Hawes looked at Meyer.
"My only regret is that I waited too long," Jannings said. "I should have shot her sooner. Then I could have enjoyed the movie."
Meyer wondered if he could get off with a plea of justifiable homicide.
Captain Samuel Isaac Grossman was hunched over a microscope when Carella got to the Police Laboratory at a little before five that Saturday afternoon. The days were getting longer. The sky beyond the huge windows fronting High Street was only now beginning to show the first faint pinkish tint of dusk, the windows in the surrounding buildings glaring sun-reflected light. Grossman was totally absorbed. A tall, rangy man who would have seemed more at home on a New England farm than in the sterile orderliness of a laboratory, he sat on a high stool, adjusted a knob, peered again into the microscope's eyepiece. Carella waited.
"I know you're there, whoever you are," Grossman said, and turned on the stool, and lowered his glasses from their perch on his forehead back to the bridge of his nose. "Well, well," he said, "long time no see," and got off the stool and walked toward Carella, his hand extended. The men shook hands.
"Did you hear the one about the man who goes to see his urologist?" Grossman asked.
"Tell me," Carella said, already smiling.
"The urologist says, 'What seems to be the trouble?' The man says, 'I can't pee.' The urologist says, 'How old are you?' The man says, 'Ninety-two.' The urologist says, 'So you peed enough already.' "
Carella burst out laughing.
"Another man goes to see the same urologist," Grossman said. "The urologist says, 'What seems to be the trouble?' The man says, "I lost my penis in an automobile accident.' The urologist says, 'No problem, we'll give you a penis transplant.' The man says, 'I didn't know you could do that.' The urologist says, 'Sure, I'll show you some samples.' He brings out a sample penis, shows it to the man. The man says, 'It's too short.' The urologist brings out another penis. The man looks at it and says, 'I was really hoping for something with more authority.' The urologist brings out this magnificent penis. The man looks at it. 'Now that's more like it,' he says. 'Does it come in white?' "
Laughing, Carella said, "I'll have to tell that one to Artie."
"I love urologist jokes," Grossman said. "What brings you here?"
"I called you yesterday," Carella said.
"I never got the message. What about?"
"How do I get pure nicotine from cigarette butts?"
Grossman blinked.
"I'm working a nicotine poisoning," Carella said. "Maybe two of them."
"That's rare nowadays," Grossman said, "nicotine poisoning."
"That's why I want to know how to make the poison from scratch. I'm assuming my man wouldn't know how to refine it from an insecticide."
"So you want to know how to make it from cigarette butts. You want to know how to distill it."
"Cigar butts, pipe tobacco, whatever."
"Mmm," Grossman said.
"Can it be done?"
"Sure," Grossman said.
"So how do I do it?"
"Do you know how to make whiskey?"
"No. My father makes wine."
"Fermentation. Close but no cigar. We're talking about distillation."
"Which is?"
"You got an hour?"
"That complicated, huh?"
"For me, it's easy. For you…" Grossman shrugged.
"What do I need?"
"Are you assuming your man has access to laboratory equipment? Well, I guess not. Otherwise titration would be an option."
"That's right."
"Then what you need is a relative in Georgia who knows how to make moonshine booze."
"Lacking such connections…"
"You'd have to make your own still."
"How do I do that?"
"You don't know anything at all about distillation, huh?"
"Nothing."
"Terrific. They sent me the class dunce. Okay. Distillation is transferring a liquid or a solid in its gaseous state to another place where it is again liquified or solidified."
"Why?"
"To purify it."
"What do you mean by another place? New Jersey? Kansas?"
"Ha-ha," Grossman said mirthlessly. "They did send me the class dunce. Pay attention."
"I am paying attention," Carella said.
"Booze is made by distilling a fermented mash of grain—rye, barley, wheat, corn, you pays your money and you takes your choice. You heat up the mash, carry off the vapor—the steam, if you will—and then condense it. When vapor condenses, you get liquid. Voilá! Booze!"
"How about poison?"
"Same animal. Let's say you use tobacco in whatever form. You make a mash from, let's say, a dozen cigars. Your average cigar has a nicotine content of somewhere between fifteen and forty milligrams. This doesn't mean that if you smoke a cigar, you're going to keel over dead, even though the fatal dose of nicotine is considered to be around forty milligrams. If you chewed it up and ate it, though, you'd get pretty damn sick. And if you distilled the alkaloid from that cigar…"
"Here we go again," Carella said.
"Okay, step by step. Step one: you make a mash of a dozen cigars, two dozen, a hundred, however many. Step two: you heat up the mash. At atmospheric pressure, nicotine'll boil without decomposition at two hundred and forty degrees."
"Is that important?"
"Merely a scientific observation. Step three: you carry off the steam in a tube. You've seen pictures of bootlegger's stills, haven't you? All those tubes and coils? The tubes are to carry off the steam, the coils are to condense it. That's step four, the condensation."
"How does that work?"
"A natural process. It cools, it condenses. So now you've got a colorless liquid that's your alkaloid, more or less, the toxic nicotine you're going for."
"What do you mean, more or less."
"More or less pure. Step five: you take this liquid and distill it again. Step six: you distill it yet another time. And then you keep distilling it until you get your pure alkaloid. Whammo. You drop it in somebody's drink and he drops dead."
"I thought you said it was complicated," Carella said, grinning. "Do me a favor, will you?"
"Name it."
"Make me a sketch of a still."
Early Monday morning, Carella went downtown again, not to the lab on High Street, but to the courthouse several doors down, where he presented to a superior court magistrate two written requests for search warrants. The first request looked like this:
I am a detective of the Police Department assigned to the 87th Squad.
I have information based upon autopsy reports from the Medical Examiner's Office that nicotine was used as a poison in two homicides I am investigating.
I have further information based upon a conversation with Captain Samuel Grossman of the Police Laboratory that toxic nicotine can be distilled from ordinary cigarette, cigar or pipe tobacco.