time.
The body was on the table in the treatment room. The left sleeve of the white shirt had been rolled up. A length of rubber tubing that had apparently been knotted around the left arm above the elbow to make the vein more accessible was unfastened but held there by the weight of the arm upon it. Over the countertop was an empty container and an empty syringe with injection needle attached. Both the small bottle with the rubber diaphragm top and the syringe showed traces of morphine. The drug safe was unlocked. The key was in his pocket. His fragmentary prints were found on the syringe and the bottle. Beside the empty bottle was a small wad of surgical cotton with a streak of blood diluted by alcohol on it. The autopsy conducted by the county medical examiner showed that the death, to a reasonable medical certainty, was due to a massive overdose of morphine. According to Penny, nothing else was missing from the drag safe, or from the other stocks of drugs used in the treatment of patients. But she could not tell whether anything was missing from the back room stocks especially ordered by Dr. Stewart Sherman and used in his experimentations.
She had unlocked the door when she arrived.
By then I had unwired Rick Holton. His attitude was a lot better and the wire had been painful.
He said, 'At one time I was the assistant state attorney here in Courtney County. The way it works, the state attorney has a whole judicial district, five counties, so he has an assistant prosecutor in each county. It's elective. I'd decided not to run again. The state attorney is still the same guy. Ben Gaffner. The day I heard that Stew Sherman was supposed to have killed himself, I told Ben that I would just never believe it. Well, dammit, they had the autopsy, and Sheriff Turk investigated and he turned the file over to Ben Gaffner, and Ben said there was no reason in the world why he should make a jackass of himself by trying to present it to the grand jury as something other than suicide, which it damn well was-according to him.'
'The doctor couldn't have killed himself!' Penny said.
'That's what I felt,' Rick said. 'So because they were closing the file, I thought what I'd do was use what time I could spare to do some digging. Ben gave me his unofficial blessing. The first time I interviewed Penny, I found out she felt exactly the same way.'
So that was how their affair had started. From what I had heard while pretending to be unconscious, I knew it was going sour. And now they were very stiff with each other, harboring delicious resentments.
As I thought the tensions between them might inhibit their communicating with me, I tried to take them off the hook. I told Holton that when the taste of the gin had clued me, I decided to give her some real reason to be jumpy and maybe teach her that pretending to be a hooker could be a messy little game, so I had peeled her out of her dress and bra. 'She put up a good fight,' I said.
He looked a little happier. 'I see. So you made me so goddamn mad at her, I gave you an opening. You're pretty good, McGee.'
'If I'd known you were a member of the bar and every lunch club in town, I wouldn't have tried you. It was a very small opening and you carry a very damaging caliber. If you'd had the hammer back, I wouldn't have tried you. But why me? Like I told you, I never heard of the doctor.'
He summarized what he had been able to dig up. He had an orderly mind and professional knowledge of the rules of evidence. With Penny's help he had located two people who had seen a very tall man let himself out of Dr. Sherman's offices late Saturday night. One guessed eleven thirty. The other guessed a little after midnight. Penny knew that when the doctor was working on his research projects, he would not answer the office phone. The answering service had recorded no calls for the doctor that evening. One witness said that the man had gotten into a dark blue or black car parked diagonally across the street, a new-looking car, and had driven away. That witness had the impression that the car bore Florida plates but had a single digit before the hyphen rather than the double digit designating Courtney County. He had taken affidavits and put them in his private file on the case.
'But how does Tom Pike come into the picture?' I asked.
'I was looking for motive. I heard a couple of people saying that Stew had died at one hell of an inconvenient time as far as Tom was concerned, and he might take a real bath on some of his deals. So I wondered if maybe somebody had killed the doctor just to put the screws on Tom. You see, Stew Sherman was the Pike family doctor, and when Tom started Development Unlimited two years ago, Stew invested with him in a big way. He'd always made pretty good money in his practice and on top of that he had the money his wife left when she died three years ago. Tom had put together some marvelous opportunities for Stew and the others who went in on the first deals he made. They stood to make really fantastic capital gains. Money is always a good motive. So I had a long talk with Tom. At first he didn't want to tell me anything. He said everything was fine. But when he saw what I was driving at, he got very upset and he opened up. The doctor had been fully committed on three big parcels of land east of town. Tom had put together a fourth deal, and Stew had made preliminary arrangements to borrow a large sum of money from the bank, using his equity in the first three parcels as collateral. Based on the bank's preliminary approval, Tom had gone ahead and committed the group on the fourth deal. Now not only was he going to be badly squeezed on the fourth deal, but the Internal Revenue Service had come in on an estate tax basis and froze the doctor's equities in the other three parcels, and actually could order sale of those equities in order to meet the estate tax bite. Tom told me that Doctor Sherman couldn't have died at a worse time, not only for the sake of his own estate, but also because of what it could do to the others who were in on all four syndicates. He told me that he was going to have to do one hell of a lot of scrambling to keep the whole thing from falling apart.'
'I assume he made out all right.'
'The word is that he squeaked through, but that it cost him. As a matter of fact, Stew's sons tried to bring some kind of action against Tom because there was a lot less left than they thought there ought to be. But there was no basis for action. I asked Tom if anybody could have killed the doctor in order to mess up the deals he had on the fire. The idea shocked hell out of him. He said he could think of some people who might have wanted to, but they would have had no way of knowing how badly it would pinch him. He agreed that it seemed very, very strange that the doctor should kill himself, but he couldn't offer any alternative.'
'But some tall man has been putting the squeeze on Tom Pike?'
'That's one of those funny breaks you get, the kind that may mean something or nothing. In late August, Tom Pike drew twenty thousand in cash out of one of his accounts. A lot of real estate deals are cash deals, so it wasn't anything unusual. I found out how much by checking back, quietly, through a friend, after I heard what happened. One of my law partners mail-ordered a big reflector telescope for his twelve-year-old kid's birthday and had it sent to the office. He set it up, tripod and all, and was fooling around putting the different eyepieces on and aiming it out the office window at the shopping plaza a block away. He had it at two hundred and forty power, meaning that something two hundred and forty yards away looks like one yard away. He focused it on a car parked all alone in an empty part of the lot and when he got it sharp and clear, he found he was looking at Tom Pike standing and leaning against the car. He wondered what he was waiting for. Just then another car pulled up and a tall man got out. My partner said he had never seen him before. He had a lot of tan and looked rugged and wore a white sport shirt and khakis. Tom gave the stranger a brown envelope. The stranger opened it and took out a sheaf of bills and riffled the end of the sheaf with his thumb. My partner said he could damned near see the denomination. He then put the brown envelope into his car and took out a white envelope or package and gave it to Tom Pike, who stuffed it away so quickly my partner didn't get much of a look at it. They got into their cars and took off. He mentioned it to me a couple of days later. We were talking about a divorce action we're handling and he said maybe we should invest in a telescope and told me about spying on Tom. There could be a lot of answers. Maybe it was a cash option on ranchland or groveland. Maybe he was buying advance highway information from a road engineer. But maybe it was the tall man who was in Stew's office that night and got into the act somehow.'
'So just how did you come up with me?'
'I was at the bar with a client last night when you came in with Tom's sister-in-law. She started crying and you took her out. I told my client I'd be right back. I saw you unlock One-O-nine and took a look at your plate and saw it was a rental number. I got your name at the desk. I have a cop friend I give some work to when he's off duty and he tailed you today and phoned me when you pulled into the Pike house. I met him here and he went through your room while I hung around the house phone to give him a warning call if you got back too soon. He didn't find a thing that would give us a clue. I don't have any official status, of course. And even if I did, I could still get in real trouble taking you in for a shakedown. Penny and I worked out the idea of her seeing if she could pick you up. I knew about the opened bottle from what my cop friend told me. Penny had something she thought would work fast. While you were eating I spiked your bottle.'
'How did you get in?'
'With the passkey from my cop friend. He's got a master key for every big motel in the area.'
I looked at them. 'You people are very diligent and so on. And damned stupid. So if I didn't want to get picked up? So I wanted to come back here all by myself and kill the bottle?'
'I was five minutes
