Bitter Almond

"Do either of you smell almonds?"

I said it quietly, still crouched on the threshold of the elevator, with my eyes on the dead woman's folded hands. Nobody answered at once. Somewhere below us a radio crackled and fell silent. Rain tapped on the roof of the shaft, and a drop of water, falling from a loose panel somewhere above the cage, struck the brass handrail with a small clear note, like a spoon on a glass.

"Almonds," said Leo.

"Bitter ones. Sharp. A sort of dry sweetness at the back of the nose."

He sniffed, loudly and conscientiously, like a bloodhound putting on a performance for the judges. I watched his nostrils flare. I watched his eyes go to the ceiling and come down again, and I knew the answer before he gave it.

"Formalin," he said. "That's the kit. Perfume. And Christ, somebody's been frying onions on the twelfth floor. That's all I've got, Doc."

"Dr. Frost?"

Hannah Frost had lowered the camera. She stood very straight in her paper gown, with her white-blonde head tilted a few degrees to one side, and for a moment I thought she was actually trying. Then her expression closed like a drawer.

"No."

"Nothing at all?"

"Dr. Vaughn." She gave me a thin, tight, professional smile. "I think I can guess where this is going, and I'd like to save us both some time. You're about to say cyanide."

"I wasn't."

"Because it isn't." She spoke over me, quite pleasantly. "Cyanide leaves a signature. The lips go cherry. The blood stays bright, because the cells can't take up oxygen; lividity is pink instead of purple. There's a smell, yes, in some people, but there's a color too, and this woman has neither. I have been looking at her for forty minutes. She is the ordinary, ugly gray-blue of a heart that stopped."

It was all perfectly true. It was also, I noticed, exactly the speech of a woman who had decided in advance which conversation she wished to be having.

I made a note of it, in the small cold ledger I keep behind my eyes. Hannah Frost. Spoke before I finished. Eleven seconds, from the first word. Then I let it go, because there was something more urgent in the air.

…

"You're right," I said. "It isn't cyanide."

She blinked. She had clearly prepared for an argument.

"Cyanide would be absurd," I said. "A crude tool, easy to detect, impossible to explain in a sealed elevator. And I don't think there is anything in this car that was meant to kill her. That's the point." I pushed myself to my feet, a little stiffly. My knees complained. "I think there is something in this car that was meant to frighten her. And I think it has left a trace of itself on the air."

"A trace of what?"

"I couldn't tell you. Not by name." I turned slowly, taking in the cage: the polished wood, the brass rail, the little speaker grille by the buttons. "There is a family of compounds that act, in very small quantities, on the part of the brain that decides how frightened to be. Not poisons. Nothing so honest. Gentle agitants. They push a little on the dial. A person who breathes enough of one will feel uneasy, a touch giddy, perhaps a prickle of unreasoning dread. Some of them, as they break down in warm air, give off a smell like almonds. Not the whole of the smell. A ghost of it."

"That's a theory," said Hannah.

"It's a smell."

"That nobody else can verify."

"That is rather the difficulty," I said.

Leo had gone very still. He had one hand in his pocket, where I knew he kept the cigar, and I could see his thumb moving against the cellophane. In all the time I had known him I had never seen him look at me quite like that: not with trust, or not only trust, but with the wary, hungry, uncomfortable look of a man who has been shown a door and is trying to decide whether it opens onto a room or a drop.

"You can really smell something," he said slowly.

"I can."

"You'd swear to it."

"On what?"

"On anything you like."

I nearly told him, then, about my grandmother's kitchen in Bristol, and the marzipan she made at Christmas, and how as a boy I had discovered in an afternoon that I could smell, at the far end of the garden, the very faint sweet acrid scent of the laurel hedge that had once killed a neighbor's spaniel. It is a peculiar gift. A good third of the species can't do it at all; the gene simply isn't there. I had spent thirty-four years assuming it was the sort of trivial accident of birth that never matters. I had been wrong about that, as I have been wrong about many things, and I am sorry to say that I discovered it in a dead woman's elevator.

"I would swear to it," I said.

…

"Then what do you want?" said Leo.

I looked up.

The ceiling of the cage was a smooth panel of frosted glass, with small recessed lamps set into it in a neat grid: twelve of them, cool and white, burning steadily. There was nothing remarkable about them. They were the sort of lights one finds in every hotel lobby in the world, soft and flattering and invisible.

Except that I had been standing under them for ten minutes, and I had noticed that they did not hum.

Most light fittings do. Most of the cheap solid-state ones sing a very faint high note, a whine at the bottom of hearing, that one only notices when it stops. These were silent. They were too silent. Or else they were tuned to something else.

"The lights," I said. "I want the lighting board taken down. The whole panel, with the driver. And the extractor fan, here." I pointed to the grille set into the corner above the handrail. "Both of them, bagged, tagged, and on a bench before sunrise."

"Doctor." Hannah's voice had acquired an edge. "You are asking me to dismantle a luxury building's fixtures on the strength of an olfactory impression."

"Yes."

"The building's insurers will go through the roof."

"I imagine they will."

"The correct procedure," she said, "is as follows. I take swabs of the interior surfaces. I take air samples, which I have already done, from the ventilation intake. I take blood, urine, vitreous, and gastric contents from the decedent, and I send the lot to the laboratory at the Medical Examiner's Office for a full toxicological and histological screen. The turnaround is seventy-two hours. If there is a substance, the lab will find it. If there is a defect, the building inspector will find it. If there is an agitant that breaks down in warm air, as you say, and leaves no trace but an odor—" She said the word with great delicacy, like a woman picking up a dead mouse. "—then it will have left nothing to find, and I shall be obliged to record this as a sudden cardiac death due to acute panic in a susceptible individual, with a documented history of claustrophobia, trapped in an enclosed space for three hours. Which is the simplest explanation. Which is, in nine cases out of ten, the correct one."

"And in the tenth?"

"In the tenth, Doctor, we are all very sorry, and we go to the funeral."

…

I will say this for her: it was a good speech. It was clear and temperate and impeccably reasoned, and it had the great advantage of being true. If I had been the sort of man who is persuaded by good speeches, I would have thanked her and gone home.

I looked at Leo.

He was standing in the doorway of the lobby with the light of the emergency lamps on one side of his face and the dark of the corridor on the other, and I saw the exact moment at which he remembered who was watching.

It was a small thing. He turned his head, fractionally, toward the stairwell door. A nerve under his left eye jumped. His hand came out of his pocket, empty, and settled on the back of his neck.

"The Commissioner's on the line," he said, to nobody in particular. "Downstairs. He wants to be kept informed."

Holt. Frederick Holt, who had signed my contract at nine o'clock one morning and had, I now saw, been told of this death within the hour. Leo had not called him. Leo would not have called him for the world. Someone else had. And the Commissioner had made it known, in the way that powerful men make things known without ever raising their voices, that he would be taking an interest in the decisions made at the Calloway Tower that night.

I had a sudden, quite unwelcome vision of Leo's career. Twenty-six years of service, a pension within sight, a quiet pale wife in Fishtown and a small boat he never took out. A man who had stuck his neck out once, for a girl in a cistern, and been rewarded with a hero's dinner and a handshake. A man who would, if I asked him now, take down the lights of a luxury tower on the word of a foreign psychologist with a gift for smells, and who would be asked, by sunrise, to explain himself to the most polished man in Pennsylvania.

"Doc," he said. His voice was gentle. "Tell me what you want me to do."

It was an extraordinary thing to be asked.

I had spent my whole adult life being asked what I thought, in rooms where nobody intended to act on it. I had been consulted and thanked and filed. Now, in a mirrored lobby on the fourteenth floor of a glass tower, with the rain at the windows and a dead woman at my feet, a good man was looking at me with his career in his hand and waiting for me to close my fingers around it.

…

I looked at the body.

Kaylee Rhodes sat with her knees drawn up and her ten broken nails turned toward me. The portable lamps threw her shadow up the wall in a long black stripe. I thought of the nails. I thought of the thirty and the twenty-five on Magnus's yellow pages. I thought, with sudden vivid clarity, of the stopped clock in Interrogation Room 3, and a child with her hand over her mouth in the dark, knocking.

Three slow.

And I thought of how easy it would be to say nothing.

There was a case for caution. I knew that. I held it up and turned it in the light and admired it, as one admires a fine piece of reasoning one has no wish to follow. If I declared this a homicide, and was wrong, I would not merely embarrass myself. I would take Leo with me. I would give Vera Castellano the ammunition she had been waiting for, and the Commissioner an excuse, and I would make the next person who said this one is different a little harder to believe.

And if I held my tongue, and was right—

I did not finish the thought.

It was, I realized, a perfectly even choice. The reasonable course and the reckless course each had a body at the end of it. Only the first would allow me to say, afterward, that I had followed procedure.

The cage had gone quiet. Hannah Frost was watching me with her arms folded. Leo had stopped moving altogether. Somewhere, down the long cream corridor, a door closed. In the dark above the ceiling panel the lights burned on, steadily, soundlessly, like twelve small white eyes.

I took out my pen.

I held it for a moment, and tapped it once on my knuckle. Two quick, one slow.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

The twelve lamps are burning above you. A dead woman sits at your feet with her fingers broken, and the smell of almonds is fading from the air. Dr. Frost is offering you procedure, the safest road, with a seventy-two-hour clock at the end of it. Captain Maddox is offering you his career. Nobody else in the room can smell what you smell.