Even the Wicked

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. It was on top of the bar and he was on the floor with Whitfield, trying to get him to start breathing again. Neat fucking trick, that would have been."

"Poor bastard."

"Which one, Whitfield or Dahlgren? Both of them, I'd have to say.

You know, I was concerned about food in restaurants. You remember that case where there was poison in the salt?"

"I must have missed that one."

"It wasn't local. Miami, I think it was. Mobbed-up businessman, he's having dinner at his favorite restaurant, next thing you know he's facedown in his veal piccata. Looks like a heart attack, and if it happened to Joe Blow it would have gone as that, but this guy's the target of an investigation so of course they check, and they establish that cyanide killed him and find cyanide on the food that's left on his plate, and there's a surveillance tape, because this is the restaurant he always goes to and the table he always sits at, the dumb bastard, and the feds or the local cops, whoever it was, were set up to tape it. And the tape shows this guy come over to the table and switch salt shakers, but you can't be absolutely certain that's what he's doing, and anyway they didn't find any cyanide in the salt shaker, because evidently somebody switched them again afterward. So they couldn't get a conviction, but at least they knew who did it and how it was done." He sighed. "Whitfield never sat down to a meal without one or two of my guys at the table with him, primed to make sure nobody switched salt shakers. It's like generals, isn't it?

Always preparing for the last war. Meantime, somebody got in his house and poisoned his whiskey."

We were on the phone for quite a while. He anticipated most of my questions, but I thought of a few others as well, and he answered them all. If there was a weak link in the security, he'd set up for Adrian Whitfield, I couldn't spot it. Short of posting a man full-time in the apartment itself, I didn't see how it could have been rendered more completely secure.

And yet someone had managed to get enough cyanide into Whitfield's drink to kill him.

* * *

It was late afternoon by the time I got to talk with Kevin Dahlgren, and by then I'd been interrogated myself by two detectives from Major Cases. They'd spent close to two hours learning everything I could tell them about my involvement with Adrian Whitfield, from the cases I'd worked on for him to the contact I'd had with him since he was the target of Will's open letter.

They found out everything I knew, which wasn't much. It was more than I learned from them. I didn't ask many questions, and the few I asked went largely unanswered. I did manage to learn that cyanide had been found in the residue of scotch left in the bottle, but I'd have learned that shortly thereafter anyway by turning on the television set.

I was worn out from my session with the two of them, and what I went through was nothing compared with what Dahlgren had to undergo. He'd been up all night, of course, and had spent most of the time either answering questions or waiting for them to get around to interrogating him some more. He managed to get a couple of hours sleep before I saw him, and he seemed alert enough, but you could tell he was pretty well stressed-out.

He was a suspect, of course, along with the several other men who'd had access to Whitfield's apartment in their capacity as bodyguards. Each of them was subjected to an intensive background check and interrogated exhaustively, and each voluntarily underwent a polygraph examination as well. (It was voluntary as far as the police were concerned. It was compulsory if they wished to remain employees of Reliable.)

Mrs. Sophia Szernowicz, Whitfield's cleaning woman, was interrogated as well, though not subjected to a polygraph test. They talked to her more to rule out the possibility of anyone else having visited the apartment while she was cleaning it than because anyone thought she might be Will. She'd been there on Tuesday afternoon, and he'd swallowed the poisoned scotch Thursday night. No one could testify with absolute certainty that Whitfield had poured a drink from that bottle on either Tuesday or Wednesday evening, so the possibility existed that the cyanide could have gone into the bottle during her visit.