Uda made no effort to improve her appearance. She wore the same grey uniform dress, no make-up, scant reddish hair pulled back. Unprepossessing, yes, but also quite harmless looking. Benignly damaged. To Carmine, she seemed subtly more crippled than she used to be, but if it were an act, it was so well done that he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what and where the changes were. Maybe, he was forced to think, the strain of this whole business had worsened her naturally?
The office of the District Attorney ran a simple case that made no reference to any other murder than Emily Tunbull’s. The woman had died of a rare and almost undetectable poison, she was vaguely related through marriage to and in fairly close geographical proximity to the Defendant, who had both a full and an empty vial of the poison concealed on her premises. There was a long history of dissent between the Victim, the Defendant, and the Defendant’s twin sister, Mrs. Davina Tunbull. Only one ultimate source of the poison existed, a person known to all the Tunbulls, and therefore also to the Defendant.
Evidence was given by the Medical Examiner’s witnesses that Emily Tunbull had died of tetrodotoxin orally administered in a carafe of water that stood in clear view on a shelf in her sculpting studio, a shed in the backyard of her home. The padlock securing its door was one of seven similar padlocks having the same key. Therefore to enter the studio and add the poison to the water was not beyond the Defendant’s capabilities.
Millie was called to testify that she had manufactured the poison in her laboratory, and had reported the theft of a significant amount to her father, Holloman County’s Medical Examiner. Born teacher that she was, she explained tetrodotoxin to the jury on a simple, understandable level. Incredibly lethal!
Horrie Pinnerton didn’t try to implicate Uda or any Tunbull in the theft, preferring to concentrate on a mythical parcel of which the Defendant had no proof beyond a letter she said had been enclosed — but where was the parcel, its wrapping, the box lined in cotton wool? And if it had ever existed, why were the ampoules secreted inside paint tubes? He called Davina to testify to all this, and succeeded very well in making the story look manufactured by the intelligent sister to save the handicapped one — who was quite capable of efficiently running a busy household on behalf of her sister, a businesswoman with other interests.
Though no one had seen Uda Savovich put the poison in the water, it was an open-and-shut case, Horrie argued: Uda Savovich had the poison in her possession, and Emily Tunbull, a thorn in her and Davina’s sides had perished of that poison.
Anthony Bera proceeded to tear the D.A.’s case down. First he called Millie back to the stand and pressed her as to why, if tetrodotoxin was so lethal, she hadn’t locked her refrigerator? Her whole little laboratory, Millie said, composure and patience unrattled, was in effect one large safe, and kept rigidly locked. Even if she left it to go to the bathroom, she locked her door, which had a special key not available to cleaning or maintenance staff, who visited while she was in attendance. No, she had no technician, nor did her husband have a copy of her key. What kind of things did her laboratory contain besides tetrodotoxin that made this locking necessary? Concentrated acids and alkalis. Sodium thiopentone. Morphine. Several other neurotoxins: her work concerned the mechanisms capable of shutting the nervous system down. And no, nothing had ever disappeared until the theft of the tetrodotoxin. Shown the two ampoules in Uda’s possession, she flatly denied having made them, and was able to point out why she was so sure of that.
Bera didn’t call Uda. He called Davina, the intact twin. Who wore a plain black suit, a white blouse, and elegant, high-heeled black shoes. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she bore no resemblance to Medusa.
First Bera demolished what might have been Horrie’s comeback by ruthlessly examining Davina as to why she treated her sister like a servant, and had kept their blood relationship a secret. She didn’t look good at the end of it, but somehow it made a kinky kind of sense; the Savovich girls had lived through perilous times, and had concocted a dual persona that suited both of them.
Davina insisted that the parcel had been real, and that it had frightened them, given the deaths of two men from some rare poison that the accompanying letter said had also been sent to them — sufficient for two deaths. The open box had sat on Uda’s work table for several days, chiefly because Davina, to whom Uda looked for guidance, genuinely didn’t know what to do about it. Why hadn’t she notified the police the moment she had supervised Uda’s opening the box? Because they would look like murderers, Davina explained. The police had not considered them likely suspects, but if they produced this box and it did have poison in the ampoules, they would look guilty. But when Uda found one ampoule open and used, they panicked.