by Jane Haddam
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—”
“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 fou
nd 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.”
2
LATER, 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.
