Dear Old Dead (10 page)

“So there was somebody in Michael’s office from the time Charles van Straadt arrived at the center until the time his body was found—Charles van Straadt was in the office. I know. I was talking to the Cardinal that night, sitting at my desk right across the hall, and I could see him.”

“That’s interesting. And he never left?”

“Not once while I was there. Which was for nearly an hour. That granddaughter of his went in and out.”

“Granddaughter?”

“Charles had four grandchildren. Two of them volunteered at the center. This was one of the ones who didn’t. Rosalie. Anyway, Rosalie went off getting coffee and whatnot from the cafeteria, running errands for the old man. The old man stayed put. He usually did.”

“That’s
very
interesting.” Gregor looked out his window at a low stone wall and a profusion of trees. They were on Central Park West now, the great old apartment houses marching uptown on their left, Central Park on their right. This was New York as Gregor used to know it, a place suffering from too much money, not too little.

“You know,” Gregor said, “whether you realize it or not, you seem to be implying—maybe subconsciously insisting is what I mean—that Michael Pride and only Michael Pride could have killed Charles van Straadt.”

Eamon Donleavy shook his head. “There’s nothing subconscious about it. Everybody’s been insisting that very thing, Mr. Demarkian. The police. The volunteers at the center. Even the Cardinal.”

“There’s only one thing missing,” Gregor told him. “Motive. And as far as I know, Michael Pride founded the Sojourner Truth Health Center and Charles van Straadt contributed generously to it. Other people also contributed to it. Mr. van Straadt wasn’t on some kind of board that could have removed Michael Pride as head of the center?”

“There is no such board. There’s just Michael.”

“Well then, you see what I mean. This is not the kind of relationship that usually results in homicide.”

Eamon Donleavy was a tall man. His legs were folded hard against the seat in front of him, as Gregor’s were, since Gregor was even taller. Eamon Donleavy shifted so that he was leaning toward the door and looking out on the apartment buildings. The buildings were just as big as they had been twenty blocks south, but no longer so well cared for. Gregor could almost feel what was coming.

“Michael,” Eamon Donleavy said carefully, “doesn’t think like other people.”

After that, Eamon Donleavy wouldn’t say anything at all.

F
IVE MINUTES LATER, JUAN
Valenciano’s cab pulled off Lenox Avenue and up to the front door of the Sojourner Truth Health Center. Gregor had changed his mind about his premonition down on CPW. He had not been able to feel what was coming. In spite of everything he had heard and seen and read. In spite of twenty years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In spite of dozens of hard-boiled private-eye novels and more than enough forays into
film noir.
Gregor had not been prepared for this. This was not the Harlem you saw sitting on the train at the 125th Street Station. This was not the Harlem you saw making forays off the main campus of Columbia University in Morningside Heights. This wasn’t even the Harlem you saw on the six o’clock news. This was—Gregor had no words to describe what this was. There seemed to be a tape playing through his head saying over and over again:
How the hell did we ever let it get like this?

The street the Sojourner Truth Health Center faced was not empty, although the buildings on it were mostly abandoned. Gregor saw an ancient black woman with a shopping cart full of worn brown grocery bags. The grocery bags were stuffed full and folded over at the tops so that no one could see what she had inside them. Sitting on the stoop of the abandoned building directly across from the center’s front door were three young men, all stoned into immobility, all laid out as if they were dead and ready for their own wakes. The steps on the stoop of that building were made of marble. Gregor recognized that even from inside the cab. He turned around and looked toward the center. The front doors were open and covered with signs in English and Spanish. Gregor could read only one of them clearly, the one that said,
“IF YOU ARE DEAF, PLEASE INFORM A NUN.”
Incredible.

“There’s Sister Augustine.” Eamon Donleavy pointed up the center’s steps to a middle-aged woman in bright red sweats coming out the front doors. The middle-aged woman was also wearing a veil, so Gregor supposed she could be “Sister” somebody. “She’s probably been hanging out of her office window waiting for us to show up for the last hour. She’s very interested in meeting you, Mr. Demarkian. Augie’s a big fan of Michael Pride’s.”

Gregor opened his door and got out. The nun in the red sweatsuit had stopped at the bottom of the center’s stoop. When Gregor was safely on the sidewalk, she advanced.

“Mr. Demarkian? Mr. Gregor Demarkian?”

“That’s right,” Gregor said.

The little nun beamed. She really was little, too. Gregor thought she was barely five feet tall. She was at least significantly shorter than Bennis Hannaford, who was five feet four. Unlike Bennis Hannaford, the little nun was very round, a composition in globes and circles. She was wearing bright white sneakers with green glow-in-the-dark patches on the heels and toes.

“Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you. I’m Sister Mary Augustine, but everybody calls me Augie. It’s so much easier.”

“How do you do,” Gregor said.

Eamon Donleavy was out of the cab now, too. The cab was pulling slowly away from the curb. Gregor guessed it was about to head straight downtown. He didn’t blame Juan in the least.

“I hope everything’s been okay up here while I’ve been away,” Eamon Donleavy said to the little nun. “No hysterical calls from the Cardinal. No last-minute emergencies that require me to call the chancery immediately.”

“The Cardinal’s been as silent as the dead,” Augie said. “We haven’t had any trouble from that quarter at all. It’s other people you ought to be worried about.”

“Did we have a raid?” Eamon Donleavy looked worried.

“What kind of raid?” Gregor asked.

“No raids,” Augie said. Then she turned to Gregor Demarkian to explain. “We run something here called the refuge program. We take girls—at their request; we don’t coerce anybody into anything here—we take girls who are prostitutes and want to quit and place them, well, anywhere we can place them. The most important consideration is to get them as far away from here as possible, so we try to put them in boarding schools and halfway houses far out into the country. We have a number of orders who will take our girls and young women free of charge, but there aren’t always enough places ready when we need them, so for a while we sometimes have to keep them here. It’s not the best solution, I know, but there it is. And, of course, the pimps don’t like it. So they raid.”

“Oh,” Gregor said.

“Julie Enderson’s pimp showed up DOA at Lenox Hill night before last,” Augie said to Eamon Donleavy, “so what I was most worried about in that direction is just not going to happen. I only found out about it by accident, though. We’ve got to do something about the way we communicate with people around here.”

“We’re trying,” Eamon Donleavy said. “We’ve been trying for a decade. Didn’t you say you had trouble?”

“You
have trouble,” Sister Augustine said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with me. Rosalie is here.”

“Do you mean Rosalie van Straadt?” Gregor asked.

Augie nodded vigorously. “That’s exactly who I mean. And she’s blowing a fit—well, you’ll have to see it to believe it, if she hasn’t calmed down by the time you get in there, which she may not have, because I don’t think she wants to calm down. I don’t think that’s her idea at all.”

“What does she want?” Eamon Donleavy asked.

“She wants Michael, of course. She wants what everybody else wants. We haven’t let her get at him, though. We’re smarter than that around here, even if she is a van Straadt.”

“Get Ida,” Eamon Donleavy said tensely. “Let her take care of it.”

“Oh, we’ve got Ida, Father E. We’ve got half the staff, too, and some of the girls from refuge. The next thing you know, we’re going to have the United States Marines. I think—”

“Sister Augustine!” someone shouted. “Sister Augustine, Sister Augustine. Come quick.”

Gregor looked up to the center doors just as a nun in a calf-length brown habit came rushing out of them, her veil bobbing precariously on her head, her eyes wild. She saw the little group of them standing together on the pavement and rushed down to them, holding on to her veil with one hand and her heart with the other.

“Oh, Augie,” she gasped when she reached them, “and Father E. I’m so glad I found you. You’ve got to come right along. You don’t know what’s going on in there.”

“Is Michael all right?” Eamon Donleavy demanded.

The nun looked bewildered. “I don’t know where Dr. Pride is. Is there something wrong with him?”

“Never mind,” Sister Augustine said crisply. “Just tell us what happened. What is going on in there?”

“This is Sister Kenna,” Eamon Donleavy said, to Gregor, in an off-hand tone. “She works in the refuge program.”

Sister Kenna was taking great gulping breaths. “It’s Rosalie van Straadt. She was going on and on and on about how it was all Dr. Pride’s fault, and then she just seemed to lose it. She began picking things up and throwing them on the floor—and she’s in Dr. Pride’s office, you know, and there’s a lot of equipment in there and medicine and now there’s glass everywhere on the floor and I just don’t know what to do—”

“I know what to do,” Sister Augustine said firmly. She grabbed Sister Kenna by the elbow and began to propel her back up the stairs to the center’s front doors. “I’ve been dealing with temper tantrums for thirty years. I can deal with one more. Trust me.”

Eamon Donleavy sighed. “Come on in,” he said to Gregor. “This isn’t exactly the first impression I wanted you to get.”

Gregor Demarkian didn’t suppose it was, but he wasn’t unhappy about it. First impressions that came off the way they were supposed to almost never told him anything.

T
HE WEST BUILDING OF THE
Sojourner Truth Health Center was six stories high—five plus the basement level—and on the sixth floor there was a small square space that looked out on the street, furnished with an old black couch and three worn chairs and an ashtray. This floor contained administrative offices. Dr. Michael Pride thought of it as providing a commentary on what he thought of administration. The Sojourner Truth Health Center was committed to getting all the necessary paperwork finished and filed. It was determined to see that both the city and state of New York got exactly what they asked for. It just couldn’t bother to waste valuable space in more convenient parts of the building to get it all done. We should have put in an elevator for staff use, Michael thought now. It would have made things easier. It would also have made things more expensive. Back when the center bought the west and east buildings and renovated them, the staff had decided on two stretcher elevators, period, no conveniences provided for people who could walk. It had saved them God only knew how much money. It had been a very good decision. The problem was that here was Michael on the sixth floor, tired as hell and knowing he had to start on down. The problem was that even after all this time, there were days when Michael didn’t want to make the right decision.

Michael had been standing against the windows here when Eamon Donleavy had driven up with Gregor Demarkian. He had seen Augie and Sister Kenna and all the commotion. He knew exactly what was going on downstairs. He had been avoiding it all morning. People at the center thought he was an absentminded professor, an Albert Einstein type—except for the periodic forays into some of the stranger establishments in the side streets off Times Square; only Eamon Donleavy ever talked to him about those—but it wasn’t true. Michael had excellent radar. He had even had excellent radar on that night the establishment he was in had gotten raided. He just hadn’t been inclined to listen to it.

The street was empty now. Everybody had come inside. Michael pushed himself away from the window and wandered back into the hall. This was an old apartment building. The doors that opened off the central corridor opened onto suites, no single rooms. The suites were small and cramped and being drowned in paper. The doors were all open, because with the doors shut the people in the suites couldn’t breathe. Michael said hello to Betsey in Processing and good afternoon to Aramanda in Permanent Files, and laughed a little to himself. If he’d ever described the situation here in just that way to someone who knew nothing about it—to one of his classmates in the Harvard Medical School class, one of the ones who had gone on to make a million dollars a year doing plastic surgery in Beverly Hills—it would have sounded as impressive as hell. There would have been no way for his listener to tell Betsey was one of only two people in Processing or that Aramanda had to do the Permanent Files by hand because the center’s computer system consisted of three Macintosh PCs, all kept in Augie’s office downstairs and used to sort out the medical backgrounds of emergency cases. They needed computers to sort out the medical backgrounds of emergency cases because they got a lot of repeat visits by people who couldn’t remember they were making repeat visits. Michael found it absolutely incredible what crack could do to a human brain. He found it even more incredible that kids in these neighborhoods, having seen what crack could do to a human brain, started taking it anyway. Sometimes he thought his cats had more sense than half of the people he knew.

He reached the fifth floor and the day-care center. Forty children between the ages of two and five were running back and forth across the central corridor, into one room and out of another. A cluster of six children around the age of three were sitting in a semicircle around Sister Rosalita, singing the alphabet song. The stairway down was blocked. Michael waited while Kanistra Johnson came over and removed the block for him.