The Poisoner's Handbook (9 page)
Within a year, the once openly rowdy saloons had given way to secretive speakeasies and to bootleggers who would sneak gin to one’s door at a delivery rate of two dollars a bottle. “The speakeasies are a remarkable feature of the new American life,” wrote one fascinated British visitor.
Every time you go for a drink there is adventure. I suppose it adds to one’s pleasure to change into a pirate or a dark character entering a smuggler’s cave. You go to locked and chained doors. Eyes are considering you through peepholes in the wooden walls . . . You sign your name in a book and receive a mysterious-looking card with only a number on it. And you are admitted to a back-parlour bar with a long row of loquacious drinkers. There may be a red signal light which can be operated from the door in case of a revenue officer or police demanding entrance.
When the light flashed over the front door, the patrons fled out the back.
By summer’s end, a bare half-year into the new amendment, New York officials were already worrying about enforcement. In August a Brooklyn magistrate presided over the trial of a burglar who had broken into a supposedly closed saloon and spent a night guzzling its gin supplies. The judge vented his frustration: “Prohibition is a joke. It has deprived the poor workingman of his beer and it has flooded the country with rat poison.” Police department chemists, analyzing the so-called gin in the Brooklyn bar and around the city, reported that much of it was industrial alcohol, redistilled to try to remove the wood alcohol content. The redistilling was not notably successful. The poisonous alcohol remained, and there was more: the chemists had detected traces of kerosene and mercury and disinfectants, including Lysol and carbolic acid, in the beverages. “Drinkers are taking long chances on their health,” warned the police commissioner, “if not their lives.”
BUT FOR THE new speakeasy devotees, the risk was part of the fun. Sometimes it was all the fun. It was amusing and exotic, as the British writer noted, to spend time in the dim light and hot jazz of some hidden corner, to experiment with the strange liquids that appeared at the table. Another groggy patron wrote, about a night of clubbing: the bartender “brought me some Benedictine and the bottle was right. But the liqueur was curious—transparent at the top of the glass, yellowish in the middle and brown at the base . . . Oh, what dreams seemed to result from drinking it . . . That is the bane of speakeasy life. You ring up your friend the next morning to find out whether he is still alive.”
At the underground clubs, inventive bartenders enjoyed new respect for disguising the taste of the day’s alcohol. They created a new generation of cocktails heavy on fruit juices and liqueurs to mix with the bathtub gin, bright and spicy additions to cover the raw sting of the spirits. There was the Bennett Cocktail (gin, lime juice, bitters), the Bee’s Knees (gin, honey, lemon juice), the Gin Fizz (gin, lemon juice, sugar, seltzer water), and the Southside (lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves, gin, seltzer water).
At least, those were the kind of drinks served at the city’s classier joints—say Jack and Charlie’s 21, on 52nd Street. Or Belle Guinan’s El Fay Club on West 45th, where the hostess gleamed like a candelabrum and the house band played “The Prisoner’s Song” when dry agents were spotted in the crowd. Down in the Bowery, as the police could tell you, the drink of choice was a cloudy cocktail called Smoke, made by mixing water and fuel alcohol. Smoke joints were tucked into the back of paint stores, drugstores, and markets, among the dry goods and the stacked cans. The drink was blessedly cheap—fifteen cents a glass—and just about pure methyl alcohol.
In a bad season, Smoke deaths in the Bowery averaged one a day. Government agents trying to hunt down suppliers of the poor man’s cocktail swore that it was served right from cans stenciled with the word POISON—and that people didn’t care. They just gambled that it wouldn’t kill them and drank it anyway.
AS DEMANDS for chemical analysis intensified, Norris was infuriated that the Hylan administration remained so stingy regarding his department. The mayor restricted funds every year, as if still holding on to his initial grudge.
In 1922, as Norris noted in yet another letter to the mayor, he had only forty-one employees in his office (compared to sixty-two under Riordan). Annual pay for the doctors working under him averaged less than $4,000 a year. Chemists didn’t even get that—by pestering the mayor constantly, he’d finally managed to get Gettler’s salary above $3,000 annually.
His own yearly salary was only $6,000; as Norris pointed out, none of the staff got the kind of incomes enjoyed under the old coroner system. But he was angrier still about the lack of basic support for the department as a whole. All new equipment purchased in 1921 had been paid for by Norris himself or by his staff: every test tube, every scalpel, a new scale to weigh tissue samples, a small brass microscope to study tissue damage. All of it. Gettler was dipping into his less-than-generous salary to buy extra chemical supplies and the weekly allotment of raw liver for his experiments.
The medical examiner’s office could not possibly do its best work, Norris said, when the city officials failed to recognize the “well known fact that guilt or innocence may rest entirely on the chemical and biological analyses” of evidence at a crime scene. And if anyone doubted that premise, it was about to be painfully proven in a beautiful little hotel in Brooklyn.
THE HOTEL MARGARET glittered like an enormous holiday ornament on the northeastern corner of Orange Street, in Brooklyn’s upscale Columbia Heights neighborhood. Built in 1889, according to the colorful plans of local architect Frank Freeman, the hotel was a twelve-story fantasy of limestone, brick, and terra-cotta, with copper balconies and arched rectangular windows that rose to an ornate peaked roof.
In the 1920S, the hotel offered both overnight accommodations—at a pricey twenty dollars a night—and residential apartments. The latter were so popular that the owners had built an annex to house the long-term residents, crafted in the same tones of copper, red, and gold, offering the same delivery of meals by white-coated waiters, the same copper-grilled elevators manned by uniformed porters, and the same nearly invisible maid service. The elegant Hotel Margaret blended seamlessly into the elegant mansions of the Heights.
At least until the day a retired carpet dealer and his wife were found dead on the bathroom floor of their annex apartment.
“AGED COUPLE Slain Strangely” read the
New York Times
headline on April 27, 1922, reflecting the bafflement of the police investigators. They’d found seventy-five-year-old Fremont M. Jackson and his sixty-year-old wife, Annie, crumpled on the black and white tile of their bathroom. Both were dressed in street clothes. She lay close to the sink, and he just inside the door.
New York Times
headline on April 27, 1922, reflecting the bafflement of the police investigators. They’d found seventy-five-year-old Fremont M. Jackson and his sixty-year-old wife, Annie, crumpled on the black and white tile of their bathroom. Both were dressed in street clothes. She lay close to the sink, and he just inside the door.
The Jacksons had died badly. Their teeth were clenched, and their lips were stained with a dried bloody froth. Their faces were oddly bluish, and their skin was patterned over with livid red spots. The physician assigned to the case suspected a double suicide, perhaps by swallowing a quick-acting poison.
But investigators found not a trace of poison in the Jacksons’ rooms—no container, vial, or bottle—and no mysterious remnants in the bottom of a drinking glass. And the family members described the couple as happy and healthy, insisting that suicide was out of the question. The Jacksons had barely been married a year. After spending years alone, they had both been enjoying the companionship of a second marriage. Annie Jackson’s son sent a telegram from his Massachusetts home, proposing that his mother had died of food poisoning and that the shock of finding her body must have killed her husband.
On Norris’s order, one of the assistant medical examiners in the Brooklyn office did an autopsy. It hinted at cyanide, which was known to cause a kind of chemical suffocation and would explain the blue look of oxygen deprivation. But cyanide from where? It killed quickly, too quickly for them to have imbibed it elsewhere and then strolled back home. Police searched the apartment again, once more failing to find a trace of the poison.
“Mr. and Mrs. Jackson met their deaths by poisoning, but whether the drug was self-administered or sent to them is impossible just now to determine,” the medical examiner’s office announced. “The poison might have been administered in food or drink.” The doctor conducting the autopsy had removed both stomachs, placed them in specimen jars, and sent them from Brooklyn to Manhattan for analysis in Gettler’s laboratory. Until those results came in, investigators could “not determine what caused the death of the couple.”
But, truth to tell, they rather hoped it was something else, something less ugly than cyanide.
CYANIDES POSSESS a uniquely long, dark history, probably because they grow so bountifully around us.
They flavor the leaves of the yew tree, the flowers of the cherry laurel, the kernels of peach and apricot pits, and the fat pale crunch of bitter almonds. They ooze in secretions of arthropods like millipedes, weave a toxic thread through cyanobacteria, massed in the floating blue-green algae along the edges of the murkier ponds and lakes, and live in plants threaded through forests and fields.
Humans recognized early the murderous potential of cyanide-rich plants. Scholars have found references to “death by peach” in Egyptian hieroglyphics, leading them to believe that those long-ago dynasties carried out cyanide executions, perhaps by making a potion from poisonous fruit pits. Centuries later cyanide became more readily available in large and lethal quantities. That happened, in part, due to some experiments by a German painter who in 1704 was only trying to improve the colors on his palette.
The artist, one Heinrich Diesbach, was a born experimenter. He spent hours in the laboratory of a Berlin chemist, trying to create a new shade of red paint. He swirled together wilder and wilder mixtures, eventually mixing dried blood, potash (potassium carbonate), and green vitriol (iron sulfate), then stewing them over an open flame. He expected the flask to yield a bloody crimson, but instead a different brilliance appeared—the deep violet-blue glow of a fading twilight. Diesbach called the vivid pigment Berlin blue; English chemists would later rename it Prussian blue.
Almost eighty years later a Swedish chemist mixed Prussian blue with an acid solution, heated the witchy, foaming result, and produced a colorless gas, undetectable but for a faint smell of bitter almonds. The gas easily condensed into a clear liquid that, even diluted with water, was an exceptionally potent acid. That corrosive liquid became popularly known as Prussic acid, although scientists preferred to call it hydrocyanic acid (from the Greek words
hydro
for water and
kyanos
for blue).
hydro
for water and
kyanos
for blue).
The gas was hydrogen cyanide (HCN), a deceptively simple, spectacularly lethal bundle of hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen atoms. It could be chemically treated to produce powdery white poisonous salts, usually potassium cyanide (KCN) or sodium cyanide (NaCN). As a group, the three cyanides quickly showed themselves valuable in industrial products. Hydrogen cyanide was used in pesticides, explosives, engraving, and tempering steel, as a disinfecting agent, in creating colorful dyes, and even in making nylon. Sodium cyanide became a favored tool of the mining industry, used to etch away useless rock and extract the gold contained inside. Potassium cyanide was also used in mining, as well as in photography, electroplating, and metal polishing.
Alexander Gettler, tracking cyanide problems in New York, kept a list of accidental poisonings, such as those caused when someone with an open cut on a hand polished the family silver. The exposure was low enough that most people, after becoming miserably sick, survived. But Gettler had logged one fatality, following a meal served by a cook who failed to thoroughly wash out a pot after polishing it to a gleam inside and out. Gettler worried—no, he knew—that people using cyanides didn’t appreciate how dangerous they were: “It is of considerable practical significance that hydrocyanic acid is a poison for all members of the animal kingdom.”
In other words, cyanides were useful, plentiful, easy to acquire—and astonishingly lethal.
STILL, most murderers tended to avoid cyanide—the poison left a too-obvious trail of evidence. The resulting corpse would be a textbook study in violent death, marked by bruising discoloration, twisted by the last convulsions, often eerily scented with cyanide’s characteristic warning perfume, a faint, fruity scent of almonds. (Researchers would later find that a fair number of people carry a genetic mutation that keeps them from smelling cyanide.)
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