“So I understand.”
“You know that I resigned six months ago.”
“After a dispute with your employer.”
“Not a dispute,” Wheeler said. “I told him where he could resituate a couple of test tubes. You see, I was in a position to make the suggestion, although I don’t know that he was in a position to follow it. On my own time I’d developed a process for extenuating lapiform polymers so as to produce a variable-stress oxypolymer capable of withstanding—”
Wheeler went on to explain just what the oxypolymer was capable of withstanding, and Ehrengraf wondered what the young man was talking about. He tuned in again to hear him say, “And so my royalty on the process in the first year will be in excess of six hundred fifty thousand dollars, and I’m told that’s only the beginning.”
“Only the beginning,” said Ehrengraf.
“I haven’t sought other employment because there doesn’t seem to be much point in it, and I haven’t changed my lifestyle because I’m happy as I am. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison, Mr. Ehrengraf, nor do I want to escape on some technicality and be loathed by my neighbors for the remainder of my days. I want to be exonerated and I don’t care what it costs me.”
“Of course you do,” said Ehrengraf, drawing himself stiffly erect. “Of course you do. After all, son, you’re innocent.”
“Exactly.”
“Although,” Ehrengraf said with a sigh, “your innocence may be rather tricky to prove. The evidence—”
“Is overpowering.”
“Like Nuits-St.-Georges with veal. A search of your workroom revealed a half-full container of Cydonex. You denied ever having seen it before.”
“Absolutely.”
Ehrengraf frowned. “I wonder if you mightn’t have purchased it as an aid to pest control. Rats are troublesome. One is always being plagued by rats in one’s cellar, mice in one’s pantry, squirrels in one’s attic—”
“And bats in one’s belfry, I suppose, but my house has always been comfortingly free of vermin. I keep a cat. I suppose that helps.”
“I’m sure it must, but I don’t know that it helps your case. You seem to have purchased Cydonex from a chemical-supply house on North Division Street, where your signature appears in the poison-control ledger.”
“A forgery.”
“No doubt, but a convincing one. Bottles of Darnitol, some unopened, others with a single Cydonex-filled capsule added, were found on a closet shelf in your home. They seem to be from the same lot as those used to murder thirteen people.”
“I was framed, Mr. Ehrengraf.”
“And cleverly so, it would seem.”
“I never bought Cydonex. I never heard of Cydonex — not until people started dying of it.”
“Oh? You worked for the plastics company that discovered the substance. That was before you took employment with the Darnitol people.”
“It was also before Cydonex was invented. You know those dogs people mount on their dashboards and the head bobs up and down when you drive?”
“Not when I drive,” Ehrengraf said.
“Nor I either, but you know what I mean. My job was finding a way to make the dogs’ eyes more realistic. If you had a dog bobbing on your dashboard, would you even want the eyes to be more realistic?”
“Well,” said Ehrengraf.
“Exactly. I quit that job and went to work for the Darnitol folks, and then my previous employer found a better way to kill rats, and so it looks as though I’m tied into the murders in two different ways. But actually I’ve never had anything to do with Cydonex and I’ve never so much as swallowed a Darnitol, let alone paid good money for that worthless snake oil.”
“Someone bought those pills.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t—”
“And someone purchased that Cydonex. And forged your name to the ledger.”
“Yes.”
“And planted the bottles of Darnitol on drugstore and supermarket shelves after fatally tampering with their contents.”
“Yes.”
“And waited for the random victims to buy the pills, to work their way through the bottle until they ingested the deadly capsule, and to die in agony. And planted evidence to incriminate you.”
“Yes.”
“And made an anonymous call to the police to put them on your trail.” Ehrengraf permitted himself a slight smile, one that did not quite reach his eyes. “And there he made his mistake,” he said. “He could have waited for nature to take its course, just as he had already waited for the Darnitol to do its deadly work. The police were checking on ex-employees of Triage Corporation. They’d have gotten to you sooner or later. But he wanted to hurry matters along, and that proves you were framed, sir, because who but the man who framed you would ever think to have called the police?”
“So the very phone call that got me on the hook serves to get me off the hook?”
“Ah,” said Ehrengraf, “would that it were that easy.”
Unlike Gardner Bridgewater, young Evans Wheeler proved a model of repose. Instead of pacing back and forth across Ehrengraf’s carpet, the chemist sat in Ehrengraf’s overstuffed leather chair, one long leg crossed over the other. His costume was virtually identical to the garb he had worn in prison, although an eye as sharp as Ehrengraf’s could detect a different pattern to the stains and acid burns that gave character to the striped overalls. And this denim shirt, Ehrengraf noted, had no patch upon its elbow. Yet.
Ehrengraf, seated at his desk, wore a Dartmouth-green blazer over tan flannel slacks. As was his custom on such occasions, his tie was once again the distinctive Caedmon Society cravat.
“Ms. Joanna Pellatrice,” Ehrengraf said. “A teacher of seventh- and eighth-grade social studies at Kenmore Junior High School. Unmarried, twenty-eight years of age, and living alone in three rooms on Deerhurst Avenue.”
“One of the killer’s first victims.”
“That she was. The very first victim, in point of fact, although Ms. Pellatrice was not the first to die. Her murderer took one of the capsules from her bottle of Darnitol, pried it open, disposed of the innocent if ineffectual powder within, and replaced it with the lethal Cydonex. Then he put it back in her bottle, returned the bottle to her medicine cabinet or purse, and waited for the unfortunate woman to get a headache or cramps or whatever impelled her to swallow the capsules.”
“Whatever it was,” Wheeler said, “they wouldn’t work.”
“This one did, when she finally got to it. In the meantime, her intended murderer had already commenced spreading little bottles of joy all over the metropolitan area, one capsule to each bottle. There was danger in doing so, in that the toxic nature of Darnitol might come to light before Ms. Pellatrice took her pill and went to that big classroom in the sky. But he reasoned, correctly it would seem, that a great many persons would die before Darnitol was seen to be the cause of death. And indeed this proved to be the case. Ms. Pellatrice was the fourth victim, and there were to be many more.”
“And the killer—”
“Refused to leave well enough alone. His name is George Grodek, and he’d had an affair with Ms. Pellatrice, although married to another teacher all the while. The affair evidently meant rather more to Mr. Grodek than it did to Ms. Pellatrice. He had made scenes, once at her apartment, once at her school during a midterm examination. The newspapers describe him as a disappointed suitor, and I suppose the term’s as apt as any.”
“You say he refused to leave well enough alone.”
“Indeed,” said Ehrengraf. “If he’d been content with depopulating the area and sinking Triage Corporation, I’m sure he’d have gotten away with it. The police would have had their hands full checking people with a grudge against Triage, known malcontents and mental cases, and the sort of chaps who get themselves into messes of that variety. But he has a neat sort of mind, has Mr. Grodek, and so he managed to learn of your existence and decided to frame you for the chain of murders.”