There was something here. I was almost sure of it. Maybe it was the angle of approach, some elusive piece of information, some new interpretation of the facts as I knew them.
When the telephone rang, I jumped, my heart banging abruptly into cardiac arrest range.
It was Ida Ruth. "Kinsey. I hope I'm not interrupting anything, but you just got a call from the coroner's office, a Mr. Walker. I guess he left a message on your office machine and then tried this one. He wants you to call him as soon as you can."
I tucked the phone against my shoulder while I picked up a pen and reached for a scratch pad. "What's Burt's number, did he give it to you?"
She gave me the number. As soon as she hung up, I dialed his office.
19
"Coroner's office. Detective Walker."
"Hello, Burt. This is Kinsey. Ida Ruth said you wanted me to get in touch."
"Oh, good. Glad she found you. Hang on a second, let me grab my notes." In the background, I heard paper rustling. He put a palm across the receiver, engaging in a brief muffled conversation before he came back. "Sorry. We just finished the post on Morley. Turned out he died of acute renal failure, with evidence of liver damage, cardiovascular damage with circulatory collapse, tubular necrosis-"
"Caused by what?"
"I'm getting to that. I called Wynington-Blake after we talked yesterday? I had a chat with the funeral director. I wanted to tell him what was going on and I was curious if he'd picked up on anything. He says when Morley was brought in, he was 'markedly jaundiced.' "
"From the drinking?"
"That was my first thought, but then I did a little research. I got to picking through that bunch of household and garden items you dropped off. The pastry specimen bothered me because it was vegetable material. Most of that other stuff I couldn't see how anybody could ingest without being aware of it. I checked some reference books here and I'll tell you what popped up. The autopsy confirms this. Did you ever hear about Amanita phalloides?"
"Sounds like a sex act. What the hell is it?"
"The death cap mushroom. Amanita verna is another possibility. That's another species from the same family, also known as the fool's mushroom. Both are deadly. Judging from this pastry-whatever you want to call it-it looks like somebody baked him an Amanita strudel."
"Sounds grim."
"Oh, it is. Listen to this. One fifty-millionth of a gram of phalloidine injected into a mouse is fatal in one to two days. Takes less than two ounces to kill a human being."
"Jesus."
"And either type would do just about what you describe of Morley's symptoms. Interestingly enough, ingestion can be followed by what they call a latent period of six to twenty hours. Then what you'd see is nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea, and cardiovascular collapse."
"So if he got sick midday on Saturday, he could have conceivably eaten the stuff anywhere from early Saturday morning to some time on Friday."
"Looks like it."
"Where would somebody find the damn things? Do they grow in this area?"
"Book says eastern North America and Pacific Coast, late summer and fall. It'd be late for that, but I suppose it's possible. Verna is said to be common in hardwood and coniferous forests. They can grow singly, or in clumps or rings. Says they're rare on the West Coast, but somebody might have brought 'em in from some other part of the country. Dried or frozen, something like that. Where'd you find the pastry, at his house?"
"In the wastebasket in his office out in Colgate. I saw the bakery box the first time I was there, but I didn't think anything about it until I went out again."
"Any idea how he got it?"
"I didn't even think to ask. I just tucked it in the bag along with everything else. Actually, I was assuming he'd stopped at the bakery and picked it up himself. Betty, in the beauty shop, says he sneaked all kinds of food in. He'd been on a strict diet for a week, but she'd seen him with doughnuts and Chinese, all kinds of fast food, so the bakery box wasn't inconsistent. Maybe somebody brought it out to him and left it on his doorstep-"
Burt cut in. "I'll tell you something else. According to the data I'm looking at? There's a brief calm period sets in. Remember telling me he got to feeling better? With Amanita poisoning, it sometimes looks like the patient's condition is improving."
"You're talking about Sunday morning," I said.
"Right. The truth is, the damage would have been done by then. This toxin tears up your liver, dissolves blood corpuscles, causes hemorrhaging in the digestive tract. He was probably experiencing bloody stools and bloody vomitus, though from what you've said he never mentioned it. Either he didn't think anything about it or he didn't want to alarm his wife. Actually, even if he'd gone into the emergency room, they couldn't have done anything to save him."