“About twenty-five capsules.”
“Or more,” Wright said.
“Well, thank you,” Kling said. “Will you send the written report to us, please?”
“Will do,” Wright said, and hung up.
Kling put the receiver back on its cradle and looked at his notes. He underlined the word “Seconal,” and then picked up his pad and walked to where Carella was just ending his telephone conversation.
“What’ve you got?” Carella asked.
“It was Seconal. Something more than five grams.”
“How many capsules would that have been?” Carella asked at once.
“Twenty-five.”
“Figures.”
“How so?”
“I was just talking to Mr. Ralph Ambrose, who runs the Ambrose Pharmacy on Jackson Circle. Asked him how many Seconal capsules were in that prescription he filled for Mrs. Newman on July twenty-ninth. He checked his files, and said the prescription called for a month’s supply, thirty capsules.”
“Must’ve stocked up for her trip to California, huh?” Kling said.
“Then why’d she leave the bottle home?” Carella asked.
“Good point, we’ll have to ask her.”
“Yeah,” Carella said, and nodded.
“Only one left in that bottle,” Kling said.
“Only one. So let’s say she took one every night from July twenty-ninth to August first, when she left for California. That’d be three capsules right? Thirty-one days in July, right?”
“Three capsules, right.” Kling said.
“Plus one left in the bottle makes it four.”
“That puts twenty-six inside of him.”
“One more than he needed to kill him.”
Both men were silent for several moments.
“She said he sounded depressed when she talked to him,” Kling said.
“Yeah, but no suicide note,” Carella said.
“They don’t all leave notes.”
“No, not all of them. How’d the M.E. make out with a time of death?”
“No help there, Steve. The heat is working against us.”
“Why would a guy turn off the air conditioner during the hottest summer in ten years?” Carella asked.
“Guy about to kill himself doesn’t care how cool the room is,” Kling said.
“So let’s say he went in the bathroom, and found his wife’s pills, and swallowed twenty-six of them, and then went out to the living room to die, okay? Would he have first turned off the air conditioner?”
“Well... no, that doesn’t seem likely.”
“Then who turned off the air conditioner?” Carella asked.
“The M.E. says he was drunk,” Kling said. “Maybe he didn’t even realize the air conditioner wasn’t running.”
“The heat wave started Friday morning, the day his wife left for California,” Carella said. “She spoke to him the following Tuesday. Are you telling me he was drunk all that time, with the windows closed and the air conditioner off?”
“No, maybe just that night. The night he decided to kill himself.”
“Went to turn off the air conditioner first, huh?”
“No.”
“No,” Carella said.
“No,” Kling said again. “But maybe it was broken or something. Maybe he didn’t realize—”
“I turned it on the minute the techs were through with it yesterday. It was working fine.”
“Yeah,” Kling said.
“With this heat, the air conditioner should have been running, damn it.”
Both men were silent again. Across the room, Willis began typing. On the street outside, an ambulance went by, its siren blaring.
“I think we ought to talk to Anne Newman again,” Carella said, and looked up at the wall clock. It was almost three-thirty, a half hour before the Evening Tour would relieve. “Want to hit her now, or have you made other plans?”
“No,” Kling said. “No other plans.”
“Have you talked to Augusta yet?”
“Not yet.”
“You promised...”
“Tonight,” Kling said. “When I get home tonight.”
“Then maybe you want to go straight home now. I can see the Newman woman alone, be no problem.”
“No, it’ll wait,” Kling said.
3
Susan Newman, the mother of the dead man, lived just off Condon Square, where the big statue of General Richard Joseph Condon reminded the city’s sometimes jaded populace that during the Civil War there had lived an Army officer of unsurpassed wit, style, and grace. Covered with pigeon shit now, the smile on the general’s face nonetheless beamed out in bronzed splendor, causing responding smiles from any passersby who chanced to look up. In this city, not many people looked up, preferring instead to study the sidewalks for souvenirs of its vast dog population. General Condon pressed on undaunted, his sword raised high above his head, his smile undiminished after all those years of standing out in the cold, the rain, the snow, and the heat.
They parked the car two blocks from the address Anne Newman had given them at the scene, and then walked past the statue, smiling up at it, and around the corner to number twelve Charlotte Terrace. A doorman asked them to identify themselves, and then phoned upstairs to inform Mrs. Newman that a Mr. Cappella and a Mr. Kling were downstairs in the lobby. He listened for a moment, and then told the detectives they could go right on up, it was apartment 3G.
Mrs. Newman was a woman in her late sixties, wearing a flowing caftan designed to obscure her plumpness. She was perhaps five feet three inches tall, Carella guessed, with an apple-dumpling face and neatly coiffed white hair, folds of flesh hanging on her jowls and on her arms, where they were exposed by the three-quarter-length sleeves of the caftan. She had told them on the telephone that her daughter-in-law would be back from the funeral home by four, but it was now four-fifteen and she apologized for Anne’s delay, saying she had phoned not a moment before to say she’d be a little late. The flesh around her eyes was puffy, and the eyes themselves were streaked with red; it was obvious she’d been crying before the detectives arrived.
“We’ll be burying him tomorrow morning, you know,” she said. “Anne is making all the funeral arrangements.” She took a handkerchief from the single pocket of the caftan, and dried the tears that were forming in her eyes again.
“Mrs. Newman,” Carella said, “I know this is a particularly difficult time for you, and I apologize for intruding on your grief this way.”
“That’s all right,” Mrs. Newman said, “I know you have a job to do.”
“Would it be all right, then, if we asked you some questions?”
“Yes, I told you on the phone it would be all right.”
“I appreciate your generosity,” Carella said. “Mrs. Newman, your daughter-in-law told us she left for California on the first of August, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“She also said she’d spoken to your son this past Tuesday night...”
“I wouldn’t know about that, I’m sorry.”
“What I was wondering... had you spoken to him anytime this past week?”
“No.”
“Was it his normal habit to call you every so often?”
“Yes, once or twice a month.”
“When did you speak to him last, Mrs. Newman?”
“I really couldn’t say. A few weeks ago, I would guess.”
“How did he sound at that time?”
“Well, he...”
“Yes?”
“My son was an alcoholic, you see.”
“Yes, we know that.”
“And when he called... well, usually he was drunk when he called.”
“Was he drunk when you spoke to him that last time?”
“Yes.”
“What did you talk about, Mrs. Newman?”