A dram of poison (11 page)

Oh, what wicked error had he made this time?

Where had he left a bottle of poison that looked so innocent? In what public place where innocent people came and went?

The shock nearly caused him to fall down. Then his blood raced and cried no no no m perfect revulsion.

Well, it was the end of him. The end of Kenneth Gibson. The end of all respect for him, forever. But somebody else was going to get the poison and die of it unless he could jjrevent this.

The lightning change of all his purposes sent him stumbling to the telephone. He dialed. He said, "Police." His voice did not sound like his own. Every bit of any kind of courage he had, stiffened his spine. Face it. All right. No nonsense, now. A sickness seemed to fall off him.

The front door of the cottage opened. His wife Rosemary was standing there.

"I came," she said, intent upon herself and her own thoughts, "because I have got to talk to you. I can't—be such a rabbit—" Her face changed. "Kenneth, what's the matter?"

He had held up his hand for her to be silent. He thrust away every thought but one.

"Police? This is Kenneth Gibson. I have mislaid a small bottle filled with deadly poison." He articulated very clearly and spoke forcefully. "The bottle is labeled olive oil. It is roughly a pyramid, about five inches high, and it's inside a green paper bag. Nobody is going to know that it is poison. Can you do anything? Can you find it? Can you put out a warning?"

Rosemary shrank back against the door.

"I stole it. From a laboratory. . . . Can't give you the name of the stuff. It is odorless, tasteless . . . fatal. . . . Yes, sir. I took a Number Five bus at the comer of Main and Cabrillo at about a quarter after one o'clock. Got off at Lambert and the Boulevard . . . must have been one forty-five. I was in the market there possibly ten or fifteen minutes. It's just after two o'clock now. . . . Yes. Walked to my house . . . and just now discovered I haven't got it. . . . No, I am absolutely sure. . . . I put it in the olive-oil ; bottle. . . . Brand? King somebody-or-other. . . . Yes, I " did that. . . . Why? Because I was going to use it myself," he told the barking questioner on the line. "I intended to kill myself."

Rosemary whimpered. He did not look at her.

"Yes, I know it may kill somebody else. That's why I'm calling. . . ." The voice raged in a controlled way. "Yes, I am criminal," said Mr. Gibson. "Anything you say. Find it. Please, do all you can to find it."

He gave his name again. His address. His phone number.

He put the phone upon the cradle.

"Why?" said Rosemary.

He had thought never to see her again.

"Kenneth, I didn't. I didn't. Forgive me. I didn't — "

He scarcely heard what she said. He spoke harshly. "Go back to your shop. Know nothing about this. Don't get into it. Leave me. I may have caused someone to die. I may be a murderer. No good to you now. Leave me." He willed her to vanish.

Rosemary shoved herself away from the slab of the door, and stood on her feet. She said, "No. I will not leave you. It isn't going to happen. Nobody will be poisoned. We will go and find it."

He made a gesture of despair. "Oh no, mouse, no use to dream . . ."

"That's wrong" said Rosemary. ''That's untrue. We can find the poison. I can— and I fjuill. And you'll come too. Paul will help us!" she cried and whirled and opened the door. "Come . . ." she said imperiously.

"All right," said Mr. Gibson. "We can try, I suppose."

He walked out into the sunshine. He was very cold. He was as good as dead. He was so ruined a man—by this stroke of fate or whatever it was—it seemed to him that he had most unfortunately survived himself.

Rosemary ran, calling, "Paul! Paul!"

Paul bobbed up from behind a hedge. "What's up?" he said cheerfully.

"Help us. Kenneth had some poison. . . . He's left it someplace. We have to find it."

"Poison! What's this!"

"Your car. Please. Please, Paul. It's in a bottle labeled olive oil. Anybody might get it. He's left it at the market Or on a bus. We have to go there."

Paul tossed her some keys. "Get out the car," he said. His hand clenched around Mr. Gibson's forearm. "What's she talking . . . ?"

"It is Number Three thirty-three," Mr. Gibson said perfectly distinctly, "I went downtown and stole it from your cupboard."

"What in heller

"I was going to kill myself," said Mr. Gibson without apology. "Now I may kill somebody else."

Paul stepped back and withdrew his hand as if from contamination. He turned and yelled at Rosemary. "Did you call the police?"

She was vanishing into Paul's garage. "Yes! Yfts! Hurry! Hurry!" she shouted.

Paul said, "Got to tell Mama—get a shirt—" He leaped up on his porch. "Don't go without me," he yelled back over his shoulder. Mr; Gibson stood still. Rosemary was in the garage trying to start a strange car.

But the quiet neighborhood was still quiet. This crisis was like a dagger plunged into flesh that did not yet feel any wound. He, the cause, stood still and could smell lavender and feel the weight of the sun's heat. He experienced a moment out of time. He might as well have killed himself, for he knew he was lost. But also he was being bom again. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the caress of the light.

Then Paul's De Soto came bucking and plunging backward. It stopped and Rosemary swung the door and leaned out. "Get in."

Mr. Gibson went meekly, and climbed into the front seat as she shoved over. She seemed to be quite sure that Paul was coming to do the driving.

Paul came in an instant, buttoning a blue shirt over his naked chest. He shoved long legs under the wheel. "Where to, Rosie?"

"The market," she said decisively.

Mr. Gibson sat in the middle. He might as well have been a wax dummy.

"I called Jeanie to come home," Paul said, speaking as if his teeth were ready to chatter. "She's at her music lesson. Mama will be all right alone for half an hour. I'd just helped her to lie down. Didn't tell her why. Couldn't leave her with a shock. . . . What got into him?" said Paul angrily.

"I must have been crazy," said Mr. Gibson quietly. It was the easiest thing to say. He was beyond horror and beyond pain.

"Pray it's in the market," said Rosemary, "and they've found it. Paul, do you know what it is? It is poison?"

"It's dangerous stufT, all right. As I told him—How did he get at it?" Paul demanded with that anger.

The ghost of Mr. Gibson explained, and Paul grimaced as if he had to hold his teeth clenched. There seemed a convention that Mr. Gibson could speak and be heard and yet not be considered quite solidly there. Paul was perspiring. The car went jerkily. It was only three blocks to the market. "What are you doing home, Rosie?" Paul said in a nervous explosion.

"I wanted to talk to him. Alone. I didn't like — This is the first day Ethel's been . . ." They had turned the comer "Look! A police car!"

If Mr. Gibson felt a twinge: it felt like simple wonder. What, he wondered, was going to happen next?

He tried to push at this wonder and make himself feel alive. What was he doing plunging around the streets—? Who was he? Who were these people, young, busy, pushing people . . . Rosemary thrusting both legs out of the car to the pavement of the market's parking lot and Paul yanking on the brake and tumbling out the other side.

Mr. Gibson sat for a moment, abandoned and strangely exposed, for both front doors of Paul's car were flapping, open. When he felt a stirring somewhere at the bottom of his being it was still remarkably simple. It was curiosity.

So he slid under the wheel and got, as nimbly as he could, out of the car. He limped rapidly after them into the market.

Chapter Xlll

Cure I know him," The little checker girl was saying. She had black tangled hair, enormous dark eyes, and wore huge gold buttons in her ears. "I always thought he was nice, you know what I mean? Sure, I saw him. Thafs him, isn't it? But I didn't see no green paper bag. It wasn't in with his groceries. He didn't have no green paper bag. See . . ." She moved closer to the tall policeman and looked up at him almost yearningly. "We aren't busy so close to lunch. We never are. So I seen him come in. Right in that door. He didn't look good. He looked like he was sick or something. I seen his bare hands. If he had it, then he musta had it in his pocket. Did you look in his pockets?"

"Did you look in your pockets?" Rosemary flashed around and seemed to bear down upon him. (She wasn't anybody he knew.) Then the policeman seemed to be searching him while Mr. Gibson stood helpless as a dummy or a small child whose elders don't trust the accuracy of his reports.

The checker girl said, almost weeping, "Why'd he want to do a thing like that? Gee, I thought he was nice. . . . I mean some customers aren't so nice, you know, but he was nice." She used the past tense as if he had died. Nobody answered her.

"And listen," she sobbed. "I didn't put no green paper bag in with anybody else's stuff, either. Only been three or four people through my stand. It isn't here. Probably he never had no poison." She peeked at Mr. Gibson fearfully.

"If it isn't here," said Rosemary, tensely, "it must be on the bus."

"Wa-ait a minute," the policeman said. ''Now—" His eyes were cold. They fixed upon Mr. Gibson as if he were an object and an obstacle. (One could tell that he was used to obstacles.) "You are positive that you had this green paper bag with this poison in it when you got on the bus?"

"Yes, I am positive," said Mr. Gibson with perfect composure.

"And when you got home?"-"

"It wasn't there.''

''You were emotionally upset?" the policeman said. ''You think you forgot it on the bus, then?"

"I 'forgot' it," said Mr. Gibson, "because, I suppose, subconsciously I did not really want . . ." The words were coming out of him as from a parrot.

Rosemary took his arm rather roughly. 'T)o you want a stranger to die?" she cried at him.

The knife went in. "No," said he. "No. No."

"Well, then!" said Rosemary with a curious air of triumph. "You see, it isn't true!"

Paul said, "Wait a minute. What are the police doing?"

The policeman said, "They are after the bus, all right. And we are broadcasting. I'll search this building thoroughly, now, just in case . . ."

"What do you think the chances ...?''

The policeman shrugged. He didn't think much of them. He was a sad man. He'd seen a lot of trouble. He did his

best and let it go at that. "Whoever might find a bottle— looks like it's olive oil—might throw it away," said he. "Might take it home—use it. Who can say what people are going to do?"

Ethel can, thought Mr, Gibson, and for a moment feared he might whinny this forth nervously.

"Can't we find the bus?" Rosemary was urging.

"Gee, Rosie, I dunno," said Paul. "Are you sure he shouldn't be seeing a doctor . . ." Paul jittered.

Rosemary said, "Hurry, hurry . . ."

The checker girl said, "Oh gosh, I hope you find it! I hope nothing bad is going to happen!" She peered at Mr. Gibson from her eye corners. "Look, you're all right now, aren't you?" She seemed to care.

Mr. Gibson couldn't answer. What was it to be "all right," he wondered, with a shadowy sadness.

Then they were back in the car, as before.

"Number Five. That is the bus that goes on out the boulevard?" asked Rosemar)'.

"Yes."

"But how will we know which one? Did you notice any number on it?"

"No."

"But the police could get the number of the right bus, couldn't they? Since they know the time you caught it downtown, the time you got off at the market."

"Maybe."

"Then, maybe they have caught it already. They must have. It's two fifteen."

Rosemary was babbling! It was vocalized worry. Mr. Gibson was answering in monosyllables. Paul was driving the car. He wasn't driving it very well. The car jerked and jittered. The man was nervous. Mr. Gibson—so curiously removed from self by his ruination (which was complete) —found his senses able to perceive. He felt a resurgence of an old power. He was no longer cut off. Paul, he realized, shrank from him as evil. Paul was almost superstitiously afraid of a man who had intended to kill himself.

Mr. Gibson wondered if he ought to try to explain. The trouble was ... he could not now remember how it had gone, all his reasoning. He thought it odd to be sitting in the middle with the two of them so bent on preserving him from the doom of becommg a murderer. Doom ... ah yes, that was the word. Now he remembered. . . 

"I was going to write a letter," he said out loud. "I was going to explain ... At least, I—"

"Well, don't!'' said Rosemary vehemently. "Not now. Just don't talk about it. Whatever you thought, whatever it was, whatever it is. Now, we have to find that terrible stuff and stop it from hurting anyone. Afterward," she said grimly, "you can talk about it if you want to. Paul, can you drive faster?"

"Listen," said Paul, nervous and sweating. "I'd just as soon not wreck us, you know . . ."

Rosemary said, "I know. I know," and she pounded with her small female fists the side of Paul's car. "But I am to blame for this" said Rosemary.

Mr. Gibson tried to protest but she turned and looked fiercely into his eyes. "And you are to blame. We are to blame. That has to be true. I'll prove it to you. I'm tired" she cried. "I am so tired—"

Paul said, "Don't talk, Rosie. He must have been crazy. Let it go and say he was crazy."

But Mr. Gibson had a strange feeling of solidity. He thought. Yes, of course, I am to blame.

The boulevard was a divided street. In the weedy center space there lay old streetcar tracks, now superseded by the bus line. The boulevard was lined with little low apartment buildings, arranged in the charming California style, around grassy courts, and in a gay variety of colors . . . pink ones, yellow ones, green ones ... all sparkling clean and bright in the light of this fine day. Like big beads on the pretty chain, there came from time to time the shopping centers. A huge food market, with banks of red and yellow and orange fruit along the sidewalk, its bulk like a mother hen beside its chicks—the drugstore, laundromats.