Gregor threw up his hands in exasperation. “Of course it’s impossible,” he said. “Of course it is. Nobody could have done all that on the night Charles van Straadt died without having been seen by somebody who would have mentioned it. Nobody could have gotten the strychnine out of Michael Pride’s office without being caught at it except Michael Pride himself—or maybe Augie. But neither Michael Pride nor Augie could have been off this floor long enough to get to the third floor and feed poison to Charles van Straadt without half a dozen people knowing. Michael himself was in the emergency room for nearly the entire two hours nonstop.”
“Augie was out of the fray for a while,” Hector said. “Look at the report. She was in the head nurse’s office having dinner.”
“Which was brought to her by Sister Kenna, who stayed to talk for five minutes. Never mind the fact that the head nurse’s office opens directly onto the corridor between Emergency Room Two and Emergency Room Three.”
“Still,” Hector said stubbornly.
“The times aren’t right,” Gregor said triumphantly. “Charles van Straadt had to have been fed that strychnine within ten minutes of the time Michael Pride found him dying—and ten minutes is making it very, very long. I didn’t see anything that said Augie was missing during that time. It was earlier that she had dinner by herself in the office.”
Hector Sheed looked up toward the front doors. “What about them?” he asked. “Ida, Victor, and Martha. Ida works in the emergency room, but the other two had all the time in the world.”
“How would either one of them have gotten the strychnine out of Michael Pride’s office without being caught in the act?”
“Maybe they were caught in the act. Maybe somebody saw one of them do it and doesn’t realize how important that information is. Maybe that’s what your Robbie Yagger saw that got him poisoned.”
“What Robbie Yagger saw was a young woman carrying a funnel of used coffee grounds to the back of the emergency-room area,” Gregor said. “And yes, that got him poisoned, but not because the young woman was coming out of Michael Pride’s office. She wasn’t. Nobody was. That elaborate scenario we’ve both been so entranced with as the most likely reconstruction of the way Charles van Straadt was murdered? Well, it’s a pile of nonsense.”
“Charles van Straadt is dead. That’s not nonsense.”
“No, it’s not. But he didn’t get dead by someone running around like a maniac in the middle of a full-scale crisis doing God knows what so skillfully and so well that he, or she, was no more visible than a ghost. You’ve got to help me with something. I want to try an experiment.”
“What kind of an experiment?”
“An experiment with time. Go down to the nurses’ station and ask the nun for her stopwatch. They’ve got a couple of them down there. They need them for cardiovascular testing or something. Meet me back here as soon as you can.”
“A stopwatch,” Hector Sheed repeated.
“Go,” Gregor said.
Hector seemed to hesitate, but not for long. Gregor watched him stride purposefully through what were still aimlessly milling crowds of people. Crowds parted before Hector like hair pulled by a rat-tail comb. Nobody looked at him in surprise or amazement. Hector Sheed might be big, but he was also a familiar quantity. He’d been around here much too often in the past two weeks for anybody to be surprised at his appearance.
Gregor turned his attention to the three people still standing next to the front doors, still clutched together, still talking. Martha van Straadt was looking resentful. Victor van Straadt was looking bewildered. Ida Greel was looking as if her patience were being sorely tried, but she was going to hang in there no matter what.
This, Gregor thought, was an opportunity he might never have again.
2
EVEN IN THE DAYS when Gregor Demarkian was the second most powerful man in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he’d had problems with rich people. The chief problem he’d had with rich people was attitude. There were people who said that the rich got away with more because they had good lawyers, and that was true, to an extent. In Gregor’s experience, good lawyers only went so far. The poor and the middle class had had long experience in pleasing other people. They had bosses to make happy and spouses they depended on. The habitual criminals had a lot to prove. They struck attitudes and looked forward eagerly to cameras in court. The rich just didn’t care. They not only knew they didn’t have to give out any information, they simply didn’t want to. They didn’t care what the police detective thought of them. They didn’t care if the district attorney liked them or not. It was maddening. You asked them for their cooperation, and they said no.