Dear Old Dead (19 page)

There was no one at all sitting at the Admitting desk. Gregor went around it and down the hall on the other side. This one was lined with doors that said things like “oxygen” and “lead shields” and “OR supplies misc.” At the far end, the hall curved around to the left again. Gregor went there and found himself where he wanted to be. This hall was very short. It ended in a pair of double doors marked “Emergency Room 3.”

Just as Gregor was about to go up to the doors to look through the windows—the last thing he wanted to do was breach a sterile environment—the doors were pushed back from the inside and Augie came walking out. She was wearing OR greens over her sweatsuit and crying. She kept wiping the tears off her face with the back of her hand. Beyond her, Gregor could see a still body on a table and a clutch of men and women in hospital whites. Dr. Michael Pride was taking off his face mask. From this distance, he looked to Gregor as if he were in pain.

“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” Augie sobbed. “There you are. I forgot all about you.”

“I called the police,” Gregor told her.

“Oh, the police. Yes, you’d have to call the police. She died, you know.”

“I guessed that.”

“I don’t even know if we came close. I don’t know what we were doing in there.”

“You were trying,” Gregor told her. “There’s nothing in the world wrong with trying.”

“Isn’t there? I’ve got to go get out of these things. I’ve got work to do. It’s a good thing this is turning out to be a slow night.”

Michael Pride walked up to them. He had his mask in his hand. His eyes were red and raw. He hadn’t been wearing one of those caps doctors wore on television. His hair was stiff with sweat and sticking up in spikes like a punk rocker’s.

“That’s that,” he said. “I take it you got in touch with the police.”

“I didn’t talk to Detective Sheed directly,” Gregor said, “but I talked to a young woman who said she could get in touch with him. There are going to be a few regular police officers on the scene as well.”

“Oh, yes, there would have to be—although you didn’t have to make a phone call for one of those. We’ve got them practically parked on the premises. That’s what happens when you treat a lot of knife wounds. Christ, what was she doing here? I thought she’d gone home hours ago.”

“She had dinner in the cafeteria,” Augie said, wiping her eyes. “I saw her there myself. With Ida and Martha and Victor. She was looking very cool.”

“I’m surprised the three of them didn’t beat her up,” Michael said. “What was she doing in my office?”

Augie considered this. “I suppose we can ask Martha. She’s supposed to be around somewhere tonight. Not on duty, of course, she took the Afterschool Program with Sister Edna this afternoon. But she’s supposed to be around.”

Michael snorted. “She’s been around less and less often these last two weeks. She’s going to quit on you, Augie, and you know it.”

“Oh, I know it.” She turned to Gregor. “All the van Straadt grandchildren volunteer at the center because old Charlie van Straadt insisted on it, but the only one who ever liked it was Ida. Ever since Charlie died, Martha’s just been itching to quit.”

“Were you talking about Rosalie van Straadt?” Sister Kenna asked, coming out of the emergency room. She had a sterile face mask hanging around her neck, but otherwise she was wearing the same modified habit she had been wearing when Gregor first met her. Gregor wondered what use they’d found for her in the emergency room.

“Isn’t that a terrible thing,” Sister Kenna said. “A terrible thing. I saw her, though. After dinner. Over in the east building.”

“Visiting with Martha?” Augie asked.

“I don’t know,” Sister Kenna said. “I didn’t see Martha. Rosalie was just there. On the first floor in the room with the television, you know.”

“She was watching television?” Gregor was confused.

“No, no,” Sister Kenna said. “The television wasn’t on. She was just there. Rosalie was. She was just sitting.”

“Doing what?” Augie demanded.

“Doing nothing,” Sister Kenna answered. “She was just sitting there. I would have gone in to say hello, but I was busy. We needed diapers up in infant care. I’d just gone through this incredibly complicated demonstration on how to diaper a baby, and then the baby I was diapering did a—well, you know—and there weren’t any extra diapers. The cupboard hadn’t been restocked. So I went down to the first floor to get some more.”

“What time was this?” Gregor wanted to know.

“About eight,” Sister Kenna said promptly. “The infant care class starts at seven thirty and goes for an hour. It has to start that late, you see, because all our students work. And then they have to come home and get dinner and look after whoever else it is they’re responsible for in their families, which usually isn’t anybody but you never know. There could always be one with an invalid mother. So the class started at seven thirty and we’d been at it for a while when the—um—accident happened. The class was beginning to get restless and that always happens about eight.”

“And she was just sitting there,” Gregor repeated. “Doing nothing.”

“That’s right.”

“Not watching television.”

“The television wasn’t on. I told you.”

“Not reading a book or a magazine.”

“No. There are books and magazines in that room, but Rosalie didn’t have one.”

“Not doing a crossword puzzle.”

“Really, Mr. Demarkian, I meant exactly what I said. She was just sitting there.”

“You must see Mr. Demarkian’s problem,” Michael Pride jumped in. “People don’t ‘just sit there.’ It’s insupportable. Whether you realized it or not, Rosalie must have been doing something.”

“Oh,” Gregor said. “I know what she was doing. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the times are wrong.”

“What are you talking about?” Augie demanded.

Gregor didn’t have time to tell her. There were sounds in the emergency room again, although not the sounds Gregor associated with an emergency. There were no sirens or running footsteps. What Gregor heard was stiff walking with a march beat. It was the rhythm of uniformed men everywhere, in armies as well as police forces, in professional fire departments as well as the National Guard. Gregor had always been able to tell which of the men on his staff at the Bureau were spending their weekends with the Guard. For some reason, women didn’t seem to pick up the gait in the same way.

Gregor left Michael Pride and Sister Augustine and walked back along the wraparound hallway toward the Admitting desk. He ran into three men coming the opposite way. Two of these men were uniformed police officers who looked vaguely familiar, but Gregor didn’t put much credit in that. It was their uniforms that were familiar, and this situation, which Gregor had been in too many times before. The third man was a massive African-American, with
massive
being the operative word. Gregor was six feet four inches tall, but this man towered over him. Gregor was naturally broad shouldered, but this man looked as if he could have taken on the entire defensive line of the New York Giants and made it an interesting match. The effect was made more pronounced by the fact that the man didn’t have a single hair on his head. His baldness served to emphasize the fact that his facial features were as outsized as the rest of him. Gregor had a sudden vision of this person as a star performer in professional wrestling. The only problem with that was that this man looked far too serious. Professional wrestlers weren’t supposed to really scare anybody.

The three men came to a halt. The tall African-American looked Gregor Demarkian over from head to foot and nodded. Gregor felt the way he’d felt standing at attention while the troops were being reviewed by the local general. Gregor had spent a great deal of his time in the army standing at attention while the troops were being reviewed by one visiting dignitary or the other.

The tall African-American held out his massive hand. “I take it you’re Gregor Demarkian,” he said, in an Oxford accent so perfect that if Gregor had had his eyes closed, he would have thought he was watching
Brideshead Revisited.

“Yes,” Gregor told him. “That’s right. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”

“I’m Hector Sheed, detective first grade, New York City Homicide. You look fatter than your picture in
People
magazine.”

“Right,” Gregor said. “Of course.”

“Never mind.” Hector Sheed sighed wearily. “Let’s see what kind of a mess Michael Pride’s gotten himself into this time.”

B
Y THURSDAY MORNING, JULIE
Enderson’s head felt as if it were filled with tiny hand grenades, pins pulled, ready to explode. This was a feeling Julie had had often in her life. Right now there were a million things she could use to explain it. Two people had been found dead in Michael Pride’s office in just over two weeks. There was nothing necessarily odd about finding dead people in the west building, but these had been the wrong kind of people to end up dead. Julie was still young enough, and had been poor long enough, to think of rich people as immortal and rich-and-famous people as more immortal still. Women with money floated up above the street on cushions of electrified air, untouchable. Nobody called them “cunt” or offered them twenty dollars to get in the back of the car. They didn’t stand in front of their mirrors in the morning, wondering if the mask they were putting on would work today, wondering how long they were going to get away with hiding their awful ugliness. Julie thought about Rosalie van Straadt often. Money, looks, education. Rosalie seemed more real to Julie than Martha and Ida, who worked at the center. Ida was always too preoccupied. Martha was what Julie thought of as “a born social worker.” It was not a compliment.

Then there were the reporters, who had come out of nowhere after Rosalie van Straadt died and decided to stay. Julie was used to television cameras and print reporters with stenographer’s notebooks and tape recorders. Gang wars and drug busts got them uptown on a sporadic basis. She wasn’t used to this crazy kind of invasion, this siege. Julie slept in a dormitory bedroom with three other girls. The room’s two windows faced the street. On the mornings after Rosalie van Straadt died, she would get up early to look out. They were always there, two or three of them. Julie became convinced that they were waiting for a third death. What if there was a third death? What would happen then? The center had always seemed like such a solid place to her, like such a sure thing. Now it felt shaky at the foundations. Shudder and roar, shudder and roar, Julie thought. A breath of the wrong wind could blow it into rubble.

No matter how many things Julie had to blame the feeling on, though, the truth of it had nothing to do with Michael or murders or little gray men from the
New York Times
asking painful questions in the street. For years, Julie had felt like this all the time, day after day, minute after minute. When she’d first started whoring, the feeling would come to her as soon as she woke up. She could get rid of it by smoking a little dope or picking up a john. The johns had always worked better for her than the dope. The dope turned on her sometimes, spun her around and made her look at herself. Back in Rakey’s apartment—Rakey was her first pimp, the one her mother’s boyfriend sold her to, when she was eleven—Julie would stand in front of the cracked yellow mirror in the bathroom and watch the skin of her face turn into cockroaches and worms, black and dead and pulsing. That was how she saw the inside of herself. That was what she thought of the first time she went into a church and heard a priest talk about her soul. That was what she thought of the first time the social workers picked her up and put her in a program. The program had a “self-esteem workshop” all the girls had to attend, where a peppy brunette in low stack heels ordered each and every one of them to “love yourself! love yourself! loving yourself is the key to loving your life!” It wasn’t until Julie met Augie that she had begun to be able to pass her reflection without revulsion, that she had begun to have days when waking up had not meant a collision with self-hatred. It was Augie who had told Julie that a true Christian looks not only at the person but at the image of Christ in every person—and oddly enough, that had worked. Julie didn’t look for the image of Christ in herself, not even now, when the image of Christ in her mind looked suspiciously like Michael Pride. Christ was too much of a man to make Julie entirely comfortable with looking for images of Him. She looked for images of the Virgin Mary instead. The Virgin Mary was very important to Julie. The Virgin Mary had been poor, but she had also been untouchable. If she had also been black, she would have been perfect.

Julie kept a picture of the Virgin Mary standing on a cloud with the moon at her feet tucked into a corner of the small mirror that hung on the wall of her dormitory room at the Sojourner Truth Health Center. She used a plastic-covered bookmark with a picture of the Virgin Mary with streams of light coming out of her fingers to mark her place in her history text. On Thursday morning, days after Rosalie van Straadt’s murder, neither of these pictures did any good at all. She looked in the mirror and she saw herself, that was all, not the Virgin Mary or Christ or anyone else. Julie looked down at the palms of her hands and wondered how the johns could bear to have her touch them. Didn’t they see that she was dead? Any minute now, her skin would begin to slough off in ripples and folds. She was a walking, talking corpse, going to rot. The hand grenades in her head had coalesced into one big neutron bomb. It was feeling like this that had blasted her out of every other program she had been in.

It was seven o’clock in the morning. Julie’s roommates lay huddled in lumps and curls under blankets and around pillows. They hadn’t noticed that Julie had pulled up the shade and let in the sun. Julie pulled the shade down again. She had thrown away all her makeup. She didn’t have a single thing with which she could paint on another face. The other girls had lots and lots, grocery bagfuls, that they shoplifted from five-and-ten-cent stores on Broadway. Julie could borrow a lipstick from Karida and a blusher from KelsiAnne. Neither one of them would ever notice there was anything missing, and if they did they wouldn’t mind. Julie picked up her history books instead. This was a very delicate moment. This was make or break. If she put makeup on her face this morning, it was as good as over. She might stay at the center another day or week or month, but sooner or later she would be out on the street again, looking for another john, looking for another pimp. Thinking of what all that was like—of what wanting it was like—scared her, because by now there were times she did want it, even when she didn’t want it, it got all confused. It was as if “normal” was feeling dead and getting beat up. Feeling alive and not getting beat up was better, but it was also terrifying, Julie didn’t know why. She just knew that she had to get past it. The rational part of her, the sane part of her, the part of her she was actually coming to like, didn’t want to end up back on the street at all.