The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum

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    AS DEMANDS for chemical analysis intensified, Norris was infuriated that the Hylan administration remained so stingy regarding his department. The mayor restricted funds every year, as if still holding on to his initial grudge.
    In 1922, as Norris noted in yet another letter to the mayor, he had only forty-one employees in his office (compared to sixty-two under Riordan). Annual pay for the doctors working under him averaged less than $4,000 a year. Chemists didn’t even get that—by pestering the mayor constantly, he’d finally managed to get Gettler’s salary above $3,000 annually.
    His own yearly salary was only $6,000; as Norris pointed out, none of the staff got the kind of incomes enjoyed under the old coroner system. But he was angrier still about the lack of basic support for the department as a whole. All new equipment purchased in 1921 had been paid for by Norris himself or by his staff: every test tube, every scalpel, a new scale to weigh tissue samples, a small brass microscope to study tissue damage. All of it. Gettler was dipping into his less-than-generous salary to buy extra chemical supplies and the weekly allotment of raw liver for his experiments.
    The medical examiner’s office could not possibly do its best work, Norris said, when the city officials failed to recognize the “well known fact that guilt or innocence may rest entirely on the chemical and biological analyses” of evidence at a crime scene. And if anyone doubted that premise, it was about to be painfully proven in a beautiful little hotel in Brooklyn.
     
     
    THE HOTEL MARGARET glittered like an enormous holiday ornament on the northeastern corner of Orange Street, in Brooklyn’s upscale Columbia Heights neighborhood. Built in 1889, according to the colorful plans of local architect Frank Freeman, the hotel was a twelve-story fantasy of limestone, brick, and terra-cotta, with copper balconies and arched rectangular windows that rose to an ornate peaked roof.
    In the 1920S, the hotel offered both overnight accommodations—at a pricey twenty dollars a night—and residential apartments. The latter were so popular that the owners had built an annex to house the long-term residents, crafted in the same tones of copper, red, and gold, offering the same delivery of meals by white-coated waiters, the same copper-grilled elevators manned by uniformed porters, and the same nearly invisible maid service. The elegant Hotel Margaret blended seamlessly into the elegant mansions of the Heights.
    At least until the day a retired carpet dealer and his wife were found dead on the bathroom floor of their annex apartment.
     
     
    “AGED COUPLE Slain Strangely” read the New York Times headline on April 27, 1922, reflecting the bafflement of the police investigators. They’d found seventy-five-year-old Fremont M. Jackson and his sixty-year-old wife, Annie, crumpled on the black and white tile of their bathroom. Both were dressed in street clothes. She lay close to the sink, and he just inside the door.
    The Jacksons had died badly. Their teeth were clenched, and their lips were stained with a dried bloody froth. Their faces were oddly bluish, and their skin was patterned over with livid red spots. The physician assigned to the case suspected a double suicide, perhaps by swallowing a quick-acting poison.
    But investigators found not a trace of poison in the Jacksons’ rooms—no container, vial, or bottle—and no mysterious remnants in the bottom of a drinking glass. And the family members described the couple as happy and healthy, insisting that suicide was out of the question. The Jacksons had barely been married a year. After spending years alone, they had both been enjoying the companionship of a second marriage. Annie Jackson’s son sent a telegram from his Massachusetts home, proposing that his mother had died of food poisoning and that the shock of finding her body must have killed her husband.
    On Norris’s order, one of the