Dear Old Dead(97)

“And now you’re dead?”

“Not quite,” Michael said. “No such luck on a Friday night. We just aren’t frantic quite yet. Could I get anything for the two of you? Coffee? Augie always keeps a pot of the stuff in here, in one of those drip machines. She says I run on caffeine.”

Hector Sheed cleared his throat. “No, thank you,” he said. “Not for me, anyway. Although that’s funny, about the coffee.”

“Funny?” Michael asked. “Why?”

“Because that’s what Mr. Demarkian is here to talk to you about,” Hector Sheed said. “Coffee.”

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Gregor Demarkian said. “And I don’t need any coffee now, either. What I want to talk to you about is Robbie Yagger.”

Michael nodded. “Robbie’s all right. If everything goes the way it’s been going, he should be fine in about a week. Will that solve all our problems here? Will he be able to tell us who tried to kill him?”

“Maybe.” Gregor nodded. “We can’t know for sure now if he saw who tried to kill him. When I saw him, he was saying something about there being ‘stuff’ in his coffee.”

“I heard that, too.” Michael nodded vigorously. “Shana Malvera heard it, too. Shana is a friend of his. She’s been keeping him company in his room as much as she can. She told me just before dinner that Robbie keeps trying to talk through his tubes, and what he seems to be saying is that there was ‘stuff’ in his coffee.”

“I wish I knew what that ‘stuff’ was,” Hector Sheed said.

Gregor brushed it away. “I know. It’s not the stuff. It’s the who. And the coffee cup, of course. I don’t know if you realize it, Dr. Pride, but the police made a very thorough search for the cup from which Robbie Yagger drank his coffee. They didn’t find it.”

“He didn’t have a cup,” Michael said. “Not when I saw him.”

“He didn’t have a cup when I saw him, either,” Gregor agreed. “When did you first see him?”

“We came into the cafeteria together. Down at the tray and flatware end of the line. If he was sick then, I didn’t notice it. What am I talking about? Of course he was sick then. He would have had to be. I must have been thinking about something else.”

“He wasn’t carrying a coffee cup when you saw him.”

“No, he wasn’t. He wasn’t carrying anything. He didn’t even pick up a tray. He just walked on through and started looking around. I assumed he was meeting somebody.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I thought the same thing myself. Would that be Shana Malvera?”

“She wasn’t in the cafeteria. You could ask her, though. Maybe she was supposed to be and she got tied up.”

“Is she up in Robbie Yagger’s room now?”

“Yes, she is. She’s got somebody to cover for her over in the east building and she’s going to spend the night sitting in the chair next to Robbie’s bed and keeping him company. Shana’s wonderful, really. She’s one of our staff volunteers next door. She’s not too bright, but she’s got all the right instincts. Just what Robbie needs to pull him through.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I can see that. She can’t spend all night in that chair, can she? She would have to use the bathroom from time to time at least.”

“The bathroom’s right next door to Robbie’s room. We don’t have space for private bathrooms upstairs, but we do our best to make what we’ve got convenient. The nuns will bring Shana her food. They’ll even keep her supplied with coffee and magazines. I don’t see what else she would need.”

“I don’t either,” Gregor said. Then he gave Hector Sheed a long look that made Hector squirm.

Michael Pride looked from the face of one man to the face of the other. He might be in terrible pain. He might be exhausted to the point of collapse. But he hadn’t turned into a mental defective. Something was definitely going on.

“Maybe one of you two could tell me what’s going on,” Michael said pleasantly. “Just so I’d know. Because I’m supposed to be head of this center, for instance.”

Michael expected to get an argument. He was a little shocked at what he got instead.

“Of course we’ll tell you what’s going on,” Gregor Demarkian told him. “In fact, we need your help. If we don’t do something right away, there’s going to be another murder.”





FIVE


1


USUALLY, GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS given to understatement, not overstatement. Ten years of chasing men who killed their victims and hung them on meat hooks, killed their victims and stuffed them in store windows, killed their victims and sent them to Honolulu in packing crates, had left Gregor with very little taste for exaggeration. Even the kind of hyperbole he was used to being handed on Cavanaugh Street made him uncomfortable. The Church Roof Fund was a worthy and necessary cause, but the four asphalt shingles that had fallen from the top of Holy Trinity Church to the pavement below didn’t constitute a crisis, a veritable crisis, no matter what Lida Arkmanian said. The afterschool program in Armenian language and culture that was being held every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in the church basement was a nice idea and fun for the children who attended, but it did not constitute an eleventh hour rescue mission to snatch the flame of Armenian history from oblivion, and Gregor had told Howard Kashinian so. No, Gregor was definitely one of the tribe that called full-scale tornadoes “windstorms” and major blizzards “a fair amount of snow.” He exaggerated in this case only because he felt he had to. He didn’t really know that there was about to be another murder. If he was right about what had happened at the Sojourner Truth Health Center—and Gregor was right; he could feel it—what happened next depended on a variable he had no way of determining for sure. Had Robbie seen the person who had handed him his last cup of coffee? Had that person been the same person who filled that coffee with “stuff”? The single impossibility was that the coffee had been handed to a third party with instructions to turn it over to Robbie. The third party would have come forward. That left Gregor with two avenues of investigation. Robbie could have gotten his own coffee, run into his murderer, and been slipped the “stuff” when he wasn’t looking. Robbie often wasn’t looking. Gregor had talked to him at length. Robbie was one of those people who seem to be perpetually distracted, with no attention span. Robbie couldn’t watch out for himself or anything else, for that matter. The more likely scenario was that the murderer had come right up and handed Robbie his coffee, “stuff” and all. This was especially likely because Robbie never had any money. That day Gregor had bought Robbie lunch had been no different from any other. Robbie was trying to live on unemployment benefits that were quickly running out. For someone whose job had been minimum wage and who had no assets to speak of—no house, no bank account, no property—those benefits had been inadequate to begin with. Robbie was always so grateful when somebody gave him something to eat or drink for free. He was always so hungry and so parched. Gregor thought he was on the verge of being homeless, too. Robbie couldn’t be paying the rent on a New York City apartment, even an apartment in one of the outer boroughs, on what he was getting in unemployment. How many months was he in arrears? How long did he have before he would be out on the street? Maybe Robbie’s church would take care of him then, Gregor didn’t know. What Gregor did know was that Robbie had had an air of desperation about him. It would be the easiest thing in the world for someone to walk up to Robbie Yagger, hand him a cup of coffee laced with strychnine, and stand by while Robbie took a great big gulp of it. Then it would only be a matter of a little subterfuge—jogging Robbie’s elbow, dropping something and offering to hold the coffee cup while Robbie picked it up—to get the cup back and whisk it away. A minute or two later, and it should all be over. The murder of Robbie Yagger should have been a much easier proposition than the murder of Charles van Straadt. It was worse than ironic that the murder of Charles van Straadt had come off without a hitch and the murder of Robbie Yagger had failed to come off at all.