True-Life Adventure

was Birnbaum’s. Ready for my second guess? Have it analyzed and you’ll find some of the pills are saccharine and some are digitalis.”
    Blick’s face was as flat as his feet, and right now his eyes were practically hidden under great hooded lids. He looked more like a potato than a man. I had a chance to observe all that while he was gathering his meager wits. The potato spoke, or rather blurted: “How do you know that?”
    “Little gray cells, Howard. Simplicity itself. Birnbaum kept saying my coffee was lousy. Then he said everybody’s coffee’d been tasting lousy lately and he guessed it was the flu he had. He was using a lot more saccharine than usual. From that I deduce that everybody’s coffee tasted bitter when he put digitalis in it and that made him keep putting pills in till he hit enough of the saccharine to sweeten it.”
    “Deduce, shit! Maybe you know because you put the pills in the bottle.”
    “Howard, come off it. If I’d done that, I would have poured the contents of that bottle down the toilet the minute my victim was dead, then thrown the bottle out.” He looked doubtful. “Look. Jack always carried that saccharine bottle with him. He always used it to sweeten his coffee and he always drank two cups— in fact, that probably explains how he happened to die when he did. He’d just finished one cup and was starting on his second— that means he’d probably just gotten a blast of digitalis.
    “The point is, he always put his saccharine bottle on the table and left it there to sweeten his second cup. And he always picked it up just before he left and put it in his pocket again. At least that’s what he always did here, and you can ask his wife if he did it everywhere. I’m betting he did, and that means anybody he’d seen in the last week could have substituted a doctored bottle.”
    “They’d have had to know his habits.”
    “I expect the murderer was someone he knew, Howard. A perfect stranger would hardly have a motive, would he?” I was just about out of patience and I guess my tone of voice was a little on the sarcastic side. Even Mr. Sensitive couldn’t help noticing.
    He said: “Don’t get smart with me, asshole.”
    And I said: “Don’t accuse me of murder, douchebag.”
    “Maybe you’ve got a motive.”
    “Come on, Howard. He was keeping Spot in cat food. The minute he stopped breathing I stopped having an income.”
    “Yeah. Stan Smith told me about that. What case were you and him working on?”
    “That’s confidential.”
    His gray-green complexion got suddenly rosy. “Confidential, hell! This is a murder investigation. He was here to pick up a report, right?”
    “If you say so.”
    “I want it.”
    “So get a search warrant.”
    He picked up the saccharine bottle and stood up. “You better watch your step, asshole.”
    I hate being called an asshole in my own house, and that was twice, but I let it go. I’d baited him and I shouldn’t have.
    All the same, I didn’t think I was impeding a murder investigation. The case Jack and I were working on was pretty routine. It was a custody case, the sort that keeps private investigators in business now that California has no-fault divorce. The way it works is, one parent gets custody after the divorce, then the other parent gets mad and snatches the kid, and the one with custody hires a P. I. to find his little darling.
    The only thing that made this one any different from a million others was that the Chronicle would have put it on page 1 if they’d known about it.

CHAPTER 2
    Jack’s client was Jacob Koehler, the Nobel prize-winner, the guy who put genetic engineering on the map. The snatcher was Lindsay Hearne, local television’s hottest property and Koehler’s ex-wife. The kid was seven-year-old Terry Koehler, who’d been living with her daddy and his nice new wife for the last couple of years.
    One Saturday about three weeks before Jack died, Lindsay picked up her daughter Terry for a weekend visit and didn’t return her on Sunday night.
    That was the whole
megillah.
Great name recognition, but no obvious murder motive.
    I was pondering the thing when the phone rang. It was Ben McGonagil of the brand-x paper, the one that comes out in the afternoon. He wanted to confirm that Jack had indeed died at my house and also he wanted to shoot the bull and pump me about Jack. I thought if he gave me a mench, the remaining P.I.’s in town might beat a path to my door and I could go on feeding