McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [159]
I awoke to a call from the coroner. He explained that the husband was knifed in the stomach at five PM, while the wife had been poisoned at a quarter to three, with a poison that took exactly 2.5 hours to kick in. They both died within about a minute of each other. Her late lunch had been a small chicken pot pie, unsalted, a green salad, peppered, and a glass of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. The poison had been discovered in sedimentary bits inside her water bottle. Her fingertips were cut at the tip, and covered neatly with bandages.
“Any fingerprints on the knife?” I asked.
“Not in yet,” he said.
“Any records of who was out buying poison in town?” I asked. He said that was not his area. My team would report on that soon. Today they would scour all the nearby pharmacies, compiling records of purchase times.
The coroner is an upstanding fellow. He fought in Vietnam and raises orchids. I thanked him repeatedly but he gets embarrassed by gratitude and hung up.
After ordering in a bowl of chicken soup and a sandwich, I spent several hours in the living room, sitting with the stain from his wound. It spread over the carpet in a curling line, as if he’d put his arm around her with his blood.
The reports came in around six PM. The wife’s middle finger and thumb prints were all over the knife handle, being the two unbandaged fingers, and the husband had bought the poison just four days before at the local pharmacy under his regular name. When I got on the phone and called back the silent people, they all, suddenly, spoke up. The two hated each other, they confessed. Hated enough to murder? I asked. They grunted toward a yes. By the end, said the friend, she would hardly talk to him anymore, and he took so many long frustrated walks that all the neighbors expected to see him pass by their window, head down, at least twice a day.
“We do not understand,” said a neighbor. “But we are not surprised.”
Now, here’s what got me. If it’s true that they killed each other, then she could not have known she was poisoned when she knifed him, as he had chosen a poison that is silent and causes no suffering, and he had hidden the bottle somewhere very difficult to find, as we had not yet found it. In fact, their greatest difference here was revealed through their choice of murder weapon, in that she wanted to make him suffer and be aware of her murderous inclinations, choosing the overt and physical technique, while he selected the secretive, one of the few methods available where she would die without fully realizing what was happening. He perhaps was more ashamed of his loathing, and also he did not want her to feel pain. Their greatest similarity, however, was revealed in their choice of occasion, since each seemed to have conceived of the exact month and moment of death fully independent of the other. Certainly that was something. Even with their differing methods, they still timed it in perfect unison. I could hardly get my mind around it. And I imagine that as they lay on the carpet next to each other, one bleeding from the gut, the other foaming from the mouth, they saw something meaningful and linked in the eyes of the other. The nature of hate is as elusive as love’s. I am just relieved they never had children.
Back to the dilemma of the spices. I finished my dinner and called up both their hairdressers, and spoke to one very unfriendly sibling, and no one had any interest in discussing these salt and pepper shakers, and in fact I could feel a stirring annoyance in the voices of the questioned, one which I am used to but still resent. I went home to shower, and spoke briefly with my girlfriend, who was half-asleep and seemed distracted, and only right before I dozed off in my own bed did a phone call come in and tell me that the missing bottle of poison had been discovered in the chef’s quarters, underneath her bathroom sink. “Has anyone questioned her?” asked my boss, and I coughed in embarrassment. I had tried repeatedly to contact her, but she had taken off several days to grieve, and was returning for the first time