Dear Old Dead(98)

Gregor was still standing in the middle of Michael Pride’s examining room. Michael Pride and Hector Sheed were staring at him. Gregor had the uneasy feeling that they had been staring at him for a very long time. Gregor shifted on his feet. How long had he been drifting around inside his head, thinking it all out? How long did they have? They not only had the murderer of Robbie Yagger to worry about. They had all of Harlem. As Gregor had heard from half a dozen people, this was Friday night. Friday nights got crazy at places like the Sojourner Truth Health Center.

“It was the strychnine,” Gregor told them as clearly as he could. “That’s when I first realized we were looking at this thing backward. It was the strychnine that couldn’t have come from Michael Pride’s cabinet.”

Michael Pride perked up. “You mean the strychnine wasn’t mine? This didn’t all happen due to my own criminal carelessness?”

“Have you been careful since Charles van Straadt died?” Gregor asked him.

“I’ve been a fanatic.”

“There now. And there has been another murder and a murder attempt.”

“A lot of strychnine was gone from that cabinet,” Hector Sheed put in. “More than enough to kill three people.”

“If you go at it that way, you get back to where we were in our discussion before,” Gregor told him. “You have a murderer carrying strychnine around on his or her person for days at a time, or hiding it in his or her room, or whatever. No, you see, your problem, my problem, all of our problems in thinking about the strychnine center on the phrase accounted for. When I first came here, Eamon Donleavy said that all the strychnine in the building had been ‘accounted for’ except for the strychnine that was missing from Michael Pride’s cabinet.”

“That’s right,” Hector Sheed said. “It was accounted for.”

“Augie did the accounting,” Michael Pride said. There was an edge in his voice. “Are you trying to tell us that Augie is dishonest?”

“No, no,” Gregor told them. “But think about it? What does accounted for mean? It means you know where that strychnine is, right?”

“Right,” Hector Sheed said.

“Wrong,” Gregor countered. “At least some of that accounted for strychnine was the strychnine in the rat poison the nuns were using in the basement. Most rat poisons are principally strychnine and whoever did the investigation here was smart enough to realize that. The stores of rat poison were checked, and they were not depleted. But you see, they didn’t have to be. What is it that you do with rat poison?”

“Kill rats,” Michael Pride said.

“How?” Gregor asked him.

“You spread the poison out in the corners or on the floor and—Oh,” Hector Sheed said.

Gregor nodded in satisfaction. “Exactly. You wouldn’t spread the poison out on the floors in the middle of the center, but down in the basements and subbasements where nobody goes, why not? You’d sprinkle the stuff here and there, maybe mix it in with a little cheese or a little garbage or some warm wet coffee grounds—”

“Oh, shit,” Hector Sheed said.

“Don’t worry,” Gregor consoled him. “I don’t think it’s that bad. I don’t think they’re making a practice here of using coffee grounds to mix rat poison in. Are they, Dr. Pride?”

“I don’t know,” Michael Pride said. “They use whatever’s on hand, I guess. I’ve never asked.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Gregor went on, “because even if what it was mixed with was a little cheese, the cheese would have been present in the poison in what amounted to microscopic quantities. There would be no reason for it to show up in the stomach content analysis when Charles van Straadt was killed. And even if it did, it didn’t matter. So Charles van Straadt ate some cheese? So what? There might have been some trouble if cheese also showed up in the stomach content analysis when Rosalie van Straadt was murdered, but it didn’t. And that’s not surprising. When you’re mixing rat poison with garbage, you use whatever garbage comes to hand. It differs from day to day or week to week. It probably differs from one side of the room to the other.”

“But what about the poison missing from my cabinet?” Michael asked. “It really is missing, Mr. Demarkian. It ought to be there and it isn’t.”

“It’s probably down in the basement with the rat poison by now,” Gregor said. “It was only taken to incriminate you. Because by incriminating you two things were accomplished. In the first place, the first murder—of Charles van Straadt—was made to look incredibly difficult, a matter of expert timing and cool nerves, when it was really quite simple. That had us running around in circles, looking for a master criminal who doesn’t exist. The second thing it did was to direct suspicion to the two people least likely to have been able to commit this particular crime. Michael Pride and Sister Augustine.”