Poisons Unknown Read online

  Gabby nodded. “Okay, then I won’t come along. When am I going to see you?”

  “Dinner tonight?”

  The blonde shook her head. “We’re setting up an evidence raid at a motel tonight. That’s why I have to get back to the office. The wife’s lawyers and the photog will be there to set the last-minute details.”

  Liddell grinned. “We better make it tomorrow night. One date with a guy in a motel should be enough for one night.”

  Gabby wrinkled her nose, stuck out her tongue. “You might say that’s only an undress rehearsal.” She pulled a mirror from the depths of her bag, inspected her appearance with apparent approval. “I’ll be back at my place after midnight. Drop by for a drink, will you?”

  Liddell nodded. “If I can.”

  “I’d better get on back.” She got up and brushed her lips across his mouth. “Take care of yourself, baby.”

  • • •

  The city room of the New Orleans Dispatch was almost deserted at 12:30. He picked his way through the organized confusion of the desks, got a passing glance from the handful of shirt-sleeved men who sat pecking away at typewriters of various ages and vintages.

  He headed for a frosted-glass door that was labeled Managing Editor. Inside a man stood at the window, staring down into the street below. He turned as Liddell closed the door after him.

  The man at the window was short, thick at the waist, narrow in the shoulder. His hair had once been red but had now receded until it was little more than rusty tufts over each ear. He studied Liddell from shrewd, humorous little eyes. He grinned broadly, dimples cutting white trenches into the tan of his face.

  “Well, fry my hide.” There was a soft Southern slur to his i’s. “I thought sure Gabby was pulling my leg.” He stuck out his hand and returned Liddell’s handshake with a firm grip. “How long you been back in our fair city, Johnny?”

  “Don’t you read your own sheet?”

  Dunlop made a humorous face. “There’s a limit to what a man will do for a buck, Johnny. Matter of fact, I’ve been out of town the past couple of days. Flew over to Baton Rouge on a legislative story, just got back.” He walked behind his desk, flipped open the copy of the Dispatch on his desk, stopped at the story about the hotel shooting. His eyes jumped from line to line. He chuckled deep in his chest, then looked up. “Looks like business is going to pick up. Liddell in town hardly a day and the shootin’ starts.” He sat down behind the desk and motioned for Liddell to pull up a chair. “Gabby didn’t make no sense on the phone, but she sounded awful interestin’. What’s goin’ on?”

  Liddell pulled a chair up to the desk and watched with interest while the newspaperman pulled a half-empty fifth of bourbon from his bottom drawer and set it on the desk. “You got the flash that Brother Alfred’s been killed?”

  Dunlop transferred his gaze from the bottle to Liddell, nodded. “In a wreck of some kind. I picked it up on the Teletype as I came in. Too bad. Alive he was juicy copy; missing he was even jucier. Dead?” He shrugged. “You’re younger than me, Johnny. Get a couple of those paper cups by the cooler, will you?”

  Liddell grunted his way to his feet and crossed the room to where a water cooler stood humming to itself. He pulled three cups from the dispenser, filled one with water, set them down on the desk. “Suppose he was murdered?”

  “Very good copy indeed.” He unscrewed the cap from the bourbon, poured a stiff peg into each of the empty glasses, added a touch of water from the third. “You interest me.”

  “I intended to. Suppose the sheriff and some of his more influential friends were determined that it be written off as an accident?”

  “And you could prove different?”

  “I could prove different.”

  The white trenches dug deep crescents into Larry Dunlop’s cheeks. “Then we’d have to contradict the sheriff and his influential friends, wouldn’t we?” He picked up one of the paper cups, held it up. “Here’s to contradiction!”

  Liddell picked up his cup, tasted the bourbon, and set the cup back on the desk. “Who’ve you got on the story?”

  “As of now? Me.” Dunlop drained his cup. “That is, of course, if you can prove to me that it was murder and not accident.” He spilled some more bourbon into his cup. “You know this Brother Alfred for all his glory-shouting wasn’t exactly a sedentary character. Although I’ve never heard of him doing any boozing.”

  “How about dope?”

  Dunlop shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me none. He was a weird-looking character—”

  “I know. I’ve seen him.”

  Dunlop stared at the private detective. “I thought you just got into town, that you were hired to find him?”

  Liddell nodded. “I had a call in the middle of the night. From this Wanda babe who stands in for Alfred. She set up a date for me to meet him.”

  “Where?”

  “In the middle of City Park.”

  Dunlop’s eyes reflected his interest. “Did he show?”

  “He showed, all right. We were all set to have a nice Kaffeeklatsch when the house fell in. I was sapped.” Liddell rubbed the back of his head ruefully. “By the time I snapped out of it, there was no sign of him.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About four or four-thirty.”

  Dunlop considered it, grunted. “He showed no signs of being snooted?”

  Liddell shook his head. “From the looks of his eyes, he might have had a skinful of C.”

  Dunlop leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “Go on.”

  Liddell dug into his pocket and pulled out the remains of the horn-rimmed spectacles, dropped them on Dunlop’s desk. “I found these scuffed into the mud near where I was sapped. Looks like he put up one helluva fight.”

  The newspaperman picked up a piece of the lens, rotated it back and forth. “I begin to get the idea. He couldn’t have been doing much driving without these.” He scowled at the shattered lens, scratched at his bald pate. “Who do you figure’s behind this, Johnny?”

  “Marty Kirk. He brought me down from New York to find this Brother Alfred. Swore that he wasn’t using me to bird-dog. I figure he had me followed when I went out to keep the date with Alfred, sapped me, and set Alfred up for the phony accident.”

  Dunlop sipped at his paper cup, considered it. “It’s an awful sucker play if it backfires. Kirk had more to gain by Alfred being knocked off than anybody else at first glance.”

  “He didn’t expect it to backfire.”

  “It hasn’t yet, you know.” The newspaperman drained his cup, crumpled it, tossed it at the wastebasket. “That business about the glasses is interesting. But it’s not conclusive. Maybe Alfred saw you getting sapped, got scared, ran for his car. Glasses or no glasses he knew he had to get away, so he took off. Because he had no glasses, he didn’t see a turn, piled into a tree.”

  “Makes a good story,” Liddell conceded.

  Dunlop shrugged. “Just as good a story as accusing somebody of murdering him. And not half as libelous.” He rubbed the heel of his hand along his chin and shook his head reluctantly. “You make a good case for a reasonable doubt, but it’ll take more than that. A lot more.”

  “Look, Larry. You’re already in town. Take a ride out to the morgue with me. I still have one card up my sleeve. If that doesn’t work,” he shrugged, “then I’m licked. If it does, you’ve got a story.”

  Dunlop nodded. “Okay, I’m in for the ride over. You prove to me that Alfred was murdered, and I’m in all the way. Fair enough?”

  Liddell drank on it.

  8

  THE MORGUE AT SAN VINCENTE was in the basement of the parish hospital. A long corridor ran from the emergency entrance ramp to a double door stenciled Medical Examiner.

  Liddell and Dunlop pushed through the doors and entered the brightly lighted office painted a sterile white. A thin man wearing a starched white jacket sat behind a metal desk making entries in a ledger. The bright light reflected off
his shiny pate and face.

  He looked up as the two men came in, and seemed glad of an excuse to put the pen down. He fished a rumpled handkerchief from his hip pocket and polished his bald head with a circular swabbing motion.

  “Looking for someone?” His voice sounded rusty, as if it didn’t get much use.

  “Accident case this morning. Guy burned up in a car.” Dunlop flipped a press card in front of the attendant. “Got him in here?”

  The attendant swabbed his face with the handkerchief, nodded.

  “Got a make on him?” Dunlop asked.

  The man behind the desk pulled open a small file index, nodded. “His name’s Brother Alfred. Ran some kind of a temple around here some place.”

  “Who identified the body?” Liddell wanted to know.

  The attendant looked from Dunlop to Liddell and back again questioningly. Dunlop nodded. “He’s with me.”

  The attendant shrugged, referred to the index card. “Some dame. Gave her name as Wanda. No surname. Seems those people only have front names.” He dropped the card back, shut the file. “Want to see him?”

  Liddell nodded.

  “Ain’t much of him left to see.” The attendant grunted. He pulled himself to his feet and limped around the desk. “Come with me.”

  He led the way to a heavy door set in the far wall and tugged it open. Beyond was a high-ceilinged, stone-floored, unheated room with double tiers of metal lockers. Each locker had its own stenciled number.

  Liddell wrinkled his nose as the blast of hot, carbolic-laden air enveloped them. There was no word spoken as they followed the thin man across the floor to the rear of the windowless room.

  He yanked on one of the metal drawers; it pulled out with a screech. A piece of canvas that bulged suggestively covered its contents. The attendant reached up and pulled on a high-powered light in an enamel reflector. He grabbed a corner of the canvas, pulled it back, exposing the blackened charred remains of what had once been a man.

  Its legs were blackened stumps, most of the face had been burned away. No one had bothered to close the eyes if there were any lids left, and the whites showed as he stared up into the night. The hands were twisted claws at the end of badly seared arms.

  “Not very pretty, is he?” the attendant commented. The phone in the inside office started pealing. The attendant swore under his breath. “Damn thing always rings when you’re nowhere near it.” He nodded at the body. “Got enough?”

  “You go ahead and answer your phone. We’ll wait.”

  The attendant seemed undecided, shrugged. “Guess you can’t walk off with him.” He grinned, showing the stumps of yellowed teeth. “Be right back.”

  His bad leg clip-clopped across the floor as he hurried to answer the phone.

  Dunlop shook his head sadly. “If it was a kill, they sure did a good job of it, Johnny. There’s not enough left of him to prove a thing.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Johnny Liddell pulled a small vial of powder from his pocket. “On the way to your office, I stopped by the hotel to pick this up. Rhodokrit. Know how it works?”

  Dunlop took the vial, examined it, handed it back. “Never even heard of it.”

  “We use it quite a lot in arson investigation,” Liddell explained. “You dump it on a surface that’s suspected of having been doused down with kerosene or gasoline or any other fat-dissolving inflammable compound. It turns red if they’re present.”

  Dunlop nodded. “In other words, if this character was torched, when you put that powder on him, it should turn red?”

  Liddell nodded. He unscrewed the cap of the vial, poured some of the powder into his hand. Then he leaned over the thing on the table and spilled some onto its face. The powder turned red. He repeated the process on the hands and legs, got a positive reaction.

  Dunlop took a deep breath through his mouth, let it out slowly from his nostrils. “Well, what do you know?” He took the vial of Rhodokrit from Liddell, poured some into his own hand, dusted it on the body. The powder turned red wherever it fell.

  “Well?” Liddell wanted to know.

  “You just got yourself a boy.” They waited until the attendant had limped across the floor. They slipped him a folded bill. “Thanks, pal. Where’s there a phone?”

  The attendant pulled the canvas sheet over the body and slammed the door back into place with a clang that reverberated throughout the entire room. “Out in the corridor. The far end.” He smoothed out the bill, folded it into quarters, stuck it into his watch pocket. “Anything else I can do for you gents? We got us a pretty one in last night. Young, too. Took a hot shot or overdose, looks like. Want to see her? Real pretty.” He leered.

  Liddell shook his head. “Not today. We’ve had our quota.” He fell into step beside Dunlop, and they walked back to the corridor. “Narcotics big here?”

  “Getting bigger all the time,” the newspaperman grunted. “Why?”

  Liddell shrugged. “A young kid on a slab from an overdose. A tea party I sat in on last night. This Alfred character with a skinful when I met him. It adds up to a hot town for the shovers.”

  Dunlop nodded, led the way to the telephone booths. He dropped a coin, dialed the number of the Dispatch.

  “This is Dunlop. Get me Eddie Connolly.” He held his hand over the mouthpiece. “All hell is going to pop when this story breaks.” He grinned. He turned his attention back to the mouthpiece. “Connolly? I’ve got a pip. Brother Alfred was murdered.”

  The receiver started to sputter metallically.

  “I know all about that. I’m out at the morgue now. He was murdered. Now, don’t tip our hand on this one, but start digging. How do I know it was murder?” He winked at Liddell. “We gave the body the Rhodokrit test.”

  The receiver chattered back at him.

  “What the hell kind of a reporter are you? What do you mean what is Rhodokrit?” he barked into the receiver. “Rhodokrit is always used in suspected arson. Brother Alfred was doused down with kerosene or gasoline, set afire, and his car wrecked.”

  The man on the other end sounded jubilant.

  “Of course it’s a good story. It’s a pip. Now you get started on it and see what you can do with it.” He tossed the receiver back on its hook, stepped out of the phone booth. “By this time tomorrow, there won’t be a soul in Louisiana who doesn’t know Brother Alfred was murdered!” He caught Liddell by the arm, headed for the exit to the street.

  Two big men in civilian clothes lounged outside the emergency entrance to the hospital. They looked up as Liddell and the newspaperman emerged. They couldn’t have been more recognizable if they’d worn sandwich boards labeling them Cop. The taller of the two, a big man in a rumpled blue suit and a gray fedora, stopped picking his teeth long enough to ask, “You the guys just been down to see the D.O.A.?”

  Liddell nodded. “Yeah. Why?”

  The man in the blue suit went back to picking his teeth. “Sheriff wants to see you.” He nodded his head at the building across the way.

  “Some other time,” Dunlop told him. “I’ve got a paper to get out.” He started to shoulder past. A hamlike hand caught his arm and spun him around.

  “The sheriff says he wants to see you now.” The big man screwed his face into what passed for a smile. “He’s not particular what condition you come in.”

  Liddell started to interfere, but the newspaperman shook his head. “Let’s go over and see the sheriff, Johnny. If you’re going to work around here, you’ll have to meet him sooner or later.” He picked the plain-clothes man’s hand off his arm. “I know the way.”

  “We’ll trail along just to make sure you don’t get lost.” The man in the blue suit nodded.

  They crossed the street and entered a low white stone building. The sheriff’s office was at the end of the first corridor. The two plain-clothes men followed them to the door and took up a position in the hall.

  Sheriff Lalonde sat behind an oversized, varnished desk, eyeing the two men with no signs of enthusiasm
. He reached out for a pack of cigarettes on the end of his desk and dumped one out.

  “Hear you were over taking a look at the body.” He directed his attention to Dunlop. “What’s on your mind?”

  “News. That’s my business. Alfred’s death is news.”

  The sheriff moved his eyes over to Liddell. “What’s your business?”

  “I’m a private detective.” Liddell dumped his credentials on the sheriff’s desk.

  Lalonde dropped his eyes to the papers, riffled through them, snorted. “What were you doing over there?”

  “Just looking.” Liddell picked up his papers, rearranged them, and shoved them back into his breast pocket. “I was hired to find Brother Alfred. I was just looking out for a client’s interests.”

  “You were hired to find him.” He scratched a paper match along the abrasive strip on the box, held it to his cigarette. “You found him. How soon will you be leaving?”

  Liddell shrugged. “As soon as I know who killed Alfred.”

  Sheriff Lalonde’s eyes flicked from one man to the other. “He killed himself. He got a skinful of liquor, drove his car into a tree.” His voice dropped dangerously. “Maybe I didn’t make myself very clear, Liddell. We don’t like peepers around here. We don’t like anybody that stirs up trouble.” His eyes rolled back to the newspaperman. “This Brother Alfred pulled a fake disappearance for reasons of his own, went on a binge. He got a snootful and hit a tree. That’s the way it stands on the record.”

  Dunlop stuck his chin out. “That’s your story.”

  “That’s the official story.” The sheriff put his hands flat on the desk and lifted himself out of his chair. “That’s the story the papers will print. Yours included.”

  “Not the Dispatch. The Dispatch will print that he was murdered.”

  The sheriff’s face turned a deep red, then darkened to purple. A little vein in the center of his forehead started to throb, and the corners of his mouth twitched. “You might have to prove that crack, Dunlop.”