Dear Old Dead(26)
“There was some. It was locked up.”
“I’m sure it was locked up, Father Donleavy. My point is that locked up or not, someone could have gotten to it.”
“The police thought of that. And they checked. Sister Augustine even had them walking through the center with clipboards, checking off our entire inventory of the stuff, which wasn’t much. There wasn’t any missing.”
“You mean as far as you know somebody brought that strychnine in from the outside?”
“No. I should have said none of it was missing except the strychnine that had been suspected all along of having killed Charles van Straadt. We do call him Charles in public, Mr. Demarkian, not Charlie. The family gets very upset with us when they think we’re being snide.”
“Go back to the strychnine,” Gregor said. “What strychnine had been suspected all along of killing Charles van Straadt?”
Eamon Donleavy rubbed the palms of his hands against the knees of his jeans. He was staring straight at the back of Juan Valenciano’s head.
“Well,” he said carefully. “Michael’s strychnine.”
“You mean Dr. Michael Pride’s.”
“That’s right.”
“What do you mean by saying it was his strychnine?”
“It was the strychnine from his office medical cabinet. His office downstairs. Not the one Charlie died in.”
“Dr. Pride has two offices?”
“Michael has an office on my floor—that’s the third—for administrative purposes and a private examining room-office kind of thing off the emergency room to see patients in. The medical cabinet is down there. The other two doctors on staff have arrangements like that, too. They have their own medical cabinets.”
Get this straight, Gregor told himself. This is simpler than it seems. “Let me go over this from the beginning. Charles van Straadt was found dead in Michael Pride’s third-floor administrative office.”
“Right.”
“Poisoned with strychnine that had to come from the locked medical cabinet in Michael Pride’s—is it a first-floor or a basement office?”
“First floor.”
“Are you absolutely sure that the strychnine came from this office?” Gregor asked. “The center is essentially a hospital, isn’t it? There must be strychnine everywhere. If I remember correctly, strychnine is used in dozens of medicines and household products as well.”
“Oh, it’s used, and we have it,” Eamon Donleavy said carefully, “but it wasn’t missing. We have a whole canister of rat poison in the basement—we’ve been having a rat problem; you do in basements in New York City—but the canister down there on the night Charles van Straadt died was new and it had a seal on it and the seal hadn’t been broken.”
“Go back to Michael Pride’s medical cabinet,” Gregor said. “Are you sure this medical cabinet was in fact locked? It hadn’t been left standing open during the emergency?”
“The medical cabinets can’t be left unlocked,” Eamon Donleavy answered. “The drug cabinets can’t either. They lock automatically when they’re shut. They can only be opened with a key.”
“Weren’t there people in Michael Pride’s examining room that night? Where was Michael Pride?”
“Michael was in OR most of the time—you know, performing surgery. I don’t know how many bullets got extracted that night. There were a lot of them. It was one of those nights, Mr. Demarkian.”
Gregor was beginning to feel as if he were having one of those days. Why was it that providing some help to the Catholic Church always ended up making him feel as if he had migraines?
They were up by Columbus Circle now, threading their way impatiently through even more impatient traffic. The late afternoon half-light made the broad plate-glass windows on the storefronts around them look tinted green.
“Is Michael Pride the only person with a key to that medical cabinet?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Eamon Donleavy told him. “Sister Augustine has one.”
“Does Michael Pride carry his keys with him wherever he goes?”
“He leaves them in the center drawer of his desk.”
“What desk? In which office?”
“The desk in his upstairs office.”
“Was that desk accessible to anyone except Michael Pride on the night in question?”
Eamon Donleavy looked amused. “Well, Mr. Demarkian, it was wide open all night because it’s wide open every night. All of our office doors are. But if you’re thinking someone sneaked in there and stole Michael’s keys and ran downstairs and got the strychnine and then ran upstairs and all the rest of it—I must inform you that there’s one catch.”