by Jane Haddam
Michael had called a cab from a restaurant phone brought directly to their table. There was no use, he assured Gregor, in trying to get an ordinary street cab to take them where they wanted to go at this time of night. The cab that drove up was a yellow medallion and not a gypsy, but its “off duty” sign was on and its meter was off. The driver was a virtual clone of Juan Valenciano, but not Juan himself. Michael spoke to the driver in rapid Spanish and was answered with a lengthy disquisition on something or the other. Michael sat back, looked at Gregor and shrugged.
“All quiet on the western front, so to speak. No big emergencies, no big accidents, no big shoot-outs uptown. We might actually have half an hour or so to talk before somebody wants me for something.”
“Good.”
“Ricardo here was saying this is his last week. He and his family are going to close on a candy store in Queens this coming Friday. They all get out as soon as they can, all the people up there. Not that I blame them. I just worry there’s going to be nothing left some day except the junkies and the children.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said, because he had nothing to say to that.
The cab shot northward recklessly, seeming to catch every green light, seeming to make the lights turn green. The buildings went from imposing and solid to imposing and deteriorating to imposing and dilapidated to just plain bad. In no time at all, Gregor found himself in a landscape of broken windows, darkened street corners, scattered garbage, echoing emptiness. The street the center was on was a little better because the area immediately around the center was so well taken care of. Either the city or the center staff had decided that that small stretch of sidewalk was much too valuable to waste. The rest of the block was just as bad as the blocks around it. Gregor wondered where all the garbage came from, when all the buildings were abandoned. Nobody lived here. Who was putting cardboard and tissue paper into big green plastic bags and throwing them off the curbs?
The doors to the east building were still open. Light spilled out of the doorway and down from a powerful arch light positioned between the second and third floors of the building. The sidewalk immediately around the center’s front entrances was as well lit as a movie set during filming. Michael said something to the driver and he pulled up in front of the west building. The doors there were closed, but the entrance was just as well lit.
“We’ll go in the back way,” Michael told Gregor. “That way nobody can stop me on the run and ask me fifteen questions.”
“What if they need you for something serious?”
“I’ve got my beeper.”
Gregor followed Michael to the west building door. Michael knocked and introduced himself to someone looking through the peephole. The cab waited until the door opened and let them inside. The woman on the other side of the west building door was the nun Gregor knew as Sister Kenna. She asked a lot of fluttery questions about where they’d been and how they felt and what they were doing on the side of the bridge, and then she was called off by a voice down the first-floor hall. Michael took Gregor to the stairwell and started to climb.
“Going this way is a little difficult in some ways,” he said. “You’ve got to go up to five and then across the bridge and then down to three again, but it’s the only way to have even a modicum of privacy. And it’s only a modicum, believe me.”
Gregor believed that Sister Kenna was probably on the phone right now, telling Sister Augustine that Dr. Michael Pride had done the very odd thing of bringing Gregor Demarkian into the center by the wrong door.
Gregor followed Michael up and up and up and then over a bridge with glass sides that made him dizzy and more than a little anxious. Twenty years in the FBI had had an effect on his assumptions of the world. He kept wondering what would happen to them if there was a sniper down there, or in one of the buildings across the street. Whose idea had it been to build a glass bridge like this in such a dangerous part of town?
Michael Pride didn’t think anything of the bridge at all. He let Gregor into the east building and looked around.
“We have day care here from six in the morning to seven at night. Day care for infants and toddlers, I mean. Sixty kids under the age of five. Lots of volunteers. It’s easy to find volunteers for projects like day care.”
“What happens when the kids are five?”
“They go over to the west building to another program we have there. Actually, half the kids in this program are doing a version of Head Start. It’s not Head Start itself—the center doesn’t take any public money, not even Medicaid—but it’s the same idea. Works pretty well, from what I’ve seen.”
“Good.”
“Two more flights. Right this way.”
Gregor followed Michael again, glad to see that these last two flights were well lit and reasonably wide. He was trying to pretend he was not out of breath. Some of the floors they had passed on the way up in the other building had been essentially shut down for people to sleep. There had barely been any light at all. Michael had perked right up when they had gotten to this building. His tiredness seemed to have been almost a result of the atmosphere downtown. He went down the last two flights of stairs humming softly under his breath. Gregor recognized the song. It was “Under the Sea.” For no reason at all, it suddenly occurred to Gregor that one of the two composers of that song had died of AIDS.
“Maybe Eamon will be in his office,” Michael said, as they rounded the last bend in the staircase before reaching the third floor. “You should talk to him about Charlie. Eamon had more to do with Charlie than anybody else in this place but me.”
Gregor didn’t think Eamon Donleavy was feeling especially cooperative. He decided not to bring it up. He went barreling down the stairs after Michael, not looking where he was going. He almost ran right into Michael Pride’s back.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, pulling up short.
Michael was standing motionless in the middle of the third-floor hall, staring at a closed office door.
“My office,” Michael said. “The door’s closed.”
“So what?”
“My door’s never closed. The only time I ever saw it closed was when Charlie—oh, for Christ’s sake. This is asinine.”
Michael Pride strode ahead, grabbed the knob of his office door and yanked the door open. He was so sure that he would find nothing there but an empty office—and Gregor was so sure with him—that it took them both a long minute to assimilate what they did see.
What they saw was a woman in a short black dress, rolling around on the worn carpet on Michael Pride’s office floor, bucking and spasming as if she were being electrocuted.
Rosalie van Straadt.
PART TWO
The Cardinal Archbishop of New York
Is Beginning
to Lose His Patience
ONE
1
THEY TRIED TO BRING her back. They tried so hard, Gregor thought they were going to do it. He was a veteran of dozens of murder cases and an expert on poisons. He should have known better than to believe for a moment that someone in Rosalie van Straadt’s condition could recover from strychnine toxicity. But he got caught up in Michael Pride’s conviction. Michael Pride radiated conviction. Gregor had had hands-on experience in medical emergencies. He had once provided enough first aid to a woman who had swallowed lye so that she didn’t die from it—although, lye being lye, she hadn’t ended up in very good shape, either. First aid, however, was the key. Always before, when Gregor had been called on to do something about a man or woman who needed a doctor, no doctor had been available. Now the doctor was available, but Gregor’s help was needed anyway. There were never enough professionals on staff at the Sojourner Truth Health Center. The first thing Michael Pride did when he got over his shock at seeing Rosalie spasming and shuddering in his office was to go for his upstairs cabinet. The second thing he did was to start issuing Gregor orders. Gregor wanted to issue a few orders of his own. Don’t touch the upstairs cabinet, he thought. The strychnine
probably came from there. Don’t touch the papers on your desk. The murderer might have gotten careless and left something important lying around. Watch where you step on the carpet. There could be fibers, sand, pieces of lint, anything. It was ridiculous. Gregor kept his mouth shut and followed orders.
“Pick up the phone,” Michael said. “Push nine. Then push four four four.”
“Who am I calling?” Gregor asked.
“Nobody and everybody.”
Gregor picked up the phone, pushed nine, then pushed four four four. The Touch-Tone beeps hammered into his ear. A second later, what sounded like an air raid siren began to go off in the building. Gregor jumped. Michael went right on doing what he was doing. The siren stopped abruptly and a computerized voice said: “Code blue. Third floor. West building. Code blue. Third floor. West building.”
“Like it?” Michael asked. “It’s put together with spare parts and I don’t know what. We had a kid here a few years ago, wealthy family in Thailand, studying to be an engineer, got religion and joined the Catholic Church and came out to volunteer. He rigged it up for us.”
“Who keeps it working?”
“Other kids.”
The computerized voice was going on and on. Gregor wondered what you had to do to stop it. He heard the sound of pounding on the stairs. Somebody was running up to them at full speed, probably several somebodies. Michael’s door was still open. Gregor sat down on the edge of the desk and watched as a small crowd of people emerged from the stairwell and crowded in around Michael.
Sister Augustine went immediately to the phone, punched in more numbers, and shut off the computerized voice.
“What’s going on around here?” she asked the air.
Michael knew better than to answer. “I need a stretcher,” he said. “Does anybody have a stretcher?”
“Yes.” A young man at the back of the crowd stepped forward. “We brought the folding stretcher, Dr. Pride, what do you want us to do with it?”
“We’ve got to get her downstairs.”
Michael Pride stepped away from Rosalie van Straadt’s body and let the young man come in. The young man unfolded what looked to Gregor like a battlefield carrier and motioned another young man to help him. Rosalie van Straadt was still and blue around the lips, but she was breathing—just. Michael Pride was wet with sweat and dead white.
“What did you do?” Gregor asked in astonishment. “I’d have thought she’d be dead by now. Strychnine victims die quickly.”
“Strychnine?” Augie asked sharply.
“Oh, shit,” somebody in the crowd said.
“Get her down to Emergency Three,” Michael told the young men holding the stretcher. He turned to Augie and shook his head. “I threw dice,” he said grimly. “I gave her Comprozan.”
“Oh,” Augie said.
“What’s Comprozan?” Gregor demanded.
Michael was heading for the door behind the stretcher. “It’s a hypnotic. A very powerful hypnotic. Strychnine victims don’t die from strychnine poisoning. At least not technically. Strychnine makes the body hypersensitive to outside stimulus—light, sound, all of that. The sensitivity is so acute the victim is subject to violent seizures. It’s the seizures that kill him. Her. Whatever. Hypnotics reduce the sensitivity of the body to outside stimulus. So—”
“That can’t be standard medical procedure,” Gregor said. “Why haven’t I ever heard of anyone doing that before?”
“Because there’s no way to know if the combination of strychnine and a hypnotic is deadly in itself.” Augie was beside herself. “Michael, for God’s sake. If it turns out to be absolutely contraindicated, the police will think—”
Michael wheeled around. “I know what everybody will think.” He was shouting. “What did you expect me to do? Let her go on in convulsions like that? Do nothing? Augie, be rational for a minute. The woman is dying.”
“They’ll say you did something to make sure,” Augie went on implacably. “They’ll say you did something even a fool would know was lethal. They’ll say she hadn’t taken enough strychnine to kill her and you finished the job.”
“She’d taken enough strychnine to kill her all right, Augie. Mr. Demarkian here can testify to that.”
“She was like a cartoon,” Gregor said. “She was jumping around like—I didn’t know a body could move like that.”
“Come on.” Michael pulled at the sleeve of Augie’s sweatshirt. “Let’s get moving. That Comprozan I gave her won’t last long. She’s still breathing. We still have a chance.”
Most of the rest of the crowd had left in the wake of the stretcher—most, but not all. Gregor thought there were just enough people around to get a good round of gossip going. Most of them seemed to be voyeurs of one kind or another. Gregor saw a couple of teenage girls, one made up clownishly in everything from undereye liner to rouge, one of them scrubbed so clean the skin of her face looked as if when you touched it it would squeak. Gregor wondered if they had come up because of the unusual location of the emergency—third floor, west building meant Michael Pride’s office, or one or two others—or if they had just been on their way up or down and just found themselves caught up in the excitement. Whatever the reason, these two would have the story all over the center in the next five minutes.
Neither Michael nor Augie was paying any attention to either of the girls. They were hurrying out into the hall. The girls stepped back to let them pass. The one with the terminal makeup job looked into Michael’s office and gave Gregor a cursory look-over. Michael got into the middle of the hall, seemed to think of something and turned back. He smiled wanly at Gregor and took a deep breath.
“If I were you,” he said, “I’d get on the phone to Manhattan Homicide and ask for Detective Sheed. We’re going to wind up with him in our laps one way or the other.”
2
THEY DIDN’T BRING HER back. Of course, it had always been impossible. Gregor had known that from the beginning. He had known it from before the beginning. In the middle of a real emergency, it was so hard to stay rational. This emergency had felt like something on television. Rescue 911. St. Elsewhere. Gregor couldn’t count the number of emergency room scenes he had been subjected to in his lifetime—and that in spite of the fact that he had been born and brought up well before the Age of Television made its debut. He couldn’t even count the number of emergency room scenes he had been subjected to in the last year. Gregor baby-sat on and off for Donna Moradanyan’s young son, Tommy. Tommy’s favorite activity—after being read to by Father Tibor Kasparian out of a book of Greek and Roman mythology—was Rescue 911 and all its clones, so that Donna had made him a videotape of two dozen of these shows with the commercials taken out. The problem with those shows was that they were rigged. The producers never seemed to pick a case in which the victim died, where all the efforts to save the woman on the stretcher proved futile. Gregor had real experience in the real world, which should have countered all this rot. He found it a little embarrassing that it didn’t.
Where his experience did come in handy was in the matter of Michael Pride’s office. Gregor had been with the FBI too long not to know that he couldn’t just pick up the phone in Michael Pride’s office and call the police, or leave the office unattended and call the police from somewhere else. He didn’t want to disturb anything at all in the office. He had no way of knowing what this Detective Sheed would find important. The two teenage girls were still in the hall. Gregor went out to them and directed his attention to the one with the scrubbed face. Looking at the other one made him a little dizzy.
“Excuse me. My name is Gregor Demarkian. I was wondering if you could do me a favor, Miss—”
“Me?” the girl said. “Oh. Enderson. Miss Enderson. Julie Enderson.”
“Miss Enderson. I was wondering if you could go into one of the offices on this hall and get me a roll of tape.”
“Tape?”
“He wants to secure the crime scene,” the one in the makeup said breathlessly. “Ju
lie, listen: This is the PI the Cardinal hired.”
“Tape,” Julie Enderson said again. Gregor wondered if she were stupid. She didn’t look stupid. Maybe she was shell-shocked. She turned around and looked at the other side of the hall. “There might be tape in Father Donleavy’s office,” she said. “I could check in there.”
“Not Father Donleavy’s office,” the other girl chided. “Julie, be sensible. Father Donleavy wouldn’t have tape. Mrs. Biederson would.”
“Who’s Mrs. Biederson?”
The made-up girl flapped her hands. “She’s head of the office staff. But she’s on vacation this week. But her office is open. All the offices on this floor are always open. Give me a second and I’ll get you some tape.”
“Masking tape,” Gregor said. “The brown kind. Not Scotch.”
“In a flash,” the made-up girl said, pumping off across the hall. Her heels were so high, she was almost walking en pointe.
Julie watched her go and sighed. “Her name is Karida. I don’t think it’s working out for her here. Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” Gregor said.
“I overheard Augie tell Dr. Pride—well, that the cops were going to suspect him. Of killing that woman. Who was that woman?”
“Rosalie van Straadt. The granddaughter of Charles van Straadt, the man who died here—”
“—two weeks ago,” Julie finished for him. “Are the cops going to suspect Dr. Pride? Of killing the woman, I mean?”
“They shouldn’t,” Gregor said carefully. “That is, they shouldn’t suspect him of killing her directly. In fact, that would have been impossible.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Dr. Pride and I have been together continuously since seven o’clock, except for one or two trips to the bathroom. And since the trips to the bathroom took place better than sixty blocks downtown from here, they wouldn’t have been long enough to allow Dr. Pride the time to get all the way up here and give Rosalie van Straadt strychnine.”