The rabbi shook his head. "Was it some sort of highway accident the last time he was here? Does it have something to do with Kestler?"
Lanigan stared. "That's what he thinks? That's what he told you?" He smiled broadly. "He's putting you on."
"All right, then suppose you put me off."
"It has to do with Kestler all right, with the old man who died," Lanigan said. "Remember my coming to see you about it because the son, Joe, claimed it was the medicine that killed him? Well, he was right. But it wasn't Dr. Cohen's fault, he prescribed something called Limpidine." He pulled open a drawer and brought forth a bottle. "Here it is, that's what it says on the label, right? But what's in the bottle is not Limpidine. It's a form of penicillin, and the old man was allergic to it, which is why Cohen prescribed the Limpidine in the first place. So the mistake was made in the drugstore by the pharmacist."
Lanigan sat back and let his visitor digest the information. "All right, mistakes happen," he went on. "But when I inquired around I found that a mistake like that was all but impossible. It's about as unlikely as a housewife making the mistake of using the salt for the sugar in baking a cake, and why couldn't she make a mistake like that? Because for all that the two look alike, they come in different type packages and they're kept in totally different type containers, that's the kind of mistake she wouldn't make even if she were blindfolded, all right, so if it's not a mistake, it must have been done on purpose. Or can you think of a third possibility?"
"Go on."
"So now the question is who would do a thing like that?" Lanigan continued. "Obviously someone with a grievance against one or the other of the Kestlers. I say either Kestler because Dr. Cohen phoned in that prescription and gave the name Kestler as the patient, the pharmacist, Ross McLane, asked him for the initial, and he said J. But J could be either Jacob, the father, or Joseph, the son."
"Ross McLane took the prescription over the phone?" the rabbi asked. "He remembered it?"
Lanigan nodded approvingly. "You're thinking it's strange he should remember a prescription he took days before? Well, he did because the name Kestler meant something special to him. You see, he had a grievance against the old man."
"Well then—"
Lanigan held up a finger to halt the interruption. "There were three pharmacists at the Town-Line Drugs that night, and each and every one of them had a grievance against one or the other of the Kestlers. Ross McLane's was against the father; Marcus and Arnold Aptaker both had grievances against the son."
"What kind of grievance?" asked the rabbi impatiently. "There's a measure and a scale in grievance as in other things. My neighbor's little boy broke one of our cellar windows, so I could be said to have a grievance against him, but not as great as if he'd broken the large picture window in our living room, and in neither case would it be sufficient to make me want to do him an injury, at least not anything more serious than spanking his bottom, which would be an excellent thing for his character, by the way, but which would then give his parents a grievance against me because they don't believe in punishing children, which accounts for his breaking the window in the first place."
"That's the Damon kid?" Lanigan chuckled. "I ought to begin keeping a file on him. In another couple of years, I figure he'll be coming to our official attention. But these grievances against the Kestlers are more than you'd have from a broken cellar window, or even a picture window." He summarized the dealings each of the three pharmacists had had with the Kestlers. "So you see,” he concluded, "each of them had good reason for hating either the old Kestler or the young one."
"And because you think Arnold's was the greatest grievance, you suspect him?"
"Oh no, David, at first I thought it was McLane, especially when I found out that Marcus Aptaker had been out front waiting on trade and that it was McLane who'd been filling prescriptions, at the time I didn't know that Arnold had been in town. I was sure I had the right man. But I didn't want to act hastily, especially where it could affect Aptaker's business, and him being in the hospital and all. So when McLane came in on another matter, I invited him into the office here and we just chatted, we got to talking about how he'd lost his store, and he was completely candid about hating Kestler." He hitched forward in his chair, indicative of the importance of what was coming. "What's more, he didn't hesitate to admit that when he found that the prescription he was taking over the phone was for Kestler— he remembered it all clearly— he said he'd be damned if he'd fill out a prescription for him and handed it to Arnold to do. Now if he'd wanted to do Kestler dirty, he had only to change the prescription and say that was what Cohen gave him over the phone. How could the doctor prove he hadn't?"
The rabbi sat silent, his mind running over the evidence. It suddenly came to him that the story Dr. Muntz had told him related to the same evening, the night of the storm. "Now I'll tell you something." the rabbi said. "I'll give you some information that will knock the pins from under your case. Not an hour ago. Dr. alfred Muntz was at my house, and he told me in the strictest confidence— but I guess the present situation warrants my telling you— that the prescription he gave Safferstein for his sick wife and that he had filled at the Town-Line Drugs that same night was not at all what he'd ordered, there, too, the label was right but the pills were wrong. Now according to his own statement, McLane made out the Safferstein prescription, so he made the same kind of mistake that you say Arnold made on the Kestler prescription. You said a mistake of that kind was as unlikely as a woman mistaking salt for sugar. But if there are two women working side by side in the same kitchen and one uses salt for suger in baking a cake while the other uses sugar for salt while preparing a stew, then no matter how unlikely it is, you've got to assume that just such a mistake was made, all the more so because two such mistakes are even less likely than one. In the present case, if it was not an accident, then you have to assume it was a conspiracy, that McLane and Arnold held a whispered conference while Safferstein waited, and they both agreed to change the prescriptions that two different doctors had ordered for two different patients, one of whom, Mrs. Safferstein, they had nothing against, and that is nonsense."
Lanigan smiled broadly. "Thank you, David. Your story explains how Arnold managed it. I'll admit I was a mite bothered about it. It seemed as though young Aptaker would be taking an awful chance putting up the wrong pills with McLane just a couple of feet away. Since McLane had taken the prescription over the phone, he'd know what was supposed to go into the bottle Arnold was working on. But I see how he managed it now, thanks to you, they've both typed up the labels and pasted them on their respective bottles, then Arnold distracts McLane's attention and switches the two bottles, then each fills the bottle in front of him and Safferstein gets Kestler's medication and Kestler gets Safferstein's."
"But what goes for Arnold goes equally well for McLane," the rabbi objected. "McLane could have distracted Arnold's attention."
"But he didn't. Just a little while ago, arnold told me he knocked over a bottle of cough syrup and McLane went into the toilet to get a mop to clean it up. I might add that McLane didn't pretend he didn't know who Kestler was, and McLane didn't leave town the next day, either."
"But if it's a case of the two being switched, anyone who had the two bottles could have done it. Safferstein could have—"
"Now that's not like you, David," said Lanigan reprovingly. "What do you mean?"
"Throwing suspicion on one of your people to save another."