Dear Old Dead (13 page)

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 want 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.

L
ATE 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 uniform 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.

Gregor got down to the basement and looked around. The way the stairwell was positioned next to the cafeteria doors, it looked as if the cafeteria took up almost every square foot on this level, with just a small cushion of space for men’s and ladies’ rooms and for the stairwell and entryway. Gregor knew that couldn’t be right. There had to be storage space down here, too. He wondered how you got to it.

He went into the cafeteria and looked around. It was standard hospital issue, small but otherwise indistinguishable from its counterparts at every hospital in every city in the United States. There was a food service line with silverware and paper napkins at one end, everything from evil-looking fruit in gelatin-molds to wilted-skinned chicken legs to cardboard apple pie in the middle, and packets of Sweet ’n Low and pats of butter near the cash register. The shelf made of stainless-steel tubing to push your tray along on, so that you didn’t accidentally drop it, even though four or five people a year would drop their trays anyway. There was a ferocious looking woman in a cap and apron standing at the cash register, looking bored while a shriveled young man counted pennies to pay for his coffee. The young man looked decidedly down at heel, and ashamed of it, too. It was the shame that piqued Gregor’s interest. This was Harlem, and the young man was not only white but practically Nordic. He had none of the casual assumption of belonging that would have marked him as a center volunteer. He didn’t look sick, except in the sense that he looked hungry. Gregor put a Danish on his tray and moved up the line. That was when he saw that the young man had more than coffee. He had a jelly doughnut on a round paper plate. While Gregor watched, he counted his change twice, sighed, and then put the doughnut on the stainless-steel counter next to the Sweet ’n Low. The woman at the cash register looked bored.

“If you’re not going to take the doughnut,” she said, “you ought to put back the doughnut.”

“Right,” the young man said.

Gregor was still coming up behind him, but the young man didn’t notice. His face was bright red. Shame was too calm a word to put on what he was feeling. This was a form of agony. The young man had the paper plate with the doughnut on it in his hand. It was a small enough doughnut, oozing jelly at one end. Under the cover of slightly lowered lashes, the young man was eyeing it with desperation. It hurt Gregor just to look at him.

“Stop,” he said, when the young man reached him. “Turn around.”

The young man looked up and blinked. “Excuse me. I have to put this doughnut back.”

“Never mind. Go back to the cash register. I’ll buy you a doughnut and a cup of coffee. I’ll buy you two doughnuts.”

“Oh.” The young man blushed harder. And harder. Gregor thought the color in his face was going to go right off the red spectrum into orange. “Oh,” the young man said again. “Thank you. But I can’t. I really can’t. I mean, I’m not hungry.”

“Take three doughnuts,” Gregor said. “Never mind the doughnuts. Eat lunch.”

“Oh,” the young man said. “But—”

“Chicken or roast beef?”

“Chicken. I mean—”

“The gentleman wants chicken,” Gregor said to the girl behind the counter.

Down at the cash register, the old woman snorted. “I don’t know what you’re helping him out for,” she said. “He doesn’t help us out any. He’s been working overtime for months now, trying to get us shut down.”

“That’s not true,” the young man said quickly.

“Keep the doughnut,” Gregor told him. “What kind of potatoes do you want?”

“Fried.” The young man was looking dazed.