“Okay, you’ve seen me.”
“Moira—”
“Hank, tell him to get out of here.”
“Moira, I just want to say hello, that’s all.”
“Then say it. And leave.”
“I never did anything to you,” he said plaintively, and spread his arms wide in supplication, the fingers on both hands widespread.
“You didn’t, huh? You killed my mother, you son of a bitch! Get out of here!” she said, screaming now. “Get out of here, leave me alone, get out, get out!”
He looked at her a moment longer, and then lowered his arms and walked silently through the open gate, and past her where she stood shaking with rage on the sidewalk. Their eyes met for only an instant before he turned away from the hatred in them and began walking swiftly toward the Avenue.
At a little past three that Saturday afternoon, Kling called the Medical Examiner’s Office to ask what was delaying the autopsy report. The man he spoke to was the one who’d been at the scene the morning before. His name was Joshua Wright, and the first thing he said was, “Hot enough for you?”
Kling grimaced, moved a pad into place, and prepared to write. At his desk near the filing cabinets, Carella was on the telephone with someone at Ambrose Pharmacy. He had earlier called the number listed for Bonnie Anderson, the Newmans’ cleaning lady, and had learned from her brother that she had indeed been in Georgia since the twelfth of July; he was now touching second base. The squadroom windows were wide open, but no breeze filtered through the wire-mesh grilles that covered them. A standing electric fan was going in one corner of the room, but all it did was rearrange the heat. Both men were in their shirtsleeves, their collars open, their ties pulled down, their sleeves rolled up. Across the room, Hal Willis, who liked to think of himself as dapper, was wearing a tan tropical suit with a gold-and-brown silk-rep tie neatly tacked to his shirt. He was sitting at his desk, talking to a man whose jewelry store on the Stem has been held up three times in the past month.
There were six detectives working the Day Tour that Saturday, but three of them were out of the office. Artie Brown was downtown at the Criminal Courts Building, trying to get a search warrant that would allow him to enter the premises of a man suspected of dealing in stolen goods. Meyer Meyer and Cotton Hawes were at the moment on Ainsley Avenue, talking — once again — to the night clerk of a hotel where, four days ago, a young prostitute had been found dead in a bathtub, her throat slit. In this precinct, seventy-five homicides had been committed since January and through the month of July, up sixteen percent from the same period the year before. Of those seventy-five, forty had already been closed out, there were good leads on another eleven, and the remaining two dozen were as cold as last night’s leftovers. If statistics held, the precinct detectives would solve only eighty percent of the murders they investigated this year. This meant that by the end of December, twenty out of a hundred killers would still be out there roaming the streets. If the homicide rate kept rising — well, no one at the Eight-Seven liked to think about that.
“It’s a little difficult to determine the postmortem interval on this one,” Wright said, and then — assuming Kling was as dumb as half the detectives he dealt with — immediately translated the medical terminology for him. “The time of death, that is.”
“Yeah,” Kling said. “What was the cause, can we start with that?”
“Barbiturate poisoning,” Wright said. “Congestion of the viscera and brain, edema of the lungs, fluid blood in the heart cavities. Stomach contents revealed a substantial residue of a barbiturate we were able to isolate as Seconal.”
“Seconal,” Kling said, writing.
“Which is a short-acting barbiturate that’s absorbed very rapidly.”
“How rapidly?”
“Within minutes after ingestion. The medicinal dose is zero point two grams.”
“And the fatal dose?”
“Anywhere from five to ten grams.”
“How many would you say the victim had ingested?” Kling asked, figuring he’d impress Wright with a little medical terminology of his own.
“Impossible to tell. But certainly five grams at least. That would be twenty-five capsules.”
“How about when he ingested them?”
“That’s what I meant earlier,” Wright said. “About the postmortem interval. As I told you, Seconal is absorbed within minutes, and an overdose would have brought on rapid coma and death. Was the man a heavy drinker?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Our alcohol findings were positive, with values well into the intoxicated range. Since ingested alcohol will decrease in value during putrefaction, it’s safe to say that at the time of death our man was in an intoxicated state possibly greater than that indicated by the percent of alcohol recovered.”
“His wife told us he was an alcoholic,” Kling said.
“That certainly would be in keeping with our findings. You’ve got to remember, too, that alcohol is a depressant, and that its ingestion would have worked on the central nervous system in sympathy with the toxic action of the Seconal.”
“So when did he die?”
“Well, considering the intense heat in the apartment — are you familiar with how we determine the postmortem interval?”
“Not entirely,” Kling said. He had stopped writing, and was listening intently.
“The loss of body heat is one of the determining factors. But in a circumstance such as this one, where the temperature in the apartment was a hundred and two degrees, the temperature of the flesh had in fact risen rather than dropped, even though rigor mortis was complete. Do you know what rigor mortis is?”
“Well, yes,” Kling said uncertainly.
“It’s a muscle stiffness that occurs after death,” Wright said.
“Well, sure,” Kling said.
“To make it simple, before death the muscle protoplasm is alkaline, and after death it becomes acid, usually within six hours, at which time the muscles of the face, jaw, neck, arms, legs, and trunk — in that order — begin to stiffen. The process is reversed when the muscle protoplasm changes to alkaline again — usually anywhere between twelve and forty-eight hours — causing the rigor to disappear. Which brings us back to the temperature in that apartment.”
“What do you mean?” Kling asked.
“Heat speeds up the rigor mortis process as well as its reversal.”
“So you’re saying—”
“I’m saying rigor is of no help to us here. Neither is the postmortem decomposition. The bacterial agents we isolated were Clostridium welchii, which can invade the body very soon after death, and also Escherichia coli and Proteus vulgaris... are you writing this down?”
“Well... no,” Kling admitted.
“Good, because you don’t need to. All these bacteria can be found in the earliest postmortem stages, but we also found Micrococcus albus and Bacillus mesentericus, which normally will not invade until several days after death. In other words, because the heat in the apartment caused such advanced putrefaction, it would be impossible to estimate a time of death on the basis of decomposition alone.”
“So then... are you saying you can’t tell me when he died?”
“I’m saying we’re unwilling to hazard such an estimate. I’m sorry. It’s the goddamn heat, you see.”
“But it was an overdose of Seconal?” Kling said.
“Definitely. Something in excess of five grams.”