A New York Haunting: Pt. 08

"Not there? What do you mean?"

"Just that. The numbers on either side are there, but the jar for 821 is missing!"

"Are you certain?"

"Quite certain."

Frowning, Izzy rose and accompanied him back to the storeroom. They both stared at the spot where the specimen jar for case 821 should have been. Izzy pushed a few jars around in the vicinity, then shook his head. "Let me make some inquiries tomorrow. Perhaps it was placed somewhere else given the subject's celebrity. I'll send you a message when I know something."

On the train back across town, Anders brooded over the new developments. Was the absence of a specimen jar evidence of a nefarious plot? Without the tissue samples in that jar, there was no way to test for arsenic, let alone any other type of poison. His thoughts veered into wild speculation about a deliberate theft of the specimens and who might be behind it --- then he stopped, cautioning himself to wait for Izzy's report before jumping to conclusions.

He forced himself to study for a couple hours before retiring. But once abed, so agitated was he, sleep eluded him. Too distracted was he even to sling his juice.

When he at last succumbed to fatigue, he dreamed he was in Central Park at the base of Cleopatra's Needle which glowed an eerie green color like in Ondine's painting. Peter Van der Veen was calmly circling the obelisk --- stalking him, a revolver in his hand. Even as Anders moved to keep the stone monument between them, he shouted, "Your heart! Watch out! Your heart!" Then the echo of his shout was cut short by the explosion of a gunshot.

Chapter 33. THE SPECIMEN JAR

The following day on the wards, in clinic, and in lecture, Anders was on tenterhooks waiting for Izzy's message. What was he learning? Pray God he was being discreet in his inquiries! But no message arrived, and by the late afternoon, he began to contemplate telephoning the pathology department at Bellevue --- but he resisted the urge, not wanting to pester his friend.

No message had been received at the boardinghouse either. Sitting at the dinner table with the other boarders, he was vaguely attuned to the conversation around him. Mrs. Sullivan apparently had read a glowing review of the new musical comedy Florodora that had just opened at the Casino Theater and was eagerly questioning a pair of lodgers who had attended the show. Much chatter was there about the remarkable sextet of beauteous chorus girls featured in the production.

Idly, Anders wondered if Fulton Fordyce had attended the opening performance --- then his thoughts veered to Ondine. They had parted so abruptly three days ago after the hypnosis session that there had been no discussion at all as to the next step in their joint venture to exorcise Peter's ghost. He was keen to tell her of his preliminary findings at the morgue --- should he send her a message via her coachman Braddock?

Then he acknowledged to himself he hadn't anything concrete yet to share --- not until he knew the fate of the specimen jar. Yes --- he admitted it --- he was simply longing to see her again ... to hear her voice. Once more, he found himself wondering if she had detected the residue of his semen on her fingers.

Another restless night was followed by another tense morning at his duties. He debated rushing to Bellevue during lunch but knew there was insufficient time to make it across town and back without missing lecture.

It was while he was sitting in Dr. Weir's lecture on cesarean section that someone tapped his shoulder. Glancing up, Anders beheld in the aisle one of his classmates who whispered, "There's a messenger boy up there for you."

He slid out of his seat and silently bounded up the stairs to the door at the top of the auditorium. A skinny, uniformed boy stood there, staring wide-eyed at the anatomical diagram projected on the screen. Ushering the youngster back into the hall, he said, "I'm Anders Røkke. Do you have a message for me?"

"Yes, sir." He handed him an envelope.

After digging in his pocket for a tip, Anders dismissed him and tore open the message. It was from Izzy and read:

I have news. Come to the morgue when you can.

The rest of the afternoon crawled with the excruciating suspense. What had his friend discovered? Was it good news or bad news? Would he make it to the morgue before Izzy left for the day? Through the remainder of lecture, operating theater, and rounds, his mind raced in anticipation. When at last his work was done, he ran from Roosevelt Hospital to the El train station.

Arriving at the morgue shortly before 6 pm, he entered the antechamber to find Orville McGrady covering his typewriter in preparation for leaving for the evening. The orderly waved him through to the inner door.

Inside, autopsies were finished for the day, and two dieners were washing tables. Izzy was in the office, sitting at the microscope. Another resident writing at a desk glanced up with his entrance and nodded; Anders responded in kind.

Izzy looked up. "Ah, there you are! I was about to give up on you. I'm meeting Dr. Rosenblatt in a few minutes to review a case." Rising, he led the way to a counter along the side of the morgue.

"What did you discover?" Anders asked in a low voice.

"There is in fact a locked cabinet for sensitive specimens upstairs in the department, and there is a logbook associated with it. I was able to look at the logbook without alerting anyone to my interest in Van der Veen's case. His specimen jar is not in it --- nor was it ever. It appears that it did indeed vanish from the storeroom here."

Anders blinked.

Izzy nodded, eyes narrowed. "In view of the original reason for your inquiries, this development is certainly suspicious." He glanced around at the dieners before continuing, "But I do have some potentially good news. I reviewed the ledger for this storeroom and confirmed that specimens from his case had indeed been placed here originally. And here's the interesting part: two specimen jars were logged in for case 821."

"Two specimen jars?"

"Yes. The formaldehyde jar for the samples and a separate jar with the stomach contents."

Anders' eyes widened. Yes! The autopsy report had indeed indicated 110 cc of stomach contents had been collected! But usually they were discarded after quantification.

To his question on that point, Izzy replied, "Occasionally they're saved." He shrugged. "Maybe Dr. Jackson was considering the possibility of testing the tainted food hypothesis. In any case, I went back to the shelf and delved deeper among the other specimens, and lo and behold, I found the second jar! It had been pushed back --- across to the shelf facing the next aisle."

Izzy grinned at Anders' excited expression and opened a cabinet door above the counter. There inside stood a glass jar labeled A99-821.

"Damn!" Anders murmured.

"You can thank me later. Now I must run upstairs. Just be sure to put it somewhere safe when you're done."

In the wake of Izzy's departure, Anders stared at the jar for only a moment more before he stripped off his suit jacket and hung it up in the office. Returning, he took down the jar from the cabinet and held it up to examine the contents.

The bottom half-inch of the jar was filled with a thick, brown, paste-like substance intermixed with more solid lumps. After a year sitting at room temperature without a fixative, one would expect the stomach contents to have been reduced to a creamy slime of bacteria or to be overgrown with mold --- but neither was the case. The telltale lack of decay made his pulse accelerate, and he carefully carried the precious jar to the corner of the room where was located the morgue's chemistry station.

Here, he rolled up his sleeves and assembled the apparatus for performing the Marsh test for arsenic --- a flask connected to a horizontal glass tube. Opening the specimen jar, he used forceps to scoop out a sample of the sour-smelling substance. The brown paste appeared to be mostly dried blood, so he collected a portion of one of the lumps of apparent food. This he placed in the flask along with zinc granules.

Following the addition of sulfuric acid, the mixture began to briskly bubble --- tongues of a greenish-gray gas rose in the container and soon traveled down the horizontal tube. With a careful match applied to the open end of the tube, a small flame jetted forth.

Anders now selected a large fragment of a broken porcelain plate from a box on the shelf and with the forceps, held it at the tip of the flame. Pulse racing and breath stilled, he stared at the porcelain. Within a few seconds, a silver-colored metallic spot appeared on it, quickly expanding to plate the glossy white surface with a mirror-like coating as he rotated the shard in the flame.

His eyes gleamed in triumph, and he almost burst into a little jig. THE TEST WAS POSITIVE FOR ARSENIC! He had the proof! Peter Van der Veen had been murdered!

And someone had attempted to dispose of the evidence.

With this sobering thought, Anders immediately squelched his exultation and assumed a neutral expression, calmly disassembling the apparatus. Short of an exhumation (had Peter been buried or cremated?), the specimen jar was the only proof of the crime.

Confirming Izzy already gone, he debated what to do next. Should he go to the police? The coroner of New York City? The Marsh test would no doubt need to be repeated officially under the auspices of a staff pathologist. He must consult Izzy.

Recognizing the vital importance of this simple specimen jar, Anders racked his brain for a safe place to hide it. Nonchalantly, he headed into the storeroom. Closing the door behind him, he cast his eyes about the rows of shelves. He could not put it back where Izzy had found it --- it would be too easy to discover there by whomever had absconded with the first jar.

An idea struck him. He headed into the aisle with the 1895 cases and placed the jar behind that for autopsy A95-423 --- ninety-five for the year his father died, and 423 for his father's birthday, April 23.

Anders' thoughts were a tumult of elation and questions as he left Bellevue Hospital. Recalling the history of arsenic in green dyes, he pondered whether the arsenic was the reason Peter's ghostly form and semen appeared green. But no insight had he as to what degree the laws of chemistry applied to supernatural creatures.

Striding along the dark street towards the train station, he was possessed by a sudden sensation of being followed. But when he spun around, no one did he spy on the shadowed street. It was only the excitement of the case, he reasoned. No wonder he had the jumps. Nonetheless, his nervous eyes continued to dart about his surroundings until he was at last safe in his room at the boardinghouse.

*****

Anders stood beside his desk at the boardinghouse, staring down at his open notebook. With the startling developments in the investigation, he reconsidered the list of suspects.

- Hugo (lying in wait with his forged will)

- Jealous former suitor of Ondine?

- Jealous lady friend of Peter?

- Ondine's aunt +/- uncle

- Ondine

Whoever the murderer was, he or she not only needed to have had access to Peter's champagne glass but needed to have had knowledge of the existence of the autopsy specimen jar, as well as access to it. To cast a waiter at the reception as an accomplice was one thing, but to then postulate the existence of a second accomplice at Bellevue Hospital stretched credulity.

Although security at the morgue was not stringent, it was not nonexistent. Firstly, someone would need to know where to find the suite in the basement. Secondly, during working hours, the orderly Orville McGrady would be there to grant or deny access to the inner door. Certainly, members of the medical staff would be allowed in, but not random people off the street. Outside of working hours, when Orville was not at his desk, the inner door was locked, and no other means of entry was there.

For all the suspects, the feat of accessing the autopsy suite storeroom was unlikely, but not impossible --- bribes, blackmail, and forged keys all sprang to mind as possibilities.

Unless --- Anders' pulse quickened --- Ondine's brother Bram would have had the knowledge to accomplish the task.

He frowned. Bram was not even on his list. Nothing in Ondine's story suggested a motive for him to murder his friend, nor to aid the Cornelissens in doing so. Was it possible that Bram had secretly shared his aunt's and uncle's disapproval of the match? Even if so, murder was certainly an extreme solution. Or maybe his motive was unrelated to his sister.

Wait!

There was something in Bram's past --- Anders checked his notes --- Bram had described his indebtedness to Peter for having saved his life in some unsavory escapade. Could Peter have been blackmailing him over this incident?

He added the name Bram to his list. Perhaps Ondine had been mistaken about where her brother had been in relation to Peter's glass.

But to return to Mr. and Mrs. Cornelissen --- they no doubt had many connections throughout the city, maybe even among the staff at Bellevue. Perhaps they wouldn't have needed to enlist their nephew as an accomplice.

He regrouped and slowly flipped through the pages of his notes. It was difficult to know what to make of the coincident milder symptoms of intestinal distress experienced by two members of Peter's bachelor party. Both men had also been at the wedding reception according to the autopsy report --- were they the military officers? Had the murderer dosed their glasses as well, but with a smaller quantity of arsenic? Or, maybe this happening was merely an unrelated coincidence --- a red herring.

Despite his attempts to analyze the problem methodically, Anders became aware of a troubling idea intruding into his consciousness. His eyes came to rest upon a name on his list: Ondine. He was forced to admit the girl was familiar with medicine and had been meeting with the pathologist at the medical school to review cases. She might have known about the existence of autopsy specimen jars.

He shook his head. That was absurd. It was only because of Ondine's recovered memory that he had discovered the arsenic poisoning at all.

Shifting his attention back to the list, Anders reminded himself that notwithstanding the problem of multiple accomplices, he could not completely eliminate the first three suspects: Hugo, one of Ondine's former suitors, or a jealous lady friend of Peter. Somehow, he had to investigate these candidates.

The following day at Roosevelt Hospital, another messenger boy found him, this time in clinic, and gave him a note from Izzy:

What did you discover?

As the boy waited, Anders began composing a reply --- then recalled his troubling thought of yesterday. It was of course ridiculous to consider Ondine a suspect --- but the police might be inclined to take a narrower view of the case. Perhaps it was reasonable to wait before alerting Izzy, the police, and the coroner to the murder --- at least for a little while so he could gather more evidence.

He tore off the bottom half of the paper and wrote quickly. Instructing the messenger boy to hand it only to the coachman Braddock, he gave him a message for Ondine:

I have news.