Dear Old Dead (28 page)

Gregor Demarkian was thinking. He was thinking as hard as he had since he first got to New York on this trip, and for once it was doing him some good. What was it Sherlock Holmes always said? “Eliminate the impossible, and what you have left, however improbable, will be the truth.” Gregor didn’t know if that was the exact quote, but it would do. Not that he put much stock in silly fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes. He was too much of a professional for that. But still. You had to take your good advice where you could find it. Anywhere.

They were all staring at him. Hector Sheed was being especially intense. Gregor forced himself into the present.

“Miss Greel,” he said. “Miss van Straadt just now said something about the money. About how Rosalie was supposed to ‘get it all,’ I think she put it, but instead it was you.”

Ida looked at Victor and then at her feet. “Yes. Yes, she did. Grandfather had made arrangements to change his will.”

“To leave everything to you?”

“To leave the bulk of his personal fortune to me, yes.”

“Which amounts to about eight hundred million dollars. Do you actually know for a fact that your grandfather was going to change his will in this particular way?”

“Oh, yes,” Ida said. “He’d contacted the lawyers. Mr. Cole had already had the new will drawn up. If Grandfather had lived another day, he would have signed it.”

“Meaning that if your grandfather had lived, you would be a much richer young woman than you are now.”

“That’s right, Mr. Demarkian. But I don’t see that that matters much. I’m a very rich young woman now.”

“Oh, yes.” Gregor nodded thoughtfully. “Did you know about this change?”

“Yes,” Ida said firmly. “Yes, I did.”

“Can you prove that you did?”

“I think I can. Grandfather wrote me a letter about it. I have the letter. I have the envelope it came in, too.”

“Do you have it here?”

“Yes, I do. I have a room here, on the staff floor. The letter is there.”

“Good,” Gregor said. “Very good. Would you do me a favor, Miss Greel? Would you go get that letter and let Mr. Sheed and I take a look at it?”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“All right,” Ida Greel said. “Certainly. Just give me a minute or two. I’ll have to use the stairs.”

“We’ll be on the stairs ourselves,” Gregor told her. “We’ll be using your brother here to get our times straightened out.”

“Of course.”

Ida Greel seemed to hesitate, then shrugged her shoulders and walked away from them, in the opposite direction to the one Martha had gone. Gregor and Hector and Victor watched her disappear into the people near the back of the hall.

Hector Sheed blew out a long stream of air. “What was
that
all about?” he demanded. “I’m gone for five minutes and everybody goes absolutely crazy. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Of course I know what I’m doing,” Gregor told him. “In fact, I know what I’m doing for the first time since I got here. Mr. van Straadt, I’d like you to do some running up and down the stairs.”

“No problem,” Victor said, but he looked confused again.

Gregor Demarkian thought Victor van Straadt would always look confused, but that was all right.

Gregor himself no longer was.

E
AMON DONLEAVY WAS TOO
good a Catholic, and too much of a rationalist, to believe in precognition, or telepathy, or auras. Nevertheless, walking into his office after the emergency-room crisis with Robbie Yagger, Eamon knew his phone was going to ring before it rang. He also knew who would be on the other end of it before he picked it up. For a split second, he considered not picking it up. To say that Eamon Donleavy was having a bad day was ludicrous. Eamon Donleavy was having a bad year. Ever since he had first heard that Michael Pride was sick, he had been in a walking coma. He did all the things he was supposed to do. He said Mass at six o’clock every morning at St. Martin Porres Roman Catholic Church three blocks downtown, for the nuns from the center and anyone else who wanted to show up. He visited the sick. He did his paperwork. He spoke to the First Communion classes and the Confirmation classes and the Interfaith Sunday School classes that were held in the east building. He just couldn’t make any of it mean anything. He had become deaf, dumb, and blind. He kept coming to in the middle of rooms and hallways, utterly unable to explain how he had gotten where he was, utterly unable to explain what he was doing there. Sometimes he found himself thinking it wasn’t Michael who was sick. Sometimes he found himself hoping that he would die first.

Today, coming up from all that fuss in the emergency room, Eamon Donleavy was not in a walking coma. He knew where he was and where he was going. He knew what he intended to tell people if they asked him what he was doing. He passed Victor van Straadt running up the stairs—what was Demarkian up to now?—and went into his office. The surface of his desk was absolutely clear except for a maroon felt desk blotter and a little stack of lined notebook sheets held down by a crystal paperweight. In the center of the paperweight there was a tiny statue of St. Joseph and a plastic plaque with the words: “
St. Joseph, Foster Father of Jesus
.” On the lined notebook sheets were letters written by Sister Angelique’s fourth-grade Afterschool Program class, thanking Eamon for being their spiritual father. Eamon sat down and looked at all of it. In the old days, his desk had never been so clean. It didn’t seem possible that “the old days” were only the beginning of this week. He had cleaned his office out, putting his affairs in order. He had begun to eat aspirins the way children eat Pez, battling a headache that wouldn’t go away.

Up on the wall next to his door, Eamon Donleavy had a crucifix. It had a brass corpus on a walnut cross. On the other side of the door, he had the framed print of the Constantinople Madonna that had hung next to his bed all the years he was growing up. Both these things seemed to be connected to the phone. The phone is going to ring, Eamon thought, and it did. The man on the other end is going to be that son of a bitch from the Chancery.

Eamon Donleavy had never used the words
son of a bitch
in his life. He had never even thought them before.

He picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

There must have been something in his voice. There was hesitation on the other end of the line. There was coughing. Finally, the Cardinal Archbishop said, “Father Donleavy? Please excuse me if I’ve disturbed you at work. I hadn’t heard from you for quite some time.”

There’s been nothing to hear, Eamon Donleavy wanted to say, but he couldn’t. That boy was downstairs, poisoned. The world was falling apart.

“We’ve been very busy here,” he said. “We all have been.”

“I got a call a little while ago, Father Donleavy. I was told there had been another—attack.”

“There seems to have been another poisoning, Your Eminence, yes. The victim was a member of the Holly Hill Christian Fellowship. You know those people. He came to the center every day and carried a protest sign.”

“A pro-life protest sign.”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“Have you talked to Gregor Demarkian in the last day or two? I haven’t talked to him at all.”

“He’s been here almost continuously, Your Eminence.” Eamon Donleavy didn’t like Gregor Demarkian, but if he had to choose between his Cardinal Archbishop and anybody, he almost always chose anybody. “He’s been very busy. And he’s managed to gain the cooperation of the police.”

“Is that good?”

“I think it is, Your Eminence, yes. It saves a lot of trouble. And it gives him access to information he couldn’t get otherwise. It gives us access, too.”

“I don’t like the way this is going,” the Cardinal said. “Demarkian’s been here almost a week. I thought it would be settled by now. When he went up to Maryville for John O’Bannion, he had the whole mess cleared up in three days.”

“When he went up to Colchester for John O’Bannion, the mess took two weeks. I don’t think you can put time limits on murder like that, Your Eminence. It’s not a calf-roping contest.”

“I know that.”

“Besides, I think he’s close to a solution. He’s out in the stairwell with Detective Sheed, making Victor van Straadt run up and down and up and down, over and over again. I think it has something to do with establishing the times.”

“For Charles van Straadt’s death?”

“Yes.”

“Demarkian suspects Victor van Straadt?”

“I don’t know that he does. He asked Victor to help him out. That’s all I’m sure of.”

“He doesn’t suspect Michael Pride?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Or you?”

“Why would he suspect me, Your Eminence?”

“This is New York, Father Donleavy. If they can pin it on the Catholic Church, they will. You know they will.”

No, he didn’t. “I suppose so, Your Eminence. Your Eminence, I’m sorry to cut this short, but with all the trouble we’ve had around here lately, I’m a little backed up. I’m late for an appointment.”

“Of course, Father Donleavy. I’ll let you go.”

“If there’s any news here, I’ll call you, Your Eminence.”

“That will be a novelty, Father Donleavy. But don’t strain yourself. I’ll call you.”

Eamon Donleavy heard a click in his ear, as sharp and lethal as a gunshot. He put the phone receiver back in its cradle and stared at it. Why bother to call the Cardinal Archbishop? The Cardinal Archbishop had spies. The Cardinal Archbishop knew everything. The Cardinal Archbishop probably had the whole damn building bugged.

Eamon got out of his chair, and went into the hall. Victor was still on the stairs, running up and down. The voices of Gregor Demarkian and Hector Sheed drifted up through the well. Eamon got the impression of calm and deliberation, but no actual words. He crossed the hall and looked into Michael’s office.

Michael’s office looked the way it always looked. There was mess. There was clutter. There was no religion. Michael didn’t keep crucifixes on his wall. He didn’t keep prayer wheels or mezzuzahs. He didn’t have plastic statues of the Virgin on his file cabinets or a copy of the Koran tucked away on a bookshelf somewhere. Michael always said he was a man without God, and tried to mean it. What confused Eamon Donleavy was that what Michael meant by being without God was not what all the other atheists meant by it. With Michael, nothing came out right, nothing was the way it was supposed to be. With Michael, when you signed on for the ride, you never knew where you were going to end up.

Suddenly, Eamon Donleavy spun around and slammed the door of Michael Pride’s office shut. It was too much for him, it really was. All the things he had tried so hard to hold back from himself for years were coming at him in waves. Just when he thought he was going to have a chance to breathe, they hit him again. No, Eamon thought, not
them.
Never
them.
Just
it.
One single sentence. Four short words. Enough to kill him as surely as strychnine had killed Charles and Rosalie van Straadt.

Oh, Christ, Eamon thought, doubling over, nauseated, in so much pain he felt as if he had needles in his bones.

Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ.

I love this man.

E
VERY PERSON IN RESIDENCE
at the Sojourner Truth Health Center for more than two weeks on a nonmedical matter was supposed to take housekeeping duty if they were asked, and since Julie Enderson had been resident at the center for months now, she was often asked. She was asked especially often because the nuns knew she was reliable. Housekeeping duty was one of those things that was very important in the aggregate but not very important piece by piece. Seeing that the laundry was folded and put away in the linen closets, dusting the stair railings and the furniture in the common rooms, making sure the flatware was properly sorted—if any one of those things hadn’t managed to get done on any one particular day, it wouldn’t have mattered, but if all of them had been consistently left unfinished, the whole place would have gone to pot. Julie Enderson knew about places going to pot. Her mother had had a kind of genius for them, so that any apartment Steeva Enderson so much as looked at instantly became a repository of litter and peeling paint. Julie didn’t mind cleaning. The really important cleaning—meaning what had to be done in the west building in the medical facilities—was taken care of by a professional service. The service protected the center from the kind of nasty surprises health inspectors could bring. Julie was assigned only those duties directly relating either to the east building itself, or to the cafeteria and basement of the west building. Even the west building offices were taken care of by the service. In practice, Julie was assigned to sort clothes in the laundry and to sort flatware. Those two things could be accomplished while studying. Julie didn’t mind that either. She wanted the time for studying. She wanted to study and study and study until her brain fell out of her head. She was convinced that if she worked as hard as she could and then harder, she would get beyond the place where she saw worms and maggots in the mirror. She would get home.

Today, she was sitting on a high stool at the table in the laundry, folding pillowcases. It was six thirty in the evening, hours after All That had happened, but she was still shaken. She had her history book open to the start of the chapter on the abolitionist movement. She had even read a paragraph or two. She hadn’t been able to retain anything. It was a good thing the qualifying test for the academy wasn’t due to be held for another month. The way things had been going around here, Julie was surprised she had been able to concentrate at all. She looked at the photograph of Harriet Beecher Stowe and the reprint of the illustration from the original
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The illustration showed a tiny black girl on her knees, praying to heaven in agony. It was not the first nineteenth-century illustration Julie had seen that had black people in it. All such illustrations made her wonder. Maybe black people had changed between the time these illustrations were drawn and now. Maybe black people were different. Certainly no black person Julie had ever met looked anything at all like the black people in these pictures.