your care. The professors were pretty damned horrified about a doctor's doing that to a patient. More than willing to testify. They even wanted to file a complaint with the medical examiner's. I held them off.'
Mainwaring moved his lips soundlessly. He retrieved the pipe and pointed it like a pistol.
'This is all rubbish. I haven't poisoned anyone.'
'The professors thought otherwise, Guy.'
'Then they're bloody wrong!'
Milo let him stew for a while before speaking again.
'Talk about your Hippocratic oath,' he said.
'I tell you I haven't poisoned anyone!'
'Way the professors figured it, you slipped it to him every time you medicated him. Not only was it subtle, but there was an added benefit: seems Thorazine and the other medicines you gave him supercharged the anticholinergics. Potentiation they called it. The equivalent of a massive OD.'
'You put him on a pharmacologic roller coaster,' I said.
'The electrochemical properties of his nerve endings were being constantly altered. Which is why he showed such a strange reaction to the medication: settling down one day; going out of control the next. When his body was free of anticholinergics, the antipsychotics did their job properly. But in the presence of atropine they were turned into poisons, which could also explain the premature tardive dyskinesia. Isn't one of the main theories about TD that it's caused by cholinergic blockage?'
Mainwaring dropped the pipe again, this time willfully. He put both hands in his hair and tried to melt into the chair. His face was as white and moist as boiled haddock; his eyes were feverish with fear. Beneath the bulk of the sweater his chest moved shallowly.
'It's not true,' he muttered. 'I never poisoned him.'
'Okay, so some stooge did the actual dosing,' said Milo. 'But you're the expert. You can the show.'
'No! I swear it! I never even suspected until - '
He stopped, groaned, and looked away.
'Until when?'
'Recently.'
'How recently?'
Mainwaring didn't answer.
Milo repeated the question, more sharply. Mainwaring sat frozen.
'Have we reached an impasse, Doc?' thundered the detective.
No response.
'Well, Guy,' said Milo, opening his jacket to reveal his shoulder holster and fingering the handcuffs that dangled from his belt, 'looks like it's you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent time. No doubt you want to dummy up until you talk to a lawyer. Do yourself a favour and get one with heavy-duty criminal experience.'
Mainwaring put his face in his hands and hunched over.
'I've done nothing criminal,' he muttered.
'Then answer my goddamn question! How long have you known about the poisoning?'
The psychiatrist sat up, ashen.
'I swear, I had nothing to do with it! It was only after the - after he'd already escaped that I grew suspicious. Following my meeting with Delaware. He kept pressing me about drug abuse, badgering me about hallucinatory content, the idiosyncratic response to phenothiazines. At the time I dismissed all of it, but it had been such a puzzling case that I started thinking - about the drug abuse issue in particular, wondering if there could be some merit to it- ' 'Where did your thinking lead you?' demanded Milo. 'Back to Cadmus's medical chart. When I reread it, I began noticing things I should have noticed before - '
'Hold it!' I said angrily. 'I read that chart. Three times. There was nothing in it to indicate atropine poisoning.'
Mainwaring shivered and laced his fingers together, as if in supplication.
'All right, you're right. It's not - wasn't the chart. It was . hindsight. Recollections. Things I hadn't recorded - things I should have recorded. Discrepancies. Discrepant symptoms. Deviations from the norm. Flushing, disorien- tation, confusion. The precocious tardive syndrome. I'd just written the article on anticholinergic syndrome, and it had passed right under my nose. I felt like a bloody idiot. An EEG at the outset might have put me right on it. Atropine causes mixed rapid and slow brain wave activity, reduced alphas, increased deltas and betas. Had I seen that kind of pattern, I would have caught it, known what it meant from the outset. But the EEG never got done; the bloody radiologist baulked. You read the chart, Delaware; that's in there. Tell him about the radiologist's baulking, go on.'
I looked away from him, attempting to suppress my disgust, fixing my eyes on a seascape so muddily rendered it had managed to make Carmel look ugly.
'Guy,' said Milo scornfully, 'am I hearing right? Are you trying to tell me that you - an expert, a board-certified imperial poobah were fooled ?' 'Yes,' whispered Mainwaring 'That's a crock,' I said. With a glance Milo told me to back off He ben' over so
that his nose was an inch from Mainwaring's. The psychiatrist tried to pull away but was stopped by the back of the armchair.
'Okay,' said the detective, 'let's go with that for a minute. Let's say you were fooled.'
'It's humiliating, but it's tr - '
'You think that kind of ignorance is gonna buy you bliss?' snarled Milo. 'You just admitted you figured it out after you spoke to Delaware. You've known about it for over a week! Why the hell didn't you say anything? How could you let that kid continue to go through that kind of suffering?' He waved his notepad in Mainwaring's face. 'Intense suffering, bleak and terrifying, a goddamn private hell? Why didn't you stop it!'
'I - I was going to. Took the time off to formulate - to plan how to go about it.'
'Oh, Jesus, more bullshit,' said Milo disgustedly. 'How much did they pay you, Guy?'
'Nothing!'
'Bullshit.'
The door to the hallway opened, and a woman stepped into the room. Young, dark, conspicuously voluptuous in a flame red turtleneck and tight jeans. Brassy brown eyes shielded by long black lashes. The sculpted cheekbones and full dark lips of a young Sophia Loren.
'It's not bullshit,' she said.
'Andrea!' said Mainwaring, with suddenly renewed vigour. 'Stay out of it. I insist!'
'I can't, darling. Not anymore.'
She walked over to the armchair, stood next to the psychiatrist, and placed a hand on his shoulder. Her fingers uncurled, and Mainwaring shuddered.
'He's not a coward,' she said. 'Far from it. He's trying to protect me. I'm Andrea Vann, Sergeant. I'm the one they paid off.'
Milo's interrogation of her was as rough as any I've seen him do. She took it unflinchingly, sitting on the edge of the sofa, straight-backed and stoic, hands folded motionless in
her lap. Every time Mainwaring triad to intervene on her behalf, she silenced him with a steely smile. Eventually he gave up and withdrew to brooding silence.
'Run that by me again,' demanded the detective. 'Someone leaves five thousand dollars in cash in your apartment along with a note telling you there'll be another five if you leave your post on a certain night, and you don't ask questions.'
'That's right.'
'That kind of thing's an everyday occurrence for you.'
'Far from it. It was unreal, like winning the lottery. The first good luck I've had in years. It bothered me that someone had broken into my place, and I knew the money was dirty; but I was dirt poor and tired of it. So I took it, changed my lock, and didn't raise a peep.'
'And tore up the note.'
'Tore it up and flushed it down the toilet.'
'Very convenient.'
She said nothing.
