“Yes, I did.” She was not cooing. “To say that one of us poisoned her, that’s terrible.”
“I agree. What did you see?”
“I was sleeping on the floor above this, and so was Mrs. Huck. She came and got me up; she was in great pain and didn’t want to disturb her husband. I got her back to bed and called a doctor — it was after midnight — and I got Mrs. O’Shea, but there wasn’t much we could do until the doctor came. It was a question about telling Mr. Huck — he couldn’t even go in the room where she was, because the door was too narrow for his chair, but of course we had to tell him. She died about eight o’clock.”
Wolfe went to Huck. “Naturally there was some inquiry — a death under those circumstances.”
“Certainly.” Huck was curt.
“Was there an autopsy?”
“Yes. It was ptomaine.”
“Was the source identified?”
“Not by analysis.” A spasm ran over Huck’s face. He was having a little trouble with the controls. “Before dinner there had been a large assortment of hors d’oeuvres, and among them was a kind of pickled artichoke which my wife was very fond of. No one else had taken any of them, and apparently she had eaten them all, since there were none left. Since no one else was ill, it was assumed that the ptomaines, which were definitely present, had been in the artichokes.”
Wolfe grunted. “I’m not a ptomaine scholar, but this afternoon I looked them up a little. Do you know how thoroughly the possibility of the presence of a true alkaloid was excluded?”