Dear Old Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “White?” Gregor suggested.

  “Just come on over here.” Hector led the way to the table he had staked out, a big round one pulled right up next to a window with a woman carrying fruit on her head painted on it. Gregor saw immediately what it was Hector liked about this table. The ceiling above it was significantly higher than the ceiling in the rest of the room. What quirk of architectural whimsy or haphazard remodeling had made it that way, Gregor couldn’t begin to guess. He took off his jacket, hung it over the back of a chair, and sat down.

  “We got the lab reports back last night,” Hector said. “I tried to call you, but you must still have been up at the center. And I didn’t want to talk to you there.”

  “I don’t blame you.” Gregor sighed. “I was up at the center. Getting nowhere, if you want to know the truth. I’m beginning to feel fairly useless.”

  “I’m beginning to feel fairly useless myself,” Hector said. “The lab reports said just what we expected to say. Strychnine. Just like Charles van Straadt. And just like Charles van Straadt, nothing in the room that the strychnine could have been in.”

  A young woman in a black skirt and a white blouse came up to their table. Hector ordered a cup of coffee and looked quizzically at Gregor. “You want a beer or something?” he asked. “You want some lunch?”

  “I’ll just take a cup of coffee. Black,” Gregor said. “You know, I hadn’t thought of it before. What the strychnine was administered in, I mean. It completely slipped my mind. I suppose that’s because strychnine is almost always given in food or drink, when it’s given deliberately. Especially drink. Coffee. Alcohol. I just assumed—”

  “I keep assuming the same thing.” Hector finished off his own coffee. “I have the reports to force me to keep looking at it, though. We tested everything in Michael Pride’s office, both when Charles van Straadt was killed and this last time, with Rosalie. There wasn’t a thing in the place that any strychnine had ever been in, except the bodies.”

  Gregor considered this. “Did you test the things in Michael’s downstairs office? In his examining room?”

  “With Charles van Straadt we didn’t. With this we did.”

  “And?”

  Hector shrugged. “There’s a bottle of strychnine clearly marked ‘strychnine’ in Michael Pride’s private locked medical cabinet. Other than that, not a thing.”

  “That’s odd,” Gregor said. And it was, too. Very odd. “That doesn’t make sense, does it? Did you run a stomach content analysis?”

  “Of course we did. Both times.”

  “What about those?”

  “Well,” Hector said. “Charles van Straadt’s stomach was empty except for coffee and strychnine. Rosalie van Straadt had had a doughnut recently enough for there to be traces of it left in her stomach—and coffee and strychnine.”

  “It was in the coffee, then.” Gregor nodded. “It would have had to be. Unless—you did check for hypodermic needle wounds?”

  “We checked, yeah, Mr. Demarkian, but we could always be wrong. Hypodermic tracks aren’t easy to find unless there are a lot of them, like with junkies. But you know, I don’t think there were any to find. I mean, what would the murderer do? Tell Charles van Straadt and then Rosalie van Straadt, just a minute there, I want to give you a shot of this stuff, don’t worry about it?”

  “That might not be entirely out of the question if the person administering the shot was Michael Pride,” Gregor pointed out. “He is a doctor. And there is another possible scenario. Maybe the killer filled a hypodermic with strychnine and used the hypodermic the way another killer would have used a knife. Wait until the victim’s back is turned, stick it in to a convenient patch of uncovered skin and plunge.”

  “Would that have worked if the killer didn’t hit a blood vessel?” Hector asked.

  “I don’t know,” Gregor admitted. “To tell you the truth, I’ve never run across a case of that kind. Without something like that, though, we’re back to the problem of what became of the cups the coffee was in, and why. Neither Charles van Straadt nor Rosalie was on any kind of medication?”

  “Nothing prescribed.”

  “What about over the counter? Were either of them taking allergy pills? Did either of them have a cold they might have been taking a decongestant for? How about aspirin for a headache?”

  Hector Sheed shifted in his seat. “Neither of them had a cold, and neither of them had any allergies severe enough for their doctors to know about. We’ve talked to the doctors, by the way. We’re pretty thorough in New York. I’ll admit we didn’t ask about over-the-counter allergy medication per se, but we did get complete health records. The only thing of the kind you’re talking about now in either record was in Rosalie van Straadt’s about ten years ago. She was taking diet pills.”

  “Diet pills? But she was very thin.”

  “She was even thinner, then. She weighed about sixty-nine pounds. She had to be hospitalized.”

  “Wonderful. But that doesn’t help us much, does it? We’re still back to the coffee cups. Or to Michael Pride. I was given to understand that you were determined to pin the killing of Charles van Straadt on Michael Pride.”

  “Were you?” Hector Sheed looked amused. “I’ll bet you didn’t hear that from Michael. No, Mr. Demarkian, I’m not intent on pinning anything on Michael Pride. In fact, I don’t think Michael Pride could have committed either of these two murders. And you know why?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because they’re not nuts enough.” Hector was adamant. “Michael Pride is probably a great man. He may even be a saint. But what he also is, no question, is a certified nutcase. I kid you not. I used to be in uniform down in Times Square. Good God.”

  “You ran into Michael Pride down there,” Gregor suggested.

  Hector snorted. “Ran into is putting it mildly. You think this glory hole business the papers made so much fuss about is a big deal? Hell, Michael must be getting old. Some of the things he used to pull—what are you supposed to make of something like this? I mean, never mind the fact that the man’s tastes in sexual congress are bizarre in the extreme—I mean, what the hell, Mr. Demarkian, everybody’s a little weird about sex—never mind all that, what about AIDS? The man is a doctor. The man is a good doctor. He ought to know better.”

  “I agree with you,” Gregor said. “But he doesn’t seem to care.”

  “If Michael Pride committed a murder,” Hector said, “what he’d do is get a wheat scythe and whack his victim’s head off into the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. Michael Pride is not an introvert. He’s not even what you could call ordinarily restrained.”

  “Possibly,” Gregor insisted, “but look at what we have here. We at least have to consider the possibility—”

  “That Michael pretended to administer medication to Charles van Straadt and Rosalie van Straadt and administered strychnine instead? All right. Consider it. It won’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Rosalie van Straadt wouldn’t have let him near her,” Hector said triumphantly. “She had a case for Michael Pride that made Elizabeth Taylor’s love for Richard Burton look weak. And Michael was Michael. Rosalie hated him. She wouldn’t have let him near her.”

  Gregor thought about the scene in Michael Pride’s examining room. The glass on the floor. The papers scattered everywhere. Rosalie in tears.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. “But then we’re back to where we began, and we have the same problem as when we began. Strychnine works quickly. It works very quickly. It couldn’t have been administered to the victims in the cafeteria, say, and not taken effect until they got upstairs. There might have been a ghost of a chance of something like that if either of them had eaten a large meal right before taking the poison, but neither of them had. That means the strychnine would have to have been administered either in Michael Pride’s office or somewhere else close on the third floor.”

  “It couldn’t have been administered anywhere else in t
he case of Charles van Straadt,” Hector pointed out. “Charles van Straadt went into Michael’s office around six or so and stayed there until his body was found by Michael at eight something. You can look up the times in the report, but you see what I mean.”

  “I see what you mean. Did Charles van Straadt or Rosalie have some special coffee cup they always used?”

  “Not that I know of. We can ask around.” Hector took a little notebook and a Bic pen out of the pocket of his jacket and wrote it all down. “I don’t see how that’s going to help us with our problem, though. Why would the murderer take away a cup belonging to the victim? Even if it did have strychnine in it? What difference would it make?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I just remembered something else,” Hector said. “When we were questioning people right after Charles van Straadt was killed. I talked to Rosalie. She was drinking coffee out of one of those white squishy disposable cups. You know, like they give out in the cafeteria.”

  “Right.” Gregor sighed. While they had been talking, his coffee had come, and so had more coffee for Hector, and neither of them seemed to have noticed. Gregor took a sip from his and found it good but only lukewarm. He looked around and found at least a dozen people in the restaurant who hadn’t been there when he first arrived. “It seems to be getting late,” he said. “I don’t want to hold up your lunch.”

  Hector Sheed looked at his watch. “Quarter to twelve. I’d better eat something before I have to leave. I hate eating take-out at my desk. I get grease on my papers and the stuff tastes like shit anyway.”

  “I think I’ll skip lunch until I get back to the center.”

  “Really?” Hector Sheed shook his head. “You’re making a mistake, Mr. Demarkian. In spite of the low-rent atmosphere, this is one of the best restaurants in New York. Maybe because of the low-rent atmosphere. The food’s much better here than it is in the cafeteria uptown.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that,” Gregor said. “It’s not the food that’s the point. It’s that I want an excuse to buy lunch for somebody at the center.”

  “Who?”

  “Martha van Straadt.”

  “Why?”

  Gregor smiled. “Because of a very interesting conversation I had on the afternoon before Rosalie van Straadt died with a young man named Robbie Yagger. Go ahead and order yourself some lunch and I’ll tell you all about it. I didn’t think it had anything to do with the death of Charles van Straadt when I first heard it, but now I’m not so sure.”

  FOUR

  1

  SISTER MARY AUGUSTINE HAD been too well trained to have anything like a hair-trigger temper, or even what most people would call a spontaneous emotional life. She might let herself be called “Augie” and wear bright colorful sweatsuits under her tiny modern veil, but at heart she was the same sixteen-year-old girl who had left her Irish Catholic neighborhood in Boston at the end of her senior year in high school to enter her order’s Rhode Island motherhouse. That had been in the days well before Vatican II, when the church and the nuns who ran so much of her believed that a religious Sister ought to be a model of discipline, a beacon of self-control. Augie had started out with a hair-trigger temper. She had spent most of her novitiate doing penance for one outburst or another, the penances always being preceded by long lectures from the novice mistress, Sister Charles Madeleine. At the time, Augie had considered Sister Charles Madeleine the eighth wonder of the world, the only body in history that was able to walk and talk and breathe after having been entirely drained of blood. After all these years, Augie hadn’t changed her mind. In spite of the outfits, she wasn’t really a modern nun. She had no use whatsoever for those orders that had gone whole hog into self-actualization and the fulfillment of the person. She believed wholeheartedly in the emptying of the self, in living not for her own sake but for the glory of God and the good she could do to other people. On the other hand, there was a limit. Sister Charles Madeleine was well past Augie’s limit.

  It was twelve o’clock noon on Friday, and Augie knew why she was thinking of Sister Charles Madeleine. Sister Charles Madeleine was like a lightning rod, the place Augie’s anger went to when she was angry, the one object Augie felt perfectly comfortable being furious at. Noon on Friday was always a slow time for the emergency room. Actually, except for the death of Rosalie van Straadt, they had been having a slow week. Augie came out of the head nurse’s office and looked around at the empty corridors and the admitting desk with nobody at it. She was wearing a jade green sweatsuit with “Luck of the Irish” printed across the chest. These days, everybody she knew gave her sweatsuits for Christmas and her name day. Her name day was what they celebrated in the convent instead of her birthday. She looked up and down again and then began to walk slowly toward the back of the floor. As she walked, she stooped to pick up scattered copies of the New York Sentinel from the floor. The New York Sentinel was still delivered to the center every morning in batches, intended to be given out free. Augie would have thought, with Charles van Straadt dead and gone, that the newspapers would stop coming. Maybe she had misjudged the van Straadt family—all of whom, with the exception of Ida, she considered absolutely worthless. Maybe nobody in the circulation department at the New York Sentinel knew that Charles van Straadt was dead.

  I’m going senile, Augie thought. I’m descending into schizophrenia. I’m losing my mind.

  She got to the door of Michael Pride’s examining room and stopped. The door was open. Augie looked inside and saw Michael with his back to her, standing next to his desk, going through a stack of papers. There was always a lot of paperwork to be got through these days. The Manhattan City Council didn’t like the Catholic Church much, or anything connected to her. They had closed down two of Mother Teresa’s AIDS hospices for “zoning violations,” and Augie knew they would close the Sojourner Truth Health Center if they could. They didn’t push it because Michael was no self-effacing, saintly nun. He wouldn’t accept defeat in meek resignation. He’d go to the newspapers and he’d get their attention, too. Still, the council felt free to harass. The center had to file document after document after document. Fire inspectors and health inspectors and other city inspectors showed up so often, Michael kept a volunteer lawyer on duty at the center at all times, to follow the inspectors around, to make sure the inspectors didn’t bribe anybody or intimidate anybody into believing the inspectors had to be bribed. It was crazy. And this was what happened when the mayor and the police department and the vast majority of ordinary citizens supported the center. What would happen to them if that support was ever withdrawn?

  Michael looked away from his papers and stretched. He didn’t look at her. Augie came into the examining room and shut the door softly behind her. Michael turned and raised his eyebrows. It was worse than déjà vu. This had happened a million times before. This had been her life for over a decade now. Michael. The center. Herself.

  Michael looked down at the papers he had been working on and then back at her again. He was smiling slightly. “Hello, Augie. I’ve been expecting you to show up. You’ve been banging around like a drummer all day.”

  “Have I been that obvious?”

  “To me, you have.”

  “I talked to Eamon Donleavy,” Augie said. “He’s—let’s not use the word upset. It’s a stupid word. Upset.”

  There really were a lot of papers in the stack Michael had. He picked them up and carried them across the room to his file cabinet, moving deliberately, as if he were playing a part in a dramatic dance. He looked fine, Augie thought, feeling how insane this meeting was. Michael looked fine. He couldn’t possibly have AIDS.

  Michael opened the top drawer of the file cabinet, took out a nearly empty manila folder, and put the papers inside. Then he refiled the folder and closed the file cabinet drawer.

  “Prescription records,” he said absently. “I’ve been meaning to get to them for a couple of weeks.”

  Augie came farther into the room and sat down on the edge of
the examining table. “I’m not Eamon Donleavy. I’m a nurse. I want you to tell me a few things.”

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, Augie.”

  “Do you actually have AIDS or are you just HIV positive?”

  “I’ve got AIDS. The Kaposi’s sarcoma showed up about two weeks ago—at least, that was when I noticed.”

  “If you noticed it, other people might notice it. People you were… intimate with.”

  “I’m not intimate with anybody, Augie, you ought to know that. Not intimate in that way.”

  “You could spread it.”

  “I could if I wasn’t careful. But I am careful, Augie, I’m very careful. I’m careful at the center and I’m careful when I’m out.”

  “You can’t always have been careful. If you had been, you wouldn’t have caught it.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true,” Michael said. “We don’t really know much about how people catch AIDS—oh, we know about the contact of bodily fluids and all that, but for somebody who lives the way I do—”

  “You don’t have to live that way,” Augie said harshly. “You really don’t.”

  Michael made an impatient gesture. “I live the way I live because I want to, Augie, you ought to know that by now. I work at the center because I want to. I’ve never had a single reason for doing anything in my life except that it was what I wanted to do. I’m not a religious person, Sister Augustine. You ought to know that by now, too.”

  Augie looked down at her hands. They were an old person’s hands, wrinkled and veined. She wouldn’t see the fair side of fifty again. Michael would never see fifty at all. Augie’s head ached.

  “I’ve been thinking of the City Council,” she said. “Of what they could make of this. I’ve been thinking of the papers. I’ve been thinking of the center. What’s going to happen to the center?”

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen to the center, Augie. I don’t even know what’s going to happen to me. Maybe, when I get too sick to work, I’ll just check in downstairs and have your nuns take care of me.”