Despite what I’d said about making the most of the next sixteen hours, I wasn’t at all sure when I walked out Joe Deane’s front door where I was heading next. I concluded the best place to puzzle this out was my own desk at City Hall. I just had to stop first at a blind pig to top up my whisky flask. The new liquor stores were hunky-dory six days a week, but today wasn’t one of the six. I managed to purchase a couple of mickeys. Just as well, because when I arrived at the detective office Rudy Crate was on duty and not slow to remind me of how he’d smoothed things over for me with Fred Stillwater on Saturday night.
“Deputy Inspector Crate.” I passed him my flask. “Deputy Banana Oil. Still, you carried it off.”
“I’d rather pour from a vessel that hasn’t had your mouth all over its aperture. From, for example, one of the bottles that are responsible for the bulges in your jacket pockets.”
I tipped a couple of precious ounces from one of my mickeys into the big Englishman’s coffee cup.
“Tell me,” I said, “why is it that you’re always the one the inspector leaves here in the evening and on weekends? Is it just that your posh way of speaking sounds so good on the phone? If so, I’m glad I’m an uncultivated colonial.”
Rudy was spared answering by the appearance at the door of a man in a pink suit. With a flourish, he removed a pale felt hat with a high crown and a rolled brim, then slowly peeled off a pair of kid gloves. His hands were stiff and heavily veined, his forehead high, and his yellowish hair thin — albeit freshly barbered in the latest style.
“Are these the offices of the Toronto Star?” he asked. “I sure hope so. I understand I’m to confess to the murder of Nora Koch, and I want to get top dollar for exclusive rights.”
Rudy was quick to push an extra chair up to my desk. “Have a seat here, sir. Mr. Shenstone will be glad to take your statement.”
“Would that be Scoop Shenstone, the crime reporter?” The elderly fashion plate seated himself and crossed his legs comfortably. “My first-born says you’ve been looking for me.”
“If you’re Jordan Stillwater,” I said, not doubting that he was. “But I’m a detective sergeant and this is police headquarters, not a newspaper office. Do you still want to confess to murder?”
“Oh yes. It was done by poison. I should tell you that as an ex-pharmacist I know my poisons. A little ergot introduced into her red wine, leading to vasoconstriction, gangrene, hallucinations, convulsions, and ultimately death.”
“That’s not how Nora Britton died, Mr. Stillwater, and you know it. Your son says you like your little joke. Now that you’ve had it, are you prepared to talk sense?”
“Ah, where’s the fun of that?” Rudy chuckled. “I liked it better when we were running a newspaper. I could be sports editor and get paid to go to the races. Or the golf course.” He took a practice swing with an imaginary club, then — catching my eye — seated himself quietly on a neighbouring desk.
“Nasty stuff, red wine,” said Jordan Stillwater. “Brandy is what I liked to stock during Prohibition, a drink with class, and with enough of a medical reputation that doctors would prescribe it.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “you sold it without a doctor’s prescription.”
“What of it? I paid the fines and still made a profit.”
Straight talk at last.
“Alcohol apart, what poisons did your pharmacy stock?”
“Arsenic, hyoscine, strychnine, potassium cyanide. And ergot. It’s used to treat migraines and stop bleeding.”
“Any poisons derived from fish?”
“Fish?” Stillwater smiled broadly, showing a suspiciously perfect set of teeth. “That’s a new one on me. I’ve never heard of fish poison.”
“Did you want to rid Christ Church of Nora Britton?”
“Not after I met her. I got to thinking if I married again she might be my third wife. She was a darling little thing.”
“At church you were heard to call her something different.”
“My opinion changed. Things change all the time. I was born in Canada West — find that on a map now if you can.”
“How could you have married her? She had a husband.”
“A Hun. That might have been got over.”
“How?”
“By running away with her. I may do it yet. Truthfully, I doubt she’s dead. Has anyone in your department seen her body?” Jordan turned to Rudy. “You, sir — have you seen it?”
I could see a quip quivering on Rudy’s lips, but he contented himself with a subdued smile and a shake of his head.
“Early next week,” I said, “I expect to obtain a photostat of the certificate of cremation. In the meantime, why don’t you tell me where you were last Monday?”
“Kansas.”
This answer didn’t surprise me any more than if he’d said he’d been camping on the dark side of the moon. “Really? The state of Kansas?”
“Yep.”
“What were you doing there, Mr. Stillwater?”
“Whatever you may think, not looking for the way to Oz. I was receiving medical treatment at the clinic of Dr. Brinkley.”
I looked at Rudy to see if the name meant anything to him. Apparently it did.
“John R. Brinkley, the goat gland doctor?”
“The same. When I heard he had a procedure to restore vigour to older men, I made an appointment. I have the clinic’s receipt if you’d like to see it.”
I inspected the receipt, which was for five nights room and board — October 6 to 10, 1927 — and for medical treatment described as the surgical implantation of goat testicles into the scrotum of Mr. Jordan Frederick Stillwater of Toronto. I had heard people talk amusedly of this treatment as our era’s version of the fountain of youth. I certainly never expected to encounter anyone who’d had the operation. I passed the document to Rudy, expecting him to expose it as a prank. He didn’t, though.
“Okay, Mr. Stillwater,” I said. “I’ll keep this until I’ve made further inquiries. Kindly don’t leave town in the meantime.”
Stillwater said he had no other trips planned. He pulled on his gloves.
“Tell me,” said Rudy, “does it work?”
“There must be something to it,” Stillwater answered with another large display of his store-bought teeth. “It’s the latest thing! Anyway, I’ll be trying my luck at a tea dance tomorrow afternoon. I’ll let you know.”
“No rush,” Rudy chuckled. “I’m not in need just yet.”
When Stillwater had gone, Rudy picked up a crossword puzzle he’d been working on.
“By the way, Paul, what’s Canada West when it’s at home?”
“A pre-1867 name for Ontario. He was just telling us he’s over sixty, but we knew that already — over by nearly twenty years, I’d guess.”
I sat quietly at my desk for the next ten minutes and did some thinking. Eric Hutchinson, rector of Christ Church Grange Park, had been right and wrong. His suspicion that Nora Britton’s death was not accidental appeared well-founded. The painter had eaten some poison derived from fish. On the other hand, his two chief suspects — Archie and Jordan Stillwater — both had alibis. Alibis that could be checked.
For my money, the likeliest murderer was Herman Koch. He was the person that had made an autopsy on Nora impossible — and was the chief beneficiary of her will. He had reason to be jealous of his wife’s professional success. She had taken the commission that should have been his, and at a time when he was short of funds. She had, on Mrs. Hutchinson’s testimony, taken a lover as well. For all his bohemian philosophy of sexual freedom, and his own adulterous affairs notwithstanding, he was not used to being cuckolded. He might have found that sauce for the gander was not necessarily sauce for the goose.
Koch was a gifted painter. Even a boor like me could see that. To hang him would deprive our world of many fine pictures, perhaps masterpieces. Artistic sensitivity, however, was no guarantee of innocence. Awareness of one’s exceptional talent might even confer a sense of entitlement to break rules made for the ungifted masses.
Turning from the topic of motive to that of opportunity, I realized I’d made no progress in determining who would have been in a position to obtain the poison and introduce it into Nora Britton’s last meal. Myrtle Hutchinson was the only person I’d talked to so far that admitted to having given Nora anything to eat or drink Monday, but what Myrtle said she’d contributed to Nora’s meal — the hermit cookies — had not contained the poison. Somehow Nora had come by another dessert. Who besides Myrtle could have provided that dessert?
I went down the hall for some water to mix with my next shot of rye. Rudy was talking on the phone when I got back.
“Hey, skipper,” he greeted me. “Professor Linacre’s called to talk to you about — guess what — fish poison.”
I lunged at my phone. “Shenstone here.”
“I talked to a fish man named Keller. He named two toxins, practically indistinguishable. They are …” In the brief pause, I could hear paper rustling; then Linacre’s flat, calm voice came back on the line. “Yes, saxitoxin, which under certain conditions accumulates in shellfish, and tetrodotoxin, which accumulates in certain organs of the pufferfish.”
I got the professor to spell the two toxins.
“None of my criminological sources mention these poisons,” he said, “which leads me to believe they have never been identified in a murder case. Are we dealing with murder, Shenstone?”
“Yes, sir. The deceased never ate fish voluntarily, and so wouldn’t have had it for lunch.”
“Keller believes these are the strongest poisons known to science. If she’d ingested even a few milligrams of either of these substances at noon, she wouldn’t have survived till mid-afternoon, let alone evening. If she ingested any during the evening, she’d have been dead before she toppled to the floor. I’m giving Keller the vomit samples to analyze, but that’ll take a few days and he’s not promising definitive results. In the meantime, I’d guess you’re dealing with the puffer. Tetrodotoxin is reliably found to be present in the liver and ovaries, whereas with saxitoxin it’s hit and miss, depending mainly on whether the shellfish in question has been exposed to something called red tide.”
“What’s that?”
“Certain reddish algae that appear in the ocean in high concentrations from time to time. Ask a marine biologist if you need more. But my bet is the pufferfish — also called fugu — always poisonous irrespective of time and tide, and yet safely edible if properly prepared; therefore, commercially available.”
“Where, Professor Linacre?”
“Keller says they’re chiefly eaten in the Orient — China, Korea, Japan. Whether they can be bought in Toronto, I leave to you coppers to discover. I’d search first the fish shops in Asian neighbourhoods.”
“Before I let you go, sir, you told me you’d found crumbs of chocolate cookies in the deceased’s knapsack. Could they have been brownie crumbs instead?”
“All I could identify in the crumbs was chocolate. It could have been brownies she was eating. When I said cookies, I suppose I was speaking loosely.”
“That would be a first.”
“One more thing, Shenstone. It should be possible to extract the tetrodotoxin from the puffer without bringing the fishy odour with it. Your murderer wasn’t a scientist, it seems. He must just have hacked out of the beast one or two organs and chopped them up. Good thing too or we’d never have known the lady was the victim of foul play.”
I said I appreciated Linacre’s call — which was putting it mildly. The university should have named a building after him.
Talking to the professor had left me restless and frustrated. I couldn’t start checking fish stores till tomorrow. In the meantime, I gritted my teeth and got down to the drudgery of typing up my notes on the case so far. I was expecting that in the morning Sanderson would open a formal investigation and assign additional detectives to carry it out, so I made a couple of carbon copies to help brief my colleagues. That done, the copies all sorted and stapled, I couldn’t think what to do with myself. I called the Daily Dispatch on the off chance that Ruth Stone might be sitting at her Remington as well, writing up a story for Monday’s edition. She was.
“Hey, Paul.” Her voice sounded playful, but she got straight to business. “You have a crime scoop?”
I didn’t really. I couldn’t announce a murder investigation until I’d spoken to the inspector, and it wouldn’t have been prudent to tell the public, including the murderer, about my interest in tetrodotoxin.
“I have some free time,” I said. “I thought if I could tear you away from your labours, we could go to an art gallery.”
“You know any that open Sunday night?”
“How about dinner?”
“I brought something from home. I have to file this advice-to-the-lovelorn column tonight.”
I imagined her pushing her wild red hair back from her face as she talked.
“Work, Paul. You know what that is?” Once again, she didn’t leave me time to respond. “Call me any time you’ve got something for me.”
“I’ll come by the newsroom right away and we can flirt a little.”
“I’ll punch you in the eye.”
“One fight taught you to box?”
“Night, handsome.” With that endearment — pleasing, I grant you — she hung up on me.
I sat thinking how I’d parry her freckled little fists, then get inside them and grab her by the waist. Lovelorn would have been too big a word, but I did have a question for Ruth’s newspaper column: what if the only girl that could save you from obsessing over a stiff is too busy to see you?
I was just starting to think of taking the Queen car back to my bedsit, opening a can of stew for my supper, and looking on my bookshelf for something soporific to read when Ruth called back.
“Did you ever catch up with Jack Wellington?” she wanted to know.
“I saw him last night in an open car, but not to talk to. I can use his plate number to find his address when the Ontario government offices open tomorrow.”
“Don’t bother. He lives on Lonsdale Road.” She gave me the number.
“How’d you find that out?”
“I’d like to pretend it was brilliant sleuthing. The fact is he’s just around the corner from where my parents and I live on Dunvegan. Daddy’s talked to neighbours that complain about his noisy parties. Don’t thank me; just tell me something sometime.”
“You’re the —”
“Something I don’t know.”
“You might have a better chance as a crime reporter if you wrote under a man’s name, something like — I dunno — Frank.”
“Funny! There’s a Frank here that writes as Flossie for the women’s pages. I’ve already done all I can to fit in: you’ll never see an article by me under any name but Ruth Stone.”
As soon as she rang off, I gathered my coat and headed for the northbound Bay streetcar, which turned west at Bloor and then north on Avenue Road and west again on St. Clair. The intersection of Lonsdale and Dunvegan was just two blocks north of where I got off. If Jack was at home, I was counting on my badge to get me in the door.
The house was red brick with the front door in the middle of its ground floor and two windows to each side. Five windows on the second floor lined up with door and windows downstairs. There didn’t appear to be a third floor: no windows poked through the sloping roof. And no pillars bracketed the door. So, a palace by my standards, but modest for the neighbourhood. Jack likely hoped to do better as a result of more fights won — or profitably lost.
The man that opened the door had the shape of a gorilla and a less friendly expression. He looked more like one of the toughs that had escorted Jack from the Coliseum last Thursday night than like a butler. I didn’t believe him when he said Mr. Wellington wasn’t at home. What was the point of a bodyguard where the body wasn’t? I was even more skeptical when I spotted over his wide shoulder two people descending the curving staircase that took up the back half of the front hall. A grey-haired man wearing an overcoat and carrying a black medical bag was coming down two steps ahead of a woman kitted out in white: dress, cap, and shoes.
The doctor may have been hard of hearing and not have realized how loud his voice was. He pretty certainly didn’t notice the proximity of an eavesdropping outsider.
“The ribs will mend,” he told the nurse without turning around. “The nose too, although he’ll never look the same. His pride’s hurt most of all, so try not to refer to the fight.”
I was exerting myself to prevent the bodyguard from closing the door on me and missed half the nurse’s soft rejoinder. I did think it included the name Dr. Telford.
“Tell the girl that replaces you tomorrow morning, won’t you? I’ll look in, but likely not till midday.”
The doctor pulled up before the door, noticing for the first time the struggle taking place there.
“You, stand back so this gentleman can get out,” said the bodyguard.
I ignored his request.
“I’m a police officer, Dr. Telford. I need a word with you. It’ll be more convenient indoors where it’s warm.”
“Let him in please, Begg,” said the doctor.
Begg stopped pushing on the door. “I’ll have to tell the boss.”
“Yes,” the doctor assented. “You do that.”
Begg went to a phone table in a corner of the front hall and kept an eye on us while he dialed. It was no surprise that by boss he meant Pork Chops, not Jack.
“Detective Sergeant Paul Shenstone, Dr. Telford. Will Mr. Wellington or the other party be wanting to lay charges?”
“I shouldn’t think so. If you’re with the Toronto department, the matter’s outside your jurisdiction anyway.”
“Could it be the fight occurred at Mr. Lariviere’s club across the river?”
“I have to be going, detective. I suggest you address any further questions to Begg.”
“Just one more thing, Dr. Telford — is there any medical reason why I can’t talk to Mr. Wellington himself?”
The doctor ran his hand over the pale stubble that had grown in on his long face since his morning shave. He was tired of me — and, I suspected, of this case. “He was in bed but awake when I left him. Miss Julien will show you up.”
“Just a moment,” Begg called, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with a broad hand. “Mr. Lariviere would like a word with the policeman.”
“Gladly,” I said, as Dr. Telford slipped out the door. “Would you mind waiting a moment, Miss Julien?”
I’d never seen or spoken to Pork Chops, although I knew the stories everyone knew — how he’d taken over his father’s butcher shop, selling cuts of meat in the front while running games of chance in a back room. As his fortunes grew, his stock in trade changed from dead pigs to live horses. Many of the nags he bought won races in smaller tracks across the country and in the States. Competing stables sometimes suffered ruinous fires, not that anything was ever pinned on Pork Chops. To date he’d won nothing as prestigious as the Kentucky Derby or the Queen’s Plate, but no one thought he’d stop until he had. Boxing was a relatively new interest, and — again — there were suspicions he used shady means to make his bets pay off. Buying a ref, for instance. As I’d told Ruth, however, paying a good fighter to lose to a palooka wasn’t something my little corner of the boxing world had seen before. If that’s what the man I was about to speak to had done, I’d happily have seen him under a doctor’s care.
I picked up the phone and identified myself. “Am I speaking to Mr. Lariviere?”
“Indeed, my friend. But what business has a hard-working city policeman like yourself up at Jack Wellington’s?” A smooth voice with a hint of a chuckle behind it.
While Lariviere was speaking, I thought of the last photo of him I’d seen in the papers. Despite his porcine name, he had looked trim and fit in his Savile Row suit. He’d phrased his question to imply I might be out of my social depth.
“I’ve followed Jack enough to know he’d be hard to beat in a clean fight,” I said. “I was just wondering who put him in bed with multiple fractures.”
“Wondering as a boxing fan then, not as an officer of the law. What if I told you that the truth was quite uninteresting, that Mr. Wellington tripped on uneven pavement?”
“That’s not what he told Dr. Telford.”
“Well, whatever happened, my friend, will not require any action on your part.” Lariviere’s amused tone of voice was by now only a memory. “Begg has instructions to show you out when we’re finished talking.”
“Then I suggest you give Begg new instructions. I’m not in your East York club, Mr. Lariviere. This part of Forest Hill is within my jurisdiction.”
“You can’t just barge into a private dwelling.”
“I was invited into Jack’s house, and I’m not leaving until I’ve seen him. If Begg tries to prevent me, he’ll be in the kind of trouble with the law you won’t want. Where was he, by the way, when Jack got busted up? Some job you did of protecting your investment.” I heard nothing from Lariviere’s end of the line. “Begg,” I said. “He wants another word with you.”
“Stay right here,” Begg growled at me as he took the receiver.
He could have saved his breath.
“Shall we go, Miss Julien?” I said, starting up the stairs. “Left or right at the top?”
I turned and let the nurse pass me. She had a round face bordered under her cap by severely pinned dark hair. A rough complexion and an unsmiling, thin-lipped mouth made her look a bit hard-boiled, but she answered me readily enough, with a charming French accent.
“Around this way, sir. Follow me.”
Wellington was lying on his back in bed in the room over the front door. One low-wattage lamp was burning in a far corner, and the illuminated dial of a radio shone from a bedside table.
“You have a visitor, Mr. Wellington,” said the nurse. “Would you like to sit up?”
“Uh-uh.”
The voice softly drifting from the radio speaker was that of Charles Hart singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Not the song to snap Jack out of his self-pity. When I approached the bed, I could hear his breath coming and going in short gasps.
“Who is it?” he asked, turning his face with its cracked centrepiece my way.
“Paul Shenstone,” I said. “A police detective and an admirer — at least until recently.”
“Marie, get Begg to throw this bum out.”
“He won’t, though,” I said. “Instructions from Lariviere.”
“Nurse!”
Marie Julien looked at me. I shook my head.
“The quickest way to get rid of me, Jack, is to tell me who broke your nose.”
“He’ll get his, don’t worry.”
“One man did all this?”
“It wasn’t a clean fight.”
“You should have been right at home then.”
Jack Wellington sat up at that, dropping his long legs over the side of the bed. Then, wincing, he got to his feet so he could look down into my face.
“If Begg won’t send you packing, I will.” His fist came flying at my jaw with all the speed Wellington was famous for. I hadn’t a hope of parrying. Still, it was just a warning punch, not hard.
“That’s the spirit, Jack,” I said, stepping back. “You’re not badly enough hurt to be lying around in bed with round-the-clock care.”
I fancied I was ready for his next punch, but he redirected it at the last instant from my face to my gut, and it hurt plenty. I come off well enough in barroom brawls, but I’m not fast enough to contend with pros like Jack. As I doubled over, I thought of head-butting him in his damaged rib cage, but didn’t have the heart. Couldn’t even bring myself to threaten charges of assault. I no longer wanted to punish him for throwing the Lucan fight: someone had beaten me to it and done a more than adequate job. What a contrast tonight’s sorry casualty made with the sheik I’d seen cruising Bay Street behind the wheel of his Big Six just twenty-four hours before!
“I’m leaving, Jack,” I said, retreating further. “Just one thing …”
Apparently winded, Jack didn’t follow me. “Yeah,” he gasped.
“Your fists are the fastest I’ve seen. What did this dirty fighter throw at you, a crowbar?”
Still gasping, Jack might not have answered at all, but then he decided to confide. He still couldn’t get out a sentence of any length.
“Boots! Boots with metal plates in the heel. He kicked me in the face. In the chest.”
“Try to take deeper breaths, Mr. Wellington,” said Marie. “Remember what Dr. Telford said about your needing to clear mucous from your lungs.”
“Ah, dry up! Stupid hag. You’d think Lariviere —”
“What about him?” I said.
“Could have sent — a pretty nurse.”
“She’s a better nurse than you deserve, Jack. Treat her right.”
Marie Julien flashed me a tight-lipped grin she made sure Jack didn’t see.