Dear Old Dead (15 page)

“And you’re going to make it all better?”

“I just thought I’d start talking to him, that was all. See what he’s like. If he isn’t too crazy, maybe there’s something around here he could do.”

“What? Lecture some eleven-year-old who’s been knocked up by her mother’s boyfriend that she’ll burn in hell forever if she terminates her pregnancy? Maybe he could do double-duty by lecturing her mother on how the best thing would be to marry the boyfriend and save his soul by turning into a submissive wife.”

“Oh, Martha, for God’s sake. You’re just so extreme. You can’t listen to reason.”

“Right,” Martha said, glad her coffee was finished. She looked at Robbie and Gregor Demarkian again. Gregor Demarkian was bent over the table, listening intently. Robbie was wolfing down enough food for at least three people. “I don’t think your precious Robbie is lonely now. Just look at him. He’s got a friend in the Cardinal’s detective.”

“Oh, Martha,” Shana said again.

Martha stood up and picked up her empty coffee cup. It was made of that white spongy plastic material that everybody called Styrofoam, but that wasn’t really Styrofoam. Martha could never remember what it was really called. Whatever it was, it was terrible for the environment. The center used it because they didn’t have enough money to hire dishwashers and bus people to look after stoneware and glass.

“I’ve got to go,” Martha said. “Sister Edna is probably having a fit. I’ll see you later.”

“Okay,” Shana said.

“I’m supposed to be on duty at the Afterschool Program.”

Shana looked shocked. Like everybody else at the center—except Martha, who was forced to be here—Shana could no more imagine stepping out for a cup of coffee when she was supposed to be on duty than she could imagine not giving the benefit of the doubt to idiots like Robbie. As far as Martha could tell, Shana didn’t disapprove of the attitude Martha took to her work. Shana didn’t believe it.

Martha went to the doors of the cafeteria and stopped. She turned around and looked back. Gregor Demarkian was still hunched over his table, listening to Robbie the Ridiculous. Maybe Shana was right. Maybe Robbie had seen something the night Charles van Straadt was killed. Maybe he had something very important to say that the police hadn’t bothered to listen to. The police were so stupid. Then there was all that about Robbie actually being inside the Center on the night it had all happened. Yes, there was that.

Sister Edna was probably sitting over in the east building, ready to commit bodily mayhem as soon as Martha walked through the door—but Martha didn’t care. This was too crucial. They had to be so careful about everything these days.

She rummaged through the pockets of her jumper, came up with a quarter, and headed for the phones.

Victor wasn’t much of a solace. He didn’t have the brains to wear a hat in the rain. Still, he was all she had.

And if Robbie the Ridiculous really had seen something, if he really did know something—well, they’d all have to get moving.

T
HE PICTURE WAS A MISHANDLED
Polaroid snapshot, made up of colors that were faded in places and overbright in others, taken in light so bright it made all the faces look washed out. According to Eamon Donleavy’s informant, it had been taken the night before at the Getting Bent, an establishment on West Forty-third Street that billed itself as “a multimedia relaxation station.” Eamon Donleavy had never been inside the Getting Bent, but he had heard about it. It wasn’t a fly-by-night operation and it wasn’t low rent. It wasn’t cheap, either. Eamon wondered how Michael had ended up there. Michael might be no saint, as he always insisted—and as pictures like these seemed invented to prove—but he was an obsessive about money. Michael spent enough on himself to stay alive, and that was it. He would never have forked over the fifty-dollar cover for a night in the Getting Bent. Somebody must have forked it over for him.

Eamon Donleavy had received the picture at ten forty-five this morning. He had put it down on his desk next to the Happy Father’s Day poster the children in his First Communion class had made for him. Sister Margarita Rose had insisted on his taking the poster, because he was the children’s “spiritual father” and most of them didn’t have one of the other kind. This gave them a way to participate in the holiday. Eamon wondered wearily why they wanted to. Old Charlie van Straadt had been a father and a grandfather, too, and as far as Eamon could see, all it had gotten him was dead.

That’s not fair, Eamon told himself. You don’t know that one of his grandchildren killed him. You just want to think one of them did.

It was almost three o’clock in the afternoon. Eamon had been down to the station to pick up Gregor Demarkian and back again. He had been sitting at his desk like this since he’d left Michael’s first-floor office after Rosalie van Straadt had her fit. He had not been happy then and he was not happy now. He had taken the picture with him when he left the office to meet Demarkian. He had put it in the back of his very thin wallet and the wallet in the front pocket of his pants. He had only taken the picture out again when he knew he would be able to sit at his desk for a good long time. None of these precautions made sense. If this picture existed, so did others. There was no way around that. He wondered who had the other pictures. He wondered if that person knew what he had. He wondered when the pictures would surface.

He heard the sound of steps on the stairs and sat up a little straighter. He had been hearing sounds on the steps for the past hour, but always been disappointed. The steps had reached this landing and gone on. Nobody had even stopped in to say hello.

These new steps reached this landing and stopped. Whoever was walking was also whistling. Eamon Donleavy stood up.

“Eamon, you in?” Michael called out.

“I’m in.” Eamon picked up the picture and put it in the pocket of his jacket.

Michael reached the door of his own office and waved to Eamon across the hall. Michael’s door was propped open with a rubber doorstop and he left it that way. Eamon walked across the hall and stood in the open doorway.

“Hi,” Eamon said. “You got a minute?”

“Just about one,” Michael told him. “I’m on duty in Emergency. Jenny needed the afternoon off.”

“This will only take one. I’ve got something to show you.”

Eamon put his hand in his pocket, got hold of the picture, took it out. He handed it over and waited. He wondered what he was waiting for. Michael looked at the image of himself for a long time, but he showed no reaction. He just handed that picture back.

“So, Eamon,” he said. “What are you going to do with that? Keep it as a souvenir?”

“I’m going to burn it, of course. What did you think I was going to do with it?”

“If you’re going to burn it, you’d better do it soon. We wouldn’t want something like that to go wandering around the center.”

“Fortunately, it’s too raw to end up on the cover of the New York
Post.
Michael, for God’s sake—literally, for God’s sake, for your sake, for anybody’s sake—Michael what do you think you’re doing?”

“Eamon, for God’s sake yourself. Take a good look at that picture of yours. It’s perfectly obvious what I’m doing.”

“Thanks a lot, Michael. Thanks a lot.”

Michael’s chair was pulled far away from his desk almost to the back wall of the office. Michael pulled it in close again and sat down, putting his elbows on the pile of papers on his desktop, putting his head on his hands. Eamon thought he looked tired, but Michael always looked tired. Michael had been born tired. What was it all supposed to mean?

Michael sat back, ran his hands through his hair, looked away, looked at Eamon again, put his chin on his hands again. He was uncomfortable.

“Look,” he said, “Eamon. Believe it or not, I don’t do this stuff just to make you crazy.”

“I know that. But Michael, no matter why you’re doing it, if you keep on doing it, you’re going to make yourself sick. Very sick. It’s a miracle you aren’t sick already. Never mind the rest of it. Like Gregor Demarkian. Like Charles van Straadt’s corpse. Like the fact that if you had been any other human being in this city, the police would have booked you two weeks ago.”

“I didn’t kill Charlie van Straadt, Eamon.”

“I know you didn’t. But the entire New York City homicide division thinks you did. They think Charlie was so disgusted at the things you were doing, he was going to withdraw funding for the center. Either that, or he was going to get the
Sentinel
to pull out all the stops, really run you ragged, and force you to quit.”

“Charlie knew about all that before you did,” Michael said. “He knew about it for years. He knew about a lot of it without asking. Charlie was a very interesting man, Eamon.”

“Yeah, well. Anyone who starts in a tenement and ends up with a billion dollars is going to be interesting. Anyone with a billion dollars is interesting. They can’t avoid it.”

“Maybe not. Tell me about this Demarkian person. Do you think he’s intelligent?”

“Very. He makes me nervous.”

“I’m going to have dinner with him tonight. At the Four Seasons restaurant. He’s buying. It’s been years since I was in the Four Seasons. Do you know what the Cardinal told him? Does the Cardinal think I killed Charlie van Straadt?”

Eamon considered this. “Yes,” he said at last, “I think he does. I think the Cardinal is looking for a way to cover it up.”

“That’s interesting.” Michael nodded. “Yes, I can see that. How does he explain it to himself?”

“He hasn’t explained it to me,” Eamon said, “but I’d guess it goes like this. Michael Pride is brilliant but obviously mentally unbalanced. Mental imbalance is the only way to explain his sexual behavior. Therefore—”

“A sin is not a sin without full knowledge and consent of the will,” Michael recited. “Yes, I see. Well, if you ever get the chance, tell your Cardinal from me that if I had killed Charlie van Straadt, I would have done it quite deliberately. In spite of what may seem to be evidence to the contrary, I do not lose control of myself.”

“You just lose control of your common sense.” Eamon waved the picture in the air. “I don’t think Gregor Demarkian would put up with it, by the way. If you were guilty. He’d find a way to hang you.”

“We have capital punishment in New York State, but it’s functionally inoperative. Governor Cuomo pardons everybody.”

“You know what I mean, Michael. He’s a dangerous man, Gregor Demarkian. I’d be careful at that dinner of yours.”

“Don’t worry. I will be. Do you think he’ll end up solving the crime, finding out who did it?”

“If they give him half a chance, yes,” Eamon said. “They could get in his way to the point where it would be impossible.”

“Who could?”

“The police. The Cardinal. Mostly the police. I think he could get around an ordinary person.”

“What about the family? They were barely cooperating with the police, the last I heard. I can’t see them cooperating with some private detective hired by the Cardinal.”

“I don’t think they will.” Eamon shook his head. “He’s good, this Demarkian. I looked him up. He was the one who solved the McAdam case. And the murder of that psychotherapist or whatever he was out in Philadelphia. I don’t think he needs a lot of cooperation, from the family or anybody else.”

Michael tilted his head. “What about you, Eamon? Do you want this murder solved?”

“It depends.”

“On what? Who did it?”

“Yes,” Eamon said, feeling defiant. “On who did it. I wouldn’t want it to be solved if the murderer was you—”

“I told you—”

“—I know you did. I want it to be one of the family. Good old grand patricide. I don’t want it to be any of us.”

“The rumor around the center is that the murderer is Robbie Yagger. Do you know who I’m talking about? The little man who carries the sign accusing us of being a death camp for performing abortions.”

Eamon shook his head. “I think that’s ridiculous and so do you. He isn’t the type. And why would he want to kill Charlie van Straadt?”

Michael smiled. “Get rid of the head Satan and all the little Satans will wither on the vine.”

“Ridiculous,” Eamon said again. “You don’t really believe that, do you, Michael? Who do you think did it?”

“I don’t think anybody did it,” Michael said firmly. “I spend my time convincing myself nobody could have done it, providing alibis for people, providing excuses. Don’t ask me why.”

“You’re very good-natured.”

“I don’t have a good nature. And I’ve got other things on my mind. If you know what I mean. Eamon?”

All of a sudden, Eamon Donleavy didn’t want to talk anymore. He didn’t want to talk at all. He wanted to walk right out of Michael Pride’s office and across the hall. He wanted to go down the stairs and out the front doors and into the city. He wanted to get as far away from here as fast as he could.

Because he knew what was coming. He had been expecting it for weeks now, waiting for it, feeling it just on the edges of things, like a phantom pain in a missing limb. Eamon was sure he wasn’t the only one. Augie down there in the emergency room had probably been feeling it too. It was the cliché at the end of the second act, and there was no way to avoid it.

“Eamon,” Michael said, very quietly, very steadily. “Eamon, what makes you think I’m not sick?”

T
HE ONLY OTHER TIME
Gregor Demarkian had been to the Four Seasons, Bennis Hannaford had taken him. “Taken” was the right way to put it. Bennis had her American Express Gold Card in one hand and her latest contracts in the other. She had been steaming, and incomprehensible to Gregor. What Gregor remembered most was feeling out of place—big shaggy ethnic-looking men did not seem to be who this place had been made for—and the fact that his menu had no prices on it. He had no idea why he had suggested the place to Michael Pride. The Cardinal had reserved Gregor a room at the Hilton. Maybe Gregor was making some kind of subliminal connection. Seeing Michael Pride come in in his battered tweed sports jacket and a tie that looked old enough to have done service in the Eisenhower administration, Gregor thought he’d done the right thing. Michael Pride looked right here somehow, more right than Gregor looked himself.