Dear Old Dead (12 page)

“It wasn’t a morals charge, Rosalie,” Michael said. He sounded so damn patient. “It was a vice charge. There’s a difference.”

“What difference?”

“On a vice charge, you weren’t corrupting the morals of a minor. Don’t tell me you pulled this entire stunt just to make sure Mr. Demarkian knew I’d been picked up using a glory hole in Times Square.”

Rosalie looked away. He was so damned casual about it. How could he be so damned casual about it? It wasn’t like telling people you were gay. Lots of people were gay. This was more like confessing to a
disease.

“You wanted him dead,” Rosalie said, carefully, still looking away. “You know perfectly well you wanted him dead.”

Michael shook his head. “No I didn’t, Rosalie. Why would I have wanted him dead?”

“If he hadn’t died, he would have put all that stuff about you in the
Sentinel.”

“So what? It had already been in every newspaper in town. It had already been on the local television news. What difference would a story or two in the
Sentinel
have made?”

“He would have forced you out of here, out of the center. He would have made you quit.”

“He couldn’t have. He didn’t own this place. I own this place. I’ve got better than fifty-three percent of the stock in the parent corporation. Nobody can force me out of here.”

“He would have withdrawn his money if you didn’t leave. The center would have had to close.”

“The center survived before your grandfather started giving us money. It will survive now that he’s no longer around to give it.”

“It will have to, won’t it?” Rosalie said. “I’m not putting a penny into this place.”

“I didn’t think you would. But Rosalie, dearest, you’ve just scuttled your own case. I couldn’t have murdered your grandfather to stop him from cutting off his funding, because by murdering him I would have cut off his funding.”

“Oh, don’t be so damned logical,” Rosalie snapped. “You’re always so damned logical. How can you do this to me?”

“How can I do this to
you?”

“You’re rigging this whole thing,” Rosalie said, appalled to realize that she was very near tears. “You’re switching everything around. You’re doing it on purpose.”

“I’m doing what on purpose, Rosalie?”

But there was no answer to that. Of course there was no answer to that. Rosalie’s head hurt. The muscles in her back and shoulders ached. What had she meant to accomplish by coming down here? What had she done now that she wouldn’t be able to take back?

She eased herself carefully off the desk. She stepped into paper and glass. Everybody around her was dead quiet and watching. Gregor Demarkian hadn’t moved. Rosalie felt as if she were transparent, like one of those jellyfish, an undifferentiated ooze of clear membrane you could see the whole of the ocean through.

“I’m going now,” she said, making herself sound as stubborn as she could. As righteous. “I can see I won’t get anyplace around here. None of you people is going to listen to me.”

“We’ve been listening to you,” Eamon Donleavy said.

Rosalie advanced toward the door, steadily, not altering her pace. People moved away as she came, still silent, still watching. This was impossible. She stopped at the door and turned back to look at them all.

“You won’t be able to go on with this forever, you know. You won’t be able to get away with it. My grandfather was murdered and he was a very rich man. We won’t let you hide his murderer and mess the rest of us up. We won’t let you.”

What was she talking about? The hall behind her was clear. God only knew where all the people had gone. Michael was staring at her, impassive. He was always so damned impassive. Her head was about to explode. She should have eaten something this morning. She wanted to heave and she hated doing that with nothing in her stomach. She wanted to run.

Actually, running was the easy part. The way was clear. The front door was right in her line of sight and temporarily clear of traffic.

Rosalie took one more look at Michael Pride’s face, and then took off.

R
OBBIE YAGGER WAS STANDING
right next to the Sojourner Truth Health Center’s front door when Rosalie van Straadt came running out. As soon as she burst through the doors, he stood up a little straighter and stared, hard. She looked a little familiar, but not familiar enough. And she was nothing at all like that girl he had seen the night it all happened. Robbie had very distinct memories of the night it had all happened, the night of the gang war shoot-out and the newspaper stories about Dr. Pride and the murder of Charles van Straadt. He woke up in the night sometimes, imagining himself walking through the corridors around the emergency room, looking in at bleeding people and wondering what he thought he was doing there. That was when he had seen the girl, or woman, or whatever she was. It was so hard to know what to call female people anymore. It was so hard to know anything.

Robbie Yagger was smoking a cigarette when Rosalie van Straadt came out. He had his sign leaning up against the handrail of the stoop and his hand cupped around the lit end of his butt. The wind was the same as always up here, meaning ferocious. His cigarette always seemed to burn down to the filter too fast. He took a drag, blew out smoke, took another drag. He looked at the doors of the center and wondered what he should do.

Robbie Yagger might not be very bright, but he was honest, painfully honest, and he always had been. In the two weeks since Charles van Straadt had been murdered, he had been feeling unrelievedly guilty. He
had
been in the center, that night, after all. He
had
been wandering in and out of the rooms on the first floor. He had—well, seen things, maybe. The problem was, he wasn’t sure what it was he had seen, or if it was important, or what would happen to him if he told the police or anybody else official about it. He’d said so many things about the center and the abortions that went on there and about Dr. Pride. The man who was killed was the center’s biggest benefactor. Maybe the police would think that Robbie had killed Charles van Straadt himself, to stop the van Straadt money from going to abortions. Maybe they would think Robbie was the kind of suspect they would really like to have, meaning somebody not very important, somebody expendable. Robbie Yagger always felt expendable.

He finished his cigarette and picked up his sign again. It felt futile, carrying it back and forth when nobody came up here except the center’s clients and half of them couldn’t read English. More than half of them couldn’t read.

I’m going to have to do something about this, Robbie told himself, shouldering his sign bravely, beginning to pace back and forth in front of the center’s front door in the wind.

I’m going to have to think of some way to tell somebody what it was I saw.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN HAD ALWAYS
had the cooperation of the local police in his investigations of what he thought of as extracurricular murders. He had always had it in his investigations with the FBI, too. He preferred to run his life that way. Cooperating with the local police had advantages beyond the obvious one, meaning aside from the fact that it kept you from getting arrested for one reason or another. There was the question of feasibility. The Cardinal Archbishop of New York was a good source. He had come through with copies of all the police lab reports. Gregor didn’t know how he’d gotten them. He wasn’t going to ask. They were both helpful and necessary. They just weren’t enough. He would have given a great deal to be able to sit down with the technicians or the medical examiner (was it a coroner in New York City?) and go over the details, especially after everything he had heard today on the subject of where the strychnine had been and what it had taken to get to it. Then there was the question of information. Gregor already had a lot of information about this case, but all of it was from secondary sources. He had read the Cardinal’s report. He had read a slew of magazine and newspaper articles, pulled together from a two-day search of the reading room of the downtown branch of the Philadelphia Public Library, both on the murder itself and on Charles van Straadt. He had been able to find much more on Charles van Straadt than on van Straadt’s murder, in spite of the fact that the death of a man that rich was always international news. Reporters didn’t know what questions to ask. They thought in terms of headlines instead of solutions. Standing in the middle of Michael Pride’s first floor examining room-office, Gregor thought that they weren’t even very good at thinking in headlines. Rosalie van Straadt was the murdered man’s granddaughter. She was obviously extremely upset about something. There hadn’t been a word of what she might be upset about in any of the press reports Gregor had read.

There was a frozen moment after Rosalie left the room, but it was only a pause for breath. The red sweatsuited nun exploded almost immediately.

“That woman,” she said. Then she spun around and looked into the crowd. “Sister Karen Ann? Get a broom, Sister, and get Mindy and Steven and clean this mess up. You’re going to have to go somewhere else for the next hour or two, Michael. I’m very sorry. All the rest of you get out of here. Out of here. You’d think you’d never seen blood on the floor, the way you rubberneck.”

There was no blood on the floor, but Gregor wasn’t going to be picky. He started to drift out at the back of the crowd. The crowd was dispersing with uncanny quickness and unnatural quiet. That’s what the authority of a real old-fashioned nun could do, sweatsuit or no sweatsuit. Gregor supposed they’d all start gossiping like crazy as soon as they got out of Augie’s earshot.

“Wait a minute,” Augie said, when Gregor was almost out the door. “Mr. Demarkian. Don’t disappear on us now. We need you.”

“Augie,” Michael Pride said in a warning voice.

“We do need him,” Augie said stubbornly, picking her way across the rubble to where Gregor was standing. “What’s the point of the Cardinal having brought him if we’re not going to talk to him?”

“I didn’t say you shouldn’t talk to him,” Michael said calmly. “I just meant—”

“I know what you meant.” Augie turned to Gregor and sighed. “He feels sorry for her. For Rosalie van Straadt. He thinks she only does these things because she’s pining for love for him.”

“Now Augie.”

“It’s true. Well, Mr. Demarkian. You tell me. Would she be behaving the way she has been only since the murder if she’s doing it because she’s pining for love for Michael? Why wouldn’t she have been behaving this way before the murder? She couldn’t have had him then any more than she can have him now.”

“Augie,” Michael said again. He had managed to make his way back to the door from the desk. Three people—two young women, neither of whom looked anything like a nun to Gregor, and a teenage boy—were just coming in with brooms and brushes and one of those gray metal dustpans on the end of the handle all janitors everywhere seemed to have. Michael moved out into the hall and pulled Gregor and Augie with him. There was an empty office next to his own and he drew them into that. Then he shut the door.

“Let’s at least not broadcast this to the entire center,” he said. “After all, it isn’t any of their business.”

“The man was murdered in your own office, Michael. Of course this is our business. And it isn’t like it’s any big secret around here anyway.”

“It isn’t like it’s a fact, either, Augie. It was just a rumor.”

“I believe in rumors,” Sister Augustine said. She crossed her arms over her chest and set her jaw and turned to Gregor. For an hallucinatory moment, Gregor thought she was going to lecture him on how he shouldn’t bite his nails. He hadn’t bitten his nails since he was ten. That was the year his mother was so sick, and there wasn’t enough money for a doctor.

“Let me tell you what the rumors have been, Mr. Demarkian, because they’ve been very interesting. Charles van Straadt left a lot of money, you know.”

“Close to a billion dollars,” Gregor said. “I read that somewhere.”

Augie waved it away. “The billion is a total figure. Most of that’s the businesses and whatever. It doesn’t come directly to the family. It’s tied up in corporations and I don’t know what. He’s supposed to have left nearly eight hundred million dollars in personal assets. That’s the money I’m talking about.”

“That is a lot of money,” Gregor said.

“You don’t know how much money it is,” Michael put in, “because the will isn’t being read until Thursday and nothing is official until then.”

Augie sighed. “I got my information from Ida, Michael. Ida is perfectly trustworthy.” She turned to Gregor again. “Ida is Ida Greel, another of Charlie van Straadt’s grandchildren. Oh, I shouldn’t go on calling him Charlie. He hated it. Anyway, Char—Charles had four grandchildren. Rosalie you just met. In a manner of speaking. Ida is a medical student who works here on her free time, vacations and weekends, that sort of thing, as much as she can while she’s studying. Then there’s Ida’s brother, Victor. Victor calls himself van Straadt and works at the New York
Sentinel.
Then there’s Martha, who’s a little older than Ida but she’s volunteering here in our two-year resident staff program. All Charles’s grandchildren volunteered like that, he required it. Even Rosalie was here for two years.”

“We could have done without Rosalie,” Michael said.

Augie sailed on. “It was Ida who told me how much money there was supposed to be,” she explained, “and she told me something else, too. What I call the interesting part. On the night Charles van Straadt died, he had just made up his mind to change his will.”

“Augie, for God’s sake,” Michael said. “You sound like
Murder, She Wrote.”

“Why shouldn’t I sound like
Murder, She Wrote?
It’s all true. On the night Charles van Straadt died, his old will was still in force. That will left his personal fortune to be divided into equal shares among his four grandchildren. Victor, Ida, Martha, and Rosalie. If Charles had lived another twenty-four hours, that would have been changed. There would have been small bequests to Ida and Victor and Martha, but the bulk of the money would have gone to Rosalie. And Rosalie knows it. That’s why she’s fit to spit.”