by Jane Haddam
“Yes, well, the thing is, it was a slow night, as I said, but slow or not the deal was that the bar had to cash out every two hours, because we were always getting robbed, you know, if we didn’t do that. I mean, everybody always says that nobody robs the Mafia, but they’re wrong. Junkies do it all the time. Nobody can find them afterward, and they’re half dead anyway. So, it was about ten o’clock and the bar cashed out and the bartender put the money in this black metal box that locked up and he gave the black metal box to me and told me to go up to the manager’s office and get a receipt for it. So I took the box and I went. But I didn’t go the way I was supposed to go. I didn’t go up the back stairs. I hated the back stairs. They were dark, and sometimes you’d find johns on them, jerking off—excuse me—you know what they were doing. And if they caught you there when they were like that you didn’t know what was going to happen. And they wouldn’t pay you for it afterward. And then if the guys who owned the place found out they’d say you gave it away for free and beat you up. So I didn’t use the back stairs. I went around to the front and up that way. Which was how I saw him.”
“Charles van Straadt,” Gregor said.
“Right. He was standing in the door of the manager’s office when I got to the top of the stairs. He really stuck out. Nobody down there dresses like that. If they get a lot of money or they’re really good at lifting stuff they go for the expensive flash. This guy’s clothes were just quality. You could tell.”
“Was there anything else on this floor except your manager’s office? Were there other offices?”
“The place was a big production. The revue was a secret. You had to have a pass to get in and they were very careful because of the raids. But there was a bookstore they had, too, with dirty books and a video rental place and one of those peep shows that are all over down there. There were lots of offices on that floor, but they all belonged to the same company. Us. If you see what I mean. And besides, I know he was coming from my manager’s office because I heard him talking.”
“To your manager.”
“That’s right. He was saying, ‘Raids or no raids, if this place doesn’t bring in a profit, there’s no point in keeping it going. Do something.’ And my manager was all jumpy. ‘Do what?’ he kept asking. I can’t go drag johns in from the street. Not for something like this.’ But it was really obvious what was going on. It was really obvious who this man was. The one who turned out later to be Charles van Straadt.”
“Who was he?”
“The owner, of course, or somebody connected to the owner. But I thought at the time that he had to be the owner, because of the way he was dressed and everything. And now that I know he was Charles van Straadt, I’m sure of it. Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor told her.
Julie wriggled around in her seat. “I thought, you know, that it might be good news for Dr. Pride. Because a man like that, an old man that owns that kind of place, well, he knows all sorts of people who might want to murder him. People who know how to murder people, if you see what I mean.”
“I think those people tend more to bullet holes in the back of the head than to strychnine.”
“Those people would do anything,” Julie said staunchly. “Michael wouldn’t kill anybody.”
Gregor was about to say that he agreed with her, he didn’t think Michael Pride would kill anybody, when there was a commotion near the cash register, and like everyone else in the cafeteria he turned to look. For a moment or two it was difficult to decipher what was going on. The cafeteria had filled up a little since Gregor and Julie had first sat down. A little clutch of people with half-filled trays blocked Gregor’s view of the scene of the commotion. Then one of the women moved away a little and Gregor saw. Martha van Straadt was standing next to the cash register, her back to the cashier, her arms folded across her chest. Facing her was a confused looking Robbie Yagger, holding nothing at all. Gregor looked around for a tray or a paper cup of coffee, but found nothing.
“Excuse me for a second,” he told Julie Enderson. Then he got up and began to advance on the cafeteria line.
“You!” Martha van Straadt was screeching. “You. I can’t believe you have the nerve to show your face here. I can’t believe you have the nerve to just walk in and drink our coffee. Who do you think you are? What do you think you’re doing?”
Robbie Yagger seemed to be swaying a little on his feet. “I don’t feel so good,” he said. “It tasted funny.”
“What tasted funny?” Gregor asked, coming up next to Robbie on the other side of the rail.
Martha van Straadt was still screeching. “He doesn’t feel so good. Hell. Why should I care how he feels? Why should any of us? He doesn’t care how we feel. He stands out there day after day, carrying that damn sign, terrifying half the clients going into the family planning clinic, how do they know what he’s going to do? How do any of us know?”
“It was the coffee.” Robbie Yagger’s voice was oddly distinct. “It tasted funny. It had stuff in it.”
“What kind of stuff?” Gregor asked him.
Martha van Straadt advanced on them both. “I want him out of here,” she said. “I want him off these premises. And I don’t want to see him back until he apologizes to every woman in this center for his bigotry, his fanaticism, and his bad manners.”
“For God’s sake,” someone in the crowd murmured. “She can’t throw him out of here just because he doesn’t approve of abortion. What about the nuns?”
“I’m not carrying the sign any more,” Robbie Yagger said. “I changed my mind.”
“She doesn’t care about abortion,” someone else in the crowd said. “She’s just Martha van Straadt. She thinks she can run everybody else’s life just the way she wants to.”
Gregor ducked under the rail. Robbie’s eyes were beginning to glaze over. He seemed to be petrifying in front of Gregor’s eyes.
“I changed my mind,” Robbie said again. “I talked to Shana. I’m not going to picket any more.”
Michael Pride loomed up out of nowhere. “What’s going on?” he asked.
Gregor pointed to Robbie. “What do you think? He keeps talking about the coffee tasting funny.”
“It had stuff in it,” Robbie said again. “Floating around. I didn’t think that was right. I—”
Robbie’s back began to arch and his head snapped forward. Michael Pride lunged at him and caught him around the waist.
“Oh, no,” Michael said. “Not this time. Augie. Get me the Comprozan.”
“Coming,” Augie said.
“Meet me in Emergency Room Three.”
Then Michael Pride picked Robbie Yagger up, slung him over his shoulder, and headed at a full-tilt run for the stairs.
PART THREE
The Cardinal Archbishop of New York
Does Not Get the Solution
He Was Looking For
ONE
1
THIS TIME, MICHAEL PRIDE pulled it off. Gregor didn’t understand how he pulled it off—Gregor didn’t have the first idea how medicine worked, or why it sometimes didn’t—but the impression he got was that nobody else understood how Michael had done it, either. The surprising thing was how quick it all was. Gregor had time to call Hector Sheed. In spite of the fact that he didn’t know, then, for sure, that what he had was a strychnine poisoning, Gregor thought getting Hector to the scene was only common sense. Something was going on. Besides, he was half sure. People had once called Gregor Demarkian America’s foremost expert on poisons. They had been exaggerating, as usual. The real expert was a professor of pathology at the Yale Medical School. Gregor was only number two. He did, however, know poisons. He’d never seen anyone as early in the process of being poisoned by strychnine as Robbie Yagger had been in the Sojourner Truth Health Center’s cafeteria, but he was willing to bet that strychnine poisoning was in fact what Robbie had had. After calling Hector Sheed, Gregor paced back and forth in the open space near the front doors in front of the Admitting desk. The emergency
room seemed to be suddenly full of people, although not people with emergencies. Gregor saw dozens of volunteer staff pins, half a dozen short modern veils, a few habits. There were also people from the street, some of them old, some of them young and garish looking, all of them poor. It was as if the center were putting out messages on some kind of silent shortwave. All these people had sensed trouble. All these people were willing to help. Gregor wondered what it was any of them thought they would be able to do.
By the time Hector Sheed showed up, Michael Pride was finished with Robbie Yagger. The doctor came out of Emergency Room 3 looking so gray in the face, Gregor thought he was going to have a stroke. Augie came out behind him, looking ill. Gregor was standing still near the front doors. Michael walked up to him with his surgical mask in his hands. His hands were covered with surgical gloves—two apiece.
“Did it,” Michael Pride said. He looked over Gregor’s shoulder and blinked. “Hello, Hector. You got here fast.”
“Demarkian said there’d been another poisoning,” Hector Sheed said. “Another poisoning.”
Michael ignored him. “The technicians took stomach samples,” he told Gregor Demarkian. “I made them. They’ve got the samples preserved. The police can have them any time they want them. Robbie’s going to be out of it for the next couple of days.”
“How out of it?” Gregor asked.
Michael shrugged. “Don’t expect him to talk to anybody until at least tomorrow afternoon. Even then it might be difficult. What we just did was essentially a stomach pumping operation. It wasn’t just a stomach- pumping operation, but you see what I mean. And we’re still worried about residual effects of the strychnine. He’s heavily sedated. And he’s got to be kept in a dark room with as little distraction as possible for at least ten hours.”
“How do you know it was strychnine?” Hector demanded. “Nobody comes back from strychnine. It’s a bitch.”
Michael was peeling the surgical gloves off his hands. “It was strychnine. Ask Gregor Demarkian here. Test our samples. It was strychnine. Nothing on earth looks like it.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Hector said.
Michael dropped both pairs of gloves into a tall wastebasket with a red lining. The red was to let everyone know that the waste the bag contained was medically hazardous, toxic, contagious. If you put a red trash bag by the side of the road, no ordinary garbage truck would pick it up. Gregor wondered why he was thinking of that and decided it was because he didn’t want to think about Michael Pride’s face, which was getting worse by the minute. It had gone from gray to chalk white. The eyes looked sunk into the sockets. The skin of the head didn’t seem thick enough to hold in the skull. Was it really still the middle of the afternoon? Gregor wondered. But of course it was.
“I thought it all out after Charlie died,” Michael said dreamily. “Thought about how there had to be a way. If you went at it logically, you had to be able to do it. Don’t you see.”
“No,” Hector Sheed said.
Michael shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. Take the samples. He was saying something about his coffee.”
Michael Pride began to drift away. Hector started after him. Gregor caught Hector by the sleeve and pulled him back.
“Let him go,” Gregor said. “He’s not going anywhere. He’s sick as hell.”
“He said something about this guy’s coffee.”
“I know more about the coffee than Michael does. That guy in there, the one with strychnine poisoning, do you know who it is? That’s the guy I wanted to talk to. The one who told me something I hadn’t taken seriously before.”
“Did you get a chance to talk to him?”
“No.”
Gregor looked around the admitting area again. Eamon Donleavy was standing in a crowd of older women, making reassuring noises. Michael and Augie had both disappeared. Julie Enderson may never have come upstairs at all. Gregor didn’t remember seeing the girl after he’d come upstairs. Over near the doors, Ida Greel and Martha van Straadt were standing with a tall, attractive, ineffectual-looking young man. Gregor had been introduced to Martha and Ida, just as he’d been introduced to everybody at the center over the last two days. He had no idea who the young man was.
“Who’s that?” he asked Hector Sheed, pointing.
“That’s Victor van Straadt,” Hector said. “Ida’s brother, Martha’s and Rosalie’s cousin, one of the late Charles van Straadt’s grandchildren. Why? Does he look suspicious to you?”
“I didn’t know who he was.” Now it was Gregor’s turn to be distracted. It was odd, he thought, how the very obvious thing never occurred to you until the bitter end. And yet it had been there for you all the time. Just sitting in front of your face.
“Hector,” he said. “You know what the problem is here? Time.”
“Time? Do you want to give me the particulars of this incident? What does time have to do with it?”
“I didn’t mean this incident. I didn’t mean Robbie Yagger. I meant Charles van Straadt. I take it we are in agreement that all three of these poisonings were perpetrated by the same person?”
“As long as this last one was a poisoning. Yeah. Sure.”
“For the moment, it doesn’t matter if this last one was a poisoning or not. Although it does in the long run, of course. In the long run, it has to be.” Gregor started to pace. “Look at the problem as a puzzle now. On the night Charles van Straadt died, there was a major emergency up here, a shoot-out in a gang war. From approximately six o’clock in the evening, when Charles van Straadt showed up in the center—totally unexpectedly, according to your own reports, without having told anyone he was going to do it—from that point until after eight o’clock when Charles van Straadt’s body was found, this floor was a mass of people. So far so good?”
“Yes. Fine.”
“In spite of that mass of people,” Gregor went on, “our murderer got hold of either Michael Pride’s keys or Sister Augustine’s, without whoever it was ever knowing they were missing, got into Michael Pride’s private examining room and opened his private medical cabinet without anyone seeing a thing, got the strychnine, doctored the coffee—let’s give the benefit of a doubt here, let’s say the murderer had the cup of coffee he or she wanted to feed poor Charles van Straadt with him—anyway, doctored the coffee, got up to the third floor by the staircase, fed the poison to Charles van Straadt, and got both the coffee cup and himself out of Michael Pride’s third-floor office before Michael walked in. Does that make sense to you?”
“The murderer could have taken the elevator to the second floor,” Hector said. “Then he could have gone up to the third from there.”
“Don’t forget the emergency,” Gregor warned him. “Those elevators were being used to carry stretchers. Even the doctors were using the stairs. Anyone who entered an elevator that night carrying nothing more than a cup of coffee would have been told off—and we would have heard about it.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. Seriously, Hector, think about what I just told you. Does that sound possible to you?”
“Lots of things are possible.” Hector was hedging. “If you had my job, you’d know. It sounds crazy, I’ll admit. But believe me, it isn’t anywhere near impossible.”
Gregor threw up his hands in exasperation. “Of course it’s impossible,” he said. “Of course it is. Nobody could have done all that on the night Charles van Straadt died without having been seen by somebody who would have mentioned it. Nobody could have gotten the strychnine out of Michael Pride’s office without being caught at it except Michael Pride himself—or maybe Augie. But neither Michael Pride nor Augie could have been off this floor long enough to get to the third floor and feed poison to Charles van Straadt without half a dozen people knowing. Michael himself was in the emergency room for nearly the entire two hours nonstop.”
“Augie was out of the fray for a while,” Hector said. “Look at the report. She was in the head nurse’s office having dinner.”
“Which was brought to her by Sister Kenna, who stayed to talk for five minutes. Never mind the fact that the head nurse’s office opens directly onto the corridor between Emergency Room Two and Emergency Room Three.”
“Still,” Hector said stubbornly.
“The times aren’t right,” Gregor said triumphantly. “Charles van Straadt had to have been fed that strychnine within ten minutes of the time Michael Pride found him dying—and ten minutes is making it very, very long. I didn’t see anything that said Augie was missing during that time. It was earlier that she had dinner by herself in the office.”
Hector Sheed looked up toward the front doors. “What about them?” he asked. “Ida, Victor, and Martha. Ida works in the emergency room, but the other two had all the time in the world.”
“How would either one of them have gotten the strychnine out of Michael Pride’s office without being caught in the act?”
“Maybe they were caught in the act. Maybe somebody saw one of them do it and doesn’t realize how important that information is. Maybe that’s what your Robbie Yagger saw that got him poisoned.”
“What Robbie Yagger saw was a young woman carrying a funnel of used coffee grounds to the back of the emergency-room area,” Gregor said. “And yes, that got him poisoned, but not because the young woman was coming out of Michael Pride’s office. She wasn’t. Nobody was. That elaborate scenario we’ve both been so entranced with as the most likely reconstruction of the way Charles van Straadt was murdered? Well, it’s a pile of nonsense.”
“Charles van Straadt is dead. That’s not nonsense.”
“No, it’s not. But he didn’t get dead by someone running around like a maniac in the middle of a full-scale crisis doing God knows what so skillfully and so well that he, or she, was no more visible than a ghost. You’ve got to help me with something. I want to try an experiment.”
“What kind of an experiment?”
“An experiment with time. Go down to the nurses’ station and ask the nun for her stopwatch. They’ve got a couple of them down there. They need them for cardiovascular testing or something. Meet me back here as soon as you can.”