A Pinch of Poison Read online

Weigand thought it over.

  “How much is a grain?” he asked. “I mean, as to bulk. A table-spoonful?”

  Francis looked at him in surprise.

  “The things you people don’t know!” he said, sadly. “You could pick it up on the tip-end of an after-dinner coffee spoon. You could hold it between your thumb and forefinger.”

  “So,” said Weigand gently, “the medical profession naturally refers to it as a ‘massive’ dose. Very illuminating, Doctor.”

  But the doctor, he decided as he left the Pathology Building, had been illuminating enough. He thought it wearily and looked at his watch. It was after one o’clock. He thought of things he might do tonight and thought he might do them, also, in the morning. He telephoned Headquarters and conferred with Mullins. The detectives who had questioned customers at the roof had made reports but Mullins thought there was little in them. Mullins was sitting on the papers. The laboratory had not reported on the contents of the glasses taken by young Kensitt from Lois’ table.

  “Well,” Weigand said, “call it a night. But get in early.”

  He turned from the telephone and drove across and uptown to his apartment in the West Fifties. The telephone was ringing. Weigand scooped it up and said, “Yes? Weigand speaking.”

  “Pam North speaking,” she told him. “I couldn’t sleep and neither could Jerry. What? No, of course I won’t.”

  “Wait a minute, Pam,” Weigand said. “What won’t you?”

  “Jerry says to tell you the only reason he can’t sleep is that I keep talking,” Pam said. “Only I won’t, of course.”

  “No, Pam,” Weigand said, “I wouldn’t. What is it, Pam?”

  “Well,” said Pam, “have you found out who?”

  “No, Pam.”

  “Or how?”

  “Well,” Weigand said, “as to that, yes. Somebody gave her something called atropine sulphate. A parasympathetic drug.”

  “Oh, yes,” Pam said. “Paralyzes the nerve endings of the sympathetic system. How awful!”

  Weigand restrained his gasp.

  “How—” he began, and thought better of it. “Somebody gave it to her in a drink,” he said. “It would only take about a grain, the M.E. says.”

  “Well,” Pam said, “how would they carry it around in a restaurant?”

  He had her there, Bill Weigand decided. He said he was afraid she didn’t realize how small in bulk a grain of atropine sulphate would be. One could carry it, he told her, between thumb and forefinger.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. North. “I see. You mean a pinch.”

  “What?” Weigand said. He was too tired to keep up, he decided.

  “A pinch,” Mrs. North told him. “Like a pinch of salt. Only in this case, a pinch of poison.”

  7

  WEDNESDAY

  8:45 A.M. TO 11:30 A.M.

  Routine awaited Lieutenant Weigand Wednesday morning at Headquarters. Mullins also waited, reading the morning newspapers. He held one up and shook it as Weigand entered.

  “The Herald-Trib got your name wrong again, Loot,” Mullins told him. “I before E.”

  “Well,” said Weigand, who was grumpy and whose mouth tasted of coffee and last night’s cigarettes. “Well, think of that.” He spoke without pleasure. Mullins looked at him, and decided the point had better be waived.

  “It’s a very popular crime, Loot,” he said. “Very popular. Except the war sorta gets in the way, of course.”

  “All right,” Weigand said. He looked at his desk, which held papers in neat piles. “All right, sergeant. What’s here?”

  There was, Mullins told him, a lotta junk. There were reports from the detectives who had asked questions of late diners at the Ritz-Plaza roof after the murder. “Nothing in ’em,” Mullins reported. There was the stenographer’s transcript of the questions asked by Weigand himself. There was a copy of the formal, interim report, made by the offices of the Medical Examiner. Weigand knew more than it contained.

  “And then there’s the Inspector,” Mullins added, glumly. Weigand nodded. There was always the Inspector. He looked at his watch and decided the Inspector could wait, for a few minutes. He read the transcript of the questions he had asked McIntosh, Buddy Ashley, Nicholas and the rest. He read fast, knowing his way, but exactly, looking for things missed.

  At one point he said, “Huh!” and made a note. Mullins, watching, made sounds of inquiry.

  “Something we missed?” Mullins wanted to know.

  “No,” Weigand said. “I got it at the time. I was just checking to see whether I was right. As I was, Sergeant Mullins.”

  Weigand’s voice was, Mullins decided, thawing.

  “Yeh?” Mullins said.

  “The reservation,” Weigand told him. “At the roof. McIntosh says he didn’t have one—at least, that seems clear from what he said. He didn’t know where he was taking the girl until they got in the cab. But the headwaiter says there was a reservation for McIntosh and the list shows it was made at”—he consulted the list—“six-fifteen that evening.”

  “Screwy,” Mullins said. He thought. “Say,” he said, “this guy McIntosh ain’t telling all he knows.” He paused and looked at Weigand hopefully. “Maybe we ought to bring him in, Loot?” he said. “You know. Just ask him some questions, sort of?”

  Weigand shook his head, and said they didn’t know enough. It was, Weigand pointed out, merely something to keep in mind. There might be a perfectly harmless explanation. Mullins looked doubtful.

  “Like what?” he said.

  Weigand shook his head.

  “You think of it, Mullins,” he said. He went on through the transcript. It ran about as he remembered it. It was all clear enough, as far as it went—clear, at any rate, as to what people said had happened. But neither the people nor what they meant was entirely clear. Lois Winston was not entirely clear herself.

  Weigand said, “Um-m-m,” thoughtfully, and the telephone rang on his desk. He said, “Yes?” and then, quickly, “Right, Inspector.” Mullins drew his face down dolefully and Weigand looked at him darkly. Then Weigand replaced the telephone, smiled.

  “We’ve got to have them,” he said. “It’s regulation. Now—”

  Mullins was to get things rolling. He was to hurry the office of the City Toxicologist, in so far as was politic, for a final report on the poison which had killed the girl. The police laboratories, less diplomatically, were to be hurried in their reports on the contents of the identified flasks which contained the dregs of Lois Winston’s glasses at the roof. And, because there was not really much doubt as to the poison, Mullins was to get men working on that. Briefly, Weigand told Mullins of the assistant medical examiner’s guess about atropine sulphate, and his speculation as to how it might have been obtained.

  “So,” Weigand said, “we’ll have to cover all the wholesale drug houses. It may be a job. What we want is a list of atropine sulphate purchases in the past few days. Where a purchase was made by a man they didn’t know, we want all the details we can get.”

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said.

  “And,” said Weigand, “we want it this afternoon. So get them started.”

  “Listen, Loot,” Mullins started, but stopped when the lieutenant looked at him. “O.K.,” Mullins repeated, with emphasis. “You want me to go along? Personally?”

  “Why not?” Weigand said. “Only check in, in case I want you.”

  Mullins went. Weigand summoned Detective Stein, who was a bright young man and came in looking it.

  “I want you to get hold of the Encyclopædia Britannica,” Weigand told him. Detective Stein gulped, but kept on looking bright. “Not all of it,” Weigand reassured him, seeing the gulp. “Volume Gunn to Hydrox.”

  “Yes, sir,” Detective Stein said, and waited.

  “Start about a third through and make a list of general subjects,” Weigand instructed. “I don’t want names, or descriptions of cities or historical data. I want something that a young woman of twenty-seven or thereabouts,
with plenty of money and O.K. socially but working as a volunteer for a social work agency, would be reading a few hours before she got poisoned.”

  Weigand looked at Stein, who looked rather baffled. Weigand smiled.

  “I don’t know what I want,” he admitted. “I don’t even know if it bears on what we’re after—the guy who killed the Winston girl. But maybe it does. Work from about a third of the way through the volume to about two-thirds of the way through.”

  “Yes, sir,” Stein said. “She was reading it, you say?” Weigand nodded. “And left it face down somewhere, opened about the middle?”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “So see what you can get me, Sherlock.” But this tone was amiable and, Detective Stein decided, approving. Detective Stein, looking brighter than ever, went out after Gunn to Hydrox.

  Weigand looked after him, reached for the telephone and let his hand drop, and went in to see Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley. O’Malley looked as if he had had a long, comfortable sleep. He was all brisk alertness, and ready to hear all about everything. Weigand told him what he knew. O’Malley nodded.

  “The brother,” he said, all having been made plain. “He figured the girl was going to tell their mother about the marriage. So he would have lost the money. He was there; he went to the table; he tells a thin story about a note, producing a note he probably wrote while he was waiting for you to come around. What do you want?”

  “Well,” Weigand said mildly, “a little evidence wouldn’t hurt. Like an identification of little brother buying poison.”

  O’Malley was impatient.

  “Sure,” he said, “we’ll get that. We’ll bring the kid in and ask him some questions and maybe he’ll spill it. Then he’ll tell us where he got the poison and we’ll have the guy who sold it to him come around and identify.” O’Malley looked at Weigand, who seemed doubtful. O’Malley glared at Weigand, and said that Weigand looked to him like turning out to be one of the bright boys.

  “Making things complicated,” he said. “Not seeing the noses on their faces.”

  Weigand was mollifying. Probably the Inspector was right. Nevertheless—

  “I want to dig around a bit yet,” he said. “I think there are some angles. Like McIntosh and the reservation he didn’t make, for example. Buddy will keep; we’re camping on him.”

  It took some time, but the Inspector mollified. He didn’t, he admitted, want Weigand to work them into a jam. “This kid’s got money, I suppose?” he said. “I mean his mama’s got enough so they know people with money?” Weigand assured him that the kid knew such people. “Yeh,” O’Malley said. “And they’d squawk.” So, O’Malley admitted, they’d better sew it up first. As a matter of form.

  “Only,” he warned, “don’t go losing sight of the kid. He’s the guy we want, all right. We’ve just got to pin it on him.”

  Weigand agreed, watched for a pause, and said he had to see some people. O’Malley let him go. O’Malley called in the Headquarters men from the newspapers, told them that he, directing the case, had identified the poison as atropine sulphate and that he expected to make an arrest very soon.

  “Within twenty-four hours,” the man from the Sun helped him.

  “Twelve,” said O’Malley, firmly. “An arrest is imminent.”

  Weigand, thankful to get on with it, picked up the telephone when he was back in his own office. He got David McIntosh on the wire and told McIntosh what he thought McIntosh ought to know. Then he took up the reservation.

  “No,” David McIntosh said, decidedly. “I didn’t make a reservation at the roof.”

  Weigand told him that, all the same, Nicholas had his name on the reservation list. McIntosh said he didn’t know about that. Then he hesitated a moment.

  “Come to think of it,” he said, “there was something about a reservation. Oh, yes—when Lois and I got there, Nicholas said he had ‘my table’ and afterward Lois said I must have made a reservation. I told her that was merely Nicholas’s way of getting good customers in ahead of outsiders who’d been waiting. But if there really was a reservation—well, I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you?” Weigand said. “All right, Mr. McIntosh.”

  It wasn’t so all right, however, he thought as he hung up. There was something fishy about it. He drummed on the desk, filed the fishiness for reference, and picked up the telephone again. He called Mrs. Gerald North, and got Mr. Gerald North.

  Mr. North said, “Hello, Bill.”

  “I wanted to get Pam,” Weigand explained. “She knows the head woman—Miss Crane, isn’t it?—at this place where the Winston girl worked. I thought she might call Miss Crane up and pass along the word I was coming around—sort of soften the old dame up. What do you think?”

  “Pam,” Mr. North said, “is out somewhere. I’m very much afraid she is out detecting, Bill. But if she comes in, I’ll tell her.”

  “Right,” Weigand said.

  “Only she isn’t an old dame,” Mr. North said. “Or not very.”

  “Listen, Gerald,” Weigand said. “You’re getting to talk like Pam.”

  “My God,” said Mr. North, prayerfully. “Thanks for telling me, Bill. Why?”

  “Who isn’t an old dame?” Weigand asked.

  “Oh,” Mr. North said. “You had me worried. That was perfectly clear—Mary Crane isn’t an old dame. Very pleasant, really. And in her middle forties, I should think. How’re you coming?”

  Weigand was, he told Mr. North, still going, in several directions.

  “How about coming around for dinner tonight?” Mr. North suggested. “Maybe we could get Dorian in. Pam will want to hear everything.”

  Weigand said it sounded swell. And that he’d try. He cradled the telephone, left word that he would be at the Placement Foundation for an hour or so, and left Headquarters. The relative coolness of the morning was gone, he discovered. His car, which had been parked in the sun, was like an oven as he settled behind the wheel. He opened everything and rolled. The breeze was pleasant and he decided on more of it. He touched the siren and rolled faster. On occasion, he thought, it was comfortable to be a cop.

  Mrs. North seemed surprised and a little chagrined to see Weigand and said, “Oh!” Then she nodded.

  “Of course you would,” she said. “Only I got here first. She doesn’t.”

  “What?” said Weigand. “Please, Pam.”

  “Know why anybody would kill Lois Winston,” Mrs. North said. “Obviously. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  Weigand looked across the desk at the woman who lived at it and discovered that she was smiling, amusedly. His own eyebrows went up like the shrug of shoulders. Mary Crane, assuming this was Mary Crane, as the lettering on the door promised, apparently was well acquainted with Pamela North.

  “This is Miss Crane, Bill,” Mrs. North said. “But I’ve already asked her, of course.”

  Lieutenant Weigand said, “How do you do, Miss Crane.” And Miss Crane said, “Hello, Lieutenant. Mrs. North’s been speaking of you.”

  Weigand saw why Mr. North had taken exception to the “old dame.” Miss Crane was not, certainly, young. But she had no particular age. She was brown and built solidly and her brown eyes looked as if she had seen a great deal and was still interested in seeing more. She wore a black silk suit that carried its own crispness and a soft white blouse. She would not, Weigand guessed, be wearing flat-heeled shoes or a shapeless felt hat. He thought of cartoons of social workers and looked again.

  “No,” Miss Crane said. “You needn’t be alarmed, Lieutenant. And sit down. Although there isn’t much I can tell you, I’m afraid.” Weigand sat and looked around the casual, rather dimly lighted office.

  “Tell him about the Pickett,” Pam North advised. She was looking unusually perky, Weigand thought, with a hat which wore a tiny red feather. The color of the feather identified as Mrs. North’s the red straw bag lying on Mary Crane’s desk.

  “If he likes,” Miss Crane agreed. “But it is obviously absurd. T
he Pickett, as Mrs. North says, is Ellen Pickett, a worker we had until about a year ago—Miss Winston took over some of her work.”

  “Oh yes,” Weigand said. “The one who thought Miss Winston had taken her job. I doubt whether—”

  “No,” said Miss Crane, decidedly. “Miss Pickett was very upset and just before she left she made a very difficult scene. She felt that Lois was an amateur who didn’t need a job and who was taking hers. But it was just—well, difficult disposition on Miss Pickett’s part. It was the disposition, really, which made us decide to let her go, rather than anything Miss Winston did.”

  “Although,” Weigand pointed out, “there was some truth in what she said. Miss Winston was an amateur, and didn’t need the job and there are, I suppose, only a certain number of jobs?”

  It didn’t, Miss Crane told him, work out that way. There were, to be sure, only a certain number of paid jobs. “But there is all the work in the world,” she said, and sighed faintly. “We could use twice as many workers as we have; when we find qualified volunteers it is—what shall I say?—so much velvet.

  “Of which,” she added after a moment, “there isn’t too much here.”

  “And Miss Winston was qualified, I gather?” Weigand asked.

  Miss Crane was succinct. “Very,” she said. She had gone to the school of social work and had spent three years at the Foundation in a, more or less, probationary capacity. Then, because, and only because, she was a useful worker they would have been glad to employ, she joined the regular staff of investigators. She took assignments like the rest, worked more or less the same hours—“with, naturally, some latitude,” Miss Crane added—and was in every sense a staff employee, except that she was unpaid. Her status was unusual but by no means unique, Miss Crane explained. Most large, well-run agencies had one or two such volunteers on their staffs.

  Weigand nodded and decided to clean up as he went along. Had Miss Pickett got another job, he wondered.

  She had, Miss Crane told him. In Detroit in an agency—She paused, and sought words. “Which has somewhat different standards from ours,” she said.