Dear Old Dead (22 page)

The phone was ringing and ringing in his ear. No one was answering. Bennis must be out. Gregor hung up and drummed his fingers against the desk. Frustration didn’t even begin to describe it. He felt bottled up.

He got up and went over to the window to look outside. The Archdiocese of New York had more clout than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had a room overlooking Sixth Avenue. Down on the street, cars were bright colored blobs. They looked like they were having a hell of a lot more fun than he was.

They’re probably all down there hating the traffic, Gregor told himself, but the thought wouldn’t stick. He had to get out of this room. It was driving him crazy.

He had taken his wallet and his change and his keys out of his pants the night before and put them on the night table next to his bed. Now he picked them up and stuffed them into his pockets again. A walk, that was what he needed. A walk would clear his head.

If anything could.

W
HETHER GREGOR DEMARKIAN’S WALK
cleared his head or not was a moot point. He took a very long one, going down Fifth Avenue to look in the windows of Bergdorf Goodman and Saks, clucking indulgently at all the silly looking clothes Bennis would probably buy six of and never wear. He went west to Times Square and looked at the bright fronts of the theaters and the neon jumpiness of the adult entertainment centers. The adult entertainment centers seemed to be operating twenty-four hours a day. After a while, he began to walk slowly up Central Park West. He had gotten explicit directions to the Akareeba Restaurant from Hector Sheed. He had been a little worried about how difficult it would be to find a cab that would take him there. In New York, when you didn’t know the neighborhoods, it was difficult to know what you were getting yourself into. In the end, Gregor decided not to worry. He was involved in walking. He would go on walking. He walked up past the Dakota and the San Remo and the other great apartment buildings on Central Park West, and then farther, past buildings just as large and just as grand but without the famous names. The buildings got more and more run down and the people got shabbier and shabbier the farther north he went, but the energy level actually seemed to be rising. These people were poor but not destitute, that was it. This was poverty as Gregor had known it, growing up. Here the broad sidewalk of Central Park West was cluttered with people selling from blankets and garbage bags spread across the pavement. He was offered watches and sunglasses and books and ties in the space of half a block.

“Traditional for Father’s Day,” a very young man with black skin and the almond eyes and fine-boned jaw line of a Thai watercolor portrait. “Ties for every occasion.”

Gregor reached the Akareeba Restaurant in a much better mood than any he had been in since he had arrived from Philadelphia. He believed in the melting pot, he really did, especially since nothing was ever completely melted in it. A friend of his at the Bureau had once described the United States as a kind of pudding stone. There was a mass of glue and then a plethora of different rocks. The rocks were stuck together in the glue, but never dissolved in it.

If I go on like this, I’m going to start singing “America the Beautiful” on street corners, Gregor told himself. The Akareeba was only one block north of Central Park North. Gregor walked that block, made the right turn he had been told to, and found himself face to face with a gaudy front that took up a third of the commercial space along that side of the street. “
AKAREEBA
” the sign said in shiny foil letters. The letters were made up of tiny sequins in half a dozen colors that shivered and jumped in the wind. The windows were painted over with African scenes that featured large numbers of bare-breasted, monumentally well-endowed women. Gregor could just imagine what the wives and girlfriends of the men who came here said about those. He found the door, four steps down from the street, and went in through it. He found himself at the edge of a large room full of dark wood tables and presided over by a long, ebonywood bar. The bar was out of a 1930s movie. There was more glass behind it than there was in Gregor’s bathroom in the Hilton. There were enough bottles and glasses and siphons and tumblers to cater a Washington political wedding. There was no hostess. Gregor moved into the gloom and looked around. It was only eleven fifteen. Maybe Hector wasn’t here yet.

Hector was here. The detective came towering out of the darkness, looking shocked and a little exasperated.

“How did you get here?” he demanded. “I’m sitting right over there by the window. I didn’t see a cab come into the street.”

“I didn’t take a cab. I walked.”

“Walked?” Hector was worse than shocked. “Check your pants. Make sure you still have your wallet.”

Gregor checked. He still had his wallet, as he knew he would, but he checked anyway. “I’m not a complete babe in the woods,” he said dryly. “I was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation for twenty years.”

“Twenty years of insulation, that’s what that was,” Hector said. “You can’t just walk around the city like that. Especially not in this neighborhood when you’re so—uh—”

“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 the 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.”