The Prodigal Son (20 page)

“More to the point, so was Emily handed a red herring,” Carmine said on a Bronx cheer. “It takes a lot of gall to play with a potential victim before doing the deed. Abe, what next?”

“Depends. Did you break the ampoule, Paul?”

“No. I drilled a hole in its bottom and emptied it that way. The actual gizmo is otherwise intact.” Paul pulled a face. “All I will add is that whoever made it is a total amateur.”

“I’m taking it to Millie Hunter,” Abe said. “She ought to have a few illuminating things to say.”

Abe found her in her laboratory, though it was surely time, he thought, for a married woman to be heading home to fix dinner. But not in the Hunter household, he divined; that was a domicile ran on TV dinners that they burned because they forgot what hour they’d put them in the oven.

She worked in an inside room ten feet by eight feet — a cross between a lab and a cupboard, given the wealth of shelving on its walls. The floor was cluttered with nineteen-inch racks holding electronic equipment, cables had been taped down to prevent being tripped over, and a tiny sink with a swan-neck faucet seemed to be her only source of water apart from carboys marked “Distilled” or “Deionized”. She did her procedures on a stainless steel cart meticulously covered in linen savers, had a small but adequate autoclave on a shelf, and, in a gap, a refrigerator/freezer that bore a steel flap and a padlock.

The room was very well lit by banks of fluorescent tubes under diffusers in the ceiling; Bach was playing from another shelf, where a cheap tape recorder cum radio sat. Everything was as neat as a pin, Abe thought as his eyes roamed around; his tidy soul applauded the kind of person who could fit so much into so little. This room’s owner was one highly organized and obsessive person. It took one to know one.

“I wish I could say it’s great to see you, Abe,” Millie said, perching on the room’s only chair, a high stool with a padded seat that revolved.

Abe stood in a vacant space, elbows tucked in. “I know, Millie, and I echo that. Can’t they find you a bigger lab? This is more overcrowded than a Sing Sing cell.”

“Not an important enough fish,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll never win the Nobel Prize, but I will contribute some tiny scrap of knowledge about the functioning of the central nervous system, kind of like a missing piece of blue sky in a jigsaw of blue sky. It’s Jim’s work is ground-breaking, which is why he has a whole floor of the Burke to himself these days.”

“Well, I think you’re wonderful to cope with this.”

“And I think you’re wonderful to say that.” Her lovely face sobered. “What can I do you for, Abe?”

He produced a box and unearthed the ampoule. “Did you make this, Millie? No, it’s not dangerous. It held flea powder.”

She took the ampoule curiously, shaking her head even as she did so. “No, this isn’t my work. Too crappy, and I’d go farther by saying it wasn’t made by anyone who can heat glass well under lab conditions. I mean, we’re always heating and bending glass. Whoever made this sawed two standard test tubes in half, put his — flea powder? — oh, I like that! — in the bottom one, held it upright in a clamp, heated the top rim, heated the rim of the other one, and just fused them together while they were gloppy. There’s no way he aspirated the air to get a vacuum inside. I made mine from two different sizes of thin-walled glass tubing, and by the time I finished with
them, I had something that looked pretty professional,” said Millie.

“If he heated the top rim with the powder in the tube’s bottom, wouldn’t the powder be affected?”

“No. Glass is a very poor conductor of heat.”

“Any idea who made this one?”

“No idea at all, except it wasn’t a lab technician. I’d fire anyone who couldn’t do better than this a month into the job training.”

“Any idea why he picked flea powder?”

“I’d say it means he’s seen tetrodotoxin. The color and the consistency are closer than, say, talcum or icing sugar.”

“Thanks, Millie.” Abe took the ampoule from her, put it back in its box and slipped the box in his pocket. “What time do you go home, honey?”

“I’m closing down here right now, as a matter of fact, but then I’ll go up to Jim’s floor and see if he needs help.”

Abe walked back to his car through the cold dark evening, aware of a lump in his throat. Were Jim and Millie ever going to make a
home
? Or perhaps, he thought, fair man that he was, they already have all the home they want or need — a laboratory. But that’s poor comfort in old age.

An unhappy day for Delia, who, upon arriving home, ran a bath and stayed in it until she was as wrinkled as any prune. No scrap of make-up or mascara was left on her face, her wet hair was slicked against her skull, and she lay understanding
the bliss of being rocked in a cradle of amniotic fluid. One of those lucky creatures with positive buoyancy who couldn’t sink, toward the end of her immersion she dozed, and the sleep did its healing thing. When she awoke she was able to get out of her bath, wrap herself in an old checkered dressing gown and fluffy slippers, and actually think of food. The sight of Emily Tunbull had been buried in her cerebral sludge, to reappear only in death that came in the same guise — and in nightmares.

She unearthed four proper British bangers from her freezer and put them in her warming oven to thaw: no hurry. If there were (few) things about England she missed, a British banger was top of her list. For reasons that entirely escaped her, the Americans had no idea how to make a decent sausage; all they produced were those tough, horrible little things they ate for breakfast smothered in
syrup
! But Delia knew a butcher up the other side of Utica who made proper British bangers, and every six months, armed with a polystyrene laboratory chest and a sack of dry ice, she made a banger run to stock up her freezer.

Tonight she would have bangers and mash with mushy peas — but not until she’d had several sherries. She lit her imitation fire, found the excellent thriller she was halfway through, and moved with a glass, the sherry bottle and her book to the window. The most comforting buffer in the back of her mind was that Uncle John, Carmine and Mrs. Tesoriero were all lighting candles. She was definitely
safe
.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 1969

T
he cure had worked so well that Delia came into County Services in one of her best outfits, a wool dress in great swirls of dark red, bright red, orange and yellow, like a rainbow that ran out of steam just as it was contemplating going green.

“I think we should look at bathroom runs again,” she said before anyone else could get a spin on the ball.

There was a universal groan.

“No more hands on shoulders!” Donny cried.

“Tch, of course not! I mean in the dark corners on the way to the toilets, inside the toilets themselves,” Delia said.

“We’ve spent loads of time on that,” Buzz said.

“Well, I’m not convinced we’ve spent sufficient. Are we absolutely positive that no one met someone else going to or from? Not necessarily off the high table — the C.U.P. table people, for instance. How do we know we’ve eliminated every and all possibilities?”

“You’re right, Delia,” Carmine said. “We can’t know, and we
never will know. If by this time people haven’t come forward to tell us that they met X or Y on a bathroom run, then they never will. The C.U.P. banquet is a leaky sieve, and the Tunbull dinner an exact opposite. No one left Max’s study, even on the shortest bathroom run, after the men went in and Max shut the door. All the men swear it, and I believe them.”

“I’m seeing Max Tunbull this morning,” Abe said.

“What about the ampoule?” Carmine asked.

“Not Millie’s. She regarded it with contempt, said any lab technician could do better after a mere month on the job. However, she did say that the joker’s use of flea powder indicates he knows what tetrodotoxin powder looks like.”

“Captain, do we have a main suspect?” Donny asked.

“You’re as much a member of this team as anyone, Donny, so what do you think?” Carmine asked.

“Dr. Jim Hunter,” he said, hardly hesitating. “Tinkerman’s death got him out of a big hole.”

“What about John Hall’s death?”

“There has to be something there, boss. Is the old guy from Oregon coming — Wendover Hall?”

“He’s supposed to arrive this weekend, staying with Max. If he doesn’t fill in the blanks, we’re up that creek.” Carmine looked at Liam. “What do you think?”

“I vote for Davina and her spooky sister. That huge print run gives all the Tunbulls motive, Captain.”

“Buzz?”

“I vote for Dr. Jim Hunter.”

“Tony?”

“Dr. Jim Hunter.”

“Delia?”

“Dr. Jim Hunter.” Her voice was loaded with significance: she knew about the baby.

But Carmine didn’t ask Abe, a courtesy. “I see Dr. Jim’s a hot favorite,” he said, “and I don’t mind anyone’s having a favorite provided no mind skews the evidence. But none of you will do that, you’re too professional. Liam is just as right when he says all the Tunbulls have a stake in this. John’s death affected how Max’s empire might be divided. We have to find out more about him — he’s a shadow.”

And so the meeting broke up. Delia remained behind.

“It’s hard being privy to information we’re not sharing,” Carmine said to her, “but in spite of that, we continue to keep Davina’s baby our secret for the time being. I’m going to see the old Head Scholar, Dr. Donald Carter. Delia, follow whatever scent your nose thinks best.”

The outgoing Head Scholar of the Chubb University Press had held his post for a full ten years and had seen many triumphs, including, five years ago, a popular bestseller on earthquakes and volcanoes that had astonished every seismologist in the nation — save, naturally, its author, vindicated.

“I don’t know why people in the field were so surprised,” Dr. Carter said to Carmine over good coffee and blueberry muffins. “It’s my experience that ordinary folk are fascinated by how Mother Earth works, or how God sews our molecular
design together, or how the Universe got going. It’s my opinion that at least one expert in a field should write a book about it for the layman, even if the result is not a bestseller — it will sell well enough to make a profit, which is all one can ask. Jim Hunter’s book is sheer genius. I admit that I had no idea he could express himself so beautifully. But then, scientists are often like that. Look at Feynman’s lectures — what a wonder!”

“Before we get down to Jim’s book per se, Dr. Carter, I need to know a great deal more than I do about the relationship between the Chubb University Press and Tunbull Printing allied to Imaginexa Design,” Carmine said.

The prawnlike white eyebrows climbed toward a head of splendidly white, waving hair; Dr. Don Carter’s dark eyes took on the expression of internal calculation. A formidable man.

“Then I’d best start with C.U.P.,” he said. “There are university presses and university presses, Captain. I mean, consider the two giants — Oxford and Cambridge. Were it not for their example, maybe no university would have gone into an esoteric field like publishing, but originally the university publisher filled a gap by providing a print medium for authors who stood no chance of publishing for profit. I guess no one in the beginning ever thought how much money there was to be made out of dictionaries and histories, but every profitable book also meant a scholar who could be published at a loss.”

He nibbled a muffin. “C.U.P. was founded to publish the unprofitable scholars, and never developed into a giant — or even a potential giant. Its list is modest and esoteric save for that one accidental bestseller,
Fire Down Below
. And Max
Tunbull just happened to have the right kind of printery to suit our needs. We hadn’t published during the War, but by 1946 we had a couple of manuscripts that needed to be books — seminal stuff, one religious, one on syntax. Max tendered, was awarded the contract, and we were so pleased we’ve just never looked elsewhere.” Dr. Carter picked a blueberry out of its surrounding cake, and ate it with relish.

“Tunbull Printing is in such close proximity to Chubb, for one thing,” he went on, still fishing for fruit, “and in all fairly small operations, Captain, there is a tendency to form into a family unit. Which is what happened with Max.”

“What about Davina and Imaginexa?” Carmine asked, a part of his mind wondering why people needed to pick the eyes — or fruit — out of things. “Is it customary to hand over design of university textbooks to an outside firm?”

“Depends on the designer,” said Dr. Carter. “I was never happy with the way C.U.P. books
looked
. Without mentioning any names, our visual designer is so hidebound she’d have the books identical to those published in 1819. And I got tired of waiting for her to retire. Even small university presses have to move with the times, especially now that we’re contemplating things like soft cover editions. Davina is brilliant, make no mistake!”

“Thank you, that answers some of my questions,” Carmine said, pouring more coffee. “Was the original idea for Jim Hunter’s book his, Doctor?”

“I always assumed so,” Dr. Carter said mildly.

“I have some reason to query that.”

“Well, you are a captain of detectives, so I bow to your far superior experience.
Could
the idea have been implanted?” he asked himself musingly. “Given the pace at which Jim works, you may be right, yes. That gigantic head is stuffed with ideas, but all about his work. To think of explaining what he does to people who wouldn’t know RNA from the NRA wouldn’t occur to him — or at least that’s how I read him. Until he gave me the manuscript, which was definitely typed on their old IBM, no other machine. I was staggered.”

“Could Millie have suggested it?”

The seamed face, almost a caricature of the scholar, fell into shadow. “Ah, Millie! Poor, poor little girl … She is as much Jim Hunter’s slave as Uda is Davina’s.”

“How did that happen to Millie, Doctor?”

“Her passion, which is immense. She wrapped all of it in one single parcel, Jim Hunter, whom she adores. Jim has colossal charisma. Millie sweeps out the inner sanctum, goes into places in his life where no other human being is allowed to go. It is enough for her until the specter of childlessness rears its cobra head, as it will. Then she will demand that Jim give her children, and he’ll obey. But the impetus must come from her. This book is the turning point in their relationship.”