"Have either of you ever read or seen Romeo and Juliet?" Nathan White asked.

Hamilton Burger had had enough. His fist slammed into the table.

"How dare you try to change the subject? We were talking of Miss Street's alleged desire to sleep through the weekend, and of your wish to somehow make her useful. What does Romeo and Juliet have to do with that?"

Nathan White sat back down and said hurriedly,

"It has everything to do with it! In the play, Juliet is given a sleeping potion, which makes her appear dead." He paused, and then added in a slower, yet rather impassioned voice, "I was always fascinated with that concept. A drug which could make someone appear dead, and yet be completely reversible with nothing but time! Decades ago, I began to dream of being the one to discover something like that. I read every book, studied every exotic medicine and plant, looking for one which might have such side effects, if properly compounded and administered."

"Are you saying that you spent the last several decades of your life trying to create a potion similar to the fictional one that Juliet drank in Shakespeare's play?" Hamilton Burger asked, trying to keep the incredulity out of his tone.

"Yes. I did spend years dabbling in it, but I did not have the time to conduct any serious experiments until I retired eighteen months ago. But by that time, I had a pretty good idea of how to go about it. There is a European sedative, which has been found to impact the anterior hypothalamus, which is the brain's thermoregulatory center; patients who were given the drug complained of always being very cold. By mixing the drug with a weakly alkaline solution, I potentiated that side effect. Then I combined it with an extract of a little-known plant which is native to South America, which has been known to relax the valves in the human heart and make them extremely leaky, as well as to vasodilate the walls of the arteries and arterioles so much that a person's blood pressure significantly drops. And eureka! I had made Juliet's draught a reality." Visibly trembling from excitement at the mere memory, Nathan White explained proudly, "You see, when someone drank the potion, they would first fall asleep due to the modified European sedative, and shortly afterwards, their body would cool by twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, which would bring it to about room temperature. A colder body usually needs less oxygen, so their breathing would become extremely irregular and very, very shallow, so that unless someone was paying extremely close attention for several minutes, they would appear to not be breathing at all. Then the second drug would start exerting its effects, and their blood pressure would fall to just below a systolic of sixty, which meant that a pulse could not be felt in either their neck or their wrist. And since heart sounds are produced when heart valves close, the very leaky heart valves would be very difficult to hear, especially since, like the breathing, the heart rate would slow down. To a casual observer, the person would appear as dead as a doornail."

It was only with difficulty that the two men in front of him retained their composure at this bizarre explanation.

"When did you finish creating this concoction?" the terse District Attorney asked.

"About three months ago."

"Did you ever use any of it before this weekend?"

"Yes, I did. For starters, I gave doses to my laboratory rats many, many times, and observed the aforementioned reactions in them. Depending on the dosage, they would be unconscious for various amounts of time, but they always woke up and appeared as healthy and hearty as ever," the chemist rebutted with a confident smile. "I even took it myself, twice. Each time, I woke up about three days later, feeling perfectly well."

"Then why involve anyone else in your experiments?" Lieutenant Tragg angrily inquired.

"Because when I was the one taking the drugs, I could not examine myself to ensure that all the effects in humans were as obvious as the ones which I had seen in my rats. I did not know any medical professionals or chemists well enough to suggest that they examine me during such an experiment. The next best course of action was to find a third party who would drink the solution in my presence, and for me to watch them personally."

"And I take it that you chose Miss Della Street as that third party?" Mr. Burger asked.

Nathan White nodded.

"Why?"

"She was the only person I knew. But I really did not plan on it in advance. The idea to use her came to me when she said that she was planning to sleep through the weekend. I figured she might as well sleep on my sofa."

"Was Miss Street aware that you were going to administer these drugs to her?"

At this, the chemist shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

"Ah…well…not exactly," he haltingly admitted.

"What does 'not exactly' mean?"

"I simply told her that I would make her a cup of special tea which would help her sleep."

"And since she had tried your unusual herbal teas many times in the past, she had no reason to suspect that this batch would be mixed with potent medications," Lieutenant Tragg sternly concluded. "She probably expected a mug of soothing chamomile, or something like it."

The prisoner looked at the floor, somewhat ashamed.

"I did not want to run the risk of her refusing to drink it. And, for scientific purposes, I wanted to eliminate any possibility of a placebo effect." He looked up with a little more bravado. "Besides, I figured that once she woke up, she would be thrilled to have played such an important part in the history of chemistry and of literature!"

It took a moment before Mr. Burger and the police officer felt equal to responding to him in a civilized manner. How dare this man? Della – levelheaded, wise Della – would never have taken pleasure in being used as an unsuspecting guinea pig.

"That is no excuse! It is never permissible to do evil, even with the expectation that good will eventually come out of it!" the District Attorney finally said, in a very hard tone. "I have had countless people lie to me, for one 'good' reason or another, and I have yet to meet a falsehood which helped anyone in the long run. Instead, I've nearly convicted innocent people because of them." Seeing the suspect quailing, he continued, "So Miss Street unknowingly drank the potion. What then?"

"She began to get drowsy, so I guided her to sit down on the couch, and when she fell asleep, laid her down on it. Then I got my watch, thermometer and notebook and began to monitor her heart rate, respiratory rate, and temperature." Suddenly, the interviewers recalled a red notebook with handwritten pages filled with times and vital signs which they had found in Nathan White's living room and kept as evidence, although they had been unsure of what to make of his notes at the time. "They all began to drop over the next hour or so, as expected, until they were nearly undetectable. I kept her on the couch and did serial examinations every thirty minutes, which all yielded the same findings, until Mrs. Roberts arrived and interfered. If she hadn't, Miss Street would have woken up on Monday afternoon, been informed that she would be a famous woman for her role in my experiment once I published my results, and she would have gone to her own apartment and then to work on Tuesday as originally planned. All this drama of arresting me and ransacking our residences would never have happened."

Ignoring Mr. White's last statement, Hamilton Burger said,

"It is Monday morning now. Are you alleging that, in a few hours, Miss Street will wake up and be alive again, as if nothing had occurred?"

"She would have if she had been under my care," the chemist replied stubbornly. "I cannot answer for what will happen to her now, considering the fact that I have no idea how much you poked and prodded her and where you kept her. If you froze her to death in a mortuary refrigerator, that is your fault, not mine."

The prosecutor had heard enough. He stood up, gathered his papers, and said in staccato tone,

"That will be all for today, Mr. White." He nodded through the bars at the bailiff. "We are finished here."

Well, that Nathan White sure is a character. Will Burger and Tragg give his story any consideration? Is it just fiction, or is there some truth to his claims?