Christietown (9 page)

oisoned?” I sank down on the couch, bewildered. “How

can that be? I don’t understand.”

Mariposa chewed on the back of his pen. “Here’s the gen
eral scenario: perp gives bad juice to victim, bad juice kills ’em. That make it any clearer?”

“For Pete’s sake!” McAllister shook his head in disgust, then turned to me. “There was foxglove in Liz Berman’s allergy pills.”

Jackie’s milky face fell. “Richard, didn’t we talk to the florist about foxglove centerpieces?”

Mariposa said, “Bad idea. The toxin’s located in the sap, flowers, seeds, and leaves.”

Richard stood up abruptly. “We have to go now. Jackie?”

She leapt to her feet like an obedient puppy.

“Do you need us, Detective?” Dot asked hopefully.

“I don’t think so, ma’am,” McAllister replied.

I was actually sorry to see them go.

“So where were we?” Mariposa asked. Now he was flipping his pen around like a majorette with a tiny baton.

McAllister closed his eyes. “We were about to question Ms. Caruso about Mrs. Berman’s activities this morning.”

“Please, sit down,” I said to them.

They sat down, then McAllister prompted, “You were saying?”

“Me?” I asked. “I wasn’t saying anything. I have nothing to say about Liz’s activities. I never even saw her this morning.”

“But you were expecting her, is that correct?”

“Yes,” I replied. “She was the star of my play. I was upset that she wasn’t there, like she was supposed to be, mostly because I was counting on her. It never dawned on me that something could be wrong.”

McAllister cocked his head to the side. “Where was Lou all this time?”

“He was at the Blue Boar. With the other members of the cast. By the time I got there, he was frantic.”

“What time was that exactly?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t wearing a watch. Maybe ten?”

“Go on,” he said, nodding.

“He was shouting. He was upset.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? Because his wife had disappeared!”

“Why would he have thought that?”

I got up and started pacing. “She’d left their house before he had, so she should’ve shown up at Christietown long before he arrived. But she hadn’t shown up. And she wasn’t picking up her phone. And he had her inhaler.” Just then something occurred to me. “I wonder why nobody thought to check the parking lot for her car.”

McAllister and Mariposa exchanged glances.

“That’s a good question, Ms. Caruso,” Mariposa said. “It
was parked just in front of the Vicarage. You must’ve walked right past it when you arrived at”—he paused and flipped back through his notes—“eight thirty this morning.”

“I have no idea what kind of car Liz drives,” I said. “Drove. Anyway, how was I supposed to recognize it? Lou’s the one who should’ve recognized it.” I stopped short.

Mariposa stood up, a gleam in his eye. “Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”

“That’s not what I meant to say,” I protested, turning to McAllister. But he wasn’t going to help me out of this one.

Mariposa cut to the chase. “What can you tell us about Mrs. Berman’s relationship with her husband, Mr. Berman?”

“I can’t believe this. Why would you be asking that?”

Because the husband is guilty nine times out of ten.

“Why do you think?” Mariposa asked, throwing my words back at me.

“Now you listen,” I said. “Lou Berman was in love with his wife. He had nothing to do with this. My god, you saw what happened to him.”

Mariposa started sucking on his pen, then pulled it out of his mouth with an obscene
thwack
. “People can put on a good show when they need to.”

McAllister changed the subject. “Ms. Caruso. Did Mrs. Berman have any enemies that you know of ?”

“There were protesters there all morning,” I said. “They have some kind of ax to grind with Christietown. One of them could have been responsible.” But I didn’t believe that for a second.

“Anyone with a more personal interest in Mrs. Berman?”

“Look, I barely even knew the woman. I took dancing les
sons from her husband. You never saw them dance. They were
amazing together.” Tears pricked at my eyes. “Are we done yet?”

McAllister was quiet for a moment, then he rose to his feet. “I think that’s all I need right now. You?” he asked Mariposa.

Mariposa looked around, then patted his pockets to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything. “I’m okay.”

They thanked me. McAllister gave me his card and asked if I had any questions before they left.

I could think of only one.

I wanted to know if Liz had been in pain.

“No pain,” said McAllister, looking straight at his partner. “The heart rate increases, and brings on heart failure. It hap
pens very fast.”

He was a nice man, and a liar.

After they left, I changed into a pair of old jeans and a sweatshirt and went out into my garden. It was early April. The spring flowers were blooming. Narcissus, hyacinths, a pair of tall sunflowers. Last summer, I’d watched, riveted, as the stalks moved in thrall to the sun. There were dandelions, too. Some people thought they were weeds, but that wasn’t true. Dandelions provided nectar for the bees after the fruit trees were tapped out.

I stopped in front of a terra-cotta pot at the edge of the garden. It was bursting with tall spikes of bell-like flowers in pink, mauve, and blue. The dark spots inside looked like they’d been drawn on with Magic Marker.

Foxglove.

Also known as ladies’ thimble, fairy finger, lion’s mouth, and throatwort.

Last winter, Javier had wanted to toss the seeds into the same bed as the potatoes and turnips. He’d explained that fox
glove helps root vegetables grow. But I’d been adamant about the pot. The first year, the plant had produced only leaves, finely toothed and furry. When the flowers first appeared a few weeks ago, Javier instructed me to cover them in cheesecloth for a while. They needed special care. They’d grow to four feet, maybe more, if I didn’t cut them first.

But I wasn’t going to cut them.

I got down on my knees.

No, I was going to yank the poisonous things out by their roots, one by one, until they were gone.

C
HAPTER
1
2

t was close to seven by the time I was done. The sun hadn’t
gone down yet. It was too busy turning the clouds all sorts of crazy colors: cherry red, purple, tangerine. I watched, trans
fixed, as the colors vanished into the darkening sky.

Afterward, I took a long, hot shower—as long and hot as my plumbing would allow. After drying off and wrapping myself in my white terry-cloth robe, I took to my bed with an Agatha Christie novel.

Appointment with Death.

Hercule Poirot goes to Jerusalem for a much-needed vaca
tion. It’s the little Belgian detective’s first night in the holy city. It’s hot, so he’s left the shutters open. The words drift into his room, out of the still desert air. The voice is male, nervous: “You see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”

I closed the book. This wasn’t working. I wanted an escape from real life, not a reminder of it. Then I opened the book again because I had to know who did it.

A family terrorized by a cruel and selfish mother. A schiz
oid daughter tearing her napkins to shreds. A romance. And a trip to Petra, capital city of the ancient Nabataeans, to see the ruins surrounded by sandstone cliffs. There, in her tent, the evil mother meets up with a hypodermic syringe containing a fatal dose of digitoxin, derived from
Digitalis purpurea
.

Foxglove.

I sat up with a sudden realization.

I had notes on this.

Twenty minutes later, I was seated at my desk with my poison file.

In more than half of Agatha Christie’s sixty-six novels, the corpse is a victim of poison. This was no accident. During World War I, Christie worked as a dispenser at the Red Cross hospital in her hometown of Torquay, where she learned every
thing there was to know about the chemistry of murder.

Foxglove was one of her old standbys. It appeared in her writings in the form of digitalis, digitoxin, digitalin, and the closely related strophanthin. Cyanide, strychnine, and arsenic were other favorites, but not nearly as accommodating. The digitalis family of drugs has been used for the treatment of heart disease for centuries. If you want to kill an elderly heart patient, it’s the way to go.

Christie occasionally took liberties, like putting a packet of strophanthin in the victim’s gin and having said victim perish within minutes. Generally speaking, however, it is only when given by injection that foxglove-derived poisons work that quickly. When administered by mouth, death tends to occur more slowly. Symptoms—which include convulsions and vom
iting—appear from one to twenty-four hours after ingestion, with death delayed for up to one to two weeks. But to give Christie her due, the margin of predictability when it comes to
digitalis is extremely low. Anything can happen if the murderer

mixes up a strong enough cocktail.

I closed the file, then went back into the house.

Who put foxglove in Liz’s medicine? When did they put it there? It could’ve been yesterday morning. It could’ve been two weeks ago. Was there any way to know for sure?

It was after one when Gambino crawled into bed.

“Liz is dead,” I said, still half asleep.

“I heard,” he answered, wrapping me in his arms.

“Also, Richard came early.”

“I’m really sorry,” he replied.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I had a bad dream I’d dreamed many times before. I’m behind the wheel of a car. I don’t know how to drive, but the car is moving forward, faster and faster. I’m flying up hills, racing around corners, plunging down embankments, but no matter what I do, I can’t make it stop. I woke up in a cold sweat and reached out for Gambino. He wasn’t there. I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face, then pulled on my robe and walked into the living room.

Gambino was sitting on the couch with something in his hand.

I could see the L.A. Sheriff ’s Department logo glowing in the dim light. Detective McAllister’s business card.

I’d left it lying on the coffee table.

Gambino gave me a look.

“What?” I asked.

“You know exactly what,” he said. “You are to stay out of this. You had nothing to do with Liz Berman’s death. You are not responsible in any way. Please don’t make me say it again. You’ve heard the lecture.”

I had.

More than once.

But even half-asleep I knew—we both knew—that it was going to take a lot more than that to stop me.

We didn’t talk much in the morning, just “Excuse me” and “Please pass the butter” and “Have you seen my watch?” We’d talked enough the night before, not to mention that we were both pressed for time. Gambino had had a break in his murder case. There was an emergency meeting downtown. And I had a condolence call to make.