Dear Old Dead (18 page)

“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.”

T
HEY 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. “Julie, 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.”

“He couldn’t have given it to her before he left for dinner?”

“If he had, Rosalie van Straadt would have been dead a long time ago. Strychnine acts very fast.”

Julie nodded. “Good,” she said. “Good. Maybe they’ll think he hired someone else to do it or he had an accomplice, but if he’s got a really good alibi, they’ll leave him alone. They’ll have to. Even the mayor gets upset when they bother Michael and there doesn’t seem to be any good reason. I saw the other one, you know.”

“Who?” Gregor asked, startled. “Charles van Straadt?”

Julie Enderson nodded. “I didn’t know that that’s who it was at the time. It must have been right before he got killed, too. It was in the middle of the shoot-out. I was going down to the emergency room to see if they’d brought my mother in.”

“Your mother,” Gregor repeated.

“She lives with this gang guy. She’s only about thirty. She had me when she was really young. Karida and I came right down this way from the east building and when we got to this hall, there he was. This van Straadt guy. And then—”

“Tape,” Karida said, clattering back. Her hands were full of spools. In spite of Gregor’s instructions, she had brought a spool of Scotch tape. Fortunately, she had also brought two spools of masking tape and a spool of black electrical tape. There was a spool of duct tape in her hands, too. Gregor took the masking tape, shut Michael Pride’s office door, and began to weave tape from one side of the doorframe to the other.

“Do you two have anything you have to go do right now?”

Karida and Julie shook their heads.

“Good,” Gregor said. “Then you can stay here. Make sure nobody goes into Dr. Pride’s office. And I mean nobody. Not Dr. Pride himself. Not Sister Augustine. Nobody.”

“If somebody went into the office, they’d mess up the tape,” Karida said reasonably. “You’d know.”

“I might. On the other hand, somebody might be careful enough not to mess up the tape too much and to put it back when he was finished. Then I wouldn’t know. Or somebody might come along and take some tape off the door but decide they’d better not go on with it, and I’d have no way of knowing if the room had been entered or not.”

“This is just like a television show,” Karida said. “This is wonderful!”

“Will the two of you stay?”

Julie Enderson straightened up a little. She had been staring off into the distance. Gregor hadn’t thought she’d been paying attention. What is it with this girl? Now that he’d talked to her, he knew she wasn’t stupid. He didn’t think she was on drugs. If she was, it was on a drug he was unfamiliar with. She wasn’t showing any of the obvious signs—except for this accursed spaceyness. It was as if she’d been hypnotized, or as if she were sleepwalking. Why was it, Gregor wondered, that he could never think of anything but clichés in a pinch? Still, there was something wrong with Julie Enderson. If he’d had the time, he would have found out what it was.

“All right then,” Gregor said, instead of investigating. He had enough to investigate at the Sojourner Truth Health Center. “You two stay here until the police show up. And don’t move. Go to the bathroom in shifts. Don’t leave the door unattended for even a minute.”

“We won’t,” Karida promised him. “Hey, Julie, this is neat. They put this guy in
People
magazine all the time. They put him in the
National Enquirer.
Maybe after he solves this case, they’ll put us in there with him.”

“I don’t want my picture in the
National Enquirer,”
Julie said.

“I’ve got to call the police,” Gregor told them. “You two stay put.”

“We will,” Karida trilled. She sounded just like a bird.

Gregor called the police from Eamon Donleavy’s office. Then he went downstairs. He would have felt safer if it had been Julie promising to stay put, but he had to live with what he had.

I
T WAS OVER. GREGOR
could feel it in the air as soon as he stepped off the service elevator onto the first floor. He knew only stretchers and their support staff were supposed to take the elevators. He even accepted the rule as necessary—usually. This, however, was an emergency. Gregor had had enough of stairs and stairwells. He was frustrated as hell with low-tech economies. The irrational part of his mind kept urging him to get back into the twentieth century. If someone ever gave him a time machine for Christmas, he would not use it to go into the past.

There were half a dozen copies of the New York
Sentinel
lying on a wheeled metal table against the wall near the Admitting desk. Gregor found the headline incomprehensible and the red banner—
WIN! FOR FATHER’S DAY!
—idiotic. He found the emergency room dead. Being in the middle of a life-and-death crisis was exhilarating. It was better than coffee for keeping you awake and alert. The aftermath was worse than a mental and physical letdown. It had a lot in common with the aftermath of being hit in the head with a cast iron skillet. Either that, or of being drained of blood. The drained-of-blood feeling was all over the emergency room now. Gregor could feel it.