Dear Old Dead (27 page)

“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.”

“A stopwatch,” Hector Sheed repeated.

“Go,” Gregor said.

Hector seemed to hesitate, but not for long. Gregor watched him stride purposefully through what were still aimlessly milling crowds of people. Crowds parted before Hector like hair pulled by a rat-tail comb. Nobody looked at him in surprise or amazement. Hector Sheed might be big, but he was also a familiar quantity. He’d been around here much too often in the past two weeks for anybody to be surprised at his appearance.

Gregor turned his attention to the three people still standing next to the front doors, still clutched together, still talking. Martha van Straadt was looking resentful. Victor van Straadt was looking bewildered. Ida Greel was looking as if her patience were being sorely tried, but she was going to hang in there no matter what.

This, Gregor thought, was an opportunity he might never have again.

E
VEN IN THE DAYS
when Gregor Demarkian was the second most powerful man in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he’d had problems with rich people. The chief problem he’d had with rich people was attitude. There were people who said that the rich got away with more because they had good lawyers, and that was true, to an extent. In Gregor’s experience, good lawyers only went so far. The poor and the middle class had had long experience in pleasing other people. They had bosses to make happy and spouses they depended on. The habitual criminals had a lot to prove. They struck attitudes and looked forward eagerly to cameras in court. The rich just didn’t care. They not only knew they didn’t
have
to give out any information, they simply didn’t want to. They didn’t care what the police detective thought of them. They didn’t care if the district attorney liked them or not. It was maddening. You asked them for their cooperation, and they said no.

Working with no official connection to any established law enforcement office was worse. Gregor was always surprised at how willing people were to cooperate with him, relying on nothing but the rather spurious reputation he had attained in popular magazines. It was incredible to him how many people were overjoyed to spend a little time with someone they thought of as a “celebrity.” Not everyone was inclined to be that voluble, however. Gregor had met with his share of defeat, and more than his share of that inevitable question:
Who do you think you are?
The question was made worse by the fact that Gregor had no idea who he thought he was. He hadn’t known for years. It wasn’t the kind of thing a man wanted to ask himself at any stage of life.

In Martha van Straadt and Ida Greel, Gregor had so far met with what he thought of as reluctant acquiescence. He had been invited here by the Cardinal Archbishop of New York and his presence had been approved by Michael Pride. Martha and Ida were willing to put up with him. Just. Gregor wanted more than that. He didn’t think he’d have much trouble out of the young man, Ida’s brother, whom he had yet to meet. Victor van Straadt looked like the kind of person who talked endlessly about himself if given half a chance.

Martha, Ida, and Victor didn’t seem to be too happy with each other. They were as tense a group as Gregor had ever seen. Martha kept scowling from Ida to Victor and back again. Victor kept dropping the sheaf of papers he was carrying under one arm and rescuing them only a second before they scattered all over the floor. Gregor nodded a little to himself and made his way over to them. They were paying no attention to him at all.

“Excuse me,” Gregor said, when he reached Martha van Straadt’s side. “I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Gregor Demarkian. I was wondering if I could ask for your help.”

Victor van Straadt was the only one of the three of them that seemed to have any reaction at all to Gregor’s arrival. The other two turned to look at the man who was speaking to them, but their faces were blank.

“I’m Victor van Straadt.” Victor put out his hand. “We haven’t met. I’m Ida’s brother.”

Gregor shook. Victor had a good strong handclasp, the kind that was allowed only to the hero in 1930s British books. So much for that as an indication of character, Gregor thought. He looked at the papers under Victor’s arm. They were slipping again.

“Oh,” Victor said. “Excuse me. That’s my work. I work for the New York
Sentinel.”

“He runs their contests,” Martha said sarcastically. “It’s not exactly a reporting job.”

“Right,” Victor said. “Father’s Day. That’s the one we’re doing now. Maybe you’ve seen the announcements. We run a red banner over the masthead. It does wonders for newsstand sales.”

“Oh, how would you know?” Martha said. “Really, you never do any work. You don’t know the first thing about it.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Ida came in. “Victor has a very responsible position. He has to oversee the physical running of the contest itself, and keep an eye on the escrow account, and work with the publicity. It’s not as if he were Vanna White turning letters.”

“He might as well be Vanna White turning letters,” Martha said sharply. “You know as well as I do that Victor never does any of that stuff. You and Rosalie and I do it all, one way or the other. I mean, my God, escrow accounts. The only reason Victor knows how to make out a check is that he left his bank card at home one day and the woman at the bank showed him how to write a check for his money instead. I mean, for God’s sake. He’s hopeless.”

“He’s no more hopeless than you are,” Ida argued.

Victor was putting his papers into a tidy pile. Gregor saw that the one on the top had a red banner printed across it. It said:

FOR A FANTASTIC FATHER’S DAY! PLAY IT NOW!

Victor got the pile neat, looked up, and grinned. He was a little green around the gills.

“Well,” he said. “Help. You asked us if we could help.”

“That’s right,” Gregor said. “Hector Sheed—the detective assigned to this case from Manhattan Homicide—Hector Sheed has just gone to get a stopwatch. He’ll be back in a minute. I need somebody who’ll be willing to do a little running around that we could time.”

“Why?” Martha van Straadt asked.

“Because we’re trying to figure out how long it would have taken for someone to do what had to be done on the night your grandfather was killed,” Gregor said. “I don’t know if you realize it, but for the murder to have been brought off the way it was, the murderer had to do quite a lot of running around. We’re having something of a hard time figuring out how long it all took, and when. If we knew how long, you see, we might be able to figure out when.”

“But you know when,” Ida insisted. “Strychnine is a fast-acting poison. Grandfather must have been poisoned almost immediately before Michael found him.”

“Not that kind of when,” Gregor explained. “It’s true your grandfather must have been poisoned very close to the time he was found, but that doesn’t mean the poison itself was acquired in the preceding few minutes. It could have been taken out of Michael Pride’s medical cabinet an hour earlier and not been given to Charles van Straadt, but hidden instead. There’s no way to know.”

“I don’t think we ought to do this,” Martha said. “We could be incriminating ourselves.”

“Of course we won’t be incriminating ourselves,” Ida said impatiently. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“There are dozens of people around here,” Martha shot back. “He could get any one of them to do it. It doesn’t have to be us.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Gregor told her, “but it would be convenient. You’re all young and healthy, so we don’t have to worry about giving you a stroke asking you to race up and down stairs. And none of you seem to be on duty at the moment. Of course, Miss Greel might be called on in an emergency.”

“I go on at six,” Ida said. “I think this all sounds perfectly reasonable, Mr. Demarkian. I’m sure we’d all like to do anything we can to help.”

“Speak for yourself,” Martha said. Her face was a little red. “I’m not going to help. I’m not going to have anything to do with this.”

“I think it sounds like fun,” Victor said. “I haven’t done any real running since I left college. I was on the rugby team.”

“I should have known this was going to happen.” Martha was indignant. “You’re ganging up on me. Ida’s got all the money and Victor thinks she’ll throw him some of it, so they’re closing ranks against me. I should have realized.”

“Oh, Martha,” Ida said. “For God’s sake.”

Victor looked confused. “I’m not closing ranks on anyone. I just think it would be fun to run around for a while.”

“It was supposed to be Rosalie who got all the money.” Martha swung around to Gregor Demarkian. “That’s what Rosalie thought and that’s what I thought too, but it wasn’t true. It was Ida.”

“I didn’t get all the money,” Ida said angrily. “Martha, I mean it, for God’s sake. Grandfather died before he could change his will.”

“And you’re trying to make it look like I killed him,” Martha snapped. “You’re trying to make it look like I fed him a lot of poison so he wouldn’t have a chance to change it.”

“And then you poisoned Rosalie,” Ida said, “and this Robbie Yagger. What for? Obviously there’s some kind of maniac running around.”

“I don’t care who you think is running around.” Martha had a full head of steam now. Gregor had seen cartoons where furious characters shot smoke through their ears. He had never before seen a living human being who seemed capable of replicating the feat. Martha seemed to be going feral. Her left foot was stamping rhythmically against the floor. It reminded Gregor of something large and shaggy pawing the ground.

“I don’t care what either of you say,” Martha bit out at them. “Family solidarity. Family solidarity my foot. This family has as much solidarity as Bosnia-Herzegovina. You two do anything you goddamn well want, but don’t expect to drag me into it. I’m going to go out and hire my own attorneys.”

“Martha.”
Ida was near tears.

Martha wasn’t listening. She pounded her foot one last time onto the hard floor, glared at Gregor Demarkian, and spun away. Then she marched straight to the front doors and out of them, out of sight. She didn’t turn around once. Ida, Victor, and Gregor watched her go. Hector Sheed watched her go, too. The detective had come up to the group with the stopwatch in his hands just moments before Martha started her last speech. Now he stared after her in astonishment.

“What was that?” he demanded. “What was the matter with her?”

“She didn’t want to help with the experiment,” Victor said nervously.

“So what?” Hector was still bewildered. “She didn’t want to help, all she had to do was say so. What’s going on around here? What’s all this about? Gregor?”