A Family Business (27 page)

“I got a report yesterday,” Lovell told him when he phoned. “I was just about to call you.”

It was, Lovell explained, a good news/bad news situation. The bad news was that Foster City technicians had been unable to find any trace of the usual poisons like arsenic in the material that had been supplied from Tim’s body. It is a common belief that toxicologists can put specimens from a victim into one end of a mysterious machine and have a list of the contents come out the other. Unfortunately, that is not so. Toxicologists can run a series of tests on tissue and fluid samples and say with a certain degree of certainty whether one or several substances are present, but they have to have an idea of what they’re looking for to begin with. Generally, tests on a suspected poison victim are designed to look for a very few common substances. If there are no positive reactions on those tests, toxicologists then either assume the victim was not poisoned or had been killed with something unusual. Any further tests have to be conducted almost on a substance-by-substance basis. It is not unlike trying to thread a needle in the dark.

“Oh,” Lewis replied unhappily when he heard Lovell’s summary, his heart sinking yet again.

But
, Lovell said optimistically, much to Lewis’s relief, he was continuing to pursue it. “I’ve asked the lab to do some more tests anyway,” the coroner added, “just in case it was something more exotic. I’ll let you know.”

“Okay,” Lewis replied, his mind already on his witnesses for the next day.

Again there was a long gap between conversations. Even when the two did talk, Lovell had nothing new to report.

Finally Lewis took a reluctant step: He bypassed the coroner and went directly to the lab. When he finished talking to the director of the department that was conducting the tests, he was dejected. Well, at least I have an answer, he told himself. Cheerlessly, he dialed Lovell’s number. As soon as the coroner was on the line, Lewis began apologizing.

“I didn’t really want to go over your head,” he said, “but time was getting critical for me and I felt I needed an answer.”

“That’s all right,” Lovell replied graciously. “What did they find?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid,” Lewis explained. “We know Waters was extremely overweight, so he undoubtedly had a heart condition and probably was taking medication for it, most likely digitalis. The only unusual substance Foster City could find in Waters’s samples was something called digoxin, which apparently points to digitalis.”

There was a pause.
“Digoxin!”
shouted the normally soft-spoken coroner. “That’s it!”

“What’s it?” Lewis said, surprised by the coroner’s reaction. “What do you mean? If Waters had been taking digitalis, they naturally would have found digoxin.”

“But Waters
wasn’t
taking digitalis,” Lovell replied.

“That doesn’t really matter,” Lewis replied. “Maybe it was some other kind of medication. In any case, Foster City said Waters was not poisoned with digitalis because the amount of digoxin in his system was not enough to be fatal.”

“That isn’t what I mean,” Lovell said excitedly. “The digoxin itself didn’t have to be fatal. I just finished reading an article in one of my journals that dealt with an elderly woman who had died from a self-inflicted dose of oleander.”

Lewis was totally confused. “What does oleander and an old woman have to do with Tim Waters?” he asked.

“Oleander is a deadly poison,” Lovell said, explaining that when someone ingests it, it affects the heart—interrupts its rate and rhythm, in fact—and that leads to death from heart block.

“I still don’t see the connection with Tim Waters and digoxin,” Lewis persisted.

Lovell then explained that if the tests conducted at the Foster City lab turned up digoxin when the person whose blood was being analyzed had not ingested anything with digoxin in it, the inescapable conclusion was that the person had ingested oleander.

Lewis wanted to put his head on his desk and sob. Oleander! he cried silently. My God, something as simple as oleander.

Truly, California has been blessed in many ways, not the least of which is its fortuitous conjunction of climate and soil which makes the area one of the world’s most prolific, agriculturally and horticulturally speaking. Fruits and vegetables grow in shocking profusion, covering fertile acre upon fertile acre. As for flowers, they are everywhere: in pots and window boxes, beds and borders, parks and playgrounds. Flowering shrubs decorate the entrances to government buildings and office complexes, high-rise apartments and humble adobes; they line the shoulders of highways and brighten the neutral grounds. Flowers are to California what crabgrass is to Indiana.

Undeniably, the flowers are beautiful. But what many people don’t realize is they can also be deadly. There is, for example, the beautiful lily of the valley with its white, bell-shaped flowers and orange-red berries. It can kill in a matter of hours. There is hemlock, which grows wild in most places. Hemlock leaves used in a salad are as deadly as curare, the infamous Central and South American poison popular in crime fiction. A subtle danger from hemlock comes not so much from the chance of someone ingesting its leaves, but in unknowingly eating quail that have fed on the seeds. The poison, universally known because it allegedly was the base for a fatal cocktail for Socrates, has no effect on the quail, but the ingested flesh of one bird can paralyze a man.

The popular azalea can be a killer as well; the state flower of West Virginia and Washington is remarkably lethal. What makes it potentially more hazardous is that its funnel-shaped blooms seem to have a special attraction for children, who often try to suck the nectar. If they do, they can be dead in six hours.

Even the beautiful poinsettia, the Christmas flower, can be perilous. Although there have been few documented cases of death caused by the plant, ingestion of the leaves can cause excruciating abdominal pain with vomiting and diarrhea. David knew something of what he spoke when he mentioned this plant to Steve Warren.

And then there is oleander. Known to scientists by its Latin name,
nerium oleander
, it has other names in other places. In some areas it is called Jericho rose. In Hawaii it is oleana or olinana. In Mexico, rose laurel. In Cuba, rose bay or rosa francesa; and in Haiti, laurier desjardins. In some places, the name derives from its properties rather than its appearance. In Italian and Arabic, the name for the plant translates as “ass killer,” and in Sanskrit as “horse killer.”

In less temperate areas oleander is a popular house plant, but in warmer, subtropical places, such as the southern, southwestern, and western United States, as well as much of Asia, Africa, Australia, Greece, and Italy, it grows well outdoors, a bush frequently reaching a height of twenty feet or more. The leaves are dark green, long, and narrow. The flowers, which are themselves not large but grow in grand clusters, are a beautiful pink, red or white. In areas where it grows readily, oleander is frequently planted as an ornamental, decorating not only public and private gardens, but miles and miles of California freeway. Around Los Angeles and its environs, in the region the residents call the Southland, oleander is ubiquitous, a colorful, easy-to-care-for, delightful-to-look-at perennial that can, and does, show up everywhere. There is no doubt, visually speaking, that it is a handsome addition to the landscape.

Unfortunately, it is also extremely lethal. Every part of the plant, from its milky white sap to its willowy branches, is capable of causing agonizing illness and death. The most dangerous parts are the blossoms and seeds. If they are ingested, they are guaranteed to cause, at the very least, debilitating illness. Particularly dangerous is the water in which cut branches have been placed, such as the liquid in a vase that has been holding a floral display. Drink that, and the foolhardy imbiber had better check to make sure his will is up-to-date. Chew a handful of leaves and the result is the same.

After the blossoms, seeds, and leaves, the toxicity drops off slightly but not significantly. Honey made by bees feasting on oleander nectar can be toxic. If the plant is burned, the smoke also is toxic. And there is a story, perhaps apocryphal but nevertheless very possible, about a Boy Scout who used an oleander stem to roast a wiener, a killer hot dog, so to speak. Whether this actually happened is irrelevant; it
could
happen. The mystery writer Lucille Kallen used just such a method for murder in her book,
The Piano Bird
. And Sue Grafton used powdered oleander leaves as a murder weapon in
“A” Is for Alibi
.

Several cultures are especially savvy to oleander’s death-causing potential. In Europe it is often used to exterminate rats. In the subcontinent, in countries like India and Pakistan, oleander is a common tool for murder or suicide.

Under the system by which fatal poisons are commonly ranked, there are four major classifications: the hyperacute, which causes death immediately; the acute, which takes a little longer; the subacute, which is slower still; and the chronic, which causes death by accumulation. Oleander fits into the acute or subacute categories. Nevertheless, it acts swiftly enough to be lumped into a subgenus the experts call the “sudden death” or “drop dead” class. In this context the actual
time
it takes to kill someone is academic.

Symptoms, which usually appear quickly, are sweating, nausea, vomiting, and bloody diarrhea, followed by loss of muscle coordination. Victims also often see colors that are not there. In almost all cases there is severe heart palpitation, which frequently convinces the victim, not altogether incorrectly, that he is suffering a coronary. The final stages are coma and death, caused by the poison’s effect on the heart.

In all its forms, it is odorless colorless, and tasteless, besides being virtually untraceable. Chances are, a toxicologist searching blindly for traces of a poison in a person’s blood or tissue almost certainly would
not
stumble upon oleander. Unless the toxicologist had an idea of what he was looking for, he most likely would find—and then only by utilizing special techniques—digoxin. That probably would lead to an erroneous conclusion that the person had overdosed on digitalis, which might very well have happened in the Tim Waters case except for Lovell being particularly aware of the properties of oleander.

Such a mistake would be totally excusable. Both digitalis and oleander are what scientists refer to as a cardiac glycosides; that is, medicines that affect the heart. In fact, oleander’s ability to produce this potentially beneficial substance has led to several efforts to incorporate oleandrin, the active substance in the plant, into a legitimate drug. One major pharmaceutical firm recently conducted an extensive series of experiments to make a marketable product from oleandrin, but then abandoned the search, apparently because the idea was not proving feasible.

There are still a lot of unknowns surrounding oleander poisoning, because the research done in this country has been both small and not altogether pertinent to what happens in situations such as that involving Tim Waters. Virtually all of the studies that have been done have focused on the properties of oleandrin, the pure form of the poison, rather than on the oleander plant.

In some countries oleander is used as a healer rather than a killer. In Haiti and India, for instance, it is popular with herbal doctors for treating a variety of health problems ranging from indigestion, ringworm, and malaria to leprosy and venereal disease. It also is commonly used to help induce abortions.

When scientific investigators began looking into Tim Waters’s death, they could find, in this country, only one other case connected to death-by-oleander, and it involved an herbal doctor in Florida’s Haitian community. In that incident, a female member of the community went to the local medicine man seeking a potion that would help her gain weight. He prescribed oleander to be administered both orally and rectally. The woman became ill very quickly. Even though she received treatment at a local hospital, doctors could not save her.

In addition, there has been at least one documented case in this country of oleander being used as a means for suicide, although it would not be surprising to learn that it happens more often than authorities think. The March 1982 edition of the American Medical Association
Journal
detailed the death of a ninety-six-year-old California woman, who, according to the article, had exhibited signs of depression and had told family members that she would like to end her life. Two weeks before Christmas, in 1980, they found her on the floor of her room, weak and very sick. Although they called for help immediately and she arrived at the hospital only fifteen minutes later, it was too late. Within forty minutes she was pronounced dead. An autopsy determined that she had chewed and swallowed from five to fifteen oleander leaves.

It was the article describing this case that Lovell had auspiciously stumbled across just before Lewis told him that digoxin had been found in Tim Waters’s specimens. Of course, in Tim Waters’s case, proving oleander poisoning was going to be much more difficult because he did not conveniently die with oleander leafage in his stomach.

On December 9, two months after sending Tim’s samples to Foster City, Lovell drafted an official report on the results of the tests as far as they pertained to the Waters case.