Chapter Eight #2
“He’s a fair man,” Leo said as they stopped in front of a door.
“Doesn’t touch a drop of alcohol, but he’s a decent fella in spite of that.
” Leo grinned when the joke made Vivian giggle a little.
“I don’t know whether we’re dealing with him or one of his staff.
But either way—” He knocked on the door with his knuckles, a quick, businesslike series of raps.
“—he should be able to tell us something. Or nothing, which is something in itself. Don’t be nervous. ”
There was no way to not be nervous, not there, not for her.
What if the commissioner found out they were there?
Would he cause trouble? Would that trouble follow her back to the Nightingale?
For a moment, Vivian wished she hadn’t asked Leo for help.
But she would do anything for Bea. And it was too late, anyway.
“Come in.”
She had been worried that she would find herself in the place where bodies were autopsied, but the room that greeted her was like any other office, full of overstuffed shelves, a desk covered in papers, and old coffee cups scattered about waiting for someone to remember them and clean them up.
Vivian had read about the coroner and his staff in the paper, men who used newfangled science to unmask killers, particularly the city’s poisoners.
He was younger than she expected, but friendly, approachable, even a little portly.
If she’d run into him on the street, she never would have guessed that he mangled bodies and chopped up their organs for experiments and who knew what else, all to catch murderers.
But she couldn’t remember his name, though knew she had to have read it at least once. She stepped forward, not wanting to hover in the doorway, and waited for Leo to introduce them.
The coroner looked at her in surprise. “You brought a friend?” he asked, a hint of disapproval in his voice.
“I told you I needed a favor for someone else,” Leo said, giving Vivian a sideways smile. “She’s the someone.”
There weren’t going to be any introductions, Vivian suddenly realized.
Leo didn’t want to give her name, and the medical examiner, it seemed, wasn’t going to insist on it.
She felt a rush of relief—the last thing she wanted was someone knowing exactly who she was and why she was there.
But she didn’t want the coroner to overlook or dismiss her, either.
She shook off her nerves and stuck out her hand.
“Pleased to meet you, mister. Thanks for your help.”
Looking bemused, he took the offered hand and shook it.
“Wait until you know what I have to tell you, young lady. Then you can decide whether to thank me or not.” He gave them another quick once-over, then nodded, as if he had just decided something, and stood.
Shrugging off his jacket, he tossed it onto a hook on the wall and pulled on the white lab coat that was waiting there. “I have five minutes. Walk with me.”
“Where are we going?” Vivian asked nervously as they were ushered back into the corridor.
The tap of their shoes on the stone floor echoed around them, and while the air was heavy and humid, the summer heat didn’t seem to penetrate inside the heavy walls.
She was hard-pressed not to shiver as they followed the coroner.
“I have an autopsy to do,” he said. Glancing sideways at her suddenly white face, he chuckled.
“Don’t worry, young lady, I’m not expecting you to watch.
But I have to stay on a schedule. And the bottle Mr. Green asked me to test is still in the lab.
” He swung open a heavy door for them. In spite of his fatherly features, his eyebrows were raised as if in challenge as he ushered them inside.
She stopped in the hallway, hands on her hips. “Are you waiting to see if I panic or faint or something?” she asked, not wanting to admit that part of her was afraid of doing exactly that.
He laughed. “A little. We don’t often have visitors here, and especially not pretty girls. I have to find my entertainment where I can since I’m going to be working past midnight tonight.”
“Busy day in the morgue?” Leo asked, his cheerful tone at odds with the dark implications of his questions.
The coroner’s smile was tight. “Ever since they passed the Eighteenth, there’s always someone on the wrong side of a mob boss or a jumpy cop or a bottle full of moonshine.
And the wrong side of any of those things means you turn up here.
But they won’t give me more men or more funding, because I don’t toe any kind of party line.
It’s always a busy day in the morgue. So, like I said, I have five minutes, and only three of them are left.
” He looked at Vivian again. “Are you coming in?”
She took a deep breath and stepped into the lab.
It was cold. One wall had shelves from floor to ceiling, each one crowded with equipment: glass bottles, rubber tubes, stands and clamps and other things she couldn’t begin to imagine the names of.
Another was full of bookcases holding more books than Vivian had seen in one place in her life.
Some were as thick as two fists placed end to end.
Others, in long lines with matching spines, looked more like sets of magazines.
The third wall, across from the door, was end-to-end cabinets, their glass doors displaying hundreds of bottles and boxes, each carefully labeled.
In the middle of the room was a long metal table with a white sheet to cover the ridges and contours of what was clearly a corpse.
Vivian shivered, then turned to the coroner, who was watching her with quietly smiling expectation. She swallowed, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in her stomach as she realized what it must mean that they were in the lab and not his office.
She had thought, when she suggested this, that it would make things easier. She couldn’t bring Pearlie back, couldn’t save the Henrys the pain of losing him. But putting Bea’s fears to rest—that much she could try to do.
She hadn’t really believed anyone wanted Pearlie dead, not even after she had seen the empty spot where he had hidden his money.
Folks spent money all the time, even when they said they were going to save it for something important.
Maybe he’d had debts he couldn’t escape.
Maybe he’d been robbed. Maybe he’d just gone out drinking or gambling and wasted it all and was ashamed, and losing the money he’d worked so hard to get had been enough to push him over that edge.
There were a hundred maybes to choose from. But now …
“I’m guessing if you’re keeping the bottle in here, you don’t want anyone accidentally drinking it after all,” Vivian said, pleased when her voice came out with its normal saucy lilt and none of the sudden panic she was feeling.
The medical examiner laughed at her lack of distress.
“Right first guess, young lady.” Vivian felt as if her stomach had taken a sudden, nauseating drop.
But she kept her fear hidden as he continued.
“It only took one test to show that the brandy in that bottle was laced with arsenic. And not in a way that would build up and kill someone slowly and carefully, either.”
“What do you mean, slowly and carefully?” Leo asked, frowning.
The coroner tugged on his coat to adjust the shoulders.
“Arsenic is a metal. Given in very small doses over time, it will build up in the body. The victim gets sick slowly, maybe has stomach pains every once in a while, and then eventually, poof, dead. It’s horrible but looks natural enough, so unless there’s a reason to get a coroner involved, they can get away with it, too.
Poor bastard just seems like he’s getting sicker and sicker over time and then suddenly drops dead all on his own. ”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Vivian blurted out, unable to keep silent even though she wanted to appear cool and unaffected.
“Sorry,” the coroner said, grimacing a little. He looked genuinely apologetic as he shook his head. “I’m usually talking to folks who are in the same line of work when poisons come up.”
“But that’s not what happened here, right?
” Leo said quickly, looking ill himself.
Leo’s work as a supplier would have taken him into all sorts of illegal business, and Vivian wouldn’t have been surprised to know that he’d had a hand in a death or two, though he had never admitted it, even when she’d asked.
But he was a straightforward guy who used his fists and, occasionally, the revolver tucked in his waistband. Poison wasn’t in his line at all.
“No.” The coroner shook his head again. “Whoever prepped that brandy just dumped the stuff in there. If someone drank it, I can’t imagine they lived through the night.”
“So what happens now?” Vivian asked, hating the quiet, unsteady way that the words came out. But she couldn’t help it.
Bea was right. Pearlie had been murdered.
The coroner rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, where the shadow of a beard was beginning to appear under his skin.
“Well, that depends. Mr. Green here only told me that he needed a favor for a friend. There have been three arsenic deaths here in the last two weeks. One was a straightforward murder”—the calm way he said that made Vivian shudder, but either he didn’t notice or didn’t care—“very poorly done; a fellow from Brooklyn poisoned his brother after they got into a fight over their family’s business.
And this isn’t evidence from that, or you wouldn’t be the ones bringing it in.
So.” He fixed first Vivian then Leo with a stern look.
“Are you going to tell me which of the two suicides we’ve got on file might actually be murder? ”
Vivian looked at Leo, but he was watching her impassively, waiting for her decision.
On the one hand, if Pearlie had been murdered, they couldn’t just ignore that.