The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (41 page)

“Gross,” Stephen said.

“But that does explain it,” Boyd said. “Somebody must have spilled peanuts on her at the opera, and she had the smell on her clothes. You know, that must be why she left early.”

“You don’t think Wagner’s explanation enough? And getting peanuts spilled on you is a risk at Yankee Stadium or the Big Apple Circus, but how often does it happen at the Met? Anyway, that’s not how it happened. She wouldn’t breathe in peanut residue at Lincoln Center and feel the effects a mile away and half an hour later. She didn’t smell peanuts until she was home in her own house.”

“I don’t understand,” Jackson said. “She didn’t keep peanuts there.”

“No, she didn’t. But someone made sure she’d smell peanuts when she got home from the opera. And it must have been a good strong smell, because there was a trace of it in the air the next day. It was faint by then, and all I knew was that I smelled something and couldn’t quite identify it. Later, when I learned what killed her, I realized what I’d smelled earlier.”

Ray said, “Would that kill a person, Bernie? Just smellin’ a couple of peanuts?”

“Probably not,” I said. “But it would bring on a reaction, and Mrs. Ostermaier would have recognized the reaction instantly, just as she would have recognized the smell that caused it. And she’d have known what to do.”

“She’d give herself a shot,” he said, “of whatchacallit.”

“Epinephrine,” I said, “which she kept in her purse. It comes in a type of syringe they call a pen, designed to dispense multiple doses over a period of time. I believe you found an empty pen in her purse.”

“Right. First thing we thought, she took the last dose a while ago and never got around to gettin’ the prescription refilled.”

“But that wasn’t it, was it?”

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

“Well?” Jackson said. “Are you going to tell us what it was?”

“I was gettin’ there, Counselor. See, this consultant I brought in came up with an idea or two. One thing I did, I got the Medical Examiner to take another good look at the body. Turns out there was evidence of a recent injection in the thigh. So she did give herself a shot.”

“But if the pen was empty—”

“It wasn’t,” I said. “Not when she injected herself. Later, when the police found it in her purse, it had been emptied of its contents. But that was after she’d given herself a shot of the substance that killed her.”

“And what was that?”

“Peanut oil,” Ray said. “An intramuscular shot of peanut oil, which would account for her havin’ peanut allergens in her bloodstream but not in her stomach. She killed herself tryin’ to cure herself. The pen was empty, but it held traces of the peanut oil.”

“And that’s what makes it homicide,” I said. “Exposure to the odor of peanuts, through airborne peanut dust, could have come about accidentally. But it’s hard to conjure up an accident that would replace the epinephrine in a syringe with the substance it was meant to counteract.”

The hush that had fallen over the room earlier came back for another visit, and once again it was Jackson who broke it. “If someone deliberately sabotaged the syringe with peanut oil—”

“It would be hard to do it accidentally.”

“Yes, of course. But to do so intentionally could only be premeditated murder.”

“It doesn’t sound spur-of-the-moment,” I agreed.

“Nor is it an act that could have been performed by an outsider.”

I glanced around the room, and what I saw was a batch of people doing the very same thing, their eyes darting from one person to another.

“It would have to be one of us,” Jackson said.

“Oh, more than one,” I said.

“Four children,” I said, “and all of you needed money. Your mother was rattling around in a house far too large for her needs, and if she would agree to move it would sell quickly for a high price. But she wanted to live out her life in the house that had been her home for so many years.

“And her heart was bad, and what kind of life could she look forward to? Maybe there were already signs of mental deterioration. Maybe she was forgetting things, maybe she’d sometimes have trouble coming up with a name, or the right word.”

I saw some of them nodding in agreement.

“In the right light,” I said, “easing her out of this world and into the next could almost be seen as an act of mercy. And done the right way it would be both quick and gentle—and, most important, neither Helen Ostermaier nor anyone else would recognize her death as what it was—an act of murder.”

The word brought a gasp or two.

“She’s alone,” I said, setting the scene. “She’s in the comfort of her own home, after an evening at a favorite venue, the Metropolitan Opera. In her living room, she sees a blue box, gift-wrapped. Perhaps there’s a note on it, something along the lines of
For You, Mom!
or
Open Me Now!

“Well, who can resist a surprise? She opens the box, pulls at the tissue paper to see what it’s concealing. There doesn’t seem to be anything there, but a strong smell of peanuts rises from the tissue paper, and she feels the beginning of an allergic reaction that has become familiar to her.

“Fortunately she knows what to do. She shrugs off her coat, reaches into her purse, finds the epinephrine pen. She uncaps it and gives herself a shot. But instead of reversing the onset of anaphylactic shock, the injection heightens it exponentially. In no time at all, the woman is dead.”

“Oh, God,” Meredith said. “It sounds so awful. I never thought—”

“Stop,” Boyd told her. “This gentleman is telling us a story, and that’s all it is, a story. You shouldn’t be saying anything, Meredith. None of us should.”

“In fact,” Deirdre said, “we should probably leave. If we say anything at all—”

“It couldn’t be used in court,” Jackson said. “I haven’t heard a Miranda warning. No one’s read any of us our rights.”

“You probably know ’em,” Ray said. “You’re an attorney yourself, so you’d have to know your rights, and so would anybody who’s spent more than fifteen minutes in front of a television set. But you’re not gonna hear ’em from me, not tonight, on account of this is just an unofficial gatherin’ of family members and friends and a couple other interested parties.”

“Unofficial,” Jackson said. “Well, in that case I’ll admit I’d like to hear the rest, Rhodenbarr. I have a brother and two sisters in this room, and it sounds as though you’re accusing one or more of them of murdering our mother.”

“All three of them,” I said. “It was very much a joint effort. Meredith, you went to a storefront clinic on Avenue A and obtained a prescription for an epinephrine pen of the type your mother carried. You filled it at a drugstore a block away. The clinic gave you a receipt, and so did the drugstore, and you kept them both.”

“Brilliant,” Nils said.

“Not that the receipts are necessary,” I said. “Everything’s on record. There’s probably security camera coverage of your visits to both establishments, as far as that goes. But never mind. You bought the pen and gave it to your brother Boyd.”

Boyd rolled his eyes. “And no doubt you can point to security camera footage showing my sister handing me this pen.”

I shook my head. “What I can point to,” I said, “is a six-ounce bottle of Nature’s Best Cold-Pressed Peanut Oil, guaranteed on its label to have been produced exclusively from organically grown peanuts, and with minute peanut particles present in suspension in order to maximize authentic peanut flavor. That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close, because phrasing like that does tend to linger in the mind.”

“I’m a cook and a caterer,” he said. “I have a great array of ingredients in my kitchen.”

“But this wasn’t stored with the other oils, was it? It was tucked away in another cupboard. And, on the basis of the sell-by date, it must have been purchased quite recently.”

“You can’t prove it’s the same oil you found in the syringe.”

“Matter of fact,” Ray said, “we probably can. You got a specialty product like that, well, it won’t have DNA, but what it’s got is close enough. You put a couple of lab technicians on it and they’ll make a good case.”

“You emptied the epinephrine out of the pen Meredith gave you,” I told Boyd, “and replaced it with peanut oil. Then you gave it back to Meredith, who had a lunch date with her mother.” I turned to Meredith. “The two of you spent what must have been a pleasant hour and a half at Le Soupçon du Jour, in the course of which you got hold of your mother’s purse long enough to switch pens. You left her a pen loaded with peanut oil and took away the one containing epinephrine. What did you do with it?”

“I’m not going to answer that.”

“I wish you would,” Boyd said. “If you’d done what you were supposed to do with it, we wouldn’t all be having this conversation.”

“I was wondering about that,” I said. “Meredith, weren’t you supposed to get the good pen to your sister? That way Deirdre could have switched pens again after she discovered your mother’s body.”

Meredith froze with her mouth open, unable to find words. Nils put a hand on her arm. “Hypothetically,” he said. “Okay?”

“Go ahead.”

“Hypothetically, let’s say that no one had told Meredith what to do after she switched the pens. Let’s say that she was so upset by what she’d just done that she couldn’t bear to have the pen on her person. So on the way home she dropped it into a subway trash barrel.”

“Actually it was a sewer, honey.”

“I was keeping it hypothetical.”

“It’s a nice hypothesis,” I said. “Boyd, you had one more task to perform. You pulverized a couple of ounces of peanuts in a blender and delivered them to Deirdre. Deirdre, you wrapped them in tissue paper, packed them up in a gift box, and tied it with a ribbon. Shortly after your mother left her house on her way to the Met, you let yourself in and put the box on the coffee table where it would be the first thing she saw when she walked in the door.

“Then you went home. You knew when the opera would let out, and when your mother would be likely to get home. You waited until then and dialed her number. What would you have done if she answered?”

“How could she?”

“Well, who was to say that the plan would work? Suppose the smell of the peanuts wasn’t enough to generate an allergic reaction? She’d have no reason to give herself a shot of epinephrine, and she’d be in perfectly good shape to pick up the telephone.

“But you wouldn’t be able to tell what happened just by hearing her voice on the phone. You’d have to ask her a couple of questions. ‘Mom, did you see the blue box on the coffee table? Did you open it?’

“And if she hadn’t opened it, then you’d have a choice to make. What would you tell her? To open it right away? Or to leave it unopened?”

“Oh, God,” Deirdre said. “She didn’t answer, she couldn’t answer, she was already—”

“Dead,” I said, “which makes it a real The-Lady-or-the-Tiger question, doesn’t I? Of course you couldn’t be absolutely certain she was dead, you wouldn’t know that until you went over and discovered her body, and you had to hold off until enough time had passed. You made a couple more phone calls—to your mother’s friend, who told you she’d left early. That made it a little more likely that your plan had worked, but you still had to bide your time and call your mother’s number another time or two. Then you went to the house you’d already visited earlier that evening, when you delivered the package.

“And there was your mother, on the floor, her forehead cool to the touch. Was the syringe still in her leg?”

“It was on the rug next to her.”

“If Meredith had given you the original pen,” I said, “you could have switched them. But she hadn’t, and you couldn’t leave things as they were, because there was too great a chance that someone would check the pen’s contents. And it was still half-full of peanut oil, because it was designed to dispense only one small dose at a time.

“So what could you do with it? Send it to join its brother in the city’s sewer system? No, she always carried a pen with her, and its disappearance would invite suspicion. So you took it to the kitchen or the bathroom and worked the plunger, pumping its contents a dose at a time into the sink or toilet.”

“Thus getting it into the sewers after all,” Stephen Cairns said, then clapped his hand to his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Just thinking aloud. This is all just like something you’d see on TV, and I have this dreadful habit of talking during the performance.”

“Back to the living room,” I said to Deirdre, “where you were about to put the empty syringe back where you’d found it. And then you got a better idea.

“Without the syringe, and without any evidence that she’d given herself a shot, how would anyone know how your mother died? Especially if you provided them with a good alternate scenario. A burglar, for example.”

“But a burglar
had
been there,” Jackson said. “Alton Ogden Smith had let himself in to steal a portrait. You just established as much a few minutes ago.”

“Yes,” I said. “But how did your sister know that?”

“Maybe because the place looked like a trailer camp in tornado season,” Ray said.

“It did,” I said, “and one had to wonder why any burglar would make such a mess. It becomes even less comprehensible when we know the burglar’s identity. Smith had a key, he was able to get in and out without leaving any evidence of his visit, and the presence of a dead woman at the scene gave him even more reason to keep it a secret. So why would he scatter the contents of the living room all over the place?