Free Christietown by Susan Kandel

roots, one by one, until they were gone.
    C HAPTER 1 2
    t was close to seven by the time I was done. The sun hadn’t gone down yet. It was too busy turning the clouds all sorts of crazy colors: cherry red, purple, tangerine. I watched, trans fixed, as the colors vanished into the darkening sky.
    Afterward, I took a long, hot shower—as long and hot as my plumbing would allow. After drying off and wrapping myself in my white terry-cloth robe, I took to my bed with an Agatha Christie novel.
    Appointment with Death.
    Hercule Poirot goes to Jerusalem for a much-needed vaca tion. It’s the little Belgian detective’s first night in the holy city. It’s hot, so he’s left the shutters open. The words drift into his room, out of the still desert air. The voice is male, nervous: “You see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”
    I closed the book. This wasn’t working. I wanted an escape from real life, not a reminder of it. Then I opened the book again because I had to know who did it.
    A family terrorized by a cruel and selfish mother. A schiz oid daughter tearing her napkins to shreds. A romance. And a trip to Petra, capital city of the ancient Nabataeans, to see the ruins surrounded by sandstone cliffs. There, in her tent, the evil mother meets up with a hypodermic syringe containing a fatal dose of digitoxin, derived from Digitalis purpurea .
    Foxglove.
    I sat up with a sudden realization.
    I had notes on this.
    Twenty minutes later, I was seated at my desk with my poison file.
    In more than half of Agatha Christie’s sixty-six novels, the corpse is a victim of poison. This was no accident. During World War I, Christie worked as a dispenser at the Red Cross hospital in her hometown of Torquay, where she learned every thing there was to know about the chemistry of murder.
    Foxglove was one of her old standbys. It appeared in her writings in the form of digitalis, digitoxin, digitalin, and the closely related strophanthin. Cyanide, strychnine, and arsenic were other favorites, but not nearly as accommodating. The digitalis family of drugs has been used for the treatment of heart disease for centuries. If you want to kill an elderly heart patient, it’s the way to go.
    Christie occasionally took liberties, like putting a packet of strophanthin in the victim’s gin and having said victim perish within minutes. Generally speaking, however, it is only when given by injection that foxglove-derived poisons work that quickly. When administered by mouth, death tends to occur more slowly. Symptoms—which include convulsions and vomiting—appear from one to twenty-four hours after ingestion, with death delayed for up to one to two weeks. But to give Christie her due, the margin of predictability when it comes to digitalis is extremely low. Anything can happen if the murderer
    mixes up a strong enough cocktail.
    I closed the file, then went back into the house.
    Who put foxglove in Liz’s medicine? When did they put it there? It could’ve been yesterday morning. It could’ve been two weeks ago. Was there any way to know for sure?
    It was after one when Gambino crawled into bed.
    “Liz is dead,” I said, still half asleep.
    “I heard,” he answered, wrapping me in his arms.
    “Also, Richard came early.”
    “I’m really sorry,” he replied.
    Sometime in the middle of the night, I had a bad dream I’d dreamed many times before. I’m behind the wheel of a car. I don’t know how to drive, but the car is moving forward, faster and faster. I’m flying up hills, racing around corners, plunging down embankments, but no matter what I do, I can’t make it stop. I woke up in a cold sweat and reached out for Gambino. He wasn’t there. I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face, then pulled on my robe and walked into the living room.
    Gambino was sitting on the couch with something in his hand.
    I could see the L.A. Sheriff ’s Department logo glowing in the dim light. Detective McAllister’s business