Mallets Aforethought by Sarah Graves

Author:Sarah Graves
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: mystery, cozy, women sleuths
ISBN: 9780553585773
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2004-03-02T04:12:32+00:00

“Rat poison really only comes in two varieties,” said Victor an hour later.

I already knew this. But I’d asked him over here to get some information from him, and when you want information from Victor you have to listen to what he wants to say, first.

And at the moment due to recent local events he was hot on poisons. “You’ve got your coumarin-based compounds, warfarin, the blood thinners. Animal leaves the premises searching for water. Dies outdoors.”

He had another swallow of wine. “Then there are convulsants. Strychnine’s one. You’ve got to catch ’em within minutes of their ingesting the substance. People, the accidental poisoning cases, I mean.”

More old news. But he was getting up a head of instructional steam. No sense knocking the train off the track.

“. . . Catch ’em fast, charcoal lavage. You pump a slurry of the charcoal into the gut, it absorbs some of the poison. Pump it out again, support all the vital signs meanwhile, maybe you’ve given yourself half a chance. But . . .”

He wagged a warning finger at me. Once upon a time if he’d done that I’d have bitten it off.

But he had been on a fairly decent run of behavior recently. So I just thought about biting it off.

“But it’s not often a strychnine victim even makes it that far. Strychnine gets absorbed fast,” he continued.

“Is there an antidote?”

He shook his head. “Treatment’s supportive. Anticonvulsant drugs, try to keep ’em alive until basically the stuff’s excreted and the effect wears off. Which,” he added, “is why it’s become a registry-only substance.”

I raised an eyebrow, which was all he ever needed. He moved along in his lecture, which was what I needed.

“The bottom line is, you’ve got to be registered to buy or use it,” he said. “But there used to be products you could buy.”

He refilled his glass. “I saw this case back in the city once, kid got hold of an old mole-bait from back in the fifties. Mole-Gone, I think it was called, and it was for putting into mole burrows in gardens and parks and so on.”

He frowned, remembering. “I guess it had been sitting in a cabinet for years and the kid just found it. The trouble was, the bait was made by mixing strychnine powder with peanut butter.”

He drank. “That was one we didn’t have a happy outcome on.”

When Sam was a small child he’d associated the skull and crossbones from poison labels with a cartoon character he enjoyed at the time, called Happy the Pirate. And when I learned of this I went a bit overboard in reindoctrinating him. As a result, for years he was terrified not only of pirates but also of parrots, eye-patches, hoop earrings, and anything else that buckled even the faintest swash.

Funny the things that pop into your head when you’re sitting with the only other person in the world who remembers them, too. Time to change the subject.

“Do you know Ginger Tolliver?” I asked.

Ginger was an attractive young woman who lived in the same time zone as Victor.

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