by Jane Haddam
I’m going to have to think of some way to tell somebody what it was I saw.
FOUR
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD ALWAYS had the cooperation of the local police in his investigations of what he thought of as extracurricular murders. He had always had it in his investigations with the FBI, too. He preferred to run his life that way. Cooperating with the local police had advantages beyond the obvious one, meaning aside from the fact that it kept you from getting arrested for one reason or another. There was the question of feasibility. The Cardinal Archbishop of New York was a good source. He had come through with copies of all the police lab reports. Gregor didn’t know how he’d gotten them. He wasn’t going to ask. They were both helpful and necessary. They just weren’t enough. He would have given a great deal to be able to sit down with the technicians or the medical examiner (was it a coroner in New York City?) and go over the details, especially after everything he had heard today on the subject of where the strychnine had been and what it had taken to get to it. Then there was the question of information. Gregor already had a lot of information about this case, but all of it was from secondary sources. He had read the Cardinal’s report. He had read a slew of magazine and newspaper articles, pulled together from a two-day search of the reading room of the downtown branch of the Philadelphia Public Library, both on the murder itself and on Charles van Straadt. He had been able to find much more on Charles van Straadt than on van Straadt’s murder, in spite of the fact that the death of a man that rich was always international news. Reporters didn’t know what questions to ask. They thought in terms of headlines instead of solutions. Standing in the middle of Michael Pride’s first floor examining room-office, Gregor thought that they weren’t even very good at thinking in headlines. Rosalie van Straadt was the murdered man’s granddaughter. She was obviously extremely upset about something. There hadn’t been a word of what she might be upset about in any of the press reports Gregor had read.
There was a frozen moment after Rosalie left the room, but it was only a pause for breath. The red sweatsuited nun exploded almost immediately.
“That woman,” she said. Then she spun around and looked into the crowd. “Sister Karen Ann? Get a broom, Sister, and get Mindy and Steven and clean this mess up. You’re going to have to go somewhere else for the next hour or two, Michael. I’m very sorry. All the rest of you get out of here. Out of here. You’d think you’d never seen blood on the floor, the way you rubberneck.”
There was no blood on the floor, but Gregor wasn’t going to be picky. He started to drift out at the back of the crowd. The crowd was dispersing with uncanny quickness and unnatural quiet. That’s what the authority of a real old-fashioned nun could do, sweatsuit or no sweatsuit. Gregor supposed they’d all start gossiping like crazy as soon as they got out of Augie’s earshot.
“Wait a minute,” Augie said, when Gregor was almost out the door. “Mr. Demarkian. Don’t disappear on us now. We need you.”
“Augie,” Michael Pride said in a warning voice.
“We do need him,” Augie said stubbornly, picking her way across the rubble to where Gregor was standing. “What’s the point of the Cardinal having brought him if we’re not going to talk to him?”
“I didn’t say you shouldn’t talk to him,” Michael said calmly. “I just meant—”
“I know what you meant.” Augie turned to Gregor and sighed. “He feels sorry for her. For Rosalie van Straadt. He thinks she only does these things because she’s pining for love for him.”
“Now Augie.”
“It’s true. Well, Mr. Demarkian. You tell me. Would she be behaving the way she has been only since the murder if she’s doing it because she’s pining for love for Michael? Why wouldn’t she have been behaving this way before the murder? She couldn’t have had him then any more than she can have him now.”
“Augie,” Michael said again. He had managed to make his way back to the door from the desk. Three people—two young women, neither of whom looked anything like a nun to Gregor, and a teenage boy—were just coming in with brooms and brushes and one of those gray metal dustpans on the end of the handle all janitors everywhere seemed to have. Michael moved out into the hall and pulled Gregor and Augie with him. There was an empty office next to his own and he drew them into that. Then he shut the door.
“Let’s at least not broadcast this to the entire center,” he said. “After all, it isn’t any of their business.”
“The man was murdered in your own office, Michael. Of course this is our business. And it isn’t like it’s any big secret around here anyway.”
“It isn’t like it’s a fact, either, Augie. It was just a rumor.”
“I believe in rumors,” Sister Augustine said. She crossed her arms over her chest and set her jaw and turned to Gregor. For an hallucinatory moment, Gregor thought she was going to lecture him on how he shouldn’t bite his nails. He hadn’t bitten his nails since he was ten. That was the year his mother was so sick, and there wasn’t enough money for a doctor.
“Let me tell you what the rumors have been, Mr. Demarkian, because they’ve been very interesting. Charles van Straadt left a lot of money, you know.”
“Close to a billion dollars,” Gregor said. “I read that somewhere.”
Augie waved it away. “The billion is a total figure. Most of that’s the businesses and whatever. It doesn’t come directly to the family. It’s tied up in corporations and I don’t know what. He’s supposed to have left nearly eight hundred million dollars in personal assets. That’s the money I’m talking about.”
“That is a lot of money,” Gregor said.
“You don’t know how much money it is,” Michael put in, “because the will isn’t being read until Thursday and nothing is official until then.”
Augie sighed. “I got my information from Ida, Michael. Ida is perfectly trustworthy.” She turned to Gregor again. “Ida is Ida Greel, another of Charlie van Straadt’s grandchildren. Oh, I shouldn’t go on calling him Charlie. He hated it. Anyway, Char—Charles had four grandchildren. Rosalie you just met. In a manner of speaking. Ida is a medical student who works here on her free time, vacations and weekends, that sort of thing, as much as she can while she’s studying. Then there’s Ida’s brother, Victor. Victor calls himself van Straadt and works at the New York Sentinel. Then there’s Martha, who’s a little older than Ida but she’s volunteering here in our two-year resident staff program. All Charles’s grandchildren volunteered like that, he required it. Even Rosalie was here for two years.”
“We could have done without Rosalie,” Michael said.
Augie sailed on. “It was Ida who told me how much money there was supposed to be,” she explained, “and she told me something else, too. What I call the interesting part. On the night Charles van Straadt died, he had just made up his mind to change his will.”
“Augie, for God’s sake,” Michael said. “You sound like Murder, She Wrote.”
“Why shouldn’t I sound like Murder, She Wrote? It’s all true. On the night Charles van Straadt died, his old will was still in force. That will left his personal fortune to be divided into equal shares among his four grandchildren. Victor, Ida, Martha, and Rosalie. If Charles had lived another twenty-four hours, that would have been changed. There would have been small bequests to Ida and Victor and Martha, but the bulk of the money would have gone to Rosalie. And Rosalie knows it. That’s why she’s fit to spit.”
Gregor thought about this. About Rosalie throwing glass. About a rich man playing favorites. He wished he had known Charles van Straadt. For some reason, this scenario didn’t ring true.
“Why?” he asked finally.
“Why what?” Augie looked as confused as Gregor felt.
“Why Rosalie? Why not one of the others? Are the others even less stable?”
“Hardly,” Augie said. “Ida’s the stable one. She’s the only one with the brains God gave an amoeba.”
“Then why would Charles van Straadt w
ant to leave the bulk of his fortune to Rosalie?”
“That’s exactly what I was always asking,” Michael put in. “This rumor has been going around for weeks, Mr. Demarkian, since long before Charlie died, and now that Ida has confirmed it, I suppose it must be true. But it never made sense to me. Not that Charlie ever made sense to me in any respect.”
Augie dismissed sense. “Rich men can be as crazy as loons and nobody thinks anything of it. Charles van Straadt took Rosalie with him everywhere, Mr. Demarkian. For the last six months or so, they’ve been attached at the hip. And Rosalie worked for him, of course, as a kind of personal secretary.”
“She shuffled his papers around and got him coffee when he didn’t want to move,” Michael corrected. “I always used to think she exasperated him beyond words, but maybe that was because she exasperated me. The fake beatnik clothes and all the pretensions.”
“She was here on the night her grandfather died,” Gregor remembered. “That was in the report the Cardinal gave me. If she was attached to her grandfather’s hip, as you put it, where was she while he was in the middle of being murdered? She wasn’t even the one who found the body.”
“I found the body,” Michael said.
“Maybe saying they were attached at the hip was going too far,” Augie conceded. “They were always together, but Rosalie would run errands for Charles. It’s just like Michael said. She was all over the place the night her grandfather died. I kept bumping into her in the most outrageous places.”
“Only authorized personnel are supposed to be in the emergency-room examining areas during major emergencies,” Michael explained, “along with the patients, of course. I don’t know if anybody’s told you, but we were in the middle of a major battle in a major gang war that night. Not that Rosalie ever paid much attention to the rules.”
“Rosalie likes to pretend she doesn’t pay much attention to the rules,” Augie corrected, “but she’s not anywhere near as unconventional as she wants people to think she is.”
“The problem is, I don’t see what good it’s going to do us if Rosalie was prowling through the building in the middle of a gang war while her grandfather was being killed, because although that gives her plenty of opportunity to do absolutely anything, there’s still the question of why she would have wanted to do anything at all.” Michael looked triumphant. “After all, Mr. Demarkian, if you were Rosalie, and all you had to do to inherit the bulk of eight hundred million dollars was to wait twenty-four hours before you committed murder, I ask you, wouldn’t you wait?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I most definitely would wait.”
“So would I.” Michael nodded happily. “And I’m willing to bet that neither one of us is anywhere near as venal as Rosalie. No, if it’s one of the grandchildren who killed Charlie, it’s much more likely to be one of the other three. The problem with that being that at least two of the three of them didn’t have the opportunity to do it, and the third one didn’t have the psychological—I don’t know the word for what I want to say.”
“I do,” Augie said. “I think you’re much too naive, Michael. I think Martha van Straadt is just as capable of murder as anybody else.”
“Martha’s name used to be Bracker,” Michael told Gregor. “She changed her name to van Straadt as soon as her father died. She’s like Victor in that respect. The old man asked. The old man got. Ida’s the only one who wouldn’t budge. Victor’s got a spine like wet spaghetti.”
“Rosalie was born a van Straadt?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, yes,” Augie said. “Rosalie’s father was Charles’s only son. He was dead before I ever came here—Rosalie’s father, I mean—but I’ve heard about him. One of those cases, you know, where the father is such a strong personality the son just wilts. He drank, from what I heard.”
“Never mind all that,” Michael said. “Ida was on duty that night. We had her running all over the place from six o’clock on. I think she took a fifteen-minute break to get some coffee, but that was it. She didn’t have time to murder anyone. She certainly didn’t have time to get my keys, get the strychnine out of my cabinet, go upstairs—all of that. And as for Victor, he was sitting in full view of fifty people in the center cafeteria from about seven or so, and before that he was either at work, in his car with his driver, or over in the other building visiting with Martha.”
“Ida says they meant to sit down and talk about the will change,” Augie said. “They couldn’t know there was going to be a gang war. And Victor never listens to anything on the radio except the all-music stations and he never reads the newspapers at all, so—” Augie shrugged.
“No matter what Augie here says, I don’t think Martha could have done it.” Michael was firm. “Martha’s an extremely unpleasant young woman in many ways, but she’s one of those people who writes angry letters to the president of the United States because she thinks the air force training exercises are disturbing the sleep of the spotted owl. I know animal rights activists have been known to resort to violence more than occasionally, but Martha—” Michael Pride shrugged.
“I think this is exactly Martha’s kind of murder,” Augie argued. “Put the strychnine in the coffee. Hand the coffee to grandfather. Get the hell out of there before he takes a sip of it. That’s the way Martha would go about it. So that she didn’t have to look.”
“Augie, I think in the old days, when they still had chapter of faults, you must have spent your time declaring faults against charity.”
“Oh, charity,” Augie said.
The red light over the top of the door to the hall went on and a low bonging sound began to come through the loudspeakers.
“That’s a delivery.” Augie straightened up a little. “Who’s on call this afternoon, Michael? Jenny or Ben?”
“I am,” Michael told her. “Jenny needed the afternoon off. It’s the only time they could give her to go in for her mammogram. Go on out. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Don’t you let him hand you any romantic nonsense,” Augie told Gregor. “He’s much too trusting.”
“I’m going to ask him if he knows anybody who would be willing to donate us a mammogram machine. We sure as hell could use one.”
“Don’t use the word hell like that, Michael. It doesn’t shock me.”
The two men watched the small, round woman leave. Gregor caught an expression of honest affection on Michael Pride’s face. It was—endearing, somehow. It made Michael Pride more human than Gregor had found him to be so far.
“Look,” Michael Pride said, when Augie was gone. “I’ve got work here to do for the rest of the afternoon, but Jenny will be back at six. I’ll have at least a couple of hours then. Why don’t you meet me downstairs in the cafeteria and we’ll have dinner? There are some things you ought to know nobody else is going to tell you.”
“Does everybody around here keep secrets as a matter of course?”
“About me they do. Cafeteria at six?”
“How about the Four Seasons at seven?” Gregor asked.
Michael Pride laughed. “The Four Seasons. For God’s sake. Not only can’t I afford it, I can’t even afford to think about it.”
“I can. I’ll buy.”
“That’ll come to three or four hundred dollars. Why don’t you just donate that money to the center?”
“The center doesn’t take credit cards.”
Michael Pride laughed again. “You’re right. We don’t. All right, Mr. Demarkian. The Four Seasons. Seven o’clock. I’ll be there. But now I’ve got to go.”
Michael Pride went.
2
LATE AFTERNOON IS NOT a busy time in big-city emergency rooms, except for unexpected infant deliveries and household accidents. When Gregor left the office in which he had spent so much time with Michael Pride and Sister Augustine, he found the corridors mostly clear and the atmosphere quiet. Whatever emergency the doctor and nurse had been called to was evidently under control. Gregor stopped a young black girl in a candystriper’s u
niform and asked for directions to the cafeteria. She gave them in a clear sharp voice with no trace of a New York City accent in it. Gregor introduced himself and thanked her.
“Tell me a couple of more things,” he said. “Do you have a minute?”
“I have a minute, yes.”
“There are elevators here, aren’t there?”
“One at the front and one at the back.”
“Where do they go? I take it I can’t use one to get to the basement, for instance. Otherwise you would have told me to take one to get to the cafeteria.”
The girl had been looking confused. Now her face cleared. “Oh, these aren’t ordinary elevators, Mr. Demarkian. They’re extra wide ones, for stretchers. They only go from here to the second floor, where the wards are. We don’t have much in the way of wards. We’re very small.”
“I couldn’t use these to get up to the third floor offices, for instance?”
“Oh, no. You’d have to take the stairs.”
“Thank you,” Gregor said.
The girl said “you’re welcome” in her clear, firm voice and continued toward the front of the building, where she’d been headed when Gregor stopped her. Gregor followed her directions and made his way to the basement and the cafeteria. It was an involved and frustrating walk. If he had known what he was doing, it wouldn’t have been so involved. Most of his feelings of confusion came from the fact that he was in unfamiliar territory. The frustration, he thought, would have been with him no matter what. This building had not been built to serve as a hospital. It had been renovated as well as it could be, but renovations always left something to be desired. What these renovations hadn’t managed to accomplish was an adequate amount of storage space. Gregor kept bumping into packing boxes and newly delivered crates. On a hunch, Gregor began to read the descriptions on the outsides of the boxes. It was a useless hunch. The boxes said things like “500 rolls sterile adhesive tape” and “15 lb sterile cotton net.” Nothing had been left lying around that could be even imagined to be dangerous. Gregor supposed that if a murderer were really determined, he might be able to use a length of sterile cotton net to strangle someone, but that was pushing it. Gregor missed Bennis Hannaford. Bennis was very good at pushing it.