Dear Old Dead (31 page)

F
ORTUNATELY FOR GREGOR’S EQUILIBRIUM
, Dave Geraldino was considerably less pompous, portentous, and self-important than his security staff. In fact, it would have been difficult for Dave Geraldino to be pompous at all. He was a small muscular man, barely five feet two, who looked like the second lead in a prize-fighter movie from the 1930s. When the man with the clipboard ushered Gregor and Hector Sheed into his office, Dave Geraldino leapt up from the chair behind his desk, hurried to the door, and shook both their hands. Then he pulled chairs from their resting places and placed them close to his desk. Dave Geraldino’s office was the kind with glass walls. The walls looked out on the bullpen. His desk held a copy of the New York
Sentinel
logo carved into crystal for a paperweight. Gregor recognized it as the kind of thing owners give their chief operating officers after a particularly good year.

Dave Geraldino had been taken aback for a moment at the sight of Hector Sheed, but only for a moment. Now he was waving them both into the chairs.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said. “Lisa will be here in just a minute. Mr. Demarkian, you don’t know how glad I am to meet you at last. I already know so much about you. At least, I know so much about your professional life.”

Gregor tried to remember what the
Sentinel
had had to say about the Baird case, or any of the other cases he had taken on since he had retired from the Bureau, but he couldn’t. He supposed the
Sentinel
had said something. All the papers had.

“I’m very glad to meet you, too,” Gregor said. “This is Hector Sheed, detective first grade—”

“Manhattan Homicide.” Dave Geraldino was pacing around and around the perimeter of the office. “In charge of the van Straadt case. I know. I know. I do read my own paper.”

“Good,” Hector rumbled.

“You don’t know how thrilled we are that you have agreed to this interview,” Dave Geraldino continued. “An interview like this in the middle of a case is an extraordinary thing for a paper to have. An extraordinary thing. Especially from you, Mr. Demarkian. You have such a reputation for refusing to give interviews at all.”

“Interview,” Hector Sheed said slowly.

Gregor shot him a look. “Leave it alone,” he said. “It’s getting us what we want.”

“What is it we do want?” Hector asked.

There was a rattle at the door of the office. Dave Geraldino stopped his pacing long enough to open up. Gregor and Hector stared at the woman coming inside. That she was very young was attested to by the condition of her skin. It was so soft and unlined, it looked newborn. That young did not mean naive or innocent was attested to by the look in her eyes. Gregor’s first impression was that here was a woman who could have reported on the bombing of Hiroshima firsthand and not even blinked.

Dave Geraldino waved the young woman inside. “Lisa,” he said enthusiastically, “Lisa, come right in. This is Mr. Demarkian and Mr. Sheed. This is Lisa Hasserdorf, our Lifestyles page editor.”

“Not for long.” Lisa Hasserdorf sat down on the edge of Dave Geraldino’s desk. She had long black hair to her waist and big black eyes. The lipstick she was wearing was bloodred.

“So,” she said, after she had looked them both over. “You want to know how our contests are run.”

“Gregor?” Hector asked.

Gregor was smiling pleasantly. “That’s right. Specifically, I want to know how your Father’s Day contest is being run and about any other contests that have been run the same way.”

“Any others? But Mr. Demarkian, there have been hundreds. Going back years. From well before my time.”

“You’re in charge of the contests?”

“Not in charge, no. Victor van Straadt is in charge, at the moment. But he’s in charge under me, if you see what I mean.”

“Not exactly,” Gregor said. “What do you do? Do you check on his work? Do you oversee the money—There is money involved, isn’t there? A hundred thousand dollars?”

“That’s right. And no, I don’t do any of those things. I just make sure Victor has what he’s supposed to have when he’s supposed to have it. Right now, I’m constantly making sure that he has his copy written, and that he’s keeping the entries that come in in the glass jar in the storeroom and that he’s logged them in before he puts them in there. He had a computer program to log them in on. The Father’s Day contest is a lottery kind of thing, you see, where people have to send in the right numbers. Sometimes we run straightforward drawings. Those are easier.”

Gregor considered this. “Let’s back up a little. You say this Father’s Day contest is a lottery kind of thing. Do you mean that people send in their numbers and then you pick balls out of a bowl with numbers on them?”

“No,” Lisa Hasserdorf said, “although we’ve done it that way once or twice. What we’ve found, though, is that people like to do puzzles. They like to feel that they’ve really figured something out. And if they win, you know, it gives them a kick to tell their friends that they’re one of the smartest people in New York. Although these days, you wouldn’t think that would take much. Anyway, what we’ve got going this time is a quiz about the most famous fathers in history, and what you’re supposed to do is guess the year they were born. We don’t give the exact names, you understand. We don’t say William Tell, for instance. We say, ‘This father was forced by an evil government official to shoot an apple off his son’s head with an arrow.’ Then you’re supposed to figure out who that is, write the name down and write the year he was born. There are ten of those.”

“So you have to know both things,” Gregor said.

“That’s right.”

“What happens next?”

“Well, next, Victor looks into his computer at the end of the time period, you know, after all the entries have to be in, and he finds out how many people got the right answers and who they are—”

“Are there always more than one?”

“Usually, yes. Anyway, he double-checks those entries and then he gives the winners a call, and they come down here for a drawing. We put all their names in a drum and pull out one and that one gets the hundred thousand. We usually have five or six people in at the end.”

“What if they can’t come down here? Do they forfeit their right to be in the drawing?”

“Oh, no.” Lisa Hasserdorf looked very disapproving. “We couldn’t do that. Many of the people who enter these contests are homebound or disabled. We often have people who can’t come down here. We put their names in the drum anyway. Then, if they win, we send a photographer out to their house and get their picture for the paper. That is, if they’ll let us photograph them, of course. It’s illegal in New York State to insist on cooperation with publicity as a condition for winning a contest like this one.”

Gregor thought it over. Carefully. “Do you often have people who don’t want to be photographed?”

Lisa Hasserdorf shrugged. “It runs two to one in favor of getting your picture in the paper. But it’s not unusual for someone not to want to be photographed. Of course, we do put their names in the paper, and their boroughs. It isn’t illegal in New York State to insist on that.”

“How long has Victor van Straadt been running these contests?” Gregor asked. “Is this his first one?”

“Oh, no,” Lisa said. “Victor’s been with the paper two years now, and quite frankly, we put him on the contests right away, right after the secretary who used to handle them quit. Victor had been with us about six months then. He’s really hopeless.”

“Lisa,” Dave Geraldino scolded.

“Well, he is,” Lisa said. “In fact,
hopeless
may not be a strong enough word. I know he’s a van Straadt, but really. He didn’t inherit any of his grandfather’s talent for newspaper work. I don’t even know if he reads newspapers. We couldn’t fire him, considering who he was, but we couldn’t leave him running around loose, either. So we gave him the contests. Any idiot could do what he does. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t have the brains God gave a donkey. In fact, the contests just don’t matter.”

“It would matter if there were any irregularities, wouldn’t it?” Gregor asked. “Most states have very strict laws about that kind of thing.”

“That would matter, yes,” Lisa agreed. “But Victor isn’t dishonest, Mr. Demarkian. He’s just stupid. And in my opinion, he’s much too stupid to devise any—irregularities—that wouldn’t be picked up immediately by one of the rest of us.”

“All right,” Gregor said. He certainly couldn’t argue that Victor van Straadt was not stupid. That would be like arguing that the ocean wasn’t wet. “Just one more thing. How many of these contests would you say Victor van Straadt has run?”

“Nine,” Lisa answered promptly. “We do six a year.”

“Of this nine, how many would you say have involved winners who have not wanted to be photographed for the paper?”

Lisa frowned. “I don’t know. It’s not the kind of thing I keep track of. Is it really important that you know?”

“Yes, I think it is.” Gregor nodded slowly. “It would also help if I knew who among the winners had and who had not shown up for the drawings and the names and addresses of the winners who had not been photographed for the paper. Do you think you could get me all that?”

Lisa Hasserdorf was bewildered. “Yes, of course I could. It’s all on the computer. But Mr. Demarkian, I just don’t understand. How is all that going to help solve the murder of Charles van Straadt?”

“That’s the question I’ve got, too,” Hector Sheed said. “You got an answer to it, Gregor?”

Gregor stood up to stretch and looked reproachfully at Hector Sheed in the process.

“The murder of Charles van Straadt is solved, Hector. That was the easy part. Now is when the real work has to be done.”

“Oh, marvelous,” Dave Geraldino said gleefully. “Just the way they described it in
People
magazine.”

I
T WAS MARTHA VAN
Straadt’s idea that her brother Victor should go down to the offices of the New York
Sentinel
after Gregor Demarkian and Hector Sheed to find out what they were up to, and it was Martha van Straadt who waited at the door of the east building hour after hour until Victor came back. Actually, it was only about an hour and forty-five minutes. It just felt as if it were taking forever. The wait was made worse by the fact that Martha had been left utterly alone. Ida had agreed with this project, in principle, when Martha had first brought it up. Ida had behaved the way Ida always behaved, deliberating calmly, coming to reasoned conclusions. Martha hated Ida’s reasonableness the way she hated Robbie Yagger’s conversion. Martha liked change only in the abstract. She liked Social Change, which to her meant reaching the point where all the stupid people in the world who believed things Martha found anathema would be forced to recognize both their own stupidity and Martha’s dazzling advancedness. In her daily life, she preferred routine, predictability, assurance. Martha remembered Ida as a child, volatile and spiteful, imperious and volcanic. In Martha’s mind, Ida should have stayed the way she had begun, the way Victor had.

Ida’s excuse was that she had work to do. She was on duty in the emergency room. It was Friday night. What did Martha expect? Martha expected a great deal more than she got. Unlike the doors to the west building, which were almost always kept open, the doors to the east building were almost always kept locked. Martha had to stand in the long thin window next to the door and look out that way, or go into the reception room and look out the windows there. Martha preferred the long thin window. The reception room was too public. People saw you there and thought you were available for conversation. Martha didn’t want to talk to anybody. She watched the moving shadows in the street and listened to the low sharp voices coming out of the darkness. It happened every Friday night. The street was full of people again. The people were invisible, uncatchable, out of sight—but they were there. Martha had no idea where they came from. What she could see was a big black pit of nothing, crowded in by hulking outlines in brick and stone. The pools of light at the entrances to the east and west buildings were empty.

By the time Victor came back, Martha was agitated beyond belief, hopping up and down, angry-frantic, the way she got when her anxieties got out of control. It didn’t help that Ida had undoubtedly been right about how busy she was going to be. In the twenty minutes before Victor’s car arrived at the entrance to the east building, Martha had seen two dozen people climbing the steps to the west building, and four ambulances coming in to the doors around the side. Dear God, Martha hated life in Harlem. She didn’t think anybody should have to do the kind of things she did in this place or witness the kind of things she witnessed. In a perfect world, the government would take care of all of this, and people like Martha wouldn’t even have to think about it.

Victor got out of his car only after his driver had come around to open his door. That was the drill they had when the neighborhood felt too jumpy, so that Victor wouldn’t get mugged. As soon as Victor got out on the sidewalk, Martha opened the door to the east building and went out on the stoop. She held the door open with her foot and waited for Victor to climb the stairs. If she let the door shut, it would lock automatically. She would have to ring the bell to be let inside again, and she didn’t want that. Victor came up to her, smiled vaguely, and passed her. Martha followed him inside, letting the door hiss shut on its cylinder. Victor looked tired. Martha didn’t care.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?” Victor looked around. The entry hall was empty. The reception room was empty, too. He motioned through the archway and said, “I’m going to go sit down. I’m tired.”

“I don’t care if you’re tired, Victor. I want to know what happened. Did you see them? Did you find out what they wanted?”

“I overheard them talking to Dave Geraldino,” Victor said.

There were two worn sofas in the reception room. There were three large club chairs with patched arms and sagging springs. There were a couple of hard chairs with wooden backs. He chose one of the club chairs and sat down. Martha couldn’t bear the thought of sitting. She had to pace.