Dear Old Dead (7 page)

Halfway up the stairs to his office, he passed Sister Kenna coming down. She was looking frazzled but relieved. She held her long habit up so she wouldn’t trip on it.

“Oh, Dr. Pride,” she said. “There you are. People have been looking for you everywhere.”

“I’ve been operating.”

“That’s what Sister Augustine said. When you have a chance you should try to find that granddaughter of Mr. van Straadt’s, the pretty one. You know, the one who doesn’t work at the center.”

“Rosalie.”

“That’s the one. I just saw her upstairs. She’s looking for you.”

“I’ll check her out as soon as I get a chance.”

“Thank you, Dr. Pride. I’m sure it must be something terribly important.”

Michael thought it must be something terribly important, too, meaning his arrest, or maybe just the publicity resulting from his arrest. He knew he didn’t want to talk about any of it, not now and not later, not ever. God, what a mess all that was.

He went the rest of the way up and looked into Eamon Donleavy’s office. It was empty. He looked across the corridor at his own door and sighed. His door was closed, and he never closed it when he was still in the building and available for work—meaning he never closed it, except once or twice a month when he made a point of going into the east building and spending the night, just so that the nuns would stop fussing at him. If his door was closed now there could be only one reason for it, a reason he should have suspected as soon as Sister Kenna said she’d seen Rosalie in the building looking for him. Old Charlie van Straadt was here and ready to talk, whether Michael was ready or not.

“Crap on crap,” Michael said to himself. “Just what I need.”

Then he got ready to read old Charlie the riot act. Michael was good at reading people the riot act. He’d turned the process into an art form.

He grabbed the knob of his office door, got ready with his opening sentence—
I don’t care how important you think it is, Charlie, we’ve got thirty-two gunshot cases needing attention down in Emergency right this minute
—and vaulted himself into his office. He was halfway across the room to the desk when the scene inside made any impression at all.

The scene inside was pretty grim.

Charles van Straadt was sitting in the chair behind Michael’s desk just as Michael had expected him to be, but he wasn’t sitting still.

He was rearing and bucking in a series of convulsions that could only have been caused by strychnine, and that made him look as if he had hold of one end of a live wire.

The Cardinal Archbishop of New York

Has a Suggestion to Make.

Just a
Little
Suggestion

A
LWAYS BEFORE, WHEN GREGOR
Demarkian had come to New York, it had been winter. “New York is cold,” he told friends who asked him how he liked it. Cold was what he thought of when he stood in his apartment in Philadelphia, packing a single large suitcase to take with him on the train. Philadelphia was not cold, at the moment. It had been an unseasonably warm May, and now, at the beginning of June, green buds had blossomed into leaves on all the trees and house fronts had blossomed into red-and-white streamers. At least, the houses on Cavanaugh Street had. Donna Moradanyan, the young woman who lived with her small son in the fourth-floor floor-through apartment in Gregor’s brownstone, was making up to the neighborhood for the funk she had been in for Valentine’s Day. Gregor didn’t remember Father’s Day being a vigorously celebrated holiday. He didn’t remember ever having taken notice of it before in his life. Mother’s Day, that was another story. Mother’s Day was on a par with Easter on Cavanaugh Street. People around here said “my mother” the way twelfth-century religious fanatics had said “my God.” Fathers had always seemed to be superfluous. Now Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store had a Father’s Day poster taking up most of its plate-glass front window, and the Ararat restaurant was offering “the Father’s Day Breakfast Special,” meaning pancakes in the shape of knotted ties. The children at the Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School were getting ready to hold a Father’s Day pageant. The choir at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church had announced its intention of holding a benefit concert for the Armenian refugees in the church basement on Father’s Day proper, made up entirely of hymns with the word
Father
in the title. Even the Armenian-American Historical Society had gotten into the act. They had taken St. Joseph, Foster Father of the Holy Family, as their patron saint.

“That’s Catholic, that bit about St. Joseph the Foster Father,” Gregor told Bennis Hannaford as he threw balled pairs of black socks into his suitcase. “And it’s all my fault, too. I had that little booklet Sister Scholastica gave me after the mess in Maryville and I gave it to Sheila Kashinian. That was all it took.”

“It never takes much of anything with Sheila Kashinian,” Bennis said.

Bennis Hannaford was sitting cross-legged on Gregor’s bedspread, looking curiously into his suitcase without offering to help. She had an ashtray in her lap and one of her standard Benson & Hedges Menthols in her right hand. Her thick black hair was pinned to the top of her head with scrunched-looking amber metal things that looked ready to fall to the floor. Gregor knew she had to be nearly forty, but she didn’t look it. Bennis had the second-floor floor-through apartment in this building. Gregor often felt sandwiched between her and Donna Moradanyan, cream cheese filling between slices of date nut bread. Any minute now, somebody was going to come along and squash him flat.

Socks, ties, shirts folded around cardboard from the laundry: Gregor had no idea how to pack a suitcase. When his wife, Elizabeth, had been alive, Elizabeth had packed his suitcases for him. When Elizabeth hadn’t been around to help, he had usually had an assistant. That was all gone now, of course. For the twenty long years of his professional life, Gregor Demarkian had been an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For the last ten of those years, he had been the founding head of the Behavioral Sciences Department, the arm of the Bureau that helped track the interstate progress of serial killers. That had amounted to being an Important Personage, as government bureaucrats go. That had meant getting his name in
Time
and
Newsweek
and being asked to explain the interior motivations of psychopaths on network television. It was odd, Gregor thought. Since he’d left the Bureau, he’d become much more famous than he’d ever been while he was in it. He spent much more of his time seeing his picture in magazines and being asked to show up for talk shows and generally being hounded by the press. He still couldn’t get anyone to pack for him. It was as if packing were the worst job on earth, worse than cleaning toilets. He had a cleaning lady who came in and cleaned his toilet every week. Either that, or the people on Cavanaugh Street didn’t like to see him go away.

Bennis dropped her cigarette butt in the ashtray, got another cigarette from her pack, and lit up again.

“So how long do you expect to be gone?” she asked. “I’ve promised Donna a dozen times that you’ll be back before the twentieth, but I was making it up. For all I know you’re going to be away for months.”

“I take it the twentieth is Father’s Day.”

“That’s right.”

“Unfortunately, I should be back home in plenty of time. This isn’t a major project, Bennis. It isn’t even a case. The New York City Police Department is neither willing nor able to be helped by me.”

“Some people would say the New York City Police Department is neither willing nor able to be helped by anybody.”

“I’m not even going to consult with the police department,” Gregor went on, ignoring her. “It’s the Archbishop I’m supposed to see. It’s the church I’m dealing with.”

“The Cardinal Archbishop of New York called the Cardinal Archbishop of Colchester. The Cardinal Archbishop of Colchester called his friend Father Tibor Kasparian. Father Tibor Kasparian called you.”

“Something like that.”

“Father Tibor isn’t Catholic, either. This is always the explanation you give me when these people get hold of you, Gregor. It never makes any sense to me.”

“You come along when you’re asked.”

“That’s different.”

Gregor’s two pairs of casual slacks were hanging folded over the bottom bars of wooden hangers suspended from the top of his bedroom door. He got them down and tossed them into the suitcase with everything else. He knew he ought to hang them up in a suit bag and put his shirts in the suit bag, too. He hated suit bags with a passion. Running through airports and train stations, they slapped heavily against his legs and made his knees ache.

Gregor flipped the top of the suitcase over and zipped the case shut. This suitcase was of the very soft leather variety, a black shiny expensive amoeba that allowed itself to be molded by the clothes inside it. He went to his bureau and found a thick wool V-neck sweater to wear over his shirt and under the jacket of his coat. He got himself put together and looked into the mirror. Gregor didn’t like looking into the mirror. He couldn’t help feeling that he was supposed to see something significant there, and he never did.

“What time is it?” he asked Bennis. “I’m supposed to catch the two forty-five train.”

“It’s only half past one. Are you sure you want to wear that sweater?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you hot?”

“I’m hot here,” Gregor said, “but I’m always cold in New York. Do I have everything I’m supposed to have?”

“Your briefcase is on the kitchen table. Are you going to take it?”

“I’m going to have to. The Archbishop sent me all kinds of things, press clippings, the transcript of a radio show, pictures. I suppose I’d better have them on me if I want to look even halfway competent. Not that they were any use to me.”

“It seems so odd that no one’s been able to solve that murder,” Bennis said. “It seems so odd that there’s any kind of murder to solve. Don’t you read the reports and think it was just some kind of mugging, some stray lunatic and Charles van Straadt was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“A mugging done with strychnine?”

“You know what I mean,” Bennis said in exasperation. “I mean it didn’t happen in the high-rent district, did it? It happened in a medical center full of hard cases, psychopaths, and loonies all over the place—I mean, all right, strychnine might be pushing it a bit, but so what? There was probably a ton of strychnine in that place. Aren’t there medical uses for strychnine?”

“One or two.”

“So there.”

“So there?” Gregor got the suitcase up off his bed and put it on the floor. Bennis was exasperating him a little. The tone in her voice was so stubbornly superior. It was as if she thought any damn fool ought to be able to see this thing the way she saw it—and what was most annoying about that, Gregor admitted to himself, was that he had to agree with her. There were undoubtedly facets of this case he knew nothing about. If he had been dealing with John O’Bannion, Cardinal Archbishop of Colchester, he would have expected full disclosure. Instead, he was dealing with an unknown quantity. There were holes in the report the Archdiocese of New York had sent him. As long as those holes were not filled in, Bennis had more than a point. Why
weren’t
the police assuming that the murder had been committed by one of the myriad misfits and crazies that infested a neighborhood like the one Sojourner Truth Health Center was supposed to inhabit?

Of course, maybe they were.

Gregor took his suitcase out of his bedroom, down the hall, across the living room and into the foyer. He dropped it next to his front door and went into his kitchen. His briefcase was indeed lying on the table there, open and organized. Gregor’s briefcases were always organized. It was his life that was a mess.

Gregor snapped the briefcase up and stood it on its end. Bennis was leaning against the door jamb with her bare feet comfortably on his kitchen floor tiles. She was shaking her head dolefully and rhythmically, as if he were a small child about to embark on a patently stupid adventure.

“I think you’re kidding yourself she said. “I think you’re going to get to New York and find yourself in the middle of an absolute firestorm of publicity. I think the police commissioner is going to be ready to kill you. I think the
Daily News
is going to be on the commissioner’s side. I think—”

“You think too much,” Gregor interrupted. “I’ve been asked to do the Cardinal a favor. I’m going to do the Cardinal a favor. You should try to relax.”

“I should come with you to keep you out of trouble.”

“Bennis, when you come with me, you never keep me
out
of trouble.”

Bennis pushed herself away from the kitchen door. Then she turned around and walked back out toward the foyer, clucking to herself. Gregor heard his own front door open and close and more clucking going on out in the hall. Bennis’s clucks could be as loud as a jackhammer when she wanted them to be. Gregor waited until the clucks had died away. Then he went into his living room and looked out on Cavanaugh Street.

Years ago—so many years ago now, he didn’t want to remember; my God, he was nearly sixty—when Gregor Demarkian had been growing up, Cavanaugh Street had been just another Philadelphia ethnic neighborhood, a few ramshackle blocks of tenements dotted here and there with groceries and shoe stores, dry cleaners and religious supply shops. Back in the 1960s, when Gregor first joined the Bureau, it had begun that characteristic slide of American urban neighborhoods, that descent into carelessness and decay. Gregor remembered coming back for his mother’s funeral. The steps of Holy Trinity Church were crumbling. The gold paint on its double front doors was chipped and peeling. The building where Gregor’s mother had lived was in fairly good repair, but the building next to it was abandoned on the top two floors. Pacing the sidewalks on the night of the wake, getting away from the endless stream of condolences delivered to him by people he didn’t know any more, Gregor had accidentally turned the wrong corner and found himself face to face with a porno bookstore. Porno bookstores hadn’t been then what they became later. Decadence hadn’t been fashionable enough then. Gregor knew that porno bookstore was a sign, the mark of the beast, the beginning of the end.