“I see what you mean. Did Charles van Straadt or Rosalie have some special coffee cup they always used?”
“Not that I know of. We can ask around.” Hector took a little notebook and a Bic pen out of the pocket of his jacket and wrote it all down. “I don’t see how that’s going to help us with our problem, though. Why would the murderer take away a cup belonging to the victim? Even if it did have strychnine in it? What difference would it make?”
“I don’t know.”
“I just remembered something else,” Hector said. “When we were questioning people right after Charles van Straadt was killed. I talked to Rosalie. She was drinking coffee out of one of those white squishy disposable cups. You know, like they give out in the cafeteria.”
“Right.” Gregor sighed. While they had been talking, his coffee had come, and so had more coffee for Hector, and neither of them seemed to have noticed. Gregor took a sip from his and found it good but only lukewarm. He looked around and found at least a dozen people in the restaurant who hadn’t been there when he first arrived. “It seems to be getting late,” he said. “I don’t want to hold up your lunch.”
Hector Sheed looked at his watch. “Quarter to twelve. I’d better eat something before I have to leave. I hate eating take-out at my desk. I get grease on my papers and the stuff tastes like shit anyway.”
“I think I’ll skip lunch until I get back to the center.”
“Really?” Hector Sheed shook his head. “You’re making a mistake, Mr. Demarkian. In spite of the low-rent atmosphere, this is one of the best restaurants in New York. Maybe because of the low-rent atmosphere. The food’s much better here than it is in the cafeteria uptown.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that,” Gregor said. “It’s not the food that’s the point. It’s that I want an excuse to buy lunch for somebody at the center.”
“Who?”
“Martha van Straadt.”
“Why?”
Gregor smiled. “Because of a very interesting conversation I had on the afternoon before Rosalie van Straadt died with a young man named Robbie Yagger. Go ahead and order yourself some lunch and I’ll tell you all about it. I didn’t think it had anything to do with the death of Charles van Straadt when I first heard it, but now I’m not so sure.”
FOUR
1
SISTER MARY AUGUSTINE HAD been too well trained to have anything like a hair-trigger temper, or even what most people would call a spontaneous emotional life. She might let herself be called “Augie” and wear bright colorful sweatsuits under her tiny modern veil, but at heart she was the same sixteen-year-old girl who had left her Irish Catholic neighborhood in Boston at the end of her senior year in high school to enter her order’s Rhode Island motherhouse. That had been in the days well before Vatican II, when the church and the nuns who ran so much of her believed that a religious Sister ought to be a model of discipline, a beacon of self-control. Augie had started out with a hair-trigger temper. She had spent most of her novitiate doing penance for one outburst or another, the penances always being preceded by long lectures from the novice mistress, Sister Charles Madeleine. At the time, Augie had considered Sister Charles Madeleine the eighth wonder of the world, the only body in history that was able to walk and talk and breathe after having been entirely drained of blood. After all these years, Augie hadn’t changed her mind. In spite of the outfits, she wasn’t really a modern nun. She had no use whatsoever for those orders that had gone whole hog into self-actualization and the fulfillment of the person. She believed wholeheartedly in the emptying of the self, in living not for her own sake but for the glory of God and the good she could do to other people. On the other hand, there was a limit. Sister Charles Madeleine was well past Augie’s limit.
It was twelve o’clock noon on Friday, and Augie knew why she was thinking of Sister Charles Madeleine. Sister Charles Madeleine was like a lightning rod, the place Augie’s anger went to when she was angry, the one object Augie felt perfectly comfortable being furious at. Noon on Friday was always a slow time for the emergency room. Actually, except for the death of Rosalie van Straadt, they had been having a slow week. Augie came out of the head nurse’s office and looked around at the empty corridors and the admitting desk with nobody at it. She was wearing a jade green sweatsuit with “Luck of the Irish” printed across the chest. These days, everybody she knew gave her sweatsuits for Christmas and her name day. Her name day was what they celebrated in the convent instead of her birthday. She looked up and down again and then began to walk slowly toward the back of the floor. As she walked, she stooped to pick up scattered copies of the New York Sentinel from the floor. The New York Sentinel was still delivered to the center every morning in batches, intended to be given out free. Augie would have thought, with Charles van Straadt dead and gone, that the newspapers would stop coming. Maybe she had misjudged the van Straadt family—all of whom, with the exception of Ida, she considered absolutely worthless. Maybe nobody in the circulation department at the New York Sentinel knew that Charles van Straadt was dead.