Dear Old Dead(51)
“Pick up the phone,” Michael said. “Push nine. Then push four four four.”
“Who am I calling?” Gregor asked.
“Nobody and everybody.”
Gregor picked up the phone, pushed nine, then pushed four four four. The Touch-Tone beeps hammered into his ear. A second later, what sounded like an air raid siren began to go off in the building. Gregor jumped. Michael went right on doing what he was doing. The siren stopped abruptly and a computerized voice said: “Code blue. Third floor. West building. Code blue. Third floor. West building.”
“Like it?” Michael asked. “It’s put together with spare parts and I don’t know what. We had a kid here a few years ago, wealthy family in Thailand, studying to be an engineer, got religion and joined the Catholic Church and came out to volunteer. He rigged it up for us.”
“Who keeps it working?”
“Other kids.”
The computerized voice was going on and on. Gregor wondered what you had to do to stop it. He heard the sound of pounding on the stairs. Somebody was running up to them at full speed, probably several somebodies. Michael’s door was still open. Gregor sat down on the edge of the desk and watched as a small crowd of people emerged from the stairwell and crowded in around Michael.
Sister Augustine went immediately to the phone, punched in more numbers, and shut off the computerized voice.
“What’s going on around here?” she asked the air.
Michael knew better than to answer. “I need a stretcher,” he said. “Does anybody have a stretcher?”
“Yes.” A young man at the back of the crowd stepped forward. “We brought the folding stretcher, Dr. Pride, what do you want us to do with it?”
“We’ve got to get her downstairs.”
Michael Pride stepped away from Rosalie van Straadt’s body and let the young man come in. The young man unfolded what looked to Gregor like a battlefield carrier and motioned another young man to help him. Rosalie van Straadt was still and blue around the lips, but she was breathing—just. Michael Pride was wet with sweat and dead white.
“What did you do?” Gregor asked in astonishment. “I’d have thought she’d be dead by now. Strychnine victims die quickly.”
“Strychnine?” Augie asked sharply.
“Oh, shit,” somebody in the crowd said.
“Get her down to Emergency Three,” Michael told the young men holding the stretcher. He turned to Augie and shook his head. “I threw dice,” he said grimly. “I gave her Comprozan.”
“Oh,” Augie said.
“What’s Comprozan?” Gregor demanded.
Michael was heading for the door behind the stretcher. “It’s a hypnotic. A very powerful hypnotic. Strychnine victims don’t die from strychnine poisoning. At least not technically. Strychnine makes the body hypersensitive to outside stimulus—light, sound, all of that. The sensitivity is so acute the victim is subject to violent seizures. It’s the seizures that kill him. Her. Whatever. Hypnotics reduce the sensitivity of the body to outside stimulus. So—”
“That can’t be standard medical procedure,” Gregor said. “Why haven’t I ever heard of anyone doing that before?”
“Because there’s no way to know if the combination of strychnine and a hypnotic is deadly in itself.” Augie was beside herself. “Michael, for God’s sake. If it turns out to be absolutely contraindicated, the police will think—”
Michael wheeled around. “I know what everybody will think.” He was shouting. “What did you expect me to do? Let her go on in convulsions like that? Do nothing? Augie, be rational for a minute. The woman is dying.”
“They’ll say you did something to make sure,” Augie went on implacably. “They’ll say you did something even a fool would know was lethal. They’ll say she hadn’t taken enough strychnine to kill her and you finished the job.”
“She’d taken enough strychnine to kill her all right, Augie. Mr. Demarkian here can testify to that.”
“She was like a cartoon,” Gregor said. “She was jumping around like—I didn’t know a body could move like that.”
“Come on.” Michael pulled at the sleeve of Augie’s sweatshirt. “Let’s get moving. That Comprozan I gave her won’t last long. She’s still breathing. We still have a chance.”
Most of the rest of the crowd had left in the wake of the stretcher—most, but not all. Gregor thought there were just enough people around to get a good round of gossip going. Most of them seemed to be voyeurs of one kind or another. Gregor saw a couple of teenage girls, one made up clownishly in everything from undereye liner to rouge, one of them scrubbed so clean the skin of her face looked as if when you touched it it would squeak. Gregor wondered if they had come up because of the unusual location of the emergency—third floor, west building meant Michael Pride’s office, or one or two others—or if they had just been on their way up or down and just found themselves caught up in the excitement. Whatever the reason, these two would have the story all over the center in the next five minutes.