The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs

Masuto nodded. “We had a report.”

“I don’t doubt it. Did the report tell you that in the eight hours before she had been taken ill she had eaten three chocolate eclairs and nothing else?”

“I think that was mentioned.”

“You think so,” Baxter said sarcastically. “You really think so. And then she died. But you defenders of law and order saw nothing unusual in that-nothing unusual in botulism from eating a chocolate eclair?”

“Look, Doc, I appreciate your wit and irony. We were waiting for your autopsy report, out of due respect for our medical examiner. People do die from food poisoning.”

“Not from eclairs.”

“Why not from eclairs? The scouts have a picnic. Someone brings creampuffs, and thirty scouts end up in the hospital. It’s happened time and again.”

“But they don’t die, mister-not from a botulism.”

“Why not? I seem to remember fatalities.”

“No, sir. Not from botulism. There are a dozen other kinds of food poisoning, but botulism is the rattlesnake of the lot and it does not grow in eclairs. It grows in putrefying meat and in badly canned vegetables. Did you ever pick up a can and find both ends bloated? Throw it away. It could contain a botulin. The bacillus botulinus will grow only in the absence of air, and there’s no such thing as an airtight eclair, and this poor kid had enough botulin in her stomach to kill a horse. From eating eclairs? Now you tell me how the botulin got into the eclairs?”

“She’s a Chicano?”

“I suppose so.”

“Maybe she ate a bad taco. The meat some of those places use-”

“Shrewd, shrewd,” Baxter agreed. “The cops are getting wiser. Why didn’t I find it in her stomach?” He pushed the drawer back into the holding cabinet. “Tell you something, Masuto, if I had to choose between being bitten by a rattlesnake and swallowing botulin, I’d take the rattlesnake hands down.”

“Is it always fatal?”

“Just about. The toxin does it-intoxication, we call it-” he grinned. “That’s the medical term.”

“All right,” Masuto said, “you’ve been very clever and I salute you. Now what are you telling me? Are you telling me that this poor kid was murdered deliberately by someone injecting a batch of eclairs with botulin and then feeding them to her?”

“That’s right. That’s just what I’m telling you.”

“It’s the most far-fetched thing I ever heard of.”

“I don’t perpetrate the murders, Sergeant, I just analyze them.”

“Are you sure?”

“You’re damn right I’m sure.”

“Was the kid married? Does she have a husband, family, friends?”

“That’s upstairs business. I just open them up.”

The hospital records listed her husband, Pedro Fortez, as next of kin. Masuto copied down the address-an East Los Angeles street-and the phone number, informed the hospital that the death had become a police matter, and then returned to headquarters.

“Pretty damn unlikely,” Captain Wainwright said after Masuto had filled him in. “Who is the kid?”

“A Chicano, occupation housemaid.”

“And someone puts together this crazy murder device? Balls! You know what I think? I think Doc Baxter has flipped out.”

“He only does the autopsy. It’s the pathologist at the hospital who came up with the botulism.”

“Then we’ll find the goddamn bakery and close it down. I don’t buy that crap that an eclair can’t kill you. My wife ate a rotten eclair once and she was in the hospital three days. Meanwhile, get through to L.A.P.D. and see if they got any cases of food poisoning. Check the County Health Service too.”

Masuto nodded slowly.

“You don’t agree with me,” Wainwright said. “You got one of those Chinese hunches of yours.”

“I don’t know. Anyway, I have to talk to her husband. He’s my only lead to the bakery.”

“Talk to him. Only don’t go looking for trouble, Masao. It finds us soon enough.”

In Masuto’s office, Beckman had finished the Los Angeles Times and was reading the Herald-Examiner.

“Perhaps I should wait until you finish the paper,” Masuto suggested.

“Just trying to catch up. You don’t read the papers, you’re not in the world.”

“I’m returning you to the world. Go downtown and talk to Omi Saiku. He runs the poison lab for the Los Angeles cops. He’s a fourth or fifth cousin of mine, so you can tell him that you’re asking for me.”

“What am I asking him?”

“You’re asking what he has on recent food poisoning in general, and specifically whether a bad eclair can produce botulism.”

“How do you spell botulism?”

Masuto spelled it out. “And get a background. If he tells you no botulism in an eclair, find out if someone could put it there. Find out if a person eating it could taste it. Get all the background you can, and then go to the County Health Service and see what they have on recent food poisoning.”

“You don’t think you ought to fill me in?”

“I don’t know what’s to fill in yet. Baxter has a Chicano girl over at All Saints who he claims was murdered by eclairs doped with botulin. It sounds crazy.”

“You can say that again,” Beckman agreed.

After Beckman had left, Masuto called the telephone number the hospital had given him. A voice answered in Spanish. Speaking careful, well-enunciated Spanish, Masuto asked for Pedro Fortez and was told that he was at All Saints Hospital.

Masuto drove back to All Saints, and as he entered the lobby, he noticed sitting on one of the benches a young man whose face reflected all the grief a face could hold, a dark, good-looking young man of about thirty. Masuto walked over to him and asked, speaking Spanish, “Are you Pedro Fortez?”

The eyes, wet with tears, looked at Masuto. The head nodded.

“I am Sergeant Masuto, Beverly Hills police. I hesitate to intrude on your grief, but I must talk to you. I must ask you some questions.”

Fortez nodded mutely.

“We can speak in Spanish or English, whichever is easier for you. Spanish?”

“Si,” the young man whispered.

“Your wife was employed as a domestic?”

“She worked for Mrs. Crombie.”

“You know the address?”

He gave an address on Beverly Drive, and Masuto jotted it down. “Can you tell me,” Masuto asked gently, “what happened the day your wife took sick?”

There was a long silence. Then Fortez drew a long breath and said, “Nothing happened. That’s what is so terrible. We have one car, my old Ford. I work in a plastics plant in Santa Monica. When I go to work in the morning, I drop Ana off at the Crombie place. In the evening, I pick her up-only-”

The tears began again. The nurse at the reception desk came over and whispered to Masuto. Was there something she could do? “Poor kid,” she said. “Are you a friend?”

“I’m a policeman,” Masuto said. “Perhaps a little water.”

Fortez drank the water and apologized for his tears. “We were only married a year,” he explained.

“And you picked Ana up the night before last?”

“Yes. We drove home. She had a dish in the refrigerator that she had prepared for me the night before. It is called carne de res con nopalitos and it is made with much garlic and green cactus. Ana could not bear the taste of garlic. She made the dish just for me. I asked her what she would eat, and she showed me the three eclairs that Mrs. Crombie let her take home. My Ana was like a little child about sweets. She decided that the pastry would be her whole supper.”

“She didn’t offer you any?”