The Countertenor Wore Garlic (The Liturgical Mysteries) (23 page)

"Hey, you know who helped us with it?" said Wynette. "It was that girl who got herself killed. Cabbage something. She'd come by looking for the fellow with the ears and the nose. You know, Ol' Snorty."

I laughed. "Dr. Ian Burch, PhD."

"If you say so," said Wynette. "Anyway, those boxes weren't light and you know with my back..."

"
Your
back?" said Mattie Lou. "What about
my
back?"

"I need to get a bottle of communion wine," I said.

"Help yourself," said Elaine. "You have the key?"

"Yep." I twirled the key on my finger. "Carol gave it to me."

"No more chit-chat," said Wendy, sticking her head back into the refrigerator. "We gotta get busy. Wynette, hand me that paint scraper."

***

I went up to the choir loft and played through Bach's D major fugue, my postlude for Sunday, and one of the staples of my now-dwindling repertoire. I'd learned the piece in college and it had been 'under my fingers,' as they say, for thirty years. I played through the subject, first in D, then in the relative minor, then the mediant minor. Playing a Bach fugue was like walking through a house admiring the architecture. You'd go into one room, stay for a moment or two, then wander into another room. By the time you were finished, you'd experienced the whole structure. Even if you didn't know exactly what was going on, the beauty was still there and you could appreciate it for what it was. Knowing how it was built made it that much more fun. Playing Bach also helped me think. I finished the piece, pulled out my cell phone and dialed Kent Murphee's office.

"Morgue," said Kent when he answered. "You stab 'em, we slab 'em."

"Hey, how about some professionalism? You should say 'Watauga County Coroner.'"

"What do you want?" said Kent. "I'm extremely busy."

"More dead bodies?"

"This is Boone, not St. Germaine. If you must know, I've got a poker game going in the autopsy room and I'm looking at aces over tens."

"You wish. Anyway, I know how Flori Cabbage was killed. Can I come down?"

"I was just about to call you," said Kent. "Well, right after I've skinned these EMTs and sent them home without their alligator wallets."

"Yeah? Why?"

"I finally got the tox screen back from the lab. She had traces of tetrodotoxin in her blood. It didn't kill her, but there certainly is something funny going on."

"How about this afternoon?" I said.

"See you then."

Chapter 19

I walked into the coroner's office, brown bag in hand, just as Kent Murphee was bidding his poker buddies farewell. I knew two of them. EMTs. Their expressions told it all. Mike's face was long enough to wrap twice around his neck and Joe gave "hangdog expression" a whole new meaning. I had no idea who the fourth guy was, but he seemed to have fared no better.

Kent had his pipe clenched between his teeth and was smiling broadly. "C'mon in," he chirped. "These boys were just leaving."

They grumbled past me on the way to the front door and once outside, with the door shut firmly behind them, huddled together and started gesturing at each other in an accusatory fashion. I turned and followed Kent into his office carrying my package with me.

"Just look at this," I said, starting to open the bag.

"Hang on," said Kent. "Business before pleasure. Or is it the other way around? No matter... it's four o'clock and I'm up seven hundred dollars. Cocktail time."

"I think we're going to have an intervention for you, Kent," I said. "All your friends."

"Friends? I have no friends."

I laughed. "Nothing for me, thanks, but don't let my temperance stop you."

"I can assure you that it won't," said Kent, pulling open his bottom desk drawer and coming up with a bottle of bourbon. He spit in a tumbler sitting on his desk, mopped it out with his handkerchief, and poured himself two fingers of Maker's Mark.

"I thought you were onto port," I said.

"That's my breakfast drink," said Kent. "Have you no couth?" He nodded toward my package. "Now, let me see what you have there."

I opened the bag and pulled out the gas-powered wine opener that I'd picked up in the sacristy of St. Barnabas.

"Ah, I've seen those," said Kent. "I almost bought one. You think someone plunged that needle into the victim's neck, eh?"

"I do," I said. "Then gave her a double shot of carbon dioxide. One in each of the holes."

"You pull any prints?"

I shook my head. "Nope. The church ladies wash it every time before they use it. Standard procedure."

"Well, that'd kill her, sure enough," said Kent, leaning back in his leather office chair and dropping both his feet onto the desk. He took a long puff and the scent of apple and tobacco filled the office. A good smell. It made me think that I might switch from cigars to pipes. "Say, if that is the murder weapon, may I keep it? I mean, you won't want to be using it back at the church..."

"Fine with me," I said. "Providing we don't need it as evidence."

"Well, if you're right, I'd never find any trace of the gas embolism it probably produced. It might have travelled to her heart and caused the infarction, or it might have travelled to her brain before causing the infarction. Either way, the CO2 would have dissipated long before I got around to discovering the cause." He took a sip of his drink. "Very clever," he conceded. "So you want to check and see if the needle holes fit the murder weapon."

"Yep," I said. "What do you think?"

He lifted his feet off the desk, put his lit pipe in his pocket and picked up his drink. "C'mon."

I followed him into his morgue and waited for him to open the vault containing Flori Cabbage's body. He tugged the tray out of the vault with some effort, since he was performing the task one-handed, then slid the sheet down to her breastbone. "Here," he said, passing me his drink and taking the wine opener from my hand. "Switch."

He walked across the room, retrieved a large illuminated magnifying glass on a wheeled stand, and rolled it over to the body. Then he switched on the light and held the needle close to the holes in Flori Cabbage's neck, comparing the diameter.

"We'll never be able to say for sure," he finally said, "because there are no trace substances around the wounds, and, of course, now her skin has shrunk a good bit and she's lost a fair amount of fluid. If you'll look closely, you can see that these holes in her neck are noticeably smaller than they were when she came in. Trying to match the holes with the needles just isn't going to work. How'd you come up with this theory, anyway?"

"We found Flori's fanny-pack in the choir dressing room in the sacristy. This was sitting just outside on the counter."

"If it's any consolation," said Kent, "I don't doubt you have the murder weapon here. I just don't think you can prove it."

"Yeah," I said dejectedly. "Thought I had something."

"But here's some other news," said Kent brightly. "I have the tox screen report. Back to the office, Sherlock." He set the wine opener on the counter. "And gimme my drink back."

***

"See, here," he said, pushing the report across the desk to me. "Like I told you on the phone. Flori Cabbage's blood had traces of tetrodotoxin, also known as tetrodox, also known as 'zombie powder.' It's a potent neurotoxin with no known antidote."

"Zombie powder? You're kidding me?"

"Nope. The poison is found in many widely differing animal species, including pufferfish, newts, toads, the blue-ringed octopus, trigger-fish... well, you get the idea." Kent pulled his pipe out and puffed it back to life.

"Yeah, I do. Fugu. Deadly pufferfish sushi. But we don't have a sushi place in St. Germaine."

"There was no sushi in her stomach," said Kent. "It wasn't pufferfish."

"Did she have enough in her body to kill her?"

"I don't think so, but we'll never know for sure. She would have been pretty sick at the very least, and probably paralyzed from the toxin, but sometimes people don't succumb. They have sort of a natural immunity. She wasn't alive long enough to find out."

"Huh?"

"She'd been dosed with the poison, but that wasn't what killed her. She'd probably been only recently exposed. Sometimes this stuff can take up to four hours, but most people feel the effects within thirty minutes. It may be that she hadn't even felt any effects from it before she died. She died of a heat attack."

"Would this zombie powder cause her to be immobile? You know... paralytic?"

"It most certainly could have."

"So, if she was immobile, someone could have easily stuck the corkscrew in her neck and finished her off."

"Yep, but it's a stretch if you're thinking about premeditation. No one would be able to calculate when that drug might take effect, or how efficacious the dosage was." Kent looked up at the ceiling and studied the pattern his pipe smoke was making. "Well," he said, "maybe a Voodoo priest in a zombie movie could have figured it out, but it would have been much easier just to give her ten cc's of the stuff and kill her quickly."

"Hmm. Yeah, you're right. How do you think she got dosed?"

"I have no idea," said Kent. "Maybe ingestion, maybe injection. You can smoke it. You can even get it from skin contact, although it's not as potent. It's a nasty compound, a hundred times more powerful than potassium cyanide. I looked it up and the stuff is quite interesting from a medical perspective. For example, did you know that the poison isn't produced by the animals themselves, but by certain symbiotic bacteria that live inside them? Here's another thing. When it's not refrigerated, the poison loses its potency within a few hours. TTX has proven useful in the treatment of pain and was originally used in Japan in the 1930s for such diverse problems as terminal cancer, migraines, and heroin withdrawal."

"Great," I said. "Now gimme something that'll help."

"That stuff about zombie powder putting you in a deathlike trance where you're still alive but can't move," said Kent. "It ain't a myth."

Chapter 20

I cracked my knuckles, put a new piece of paper in the typewriter, and stuck my new pipe between my teeth. Raymond Chandler smoked a pipe and Raymond Chandler was the man who said, "She had a face like a collapsed lung." Meg hadn't put the kibosh on pipe smoking in the house, but only because I hadn't tried it. I wasn't ready for that kind of hairsplitting yet, so my pipe was unlit although packed with a wonderful smelling tobacco that Kent had given me called Black Cordial. Meg had spent the night at her mother's house and I'd made plans to meet her in town later for lunch, but for now, I had a free morning, a cup of coffee on the desk, and an ardent and demanding muse. I was even thinking seriously about putting on pants.

The pope floated in the air like a five-foot-tall glowing weather balloon filled with bad weather, his arms outstretched, and lightning bolts rocketing out of his fingertips. His white pointy hat shot sparks into the air like old Aunt Millie's toaster, which had also been white due to it being a 1948 model with a white enamel finish which was all the rage that year until the sparks started several house fires including the one that sent Aunt Millie to heaven, which brought us back to the pope, who also sent people to heaven, but not vampires.

"Vos bardus lamia!" he screeched in ecclesiastical fury. "Vamoosia!"

"Oooch! Oooch!" hooted the Vampire Amish in their funny Pennsylvania-Dutch dialect as they burst into flames.

Race Rankle ran for the stairs, but couldn't go fast enough, even at vampire speed, which according to many teen vampire novels is much faster than regular speed, to escape the pope's fiery finger of fate.

"Hasta la vista, Baby," the pope snarled, exhibiting both his linguistic proficiency and cinematic recall while at the same time showing off his pope superpowers by shooting Race with one of his lightning finger-bolts. "See you in purgatory."

Race went up like a Roman candle, which was sort of ironic seeing that we were, in fact, surrounded by real Roman candles, not the kind that Race Rankle went up like, which was the exploding Chinese kind, but rather the religious non-exploding kind.