Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross

Author:Amanda Cross [Cross, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-80210-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

It was almost morning when Kate opened the door to Reed, and for a moment, seeing each other, they remembered the reason for the party that had so abruptly ended and were glad in spite of everything.

But sooner or later they had to talk about it. “It’s quite a while,” Reed said, “since I watched a man die, though technically he wasn’t yet dead when the hospital carted him off. The appalling irony of it is that he had time to call out ‘aspirin,’ and there were God knows how many people in the room who could interpret that remark—I’ll explain it to you in a minute. I knew exactly what to do, we all did exactly the right thing, but the elevator stuck, the mucous membrane of the stomach began to erode very near to a major artery—talk about destiny. He’s dead. How much difference will that make in the whole University picture?”

“I’ve no idea. Does it really matter?”

“I think it might; I very strongly suspect that he was murdered.”

Kate stared at him. “But you’ve only just now said that given your presence, and lots of other factors, it was really only the most extraordinary bad luck that he died.”

“Perhaps you’re right. If I decide to run someone over with my car, injuring him sufficiently so that he will be out of commission for a good while, and by mistake I skid and kill him, would you or would you not call it murder?”

“Great Scot,” Kate said. She was, when really affected, likely to revert to the innocent ejaculations of her childhood. “What’s it all got to do with aspirin?”

“Like many other common medicines, aspirin is a poison to some people.”

“I never knew that. Aren’t Americans supposed to gulp down millions of aspirin tablets a year? ”

“They are not only supposed to; they do. Not to mention the aspirin they swallow in Alka-Seltzer, Coricidin, Pepto Bismol, and fifteen other household remedies you might care to mention. But to some people aspirin is a deadly poison. The moment it is absorbed by the bloodstream—and that doesn’t take very long, nor, which is more mysterious, does the amount of aspirin taken matter—an allergic person begins to suffer erosion of his mucous membrane. He feels dizzy and weak, he vomits—you saw before you a classic demonstration. There is, I now learn, more and more question whether aspirin ought, in fact, to be as readily available as it is.”

“What would they have done if they had got him in the hospital on time?”

“An interesting point we need now never really explore. Probably they would have wasted time doing blood tests, and so forth. They would probably suspect an ulcer or something of the sort. What is of special interest, however, is not only that there probably were many people in that room who knew Cudlipp was allergic to aspirin, but that I am still in the D.A.’s Office and able, therefore, to demand and get a certain amount of prompt action from the hospital.

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