'A shame Whitfield didn't sniff the glass.'
'No, he just knocked it right back, and then it knocked him on his ass. On his face, actually. He pitched forward. Dahlgren had to roll him over to start CPR.'
'Dahlgren's your op?'
'I had two working. He's the one was upstairs with Whitfield.
Other guy was in the lobby. If I'd have put them both upstairs… but no, what are they gonna do, sit up all night playing gin rummy? The procedure was the correct one.'
'Except the client died.'
'Yeah, right. The operation was a success but the patient died.
How do you figure poison in the whiskey? The apartment was secure. It was left empty that morning and the burglar alarm was set. My guy swears he set it, the one who picked Whitfield up yesterday morning, and I know he did because my other guy, Dahlgren, swears it was set when he opened up last night. So somebody got in there between whenever it was, eight or nine yesterday morning and ten last night.
They got through two locks, a Medeco and a Segal, and bypassed a brand-new Poseidon alarm. How, for Christ's sake?'
'The alarm was new?'
'I ordered it myself. The Medeco cylinder was new, too, on the top lock. I had it installed the day we
came on the job.'
'Who had keys?'
'Whitfield himself, of course, not that he needed a key. Coming or going, he was never the first one to go through the door. Then there were two sets of keys, one for each of the men on duty. When they were relieved they passed on their keys to the next shift.'
'What about the building staff?'
'They had keys to the Segal, of course. But we didn't give them a key to the new lock.'
'He must have had a cleaning woman.'
'Uh-huh. Same woman's been coming in and cleaning for him every Tuesday afternoon for as long as he's had the apartment. And no, she didn't get a key to the Medeco, or the four-digit code for the burglar alarm, and not because I figured there was much chance of Will turning out to be a nice old Polish lady from Greenpoint. She didn't get a key because nobody got one who didn't need one. On Tuesday afternoons one of our men would meet her there, let her in, and stick around until she was done. He's sitting there reading a magazine while she's vacuuming and ironing and on her hands and knees scrubbing out the bathtub, and you know his hourly rate's three or four times what she's getting. Don't you ever let anybody tell you life is fair.'
'I'll remember that,' I said.
'Let me answer a question or two before you ask it, because the cops already asked and I already answered. The alarm's not just on the door. The windows are also wired in. That was probably excessive, since there's no fire escape, and do we really figure Will to be capable of doing a human fly act, coming down from the roof on a couple of knotted bedsheets?'
'Is that what flies do?'
'You know what I mean. I been up all night talking to cops and not talking to reporters, so don't expect me to sound like Shakespeare. It doesn't cost that much more to hook up the alarm to the windows, so why cut corners? That was my thinking. Besides, if this guy could get Patsy Salerno and Whatsisname in Omaha, who's to say he can't walk up a brick wall?'
'What about a service entrance?'
'You mean the building or the apartment? Of course there's a service entrance for the building, and a separate service elevator. There's also a service entrance for the apartment, and nobody went in or out of it from the time we got on the case. One of the first things I did was throw a bolt on it and keep it permanently shut, because as soon as you got two ways in and out of a place you've got the potential for headaches from a security standpoint. Sooner or later somebody forgets to lock the service door. So I had it all but welded shut, and that meant Mrs. Szernowicz had to take the long way around when she took the trash to the compactor chute, but she didn't seem to mind.'
We talked some more about the security at the apartment, the locks and the alarm system, and then we got back to the cyanide. I said, 'It was in the whiskey, Wally? Do we know that for sure?'
'He drank his drink,' he said, 'and flopped on the floor, so what could it be but the drink? Unless somebody picked that particular minute to plink him with a pellet gun.'
'No, but—'
'If he was drinking tequila,' he said, 'and he was one of those guys goes through the ritual with the salt and the lemon, takes a lick of each after he does the shot of tequila, then I could see how we could check and see if the lemon's poisoned, or maybe the salt. But nobody drinks tequila that way anymore, at least nobody I know, and anyway he was drinking scotch, so where the hell else would the poison be but in the whiskey?'
'I was at his place once,' I said. 'The night he got the letter from Will.'
'And?'
'And he had a drink,' I said, 'and he used a glass, and if I remember correctly he had ice in it.'
'Aw, Jesus,' he said. 'I'm sorry, Matt. I was up all night, and it's shaping up to be a bitch of a day.
Could it have been in the glass or the ice cubes? I don't know, maybe. I'm sure they're running an analysis of the booze in the bottle, if they haven't done it already. Dahlgren smelled cyanide on the guy's breath, and I think he said he smelled it in the glass, or maybe on the ice cubes. Did he smell what was left in the bottle? I don't think so.
