Dear Old Dead (33 page)

There was a gentle tap on his open door. In the hall, Gregor Demarkian and Hector Sheed waited politely. Michael stood, said, “Come in,” and walked around the desk to take a seat in the chair.

“There was some discussion outside that you might be busy,” Gregor Demarkian said. “If we’re interrupting something we could wait a few minutes until you had time.”

“I’ve got time.” Michael waved them into the two seats in front of the desk. The chairs looked much too small for such big men. “If I didn’t have time, waiting a few minutes wouldn’t be much help. Sometimes it seems to me that what we do around here is either everything or nothing. We’re either frantic or dead.”

“And now you’re dead?”

“Not quite,” Michael said. “No such luck on a Friday night. We just aren’t frantic quite yet. Could I get anything for the two of you? Coffee? Augie always keeps a pot of the stuff in here, in one of those drip machines. She says I run on caffeine.”

Hector Sheed cleared his throat. “No, thank you,” he said. “Not for me, anyway. Although that’s funny, about the coffee.”

“Funny?” Michael asked. “Why?”

“Because that’s what Mr. Demarkian is here to talk to you about,” Hector Sheed said. “Coffee.”

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Gregor Demarkian said. “And I don’t need any coffee now, either. What I want to talk to you about is Robbie Yagger.”

Michael nodded. “Robbie’s all right. If everything goes the way it’s been going, he should be fine in about a week. Will that solve all our problems here? Will he be able to tell us who tried to kill him?”

“Maybe.” Gregor nodded. “We can’t know for sure now if he saw who tried to kill him. When I saw him, he was saying something about there being ‘stuff’ in his coffee.”

“I heard that, too.” Michael nodded vigorously. “Shana Malvera heard it, too. Shana is a friend of his. She’s been keeping him company in his room as much as she can. She told me just before dinner that Robbie keeps trying to talk through his tubes, and what he seems to be saying is that there was ‘stuff’ in his coffee.”

“I wish I knew what that ‘stuff’ was,” Hector Sheed said.

Gregor brushed it away. “I know. It’s not the stuff. It’s the who. And the coffee cup, of course. I don’t know if you realize it, Dr. Pride, but the police made a very thorough search for the cup from which Robbie Yagger drank his coffee. They didn’t find it.”

“He didn’t have a cup,” Michael said. “Not when I saw him.”

“He didn’t have a cup when I saw him, either,” Gregor agreed. “When did you first see him?”

“We came into the cafeteria together. Down at the tray and flatware end of the line. If he was sick then, I didn’t notice it. What am I talking about? Of course he was sick then. He would have had to be. I must have been thinking about something else.”

“He wasn’t carrying a coffee cup when you saw him.”

“No, he wasn’t. He wasn’t carrying anything. He didn’t even pick up a tray. He just walked on through and started looking around. I assumed he was meeting somebody.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I thought the same thing myself. Would that be Shana Malvera?”

“She wasn’t in the cafeteria. You could ask her, though. Maybe she was supposed to be and she got tied up.”

“Is she up in Robbie Yagger’s room now?”

“Yes, she is. She’s got somebody to cover for her over in the east building and she’s going to spend the night sitting in the chair next to Robbie’s bed and keeping him company. Shana’s wonderful, really. She’s one of our staff volunteers next door. She’s not too bright, but she’s got all the right instincts. Just what Robbie needs to pull him through.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I can see that. She can’t spend all night in that chair, can she? She would have to use the bathroom from time to time at least.”

“The bathroom’s right next door to Robbie’s room. We don’t have space for private bathrooms upstairs, but we do our best to make what we’ve got convenient. The nuns will bring Shana her food. They’ll even keep her supplied with coffee and magazines. I don’t see what else she would need.”

“I don’t either,” Gregor said. Then he gave Hector Sheed a long look that made Hector squirm.

Michael Pride looked from the face of one man to the face of the other. He might be in terrible pain. He might be exhausted to the point of collapse. But he hadn’t turned into a mental defective. Something was definitely going on.

“Maybe one of you two could tell me what’s going on,” Michael said pleasantly. “Just so I’d know. Because I’m supposed to be head of this center, for instance.”

Michael expected to get an argument. He was a little shocked at what he got instead.

“Of course we’ll tell you what’s going on,” Gregor Demarkian told him. “In fact, we need your help. If we don’t do something right away, there’s going to be another murder.”

U
SUALLY, GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS
given to understatement, not overstatement. Ten years of chasing men who killed their victims and hung them on meat hooks, killed their victims and stuffed them in store windows, killed their victims and sent them to Honolulu in packing crates, had left Gregor with very little taste for exaggeration. Even the kind of hyperbole he was used to being handed on Cavanaugh Street made him uncomfortable. The Church Roof Fund was a worthy and necessary cause, but the four asphalt shingles that had fallen from the top of Holy Trinity Church to the pavement below didn’t constitute
a crisis, a veritable crisis,
no matter what Lida Arkmanian said. The afterschool program in Armenian language and culture that was being held every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in the church basement was a nice idea and fun for the children who attended, but it did not constitute
an eleventh hour rescue mission to snatch the flame of Armenian history from oblivion,
and Gregor had told Howard Kashinian so. No, Gregor was definitely one of the tribe that called full-scale tornadoes “windstorms” and major blizzards “a fair amount of snow.” He exaggerated in this case only because he felt he had to. He didn’t really know that there was about to be another murder. If he was right about what had happened at the Sojourner Truth Health Center—and Gregor was right; he could feel it—what happened next depended on a variable he had no way of determining for sure. Had Robbie seen the person who had handed him his last cup of coffee? Had that person been the same person who filled that coffee with “stuff”? The single impossibility was that the coffee had been handed to a third party with instructions to turn it over to Robbie. The third party would have come forward. That left Gregor with two avenues of investigation. Robbie could have gotten his own coffee, run into his murderer, and been slipped the “stuff” when he wasn’t looking. Robbie often wasn’t looking. Gregor had talked to him at length. Robbie was one of those people who seem to be perpetually distracted, with no attention span. Robbie couldn’t watch out for himself or anything else, for that matter. The more likely scenario was that the murderer had come right up and handed Robbie his coffee, “stuff” and all. This was especially likely because Robbie never had any money. That day Gregor had bought Robbie lunch had been no different from any other. Robbie was trying to live on unemployment benefits that were quickly running out. For someone whose job had been minimum wage and who had no assets to speak of—no house, no bank account, no property—those benefits had been inadequate to begin with. Robbie was always so grateful when somebody gave him something to eat or drink for free. He was always so hungry and so parched. Gregor thought he was on the verge of being homeless, too. Robbie couldn’t be paying the rent on a New York City apartment, even an apartment in one of the outer boroughs, on what he was getting in unemployment. How many months was he in arrears? How long did he have before he would be out on the street? Maybe Robbie’s church would take care of him then, Gregor didn’t know. What Gregor did know was that Robbie had had an air of desperation about him. It would be the easiest thing in the world for someone to walk up to Robbie Yagger, hand him a cup of coffee laced with strychnine, and stand by while Robbie took a great big gulp of it. Then it would only be a matter of a little subterfuge—jogging Robbie’s elbow, dropping something and offering to hold the coffee cup while Robbie picked it up—to get the cup back and whisk it away. A minute or two later, and it should all be over. The murder of Robbie Yagger should have been a much easier proposition than the murder of Charles van Straadt. It was worse than ironic that the murder of Charles van Straadt had come off without a hitch and the murder of Robbie Yagger had failed to come off at all.

Gregor was still standing in the middle of Michael Pride’s examining room. Michael Pride and Hector Sheed were staring at him. Gregor had the uneasy feeling that they had been staring at him for a very long time. Gregor shifted on his feet. How long had he been drifting around inside his head, thinking it all out? How long did they have? They not only had the murderer of Robbie Yagger to worry about. They had all of Harlem. As Gregor had heard from half a dozen people, this was Friday night. Friday nights got crazy at places like the Sojourner Truth Health Center.

“It was the strychnine,” Gregor told them as clearly as he could. “That’s when I first realized we were looking at this thing backward. It was the strychnine that couldn’t have come from Michael Pride’s cabinet.”

Michael Pride perked up. “You mean the strychnine wasn’t mine? This didn’t all happen due to my own criminal carelessness?”

“Have you been careful since Charles van Straadt died?” Gregor asked him.

“I’ve been a fanatic.”

“There now. And there has been another murder
and
a murder attempt.”

“A lot of strychnine was gone from that cabinet,” Hector Sheed put in. “More than enough to kill three people.”

“If you go at it that way, you get back to where we were in our discussion before,” Gregor told him. “You have a murderer carrying strychnine around on his or her person for days at a time, or hiding it in his or her room, or whatever. No, you see, your problem, my problem, all of our problems in thinking about the strychnine center on the phrase
accounted for.
When I first came here, Eamon Donleavy said that all the strychnine in the building had been ‘accounted for’ except for the strychnine that was missing from Michael Pride’s cabinet.”

“That’s right,” Hector Sheed said. “It was accounted for.”

“Augie did the accounting,” Michael Pride said. There was an edge in his voice. “Are you trying to tell us that Augie is dishonest?”

“No, no,” Gregor told them. “But think about it? What does
accounted for
mean? It means you know where that strychnine is, right?”

“Right,” Hector Sheed said.

“Wrong,” Gregor countered. “At least some of that accounted for strychnine was the strychnine in the rat poison the nuns were using in the basement. Most rat poisons are principally strychnine and whoever did the investigation here was smart enough to realize that. The stores of rat poison were checked, and they were not depleted. But you see, they didn’t have to be. What is it that you do with rat poison?”

“Kill rats,” Michael Pride said.

“How?” Gregor asked him.

“You spread the poison out in the corners or on the floor and—Oh,” Hector Sheed said.

Gregor nodded in satisfaction. “Exactly. You wouldn’t spread the poison out on the floors in the middle of the center, but down in the basements and subbasements where nobody goes, why not? You’d sprinkle the stuff here and there, maybe mix it in with a little cheese or a little garbage or some warm wet coffee grounds—”

“Oh, shit,” Hector Sheed said.

“Don’t worry,” Gregor consoled him. “I don’t think it’s that bad. I don’t think they’re making a practice here of using coffee grounds to mix rat poison in. Are they, Dr. Pride?”

“I don’t know,” Michael Pride said. “They use whatever’s on hand, I guess. I’ve never asked.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Gregor went on, “because even if what it was mixed with was a little cheese, the cheese would have been present in the poison in what amounted to microscopic quantities. There would be no reason for it to show up in the stomach content analysis when Charles van Straadt was killed. And even if it did, it didn’t matter. So Charles van Straadt ate some cheese? So what? There might have been some trouble if cheese also showed up in the stomach content analysis when Rosalie van Straadt was murdered, but it didn’t. And that’s not surprising. When you’re mixing rat poison with garbage, you use whatever garbage comes to hand. It differs from day to day or week to week. It probably differs from one side of the room to the other.”

“But what about the poison missing from my cabinet?” Michael asked. “It really is missing, Mr. Demarkian. It ought to be there and it isn’t.”

“It’s probably down in the basement with the rat poison by now,” Gregor said. “It was only taken to incriminate you. Because by incriminating you two things were accomplished. In the first place, the first murder—of Charles van Straadt—was made to look incredibly difficult, a matter of expert timing and cool nerves, when it was really quite simple. That had us running around in circles, looking for a master criminal who doesn’t exist. The second thing it did was to direct suspicion to the two people least likely to have been able to commit this particular crime. Michael Pride and Sister Augustine.”

“I suppose at the same time it directed suspicion off someone else,” Michael said. “It wasn’t so impossible that I could have committed that murder. I figured it out on my own, after it happened. I could have done it when I first came up to the third floor and only said that I found Charlie already poisoned when I got there.”

“It’s just possible,” Gregor agreed, “but we’re back to master criminals again. The timing would have been brutal. Of course, you are the only person around here with the brains to be a master criminal. There is that.”

“Thanks a lot.” Michael’s tone was dry.

“Really, though,” Gregor went on, “it makes much more sense to go on working out how the murder of Charles von Straadt could have been committed simply. Most murders are committed simply. Even murders in this little subcategory of murders. It isn’t only street criminals who are lazy. The simple fact is that there was no reason for the murderer to involve himself in a lot of complicated nonsense if he wanted to kill Charles van Straadt, even if the murderer wanted to kill Charles van Straadt at the center and do it on that particular night. Of course, that particular night was crucial. It was going to be done then or not at all—”