“At the apartment, where do you think?”
“You’re going to be staying there?” Hawes asked incredulously.
“Sure. The bedroom’s in fine shape. You’d never even know anything happened. The living room’s not too bad, either. That’s where I keep all my film. Man, if I’da had it stored in the kitchen, brother!”
“Well, thanks again, Mr. Hassler.”
“Sure, anytime,” Hassler said. He shook hands with both detectives, waved at Meyer Meyer, who acknowledged the wave with a sour nod of his head, and then walked out of the squadroom and down the corridor.
“What’s he doing?” Meyer asked. “Running for mayor?”
“We could use a mayor in this city,” Kling answered.
“What do you think?” Carella asked Hawes.
“One thing,” Hawes said. “If Tommy Barlow was planning to commit suicide, why would he use a friend’s apartment? People don’t go around causing trouble for their friends, especially when they’re ready to take the pipe.”
“Right,” Carella said. “And since when do potential suicides go around happy and laughing?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t sound as if Tommy was planning a funeral.”
“No,” Hawes said. “It sounds as if he was planning a party.”
* * * *
It would have been very simple to call the damn thing a suicide and have done with it. Neither Carella nor Hawes were particularly anxious to whip a dead horse, and there was certainly enough evidence around to indicate that Tommy Barlow and Irene Thayer had done the Endsville bit. There was, after all, a suicide note; there was, after all, the presence of enough illuminating gas to have caused an explosion. In addition, there were two empty whisky bottles in the room, and the nearly naked condition of the bodies seemed to strongly indicate this was a true love pact, the doomed lovers perhaps indulging themselves in a final climactic embrace before the gas rendered them unconscious and then dead. All these things in combination made it very easy to reach a conclusion. And the conclusion, of course, should have been suicide.
Carella and Hawes, though, were fairly conscientious cops who had learned through years of experience that every case has a feel to it. This “feel” is something intuitive, and impervious to either logic or reasoning. It is something close to insight, something close to total identification with victim and killer alike. When it comes, you listen to it. You can find whisky bottles on the floor, and clothing stacked in neat little piles, and a typewritten suicide note, and an apartment full of illuminating gas; you can add up all these pieces of evidence and come up with an obvious suicide, and the feel tells you it ain’t. It’s as simple as that.
It was equally simple for the toxicologist attached to the Chief Medical Examiner’s office to arrive at his conclusions. Milt Anderson, Ph.D., was not a lazy man, nor was he being particularly negligent. He was, in all fairness, a man who had been practicing legal toxicology for more than thirty years, and who was a professor of forensic toxicology at one of the city’s finest universities. He knew his work well, and he performed it with accuracy and dispatch. The detectives wanted to know only three things:
1. The cause of death.
2. Whether or not the couple were intoxicated prior to death.
3. Whether or not the couple had engaged in sexual intercourse prior to death.
No one had asked him to speculate on whether the deaths were accidental, suicidal, or homicidal. He did exactly what he was asked. He examined the victims and reported, as requested, on the three areas of concern to the detectives. But he had also been filled in on the circumstances surrounding the deaths, and these were firmly in his mind as he performed his tests.
Anderson knew there had been an explosion of illuminating gas. He knew that the jets on the gas range in Fred Hassler’s apartment had been left opened. He looked at the bright cherry-red color of the body tissues, blood, and viscera and was willing right then and there to call it death by acute carbon monoxide poisoning. But he was being paid to do a job, and he knew that the most accurate and incontestable method for the determination of carbon monoxide in blood was the Van Slyke Manometric Method. Since his laboratory equipment included the Van Slyke apparatus, he went to work immediately on the blood of both victims. In both cases, he found that the carbon monoxide saturation was close to 60 per cent, and he knew that as low a saturation as 31 per cent could have caused fatal poisoning. He drew his conclusion. His conclusion was absolutely correct. Both Irene Thayer and Tommy Barlow had died of acute carbon monoxide poisoning.
Anderson knew that whisky bottles had been found in the apartment bedroom. He concluded, as he knew the detectives would have, that the couple had been drinking before they turned on the gas. But the detectives specifically wanted to know whether or not the couple had been intoxicated, and Anderson was grateful for the fact that the bodies had been delivered to him with reasonable dispatch. Alcohol is a funny poison. It feels very nice going down, and it can make you very gay and happy-but it is oxidized very rapidly in the system and will disappear entirely from the body during the first twenty-four hours after its ingestion. Anderson received both bodies almost immediately after Michael Thayer had identified his wife, less than twenty hours after the deaths had occurred. He realized this was cutting it dangerously close, but if the pair had been intoxicated, he was certain he would still find a sizable percentage of alcohol in their brains. Happily, the brain tissue of both bodies was intact and available for testing. If there was one aspect of toxicology (and there were indeed many) that produced the most heated controversy concerning method and results, it was the analysis of ethyl alcohol. The controversy ranged the spectrum from A to Z, and began with that portion or portions of the body which provided the most reliable biologic specimen for testing purposes. Anderson was a brain man. He knew there were toxicologists who preferred muscle tissue, or liver tissue, or even samplings from the kidney or spleen, but whenever a brain was available to him, he preferred that as a source for his tissue samplings. Two undamaged brains were available to him in the bodies of Irene Thayer and Tommy Barlow, and he used portions of those first to run a routine steam distillation test in an attempt to isolate and separate any volatile poisons in the bodies. There were none. Then, since he had already recovered alcohol during the distillation process, he used that same sampling for his quantitative determination tests. There were charts and charts and more charts relating to the percentage of alcohol recovered in the brain, and how much alcohol it took to make a man tipsy, or staggering, or reeling, or crocked, or downright fall-down, blind, stoned, inert, dead drunk. He had found only the faintest trace of alcohol in each of the brains, and he knew that whichever chart he used, neither of the victims would have come anywhere near to being drunk or even mildly intoxicated. But Anderson preferred using a chart based on the findings of Gettler and Tiber who had examined the organs of six thousand alcoholic corpses in an attempt to record degrees of drunkenness Dutifully, he looked at that chart now:
Dutifully, he decided that the answer to the second question posed him was a definite, negative, resounding NO. The couple had not been intoxicated prior to death.