Dear Old Dead(100)
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.