Desperate Measures (26 page)

She felt as if her throat was constricted too much for her to speak for a time. Finally she said, “You said two things.”

“Yes.” He threw rocks with unerring aim, harder and harder. “The other one is about Shelley. Graham said she's falling in love with me. He said you know it, too. Of course, she isn't. It's a mixture of pity, compassion, regret over her outburst when we met, a lot of things. And I've been stupid. She's the first person besides Graham, the only person my own age, I could ever talk to and I've taken advantage of that. I don't want to wound her. She's too good to be hurt because of an infatuation. I'll tell her she's like the little sister I never had.”

“How old are you, Alex?” Barbara asked when he became silent.

“Depends,” he said. He tossed a handful of stones into the air, and then leaned back, done with pelting the big rock. “Chronologically? I'll be twenty-nine in September. A Virgo. Other ways? Older than Graham, older than anyone. A strange thing happens when you've been hurt, surgically, emotionally, in a lot of ways; I think each hurt adds a year or two. I've been alone a lot, and that adds a year or two tucked in between real time. It helps if you can think of real time as divisible. Sometimes I feel like an ancient man who's been revitalized in a poor excuse of a frame.”

“Will you let her be your friend?”

“My little sister is for life, Barbara. You ready to start back down?”

He led the way back down, and watching his easy stride, she wanted to weep.

23

“Okay, gang, we
have fifteen weeks,” Barbara said on Monday afternoon in her office. Shelley and Bailey made up the gang. Barbara had had a choice of trial dates, October sixteenth or February something. She had opted for October.

“We have quite a few directions to follow,” she said. “The day of the murder. I want a timetable. When Leona Marchand went to school during the day, when she returned home, when she prepared the food, what was in the box she took back with her. What was in that skillet and casserole…?”

She had several pages of notes, and they covered them all during the session. Bailey was making notes, page after page of notes. Shelley was doing the same.

Finally she said, “That's for starters. As discovery trickles in, there will be more.”

“Fifteen weeks,” Shelley said in a low voice. “Your father said a proper defense takes at least a thousand hours.”

“Look at it this way,” Barbara said. “Fifteen weeks times a hundred hours per week, divided between us, remember. Not so bad.”

Shelley did not look convinced.

“And you remember that we start with a holiday,” Bailey said.

“Fourth of July. Tomorrow. Hannah and I are going on a picnic.”

“I told Alex I know a place where we can watch fireworks,” Shelley said, keeping her eyes downcast. “He's never gone out to see fireworks.”

Barbara looked at her own legal pad; what a good stage prop, someplace to direct the gaze when you couldn't bear to look at another person. She suspected that after tomorrow Shelley might not be worth much as an associate for a time. “So let's call it a day for now,” she said. “Have fun. Take earplugs. And from Wednesday on, no more fooling around.”

Barbara called Will Thaxton as soon as she was alone again. She had known he would be appalled at the short time she had allowed to prepare the defense, and he was. Appalled and angry. When he demanded to know why she was shortchanging Alex, she said, “I said I'd keep you informed. I didn't say I wanted your advice or your recriminations. Just let me handle my case, all right?”

There was a pause, then very stiffly he said, “Of course. Sorry. Thanks for calling.”

They hung up. She glared at the telephone, finally shrugged, and started to go through the police reports she already had in hand.

When she got home that evening, Frank was on the back porch with his page proofs.

“Is it done now?” she asked.

“Patsy said it is. It seems that it was a bit more trouble than either of us anticipated. Anyway, one last read through it, and then I'll ship it off. Patsy wants to go on her vacation, but she won't leave until this blasted thing has been put in the mail.”

He put the paper he had been reading on the stack, then said, “Reading through those old trials made me think of some of the people involved. Remember Bucky Case? Maybe he was before your time. Bucky and his wife, Eunice, owned a mystery bookstore in Portland, sold it a few years back to retire. Case Books, fine name for a mystery bookstore. I called Bucky a while ago. He remembers Talbot Grady. He remembers every mystery he ever read, every writer he ever met. Anyway, Grady is a pseudonym for Edward Fensterman, and he is alive and well in Clearwater, Florida. What do you think of that?”

“I think that's swell,” she said. “Did you call him?”

“Yep. When Patsy leaves on her vacation, Wednesday or Thursday, I think I'll take a little trip to Florida. Get in some fishing, eat grouper cheeks and crabs….”

“And chat with Fensterman,” she said with satisfaction. Her book search had not come up with anything.

“Fensterrnan said he has file copies of everything he ever wrote,” Frank said, “all boxed up in a spare room. He won't sell a copy, or let me borrow one, but I can Xerox anything I want, if they'll hold together long enough.”

“Are you sure you're up to a trip like that? It's going to be hot as blazes in Florida in July.”

“I think they've caught on to air-conditioning,” he said. “And from what Bucky told me, I believe Fensterman is something of a millionaire, a real-estate developer. He got out of the writing business when he discovered money in land.”

That would take care of several problems, Barbara thought then. When Patsy was off, Frank got grumpy, irritable. He would be safely out of the way for a week or so while they tracked down Mr. Wonderful for certain. And they would get their hands on that damned book. If what Mr. Wonderful had wanted was in the text itself, they would have it. If it had been a scribbled note, an inscription, anything of that sort, they would have nothing. But that was what they had now, nothing; what was there to lose? A Florida trip might even be good for her father.

“What made you decide the intruder was really after the book?” she asked. They had gone back and forth a lot about that missing book.

“Something Hilde's sister said. Every now and then Hilde packed up a box of books and hauled them down for her and her mother. They all liked the same kind of light reading, I guess. Anyway, if Hilde ever mentioned something like that to her friend, he might have been afraid that whatever's in that book is dangerous. If the book is what he was after, in the first place.”

Another grain to add to the beach, she thought, but they needed whatever grains fate tossed them.

On Thursday morning she took him to the airport and saw him off. Late that afternoon the toxicology report was delivered. She sat at her desk and read through it, read it again, then stood up. She had to see Dr. Minick. The day before, she had glimpsed Shelley only in passing; now she went looking for her. Shelley was trying to interview Rachel's teachers, the school secretary, friends, and trying harder to find a good picture or two of her BN—Before Nunhood. Rachel was sticking close to home, wearing no makeup, not running around with a boyfriend in a red Camaro. Practicing for the convent. Shelley was on her phone, Maria said; Barbara tapped on her door, pushed it open, and entered when Shelley said, to come in. Then she gasped.

“Good God! What have you done?”

“Is it really that bad?” Shelley asked plaintively, hanging up the telephone. She had cut her hair.

“It's beautiful,” Barbara said. “Just a surprise. When did you get it done?”

“After work yesterday. I went straight to the salon and said, Whack it off, most of it, all of it. Whatever. It was too hot. And too… just too much.” She looked sad, and older, at least a day or two older with her hair short.

“It's really beautiful, and you look terrific.”

“You know what I was thinking before I decided to get it zapped? How pretty Bill Spassero and I were together. All that blond hair, what a match. People looked at us together and smiled, we were so perfect. That's not a very good reason to stay with someone. Because you look neat together. It was pretty juvenile. Vanity, vanity, begone.”

“Well, what I came in to tell you is that the tox report came, and I have to go talk to Dr. Minick. It doesn't make any sense. If you're free after work, I thought maybe you could come by the house, we'll have something to eat, and put our heads together.”

“Good,” Shelley said. “I'll pick up dinner.”

Traffic was fierce; it seemed that all of Springfield worked across the river in Eugene, and they all started for home at the same time. It took forty-five minutes to get to the Minick house. Dr. Minick greeted her at the door, and Alex came from his studio to say hello. He was wearing a beret, but not the sunglasses, and he didn't bother to put them on.

“What's up?” Alex asked.

“Questions for a doctor,” she said. “It's about the Hilde Franz toxicology report.” She realized to her surprise that she no longer felt compelled to look away, or to force herself to pretend anything with him. He was just a guy with a hideous face, one that she was growing used to.

“Let's sit at the kitchen table,” Dr. Minick said. “I made lemonade, or would you like wine, a drink, something else?”

“Lemonade is fine,” she said.

Dr. Minick poured the lemonade, then sat down and read the report. He frowned and read it again.

“See the problem?” Barbara said. “The medical examiner broke it down for those of us who are math-challenged. It would take the equivalent of six hundred milligrams of meperidine HCl to get that much in her blood. That would be twelve of her fifty-milligram capsules. If she was going to take that much, why not all of it? Why stop there?”

“No one could force another person to take that many, not without a struggle, and you said there was none,” Dr. Minick said.

“Could that kind of medication be dissolved in a glass of milk?

A cup of tea? A glass of wine? Anything.”

He shook his head. “You'd taste it and stop drinking. Besides, as I recall, her last meal had been many hours before her death; her stomach was pretty empty.”

“Try this then. Could someone have tampered with the capsules, crushed tablets to refill them? Could you get that kind of dosage in a capsule?”

“Maybe in several,” he said doubtfully. “But they would have been larger capsules; she would have noticed, wouldn't she?”

“Maybe someone refilled all of them, so it wouldn't matter. If she was not a regular user, and apparently she wasn't, she might not have remembered how big they were two years ago, especially if they were all the same size.”

“You really believe she was murdered, don't you?” Alex said then. “Why? Why her?”

“I don't know,” Barbara said. “But I know she didn't take twelve capsules, because she didn't have twelve to take.”

“Did she have the prescription refilled?” Dr. Minick asked. “No. It was the original container, with
NO REFILLS
printed on the label, dated two years ago.”

Dr. Minick read the report another time. “If this is correct, and there's no reason to doubt it, I agree with you, she was killed by someone.”

“But why her?” Alex said again. “Is there a connection between her death and Marchand's?”

“I think so, but I don't know what it is,” Barbara said. Then, addressing Dr. Minick again, she asked, “What would you expect if someone took six hundred milligrams of that drug? Is it enough to guarantee death?”

He shook his head. “I don't know. Barbara, something else in that report strikes me as strange. Only a trace of the meperidine was in her stomach; the rest was in her blood already. But the problem with oral medications is that they're not assimilated all at once. It can take several hours for an antibiotic to be dispersed through the bloodstream, for example, and capsules don't release the medication all at once. If she had been injected with that dose, then yes, it could have paralyzed her, stopped her lungs' function, and that would have stopped her heart, but an oral dose? I don't think so. When they use that as a surgical relaxant, it's administered through an IV, and they put the patient on a respirator. Are you sure she wasn't injected?”

“They didn't find a single puncture,” she said.

“Perhaps she was extremely sensitive to that particular medication,” he said after a moment; then he shook his head. “It still doesn't explain how it got into her bloodstream so fast.”

Barbara finished her lemonade and stood up. “I've got to go. Thanks, Dr. Minick.”

Shelley's red Porsche was in Frank's driveway when Barbara arrived. She let herself in the front door, walked through the house and out to the porch, where Shelley was sitting on the steps throwing a ball for the cats to chase.

She looked up and said, “They brought it to me and said let's play.”

“And they won't stop until you do,” Barbara said, sitting down next to Shelley. Thing One brought the ball back and dropped it at Shelley's feet. She threw it again, and both cats streaked off after it.

“I have stuff that should go in the fridge,” Shelley said. “I thought it would be as easy to wait here as at home, so I came on over.”

She sounded so low that Barbara wanted to hug her, but she resisted. She stood up. “Let's do it. I'm dying for something to drink. Have you ever driven to and from Springfield at this time of day? Death on wheels.”

One of the cats brought the ball back and Shelley tossed it. Then they picked up Shelley's packages and went inside, leaving the cats to amuse each other.

“I went to Taco Loco and told them two of everything, to be reheated later,” Shelley said, stowing things in the refrigerator. “No big deal.”