Gregor thought about this. About Rosalie throwing glass. About a rich man playing favorites. He wished he had known Charles van Straadt. For some reason, this scenario didn’t ring true.
“Why?” he asked finally.
“Why what?” Augie looked as confused as Gregor felt.
“Why Rosalie? Why not one of the others? Are the others even less stable?”
“Hardly,” Augie said. “Ida’s the stable one. She’s the only one with the brains God gave an amoeba.”
“Then why would Charles van Straadt want to leave the bulk of his fortune to Rosalie?”
“That’s exactly what I was always asking,” Michael put in. “This rumor has been going around for weeks, Mr. Demarkian, since long before Charlie died, and now that Ida has confirmed it, I suppose it must be true. But it never made sense to me. Not that Charlie ever made sense to me in any respect.”
Augie dismissed sense. “Rich men can be as crazy as loons and nobody thinks anything of it. Charles van Straadt took Rosalie with him everywhere, Mr. Demarkian. For the last six months or so, they’ve been attached at the hip. And Rosalie worked for him, of course, as a kind of personal secretary.”
“She shuffled his papers around and got him coffee when he didn’t want to move,” Michael corrected. “I always used to think she exasperated him beyond words, but maybe that was because she exasperated me. The fake beatnik clothes and all the pretensions.”
“She was here on the night her grandfather died,” Gregor remembered. “That was in the report the Cardinal gave me. If she was attached to her grandfather’s hip, as you put it, where was she while he was in the middle of being murdered? She wasn’t even the one who found the body.”
“I found the body,” Michael said.
“Maybe saying they were attached at the hip was going too far,” Augie conceded. “They were always together, but Rosalie would run errands for Charles. It’s just like Michael said. She was all over the place the night her grandfather died. I kept bumping into her in the most outrageous places.”
“Only authorized personnel are supposed to be in the emergency-room examining areas during major emergencies,” Michael explained, “along with the patients, of course. I don’t know if anybody’s told you, but we were in the middle of a major battle in a major gang war that night. Not that Rosalie ever paid much attention to the rules.”
“Rosalie likes to pretend she doesn’t pay much attention to the rules,” Augie corrected, “but she’s not anywhere near as unconventional as she wants people to think she is.”
“The problem is, I don’t see what good it’s going to do us if Rosalie was prowling through the building in the middle of a gang war while her grandfather was being killed, because although that gives her plenty of opportunity to do absolutely anything, there’s still the question of why she would have wanted to do anything at all.” Michael looked triumphant. “After all, Mr. Demarkian, if you were Rosalie, and all you had to do to inherit the bulk of eight hundred million dollars was to wait twenty-four hours before you committed murder, I ask you, wouldn’t you wait?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I most definitely would wait.”
“So would I.” Michael nodded happily. “And I’m willing to bet that neither one of us is anywhere near as venal as Rosalie. No, if it’s one of the grandchildren who killed Charlie, it’s much more likely to be one of the other three. The problem with that being that at least two of the three of them didn’t have the opportunity to do it, and the third one didn’t have the psychological—I don’t know the word for what I want to say.”
“I do,” Augie said. “I think you’re much too naive, Michael. I think Martha van Straadt is just as capable of murder as anybody else.”
“Martha’s name used to be Bracker,” Michael told Gregor. “She changed her name to van Straadt as soon as her father died. She’s like Victor in that respect. The old man asked. The old man got. Ida’s the only one who wouldn’t budge. Victor’s got a spine like wet spaghetti.”
“Rosalie was born a van Straadt?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, yes,” Augie said. “Rosalie’s father was Charles’s only son. He was dead before I ever came here—Rosalie’s father, I mean—but I’ve heard about him. One of those cases, you know, where the father is such a strong personality the son just wilts. He drank, from what I heard.”
“Never mind all that,” Michael said. “Ida was on duty that night. We had her running all over the place from six o’clock on. I think she took a fifteen-minute break to get some coffee, but that was it. She didn’t have time to murder anyone. She certainly didn’t have time to get my keys, get the strychnine out of my cabinet, go upstairs—all of that. And as for Victor, he was sitting in full view of fifty people in the center cafeteria from about seven or so, and before that he was either at work, in his car with his driver, or over in the other building visiting with Martha.”