I is for Innocent (Kinsey Millhone 9)

"Could I call you later this evening? I'm really sorry to have to press. I know it's distressing, but with services tomorrow, time is very short."

"Don't apologize," she said. "Of course you may call. At this point, I don't suppose an autopsy would do any harm."

"I'd like to have a conversation with the coroner's office to alert them to the situation, but I don't want to do anything without your permission."

"I have no objections."

"To what?" Louise asked as she came around the corner with a fully laden tea tray. She placed the tray on the coffee table. Dorothy filled her in, summing up the possibilities as succinctly as she'd summed up the wrongful death suit.

"Oh, let her go ahead with it," Louise said. She filled a cup and passed it over to me. "If you discuss it with Frank, you'll never hear the end of it."

Dorothy smiled. "I thought the same thing myself, but I didn't want to say so." To me she said, "Go ahead and do whatever you think best."

"Thank you."

Detective Burt Walker, of the coroner's bureau, was a man in his early forties with receding auburn hair and a close-clipped beard and mustache in a blend of red and blond. His face was round, his complexion ruddy, his coloring suggestive of Scandinavian heritage. His glasses were small and round with thin metal frames. He wasn't heavyset, but he looked like a man who was becoming more substantial as the years went on. The weight looked good on him. He wore a brown tweed jacket, beige chinos, blue shirt, a red tie with white polka dots. While I detailed the circumstances surrounding Morley's death, he leaned an elbow on his desk and variously nodded and rubbed his forehead. I verbalized my suspicions, but I couldn't tell if he was taking me seriously or simply being polite.

When I finished, he stared at me. "So what are you saying?" I shrugged, embarrassed when it came right down to articulating my hunch. "That he actually died from some kind of poisoning."

"Or maybe it was a poison that precipitated his fatal heart attack," Burt said.

"Right."

"Well. It's not inconceivable," he said slowly. "Sounds like he could have been dosed. I don't guess there's any chance he might have done it himself, despondent, depressed about something."

"Not really. His wife does have cancer, but they'd been married forty years and he knew she depended on him. He'd never abandon her. They were very devoted from what I gather. If he was poisoned, it'd almost have to be something he ingested without knowing."

"You have a theory about the chemical agent involved?"

I shook my head. "I don't know anything about that stuff. I've talked to his wife about his last couple of days and she can't pinpoint anything in particular. Nothing overt or obvious, at any rate. She said his color was bad, but I really didn't quiz her about what she meant by that."

"Couldn't have been anything corrosive or you'd know right off," he said. He sighed, shaking his head. "I don't know what to tell you. I'm not going to ask a toxicologist to run any kind of 'general unknown.' You got nothing to work with. A request like that is too broad. You look at the number and variety of drugs, pesticides, industrial products… man oh man… even the substances you handle casually at home. From what you're telling me-I mean, let's assume you're right, just for the sake of argument-the problem's compounded by the fact he was in such poor shape."

"You knew Morley?"

He laughed. "Yeah, I knew Morley. Great old guy, but he's living in the fifties when everybody thought drinking a fifth a day and smoking three packs of cigarettes was just something you did for sport. Guy like Morley whose liver or kidney functions were probably already hampered by disease will be more severely affected by any kind of toxic agent because they got no efficient way to excrete such a substance and they probably can't tolerate as much as a healthy individual. Few things we can probably eliminate right off the bat," he said. "Acids, alkalies. I take it she didn't mention any kind of smell to his breath."

"No, and she'd have noticed. They tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at first and then figured out it was pointless."

"Takes out cyanide, paraldehyde, ether, disulfide, and nicotine sulfate. You couldn't palm those off on a person anyway."

"Arsenic?"

"Well, yeah. Symptoms you described would fit that pretty well.

Except him feeling better. I don't like that much. Too bad he never went over to ER. They'd have tagged it."