Up to this point his planning had proceeded without a hitch. He didn't run into a snag until he attempted to obtain the poison.
In a vague way Homer supposed that the law established certain restrictions against the indiscriminate sale of poisons. He was quite prepared to be questioned about its intended use when he bought his cyanide, and he expected to be asked to sign a poison register of some kind. For this reason he went to a downtown drug store where he was unknown, intending to give a fictitious name.
However, he wasn't prepared to encounter a blank wall.
The druggist, an affable middle-aged man, chuckled indulgently when Homer told him in a diffident voice that he would like some potassium cyanide to use as a rat poison.
"You can't buy cyanide without a doctor's prescription, mister," he said. "You can't buy any poison without a prescription. It's a federal law. Here's what you want for rats."
He produced a small, round tin labeled: Rat Poison.
Homer looked at it doubtfully. "Do I need a prescription for this too?"
The druggist shook his head with a smile. "You only need a prescription for poisonous drugs which might be taken internally by a human."
"Mightn't this be taken by a human?"
The druggist shrugged. "Sure. Might even kill him. But chances are he'd throw it up. Rat poison contains white phosphorus, which is a deadly poison, but difficult to keep down. It works on rats because they don't know how to vomit. Anyway, the main reason for the federal law is to prevent murders. I guess they figure a suicide would find some way to kill himself even if he couldn't get poison. You might commit suicide with this, if you managed to keep it down, but you'd have a hard time poisoning anybody on the sly. The first sip would burn so bad, they'd spit it out without swallowing."
"I see," Homer said. "How much?"
As he left the store with the small tin in his pocket, he felt thankful that the druggist had been so informative. The thought of Samantha tasting her hot chocolate, spitting it out and realizing he had meant to kill her, sent him into a cold sweat. She would be quite capable of forcing him to drink it.
A block from the drug store he took the tin from his pocket, looked at it ruefully and rolled it into a sewer opening.
Not being a very resourceful person, this incident brought Homer's murder plan to a dead stop. Aside from purchasing it in a drug store, he hadn't the faintest idea of how to obtain poison. Murder remained in his mind, but it ceased to be an active plan. He relapsed into his dream world, and except that he had a new fantasy to entertain him, his life went on much as it had before he ever thought of murder.
For twenty-five years Homer had held the title of "chief clerk" at the law firm of Marrow and Fanner, a designation which implied more prestige than the job actually involved. He was chief clerk because he was the only clerk; his real status was that of an exalted office boy.
Five days a week he did routine office work for the law partners, each Friday faithfully brought home his pay and handed over half of it to Samantha. What was left barely covered his expenses, including carfare and personal needs and the monthly insurance premium.
On the surface this routine continued, but secretly Homer began to live an entirely different life. By a sort of schizophrenic process he succeeded in imagining, whenever he was away from home, that the murder was an accomplished fact and that he now lived in carefree isolation. Riding the streetcar to and from work, he would plan how he meant to convert Samantha's old room into a den, would mentally frame newspaper ads for a cleaning woman to "come in" once a week, and would wrestle with the problem of what he ought to prepare for dinner that night.
However, he carefully avoided losing himself in the fantasy as completely as he had the evening Samantha's murder first occurred to him, for he had no desire to repeat the experience of being frightened into a near faint by seeing his sister's ghost. Each evening, just as he reached the porch steps, he automatically returned to reality in time to greet his sister without surprise. The fantasy would then take a slight twist; instead of the murder being fait accompli, it would become a deed planned for the next day.
But, of course, the next day never arrived.
It was within Homer's capacity to live in reasonable contentment with this fluctuating dream for years without taking any positive action and he probably would have if Samantha herself hadn't unsuspectingly furnished the impetus necessary to jar him into action.
Samantha developed a cold accompanied by a hacking cough which required the services of the family doctor. By the time Samantha let him go, it was past ten P.M. The local drug store was closed when Homer arrived with the prescriptions. The other two drug stores also were closed.
Homer didn't work on Saturday and he went out again with the prescriptions immediately after breakfast. Idly he looked them over.
The doctor had written both before tearing them from the prescription pad, then had ripped them off together so that they were still attached to each other by the glued top edge. Apparently he had flipped one sheet too many after writing the first, for there was a blank prescription sheet between them.
The top one was a prescription for some kind of nose drops. The bottom read:
=== Tab. codeine XXX TT 1/2 gr. Sig. one tab. Q 3 H.
Though he was unacquainted with pharmaceutical shorthand, Homer recognized the word "codeine" from his research on poisons. He couldn't recall whether or not it was a dangerous drug, but he did remember that it was some kind of opiate. Simultaneously it dawned on him that he had a blank prescription sheet, and with the original as a model, it would be a simple matter to forge a duplicate.
Instead of stopping at the drug store, he walked on two blocks to a branch public library, drew out a textbook of materia medica and retired with it to the reading room.
He discovered that one of the primary uses of codeine was to lessen coughing, which explained why the prescription had been written. He also learned that it was a compound of morphine and was one of the active alkaloids of opium. It was listed as a safer drug than morphine, and he searched every indexed reference to the drug without finding an indication of how much constituted a fatal dose, or even any indication that it was a dangerous poison.
However, he was certain it would be fatal in a large enough dose, for it was included under the general heading of "Brain and Spinal Cord Depressants," along with opium, morphine and the illegal drug, heroin. Rechecking the prescription, he deduced that the figure "XXX" probably meant thirty tablets. At a half grain each, this came to fifteen grains, certainly enough of any opiate to kill a person.
Satisfied that he had a poison which would work, he took out his fountain pen and carefully duplicated the prescription on the blank sheet. He forged a reasonable facsimile of the doctor's signature, not taking too great pains with it because he knew it would not be subjected to the same scrutiny a bank might give a check. The office heading and the fact that the terminology was authentic were enough to make it acceptable to the average druggist.
He walked six blocks to another drug store where he was unknown to get the forged prescription filled. Then he returned to his own neighborhood drug store to have the two filled which the doctor had written.
When he finally got home, he received a sound tongue lashing from his sister for taking so long, but he accepted it stoically. For consolation he fingered the extra bottle in his pocket.
For the first time in weeks Homer didn't retreat into his world of fantasy. For now he had the reality of definitely planned action to replace his dreams. He was in such a state of anticipation all week end he could hardly wait to get home Monday evening.