Dear Old Dead(78)

“I thought it all out after Charlie died,” Michael said dreamily. “Thought about how there had to be a way. If you went at it logically, you had to be able to do it. Don’t you see.”

“No,” Hector Sheed said.

Michael shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. Take the samples. He was saying something about his coffee.”

Michael Pride began to drift away. Hector started after him. Gregor caught Hector by the sleeve and pulled him back.

“Let him go,” Gregor said. “He’s not going anywhere. He’s sick as hell.”

“He said something about this guy’s coffee.”

“I know more about the coffee than Michael does. That guy in there, the one with strychnine poisoning, do you know who it is? That’s the guy I wanted to talk to. The one who told me something I hadn’t taken seriously before.”

“Did you get a chance to talk to him?”

“No.”

Gregor looked around the admitting area again. Eamon Donleavy was standing in a crowd of older women, making reassuring noises. Michael and Augie had both disappeared. Julie Enderson may never have come upstairs at all. Gregor didn’t remember seeing the girl after he’d come upstairs. Over near the doors, Ida Greel and Martha van Straadt were standing with a tall, attractive, ineffectual-looking young man. Gregor had been introduced to Martha and Ida, just as he’d been introduced to everybody at the center over the last two days. He had no idea who the young man was.

“Who’s that?” he asked Hector Sheed, pointing.

“That’s Victor van Straadt,” Hector said. “Ida’s brother, Martha’s and Rosalie’s cousin, one of the late Charles van Straadt’s grandchildren. Why? Does he look suspicious to you?”

“I didn’t know who he was.” Now it was Gregor’s turn to be distracted. It was odd, he thought, how the very obvious thing never occurred to you until the bitter end. And yet it had been there for you all the time. Just sitting in front of your face.

“Hector,” he said. “You know what the problem is here? Time.”

“Time? Do you want to give me the particulars of this incident? What does time have to do with it?”

“I didn’t mean this incident. I didn’t mean Robbie Yagger. I meant Charles van Straadt. I take it we are in agreement that all three of these poisonings were perpetrated by the same person?”

“As long as this last one was a poisoning. Yeah. Sure.”

“For the moment, it doesn’t matter if this last one was a poisoning or not. Although it does in the long run, of course. In the long run, it has to be.” Gregor started to pace. “Look at the problem as a puzzle now. On the night Charles van Straadt died, there was a major emergency up here, a shoot-out in a gang war. From approximately six o’clock in the evening, when Charles van Straadt showed up in the center—totally unexpectedly, according to your own reports, without having told anyone he was going to do it—from that point until after eight o’clock when Charles van Straadt’s body was found, this floor was a mass of people. So far so good?”

“Yes. Fine.”

“In spite of that mass of people,” Gregor went on, “our murderer got hold of either Michael Pride’s keys or Sister Augustine’s, without whoever it was ever knowing they were missing, got into Michael Pride’s private examining room and opened his private medical cabinet without anyone seeing a thing, got the strychnine, doctored the coffee—let’s give the benefit of a doubt here, let’s say the murderer had the cup of coffee he or she wanted to feed poor Charles van Straadt with him—anyway, doctored the coffee, got up to the third floor by the staircase, fed the poison to Charles van Straadt, and got both the coffee cup and himself out of Michael Pride’s third-floor office before Michael walked in. Does that make sense to you?”

“The murderer could have taken the elevator to the second floor,” Hector said. “Then he could have gone up to the third from there.”

“Don’t forget the emergency,” Gregor warned him. “Those elevators were being used to carry stretchers. Even the doctors were using the stairs. Anyone who entered an elevator that night carrying nothing more than a cup of coffee would have been told off—and we would have heard about it.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely. Seriously, Hector, think about what I just told you. Does that sound possible to you?”

“Lots of things are possible.” Hector was hedging. “If you had my job, you’d know. It sounds crazy, I’ll admit. But believe me, it isn’t anywhere near impossible.”