There was a little pause. Then he said: “Si. I catch. Hasta la vista, amigo.” He hung up.
I dialed the Ritz-Beverly and asked for Howard Spencer.
“One moment, please. I’ll give you the desk.”
A man’s voice said: “Desk speaking. May I help you?”
“I asked for Howard Spencer. I know it’s early, but it’s urgent.”
“Mr. Spencer checked out last evening. He took the eight o’clock plane to New York.”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.”
I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.
It was a couple of hours later that Bernie Ohls called me.
“Okay, wise guy,” he said. “Get down here and suffer.”
44
It was like the other time except that it was day and we were in Captain Hernandez’s office and the Sheriff was up in Santa Barbara opening Fiesta Week. Captain Hernandez was there and Bernie Ohls and a man from the coroner’s office and Dr. Loring, who looked as if he had been caught performing an abortion, and a man named Lawford, a deputy from the D.A.’s office, a tall gaunt expressionless man whose brother was vaguely rumored to be a boss of the numbers racket in the Central Avenue district.
Hernandez had some handwritten sheets of notepaper in front of him, flesh-pink paper, deckle-edged, and written on with green ink.
“This is informal,” Hernandez said, when everybody was as comfortable as you can get in hard chairs. “No stenotype or recording equipment. Say what you like. Dr. Weiss represents the coroner who will decide whether an inquest is necessary. Dr. Weiss?”
He was fat, cheerful, and looked competent. “I think no inquest,” he said. “There is every surface indication of narcotic poisoning. When the ambulance arrived the woman was still breathing very faintly and she was in a deep coma and all the reflexes were negative. At that stage you don’t save one in a hundred. Her skin was cold and respiration would not be noticed without close examination, The houseboy thought she was dead. She died approximately an hour after that. I understand the lady was subject to occasional violent attacks of bronchial asthma. The demerol was prescribed by Dr. Loring as an emergency measure.”
“Any information or deduction about the amount of demerol taken, Dr. Weiss?”
“A fatal dose,” he said, smiling faintly. “There is no quick way of determining that without knowing the medical history, the acquired or natural tolerance. According to her confession she took twenty-three hundred milligrams, four or five times the minimal lethal dose for a non-addict.” He looked questioningly at Dr. Loring.
“Mrs. Wade was not an addict,” Dr. Loring said coldly. “The prescribed dose would be one or two fifty-milligram tablets. Three or four during a twenty-four-hour period would be the most I’d permit.”
“But you gave her fifty at a whack,” Captain Hernandez said. “A pretty dangerous drug to have around in that quantity, don’t you think? How bad was this bronchial asthma, Doctor?”
Dr. Loring smiled contemptuously. “It was intermittent, like all asthma. It never amounted to what we term status asthmaticus, an attack so severe that the patient seems in danger of suffocating.”
“Any comment, Dr. Weiss?”
“Well,” Dr. Weiss said slowly, “assuming the note didn’t exist and assuming we had no other evidence of how much of the stuff she took, it could be an accidental overdose. The safety margin isn’t very wide. We’ll know for sure tomorrow. You don’t want to suppress the note, Hernandez, for Pete’s sake?”
Hernandez scowled down at his desk. “I was just wondering. I didn’t know narcotics were standard treatment for asthma. Guy learns something every day.”
Loring flushed. “An emergency measure, I said, Captain. A doctor can’t be everywhere at once. The onset of an asthmatic flare-up can be very sudden.”
Hernandez gave him a brief glance and turned to Lawford. “What happens to your office, if I give this letter to the press?”
The D.A.’s deputy glanced at me emptily. “What’s this guy doing here, Hernandez?”
“I invited him.”
“How do I know he won’t repeat everything said in here to some reporter?”
“Yeah, he’s a great talker. You found that out. The time you had him pinched.”
Lawford grinned, then cleared his throat. “I’ve read that purported confession,” he said carefully. “And I don’t believe a word of it. You’ve got a background of emotional exhaustion, bereavement, some use of drugs, the strain of wartime life in England under bombing, this clandestine marriage, the man coming back here, and so on. Undoubtedly she developed a feeling of guilt and tried to purge herself of it by a sort of transference.”
He stopped and looked around, but all he saw was faces with no expression. “I can’t speak for the D.A. but my own feeling is that your confession would be no grounds to seek an indictment even if the woman had lived.”
“And having already believed one confession you wouldn’t care to believe another that contradicted the first one,” Hernandez said caustically.
“Take it easy, Hernandez. Any law enforcement agency has to consider public relations. If the papers printed that confession we’d be in trouble. That’s for sure. We’ve got enough eager beaver reformer groups around just waiting for that kind of chance to stick a knife into us. We’ve got a grand jury that’s already jittery about the working-over your vice squad lieutenant got last week—it’s about ten days.”
Hernandez said: “Okay, it’s your baby. Sign the receipt for me.”
