Poison Most Vial (4 page)

Neither felt safe until their feet were back on College Avenue and they had passed Trevor's Tropical Corner Store, the two wig shops (House of Wig, and House of Wigs, plural), and the Orbit Room bar, and were stopped out front of Sister Paulette's Bakery, where most everyone in the Terraces seemed to spend some part of their day.

It was a miracle Rex did not stick his head into every one of those places, even the wig shops. He actually looked like—
what was it?—like he was in a hurry. “This thing will take care of it,” he said.

“What thing?”

“The report. The lady's gonna solve the crime so we can get our normal livelihoods back.”

“Normal livelihoods? You mean, making fun of Simon and trying on orange wigs at the wig shops?”

“They're burnt orange. And you can hate the man, but why you want to go and hate a man's livelihood?”

“'Cuz that's who I am,” said Ruby, now staring up at the window of 921, a mirror of gray light. “I just wonder who she is.”

Looking through the other side of that window, a step back from her usual spot to avoid being seen, Mrs. Whitmore wished for a moment that she hadn't responded to the children's note. It was impulsive, with no thought of the possible consequences: very unlike her.

Too late now; the children were almost back.

“Why must they all walk in the middle of the street?” she said aloud, turning from the window.

She removed an advertisement from her bulletin board—
Emmet Sloane and Bernie Diaz, Attorneys at Law
—and made a phone call. A recorded voice answered, followed by a tone.

“Is this recording? Oh dear, I guess so. Bernie? Why, hello. It's me, Clara. Clara Whitmore. I do hope you'll forgive my dropping in on you like this after so many years. I so hope you are well. But I'm calling to send you a client. It's someone who—”

Beep
. The machine cut her off.

She redialed. “I am sending you a client, Bernie; I hope you don't mind. You will know who it is the minute he walks in the door, and I can pay for your time, if needed. I hope we can catch up very soon.”

She hung up. Not much time. She folded the ad in half, wrote
For Ruby
on it, and pushed it under the door. It disappeared instantly, replaced by a sheaf of papers coming the other direction—the coroner's report.

She swept the report off the floor and abruptly stood. She faced the door, light-headed. What was it? Nothing; nerves, maybe. They were kids, for heaven's sakes. She had seen them a hundred times. They seemed perfectly nice, if a little scruffy. Surely she would think of something to say as soon as they knocked.

But the knock never came.

The office of Sloane and Diaz was in an old building downtown, a half-hour ride on the bus, during which Ruby studied her father while pretending to daydream. He looked pale, drained of all his humor. Dazed.

He didn't even argue when she'd shown him the ad; only asked where it came from, who the Window Lady was. Then he nodded and made the call—“The woman said to come in now; the office is open”—and off they went.

The place sure didn't look open. A grimy turnstile pushed into an empty lobby steeped in wasted brown light. No doorman, no information person, nothing but a stack of boxes in a corner. An old directory on the wall read L
AW
O
FFICES
#601.

“Fat guy with a hat and a cigar,” Mr. Rose said on the
way up in the elevator. “Chewed cigar, food stains on his tie.”

“No—skinny, crooked glasses, stooped over,” said Ruby. “Mole on his forehead, hair coming out.”

“You mean, pants pulled way up, that kind of guy? Let's hope not.”

Bernie Diaz was not a he but a she, a squat, dark woman with brown lipstick set off by a black outline. She was seated behind a large metal desk heaped with paper. Ruby couldn't believe this woman was a lawyer at all. Didn't lawyers look like—well, she didn't know. Not like this.

“Mr. Rose, I guess?” the woman said, coming from behind the desk. “I am Bernie Diaz.”

The two shook hands, and Ms. Diaz turned to Ruby. “And this young lady is . . . ”

“My daughter, Ruby,” Mr. Rose said. “She'll make sure I don't forget anything important.”

Ms. Diaz looked ready to say something but only nodded, resting her flat eyes on Ruby for a moment. Ruby held out her hand stiffly. How could this goat of a woman with moles on her forehead possibly help her dad?

“All right, have a seat, Mr. Rose,” the woman said. “Young lady, I'll ask you to take a chair in the room next door and not to interrupt us. This is a confidential conversation. Do you understand that?”

Ruby gulped. She found a hard wooden chair in the small
room adjoining Ms. Diaz's office, opened her sketchbook, and let her thoughts wander for a second. An early-morning scene filled her head: wooden fence, hardened by age, still damp. A footpath there, just behind a stile. A figure down the path, someone friendly: her pal Lillian, maybe?

Ruby studied the scene, shaded each detail. She drew until her ears froze her hand. She looked up.

“Describe, sir, your own relationship with the victim,” the woman was saying to Ruby's dad in a soft voice, her face impassive.

Ruby could see and hear the whole thing through the open door between the two offices. She closed her eyes, her ears warming. She had been afraid to ask her dad about this directly, afraid he'd think that she doubted him. She peeked at him over her sketchbook, saw her father nodding, shifting in his chair.

“Our relationship?” Mr. Rose said. “Not good. I mean, Rama was such a total—ah, I mean, he was, you know, formal. Cold. That's just how he was. That's who he was. What I didn't like was . . . well, Rama didn't notice people. It was like we were invisible, all of us, even the grad students. Then he'd blow up at some little thing out of nowhere.”

Ms. Diaz held her pen over her pad but had not taken her eyes off of the client. “Mr. Rose,” she said coldly, “did you poison Dr. Ramachandran?”

Ruby saw her father sit up, tip forward on his chair. He looked somehow bigger. “No. No, ma'am, I did not.”

Ruby breathed again. Of course he hadn't. Ms. Diaz seemed satisfied, too. She nodded slowly and sat back in her chair. “Well, someone sure did. Someone in that lab, almost certainly. If it wasn't you, then who?”

Mr. Rose did not have an answer. Ruby, her head down now, wished her dad could say something. Anything.

“OK,” Ms. Diaz said. She sighed heavily. “Mr. Rose, tell me about everyone who came into the lab that night, starting with yourself. The times people came and went, as you remember it all.”

“Right,” said Mr. Rose, glancing over his shoulder at Ruby. She pretended to draw but began taking notes.

“Well, I got there just about six o'clock in the evening, like always. I can tell you the exact times. I already been through all this with the police.” Her father stated his routine, which now seemed much less boring to Ruby than it usually did. Punch in with security card (6:02
P.M.
). Hang jacket in locker, put sandwich in fridge (6:05
P.M.
). Make sure lab instruments are clean, well supplied (6:10
P.M.
).

“And then I made Rama a pot of tea, because Lydia was busy, I guess.” he said. “I took it in to him at about 6:15 or just after, I'd say.”

“Stop there,” said Ms. Diaz, still engrossed in her notepad. “You usually made his tea, or you did it this once?”

“Well, this once. Lydia—she's a grad student—she usually made it.”

“And she asked you to do it this time?”

“That's right.”

“A change in routine. No wonder you're a prime suspect. I wonder what they found in that tea. We'll have to find that out, and soon.”

Ruby felt an urge to mention the red vials but swallowed it. She wasn't even supposed to be listening; and how would she explain knowing about that?

“OK, keep going. What else?” Ms. Diaz said.

Her dad said that Rama had a taped TV interview scheduled for 8:15
P.M.
Nothing unusual there. Dr. Ramachandran often commented on cases and evidence as an outside forensics expert and, Mr. Rose said, he was expected that night to say something about the Robert Pelham case. Pelham was a prominent investor with ties to the university. He'd been cleared of an alleged plot to kill a business partner as a result of problems with the handling of evidence.

“You know, the rich guy who went free because the evidence fell apart—”

“Of course I am very familiar with that case; when Pelham's company went bankrupt, people all over the city
were trying to get their money back,” Ms. Diaz said. She made a note, circled it. “Go on.”

“Well, you may not know that DeWitt Forensics did the lab work while Rama was gone on vacation. I don't know the details, but someone made a mistake there, at DeWitt, handling or testing the evidence. Rama took it personally, even though he wasn't around. He couldn't let it go.”

Ms. Diaz raised her eyebrows. “Hmm. Did he blame anyone in particular?”

“No idea. He kept his opinions to himself.”

“All right. What was the next thing you remember from that night?”

At 7:59
P.M.
, the dean and a DeWitt publicity person knocked on Dr. Ramachandran's office door to make sure he was ready. No answer. After repeated knocks and calling his name, they entered.

“Dean? You mean Earl Touhy, dean of forensics, correct?” Ms. Diaz said.

“Sorry—yes, that's right.”

A minute later the entire lab was gathered around Rama's body, awestruck. “And there he was, right on the floor near his chair.”

“You heard nothing before that?”

“Nope.”

“You didn't even hear him fall?”

“The lab can be a noisy place, and the door was closed.”

“OK. You said the entire lab gathered around, huh?” Ms. Diaz said, again lost in her notepad. “How many people total in that group? In fact, tell me how many people total entered the lab that day. As far as you know.”

Mr. Rose looked up at the ceiling. “Right. Including me? Seven. Four grad students. Me. The dean, and Miriam—that's the public affairs lady.”

Ms. Diaz squinted at her nails. “Let's hear about every last one of 'em,” she said. “Including the dean. And the publicity person. Everyone. Everything about them and anyone who regularly enters that lab.”

Mr. Rose dropped his head and put a fist to his mouth. Ruby badly wanted to get a drink but didn't dare move. “I feel like I'm ratting people out here, and I don't like it,” her father said finally. “But I guess there's no choice.”

Ms. Diaz tipped her head and gave him a look that said,
Uh, no
.

“Right, OK. Well, let's see. Regularly entered. Well, there's Roman Kapucinsky, the day janitor. His shift starts at about 10
A.M.
or so, goes till about 6
P.M.
, when I start. Older guy, barely speaks English. Kind of angry, in a quiet way. Not the smartest kid in class. I'm not saying I'm a genius, either, but Roman sometimes has this slack-jawed look, like a lost peahen. Almost retired, I think. I can't imagine him doing
something like this. He doesn't have the energy, at least I don't think—”

“OK, good. Who else?”

Ruby wrote in her book:
Roman, day janitor, quiet, angry, tired
. She'd seen Roman dozens of times but had never thought about him much.

“All right,” her dad was saying. “Well, I don't know if it matters, but Dean Paul Touhy was always in there. You seen the dean. Big boy, sometimes on TV with Rama, commenting on crime stuff.”

“If he was there, he's a suspect,” Ms. Diaz said.

“Yeah, I agree, he should be. Dean and Rama got on OK, but Dean's job depended on Rama totally, and I don't think he liked that. You know, having to manage this superstar and all. Then again, he'd be crazy to take out Rama; it would be impossible to replace him. And Dean completely lost it when we found the body. Fell to the ground on top of the body, all that. I don't know. Maybe they were closer friends than I thought.”

Ruby wrote:
Dean Tubby
. That's what the grad students all called him behind his back. Big, jolly fella, reminded her of Rex a little, the way he laughed a lot at almost everything. He was nothing like Rama or the other important people over there. Dean Touhy knew who Ruby was and actually greeted her, asked about school. Random
adult chatter, but it was more than she ever got from the little gods.

“Who else, Mr. Rose? What about students? Don't forget a single person.”

“Yeah, there's a bunch of students. Or fellows, or, uh, postdocs, or whatever. Some's all right, others I don't like so much. Sit there studying for ten hours and never say boo to anyone. I mean, I guess—”

“Names.”