The Prodigal Son(92)

“Is he skilled with his hands, Millie?”

“Tremendously. We’ve lived in some awful dumps over the years — broken everythings. He taught himself carpentry, concrete work, plumbing, plastering. Electrical wiring was always left to me, I’m as skilled as any electrician. The thing is, he’s such a perfectionist that the bookshelves will look hand-carved — he found some beautiful molding he can glue on the edge of each shelf, so it really will look like a high class library. And Mario Cerutti gave him a wonderful old desk — you know, huge, lots of drawers, a great work surface, room for In and Out trays — Jim’s so orderly.”

Millie looked at the waitress. “I’ll have lobster bisque, a lobster roll, and thousand island dressing on my salad,” she said, smiling, idyllically happy.

“Double that,” Carmine said as the waitress poured coffee. He looked at her sternly. “Have you got a study, Millie?”



Scarlet flooded into her skin, she looked adorably confused. “Oh, Carmine, I hope not to need one,” she said. “I want a nursery and bedrooms for kids, a basement play den.”

“Sounds as if you’re buying.”

“Yes. Jim agreed the moment he walked through the door. A good price for a reasonably large house, Dad says. C.U.P. is going to give us our royalties as they’re earned instead of sitting on them for the customary twice-yearly payments. If they adhered to that, it would be more than another year before we saw any money at all.”

“Didn’t they give you an advance?” Carmine asked.

She looked hunted. “If they did, I wasn’t told, and Jim ploughed it into his work as usual.”

“That’s got to stop, Millie.”

“Yes, it must.”

Carmine let her eat; she was hungry enough to devour a parfait for dessert, and perpetually thirsty for coffee.

Finally he could delay the serious talk no longer.

“Millie, I need more about the tetrodotoxin,” he said.

Her light went out. “Oh. That.”

“Yes, that. I’m sorry to resurrect the misery, believe me I am, but enough time’s gone by for both of us to see it in a far different way than when you reported its loss. Why did you?”

“Why did I what?” she asked, looking bewildered.

“It won’t wash, Millie. You know as well as I do. What made you report the loss of this incredibly esoteric poison?”

“I wanted to do the right thing.”



“Maybe, but that wasn’t why you reported it. And reported it so cleverly. Not to me, but to your father, who you knew would pass the information on to me, thus sparing you yourself from a series of questions you might have had difficulty answering. It was imperative to make the cops aware that the stuff was out there in the community, yet you didn’t know enough yourself to feel confident you could survive an interview with me.”

Her laugh was forced. “My goodness, you make it sound as if I were party to a conspiracy,” she said, voice trembling.

“No, I don’t believe that,” Carmine countered. “I think your reasoning went more like this: Thomas Tinkerman, plus a surefire bestseller suppressed to feed Tinkerman’s ethics and egotism, plus a livid husband who could unstitch the mysteries of tetrodotoxin as easily as he can any other complex molecule.” Carmine paused, watching her intently.

She was absolutely white, but her chin was up and the eyes guarded. “Go on,” she said.

“Since your fifteenth birthdays, you and Jim have been as glued together as two layers in a laminate. By this time, you hardly need to talk in order to transmit information. And you had isolated a very rare substance from its natural source, the blowfish. It was a small triumph, maybe, but one of sufficient caliber to make your husband sit up and take notice. You’d done what few had managed, and the pair of you would have discussed your feat — pillow talk, Millie, that’s where conjugal confidences happen. Undoubtedly Jim was already aware what you were trying to do, and why. For you, it was a tool rather than an end in itself, but one that saved you grant money buying the stuff and represented a challenge to make. I’m sure the fish cost you a packet, but not as much as tetrodotoxin would have. And by making more than you needed, you could sell the remainder, make a profit. You can’t tell me Jim wasn’t interested.”

Millie looked wry. “There is a lot of pillow talk in our bed, Captain, but it’s entirely one-sided. Me! Jim’s head hits the pillow, and he’s asleep. The four hours after he goes to bed are his best sleep, as a matter of fact.”

“I don’t think you intended to make a lot,” Carmine went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “However, I’m going to speculate that you got your tank of blowfish cheaply, from a supplier to Japanese restaurants going out of business. Well, it’s not actually speculation, it’s the truth. Cops don’t twiddle their thumbs, they investigate everything. We prowl down all kinds of avenues, including what look like dead ends. So there you were, with a whole tank of blowfish that cost you next to nothing. Why waste them? Jim asked. Make some money, sell the leftovers! That’s why you reduced it to a powder — easier to cut, ask any cocaine dealer. A speck is easier to corral than a drop — smaller too.”