“Why?” Martha asked desperately.
Victor stood up. “We ought to go over and get Ida, don’t you think? She’s going to want to know about this as much as you do. We’re going to have to fill her in.”
“Ida’s on duty in the emergency room,” Martha said uncertainly.
“I think I’ll go down and tell her I’m here anyway. Then I think I’ll go down to the cafeteria and drink some coffee and read the papers. I’m going to find that very interesting. And it will be the last time. The last time for anything is always interesting.”
All of a sudden it hit Martha, in a wave, that she knew what was going on here. She felt poisoned. Sickness rose in her stomach and spread into her veins.
“Victor,” she said, “did you kill Grandfather?”
“No.”
“No? Just like that?”
“What other way is there to say no? No. No. No. No. But I’ll tell you a secret. I’m going to get arrested for killing him and I’m going to get tried for killing him and I’m going to get convicted of killing him. I’ll even go to jail for killing him. I don’t think the state of New York would take too well to a request for alternative community service in a case like this, do you? Not even for somebody with a name like van Straadt.”
Victor’s lost his mind, Martha thought, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to say anything. She was just glad Victor knew so little about the center. He had volunteered here, of course, just like the rest of them, but he hadn’t really taken to it. He didn’t know his way around. Martha knew half a dozen ways to get to Ida before he could. Martha had to get to Ida. Martha had to warn her.
There was a framed photograph of Michael Pride on the wall of the reception room. Victor stopped in front of it, straightened it unnecessarily, and smiled.
“Saint Michael Pride,” he said.
And then he burst out laughing.
2
DOWN IN THE EMERGENCY room, Sister Augustine was counting sodium pentathol doses on a long metal tray. The doses had already been counted twice, once by Sister Kenna and once by Sister Mary Grace. The counts had come up wrong both times. Augie could see now that the counts were going to come up wrong again. The tray had been left out. That was the problem. The situation had gotten bad—not as bad as it had been two weeks ago, on the night when Charles van Straadt had died, but bad—and somebody had gotten careless. If Augie went to work at it, she could figure out just whose responsibility it had been. She never did bother to go to work at it in these cases, because doing that was stupid. She just took responsibility for it herself. There wasn’t a single member of this staff that hadn’t gotten careless at least once because of lack of sleep or lack of food or lack of something else. Except Michael, of course, but Michael didn’t count. Michael was the exception to all the rules in the universe except one.
The count came out wrong. Augie pushed the tray away and looked up at Sister Kenna and Sister Mary Grace. Both looked haggard. It was horrible when the counts came out wrong. You always knew what had happened when you were short a dose. The junkies would take anything if they were far enough gone. You always wondered if your carelessness had killed somebody. Mixing drugs was not the safest thing to do.
“It’s all right,” Augie said. “I’ll have to report it, but it’s all right. It’s only three doses.”
“Only three,” Mary Grace repeated miserably. “Three is enough.”
“For a veteran junkie, three is barely an appetizer.”
The tray was lying on the lower level of the counter at the nurses’ station. From there Augie could see the front doors and the people coming in and out. Most of the people tonight looked damaged. There was nothing hidden about their pain. Then a flutter of excitement seemed to rise from the darkness just outside the door. The people milling around the entrance stood back. Augie saw Gregor Demarkian and Hector Sheed come in one right after the other. They stopped near the front to talk, Augie didn’t know to whom.
“It’s the detectives,” she said to Sister Kenna and Sister Mary Grace. “With the kind of night we’ve been having, I’d almost forgotten they were here.”
“They haven’t been here,” Sister Mary Grace said. “They’ve been out. I know because Michael was looking for them earlier, and I couldn’t find them for him.”
“They went down to the New York Sentinel,” Ida Greel said, coming up to the nurses’ station with her white smock open and a red smear of Mercurochrome across her cheek. “Victor and Martha and I heard them talking before they left. I don’t know what it was about.”