“Wait a minute,” Augie said, when Gregor was almost out the door. “Mr. Demarkian. Don’t disappear on us now. We need you.”
“Augie,” Michael Pride said in a warning voice.
“We do need him,” Augie said stubbornly, picking her way across the rubble to where Gregor was standing. “What’s the point of the Cardinal having brought him if we’re not going to talk to him?”
“I didn’t say you shouldn’t talk to him,” Michael said calmly. “I just meant—”
“I know what you meant.” Augie turned to Gregor and sighed. “He feels sorry for her. For Rosalie van Straadt. He thinks she only does these things because she’s pining for love for him.”
“Now Augie.”
“It’s true. Well, Mr. Demarkian. You tell me. Would she be behaving the way she has been only since the murder if she’s doing it because she’s pining for love for Michael? Why wouldn’t she have been behaving this way before the murder? She couldn’t have had him then any more than she can have him now.”
“Augie,” Michael said again. He had managed to make his way back to the door from the desk. Three people—two young women, neither of whom looked anything like a nun to Gregor, and a teenage boy—were just coming in with brooms and brushes and one of those gray metal dustpans on the end of the handle all janitors everywhere seemed to have. Michael moved out into the hall and pulled Gregor and Augie with him. There was an empty office next to his own and he drew them into that. Then he shut the door.
“Let’s at least not broadcast this to the entire center,” he said. “After all, it isn’t any of their business.”
“The man was murdered in your own office, Michael. Of course this is our business. And it isn’t like it’s any big secret around here anyway.”
“It isn’t like it’s a fact, either, Augie. It was just a rumor.”
“I believe in rumors,” Sister Augustine said. She crossed her arms over her chest and set her jaw and turned to Gregor. For an hallucinatory moment, Gregor thought she was going to lecture him on how he shouldn’t bite his nails. He hadn’t bitten his nails since he was ten. That was the year his mother was so sick, and there wasn’t enough money for a doctor.
“Let me tell you what the rumors have been, Mr. Demarkian, because they’ve been very interesting. Charles van Straadt left a lot of money, you know.”
“Close to a billion dollars,” Gregor said. “I read that somewhere.”
Augie waved it away. “The billion is a total figure. Most of that’s the businesses and whatever. It doesn’t come directly to the family. It’s tied up in corporations and I don’t know what. He’s supposed to have left nearly eight hundred million dollars in personal assets. That’s the money I’m talking about.”
“That is a lot of money,” Gregor said.
“You don’t know how much money it is,” Michael put in, “because the will isn’t being read until Thursday and nothing is official until then.”
Augie sighed. “I got my information from Ida, Michael. Ida is perfectly trustworthy.” She turned to Gregor again. “Ida is Ida Greel, another of Charlie van Straadt’s grandchildren. Oh, I shouldn’t go on calling him Charlie. He hated it. Anyway, Char—Charles had four grandchildren. Rosalie you just met. In a manner of speaking. Ida is a medical student who works here on her free time, vacations and weekends, that sort of thing, as much as she can while she’s studying. Then there’s Ida’s brother, Victor. Victor calls himself van Straadt and works at the New York Sentinel. Then there’s Martha, who’s a little older than Ida but she’s volunteering here in our two-year resident staff program. All Charles’s grandchildren volunteered like that, he required it. Even Rosalie was here for two years.”
“We could have done without Rosalie,” Michael said.
Augie sailed on. “It was Ida who told me how much money there was supposed to be,” she explained, “and she told me something else, too. What I call the interesting part. On the night Charles van Straadt died, he had just made up his mind to change his will.”
“Augie, for God’s sake,” Michael said. “You sound like Murder, She Wrote.”
“Why shouldn’t I sound like Murder, She Wrote? It’s all true. On the night Charles van Straadt died, his old will was still in force. That will left his personal fortune to be divided into equal shares among his four grandchildren. Victor, Ida, Martha, and Rosalie. If Charles had lived another twenty-four hours, that would have been changed. There would have been small bequests to Ida and Victor and Martha, but the bulk of the money would have gone to Rosalie. And Rosalie knows it. That’s why she’s fit to spit.”