True-Life Adventure

dick’s going to call in at six”; or, “Yeah, I’m making it okay; I’ve still got my dick.” What a card.
    “The cops say he died at your house.”
    “You doing his obit?”
    “Yeah. What was it, stroke or something?”
    “Heart attack, I think. ‘Died suddenly’ ought to do it.”
    “What was he doing there, anyway?”
    “Picking up one of my handcrafted client reports.”
    “Oh, God. Don’t tell me he didn’t pay you before he conked out. Look, if you need any money— ‘”
    “Thanks, Deb. I’m okay.”
    “You want a mench?” A mench is a mention in Debbie-speak. It was sweet of her, but I didn’t want to steal any of Jack’s glory.
    “No, thanks. How about ‘died suddenly at the home of a friend’?”
    “Okay. Let me know if you need a loan.”
    When I hung up, the purple glow was fast disappearing.
    Though with the best of intentions, Debbie had brought up yet another subject I didn’t want to think about. Jack hadn’t paid me before he conked out. He owed me $250, which would have doubled my fortune.
    Somehow, in the previous month or so, no banks had needed brochures and no egotistical rich people had needed autobiographies. Jack was my last and only client. I literally didn’t know where my next dime was coming from.
    I drank a lot more wine before I went to bed that night and still didn’t sleep very well.
    I got up early. I was sitting on my sofa, reading Jack’s obit, when the doorbell rang. I threw the Chronicle down on the coffee table and opened my door to Howard Blick, a guy I knew from my days on the police beat.
    He might possibly have achieved some measure of success as a hod-carrier, say, or a tube-winder. Unfortunately, some bozo with even fewer brains than he had had made him a homicide inspector for the San Francisco Police Department.
    I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me, but he was on my doorstep and my mother brought me up right. I asked him in and offered coffee.
    “No, thanks,” he said. “That’s what Birnbaum was drinking, right?”
    “For Christ’s sake, I didn’t poison him, Howard.”
    “Somebody did.”
    It took me a second to catch on; I’m a little slow in the morning. “They did the autopsy already?”
    “Yeah. Digitalis poisoning.”
    “Digitalis? The heart stuff?”
    “Yeah, but he didn’t have heart trouble. He had no reason in hell to take it and no prescription for it. Somebody croaked him.”
    “And you think it was me.” This might seem like jumping to conclusions, but you have no idea how dumb Blick can be.
    “Well, now, there’s a little mystery about it, Mcdonald. And mystery’s what you specialize in, right? You still writing that trash?”
    “What are you getting at, Howard?”
    “There’s a couple of little tricks to killing somebody with digitalis. Not everybody would know how to do it. Maybe a mystery writer would.”
    “Not this one. But if I wanted to know, I’d call up the coroner, say I was writing a book, and ask him.”
    “Somebody did.”
    “Huh?”
    “Somebody did, exactly like that, about a week ago. Dr. Blankenship thought it was kind of a coincidence. Seems when you do an autopsy, you’ve got a choice of certain tests you could do or not do, depending what the first tests show. You follow?”
    “Barely.”
    “Well, early on, this one started looking like a toxicity, so Blankenship did the test for digitalis. When it turned out positive, he remembered the phone call.”
    “Was the caller a man or a woman?”
    Blick looked confused. He’d probably forgotten to ask. “The point is, it’s the sort of thing you’d do. And you know what else? Digitalis has an alkaloid taste.”
    “So?”
    “So you couldn’t taste it in coffee. That’s one of the little tricks to pulling it off. Also, it’s not very soluble in water. But the heat of the coffee would increase the solubility.” That was supposed to tighten the noose and scare the hell out of me. What it did was shift my famous quicksilver brain into gear— I remembered why Jack and I had been having that little talk about saccharine being poison.
    “Don’t tell me what the other trick is. Let me guess. One tablet wouldn’t kill you, right? You’d have to get somebody to take them for several days.”
    “Bingo, Mcdonald. Now how’d you know that?”
    “Like I said, Howard. I guessed.” I swept the Chronicle off the coffee table. Underneath was Jack’s little bottle of saccharine, right where he’d left it. “See that? It