The Anatomy of Deception - Lawrence Goldstone [58]
Brass Buttons Borst made little effort to hide the fact that he believed himself to be investigating a conspiracy rather than an isolated death and, further, that he was likely in the company of two of the conspirators. “Once we discovered that we weren’t dealing with cholera,” he said after some preliminary questioning, “we broke the quarantine on Mr. Turk’s rooms. What do you think we found?” The smirk that accompanied the question left little doubt that it was meant to be rhetorical.
The Professor was quite capable of matching pugnacity when aroused. He turned his back on the sergeant and walked to the window. “Are you waiting for me to guess, Sergeant Borst?”
“Five thousand dollars. In cash.”
“Five thou …” I exclaimed. “In his rooms?” My cursory survey of the premises had apparently been severely lacking.
“Yep. Under the rug in the bedroom. He cut the nails out of one of the floorboards … left the nail heads in so it would lift up without being noticed … and then stuck a package with five thousand dollars in the hollow underneath. Lucky for him the mice didn’t get it.”
“I would hardly describe Dr. Turk as lucky, Sergeant,” said the Professor, still refusing to turn around.
Nor Mrs. Fasanti, I thought, for settling for two hundred dollars when she had walked across five thousand dollars every time she had to fetch Turk’s soiled chamber pots.
“Perhaps not,” acknowledged Sergeant Borst. “Still, where would a young doctor like Turk get that kind of money?”
The Professor finally deigned to face the policeman. “If you are asking me whether he could have come about it honestly through the practice of medicine, you know as well as I that the answer is no. If you are asking me if I had any idea of how he was obtaining it dishonestly, the answer is also no.”
“How about you, Dr. Carroll?” Borst asked, sizing me up as the more easily intimidated. “You have any idea what Turk was into? You was the one who tracked him down, wasn’t you?”
“I did not know him well,” I replied. “Turk was a remarkably secretive man. Until last week, I had never seen him outside of work. As you know, it was only by speaking to those we encountered on our evening out that I discovered where he actually resided.”
“Yes. One of those you encountered was Brigid O’Leary. You’re lucky to still have your teeth.”
“Brigid O’Leary?”
“I think she calls herself ‘Monique’… at least this week.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “She helped.”
“So, Doctors,” said Borst, raising himself up on his toes, “let’s see if I’ve got this right. One of you finds the body, even though nobody is supposed to know where this hospital doctor lives, getting help from a woman as handy with a knife as you are with a pillbox, then you decide to check to see if he was poisoned even though it looks like cholera, and when we look in his rooms, we turn up a small fortune, but nobody here knows anything about anything, is that what you’re saying?”
The Professor placed his fingertips on the desk and leaned forward. “Sergeant Borst,” he said with exaggerated patience, as if he were addressing someone who still believed in spontaneous generation, “you have done everything but accuse me and Carroll here of having some illicit involvement with Turk, either during his life or at the end of it. I will simply say to you that I am shocked that a member of the hospital staff has conducted himself in the manner that Turk apparently has. If, however, you do not find that statement satisfactory, I suggest you state your accusations plainly. If not, I have patients who are awaiting me.”
Borst stood fast. “Don’t be so sensitive, Doctor,” he replied with a challenging grin. “If—or when—I’m ready to accuse you, you won’t have to guess about it. There’s two ways that I can think of where’s a doctor can most easily make that much money on the side—drugs or illegal operations—and it’s a pretty trick to do five thousand dollars worth of either the way that this fellow did without no one knowing about it.”
“I cannot say that someone did not know about it,” retorted the Professor, “only that we did not