Dear Old Dead (17 page)

“But it’s precarious,” Gregor said.

“It is definitely precarious,” Michael agreed. “Especially with this new Cardinal. People used to complain about the old one, you know, and say he was intolerant. But he wasn’t, really. He was just orthodox. This one is intolerant.”

“I didn’t like him either.” Gregor poured himself another glass of wine. “Were you worried that your arrest would give him a chance to change the Archdiocese’s relationship with the center?”

Michael snorted. “Worried? No, I wasn’t worried. I was scared to death. Not about the funding. I can always make up the funding elsewhere. I don’t care about the money. But the nuns. Ever since my face ended up on the front page of the
Post,
I’ve been lying awake nights, wondering when Augie is going to walk through my office door to tell me that the Cardinal has issued a ban on clergy and religious working at the center. We couldn’t survive without nuns. We couldn’t survive without Augie. She can work fifteen hours straight, take fifteen minutes off for a cup of coffee, and do it all over again. And she works for less than I do. There’s nothing in the world for getting work like we do done and done right than nuns.”

Gregor sat back. “But the Cardinal didn’t withdraw the nuns from the center,” he said. “And the murder and your arrest are two weeks gone. He’s not likely to withdraw them now unless something else happens.”

“I know. Something else could always happen. I told you I wasn’t an ascetic, Mr. Demarkian. I meant it.”

“Are you at least attempting to protect yourself from being caught in raids?”

“Raids are very rare in New York, I’m thankful to say. The one I got caught in only came off because the proprietor was enmeshed in a RICO action.”

“Still.”

“I know. I know. That’s what Eamon said. But there’s more, as I said. More about the night Charlie died. I’m not worried, at the moment, about everything blowing up in my face because of my tastes in extracurricular activities. I’ve got some control over those. I don’t worry about what I know. I worry about what I
don’t
know.”

“Charlie called you in the afternoon before he came down to the center,” Gregor repeated. “And you didn’t think the reason he wanted to see you that night was entirely concerning the publicity around your arrest.”

“I know it wasn’t.”

“Then what was it about?”

Michael’s Perrier water was gone. He picked up the glass it had come in and rolled it back and forth between his palms. Gregor thought he looked even more tired than he had when they had first come in. Relaxation had been a mistake. Now that his guard was down, Michael had nothing to keep him going. The creases in his forehead were as deep as riverbeds.

“Charlie was laughing,” Michael Pride said carefully, “the way he laughed when he had something going in business. He’d call me up and tell me about real estate and loans and laugh like that. Don’t ask me why, why he told me or why he laughed. I never understood half of it. This time, though, it wasn’t about business. It was about people.”

“What people?” Gregor asked.

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “Charlie told me that he’d done a brilliant thing, because he’d given someone just what he didn’t want. That was the ticket. He’d told this person he was going to give him this thing, whatever it was, and the person couldn’t say he didn’t want it, because it would sound crazy, but the person didn’t want it and it was going to cause no end of trouble. And then everything would come out, and it would all be to the advantage of the center in the end. And then he laughed even harder and said, ‘Happy Father’s Day, Michael, Happy Father’s Day.’ I’m sorry I’m not being more coherent, Mr. Demarkian, but to tell you the truth, I had my mind on other things at the time. My face was all over the New York papers. And there had been rumors all morning that we were on our way to a shoot-out sometime later in the day.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said.

“Here come the hors d’oeuvres. You could have done better than that, you know.”

Gregor sat back and allowed one of the waiters to put a small plate of smoked salmon in front of him. The waiter put a large platter of fried shrimp in front of Michael Pride.

“Are you really going to be able to eat all this food?”

“Sure. The way you look, you ought to be able to do just as well.”

“Not without gaining forty pounds,” Gregor said. Actually, at this point in his life, he couldn’t do that well at all. No one could do that well unless they had gone hungry for a while. Michael Pride must have gone hungry for a while. Either that, or he was at the start of being seriously ill.

Gregor nibbled on a bit of salmon and then decided to get back to business. “Let’s start from the beginning,” he told Michael Pride. “Maybe if we go over it all in detail, we can make it make sense.”

Michael Pride was better than halfway finished with his shrimp.

G
REGOR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
that starting at the beginning would be useless. It was the kind of thing that worked for the great detectives in the books Bennis gave him to read, but that never had worked for him. Three and a half hours after the arrival of the hors d’oeuvres, after Michael Pride had dispatched with countless shrimp, mounds of green vegetables, boatloads of rice and a dessert that had to be lit on fire before it could be eaten, Gregor was no closer than he had been to discovering what had been on Charles van Straadt’s mind the afternoon before he died. Gregor had come to the conclusion that he would like to take Michael Pride back to Cavanaugh Street. Gregor knew a lot of middle-aged women whose mission in life seemed to be to feed the people around them as much food as possible. Michael Pride would be a wonderful subject for their attentions. And they were more sophisticated on Cavanaugh Street than they used to be. They wouldn’t blink an eye when they found out Michael was gay. Lida Arkmanian would just switch her efforts from trying to find Michael a nice Armenian girl to trying to find him a nice young man of the same persuasion. In Gregor’s experience, those women were incorrigible on Cavanaugh Street.

It was Michael’s idea that they should both go up to the Sojourner Truth Health Center and look through the things he had of Charles van Straadt’s, tucked away in his third-floor office. It was after eleven o’clock, but Michael Pride quite obviously had no sense of time. This, too, Gregor should have expected.

“He used to come in and talk to me and leave debris lying everywhere,” Michael said. “He’d come in and just talk and talk and talk. I have a file cabinet drawer I keep it all in. In case he ever wanted it back.”

“But he never did?”

“No. It’s not likely any of it is of any importance. Charlie liked props, that’s all. He liked to tell me how he took revenge on people who tried to cheat him and he liked to wave things around while he did it. Have you ever noticed how rich men are obsessed with the idea of people wanting to cheat them?”

“It’s probably a very practical form of paranoia. A lot of people probably are trying to cheat them.”

“Maybe. That’s another reason not to want to be rich.”

Michael had called a cab from a restaurant phone brought directly to their table. There was no use, he assured Gregor, in trying to get an ordinary street cab to take them where they wanted to go at this time of night. The cab that drove up was a yellow medallion and not a gypsy, but its “off duty” sign was on and its meter was off. The driver was a virtual clone of Juan Valenciano, but not Juan himself. Michael spoke to the driver in rapid Spanish and was answered with a lengthy disquisition on something or the other. Michael sat back, looked at Gregor and shrugged.

“All quiet on the western front, so to speak. No big emergencies, no big accidents, no big shoot-outs uptown. We might actually have half an hour or so to talk before somebody wants me for something.”

“Good.”

“Ricardo here was saying this is his last week. He and his family are going to close on a candy store in Queens this coming Friday. They all get out as soon as they can, all the people up there. Not that I blame them. I just worry there’s going to be nothing left some day except the junkies and the children.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said, because he had nothing to say to that.

The cab shot northward recklessly, seeming to catch every green light, seeming to make the lights turn green. The buildings went from imposing and solid to imposing and deteriorating to imposing and dilapidated to just plain bad. In no time at all, Gregor found himself in a landscape of broken windows, darkened street corners, scattered garbage, echoing emptiness. The street the center was on was a little better because the area immediately around the center was so well taken care of. Either the city or the center staff had decided that that small stretch of sidewalk was much too valuable to waste. The rest of the block was just as bad as the blocks around it. Gregor wondered where all the garbage came from, when all the buildings were abandoned. Nobody lived here. Who was putting cardboard and tissue paper into big green plastic bags and throwing them off the curbs?

The doors to the east building were still open. Light spilled out of the doorway and down from a powerful arch light positioned between the second and third floors of the building. The sidewalk immediately around the center’s front entrances was as well lit as a movie set during filming. Michael said something to the driver and he pulled up in front of the west building. The doors there were closed, but the entrance was just as well lit.

“We’ll go in the back way,” Michael told Gregor. “That way nobody can stop me on the run and ask me fifteen questions.”

“What if they need you for something serious?”

“I’ve got my beeper.”

Gregor followed Michael to the west building door. Michael knocked and introduced himself to someone looking through the peephole. The cab waited until the door opened and let them inside. The woman on the other side of the west building door was the nun Gregor knew as Sister Kenna. She asked a lot of fluttery questions about where they’d been and how they felt and what they were doing on the side of the bridge, and then she was called off by a voice down the first-floor hall. Michael took Gregor to the stairwell and started to climb.

“Going this way is a little difficult in some ways,” he said. “You’ve got to go up to five and then across the bridge and then down to three again, but it’s the only way to have even a modicum of privacy. And it’s only a modicum, believe me.”

Gregor believed that Sister Kenna was probably on the phone right now, telling Sister Augustine that Dr. Michael Pride had done the very odd thing of bringing Gregor Demarkian into the center by the wrong door.

Gregor followed Michael up and up and up and then over a bridge with glass sides that made him dizzy and more than a little anxious. Twenty years in the FBI had had an effect on his assumptions of the world. He kept wondering what would happen to them if there was a sniper down there, or in one of the buildings across the street. Whose idea had it been to build a glass bridge like this in such a dangerous part of town?

Michael Pride didn’t think anything of the bridge at all. He let Gregor into the east building and looked around.

“We have day care here from six in the morning to seven at night. Day care for infants and toddlers, I mean. Sixty kids under the age of five. Lots of volunteers. It’s easy to find volunteers for projects like day care.”

“What happens when the kids are five?”

“They go over to the west building to another program we have there. Actually, half the kids in this program are doing a version of Head Start. It’s not Head Start itself—the center doesn’t take any public money, not even Medicaid—but it’s the same idea. Works pretty well, from what I’ve seen.”

“Good.”

“Two more flights. Right this way.”

Gregor followed Michael again, glad to see that these last two flights were well lit and reasonably wide. He was trying to pretend he was not out of breath. Some of the floors they had passed on the way up in the other building had been essentially shut down for people to sleep. There had barely been any light at all. Michael had perked right up when they had gotten to this building. His tiredness seemed to have been almost a result of the atmosphere downtown. He went down the last two flights of stairs humming softly under his breath. Gregor recognized the song. It was “Under the Sea.” For no reason at all, it suddenly occurred to Gregor that one of the two composers of that song had died of AIDS.

“Maybe Eamon will be in his office,” Michael said, as they rounded the last bend in the staircase before reaching the third floor. “You should talk to him about Charlie. Eamon had more to do with Charlie than anybody else in this place but me.”

Gregor didn’t think Eamon Donleavy was feeling especially cooperative. He decided not to bring it up. He went barreling down the stairs after Michael, not looking where he was going. He almost ran right into Michael Pride’s back.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, pulling up short.

Michael was standing motionless in the middle of the third-floor hall, staring at a closed office door.

“My office,” Michael said. “The door’s closed.”

“So what?”

“My door’s never closed. The only time I ever saw it closed was when Charlie—oh, for Christ’s sake. This is asinine.”

Michael Pride strode ahead, grabbed the knob of his office door and yanked the door open. He was so sure that he would find nothing there but an empty office—and Gregor was so sure with him—that it took them both a long minute to assimilate what they did see.

What they saw was a woman in a short black dress, rolling around on the worn carpet on Michael Pride’s office floor, bucking and spasming as if she were being electrocuted.

Rosalie van Straadt.

The Cardinal Archbishop of New York

Is Beginning

to Lose His Patience

T
HEY TRIED TO BRING
her back. They tried so hard, Gregor thought they were going to do it. He was a veteran of dozens of murder cases and an expert on poisons. He should have known better than to believe for a moment that someone in Rosalie van Straadt’s condition could recover from strychnine toxicity. But he got caught up in Michael Pride’s conviction. Michael Pride radiated conviction. Gregor had had hands-on experience in medical emergencies. He had once provided enough first aid to a woman who had swallowed lye so that she didn’t die from it—although, lye being lye, she hadn’t ended up in very good shape, either. First aid, however, was the key. Always before, when Gregor had been called on to do something about a man or woman who needed a doctor, no doctor had been available. Now the doctor was available, but Gregor’s help was needed anyway. There were never enough professionals on staff at the Sojourner Truth Health Center. The first thing Michael Pride did when he got over his shock at seeing Rosalie spasming and shuddering in his office was to go for his upstairs cabinet. The second thing he did was to start issuing Gregor orders. Gregor wanted to issue a few orders of his own. Don’t touch the upstairs cabinet, he thought. The strychnine probably came from there. Don’t touch the papers on your desk. The murderer might have gotten careless and left something important lying around. Watch where you step on the carpet. There could be fibers, sand, pieces of lint, anything. It was ridiculous. Gregor kept his mouth shut and followed orders.