Dear Old Dead(25)

“Something special?”

“It was definitely something special, Mr. Demarkian. That’s Harlem we’re talking about now. Spanish Harlem. The center averages, oh, about five knife wounds a night.”

“Wonderful.”

“Definitely wonderful. It’s been worse than that, of course. It gets terrible. Anyway, the night Charlie was killed, we were in the middle of a gang war. Big time. Two rival gangs had taken over opposite sides of an entire city block uptown and they were blasting away at each other with assault rifles. We were getting thirty or forty admissions every ten minutes for a while.”

“The place must have been a mess.”

“Oh, it was, Mr. Demarkian, it was. Everyone was running around going crazy. And of course Charlie showed up at just the wrong time, itching for a confrontation with Michael. Charlie had the kind of timing that ought to have been bottled and studied at MIT. Anyway, there we were in the middle of a war, and there Charlie was in the middle of a snit.”

“Why?”

“Over here, Mr. Demarkian. This is Juan Valenciano. He’ll take us uptown.”

Juan Valenciano was leaning against the side of his cab, pulled up at the curb out of the rank and with his “off duty” light lit. When he saw Eamon Donleavy and Gregor he straightened up and smiled, opening the back passenger door with a flourish. Gregor let himself be shepherded toward the waiting vehicle. He didn’t flinch at all when his suitcase was whisked away from him and into the trunk, or when Juan Valenciano took his briefcase and chucked it into the front passenger seat. Usually Gregor hated being parted from his things. One of the first things he had been taught as a rookie agent was never to allow that to happen. Once your suitcase or your briefcase was out of your hands, you never knew what was going to happen to it. It could be searched. It could be destroyed. It could be lost, taking all the work you’d done for the last three months with it.

Gregor climbed into the cab and let Eamon Donleavy climb in beside him. Eamon Donleavy said a few things in Spanish to Juan Valenciano and slammed the cab door shut. Juan Valenciano turned his “off duty” light off, put his “in service” light on, and pulled out into the street.

“There,” Donleavy said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I interrupted you. I didn’t mean to be rude, but it’s practically impossible to get a cab as far up into Harlem as we’re going. It’s not supposed to be. The city ordinances are quite specific. Medallion cabs are supposed to go anywhere in any of the five boroughs they’re asked to go, but it doesn’t work like that in real life. If they don’t want to go, they just refuse to take you. Juan here lives up in Spanish Harlem and he knows practically everybody at the center. We use him all the time when we need to bring somebody uptown.”

“You’re lucky to have him. New York looks—shabbier than I remember it being.”

“New York is a mess.”

“New Yorkers are always saying that.”

“Maybe we are. Let’s see, Mr. Demarkian. What were you asking me? Oh, yes. You were asking me why Charlie van Straadt was having a fit.”

“Answer something else first. You’ve just described what sounds to me like a very chaotic situation.”

“That’s putting it mildly enough.”

“What I want to know is, in such a situation, why didn’t the police—and the papers and everybody else—why wasn’t the first assumption simply that Mr. van Straadt had been killed by a stray loony or a gang member or some nut in off the street? How did this turn into a murder mystery?”

Eamon Donleavy looked uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, “the papers are treating it as if it were some loony or a gang member.”

“Nobody else is.”

“I know that. There was the strychnine, Mr. Demarkian. Stray loonies don’t usually poison their victims with strychnine. Gang members use Uzis and knives.”

Gregor was impatient. “Stray loonies do use strychnine, Father Donleavy. They use it all the time. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be difficult for a bag lady to get, but we’re not talking about ordinary circumstances. The center is a fully equipped medical facility, isn’t it?”

“We’re not Mass General, Mr. Demarkian. We do have a fully equipped emergency room—one of the best and most up-to-date in the country, as a matter of fact—because we have to, and we do a lot of obstetrics because the neighborhood needs it. I suppose we’re at least as good as a small-town hospital. Maybe better.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “Then there must have been strychnine around. There must have been strychnine available.”