Dear Old Dead(64)

Hector was here. The detective came towering out of the darkness, looking shocked and a little exasperated.

“How did you get here?” he demanded. “I’m sitting right over there by the window. I didn’t see a cab come into the street.”

“I didn’t take a cab. I walked.”

“Walked?” Hector was worse than shocked. “Check your pants. Make sure you still have your wallet.”

Gregor checked. He still had his wallet, as he knew he would, but he checked anyway. “I’m not a complete babe in the woods,” he said dryly. “I was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation for twenty years.”

“Twenty years of insulation, that’s what that was,” Hector said. “You can’t just walk around the city like that. Especially not in this neighborhood when you’re so—uh—”

“White?” Gregor suggested.

“Just come on over here.” Hector led the way to the table he had staked out, a big round one pulled right up next to a window with a woman carrying fruit on her head painted on it. Gregor saw immediately what it was Hector liked about this table. The ceiling above it was significantly higher than the ceiling in the rest of the room. What quirk of architectural whimsy or haphazard remodeling had made it that way, Gregor couldn’t begin to guess. He took off his jacket, hung it over the back of a chair, and sat down.

“We got the lab reports back last night,” Hector said. “I tried to call you, but you must still have been up at the center. And I didn’t want to talk to you there.”

“I don’t blame you.” Gregor sighed. “I was up at the center. Getting nowhere, if you want to know the truth. I’m beginning to feel fairly useless.”

“I’m beginning to feel fairly useless myself,” Hector said. “The lab reports said just what we expected to say. Strychnine. Just like Charles van Straadt. And just like Charles van Straadt, nothing in the room that the strychnine could have been in.”

A young woman in a black skirt and a white blouse came up to their table. Hector ordered a cup of coffee and looked quizzically at Gregor. “You want a beer or something?” he asked. “You want some lunch?”

“I’ll just take a cup of coffee. Black,” Gregor said. “You know, I hadn’t thought of it before. What the strychnine was administered in, I mean. It completely slipped my mind. I suppose that’s because strychnine is almost always given in food or drink, when it’s given deliberately. Especially drink. Coffee. Alcohol. I just assumed—”

“I keep assuming the same thing.” Hector finished off his own coffee. “I have the reports to force me to keep looking at it, though. We tested everything in Michael Pride’s office, both when Charles van Straadt was killed and this last time, with Rosalie. There wasn’t a thing in the place that any strychnine had ever been in, except the bodies.”

Gregor considered this. “Did you test the things in Michael’s downstairs office? In his examining room?”

“With Charles van Straadt we didn’t. With this we did.”

“And?”

Hector shrugged. “There’s a bottle of strychnine clearly marked ‘strychnine’ in Michael Pride’s private locked medical cabinet. Other than that, not a thing.”

“That’s odd,” Gregor said. And it was, too. Very odd. “That doesn’t make sense, does it? Did you run a stomach content analysis?”

“Of course we did. Both times.”

“What about those?”

“Well,” Hector said. “Charles van Straadt’s stomach was empty except for coffee and strychnine. Rosalie van Straadt had had a doughnut recently enough for there to be traces of it left in her stomach—and coffee and strychnine.”

“It was in the coffee, then.” Gregor nodded. “It would have had to be. Unless—you did check for hypodermic needle wounds?”

“We checked, yeah, Mr. Demarkian, but we could always be wrong. Hypodermic tracks aren’t easy to find unless there are a lot of them, like with junkies. But you know, I don’t think there were any to find. I mean, what would the murderer do? Tell Charles van Straadt and then Rosalie van Straadt, just a minute there, I want to give you a shot of this stuff, don’t worry about it?”

“That might not be entirely out of the question if the person administering the shot was Michael Pride,” Gregor pointed out. “He is a doctor. And there is another possible scenario. Maybe the killer filled a hypodermic with strychnine and used the hypodermic the way another killer would have used a knife. Wait until the victim’s back is turned, stick it in to a convenient patch of uncovered skin and plunge.”