'You mean like, 'What's this bottle doing over here?' No, nothing like that. Though to tell you the truth I'm not sure he would have noticed. You know the mood he was in.'
'Yes.'
'He seemed abstracted, if that's the word I want. Sort of out of sync. Right before he took the drink—'
He snapped his fingers. 'I know what it reminded me of.'
'What's that, Kevin?'
'It's a scene in a movie I saw, but don't ask me the name of it. This one character's an alcoholic and he hasn't had a drink in, I don't know, months or years, anyway a long time. And he pours one and looks at it and drinks it.'
'And that's how Whitfield looked at his drink.'
'Kind of.'
'But he had a glass of scotch every night, didn't he?'
'I guess so. I wasn't always there to see him have it. Some nights he was already home when my shift started, so I would just come up and relieve the man from the earlier shift. Other times he'd already had his drink before I got him. As far as being an alcoholic, I'd say he was anything but. I never saw him take more than one drink a night.'
'When I talked to him,' I said, 'he said he was about to have his first drink of the day.'
'I think he said as much to me. I wasn't with him earlier, but I can testify he didn't have it on his breath.'
'Would you have noticed it if he had?'
'I think so, yes. I was standing right next to him in the elevator, and I've got a pretty good sense of smell.
I can tell you he had Italian food for dinner. Plus I hadn't had anything to drink all that day, and when you're not drinking yourself it makes you much more aware of the smell of alcohol on somebody else.'
'That's true.'
'It's the same thing with cigarettes. I used to smoke, and all those years I never smelled smoke on anybody, me or anybody else. I quit four years ago, and now I can just about smell a heavy smoker from the opposite side of an airport. That's stretching it, but you know what I mean.'
'Sure.'
'So I guess it was his first drink of the night. Jesus.'
'What, Kevin?'
'Well, it's not funny, but I was just thinking. One thing for sure, it was his last.'
* * *
I didn't have to take Kevin Dahlgren's word about the acuity of his sense of smell. He'd proved it shortly after Adrian Whitfield collapsed.
Dahlgren's immediate assumption had been that he was in the presence of a man having a heart attack, and he reacted as he'd been trained to react and began performing CPR.
At the onset of the procedure, he had of course smelled alcohol on Whitfield. But there was another odor present as well, the odor of almonds, and while Dahlgren had never smelled this particular almondy scent before, he was sufficiently familiar with its description to guess what it was. He picked up Whitfield's empty glass from where it had fallen and noted the same bitter almond scent. Accordingly, he discontinued CPR and called the Poison Control number, although his instincts told him there was nothing to be done. The woman he spoke to told him essentially the same thing; about the best thing she could suggest was that he try to get the victim breathing again, and his heart beating. He took a moment to call 911, then resumed CPR for lack of anything better to do. He was still at it when the cops got there.
That was shortly after eleven, and New York One was on the air with a news flash well before midnight, beating Channel Seven by a full five minutes. I didn't have the set on, however, and Elaine and I went to bed around a quarter of one without knowing that a client of mine had died a couple of miles away from the ingestion of a lethal dose of cyanide.
Sometimes Elaine starts the day with 'Good Morning America' or the 'Today' show, but she's just as likely to play classical music on the radio, and when I joined her in the kitchen the next morning she was listening to what we both thought was Mozart. It turned out to be Haydn, but by the time they said as much she had left for the gym. I turned off the radio—if I'd left it on I'd have heard a newscast at the top of the hour, and Whitfield's death would have been the first or second item. I had a second cup of coffee and the half bagel she had left unfinished.
Then I went out to get a paper.
The phone was ringing when I left the apartment, but I was already halfway out the door. I kept going and let the machine answer it. If I'd picked it up myself I'd have received word of Whitfield's death from Wally Donn, but instead I walked to the newsstand, where twin stacks of the News and the Post rested side by side on adjacent upended plastic milk crates. 'LAWYER WHITFIELD DEAD' cried the News, while the Post went right ahead and solved the crime for us. 'WILL KILLS #5!'
I bought both papers and went home, played Wally's message and called him back. 'What a hell of a thing,' he said. 'Personal security work's the most clear-cut part of the business. All you have to do is keep the client alive. Long as he's got a pulse, you did your job right. Matt, you know the procedures we
set up for Whitfield. It was a good routine, and I had good men on it. And there's cyanide in the fucking scotch bottle and we come off looking like shit.'
'It was cyanide? The account I read just said poison.'
'Cyanide. My guy knew it from the smell, called Poison Control right away. A shame he didn't sniff the glass before Whitfield drank it.'
