She shook her head dumbly.
Softly, Cal said, “I think he’d better.”
Like an obedient child, Jan glanced down at the pill in her hand and gave it to Cal. A dam of tears broke and flooded her cheeks.
Gage sat still as a statue. The blood had drained from his face.
“Daddy,” Jan murmured. It sounded like an accusation. Head lowered, her voice caught. “You hated Rufus. You hired a private investigator to follow him. But I didn’t believe you. I still don’t.”
She looked up at him for the first time. “Can’t you see? Sometimes you don’t want to believe. All that, I could forgive you. I could forget. But this—”
Her voice was perfectly calm, level, lifeless. Slowly, she rose from her chair and walked out of the room.
Gage was stunned. Cal sat staring at the pill in her hand. Callahan looked uncomfortable.
Plato walked to the telephone and dialed the sheriff’s office. Ian was out, but the dispatcher would radio his car and send him over.
He hung up. For the first time, all the pieces had fallen into place. Gage’s embarrassment at his son-in-law. The bitter confrontation, that Friday before the party.
It must have seemed ridiculously easy to the gastroenterologist. The symptoms of food poisoning and arsenic were remarkably similar. Perhaps one day, long ago, he had filed that away in his mind.
When his daughter didn’t want to see the truth about her husband, he removed her problem with cold, clinical precision. Like excising a cancer. A simple matter. Wait for the right moment, open her purse, and dust the pills with arsenic. It wouldn’t take much. When Rufus got sick at the party, he’d turn to the medicine Gage had prescribed. Unexpectedly, he’d offered his remedy to Felicia as well.
Gage’s friendship with Mrs. Reiss was a stroke of luck. Contaminating the mayonnaise was pathetically easy. Too bad he’d mixed up the cars, draining Leonard’s brake fluid instead.
But then Plato had a disturbing thought. He turned to his wife, who was examining the pills more closely. “Cal, you won’t find any arsenic on those.”
“Don’t say anything.” Her voice was hard with warning.
He ignored her. “Think about it. Gage had every chance to switch the pills Monday when he visited her. Or during the night, when she was asleep.”
Cal glanced at the old physician. He was motionless, a pale white ghost trapped in ice.
“Plato,” she said quietly, “Dr. Gage didn’t kill Rufus.”
Her husband crossed his arms, lifted his chin belligerently. “No? Then who did?”
Just then, Martin Callahan rose and headed for the door.
“Wait,” Cal cried.
Like a black leopard spotting an antelope, Callahan burst into a run. He was nearly to the hall when Plato stretched his leg across the threshold. The chairman of Mardyke Pharmaceuticals crashed into an ornate china cabinet. Astonishingly, he emerged from the wreckage and took off down the hall before Plato could stop him.
But as he opened the door to freedom, a voice met him. “Hold on a minute, laddie! What’s your hurry?”
A raincoated dwarf blocked the doorway. Surprised, Callahan paused for a moment, then tried to push past him. But the sheriff packed quite a bit of inertia. Before Plato could blink, a chubby paw flipped into the mackintosh and reappeared with a .38 caliber police special.
“Now, let’s all head back inside and have a little chat, shall we?”
Back in the study, Cal held a handful of capsules. On one side they were stamped with the letters “ginrt.” On the reverse they bore an interlocking M and D.
“Ginger root,” Cal said. She cracked one open. “Heavily laced with arsenic.”
The sheriff nodded his head at Callahan. “Maybe you’d better have a seat.”
Gage finally spoke. It took him a while to get his voicebox lubricated again. “She thought... she thought that I—”
He went after his daughter.
Callahan sat sullenly, scowling at the carpet.
“By the way, Cal,” Ian remarked, “Reiss woke up this morning. He’s still pretty foggy, but he said he was investigating some new street drug called sleeper. He’d met with Rufus about it last week.”
“Sleeper,” Cal whispered.
“Indeed,” the sheriff answered, but Plato waved him to silence.
He watched his wife’s face. She was sitting back in her chair, frowning, eyes closed. Her nose crinkled subtly like a rabbit sniffing alfalfa. It was her pose of intense concentration. The poisoned capsules still rested in her hand.
To Plato, it didn’t make any sense. Why would Callahan want to kill Rufus? What did sleeper have to do with it?
“Hypnocose.” Cal opened her eyes, gazed at Callahan. “One and the same. Oh, maybe there were a few of your special modifications so the drug couldn’t be traced. Synthetic narcotic plus an anti-anxiety drug. Both highly addictive.”
Ian pulled out his Miranda card and read it to the prisoner.
“Reiss was investigating sleeper,” Cal noted. “He probably suspected that Mardyke was the source.”
She turned to Plato. “Remember the DEA agent at the party? He thought sleeper was coming up from Mexico. Just the reverse. Callahan was probably sending it down there. He had connections in San Diego. Rufus probably wanted to talk to the DEA before Reiss blew the story.”
“Thorndyke would have asked his partner about it first,” Plato noted.
“Oh, yes,” Cal agreed bitterly. “After all, he was such a trusting person. Callahan probably reassured him, then moved to get rid of him. Easy enough for him, since Rufus’s addiction to health foods was their ‘little secret.’ ”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” Callahan exclaimed. When he rose from the chair again, Ian produced a pair of handcuffs.
“I don’t have to use these, Martin. But if you make me, I will.”
Callahan sat down again.
“There was no breakthrough at the plant, was there?” Cal asked rhetorically. “The celebration at your house was just an excuse. While Rufus and Jan were swimming, you switched the pills in her purse. I’m sure Rufus had told you how he hid the ginger root in Gage’s bottle. Another ‘little secret’ you shared. When he got sick the next day, he took one. And probably offered one to Felicia as well.
“Unfortunately for you, your plane was delayed. You probably planned to switch the pills back again during the confusion at the party. But you couldn’t.”
“Hold on, lassie.” Ian turned to Callahan, began searching his pockets. He pulled out a small plastic bag. Inside were several capsules identical in appearance to those Cal held. “Is this why you came today? And why you were leaving in such a hurry?”
Callahan ignored him. Like a patient martyr, he looked up at the ceiling, then out the window at the mist clearing in the valley.
“There’s only one thing I can’t figure out,” Cal concluded. “Martin Callahan wasn’t at the party. How did he contaminate the food?”
“I can answer that.” Jan Thorndyke’s voice was clear and confident. She stood just inside the room.
Gage was beside her, an arm over her shoulder.
“Salad spray?” Plato cried. “Never heard of it. Who’d want hair-spray on their salad, anyway?”
“Not hairspray,” Cal corrected him. “Salad freshener. All the good restaurants use it these days. Keeps the lettuce from wilting.”
“I still don’t get it.” Plato rummaged through the freezer. It had been another long day. But Callahan was safely in the county hotel, so it looked as if Plato was done with the case. “We need a vacation. Maybe a cruise. There’s good food on cruise ships, isn’t there?”
“Yeah. But you’d be too seasick to eat.” Cal sat before the portable electronic typewriter on the kitchen table. One finger at a time, she plinked out the final draft of her coroner’s report.