A Super-Athlete and His Loving Spouse

David Antonio was a handsome man.  Because of his Italian  heritage, he actually looked a lot like a fair-skinned version of our  Bollywood hero, Dharmendra. Not our recent Dharmendra, but  Dharmendra of “Dewar” when he was much younger.

He was also a super-athlete. Not like you and me who go out for an occasional jog or  work out in the gym for an hour and coyly check our flailing biceps. When I met him, he had run five marathons. He talked about his one-hundred mile bicycle races. I was in awe when he showed me pictures of himself going to the top of the Hurricane Ridge on his bicycle. That’s like going from   Siliguri to Darjeeling (and coming back within the same day ) on a  bicycle, fifty-five miles straight uphill, going from sea level to 7500 ft.! I had respect for this dude’s athletic prowess.

His academic credentials were excellent. He had a Ph. D. in political science from a top school. But the North American tenure system was his nemesis. Running and training for a marathon takes a lot of time. He was also very popular with the ladies. All this reduces one’s academic research output, something you need for tenure.

I was visiting Cleveland State U. for a year, and he was shuttling back and forth between  Seattle State U. and Cleveland State. None of them wanted to offer him tenure.

He had really tried. He  recently wrote several good papers. They were in the pipeline, going through a serious “refereeing “ process in academic journals. He was also getting out of his playboy phase.

“I got married last year, Pronto. Nina is a scientist, works at  a lab at Seattle. She is a long-distance runner. We don’t see each other that often.  Man, I would love to get tenure somewhere around  Seattle.”

Seattle was his hometown, right on the Pacific ocean.  Close to Seattle, there were snow-capped mountains, incredible forests, and rugged islands. A super-athlete’s  dream.

His wife was flying in from Seattle, Wednesday night.

“Why don’t you drop by Thursday evening for some beer? You can meet Nina.

Little did I know about  the consequences of this innocuous invitation.

Nina was an attractive professional woman. She had a runner’s lean body, short cropped hair, thick glasses, a sweet smile. But honestly, I was expecting a glamorous, fabulously sexy babe as the wife of our super-athlete playboy. I was a little surprised.

We drank some beer. Played some  ping pong. David  kicked my butt. Man! Once he connected his racket with the ball, all I would see is a white streak hitting the table and the floor.

We went upstairs, started playing chess. It was my turn to kick some butt. Nina put in some popcorn in the oven. She came over to watch, snuggling  against her favorite hunk. Obviously, she was very much in love with him.

I was destroying David in chess. Meanwhile, Nina was kissing his shoulders. Her hands were caressing his chest. She was all over him.

Pronto was feeling uncomfortable. She flew in last night. Obviously, she needed David’s company.  I needed to get lost.

“David, it is getting late. My bishop on c5 is going to finish you off soon anyways”

David had opened up a rook file in the chess game. It was not going to do him any good.

“Stay for the popcorn , man. I have  a great plan for this game”

“ Nina, don’t I always make great plans?” He said, pondering a rook move.

“mmmm” from a lovelorn Nina, followed by more caressing.

The popcorn came, my bishop and queen mated David’s king, and I checked out.

An interesting, but rather  unremarkable evening with friends.

This was Thursday night.

The phone rang Saturday evening. It was Joe, another colleague.

“Pronto, Antonio’s wife died today!  There was an accident of some sort”

He didn’t know the details. We all read it in the Sunday  paper

“Runner collapses after finishing a half-marathon with her husband” The headline said.

Nina and David ran a half-marathon together, early Saturday morning. There was a buffet-style restaurant near the finish line. They had a meal, after which Nina collapsed and died shortly thereafter.

Monday morning at the office, I told everyone about my visit to the Antonios on Thursday. How I had seen Nina, full of life, very much in love.

A Half-marathon is thirteen  miles. Not an easy jog by any means. Even super-athletes’ bodies sometimes fail. The general consensus was a heart attack. That’s what the newspaper report indicated anyways. We sent flowers and cards to David.

All hell broke loose on Tuesday morning. The Cleveland Star reported that although the doctor was satisfied with a heart attack diagnosis, some paranoid detective had demanded an autopsy. They found Cyanide in Nina’s blood!

Cyanide being one of the substances that a human body does not produce naturally, the Cleveland police declared this a possible homicide.

There were several leads. One of them was an  Indian professor, a colleague of David. He was the last person to visit  Antonio’s house, and  the last person besides her husband  to have seen Nina alive.

Yours truly became a murder suspect. Yikes!!

Tuesday afternoon, there was the dreaded knock on my office door. I was expecting a tough guy  like in the TV shows. The detective was a middle-aged woman, very polite and business-like.

“Professor, why did you visit David and Nina on Thursday night?”

“Did you know Nina before?”

“Tell us, in detail, what you did between Thursday night and Saturday morning”

Thursday night was easy. Ravi called me from New York  after I came back from David’s house. We talked for an hour. She wrote down his phone number.

Thankfully, my activities on Friday were well-documented. I took Pickoo to the day care center in the morning and signed him in. Then I went to work and taught my classes in front of a lot of students. There was a faculty meeting in the afternoon. Then I went to the gym. Signed their daily log. In the evening we all went grocery shopping. I showed her the credit card receipt, still in my wallet, signed by me at 8:05 pm on Friday.

"What about Friday night? Did you go out for a while?"

"No, Ma’am, I was exhausted. Sumita and I crashed right after we put Pickoo to bed."

“Where were you Saturday morning?”

I was sleeping, ma’am.  Woke up around  nine. Cuddled with Pickoo and Sumita  on the couch. Pickoo watched cartoons and giggled a lot. We giggled with him for a while. Then I started vacuuming  the carpet. Sumita started doing laundry.

(“Officer, I am incredibly ordinary, just a desi college prof with a family. I don’t go around poisoning  young women with cyanide or anything else for that matter – leave me alone”!)

“Just one more thing, sir,” she said “Do you have any scientist friends? A  pharmacist? A chemistry  professor or a post-doc?”

“Nope” I lied. I knew where this was going.

She smiled , “I don’t think you were involved in this sir. We will contact you in future if necessary.”

That night,  Sumita and I thanked  Kali, Durga, and many other divine entities for their kindness!

Once I was off the list of suspects, Cleveland Police and a reporter from the Cleveland Star considered  the following hypotheses:

Nina committed suicide: Nina was a scientist in a chemistry lab, she obviously had easy access to cyanide. But, I had seen her Thursday night, vibrant, and very much in love. She was not contemplating suicide on Thursday night, I will vouch for that on my son Pickoo’s name. In the event that she did commit suicide, why the hell would she run a half-marathon when she knew she would die very soon? It just does not make any sense!!

David killed Nina: David was, and still remains, the primary suspect in this case. He had the opportunity. But where would he get the cyanide? Nina certainly did not get it for him so that he can use it to poison her! Assuming he obtained some cyanide, he had injected Nina with it or put it in her food or drink. In the latter case, he would have needed to flush her stomach as well because no cyanide was found there. He only had about 48 hours to do all this!

He was allegedly linked to a lot of other women. But if he wanted  to be with someone else, he could divorce Nina! They had no children, a divorce would have been easy and convenient! Nina was not a wealthy woman. Money was not a motive here.

The Psycho Tylenol Killer: Earlier that year, about eight  months ago, a psycho started  injecting cyanide into Tylenol capsules in drugstores in Seattle, not in Cleveland. The killings started abruptly and stopped a couple of months later. He only tainted Tylenol capsules as far as  we know.  It turns out that the only medicine Nina took were anti-histamines for her allergies. Is it  possible that the psycho killer put some cyanide into anti-histamines as well, nobody  but Nina bought them in  Seattle  and she happened to take them on that fateful weekend?  Possible,  but very unlikely. In any case, the autopsy showed  no anti-histamine capsules in her body.

 Could it be a lunatic employee in the restaurant where Nina had her last meal? The autopsy showed no cyanide in the food that she ate just before she died. The cyanide was in her blood.

The police interviewed David intensely, even kept  him in custody for a couple of days, but they had to let him go. They had no evidence linking him directly  to the poisoning.

They questioned the women allegedly linked to David, they probed Nina’s past   for a crazy ex-boyfriend. All these led to nowhere.

At the end of the semester, David went back to Seattle State U. He was no longer on tenure-track. Just a temporary visiting faculty. He disappeared  from public eye next year.

I went back to Baker University in Missouri, where I had tenure. I have  been there ever since.

All this happened in October 1989.

Since 1997, when I gained access to a faster and more functional internet, I have been typing in “David Antonio”, “Seattle” in the search engine boxes. Google, Yahoo, MSN, telephone directory, I have done them all. I have thrown in marathon, bicycling, political science , and everything else I can think of in the search boxes. Nothing. If he taught somewhere, ran any races,  published  even minor papers, it would have shown up.

Did he die  in an accident? May  be.

Or is he running away from the law, suffering the consequences of a well-executed plan years ago?

Shivers still run down my spine when I remember him pondering his rook move, this incredibly handsome man with his loving wife snuggled next to him:

“Nina, don’t I always make great plans”?

(Names and locations have been changed, but Nina’s death in 1989  is still a cold case. David  did disappear in the Seattle area, his hometown. I have never been able to figure this one out)