, but I couldn't tell if he was taking me seriously or simply being polite.

When I finished, he stared at me. "So what are you saying?" I shrugged, embarrassed when it came right down to articulating my hunch. "That he actually died from some kind of poisoning."

"Or maybe it was a poison that precipitated his fatal heart attack," Burt said.

"Right."

"Well. It's not inconceivable," he said slowly. "Sounds like he could have been dosed. I don't guess there's any chance he might have done it himself, despondent, depressed about something."

"Not really. His wife does have cancer, but they'd been married forty years and he knew she depended on him. He'd never abandon her. They were very devoted from what I gather. If he was poisoned, it'd almost have to be something he ingested without knowing."

"You have a theory about the chemical agent involved?"

I shook my head. "I don't know anything about that stuff. I've talked to his wife about his last couple of days and she can't pinpoint anything in particular. Nothing overt or obvious, at any rate. She said his color was bad, but I really didn't quiz her about what she meant by that."

"Couldn't have been anything corrosive or you'd know right off," he said. He sighed, shaking his head. "I don't know what to tell you. I'm not going to ask a toxicologist to run any kind of 'general unknown.' You got nothing to work with. A request like that is too broad. You look at the number and variety of drugs, pesticides, industrial products… man oh man… even the substances you handle casually at home. From what you're telling me-I mean, let's assume you're right, just for the sake of argument-the problem's compounded by the fact he was in such poor shape."

"You knew Morley?"

He laughed. "Yeah, I knew Morley. Great old guy, but he's living in the fifties when everybody thought drinking a fifth a day and smoking three packs of cigarettes was just something you did for sport. Guy like Morley whose liver or kidney functions were probably already hampered by disease will be more severely affected by any kind of toxic agent because they got no efficient way to excrete such a substance and they probably can't tolerate as much as a healthy individual. Few things we can probably eliminate right off the bat," he said. "Acids, alkalies. I take it she didn't mention any kind of smell to his breath."

"No, and she'd have noticed. They tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at first and then figured out it was pointless."

"Takes out cyanide, paraldehyde, ether, disulfide, and nicotine sulfate. You couldn't palm those off on a person anyway."

"Arsenic?"

"Well, yeah. Symptoms you described would fit that pretty well.

Except him feeling better. I don't like that much. Too bad he never went over to ER. They'd have tagged it."

"I guess with his wife sick, he didn't want to be a bother," I said. "Everybody's had the flu. He probably thought that's all it was."

"Which it might have been," Burt said. "On the other hand, if it's something he ate and you're talking about the gastrointestinal tract as the portal of entry, then you're talking about a period of time here when you got both chemical transformation and elimination. Generally speaking, chemicals that enter a living organism are either metabolized, eliminated, or both, which means you're progressively reducing the amount of detectable poison. Digestive system goes to work. Hell, he's throwing up the evidence. If the poison kills quickly, there's almost always quantities present on autopsy. It doesn't help he's been embalmed. In a situation like that, when you've got embalming fluid injected in the circulatory system with resultant visceral profusion, toxicologist's problems are blown way bad."

"But would it still be possible to identify?"

"Probably. We'd have to analyze samples of clean embalming fluids, too, check those against whatever foreign elements and compounds are found in the viscera. I tell you what would be the biggest help if you want to get serious about this: Bring me any household products you can find on the premises. Check the garbage for suspect foods. Pill bottles, rat poison, roach powder, cleaning and disinfecting agents, garden insecticides, that kind of thing. I can have a conversation with the funeral director and see if he has anything to contribute. Those guys are pretty sharp once they know what you're after."