The Prodigal Son. Colleen McCullough

attack. Ambulance!” And he rushed to the phone, gabbled into it that Dr. Al Markoff needed a resuscitation ambulance immediately—uh, yeah, address …

      By this time Muse had returned, Uda carrying a seemingly heavy black leather doctor’s bag. Max snatched it.

      “Stay here, all of you,” he said.

      The minutes ticked by, marked out on a gigantic, fanciful clock sculpted into a wall; the women sat frozen, mute.

      An ambulance came very quickly; the vigilant Uda let in two equipment encumbered physician’s assistants and ran them to the den, then returned to take up her station beside Davina, who looked wilted and terrified.

      Jim appeared, went straight to Millie.

      “John is dead,” he said abruptly, “and Dr. Markoff says it’s suspicious.” The green eyes were stern, level. “I thought of the missing tetrodotoxin.”

      Her skin lost all its color. “Jesus, no! How could it have gotten here, for God’s sake?”

      “I don’t know, but if you can help, Millie, then help. Call your father and tell him what’s happened. The symptoms sound as if it was injected. If the pathologist acts quickly enough, there may be a chance he can find tetrodotoxin in the form of its last metabolites. There’s blood drawn, so get a motorcycle cop here to siren it into town. Then your dad’s got a fighting chance. Call Patrick, please.”

      She obeyed, pushing Max away from the phone.

      “By the time the road cop picks the sample up, Dad, I’ll have drawn a schematic of tetrodotoxin’s molecular structure,” Millie said to Patrick a moment later. “I think Jim’s crazy to suspect it, but what if he’s right? What if whoever stole the stuff is selling it as the undetectable poison? That’s why you have to assay the victim’s blood a.s.a.p.—more chance of a last metabolite or two. Gas chromatography first, then the mass spectrometer. Humor Jim, Dad, please! I mean, it can’t possibly be tetrodotoxin, these people have no connection to me.”

      “I’ll send Gus Fennell. I have to recuse myself, Millie,” said her father’s voice, “and I’m guessing Carmine will too. It will probably be Abe Goldberg. Oh, shit!”

      “Tell me about it.” She hung up.

      Max Tunbull and Al Markoff were arguing.

      “You’ve got it all wrong, Al! John’s mom died at about the same age, and John’s her spitting image—it runs in that family!” Max said.

      “Crap!” said the doughty doctor. “Bitch all you like, Max, I’m not convinced John died from natural causes. The time span between onset of symptoms and death was nearly lightning. Pity I was too busy to time it.”

      “I timed it,” Jim Hunter said. “From his saying the word ‘hot’ to his death, eleven minutes. You’re absolutely right, Al, it’s suspicious. John was a healthy guy.”

      Whereupon Davina, eyes distended, uttered a shriek, went rigid, and fell to the floor. Uda knelt beside her.

      “I put Miss Vina bed,” she said. “Mr. Max, you phone her doctor now. She get needle.”

      “No way,” said Muse Markoff. “The cops will want to see her, Uda—unsedated.”

      “Thiss not Iron Curtain!” Uda snarled on yellow teeth. “Big function tomorrow night for Miss Davina, she be ready!”

      And, thought Millie, remembering tomorrow night, Davina would go through hell to be ready for it. No matter what the cops might want, Davina’s doctor was going to knock her out until late tomorrow afternoon. “Or,” said Millie to Jim, “I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

      He grinned, brushed her cheek with one finger. “That, my love, you are not.” His eyes followed the servant, supporting her mistress to the stairs. “To get to Davina, first get past Uda. If I’ve learned nothing else, I’ve learned that.”

      Lieutenant Abe Goldberg appeared a few minutes after the motorcycle cop picked up the test tubes of blood for the M.E.; with him came Dr. Gus Fennell, Deputy Medical Examiner, and his own pair of detectives, Sergeants Liam Connor and Tony Cerutti.

      “What do you really think, Millie?” Abe asked, his fair and freckled countenance looking unusually grim. Millie Hunter’s marital history was well known, and she was loved.

      “John’s symptoms sound very supicious, but the rapidity of his death suggests injection rather than ingestion. If he’d eaten it, especially given the good meal he consumed, I would have expected considerable vomiting and fecal purging. And it wouldn’t have come on so fast. Tell whoever does the autopsy to look for a puncture mark, and tell Paul the dose might have been as small as a half of one milligram. John was about six feet, but he wouldn’t have weighed more than one-sixty.” Millie kept her voice low, glad Davina Tunbull wasn’t watching. Hysterics, my eye!

      “Now’s not the time or place, Dr. Hunter, but I gather you were aware your wife had tetrodotoxin at her laboratory?” Abe asked Jim, his voice courteous.

      “Yes, she mentioned it.”

      “Were you aware how dangerous it is?”

      “In all honesty, no. I’m not a neurochemist, and I would not have recognized it as a toxin if I’d encountered it, at least before I determined its molecular structure. That always gives a lot of things away. But it’s only tonight, after watching John Tunbull die, that I understand how lethal it is, particularly for such a tiny dose. I mean, it’s lethal at the kind of dose you might give yourself by sheer accident!”

      “Who suspected the death, Dr. Jim?”

      “Dr. Markoff. Said flatly it was a coroner’s case and the police had to be called in. He’s impressive.”

      “Did you think the death suspicious?”

      Jim considered that carefully, then shook his head. “No, I guess I just thought it was a heart attack, or maybe a pulmonary embolus—I’m not totally medically ignorant, but I’m not a physician either. Except for his age, John’s death looked pretty routine to me. Millie wasn’t so sure because someone stole her tetrodotoxin—it’s absolutely lethal stuff, Lieutenant.”

      “Did you know about the theft, Doctor?”

      “Sure I did—Millie and I tell each other everything. But I never thought of connecting it to John—I have no idea what the symptoms are, except I guess I thought they’d be the usual symptoms of poisoning—vomiting, purging, convulsions. None of which he displayed. The only poisons I know behave the way John behaved are all gases, and since no one else felt a sign of what John went through, it can’t have been a gas. Tetrodotoxin isn’t a gas either. It’s a liquid that can be reduced to a powder, or vice versa.” Jim gave a half-hearted grin. “By which, Lieutenant, you know that Millie and I do discuss things.”

      Abe’s large grey eyes had narrowed; so this was the black half of a famous alliance! Wherever he might have met Jim Hunter, under what circumstances, his eyes betrayed enormous intelligence, innate gentleness, a huge capacity to ponder. Carmine liked him: now Abe saw why.

      “May my wife and I find a quiet, out of the way corner, Lieutenant?” Jim asked.

      “Sure, Doctors. Just don’t leave the house.”

      Abe kept his questions to the dinner guests brief and to the point: just events at the dinner, in the den, trips to the toilets, John’s sudden illness. The only one he suspected of real duplicity was Mrs. Davina Tunbull, who had retreated into hysterics Millie whispered were fake. They were always bad news, those women, even though mostly they had nothing to do with the commission of the crime. They muddied the waters simply to be noticed, treated specially, fussed over. And there was no way he was going to get to see her or the servant, Uda, tonight.

      With their details written down in his notebook and John Tunbull’s body gone to the morgue an hour since, Abe wound up his investigation shortly after midnight and let people go home.