The room went quiet. Both women leaned forward, attentive, anticipating, as though I might pop out a theory that would correct everything. I had no theories. I stood up. Debbie Goring and Mrs Johnson exchanged glances, then got up too.
At the front door, Mrs Johnson said, ‘I feel so bad, Debbie. Your father left me a wonderful bequest. I don’t have to work again if I don’t want to. But you…’ She reached for her tissue.
‘It’s all right, Mrs Johnson,’ Debbie said. ‘Elstrom here is going to set things straight.’
I didn’t look at either of them as I walked to Debbie’s station wagon and got in.
Debbie got in a second later, started the car and we pulled away. Lighting a cigarette, she spoke in the same small voice she’d used in front of Mrs Johnson. ‘That didn’t help, did it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I seemed to be saying that a lot lately.
‘You won’t help me?’ she asked, her voice rasping now.
‘I don’t know how, yet.’
We drove the rest of the way in silence. She pulled into her driveway and we got out.
‘I’ll call his driver,’ I said over the roof of her car, but it was to her back. She was already walking away.
FOURTEEN
The main drag through Deer Run was noisy with traffic. I pulled into a cemetery, parked next to a granite Civil War sentry who looked like he might welcome company, and called the chauffeur’s number. Robert McClain answered on the first ring. He sounded eager for company, too, but said he played bridge until three o’clock. I told him I’d see him then.
I hadn’t eaten since the modest half of a long coffee cake at Leo’s. I drove into Deer Run’s business district, hunting for a fast-food restaurant with the right kind of windows. I got lucky right away. A storefront across from the train station was papered with window banners advertising chili dogs, half-pound hamburgers and cheese fries. The promise showed in the sharpness of the red letters on the white signs. They were not sharp. They were blurred. I cut the engine and got out to make sure. Right off I spotted a fly stuck to the inside of the window, proof enough that the faintly fuzzy signs weren’t the result of sloppy brush work. The blur came from the glass. I went in.
Kings, Kentuckys and Macs are never my first choice because their windows are invariably spotless. The joints I seek have glass made opaque by the inside air. If the windows are filmy with grease, the chef is using properly fatty meat and real lard – sure signs he’s not cooking to some bland, committee-crafted, offend-no-one formula. I see it as my obligation to support such efforts by visiting those grease blots as frequently as I can, for they are highly flammable and regularly explode into black smoke.
I ordered a hot dog, onion rings and a Diet Coke and took them to a Formica counter to look at the blur of the world outside. My first bites validated my greasy window theory once again. The hot dog was properly slippery, topped with pickle, tomatoes, peppers, mustard, chopped onions, dill salt and absolutely no trace of catsup. The rings were strong, sure to delight for the rest of the afternoon. And the Diet Coke… well, the Diet Coke, like every diet soft drink, was there simply to dissolve calories.
I puzzled again over my earlier sense that I’d missed something when Mrs Johnson talked about Whitman’s pills. And in a moment, I had it: Whitman had been about to crack open the reserve vial of pills she’d showed us. That meant his current supply, the one they found in his pocket, should have been almost depleted if he’d been taking his pills in the dosage prescribed.
I swallowed the last bit of hot dog and turned around to ask where the police station was. The man behind the counter shrugged and said something in Spanish to the woman who’d taken my order. ‘Three blocks up the street,’ she said. ‘It’s in the basement of City Hall, opposite the park.’
I stepped almost lightly outside, sure of my wisdom in selecting a hot dog and onion rings for lunch. Like an automobile, my brain functions best when it’s freshly greased.
I decided to hoof the three blocks. Crossing the first street, I spotted a junior-grade black BMW parked down the side street, just like the one that had tailed me for a time earlier that morning. I continued on to the middle of the next block, and stopped as if to look in a store window. No black BMW or well-barbered head on feet had followed.
Deer Run’s city hall was red brick and white pillars. Walking down to the police department in the basement set the onion rings to barking. I slid three breath tapes into my mouth. The tapes were generic; I get them at the Discount Den in Rivertown, at the same place I get the duct tape to mend the rips in the Jeep’s top and Leo gets his shiny Hawaiian shirts and fluorescent pants. I aimed a test breath at the painted yellow block wall before opening the metal door at the bottom. Nothing peeled. Encouraged, I went in.
‘I’d like to talk to someone about Jim Whitman’s death,’ I said to the desk sergeant.
He scooted his chair back a yard, making me wonder if the Discount Den’s breath tapes were as unreliable as the duct tape that curled from the Jeep every time it rained. I slipped my hand surreptitiously into my pocket and thumbed loose another tape.
‘Your business?’ he asked, looking off to my right where, perhaps, there was better air.
I held out a card. It says I do insurance investigations. He scooted forward, grabbed it, and again retreated fast. I slipped the new tape into my mouth.
He frowned as he studied the card. ‘I thought you insurance guys closed your file.’
‘I’m just filling in a couple of blanks.’
The sergeant swiveled around. ‘Finch, get the Whitman file,’ he yelled to the empty hallway behind him. Turning back, he motioned for me to sit by the door, on the plastic chair farthest from his desk.
Officer Finch came out in five minutes. He was young, maybe twenty-five, and carried a brown accordion file. ‘How may I help you, sir?’ he asked.
‘I’d like to know how much Gendarin Jim Whitman swallowed the night he died.’
Finch looked to the desk sergeant, who nodded. Finch took a sheet of paper from the file and said, ‘Approximately twelve hundred milligrams. It was enough to send him to the moon twice.’
‘You’re sure it was Gendarin?’
Finch took out a clear plastic bag. Inside was an orange pill bottle identical to the one Mrs Johnson had showed me. It rattled as he held it up to read the label. ‘Gendarin,’ he said.
‘May I?’ I asked.
‘So long as you leave it inside the plastic bag,’ he said, and handed it to me.
The pill bottle rattled again as I held the bag up to the light. ‘There are still pills in there,’ I said, like I was surprised.
‘Two,’ Finch said.
‘This vial was found in Whitman’s suit jacket?’
‘Yes.’
I read the label through the bag. Just like the reserve supply Mrs Johnson had showed me, this vial had contained twenty-eight pills, eighty milligrams each, prescribed at two a day. It had been filled almost a month before Whitman died. That made sense, calendar-wise. It had been kept in reserve for two weeks before Whitman had begun taking pills from it, at the prescribed rate of two a day, not quite two weeks before he died.
Which meant the vial I was now holding should have contained but a few pills, the end of a two-week supply.
Which meant it could not have contained enough pills to kill him.
‘You’re sure the medical examiner found twelve hundred milligrams of this stuff in Whitman’s system?’ I asked.
‘Approximately.’
‘Isn’t it odd that two pills remain inside this vial?’
‘Whitman would have known just a few would do the trick.’
I gave him the arithmetic. ‘Fifteen pills were needed to put twelve hundred milligrams in his system.’