Dear Old Dead(53)

“He couldn’t have given it to her before he left for dinner?”

“If he had, Rosalie van Straadt would have been dead a long time ago. Strychnine acts very fast.”

Julie nodded. “Good,” she said. “Good. Maybe they’ll think he hired someone else to do it or he had an accomplice, but if he’s got a really good alibi, they’ll leave him alone. They’ll have to. Even the mayor gets upset when they bother Michael and there doesn’t seem to be any good reason. I saw the other one, you know.”

“Who?” Gregor asked, startled. “Charles van Straadt?”

Julie Enderson nodded. “I didn’t know that that’s who it was at the time. It must have been right before he got killed, too. It was in the middle of the shoot-out. I was going down to the emergency room to see if they’d brought my mother in.”

“Your mother,” Gregor repeated.

“She lives with this gang guy. She’s only about thirty. She had me when she was really young. Karida and I came right down this way from the east building and when we got to this hall, there he was. This van Straadt guy. And then—”

“Tape,” Karida said, clattering back. Her hands were full of spools. In spite of Gregor’s instructions, she had brought a spool of Scotch tape. Fortunately, she had also brought two spools of masking tape and a spool of black electrical tape. There was a spool of duct tape in her hands, too. Gregor took the masking tape, shut Michael Pride’s office door, and began to weave tape from one side of the doorframe to the other.

“Do you two have anything you have to go do right now?”

Karida and Julie shook their heads.

“Good,” Gregor said. “Then you can stay here. Make sure nobody goes into Dr. Pride’s office. And I mean nobody. Not Dr. Pride himself. Not Sister Augustine. Nobody.”

“If somebody went into the office, they’d mess up the tape,” Karida said reasonably. “You’d know.”

“I might. On the other hand, somebody might be careful enough not to mess up the tape too much and to put it back when he was finished. Then I wouldn’t know. Or somebody might come along and take some tape off the door but decide they’d better not go on with it, and I’d have no way of knowing if the room had been entered or not.”

“This is just like a television show,” Karida said. “This is wonderful!”

“Will the two of you stay?”

Julie Enderson straightened up a little. She had been staring off into the distance. Gregor hadn’t thought she’d been paying attention. What is it with this girl? Now that he’d talked to her, he knew she wasn’t stupid. He didn’t think she was on drugs. If she was, it was on a drug he was unfamiliar with. She wasn’t showing any of the obvious signs—except for this accursed spaceyness. It was as if she’d been hypnotized, or as if she were sleepwalking. Why was it, Gregor wondered, that he could never think of anything but clichés in a pinch? Still, there was something wrong with Julie Enderson. If he’d had the time, he would have found out what it was.

“All right then,” Gregor said, instead of investigating. He had enough to investigate at the Sojourner Truth Health Center. “You two stay here until the police show up. And don’t move. Go to the bathroom in shifts. Don’t leave the door unattended for even a minute.”

“We won’t,” Karida promised him. “Hey, Julie, this is neat. They put this guy in People magazine all the time. They put him in the National Enquirer. Maybe after he solves this case, they’ll put us in there with him.”

“I don’t want my picture in the National Enquirer,” Julie said.

“I’ve got to call the police,” Gregor told them. “You two stay put.”

“We will,” Karida trilled. She sounded just like a bird.

Gregor called the police from Eamon Donleavy’s office. Then he went downstairs. He would have felt safer if it had been Julie promising to stay put, but he had to live with what he had.





3


IT WAS OVER. GREGOR could feel it in the air as soon as he stepped off the service elevator onto the first floor. He knew only stretchers and their support staff were supposed to take the elevators. He even accepted the rule as necessary—usually. This, however, was an emergency. Gregor had had enough of stairs and stairwells. He was frustrated as hell with low-tech economies. The irrational part of his mind kept urging him to get back into the twentieth century. If someone ever gave him a time machine for Christmas, he would not use it to go into the past.

There were half a dozen copies of the New York Sentinel lying on a wheeled metal table against the wall near the Admitting desk. Gregor found the headline incomprehensible and the red banner—WIN! FOR FATHER’S DAY!—idiotic. He found the emergency room dead. Being in the middle of a life-and-death crisis was exhilarating. It was better than coffee for keeping you awake and alert. The aftermath was worse than a mental and physical letdown. It had a lot in common with the aftermath of being hit in the head with a cast iron skillet. Either that, or of being drained of blood. The drained-of-blood feeling was all over the emergency room now. Gregor could feel it.