Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008

“Let’s go in your office and talk this over,” I suggested. Pryor led the way to his office with Barnovich, the sheriff, and me following.

Within minutes Judd Francis joined us. “I can’t believe this could happen,” he said as he took a chair in the administrator’s office. “Who even knew he was here?”

“We’re working on that,” Sheriff Lens told him. “First I’d better know the identity of this mystery patient.”

“We don’t know,” Dr. Pryor insisted. “You’d better ask the FBI that question.”

The sheriff turned to Agent Barnovich, who held up his hands. “I only know he was an important German, flown out of there last Saturday night. Maybe he was a defector, like Rudolph Hess.”

“But no name?”

“No name, only Mr. Fuchs.”

“Have you notified Washington of his death?”

“Of course. They’re awaiting further news.”

“What sort of news?” I asked.

“I haven’t told them he may have been poisoned. I wanted to be sure of it first.”

He handed me the FBI log and I ran my finger down the list of everyone who’d visited the patient after I’d left. Dr. Pryor had been in to see him at a few minutes before six. “I wanted him gone from here as soon as possible,” the administrator told us. “His presence was disrupting the hospital routine, and since the entire matter was top secret we couldn’t even profit from the publicity.”

“Were you searched when you came to visit him?” I wondered, remembering the cursory inspection I’d received from the government agents.

“I was,” Pryor acknowledged.

“So was I,” Judd Francis told us. “I came by around eight o’clock and our patient seemed to be resting comfortably. His throat was dry and I had Nurse O’Toole bring him some ice water.”

Sheriff Lens raised his eyebrows but Barnovich quickly said, “I tasted it, just like we tasted every scrap of food and drink that he had. And after I tasted it he took a couple of swallows himself. Nothing but water.”

“No one else visited him?”

“The nurse came back to check his blood pressure around midnight but I was with her. He was half asleep then, and only wanted to know when he’d be out of here. I told him soon.”

“Did you kill him?” Sheriff Lens asked the FBI man.

“Me? Of course not! What motive would I have?”

“He was an enemy. A German.”

“But he was over here now. He’d left Germany.”

“Perhaps that’s why he was killed,” Dr. Pryor speculated. “To keep him from revealing Nazi secrets to our side.”

I smiled at the suggestion. “Do you think there’s a Nazi agent at Pilgrim Memorial Hospital?”

“Well, somebody killed him.”

I turned back to Barnovich. “Let’s go over this again, step by step. I assume Fuchs was carefully searched when he arrived here.”

“Right down to the skin,” the FBI man said. “They put their own hospital garments on him here. And he had no possessions at all with him. His own clothes had been taken away in England, before he was flown here, to avoid any trace of his identity.”

“And no one at Pilgrim Memorial had access to cyanide?”

“No one,” Dr. Pryor insisted. “Of course, cyanide is a gas. The solid state is usually potassium cyanide. It can kill almost instantly if swallowed on a empty stomach, where the stomach acids quickly turn it back into a gas.”

“Three seconds,” I murmured, remembering what Fuchs had told me. “And no one was in the room when he died?”

Barnovich shook his head. “I was on a chair right outside his door. No one entered the room after my midnight visit. I went back outside and partly closed the door to his room.”

“There are no other exit doors, of course, and no one was in the bathroom,” Judd Francis said. “Before I realized he was dead I took his water glass to the sink to refill it. The bathroom was empty.”

“We need to pin down the time of his death,” I decided. “That might help.”

Pryor nodded. “We’ll have the preliminary autopsy report by morning.”