Even the Wicked

Page 14

"It was cyanide? The account I read just said poison."
"Cyanide. My guy knew it from the smell, called Poison Control right away. A shame he didn't sniff the glass before Whitfield drank it."
"A shame Whitfield didn't sniff the glass."
"No, he just knocked it right back, and then it knocked him on his ass. On his face, actually. He pitched forward. Dahlgren had to roll him over to start CPR."
"Dahlgren's your op?"
"I had two working. He's the one was upstairs with Whitfield. Other guy was in the lobby. If I'd have put them both upstairs… but no, what are they gonna do, sit up all night playing gin rummy? The procedure was the correct one."
"Except the client died."
"Yeah, right. The operation was a success but the patient died. How do you figure poison in the whiskey? The apartment was secure. It was left empty that morning and the burglar alarm was set. My guy swears he set it, the one who picked Whitfield up yesterday morning, and I know he did because my other guy, Dahlgren, swears it was set when he opened up last night. So somebody got in there between whenever it was, eight or nine yesterday morning and ten last night. They got through two locks, a Medeco and a Segal, and bypassed a brand-new Poseidon alarm. How, for Christ's sake?"
"The alarm was new?"
"I ordered it myself. The Medeco cylinder was new, too, on the top lock. I had it installed the day we came on the job."
"Who had keys?"
"Whitfield himself, of course, not that he needed a key. Coming or going, he was never the first one to go through the door. Then there were two sets of keys, one for each of the men on duty. When they were relieved they passed on their keys to the next shift."
"What about the building staff?"
"They had keys to the Segal, of course. But we didn't give them a key to the new lock."
"He must have had a cleaning woman."
"Uh-huh. Same woman's been coming in and cleaning for him every Tuesday afternoon for as long as he's had the apartment. And no, she didn't get a key to the Medeco, or the four-digit code for the burglar alarm, and not because I figured there was much chance of Will turning out to be a nice old Polish lady from Greenpoint. She didn't get a key because nobody got one who didn't need one. On Tuesday afternoons one of our men would meet her there, let her in, and stick around until she was done. He's sitting there reading a magazine while she's vacuuming and ironing and on her hands and knees scrubbing out the bathtub, and you know his hourly rate's three or four times what she's getting. Don't you ever let anybody tell you life is fair."
"I'll remember that," I said.
"Let me answer a question or two before you ask it, because the cops already asked and I already answered. The alarm's not just on the door. The windows are also wired in. That was probably excessive, since there's no fire escape, and do we really figure Will to be capable of doing a human fly act, coming down from the roof on a couple of knotted bedsheets?"
"Is that what flies do?"
"You know what I mean. I been up all night talking to cops and not talking to reporters, so don't expect me to sound like Shakespeare. It doesn't cost that much more to hook up the alarm to the windows, so why cut corners? That was my thinking. Besides, if this guy could get Patsy Salerno and Whatsisname in Omaha, who's to say he can't walk up a brick wall?"
"What about a service entrance?"
"You mean the building or the apartment? Of course there's a service entrance for the building, and a separate service elevator. There's also a service entrance for the apartment, and nobody went in or out of it from the time we got on the case. One of the first things I did was throw a bolt on it and keep it permanently shut, because as soon as you got two ways in and out of a place you've got the potential for headaches from a security standpoint. Sooner or later somebody forgets to lock the service door. So I had it all but welded shut, and that meant Mrs. Szernowicz had to take the long way around when she took the trash to the compactor chute, but she didn't seem to mind."
We talked some more about the security at the apartment, the locks and the alarm system, and then we got back to the cyanide. I said, "It was in the whiskey, Wally? Do we know that for sure?"
"He drank his drink," he said, "and flopped on the floor, so what could it be but the drink? Unless somebody picked that particular minute to plink him with a pellet gun."
"No, but-"
"If he was drinking tequila," he said, "and he was one of those guys goes through the ritual with the salt and the lemon, takes a lick of each after he does the shot of tequila, then I could see how we could check and see if the lemon's poisoned, or maybe the salt. But nobody drinks tequila that way anymore, at least nobody I know, and anyway he was drinking scotch, so where the hell else would the poison be but in the whiskey?"
"I was at his place once," I said. "The night he got the letter from Will."
"And?"
"And he had a drink," I said, "and he used a glass, and if I remember correctly he had ice in it."
"Aw, Jesus," he said. "I'm sorry, Matt. I was up all night, and it's shaping up to be a bitch of a day. Could it have been in the glass or the ice cubes? I don't know, maybe. I'm sure they're running an analysis of the booze in the bottle, if they haven't done it already. Dahlgren smelled cyanide on the guy's breath, and I think he said he smelled it in the glass, or maybe on the ice cubes. Did he smell what was left in the bottle? I don't think so. It was on top of the bar and he was on the floor with Whitfield, trying to get him to start breathing again. Neat fucking trick, that would have been."
"Poor bastard."
"Which one, Whitfield or Dahlgren? Both of them, I'd have to say. You know, I was concerned about food in restaurants. You remember that case where there was poison in the salt?"
"I must have missed that one."
"It wasn't local. Miami, I think it was. Mobbed-up businessman, he's having dinner at his favorite restaurant, next thing you know he's facedown in his veal piccata. Looks like a heart attack, and if it happened to Joe Blow it would have gone as that, but this guy's the target of an investigation so of course they check, and they establish that cyanide killed him and find cyanide on the food that's left on his plate, and there's a surveillance tape, because this is the restaurant he always goes to and the table he always sits at, the dumb bastard, and the feds or the local cops, whoever it was, were set up to tape it. And the tape shows this guy come over to the table and switch salt shakers, but you can't be absolutely certain that's what he's doing, and anyway they didn't find any cyanide in the salt shaker, because evidently somebody switched them again afterward. So they couldn't get a conviction, but at least they knew who did it and how it was done." He sighed. "Whitfield never sat down to a meal without one or two of my guys at the table with him, primed to make sure nobody switched salt shakers. It's like generals, isn't it? Always preparing for the last war. Meantime, somebody got in his house and poisoned his whiskey."
We were on the phone for quite a while. He anticipated most of my questions, but I thought of a few others as well, and he answered them all. If there was a weak link in the security, he'd set up for Adrian Whitfield, I couldn't spot it. Short of posting a man full-time in the apartment itself, I didn't see how it could have been rendered more completely secure.
And yet someone had managed to get enough cyanide into Whitfield's drink to kill him.
* * *
It was late afternoon by the time I got to talk with Kevin Dahlgren, and by then I'd been interrogated myself by two detectives from Major Cases. They'd spent close to two hours learning everything I could tell them about my involvement with Adrian Whitfield, from the cases I'd worked on for him to the contact I'd had with him since he was the target of Will's open letter.
They found out everything I knew, which wasn't much. It was more than I learned from them. I didn't ask many questions, and the few I asked went largely unanswered. I did manage to learn that cyanide had been found in the residue of scotch left in the bottle, but I'd have learned that shortly thereafter anyway by turning on the television set.
I was worn out from my session with the two of them, and what I went through was nothing compared with what Dahlgren had to undergo. He'd been up all night, of course, and had spent most of the time either answering questions or waiting for them to get around to interrogating him some more. He managed to get a couple of hours sleep before I saw him, and he seemed alert enough, but you could tell he was pretty well stressed-out.
He was a suspect, of course, along with the several other men who'd had access to Whitfield's apartment in their capacity as bodyguards. Each of them was subjected to an intensive background check and interrogated exhaustively, and each voluntarily underwent a polygraph examination as well. (It was voluntary as far as the police were concerned. It was compulsory if they wished to remain employees of Reliable.)
Mrs. Sophia Szernowicz, Whitfield's cleaning woman, was interrogated as well, though not subjected to a polygraph test. They talked to her more to rule out the possibility of anyone else having visited the apartment while she was cleaning it than because anyone thought she might be Will. She'd been there on Tuesday afternoon, and he'd swallowed the poisoned scotch Thursday night. No one could testify with absolute certainty that Whitfield had poured a drink from that bottle on either Tuesday or Wednesday evening, so the possibility existed that the cyanide could have gone into the bottle during her visit.
She told them she'd seen no one in the apartment while she cleaned it, no one except for the man who'd let her in and out, and who'd sat watching talk shows on television all the time she was there. She could not recall seeing him anywhere near where the bottles of liquor were kept, although she couldn't say what he'd done when she was in one of the other rooms. For her part, she had been at the bar, and might even have touched the bottle while dusting it and its fellows. Had she by any chance sampled it, or any of the other bottles, while she was dusting? The very suggestion outraged her, and they'd been a while calming her down to the point where they could resume questioning her.
The only fingerprints on the bottle were Whitfield's. All that suggested was that the killer had wiped the bottle off after adding the cyanide, and one could hardly have assumed otherwise. It also implied that no one but Whitfield had touched the bottle after its contents were poisoned, but, as far as anyone knew, no one but Whitfield had laid a hand on that particular bottle since it had come into the house.
It had been delivered two weeks before Will mailed his threat against Whitfield to Marty McGraw. A liquor store on Lexington Avenue had delivered the order, consisting in all of two fifths of Glen Farquhar single-malt scotch, one quart of Finlandia vodka, and a pint of Ronrico rum. The rum and vodka remained unopened, and Whitfield had worked his way through one bottle of the scotch and was a third of the way into the second bottle when he drank the drink that killed him.
"You don't drink," he'd said to me. "Neither do I." He'd been enough of a drinker to order two bottles of his regular tipple at a time, but a light enough hitter that it had taken him over a month to drink as much as he had. A fifth holds twenty-six ounces, or something like eighteen drinks if you figure he poured approximately an ounce and a half of scotch over his two ice cubes. Eighteen drinks from the bottle he'd finished, another six or so from bottle #2-I decided the math worked out right. There were nights when he had his drink before he came home, and other nights when he evidently didn't drink at all.