I woke in a stupor to the sounds of pounding and ringing. I sat up in bed and assessed what I heard. Was it was real or was it from a dream? I decided it was a real person who was determined to get my attention no matter what the damage to my bell, the banger’s fist or my door. Based on their persistence and the volume of noise, my first thought was fire.
I grabbed my glasses, put on my running shorts and bolted for the front door. When I opened it, I almost ran into a uniformed police officer.
“Where’s the fire?” I asked. “I don’t smell any smoke.”
The officer was one I hadn’t seen before. He looked like a High School senior. “Mr. Fried?”
“Yeah?”
“Detective Torres wants to see you. You’re to come with me, sir.” He pointed inside my house, “but first, let’s go in and get you dressed.”
I turned and went back into the house. The officer followed me.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Just after midnight, sir.”
”Where’re we going?”
“The hospital, sir.”
When he said “hospital”, I must have turned white. I turned on him and grabbed his shoulder. “Mariel? My wife?”
”Oh, no sir. The Detective wants to see you about a case. Sorry if I shook you up. Let’s get you dressed now. The Detective doesn’t like to wait.”
I went to my bedroom to dress but the sudden awakening and the possibility of Mariel being hurt left me shaky. I had to sit a moment. The soreness in my arm and side from being knocked to the ground didn’t help any. Somehow, I managed to put in my contact lenses and get dressed. I stepped back into my living room where the officer had been waiting on my couch.
“OK. I’m ready.” By now, I was alert enough to ask, “What case?”
“Sorry, I can’t say. sir.”
“You don’t know or you can’t tell me?”
“Yes, sir.”
He was young, but I could see I wasn’t going to get any more information until I got to Torres. The officer got up and we walked to his cruiser in my driveway. He had to wait a moment to back out while a blue car drove down the street. I watched it pull into Ralph’s garage and then we were on our way. Except for periodic squawks from the police radio, we rode in silence up Saxon Drive to Third Avenue.
A left turn over the South Causeway and we were on the mainland. At the foot of the bridge, he pulled into the lot at the Bert Fish Medical Center. I always thought it was an odd thing to call a hospital on the water. I eventually got curious enough to learn they named the place for a philanthropic Judge.
The officer pulled up in front of the main door and parked at the curb. He locked the car and we entered the building, navigating the maze of halls and the islands of nurse’s stations. I followed him for about five minutes until we came to a waiting area. He pointed to the assembled chairs and sofas. “Have a seat. I’ll tell the Detective you’re here.”
It was a typical waiting room complete with places to sit, magazine covered coffee tables and coffee covered magazines, so I sat down and waited. Across the room, alcove really, a thirty something woman sat on one of the couches. She read a paperback while a young girl faced her and danced from side to side with her hands on the woman’s crossed knee.
I examined the magazines but none appealed to me. CNN ran silently on a TV hanging from the ceiling, while the closed captioning fought the screen-bottom news scroll for clarity. If she was awake, Mariel was probably watching now, flipping back and forth to MSNBC or maybe to the local channel 13 news.
I waited some more and then after that, I waited again until Torres appeared. When he did, I stood up. By now, the girl had the woman reaching into her purse for something.
“Sit down, Mr. Fried.”
I sat down. The High Schooler cop came in and stood silently by the waiting room entrance.
Torres asked me. “Do you know why you’re here?”
I looked up at him. “The last time a cop asked me if I knew why he did something, I got a speeding ticket. I don’t like to guess.”
“I just left Ben Horton’s room. Someone tried to kill him and you were the last person to see him.”
I didn’t expect that. I decided to sit down and then realized I already had. “What happened? You don’t really expect that I… me…”
“Please, just answer the question. In any event, I need to know what you discussed with Horton. If you’re cooperative, I’d be more inclined to think you didn’t do it.”
I thought about that while I watched the girl standing on her toes feeding money into a vending machine. “OK. We talked about Ray Kenwood.”
“Anything else?”
“No. Ed passed everything we discussed onto the D. A. I thought that information was the basis for you guys picking him up for questioning. What happened?”
“We sent a car to get him at home. When the officers got there, no answer. They looked in a window, saw Horton on the floor. They broke in, found him in anaphylactic shock. Horton was gasping something about a black leather case in the kitchen. One of the men found the case with a hypo in it. He used it to shoot Horton with epinephrine. When the paramedics arrived, they said that shot saved his life. He’s been recovering here for a few hours. I just talked with him.”
The girl left the vending machine with a bag of nuts and sat down beside the woman. “Sounds like a peanut allergy.” I said.
“You knew that. Very good. Now, you can see why you make such a good prospect.”
“Lots of people know about anaphylactic shock, peanuts and epinephrine. Why do you think peanut warnings are on so many food labels? More importantly, why did Horton eat peanuts? If he had the syringe, he must have known he had the allergy.”
“We’re checking that now. The crew at the scene thinks some one may have crushed peanuts into Horton’s Cheese Doodles.”
“Cheese Doodles? Death by Doodles? Why do they think that?”
“The TV was on. There was an open bag of Cheese Doodles on the floor by his lounge chair and his fingers were orange. It’s possible someone snuck in while Horton was away and sprinkled crushed peanuts or put some peanut oil in his Cheese Doodles bag. We found one of those bag clips by the lounge chair. It looks like he was eating from a previously opened bag.”
“His attacker would have had to know Horton has this allergy and that it was severe enough to kill him. Any signs of entry?”
“It looks like one of the windows was recently replaced. The putty is still fresh. We think someone broke a window to get in and then replaced it to avoid detection.”
“How come Horton didn’t inject himself?”
“His syringe was in the kitchen, he was in the TV room. Too far to go with such a severe reaction. I’m guessing since he was in his own home, eating his own bag of previously consumed food he just got careless. Either that or somebody moved it where he couldn’t get to it.”
“Wow. Someone went to a lot of trouble to get Horton out of the way. I’d like to know why.”
“Yeah? Me too. Well, I guess I’ve got all I’m going to get out of you. Go back to bed. You look like hell.” As Torres walked away, he waved to the officer who brought me here. “Take him home.”