The Poisoned Pawn Read online

  “I’d forgotten you owned a pharmacy, Mr. Kelly.”

  “Please, call me Walter. Everyone does. Yes, we’ve had it for years. ‘Your Friendly Neighbourhood Pharmacy,’ that’s our motto. But we’re closing it down soon, getting ready to retire. This business with our daughter really hit us hard. And retail is getting tougher all the time. That Superstore on Richmond Road almost killed us.”

  “I can imagine how difficult that must be. Not to mention the shock of what happened to your daughter. Again, I’m so sorry. It must be very hard for you both, particularly coming so close to Christmas.”

  “It’s everything, Celia. There was a time when we enjoyed working in the drugstore. Now it’s become a chore. We’re hoping to sell the business, maybe leave Ottawa altogether. We’re thinking of going somewhere warmer. Like Florida.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear that. I drive by your drugstore all the time. Now I’ll have an excuse to stop in to say hello. At least while you’re still there.”

  She smiled at the kindly old man. She removed a turquoise silk top, a beige skirt, and a pair of silver sandals from the box. A woman’s bra, size 36C. Underpants, polyester, pink, medium. A book, The Taming of the Shrew.

  She was unzipping the green Roots bag when a woman shouted from upstairs. “Who was that at the door, Walter? Has that asshole son-in-law of ours OD’d yet?”

  Jones jumped, a little startled. The indomitable Mrs. Kelly, no doubt. The “untamed” shrew.

  “Someone from the Rideau Police, dear. She’s still here.”

  June Kelly clumped down the stairs. Celia Jones looked from husband to wife and back again. No information about Mike’s suicide attempt had been released to the public. No mention of drugs or an overdose. There was no way that June Kelly should have known anything about it.

  No visitors all day. Except for a prescription delivered about an hour ago.

  “She’s not here about that, June,” Kelly said, and Jones heard the warning in his voice. “She came to return Hillary’s things.”

  Jones stood up slowly. She pretended to look out the window. “You know, I think I should maybe leave. You’re right; that is a bad storm moving in. Traffic looks snarled. My husband is expecting me for dinner. He’s cooking tonight. I’m supposed to pick up the wine. It looks like all of Hillary’s things are here.”

  She kept her back to the counter. Kelly still had the linoleum knife. He was gripping it a little too tightly for her liking. He didn’t look quite as kindly anymore.

  “Aw, shit,” said June Kelly. “You should have said something, Walter. We can’t let her go. Now she knows.”

  Jones looked again at the glass bottles on the counter, saw the small black skull and crossbones on the labels. The Kellys were the residual beneficiaries under the insurance policy. They would get the two-million-dollar payout if the principal beneficiaries, Mike and Hillary Ellis, died.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” said Jones. “You poisoned Mike. The medication that was delivered today was from your pharmacy. You put something in it.”

  Walter Kelly narrowed his eyes and gripped the knife tightly. “There must be a syringe around here somewhere, June. You go find one for me, alright? A hundred-cc needle should do it. That’s enough to cause an embolism.”

  June Kelly nodded and made her way back up the stairs as her husband extended the blade.

  FORTY - NINE

  Ricardo is good, thought Hector Apiro. He had picked up Ramirez’s message after Maria left, and made his way to the exhibit room.

  He found the green plastic disk taped to the bottom of Rita Martinez’s desk drawer: a package of birth control pills, with several pills missing.

  Apiro now stood in the laboratory, the contents of the mini-bar in Room 612 at the Parque Ciudad Hotel lined up in neat rows along the counter. He started with the bottled water as Ramirez had suggested.

  He dusted each bottle for prints but found only smudges, nothing useful. He was almost relieved. Elimination prints would have been problematic. Probably dozens of tourists had pulled bottles in and out of that mini-bar as they considered their selection. The maids would have moved things around each day as they replaced missing bottles.

  For the next half-hour, Apiro checked each bottle of water carefully, using the tests he had available. He found nothing out of the ordinary in any of them. They seemed to contain only water.

  That left the beer, the cans of Coke, the orange juice, and the rum.

  He opened a bottle of Havana Club and used a pipette to extract a drop, which he put in a test tube. He applied various reagents as well as metallic sodium and watched the fluids react.

  By the time Apiro was finished his tests, he was certain that the small brown bottles of rum held something besides alcohol. It would take hours to be sure, but given the circumstances, he felt sure it was fluoroacetate.

  Apiro sat down on a stool and lit his pipe.

  Why would Michael Ellis bother to put poisoned birth control pills in the bottles of rum in the mini-bar when his wife would have died simply by taking her medication as prescribed?

  Perhaps Ramirez was right and Ellis wanted to make sure of her death by finding more than one mechanism to kill her. But Apiro had never liked the concept of overkill.

  Why poison the rum at all?

  Water, Apiro could understand, but there was nothing in the Canadian tests that pointed to Hillary Ellis having any dependence on alcohol. Her liver wasn’t fatty, and her enzyme levels were normal.

  He shook his head. It made no sense. Something was wrong.

  According to the medical reports provided by Celia Jones to Ramirez when he was investigating Ellis for Arturo’s murder, Señor Ellis was infertile. Then why was his wife taking birth control pills?

  Apiro spread out the various test results from the three dead women. He lined them up in rows as if they were cards in a game of solitaire: two red queens, one black. He scanned down the pages and then across them, comparing results.

  His eyes stopped on one test from the blood samples the Canadian medical authorities had removed from Hillary Ellis’s remains.

  A woman on birth control pills should have a decreased level of follicle-stimulating hormone, or FSH. Unless, of course, she was menopausal, which would result in higher levels of FSH than normal.

  At only thirty-nine years of age, Hillary Ellis was unlikely to be going through menopause. The Canadians had tested her blood and urine for FSH, perhaps to rule out adrenal disease or disorders of the hypothalamus. But her FSH levels were normal. She definitely wasn’t taking birth control pills, then, thought Apiro. And she hadn’t for some time—at least four to eight weeks.

  He put his pipe in the glass ashtray and pulled his latex gloves back on. He walked over to the counter and picked up the plastic envelope in which he had placed the package of birth control pills.

  He opened the envelope and turned the package over. The label on the back was from a pharmacy in Ottawa. Kelly’s Pharmacy. The drugs were dispensed in Hillary Ellis’s name.

  Apiro shook his head, puzzled. Señora Ellis had a prescription for birth control pills that she took all the way to Cuba but never used. Did she know her husband’s pencil had no lead? If so, why bother?

  Apiro sat down once more to think about this. He drew on his pipe again, watching the smoke float to the ceiling.

  According to the hotel records, the maids had replaced only one tiny bottle of rum during Nicole Caron’s stay in Room 612. Apiro picked up the test results from Caron’s tissue samples and reviewed them again.

  She had a very low level of blood alcohol, not enough to be intoxicated. But it meant she had consumed at least one alcoholic drink. The maids had replaced the empty bottle of rum at two in the afternoon, less than an hour after Nicole Caron collapsed on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.

  A free afternoon in Havana, thought Apiro. A hot day, a cold drink. But that one small bottle could have held enough fluoroacetate to kill a village.

&nb
sp; Ramirez had it backwards, Apiro suddenly realized. Michael Ellis hadn’t murdered his wife; Hillary Ellis had tried to kill him.

  Michael Ellis didn’t drink water when he was in Cuba, he drank rum. A good two bottles of it in the bar on Christmas Eve after his wife left him alone in Old Havana. He was the one with the drinking problem, not her.

  She had knowingly brought the poisoned pills into Cuba. It made sense, now that Apiro thought about it. Señor Ellis would not have hidden birth control pills in his wife’s luggage; Customs officials might have asked her questions about them. Besides, they were prescribed in her name. No, she must have brought them herself, knowing full well what they were. That was the only way to explain it.

  She had put the fluoroacetate in the rum in the mini-bar after she returned to their room to pack, anticipating that her husband would start drinking when he returned. But he went out that night to get drunk instead. He was taken into custody the next morning in connection with the death of Arturo Montenegro. Those two events—his going out to drink and his arrest—had saved his life.

  Apiro had to reach Ramirez.

  He hopped over to the phone on the wall. He dialed the number he had used previously, but Ramirez had already checked out of the Chateau Laurier. There was no answer on Celia Jones’s cell phone either.

  He tried to think where else he could try. Then he remembered that Ramirez had phoned him once from Chief O’Malley’s office, a call that Sophia had transferred to the morgue. He called the switchboard and asked the operator if she could kindly locate the Canadian police chief’s number and patch him through directly as the matter was urgent.

  Chief O’Malley answered on the second ring.

  “Forgive me for interrupting you, Chief O’Malley. My name is Hector Apiro. I’m the pathologist with the Major Crimes Unit in Havana. Is it possible for me to speak to Inspector Ramirez before he leaves for his flight?”

  “He may still be here, Doctor. If so, he won’t be for long. I’ll transfer your call. If no one answers, then I’m afraid he’s already gone.”

  When the phone rang, Andrew Britton picked it up. He handed it to Ramirez. Apiro filled Ramirez in while Britton fidgeted.

  “That is very interesting, Hector. Was the prescription issued in her name?”

  “Yes,” Apiro said. “Dispensed by Kelly’s Pharmacy in Ottawa. And Ricardo, a pharmacist would be able to get fluoroacetate easily. It would be almost impossible for someone else to insert pills into that plastic case without breaking it. They’re designed to be tamper-proof. To keep children from being poisoned.”

  Kelly. Ramirez had heard that name before. But where?

  He put the phone down and signed the affidavit without reading it. Andrew Britton witnessed his signature and crimped the document with a round metal notary seal, imprinting his name in raised letters.

  “Thank you very much, Señor Britton,” Ramirez said. “I appreciate that you stayed behind to take care of this.”

  “I have to go back to the office tonight anyway, Inspector Ramirez. The weather’s too bad right now to take a chance on the Queensway,” the prosecutor said as he stood up. “I don’t think we’re going to get very far with the charges against Mike Ellis. Just so you know. But at least that travel advisory wasn’t issued.”

  “That’s a relief, trust me,” said Ramirez. “Please, let me help you gather your papers.”

  He pulled the Crown attorney’s documents towards him. As he did, some fell from the desk to the floor. When Britton bent down to pick them up, he lost sight of Ramirez momentarily. Ramirez felt guilty for a moment as he palmed the notary seal, but that was probably his Catholic upbringing.

  “Again, thank you for your help, Mr. Britton. I’m sorry if I did something wrong under your laws. In my country, it would not have been a problem.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Like Celia said, it’s not your fault. We’ll find a way to get Ellis. I hope your flight doesn’t get grounded by bad weather. That snow is getting worse. Have a good flight back to Havana. Day like this, I wish I was going with you.”

  Britton closed his briefcase and shook Ramirez’s hand. The two men walked down the hall to the elevators, where Corporal Tremblay and his prisoner waited with Charlie Pike.

  “Chief O’Malley asked me to arrange a ride to the airport for the two of you,” Pike said to Ramirez. “The weather is getting pretty bad. I was thinking maybe I’ll take you there myself. My truck can get through just about anything, and I have a cherry— that’s a portable flashing red light—and a siren if we need it.”

  “That would be very helpful, thank you.”

  Ramirez handed Yves Tremblay the notarized statement. It had felt strange to swear a document on the Bible, to the Christian God, after all the messengers Eshu had sent Ramirez’s way. But then again, the document wasn’t true, which was something that Eshu might find amusing.

  What was it Francesca had said about The Beggar’s Opera? Ramirez cast his mind back, trying to recall. That she wouldn’t believe they were really going to the opera until she heard the Peachums plot to kill their son-in-law for his money.

  “Corporal Tremblay, I need to speak with Chief O’Malley briefly before I take custody of the prisoner,” said Ramirez. “Can you stay a few minutes longer? I do apologize for making you wait.”

  Tremblay nodded unhappily. His working day was supposed to be long over. Ramirez could see through the windows how the traffic had slowed to a near standstill. Cars crawled forward a foot at a time.

  “I promise, this won’t take long.” Ramirez walked the few steps down the hall to the police chief’s office. Clare Adams was putting on her coat and gloves.

  “May I see Chief O’Malley for a moment before I leave?”

  “He’s getting ready to go home, but I’m sure he won’t mind,” she smiled. “Go ahead, Inspector.”

  Ramirez poked his head through the door. “Excuse me for disturbing you, Chief O’Malley, but what was the last name of Hillary Ellis’s mother?”

  “Kelly,” said O’Malley. He pulled on a dark-green parka with grey fur around the hood, then took a black toque out of the pocket and pulled it over his ears.

  “Do you know if she owns a drugstore?”

  “The family does. Why do you ask?”

  “Chief O’Malley, I think your patrol officers may want to treat Señor Ellis’s home as a crime scene. Someone from your technical services should check the pills in that prescription bottle of his to see what they really are. They should be extremely careful how they handle them. If the bottle contains what I think it does, it could be lethal.”

  “What’s going on here, Inspector?” O’Malley frowned.

  “I’ve just spoken to our pathologist, Hector Apiro.”

  “Yes, he called here. I put him through.”

  “Well, Dr. Apiro thinks that Hillary Ellis poisoned the rum in the hotel mini-bar. She planned to murder her husband. Señor Ellis has a serious drinking problem. She probably expected him to start drinking as soon as she was gone. But he went out to get drunk instead, and we arrested him the next morning. By the time he was released from custody, he was determined to quit drinking altogether. Nicole Caron checked into Room 612 on the same day that Señor Ellis checked out. She drank rum from the mini-bar. She died shortly after.”

  “My God,” said O’Malley, astonished. “But if Hillary Ellis was trying to murder Michael, then who the hell killed her?”

  “She may have poisoned herself by handling the pills. The drug is highly toxic; it could have been absorbed through her skin. Or the test results could be wrong. But the birth control pills were obtained from Kelly’s Pharmacy; that’s clear from the label. Dr. Apiro says Señora Ellis could not have tampered with the pills herself; the packaging was intact. Fluoroacetate is hard to find, so she had to have help. The logical person is her mother.”

  “She was certainly quick enough to blame Michael for her daughter’s death,” said O’Malley, shaking his head. “I thought she wa
s crazy when she went running to the media. But I suppose that could have been a smokescreen. Something to distract us.”

  Ramirez nodded. “Something else troubles me. I had assumed that Señor Ellis had his wife’s body cremated to hide the fact that she died from a rare poison. But he was in Havana when that decision was made. It was Dr. Apiro who pointed out to me that cremation made no sense if the family itself was alleging murder.”

  “It was the mother who demanded cremation,” said O’Malley. “Michael didn’t even know about Hillary’s death. The General Hospital dealt with her when they couldn’t find him.”

  “I think Señora Kelly conspired with her daughter to murder Señor Ellis in Havana. And I think she tried to kill him again today by putting fluoroacetate in the prescription that was delivered to his door this afternoon. With everything that’s happened, the first assumption would be suicide.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said O’Malley, slapping his forehead. “Celia went over to their address about an hour ago to drop off Hillary’s belongings.” He dialed her cell phone number. “I’m only getting her voice mail, but you heard her: she said she was going to keep her cell phone on.” He tried Jones’s home number. “No, nothing important, Alex. Just wondered if she’d made it home yet. … Yes, I know. Probably the snow.”

  He put down the phone. “I need to get someone over to the Kellys’ right away to check on Celia’s welfare. Sometimes she’s too goddamn smart for her own good.”

  “Nothing’s going to be moving very fast in this weather, Chief,” said Charlie Pike, appearing at the door. “Dispatch says all the squad cars are tied up at accidents. Celia’s probably stuck in traffic somewhere and can’t answer the phone. I’m sure she’s fine. But I can stop by the Kellys’ when I’m taking Rick and the prisoner to the airport and check on things. It’s not too far out of the way.”

  FIFTY

  “You really don’t want to do this, Walter.” The words sounded lame coming out of Jones’s mouth. From the look on Walter Kelly’s face, he really did. June Kelly re-entered the kitchen gripping a long syringe.