I waited another minute, but she only sobbed, “Oh, go, why aren’t you gone yet?”
I left a card inside her laptop, away from her grandmother and father’s prying eyes, but where she’d see it when she next went to log on. On my way out of the apartment, Elsbetta appeared from the other wing, the one that held Renee’s office. She was taken aback, since she hadn’t let me in, and demanded to know my business. I told her I’d been calling on Catherine, yes, I knew Mrs. Renee didn’t want me here, but I had come anyway, and now I was leaving.
My visit was completed by running into Edwards Bayard just as I opened the gate to the street. He also wanted to know what I was doing there.
“I peddle Tupperware door-to-door; it augments my agency income. I hit Schiller Street yesterday, but this neighborhood is a tough sell.”
He reacted as predictably as Peppy to a squirreclass="underline" he was a presidential adviser, he was a Bayard, no one talked to him like that.
“Yeah, you’re a Bayard when you want to call up some privileges. The rest of the time, you slink away from your parents.”
I stomped west, away from the island of wealth and privilege, back toward my own world. I felt exhausted, the morning’s good omens dissipated by Catherine’s outburst. Her wound and the anesthesia that lingered in her system were knocking her off balance. And then, she was sixteen, it wasn’t like her judgment was the steadiest to begin with.
I knew these things, but her tantrum left me feeling as though I had been beaten by sticks. I kept replaying the conversation, wondering what I should have said differently. I should have described Bobby first, explained that he was at odds with the Feds, I should have spent more time talking to her on neutral topics first, I should have this, I shouldn’t have that, over and over. You’d think a detective like me would be thick-skinned by now, as J.T had said last night, but lately every whack against my rhino hide was making me more prey to self-doubt.
CHAPTER 48
I walked up to North Avenue, where I caught a crosstown bus to my office. The street is an important conduit between the city and the expressway, which is why I suppose the big national chains have stuffed it full of outlets. The traffic is so heavy on North these days that it took half an hour for the bus to trundle the three miles across town. Delays like that usually leave me gnawing my nails in annoyance. Today I welcomed the chance to rest.
When I finally got off at Western, I didn’t bother to check for tails. I was tired, I didn’t care and, anyway, it didn’t matter if people followed me to my office-if they were tapping me, they’d know I was in there:
It was close to lunch time. I walked down to La Llorona for a fish taco. The lunchtime crowd was heavy, so I didn’t chat with Mrs. Aguilar but ate my taco at one of the high tables in the corner while I finished glancing through the papers.
The taco was so good, and I was feeling so sorry for myself, that I took a second one back with me to eat at my desk. At Division Street, where Milwaukee changed abruptly from a neighborhood street to an extension of Yuppie Town, I stopped in one of the coffee bars for a cappuccino. Either protein or caffeine would revive me, or at least that was my theory.
While I was out, Freeman’s secretary had messengered over the toxicology report. Tessa had signed for it and taped it to my office door. I took it
in with me and laid it on my desk. I almost couldn’t bear to read it: I’d moved heaven and earth, or at least medical examiners in two counties, to get this document. If it told me nothing, I might he down and never get up again.
I finally took the report from the envelope and began reading. Callie had sent a photocopy of a ten-page fax, so it was blurry in places. The text bristled with “epithelial cells of the distal part of the renal tubules” and “immunocytochemical electron microscopy of the hepatocytes.” Fascinating, if you knew what it meant.
I slowly went through the whole ten pages. The analysis of Marc’s last meal (skinless chicken, broccoli, baked potato and a lettuce-tomato salad, consumed three hours before death, with a statistical variation of so much based on digestive whatever) was so detailed that I abruptly tossed the second taco into the trash.
The lab had found no trace of cocaine, diazepam, nordiazepam, hydrocodone, cocaethylene, benzoy-lecgonine, heroin ‘hydrochloride or marijuana metabolites in Marc’s urine. He had alcohol in the vitreous humor and phenobarbital in the blood plasma, discovered with “high-performance liquid chromatography.” The report gave the drugs in milligrams per liter, with the information that Marc had weighed eighty kilos, so I couldn’t tell how much Marc had drunk on top of the drug, but Vishnikov had provided a summary at the end: “… a six hundred milligram dose of phenobarbital taken with approximately two shots of bourbon would have depressed respiration and most likely killed him if he hadn’t first died of drowning.”
I leaned back in the desk chair. It wobbled badly; I needed to get a screwdriver out to tighten the castors.
All I knew about phenobarbital was that it was used to treat epilepsy. If Marc had epilepsy, he should have known better than to mix alcohol with his medication. He would have known better: by all reports he was a careful man; he wouldn’t have taken a drug without knowing its side effects. But maybe after years with the disease, he knew he could drink a modest amount without getting into distress with his medication.
The sinking feeling returned to my diaphragm; he had gone into that pond alone. Unless-a couple of shots of whisky wasn’t much for a man
who weighed-eighty kilos-I scratched arithmetic on a scrap of papera hundred seventy-five pounds. But I didn’t know how to evaluate the amount of phenobarb he’d taken.
Since I couldn’t ask Vishnikov to explain, I phoned Lotty, who was in her clinic today. Mrs. Coltrain, her longtime administrator, said Dr. Herschel was with patients and couldn’t be disturbed.
“All I want to know is how much of a dose six hundred milligrams of phenobarbital is. Can you ask her, or Lucy Choi?” Lucy was the advanced practice nurse who did a lot of the routine patient care at the clinic.
After a minute on hold, Lotty came to the phone herself. “Six hundred milligrams is a huge dose, Victoria. Did someone prescribe that for you? It could kill you if you took it all at once.”
“How long would it take?”
“This isn’t a game, is it? I don’t know. It moves fast into the system, depresses respiration. You might have an hour for someone to try to revive you, possibly only half an hour.”
“What if I weighed thirty pounds more than I do?”
“Still far too much. If someone prescribed that for you, don’t ever see her again.”.
She hung up. I looked again at the report. If Marc had epilepsy, he wouldn’t have taken such a lethal dose on purpose. Not unless he wanted to die. But then, why go into the Larchmont Pond? Why not stay in the comfort of his bed? Maybe he didn’t know he would die from it-maybe he thought it would just make him unconscious enough not to mind drowning. But why go all the way out to that foul pond at Larchmont instead of the welcome expanse of Lake Michigan? And then, his car-I shook my head, trying to stop the incessant buzzing: hamster on its wheel again.
My hand hesitated over my phone. Harriet Whitby had planned to move in with Amy after her parents left for Atlanta yesterday. If I phoned Amy’s apartment, would that get the law to monitor her calls, too? I shook my head angrily: I couldn’t live like this, second-guessing whether anyone was listening to me and my friends, or following me. And I wasn’t going to spend an hour on public transport just to make sure I talked to her unsupervised.