Dear Old Dead (14 page)

“Take a couple of desserts, too.”

The girl serving main dishes was smiling pleasantly, but the woman at the cash register was scowling more fiercely than ever. Gregor went up to her and took out his wallet.

“How much do I owe you?” he asked her.

“You ask me, you owe me a lot more than you’re gonna be able to pay me. Pro-life, that asshole calls himself. Pro-himself is what I say. He’s just after the publicity.”

“What publicity?” Gregor asked.

The young man came up to the cash register with two pieces of chocolate layer cake as well as the rest of the food. Gregor was glad he had finally gotten into the spirit of the thing.

“There isn’t any publicity,” the young man said sadly. “Nobody ever notices me out there. I picket this place. With a sign.”

“A sign about what?” Gregor asked.

“About the abortions they do here. I don’t know if you knew they did that. I mean, you probably did. But I picket about it anyway.”

“Because you’re opposed to abortion,” Gregor said.

“What? Yeah. Yeah. It’s more complicated than that. Thank you for all this. I don’t even know who you are. I’m Robbie Yagger.”

“I’m Gregor Demarkian. What do you mean when you say you picket this place? You mean you walk up and down in front of it?”

“All the time,” the woman at the cash register said. “Day and night.”

“Were you picketing here the night Charles van Straadt died?”

Robbie Yagger nodded. “Oh, yeah. Except, I don’t think of it like that. I think of it as the night they had the war uptown. That brought lots of people here who aren’t here usually. People who aren’t already used to my sign.”

“Were you picketing here between six and eight?”

“You mean when the murder happened,” Robbie Yagger said. “I was around then, but I wasn’t always picketing. I came in here and had a cup of coffee sometime between seven and eight o’clock. I don’t remember exactly when.”

“That’s very interesting,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“Fourteen seventeen,” the woman at the cash register said.

Gregor gave her a twenty. “Would you mind having lunch with me?” he asked Robbie Yagger. “I mean, I’m only going to have this cup of coffee, but do you mind if I join you while you’re eating? You may be able to tell me something I need to know.”

Robbie looked down at his full tray of food and shook his head. “I’ll tell you anything you want. I haven’t been able to eat like this for months.”

Gregor’s private opinion was that Robbie Yagger probably hadn’t been eating too well before that, either, but he had to save a little of the young man’s pride. Nobody ever needed pride so badly as when he was down and out.

F
OR MARTHA VAN STRAADT,
volunteering at the Sojourner Truth Health Center was a kind of torture. The fact that it was torture she had chosen to experience, for money, didn’t help any. She might have done all right if she had been assigned to some impersonal medical service. She could have survived a couple of years of cleaning bedpans or setting up lunch trays without too much mental anguish. Instead, she had been handed over to the Sisters and put to work in the Afterschool Program, day care for children in the first through fourth or fifth through eighth grades. Martha had first to fourth, along with Sister Edna and a young woman named Kerri Stahl who was studying education at SUNY Buffalo and thinking of opening a day-care center of her own when she got through. Martha wasn’t too happy with Sister Edna and she couldn’t abide Kerri Stahl—but she truly hated the children. The children were a nightmare come to life. Today they were making Father’s Day cards and posters—except they weren’t, exactly, because Father’s Day didn’t mean anything to most of them, they didn’t have fathers. Martha had attended a very expensive college with a ferocious speech code that had effectively prevented the discussion of real life in any of its myriad forms as it existed outside of college dormitories. She had been convinced by a parade of right-thinking sociology professors that the only reason some people said that the fatherlessness of the ghetto family was a problem was racist propaganda, and sexist, too, because what difference did fathers make? Now here she was. She didn’t know a single child with both a mother and a father in the house—or even a mother and a stepfather. And fathers might not matter in the long run, but in the short run the children certainly thought they did. It was crazy. It made Martha’s head ache just to think about it. It made Martha want to cry every time she turned off the light in her room upstairs. She wanted desperately to be downtown in her apartment, taking a shower in the walk-in stall lined with periwinkle blue ceramic tiles, lying down in the queen-size bed under four down comforters. She wanted to be sitting in Serendipity and eating cheesecake Vesuvius. She wanted a nice, sensible job in a bookstore or an art gallery or an Off-Off Broadway theater, where she would meet only the kind of people she liked.

Now she picked up the big box of crayons Sister Edna had sent her in to the storehouse to get—there were only used crayons at the center; schools and church groups donated them when they were half their original size and embedded with flecks of dust and sand—and went back out into the play area, where a little clutch of girls was lying on the floor, drawing something that made them giggle that they wouldn’t show anyone else. Martha made a face at them—first to fourth grade didn’t matter; Martha knew what they were drawing; it had something to do with sex—and went across the room to where Sister was sitting at an old-fashioned teacher’s desk. Sister Edna was a tiny woman in her early sixties who wore more of a habit than any other nun at the center except Sister Kenna. Sister Edna was some kind of Dominican and had a white dress with long white flaps to the front and back and a black veil. Martha didn’t like nuns any more than she liked anyone else at the center. They gave her the creeps.

Martha put the box of crayons down on Sister’s desk.

“Here they are,” she said. “Are you going to need me for the next five minutes?”

“I always need you,” Sister Edna said, imperturbable. “Where do you want to go?”

“I want to run down and get myself a cup of coffee. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Coffee.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“You should make a point of getting to sleep on the nights before you’re on duty here. You’re expected to be here when you’re on duty here.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“This isn’t a hobby, you know. This is a desperate necessity in the lives of these children.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“This is a desperate necessity in the lives of these children’s parents, too. Are you sure you need this coffee?”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Well, go get it, then. But hurry along. We’re understaffed even when you’re here.”

Martha was going to say “yes, Sister” one more time, but she didn’t. Nuns didn’t just give her the creeps. She hated them. They made her feel as if she were ten years old again. Who was Sister Edna to tell her when she couldn’t get a cup of coffee and when she could? Who were any of these people? This wasn’t some job Martha had taken to pay the rent or further her own career. She got paid room and board and a dollar a week. It was a charity she was doing. She wouldn’t be doing it much longer. If it had been up to Martha, she would have handed in her resignation to the center the day after Grandfather was found dead in Michael Pride’s office. With Grandfather dead, there was no reason for her to suffer under this nonsense anymore. It was Ida who had convinced her to stay. How would it look? Ida had said, and Martha had had to concede the point. If Martha up and quit right after the death, the police
might
think it was because she suspected Michael Pride and didn’t want to be around him. Then again, they might think it was because she was guilty herself and wanted to be away from the scene. There was no way to tell which way the police would jump. Martha didn’t want to pit herself against Michael Pride. In the city of New York, Michael Pride was a secular saint.

The Afterschool Program was held in the east building. Martha didn’t like to cross to the west building over the bridge because she didn’t like to look at the day-care children any more than she liked looking at the children she was supposed to be caring for herself. She didn’t like to cross the bridge in the dark because it was spooky. She went down to the first floor of the east building and out the front door. The street was absolutely empty and absolutely calm. Even the damn fool with the sign had disappeared. Martha went down the east building stoop, along the sidewalk, and up the west building stoop. The doors there were wide open as always. Sister Augustine only deigned to close them when the wind chill got into the negative figures. Martha said hi to the girl at the reception desk—the girl at the reception desk was always some local teenager, fourteen years old and very pregnant—and went on to the back to the stairs that led to the cafeteria. She didn’t really want a cup of coffee. She was only here because she wanted to make sure nobody saw her anywhere else and reported her whereabouts to Sister. Why did she care?

The cafeteria was almost empty. Sister Kenna and Sister Clarice were sitting together at a table in the far corner, eating coffee and chocolate cake. Nuns ate so many sweets. Julie Enderson was sitting by herself in a table near the cash register, drinking a glass of milk and reading a thick textbook that was making her frown. Shana Malvera was sitting by herself, too, looking over a copy of the New York
Sentinel
she didn’t seem to be very interested in and glancing up every once in a while to see who else had come in. Martha caught her eye and waved. Shana waved back. Martha got herself a cup of coffee, paid for it and went to sit with Shana. On her way she passed the only other table in the room that was occupied, taken up by a tall, muscular, well-padded man in a good suit and a red sweater—and the Eternal Protester, Robbie what’s-his-name. Martha wondered who the well-dressed man was. The chief lawyer in charge of Right to Life Vigilantes, Inc. The president of Keep Women Down Unlimited. Somebody. Martha knew good tailoring when she saw it.

Martha put her coffee down at Shana’s table and sat. “Who’s the man with Robbie the Ridiculous?” she asked. “He looks like a recruiting officer for the FBI.”

Shana Malvera giggled. Shana Malvera always giggled. She always rolled her eyes. She always shook her head. She always shrugged her shoulders. Shana Malvera was never still. At the age of five, it had been cute. At the age of forty-five, it was intensely annoying. People put up with it because Shana always knew everything. Shana was a one-woman compendium of gossip.

“FBI is exactly it,” she now told Martha. “I’d have thought you’d know. It’s all because of your grandfather that he’s here. Gregor Demarkian, I mean.”

“Gregor Demarkian?” The name was vaguely familiar. “He’s from the FBI?”

“No, no.” Shana’s head-shaking was so vigorous, her eyes looked as if they were going to pop out. “He used to be with the FBI. He used to chase serial killers. You know. Like Jeffrey Dahmer. Except he’s really old. I don’t think he chased Dahmer himself. No, he’s some kind of private detective now. The Cardinal called him in. Don’t you remember all that fuss a little while ago when Donald McAdam died?”

Martha certainly did remember “all the fuss” when Donald McAdam died. There had been a lot of it. In the first place, Donald McAdam had been the lynchpin of a federal insider trading case that had touched every important financial firm on Wall Street. In the second place, he’d gone right out a penthouse apartment window onto Fifth Avenue in the Fifties.

“What did this Gregor Demarkian have to do with Donald McAdam?” Martha asked.

“He solved the case,” Shana said, obviously surprised Martha didn’t know. “Not right away, you know, but later, on that boat Jonathan Baird owned. I’d think your grandfather would have known Jonathan Baird.”

“Maybe he did. He knew Donald McAdam.”

“Well, from what I hear, the Cardinal is going crazy. With the murder being unsolved and all. So he’s called in this Demarkian person to clear it up. The police are supposed to be just livid.”

“I wonder what he’s talking to Robbie the Ridiculous for.”

“Maybe Robbie saw something pacing back and forth with his sign like that. Maybe he saw somebody come in or somebody go out. Or maybe he saw something inside the center itself. He was inside that night, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

Shana was nodding this time. It was just as violent as everything else she did. “Oh, yes. I gave him directions to the cafeteria myself. He was lost up on the first floor. It was the first time he’d come in.”

“I’m surprised he does come in,” Martha said. “Considering.”

“Oh, Martha. He’s harmless enough. He’s just one person by himself and he isn’t the kind who does dangerous stuff like unplug things. And he’s so sad. Anyway. I found him upstairs by the examining rooms looking perfectly ready to panic, and I told him the way down here.”

“And he’s been coming down here ever since,” Martha said musingly.

“Mmm hmm.” Shana sounded happy. “You know, Martha, I don’t think he’s really serious about all this pro-life business. I don’t think he’s real about it, you know, the way somebody like the Cardinal is, or that woman who went to jail for five years because she wouldn’t give her name at her trespassing trial or whatever it was down in Florida. I think he’s just—lonely.”

“Lonely,” Martha repeated, shocked. “Shana, what are you talking about? The man’s outside our doors with a picket sign twenty-four hours a day. I don’t think he sleeps.”

“He does. He goes away at midnight and comes back at six. I heard somebody say he lives in Brooklyn or Queens or somewhere.”

“The Holly Hill Christian Fellowship. In Queens.”

“Whatever. Do you think if he had a family that loved him he’d be here like this all the time? At least he wouldn’t be alone. His wife would come with him once in a while.”

“Maybe his wife has to stay home taking care of their seven children.”

“If he had seven children he wouldn’t be able to picket.” Shana was definite. “No matter how bad the economy was, he’d have to find work doing something, like working in Burger King or picking up deposit bottles or even dealing dope. Trust me. He’s all alone in the world.”