After a few minutes of thought, I had a solution, but I had been smartass too often with Stanger, so I gave up.
It pleased him. “He brought home an identical ampule of distilled water, maybe making the switch of the contents in his office. Gets up in the night and switches the water for the insulin. She gets up in the morning and shoots water into her leg. Before he goes to the hospital, he goes into the bathroom, fishes the water ampule out of the wastebasket, takes the needle out of the sterilizer, draws the insulin out of the one he filched and shoots it down the sink, puts the genuine ampule in the wastebasket, rinses the needle and syringe, and puts it back into the sterilizer. On the way into town he could have stopped, crushed the ampule under his heel, and kicked the powdered glass into the dirt if he wanted to be real careful. I think he was careful, and patient. I think maybe he waited for a lot of years until the situation was just exactly right. I mean maybe you could stand living with a terrible old broad like that if you knew that someday, somehow, you were going to do it just right. Nice?”
“Lovely. And doesn’t leave you anyplace to go.”
“It’s the reason I was willing to lean a little bit toward suicide. Stew Sherman was a pretty right guy. And killing is sort of against everything a doctor learns in school and in his practice.”
“And what if somebody else figured it out too and trapped the doctor somehow into admitting it?”
“Strengthens the suicide solution.”
“Sure does.”
“And I couldn’t come up with a single motive for murder. His dying didn’t benefit anybody in any way, McGee.”
“Right back where we started?”
“I don’t know. Sure like to know why that Boughmer girl changed her mind so fast. Or who changed it for her. Isn’t she one sorry thing though? Just imagine what she’d look like if you stripped her down to the buff.”
“Please, Al.”
He chuckled. “When I was little, we had a scrawny little old female cat out at the place. Had some Persian in her, so she looked pretty good. Picked up some kind of mange one spring, and in maybe ten days every last living hair fell off that poor beast. Honest to God, you’d look at her and you wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. McGee, now I know that Helen is a sad, ugly, nervous woman, and I’m ashamed of myself, but if I can get to her when her mother can’t pull out of the line and block for her, I think I could scare that Helen so bad she just wouldn’t know what in the world she was telling me. Suppose I just do that. Tomorrow, if I can. What are you figuring on doing?”
“I might try to have a talk with Janice Holton and see if I guessed right about the boyfriend.”
“So what if you did?”
“It will prove it wasn’t somebody else instead of Tom Pike. So we can mark that part of the file closed.”
“Anything else?”
“Find out if I can why Hardahee brushed me off.”
“If he doesn’t want to see you, you’re not going to see him.”
“I can give it a try. By the way, how are your contacts in Southtown?”
“As good as anybody’s, which doesn’t mean much. You think there’s some Negra mixed up in this mess?”
“No. But Southtown supplies this city with cooks and maids and housekeepers and yard men. Waiters, waitresses, all kinds of manual labor. There can’t be much going on among the white middle classes that they don’t know about.”
“You know, I think about that a lot. If I could ever tap that source, I think I’d have fifty percent of my job licked. They hear a hell of a lot, see a lot, and guess the rest. Sometimes I get a little help. But not lately. Sure God not lately. Those movies that have Southren law officers in them give us a pretty bad smell, regardless of how you handle yourself. I try to level with them, but shit, they know as well as I do there’s two kinds of law here, two kinds of law practically everyplace. One of them kills a white man, they open the book to a different place from where a white man kills a Negra. Rape is a different kind of word there in Southtown too. Put it this way. A neighborhood where you got lots of garbage collection, good pavement, good water, good mail service, good streetlights, nice parks and playgrounds, rape and murder are great big dirty ugly scary words. Sorry, friend. None of them are on my side and I can’t think of a way to change it one bit.”