She stopped in the hallway, hands on her hips. “Are you waiting to see if I panic or faint or something?” she asked, not wanting to admit that part of her was afraid of doing exactly that.
He laughed. “A little. We don’t often have visitors here, and especially not pretty girls. I have to find my entertainment where I can since I’m going to be working past midnight tonight.”
“Busy day in the morgue?” Leo asked, his cheerful tone at odds with the dark implications of his questions.
The coroner’s smile was tight. “Ever since they passed the Eighteenth, there’s always someone on the wrong side of a mob boss or a jumpy cop or a bottle full of moonshine. And the wrong side of any of those things means you turn up here. But they won’t give me more men or more funding, because I don’t toe any kind of party line. It’s always a busy day in the morgue. So, like I said, I have five minutes, and only three of them are left.” He looked at Vivian again. “Are you coming in?”
She took a deep breath and stepped into the lab.
It was cold. One wall had shelves from floor to ceiling, each one crowded with equipment: glass bottles, rubber tubes, stands and clamps and other things she couldn’t begin to imagine the names of. Another was full of bookcases holding more books than Vivian had seen in one place in her life. Some were as thick as two fists placed end to end. Others, in long lines with matching spines, looked more like sets of magazines. The third wall, across from the door, was end-to-end cabinets, their glass doors displaying hundreds of bottles and boxes, each carefully labeled.
In the middle of the room was a long metal table with a white sheet to cover the ridges and contours of what was clearly a corpse.
Vivian shivered, then turned to the coroner, who was watching her with quietly smiling expectation. She swallowed, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in her stomach as she realized what it must mean that they were in the lab and not his office.
She had thought, when she suggested this, that it would make things easier. She couldn’t bring Pearlie back, couldn’t save the Henrys the pain of losing him. But putting Bea’s fears to rest—that much she could try to do.
She hadn’t really believed anyone wanted Pearlie dead, not even after she had seen the empty spot where he had hidden his money. Folks spent money all the time, even when they said they were going to save it for something important. Maybe he’d had debts he couldn’t escape. Maybe he’d been robbed. Maybe he’d just gone out drinking or gambling and wasted it all and was ashamed, and losing the money he’d worked so hard to get had been enough to push him over that edge.
There were a hundred maybes to choose from. But now…
“I’m guessing if you’re keeping the bottle in here, you don’t want anyone accidentally drinking it after all,” Vivian said, pleased when her voice came out with its normal saucy lilt and none of the sudden panic she was feeling.
The medical examiner laughed at her lack of distress. “Right first guess, young lady.” Vivian felt as if her stomach had taken a sudden, nauseating drop. But she kept her fear hidden as he continued. “It only took one test to show that the brandy in that bottle was laced with arsenic. And not in a way that would build up and kill someone slowly and carefully, either.”
“What do you mean, slowly and carefully?” Leo asked, frowning.
The coroner tugged on his coat to adjust the shoulders. “Arsenic is a metal. Given in very small doses over time, it will build up in the body. The victim gets sick slowly, maybe has stomach pains every once in a while, and then eventually, poof, dead. It’s horrible but looks natural enough, so unless there’s a reason to get a coroner involved,they can get away with it, too. Poor bastard just seems like he’s getting sicker and sicker over time and then suddenly drops dead all on his own.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Vivian blurted out, unable to keep silent even though she wanted to appear cool and unaffected.
“Sorry,” the coroner said, grimacing a little. He looked genuinely apologetic as he shook his head. “I’m usually talking to folks who are in the same line of work when poisons come up.”
“But that’s not what happened here, right?” Leo said quickly, looking ill himself. Leo’s work as a supplier would have taken him into all sorts of illegal business, and Vivian wouldn’t have been surprised to know that he’d had a hand in a death or two, though he had never admitted it, even when she’d asked. But he was a straightforward guy who used his fists and, occasionally, the revolver tucked in his waistband. Poison wasn’t in his line at all.
“No.” The coroner shook his head again. “Whoever prepped that brandy just dumped the stuff in there. If someone drank it, I can’t imagine they lived through the night.”
“So what happens now?” Vivian asked, hating the quiet, unsteady way that the words came out. But she couldn’t help it.
Bea was right. Pearlie had been murdered.
The coroner rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, where the shadow of a beard was beginning to appear under his skin. “Well, that depends. Mr. Green here only told me that he needed a favor for a friend. There have been three arsenic deaths here in the last two weeks. One was a straightforward murder”—the calm way he said that made Vivian shudder, but either he didn’t notice or didn’t care—“very poorly done; a fellow from Brooklyn poisoned his brother after they got into a fight over their family’s business. And this isn’t evidence from that, or you wouldn’t be the ones bringing it in. So.” He fixed first Vivian then Leo with a stern look. “Are you going to tell me which of the two suicides we’ve got on file might actually be murder?”
Vivian looked at Leo, but he was watching her impassively, waiting for her decision.
On the one hand, if Pearlie had been murdered, they couldn’t just ignore that.
On the other hand, if he had been involved in mob business, who knew what the police would uncover. Bea’s work put her on the wrong side of the law nearly every night. Or what if the boss he’d been working for didn’t like the attention and came after the Henrys?
She couldn’t decide without talking to Bea first.
She had no idea how to say that to the man in front of her. But apparently her silence had gone on long enough to speak for itself.
“That wasn’t part of the deal,” Leo said. He sounded cheerful enough, but the glance he gave Vivian as he checked to see whether she wanted to say anything more was wary. She swallowed nervously and shook her head.
“Our deal was that I do you a favor,” the medical examiner replied testily. “I could always tell your uncle about it, and I don’t think he’d be happy.”
“Calling him my uncle is a stretch,” Leo said, still cheerful, but there was something cold in his voice. “As he’d be the first to tell you. And then he’d be unhappy with me, and I wouldn’t be able to warn you when he has some new bee in his bonnet that you should know about.”
