Dear Old Dead (34 page)

“Because of the will change,” Hector put in.

“That’s right,” Gregor told him, “but look here. All the murderer had to do was to get hold of a cup of coffee—possible in half a dozen places on this floor and down in the cafeteria and I don’t know where else; this place runs on coffee—go down to the basement, pick up some of the rat poison—”

“With his bare hands?” Hector demanded.

“No,” Gregor said. “Not with his bare hands. With coffee grounds.”

“Coffee grounds,” Michael Pride repeated. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t either, for a while,” Gregor said. “That was why I thought Robbie Yagger wasn’t telling me anything important when he said he’d seen someone leaving this examining room on the night Charles van Straadt died carrying one of those paper funnels full of coffee grounds. That’s something else there’s more than enough of around here. Coffee grounds. The murderer took the coffee grounds into the basement, pressed them into the rat poison, and dumped the whole mess, coffee grounds and all, into a cup of coffee.”

“Stuff.” Michael Pride sat bolt upright. “That’s what Robbie was talking about when he said his coffee was full of stuff.”

“Absolutely. Oh, by the way. Coffee grounds have another virtue. I’ve been assuming that the murderer acquired the cup of coffee first, before the strychnine, but that wasn’t necessary. It doesn’t take a lot of strychnine to kill a person, not even a large man like Charles van Straadt. If you want to commit a murder in this way and you don’t want to carry a cup of coffee to the basement and back, all you have to do is palm some coffee grounds, use them to pick up the strychnine you need, and carry the grounds to wherever the coffee is. That would be messy, but it would certainly be feasible.”

Hector Sheed was nodding. “That’s why the coffee cups always disappeared. They were full of coffee grounds. You never find grounds in coffee when it’s been made in the kind of automatic machines they use around here. If we had found them, it would have made us suspicious.”

“It might have made you think about rat poison,” Gregor said, “and that was insupportable.”

“Why didn’t the victims get suspicious that their coffee was full of grounds?” Michael asked. “Why didn’t they just get grossed out and demand a different cup?”

“I think Robbie Yagger had a lot more grounds in his coffee than the other two had,” Gregor said. “By the time it was Robbie Yagger’s turn to die, our murderer was getting very impatient. And exasperated. It was never supposed to get this involved.”

Hector Sheed stirred uneasily. “Gregor,” he said, “if Robbie Yagger was a candidate for murder before he was poisoned this afternoon, isn’t he an even more likely candidate now? He must have seen the person who handed him that coffee.”

“Not must,” Gregor said. “I worked it out. But I agree it’s most likely that he saw the murderer.”

“Well, nobody is going to be able to poison him with coffee tonight,” Michael said. “He isn’t going to be able to swallow anything for days.”

“There are other ways to kill somebody,” Hector pointed out. “Especially in a place like this. Somebody could just go into that room and rip his tubes out.”

Michael shook his head. “That wouldn’t work. The only way Robbie could die from that is by dehydration, and one of the nurses would find him long before he dehydrated. Or Shana Malvera would.”

“I’m more worried about something nasty like a little strychnine injected into his IV bag,” Gregor said. “When I first started thinking about this, I told myself Robbie was only in danger if he had seen the person who doctored his coffee, but I realize now that that’s not true. He’s in danger for the same reason he was in danger before. Because he saw that person carrying those coffee grounds. He’s in
worse
danger than he was before, because the murderer must know that after everything that’s happened, we’re going to be taking anything he says much more seriously than we did before. I don’t think it would make any sense for this murderer to allow Robbie to wake all the way up.”

“All right,” Michael Pride said. “Then what am I supposed to do? You said before that there was some way I could help with this.”

“There is. Hector Sheed and I are going to go upstairs now. We’re going to ask this young woman, this Shana Malvera, to leave Robbie Yagger’s room, and we’re going to hide ourselves inside. Is there room for us to hide ourselves inside?”

“There’s room for one of you in the closet. The other one of you will have to use the closet across the hall. I mean, you two aren’t clones of Tinkerbell.”

Gregor let that pass. “That will be fine. What I want you to do is, first, wait about three minutes after we’ve gone, to make sure we’re well on our way. Then I want you to go downstairs to the cafeteria. My guess is that you’ll find Victor van Straadt at a table down there, wasting time.”

“Victor?” Michael was doubtful. “What would Victor be doing there? I saw him leave the building hours ago.”

“He came back. Don’t ask me how I know. I know. If Victor isn’t in the cafeteria, go for Martha or Ida, but Victor would be best. I don’t want you to talk to him. I want you to talk near to him. I want you to run into one of the nuns or take Augie downstairs with you or whatever, and I want you to say in a very loud voice, loud enough for Victor to hear, that you’ve just given Shana Malvera strict orders to go to her room and lie down for an hour no matter what. Do you think you can do that?”

“What if none of the van Straadts is in the cafeteria?”

“Find a van Straadt and stage that scene somewhere else,” Gregor said. “The important point is to stage that scene somewhere and to do it right away. All right?”

“All right.” Michael Pride sighed. “But if you don’t mind, I think I will bring Augie with me. If I start accosting stray nuns in the cafeteria with odd conversations delivered in a loud voice, they’re going to think I’ve finally had a breakdown.”

L
ATER, UPSTAIRS, IT WAS
Hector Sheed who got the closet in Robbie Yagger’s room—not because he was an official New York City policeman, but because he couldn’t fit into the linen closet in the hall. Gregor could barely fit into the linen closet himself, but with a little folding and twisting he managed. The sheets and pillowcases that surrounded him smelled clean but acrid, nothing at all like the linens the cleaning woman put on his own bed back on Cavanaugh Street. Outside in the hall, the air smelled of disinfectant, the way hospital air always did. The floors had been meticulously swept and the doors to the rooms and closets had been polished. This was a convalescent ward. Aside from Robbie, there was only one old woman in residence and it was no secret what she was in residence for. She had no place else to go. Gregor tried to check his watch and couldn’t in the darkness. It was very, very dark. There was a single small security light burning in this hall, and a light above the desk but under the counter of the nurses’ station. All the other lights had been turned off. Gregor and Hector had made sure of that as soon as they got upstairs. Gregor had expected the nun who served as head nurse on this floor to protest, but she hadn’t. She had merely given the two of them a very odd look and decided to take a break.

“I’ll be in the nurses’ lounge at the end of the corridor,” she had said, “with the door closed. You will find a buzzer next to every patient bed. If I’m needed, all you have to do is ring.”

Then she had disappeared, the way only a nun can disappear.

Gregor tried to look at his watch again and failed again. There was a sharp corner of something sticking into his back. Gregor twisted around in an attempt to avoid it and gave himself a cramp in his side. This was taking forever. He was getting very nervous. What if he were wrong? Gregor Demarkian was almost never wrong, especially in cases like this, but almost wasn’t always. What if he had misread all the signals? He wasn’t wrong about the identity of this murderer. He had that much nailed down tight. He might be wrong about the way the murderer’s mind worked. This was the part he had always hated most about work when he was with the Bureau. This was why he had given up kidnapping detail as soon as he possibly could. He hated stake-outs with the kind of passion Serbs brought to their relationships with Muslims. Back on Cavanaugh Street, Bennis Hannaford gave him books to read, and Gregor’s favorites were about a Great Detective named Nero Wolfe. Nero Wolfe was the only human being Gregor had ever heard of who managed to chase criminals without ever venturing out of his easy chair, except to advance on the dining room for lunch.

Gregor stretched, twisted, rubbed his temples. He reminded himself that waiting in the dark was never anything but interminable. He wished he were in a position to hear Robbie Yagger breathing. He opened the linen closet just another crack and stared out into the hall. Nothing, he thought. Nothing, nothing, nothing—

—except there was.

It started way down on the other end of the hall, the end that opened not onto the elevator doors and the nurses’ lounge, but the end that led to the back stairs. The door down there, like all the doors on the wards, was a firebreak. It was a heavy green thing on a pneumatic delay with a window at eye level. The window was a double pane of glass sandwiching in a thin net of wire. For a second, Gregor thought he saw a flash of light behind that window. It was gone so quickly, he couldn’t be sure. The door swung open slowly and steadily and then began to swing shut again. It took Gregor a moment to see that someone had come in down there.

“Someone” was as close to an identification as Gregor could get. In spite of the fact that he knew who this had to be, he couldn’t really recognize anything but a tall shapeless mass, moving toward him. He pulled back into the linen closet and held his breath. The figure was walking oddly, in jerky movements. The sound of shoes on floor was unnaturally loud. Gregor held himself against the sheets and waited. The figure came closer and closer. It was moving very slowly. It was being very careful.

Trench coat, Gregor said to himself, when the figure got close enough. That was all he could make out clearly in the shadows. A trench coat and a pair of long white pants, the kind the orderlies wore. The collar of the trench coat was pulled way up, over the back of the figure’s head. Gregor couldn’t even make out the color of the figure’s hair. That was odd, but he didn’t have time to think about it, not now. The figure was advancing on the door of Robbie Yagger’s room. It was going inside. Gregor let the door of the linen closet begin to swing slowly open.

Inside Robbie Yagger’s room, everything was in absolute darkness. Gregor and Hector had been careful to turn out even the small nightlight that was supposed to glow perpetually over the emergency buzzer. Robbie Yagger wasn’t going to buzz anybody by himself. He wasn’t going to turn over on his side until well after lunch tomorrow. What was important was making sure that Hector could not be seen by anybody.

The trick was to move without giving yourself away. Gregor had never been good at it. He got out of the linen closet without making any noise, but it took him forever. He got across the hall to the wall next to Robbie Yagger’s doorway, but he must have done something wrong. In the middle of the room, the figure hesitated. It looked up and around. It was suspicious. Gregor flattened himself against the wall and held his breath.

The things he’d done must have been sufficient. He heard the figure beginning to move again. He moved forward, twisted with aching slowness, and put himself in a position to look in through the door. He must have done it all right, because the figure continued to move. It walked up to Robbie Yagger’s bed and picked up the IV line. It put the IV line down and reached into the pocket of its trench coat. The nightlight next to Robbie Yagger’s bed was still off, but Gregor and Hector hadn’t incapacitated it. The figure leaned over and turned it on. Surgical gloves, Gregor told himself, straining to see in the shifting shadows. A stocking over the head. Idiot.

Now that there was a light on in the room, the figure in the trench coat seemed to pick up a sense of urgency. It stuck its hand into its pocket and came up with a syringe. It stuck its hand into its other pocket and came up with what looked like a small perfume bottle. Gregor would bet anything that what was in that perfume bottle was strychnine dissolved in water. Murderers were so damned lazy, and so unoriginal. They wanted to do the same thing over and over again. They didn’t want to have to think.

The figure put the syringe and the perfume bottle down on the rolling tray at the side of Robbie Yagger’s bed. There wasn’t much time now. A real nurse engaged in giving a real medicine through injection would have to be careful. She’d want to make sure there wasn’t a bubble of air in the syringe. This dim figure would want only to make sure that it was fast. In and out as quickly as possible was the only advantage it had.

There was no need to go on being careful. Nothing could come of staying hidden now but Robbie Yagger’s murder. Gregor started toward the open doorway and the dim figure in the trench coat. He wondered what was keeping Hector from moving. He was just about to go through the door when he collided with the nun.

“Excuse me,” the nun said, in a very loud voice. She was the nun who had been on duty at the nurses’ station when Gregor and Hector came up to this floor, but beyond that, she was not a nun Gregor knew. She was small and old and she had a voice like frozen arrowheads.

“Excuse me,” she said again.

Then she marched past a stunned Gregor into Robbie Yagger’s room and right up to the figure in the trench coat. The figure had frozen, syringe in the air. Now a shudder seemed to pass through its body; the syringe dropped on the floor. The nun got a grip on the figure’s wrist and refused to let go.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. “What are you doing with those shoes? Those are Karida Johnson’s shoes.”

Gregor looked down at the shoes. They were hidden under the long white pants, but what he could see was the thick bottom of a high platform, the kind of thing the whores wore to make themselves look five or six inches taller. Gregor himself had seen Karida Johnson in those shoes.