The Clairvoyant Countess (19 page)

“The poor woman. But,” added Madame Karitska thoughtfully, “she does have a dress. She said so.”

“Very funny,” growled Pruden. “What I particularly called about, though, is that I’ve gone to see her and she’s very upset at leaving her house unattended in the daytime. She liked you. When I asked her what could be done for her she wondered if you could possibly house-sit. Unfortunately,” he added, “we can’t spare a policeman for that sort of thing.”

“Obviously,” said Madame Karitska.

“Feeling is running high about her, I might add, although I think you’d be safe enough. Not entirely because of the dog,” he added. “Somebody else has become ill.”

“Who?”

“A seventeen-year-old girl—same neighborhood—named Julie Austen. She’s been taken to the hospital, so maybe this time our mysterious ailment can be identified.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. At what time should I present myself at Mrs. Trumbull’s house tomorrow?”

“You’ll do it? Great. I’d suggest half past twelve. She’s due in court at one o’clock. She shouldn’t be there more than an hour or two at most.”

“Tell her I’ll be there at twelve twenty-five,” said Madame Karitska, and hanging up the telephone she picked it up again to begin rearranging two of her afternoon appointments for the next day.

At half past twelve the next day Mrs. Trumbull left for Magistrate’s Court looking very neat in a dark-blue dress and a curious sort of hat that Madame Karitska yearned to bring into the twentieth century with a few adjustments. Since Mrs. Trumbull had no money for taxi fare, Pruden had offered to take her to court in his car; she wrung Madame Karitska’s hand, asked her to explain matters to her three remaining dogs, and climbed in beside Pruden, looking very small, anxious and defenseless.

Madame Karitska closed the gate behind her, chatted with the dogs for a few minutes, and then went into the house. Its darkness was oppressive and she headed for Mrs. Trumbull’s microscopic living area where at least the darkness had been lightened into mere gloom. She sat for a long time on the couch, opening herself up to the feel of the house, and then she began to walk up and down the aisles of towering cartons and piles of newspapers, feeling drawn to them as if somewhere
in the maze lay something of importance to Mrs. Trumbull’s future. But only a few of the cartons lay open, and she had no flashlight; what she did find, however, was an ancient pair of grass clippers. Carrying these she went outside, looked over the jungle of green, and glanced at her watch. An hour had already passed; she decided that she might as well make herself useful, and with some humor began to attack the path to the house.

She was hard at work when the gate opened and Johnny Larkin’s mother walked in. Once the dogs had been quieted she said rather breathlessly, “I hope you don’t mind. Lieutenant Pruden stopped at the house this morning—he wanted Johnny to remember and write down everywhere he’d been the day he became sick—and he said you’d be here while Mrs. Trumbull’s at court. I think it’s perfectly splendid of you. I’ve brought you some lunch.”

“It’s very kind of you,” said Madame Karitska, “but I had lunch before I came.”

Mrs. Larkin nodded. “Then I’ll save it for Mrs. Trumbull. I made her a cake, chocolate with three layers.” Looking around her she said, “It really is a mess, isn’t it? I suppose she just didn’t have the energy to keep
up.
The housewives’ nightmare,” she added with a grin. “You catch the flu and lose a week and it’s overwhelming how behind you can get.” Sobering, she said, “You know, if people didn’t insist she was a witch—this really is a nice neighborhood—we could all pitch in and do something about this.”

Madame Karitska said gently, with a faint smile, “Yes indeed. It would be so helpful, wouldn’t it?”

The gate creaked again, the dogs came running, and
Madame Karitska turned to see a man and a young woman standing in the tunnel of green and looking somewhat appalled. She quieted the dogs and looked at them questioningly.

“Inspector Fowler from the Department of Housing,” the man said gruffly. “And Miss Wyler from the Department of Welfare. We’ve come to inspect the house and remove the dogs for examination. Magistrate’s Court sent us.”

“But Mrs. Trumbull?” asked Madame Karitska, brows lifting.

“She’s still at court. She’ll be there until our investigation’s finished and the magistrate makes a recommendation. A few more hours.”

“So we’ll just go in,” the young woman said with a smile.

It did not take long for the house to be declared uninhabitable. Every room in the building was piled high with junk, with only narrow aisles for access. There was a thirty-foot well in the basement, and around this were arranged a number of perishable food items and two buckets. There was no electricity, no running water, and no toilet facilities. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the building inspector said incredulously. “One match and the whole place could blow up.”

“And she insists she needs no help from welfare,” said Miss Wyler sadly, looking around her. “Well, we’d better go back and report.”

When they had gone Mrs. Larkin looked at Madame Karitska. “You’re going to have a long wait.”

“Yes,” said Madame Karitska.

“I’ll just go home and put a casserole in the oven
and then I’ll come back and wait with you. I feel,” she added vaguely, “somehow responsible. You know, ‘no man is an island,’ and all that.”

It was six o’clock before Pruden walked in the gate; he came alone. “Still here?” he said.

“Still here,” Madame Karitska told him with a smile. “But where is Mrs. Trumbull?”

“I’ll take you both home,” he said in a hard voice. “They’ve sent Mrs. Trumbull to Harlow Hospital for two days of testing to see whether she’s sane, and Julie Austen died half an hour ago in the hospital.”

“Died!” cried Mrs. Larkin. “Oh no,
Julie?
Only seventeen and
dead?
”

“Yes,” Pruden said grimly. “The nearest they can get to it is belladonna poisoning but they’re not sure.” With a glance at the house he added, “They’re posting a guard here. I explained the circumstances and they don’t want trouble so they’ll post a guard. Let’s go,” he said in a savage voice, and turned on his heel and led them to his car.

“Belladonna,” Pruden said the following day when he stopped in, exhausted, at Madame Karitska’s. “Also called deadly nightshade, devil’s cherries, devil’s herb, and great morel. I don’t get it, frankly. Seven patrolmen spent the entire morning combing the back yards of the neighborhood, especially Joe’s auto-body shop where the weeds are thickest, and none of them found any deadly nightshade. And even if they did, why would four people go out and eat the stuff?”

“What is interesting to me,” said Madame Karitska, “is the pattern of the illnesses.”

“What do you mean?”

“Johnny Larkin was only mildly ill. You tell me that Cas Johnson was a trifle sicker—it was necessary for him to report out of work for two days. Kathy Dunlap went berserk and Julie Austen died.”

Pruden’s brows lifted. “I’m not following you.”

She said calmly, lighting a cigarette in a long jade holder, “To me it gives the impression of someone—shall we say fumbling for the right dosage?”

He stared at her incredulously. “You’re implying
murder?
”

She looked at him steadily. “This hadn’t occurred to you?”

Startled, he said, “Actually, no, but then no one died until last night. And when you discover it’s a weed that grows wild—”

“You would have come to the possibility eventually,” she assured him, “but perhaps not until someone else had died. Did Johnny Larkin give you a—a
scientific
listing of the places he’d visited before he became ill?”

He nodded. “It’s here somewhere.” He groped in his pocket and brought out several lists. “Cas Johnson did it for me, too, and Kathy Dunlap. But look here, why do you suspect a human hand in this?”

“Let me look at them a moment,” said Madame Karitska, interrupting him, and studied the three lists with interest.

“I know what you’ll find,” Pruden said with a rueful smile. “There’s just one common denominator, one place they all visited before becoming sick.”

“Yes, the auto-body shop,” said Madame Karitska, nodding, and glanced at her watch. “I feel it’s important we go there. Will you take me right now?”

The senior Joe Lister was a large, slow-moving man with a round, cheerful face. He turned off the sanding machine with which he’d been removing paint from a crumpled fender and wiped his fingers carefully on his jeans before shaking hands. His garage held two cars as well as the truck on which he was working, each in various stages of deshabille; there were more cars waiting outside. “Hey, Cas,” he shouted, “take over, will you?” His helper started up the sanding machine again and Lister beckoned them toward the rear.

“Rush job,” he apologized. “We can talk better in here.” Behind a window set into the wall lay an untidy office with a desk. He opened the door and led them inside.

“Yeah, the kids hang out here a lot,” he said in reply to Pruden’s questions. “It don’t bug me at all. Hell, kids like grease and dirt. Every once in a while somebody starts up a petition to get the shop off the street—usually somebody just moved here—but hell, a few weeks later they forget about it, they’re glad to know where their kids are. There’s a Coke machine out in the corner near the door to the yard, and there’s usually a pot of coffee going.… I don’t mind, I like kids. Got two myself.”

“We met your son Joe,” said Madame Karitska pleasantly. “At the Dunlap house.”

“At the house but I’ll bet not in it,” he said with a short laugh. “And that
does
bug me, Joe being as good as anybody on this street, and my shop being a place they all practically grew up in, but the girls on this block—Kathy in particular—look down their noses at him. Yeah, that bugs me,” he said. “I don’t like that.”

“Does Joe mind?” asked Pruden.

“Mind? Of course he minds. He’s nuts about that Dunlap girl and she plays him like a fish on a line. But what’re you going to do?” he asked with a shrug. “They have to learn the hard way.”

Pruden nodded, his gaze moving around the office. “I wonder if you could tell me what chemicals you use here, or have stored in the building. Anything exotic? Anything you may have had for years and forgotten about?”

It was stuffy in the office. Seeing Pruden take out his notebook, presumably to make lists, Madame Karitska excused herself, saying, “I’ll be outside, Lieutenant.”

He nodded absently and she went out, closing the door behind her. Cas Johnson was leaning over the crumpled fender, the sanding machine still buzzing like an angry insect. Beyond him, on the street, she saw Mrs. Larkin talking animatedly to an elderly man with a cane. Madame Karitska turned to the right, toward the small door that led into the yard with its tall grass and rusting cars. Next to the door, just inside it, she saw the Coke machine that Lister had mentioned, and beside it, on a shelf, a hot plate, a water kettle already near the boiling point, several jars of instant coffee, and a bag of sugar. Still more interesting, she thought, was the bulletin board hanging over the coffee shelf. This more than any of Lister’s words spelled out the part which the auto-body shop played in the neighborhood. It was festooned with handwritten signs:
KATHY, report home before your music lessons. Important, Mother. For Sale—one piano, see Larkins after
7
P
.
M
. A family named Maraziti had three kittens free to anyone who could give them a good home. Birch Dunlap
had a ukelele for sale, and Butch Jamison was ready to trade his Batman cards for some aggies.

Madame Karitska wondered what aggies were.

She walked out into the sun, vaguely inspected some of the cars waiting for repair, and then felt drawn to a shady corner with a bench at the side of the garage. She sat down and studied the sunny yard around her, her glance eventually falling on a thick growth of horizontal stalks which she recognized as a plant that grew thickly in Russia. Southern Russia, she remembered. Its name was … was …

She was lost in thought when Pruden found her. “I thought you wanted to interview Joe Lister senior,” he said accusingly. “You stayed only about three minutes.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m beginning to wonder about Joe junior. Lister says—”

“I heard,” she said, lifting one arm to point. “Over there.”

“Over there what? You look strange.” “I think,” she said, “that I am staring at your poisonous plant.”

“Here? Belladonna?”

“Not belladonna. I’ve been trying to remember its generic name; it grows all along the coast of the Black Sea in Russia. Datura Stramonium, that’s it. In Europe it’s called thorn apple.” She rose and walked over to the horizontal stems. “It’s September and it’s in seed now,” she pointed out. “These look like berries but they’re seeds.” She plucked a stalk and brought it to him. “They’re fully as poisonous as belladonna. They produce giddiness, dilation of the pupils of the eyes.…”

Pruden stared at the plant, thinking that he’d never seen anything so modest look so evil. Nature supplied most of her seeds with lavish colors—green, red, white, yellow—but these were dark brown, nearly black, a dozen of them to each stem, like tiny beads. There were no leaves, only the thin upright stalk and the slender sheath bearing this lacy frond of brownish-black seeds. He said abruptly, “I’ll call our lab man.”

He turned—they both turned—at a sudden cry from the door. Mrs. Larkin stood there with her mouth open, a cup dangling from one finger. Her eyes looked huge and frightened, her lips framed words that the sanding machine behind her blotted out. With a look of astonishment she slumped forward and fell to the ground.

Pruden rushed to her side and stretched her flat on the grass, pried open the lid of one eye and nodded. “Dilated.” He stood up and shouted “Lister!” and then rushed inside to silence the sanding machine.

Madame Karitska was already hurrying along the path and through a gap in the board fence to the Larkin house. She walked into the kitchen, found the spices in a cabinet over the sink, and returned to the garage; it was the first time Pruden had seen her run.