“Fascinating,” said Millie, still white-faced.
“Did you make the ampoules, or did Jim? No matter, they were made. And when your series of experiments was finished, you put the six remaining ampoules in the back of your refrigerator. When you found them missing, you knew Jim had taken them, and with what end in view. The murder of Thomas Tinkerman. You know Jim Hunter as only a devoted wife of many years can know a man, and you knew he’d kill Tinkerman. That’s why you reported the loss. To let Jim know that the cops knew all about this weird, untraceable poison — that they had been furnished with the lab techniques able to detect it. You thought that would stop him. But Tinkerman died of tetrodotoxin poisoning. After John Hall did. Now you understood what you had started, and desperately rued your action. If you’d kept silent, none of the tetrodotoxin deaths would have been discovered for what they are, and Jim wouldn’t be our main suspect. You do know he is?”
“Yes,” she said, mouth stiff. “But he didn’t steal my tetrodotoxin, and he didn’t kill any of these dead people.” Her eyes were dry, tearless. “Jim is innocent.”
“Then give me a name, Millie.”
“I can’t, Captain. I don’t know one. Except that someone stole the poison, and it wasn’t Jim, it wasn’t!”
“Would the word tetrodotoxin mean anything to an eavesdropper?”
“I very much doubt it, unless they were interested in animal poisons — snake and spider venom, that kind of thing.”
“Is there such a person in Chubb Biology?”
“Bound to be, but don’t know a name, and no one has ever visited me to enquire about tetrodotoxin.”
“Does Jim have any personnel working for a doctorate?”
Millie looked appalled. “Jim? Jim can’t teach, and he’s the world’s worst thesis supervisor. People go to him after they’ve done their doctorates. His doctoral fellows belong to his deputies and have about as much to do with Jim as the President does with his kitchen staff.”
“Interesting, that he can’t teach or supervise, yet he can write this great book for the layman. Isn’t that a contradiction?”
“Paper, Carmine, paper,” said Millie, smiling at some private memory. “What Jim can do on paper cannot be translated to the flesh. Besides, the book is his own output, it’s a part of his persona. Doctoral theses are lead weights tied around his neck.”
“You mean, I think, that his entire world from government grants to dean to wife conspire to spoil and indulge Jim Hunter. If he doesn’t like to do it, he doesn’t have to do it.”
A statement that made Millie laugh aloud. “You may have some basis in fact, Carmine, but you’ve exaggerated. Right at this moment I have a very rebellious husband indeed. He thought book publicity would entail a couple of days in New York, but now he’s discovered it means taking a month off work for a nationwide tour. He is not pleased.”
“I can see why that wouldn’t please him, but here’s a question really bugs me — how does everyone know that A Helical God is going to be a bestseller?”
“As I understand it from his editor Fulvia Friedkin, it’s possible to predict the fate of non-fiction. The publisher can estimate how many copies a work of non-fiction will sell down to a very few. Whereas the fate of fiction is in the lap of the gods — no one can predict the sales of fiction. Weird, yet apparently true,” said Millie. “Jim is certain to sell in the hundreds of thousands, which is how come our living standard has suddenly risen.” She leaned forward, face earnest. “Carmine, I’m not getting any younger, and I want to start our own family. For the parents of so many girls, Mom and Dad are kinda short on grandchildren. As the eldest outside the walls of a nunnery, I want to remedy that.”
“I never did understand Lizzie’s vocation,” Carmine said, not averse to changing the subject.
“Considering how wild she was, nor did we,” Millie said with a laugh. “Nineteen, the world her oyster, and she enters the convent — the Carmelites, yet! Vows of silence, the works.”
“Well do I remember the fuss. How long has she been in now?”
“Seventeen years. But conventual living, even Carmelite, is pretty enlightened these days. Lizzie seems really happy.”
“I never saw a more beautiful girl. Silvestri in a totally feminine mold. She threw pure Cerutti.” Carmine sighed.
“I think Liz likes the peace and quiet.”
And so they left it.
Carmine dropped her back at her new house agog to continue with her renovations, and returned to County Services not much the wiser for a good lunch. It was true, however, that the O’Donnells had had a checkered career with their girls, none of whom fit any conventional ideal. Millie came closest in one respect, her science, but Annie, a pre-med student at Paracelsus College in the same year as her cousin Sophia, Carmine’s daughter, was a marked contrast to Millie. Annie was militant, aggressive and fanatically left-wing politically. Her fees were a big contributing factor to Patrick’s chronic shortage of funds, but she showed not one scrap of gratitude for her parents’ sacrifices. Not unnaturally, she and Sophia loathed each other, not helped by Sophia’s beauty, popularity — or wealth.