Murder for Lunch Read online

  The professional Irish pallbearers removed the wooden casket, and Bannard and Frost led the Chase & Ward partners out the rear door. Bannard wanted very much to get away from the church. He could not bear the thought of anyone telling him what a “beautiful” service it had been—nor could he bear confronting the preposterous Dr. Clark.

  “I’ve had enough,” Bannard muttered to Keith Merritt as he came down the steps. “Let me speak to Eleanor for a minute and then let’s get the hell out of here. The day is bound to pick up after this.”

  Bannard, so often right, was very wrong about the rest of that Thursday.

  BAD NEWS AND ANOTHER LUNCHEON

  9

  Frost arrived at Chase & Ward shortly before noon. Ross Doyle was waiting for him in the firm’s reception room. Doyle, clearly on the lookout for Frost, stood up to greet him as he came through the glass doors at the main entrance to the office.

  “Good morning, Reuben. Can I see you for a moment?”

  “Of course. You have something to report, I hope?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then come on.” Frost gently took Doyle by the arm and propelled him toward his office. He thought he should probably call Bannard, but then decided he would hear Doyle out first.

  “I’ve got news on both fronts, Reuben,” he said, once they were inside with the door closed.

  “Both fronts?”

  “Yes. Donovan and—”

  “Oh yes, the Stephens thing,” Frost interrupted, as he remembered the episode he was not supposed to know about.

  “I wish I could use the good news/bad news gambit, but I can’t,” Doyle said.

  “You mean it’s all bad.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Then let’s hear about the water carafe first.”

  “Okay. I took it and the used glass to Keller Laboratories, a lab I’ve used from time to time in the past. I was after them all day yesterday to get a report, but apparently they had a helluva time identifying the substance they found in the residue on both the carafe and the glass. They worked all last night on it and finally reached a conclusion this morning.”

  “And it was?” Frost asked.

  “It was a derivative of digitalis—not digitalis itself, but a chemical distillate from it. A distillate that is the basic ingredient of Pernon, a new heart treatment drug that recently came on the market.”

  “So it was medicine, not a poison?” Frost interjected.

  “I wish I could say that it was, Reuben. But it was not just plain digitalis or this new stuff, Pernon. It was a distillate equivalent to a high concentration of digitalis. A lethal concentration.”

  “Then why didn’t Graham die in his office? He presumably drank the poison there.”

  “I wondered the same thing, so I asked a pathologist friend of mine about it. He told me that a delayed reaction of two or three hours would not be unusual. And the symptoms are very much those I understand Graham had.”

  “Convulsions?”

  “Convulsions, and all the symptoms of cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest, induced by the digitalis, is in fact the cause of death. I’m afraid he was murdered, Reuben.”

  “But how could he drink the water with the poison in it? Wouldn’t he know what was happening to him?”

  “Have you ever tasted instant iced tea, Reuben? As you learned the other day, Graham drank it every morning with his Danish, or so Miss Appleby said. My guess is you could put almost anything in that powdered stuff and not know the difference.”

  “But what about the color?” Frost persisted. “Wouldn’t he have seen that awful color we saw the other day?”

  “Not necessarily. Don’t forget you only saw the brownish stain after the liquid had spilled. If you were pouring it into a glass—and one with iced tea powder in it at that—you might not notice.”

  “It all seems improbable to me. And who put the goddam stuff there in the first place?”

  “That, as they used to say, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

  “Let’s see if George Bannard is back from the church yet. We’d better give him the bad news right away.” Frost dialed Bannard’s extension and was told he was in the office.

  “Tell him Ross Doyle and Reuben Frost will be right down to see him,” Frost said to Bannard’s secretary.

  In Bannard’s office, Doyle repeated the laboratory’s findings. Bannard, like Frost before him, tried to reinterpret those findings in some way that did not point to murder, but with no more success than Frost.

  “You know, Ross, there’s one little fact you haven’t been told,” Bannard said.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is that the City Medical Examiner did an autopsy on Donovan and concluded that he died of a heart attack.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Arthur Tyson. Arthur Tyson was there the whole time and claimed the body once the autopsy was over,” Frost said.

  “And did Arthur perhaps ride herd on the poor M.E. who did the autopsy? I’ve worked on enough things with him to know that he can really be tough when he starts leaning heavy.”

  “Yes, I suspect he did, judging by the way he described it all to me,” Frost said. “And he had Donovan’s doctor, Stanley Hall, giving the examiner hell as well.”

  “So perhaps there was a suggestion—just a suggestion—that Donovan had a history of heart attacks?” Doyle asked.

  “I suppose so,” Frost said.

  “But how the hell could Arthur Tyson or Stanley Hall influence an autopsy?” Bannard asked. “An autopsy is a medical procedure, not a public opinion poll.”

  “George, let me tell you something. You’ve never been divorced, right?”

  “No, certainly not,” Bannard said, puzzled by Doyle’s question.

  “Well, George, if you’ve ever been divorced and want a license to remarry in New York, you have to present your divorce papers to a lawyer from the corporation counsel’s office for approval. Can you imagine what that is like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What it is like, day after day after day, examining divorce papers? Or dealing with those without papers? Liars, cheats, crazies, bigamists, the whole works. Do you know what it’s like? What it’s like if your mother was proud of you the day you graduated from law school, proud of you the day you passed the bar exam? And maybe proud of you as eighty-fifth assistant corporation counsel in charge of divorce papers?”

  “No, Ross, I really don’t know what that might be like,” the Executive Partner of Chase & Ward said, subdued.

  “Well, if you can imagine it, transpose the scene to medicine. Doctor in charge of the day’s dead bodies. Big chance for loyalty to the Hippocratic oath, right? Big source of pride to your mother—my son the coroner, right?”

  “Um.”

  “Um, indeed. George, these guys, these assistant M.E.’s, they’re not your Columbia Presbyterian teaching faculty, not your Brick Church vestrymen. And not your brilliant pathologists, discovering new diseases and new causes of death. These are ordinary Joes, cutting open stiffs for a civil service living. Now do you understand why one of them says a corpse stuffed full of poison got that way because of a coronary?”

  “Ross, you’re very eloquent. Maybe I do understand. But under all the circumstances, don’t you think we should try and keep them from burying Graham? Shouldn’t we let the Medical Examiner have another look?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Let me call Campbell’s right now,” Frost said. “I talked to them yesterday.” He had Mrs. Davis place the call and told his story to a very puzzled attendant at the other end.

  “Mr. Donovan was to be cremated, right?” the voice said.

  “That is absolutely right, and that’s why I’m calling you to get the cremation called off. There has to be a new autopsy of Mr. Donovan.”

  “Well, sir, I’ll do my best,” the disembodied voice said. “But you ought to know that they do these things pretty fast and Mr. Donovan’s body wa
s taken there right after the funeral.”

  “I know that. But please do your best, as this is very important,” Frost said. “And let me know as soon as you can.” Frost hung up the phone.

  “I’m afraid I have other glad tidings,” Doyle said. Bannard looked around uncomfortably; he knew Doyle was referring to the Stephens matter, which he did not think Frost knew about.

  “I’ve had a break in the Stephens stock thing,” Doyle went on.

  Frost, playing the scene for all it was worth, got up to leave.

  “No, no, don’t go, Reuben. This is the stolen papers thing that was being hinted at at lunch yesterday. Someone took some papers from the files and tried to bear down on the price of Stephens stock.”

  “I see,” Frost said.

  The lawyers’ interchange left Doyle totally confused; he did not figure out that he had been conned into telling Frost a good bit more about the incident than Frost then knew.

  “Go ahead, Ross. What’s the news?” Bannard said.

  “Let me tell the story in sequence.”

  “Have it your way.”

  “Okay. My sister-in-law works in the back office operation at Bennett Holbrook,” Doyle said. (He was going to add, “as I told Reuben the other day,” but his instincts—rightly—told him not to.)

  “So?” Bannard said.

  “The broker who got the big tip from the press release wasn’t about to be cooperative. He was downright surly, in fact. So, instead, I sweet-talked my sister-in-law—not an unpleasant task, since I quite like her—into letting me have a peek at a computer printout of the customer records around the time the press release surfaced. My luck was with me. I found a purchase of ten thousand shares on August 9—which is the day after the Bennett Holbrook broker called Donovan—by a name I recognized. No street name, no nominee name, nothing. And working backwards, I found a sale by the same person a week earlier.”

  “So it was just as we thought—the guy was trying to drive down the price of Stephens so that he could cover his short sale,” Bannard said.

  “Your analysis is correct. Except that it wasn’t a guy.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Grace Appleby.”

  Frost leaned back in his chair. In its way, the answer that Miss Appleby was the culprit was obvious, given her access to Donovan’s office; indeed, Frost had looked her over with suspicion in their encounter two days earlier. But, still, stock market plunging seemed out of character for this prim and cool woman. She was disagreeable—everyone agreed on that—but there was no reason to think she was disloyal. Then Frost remembered her remark about Smith Kline & French, which showed a more than passing interest in business.

  “She was an obvious suspect,” Bannard said, as if he had known Miss Appleby was the guilty party all along. “But I don’t think anyone seriously thought it was she. What’s the Stephens stock price? That was a pretty healthy plunge she was making.”

  “Yes, indeed. At the time the price was around seventeen dollars a share—that’s one hundred seventy thousand dollars. You must be paying your secretaries better than I thought, George.”

  “I don’t understand it. That’s a lot of money. There has to be something—or someone—behind this. Can you have her followed?” Bannard asked.

  Doyle looked surprised. “Sure. That’s easy. But I don’t offhand see what that will accomplish.”

  “I’m not sure either. But I just can’t believe one of our loyal secretaries is mixed up in some six-figure stock fiddle unless someone else got her involved.”

  “Well, it’s worth a try, I guess. Tailing her will cost money, though.”

  “Never mind that. There’s more at stake here than a few hundred bucks,” Bannard said.

  “Or a few thousand?”

  “Or a few thousand,” Bannard replied.

  “Ross, do you suppose the two things are linked?” Frost asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “The poisoning and the press release incident.”

  “I suppose it’s possible. From what I understand, she certainly had access to Donovan and the water carafe.”

  “But where would she get the poison?” Frost interjected.

  “Good question,” Bannard said. “Ross, we’ve got to know more about this woman. You’ve got to have her followed.”

  “Fine.”

  Bannard looked at his watch and stood up behind his desk. “I’ve got to go to … an engagement now. I’ll call you this afternoon.”

  “Fine,” Doyle said.

  “And Reuben, we should talk after lunch,” Bannard added.

  “Sure, George. Sure,” Frost replied. He marveled at Bannard’s crude attempt at tact, for Bannard’s “engagement” was the weekly partners’ lunch from which Frost had been so recently banned. “Call me at your convenience.”

  Partners’ lunch was a ritual that took place every Thursday. All members of the firm were expected to attend unless busy with clients or away. Except for semiannual meetings when new partners were chosen, the weekly get-togethers were the only formal gatherings of the partnership. The principal business each week was usually to review new matters to make sure the firm did not have a conflict. That the firm might find itself on two sides of a controversy—“meeting yourself going around the barn,” as Bannard called it—was entirely possible, given the fact that new business could come in to any of the Chase & Ward partners and the further fact that Chase & Ward was involved, one way or another, in virtually every industry. Fortunately the review that took place at each Thursday’s lunch smoked out most of the potential conflicts so that embarrassing collisions around the barn were very rare.

  The Thursday lunches were always of interest to the partners since the status of the firm’s financials—and the amounts available to be parceled out to the partners—were reviewed on a weekly basis.

  Attendance was generally high at these weekly meetings, but certainly not because of the food. The lunch, served in a private dining room at MacMillan’s, would have disgraced a self-respecting roadside diner. Chopped “steak,” a purplish, ill-cooked lump of nondescript meat, and a piece of untitled fish cooked in peanut oil were among the regular fare. Old man MacMillan, no fool, knew his financial district customers; prime interest was in the business transacted, not in the quality of the food.

  Occasionally over the years there had been rebellion and demands for shifting the locale of the Thursday lunches, particularly from the younger partners, depressed at the thought of facing MacMillan’s handiwork week after week, year after year and decade after decade. But no one had been able to come up with an alternative offering a convenient location, privacy and speedy service.

  The members of Chase & Ward began arriving at the customary hour of one o’clock, entering MacMillan’s ugly private party room with its plain, light brown walls. They ranged themselves around the tables, which were pushed together to form a U. By common consent, Bannard and his Executive Committee sat in the bottom of the U, and the other partners sat wherever they liked along the sides. Some compulsively selected the same seat week after week, but most did not give a thought to where they sat.

  Attendance was heavy. Summer vacations were over, so nearly all the members of the firm were in the city. Besides, most had kept the morning free because of Donovan’s funeral. (And the imminence of the September 15 quarterly federal income tax payment made many more than a little curious about Chase & Ward’s current bank balance.)

  Bannard had hurriedly relayed the news of the laboratory’s findings to Coxe, Merritt, and Tyson while walking to the restaurant. He also told them about Miss Appleby, but the four agreed that there was probably a limit to the amount of bad news that could be digested by the firm at one sitting. Besides, no one had considered what exactly to do about the Appleby problem. But clearly the partners had to be told about Donovan’s poisoning. And, at least in Bannard’s view, to decide whether the police should be called in.

  The four sat at the head table and tried to
avoid telegraphing by their expressions the bad news they possessed until after lunch—chopped steak this time—had been eaten. They joined in the luncheon chitchat, which consisted mostly of a critique of Donovan’s funeral service.

  “I hadn’t realized that the Supreme Court had outlawed prayer in your churches,” Marvin Isaacs remarked. Others quickly reacted to disassociate Dr. Clark and his church from their part of Christendom.

  “He was nondenominational, all right,” Nigel Stewart added. “Or should one say non-nominational? I don’t believe he mentioned the Almighty once.”

  “I wondered about that,” Isaacs went on. “And when the saints went marching in, where did they march to?”

  “Now, Marvin, there have to be some Christian mysteries that you are not meant to fathom,” Merritt said.

  “That’s for sure. But speaking as a Jew, I must say I would have preferred a good high church Catholic mass, Peter,” Isaacs said, nodding to Peter Denny.

  “I of course agree with you, Marvin,” Denny said. “Though there are some that say our services these days are more like Dr. Clark’s.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, can we get started?” Bannard called out over the conversation. “I realize we haven’t had dessert, but I’ve asked the waiters to skip it today as we have a very important matter to discuss.”

  Many of the partners looked around the room with surprise, hoping to read some meaning into their colleagues’ expressions.

  “Captain, would you have the waiters leave now? You can clear the tables later,” Bannard said, addressing MacMillan’s aged functionary standing at the side of the room.

  This caused still further glancing around the table; this had never happened before at the partners’ luncheon. What was going on?

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I have something very serious to report to you today. Very serious and very shocking. Indeed, I suspect what I have to say will be the saddest and most shocking thing that has ever happened in the history of the firm.”

  The room was totally silent as Bannard spoke.