Dear Old Dead (21 page)

The women ignored him. They always ignored him.

“Gregor Demarkian is definitely the one we have to worry about,” Martha said. “He insinuates himself into places. Have you noticed that? He’s everywhere.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about anyone,” Ida said. “None of us did it. None of us is in any danger of being accused of doing it. Grandfather got killed by some stray crazy who wandered up to the third floor without anyone realizing it.”

“Is that what happened to Rosalie, too?” Martha asked. “Maybe the stray crazy is hiding in somebody’s closet up there. Maybe he’s like the phantom of the opera, always waiting in the wings.”

“Oh, stop it,” Ida snapped. “Just stop it. I don’t know why I put up with you.”

Victor didn’t know why he put up with either of them. He didn’t know why he put up with sitting in this chair. The conference door opened and Bartram Cole came in, carrying a sheaf of papers in one hand and a cardboard accordion file under the other arm. He bounced and bustled to the head of the table and sat down.

“Well,” Cole said. “Here we are. Pleasant news in the wake of tragedy. A deeply felt tragedy, of course, but here we are. Pleasant news nonetheless.”

“It’s pleasanter than it could have been,” Victor agreed. “You know, now that I’m thinking of it, what happens to Rosalie’s money? The money she inherits under the will, I mean?”

“Oh, Victor,” Martha said.

Bartram Cole shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that. Miss van Straadt—possibly she would have said Ms. van Straadt—wasn’t a client of ours. She preferred to retain a separate firm of attorneys. Of course, we would have been more than happy to oblige her. It’s so often true that one can avoid a great deal of red tape, of duplication and expense, if all of a family’s affairs are under one legal roof, so to speak. But Miss van Straadt was adamant. She wanted her own firm.”

“It all depends on if she made a will,” Ida explained to Victor. “If she did make a will, then her money goes to whoever she willed it to. If she didn’t, then it goes to her next of kin. That would probably be her mother, if she’s still alive.”

“I think she is.” Victor sighed.

“You’ve got to wonder what’s wrong with this family,” Martha said. “People who marry into it disappear as soon as they get the chance. We must send off some kind of antiattraction signal.”

“Rosalie didn’t send out any antiattraction signal,” Ida said. “She had so many men around, you fell over them every time you ventured through her front door.”

“Maybe one of them killed her,” Martha said. “Rosalie van Straadt, cut off in her prime for being the world’s champion prick tease.”

“Did she only tease?” Ida asked the air. “Maybe that was the trouble.”

Bartram Cole cleared his throat. “Well now,” he said. “I have copies of the will for each of you. If you’ll just look these over for a moment.” He handed out long legal-size sheets of paper. Ida took one and appeared to read it. Martha took one and turned it upside down. Victor refused to touch his. It might be catching.

“Isn’t it funny,” he said. “This was supposed to be Rosalie’s big moment. Grandfather dead. The will being read. Now she isn’t even here to be upset that Grandfather died too soon.”

“Just be glad that Grandfather didn’t die too late,” Martha said. “Did you know about all this, Mr. Cole? That Grandfather was thinking of changing his will.”

“Well, yes.” Bartram Cole was nonplussed. “Your grandfather spoke to me about it just a week before he died. I’ve been worried about it. I’ve been thinking I ought to tell the police about it. Under the circumstances, you know. On the other hand, confidentiality being what it is, and the firm acting in the interests of the remaining family—”

“Oh, there’s nothing confidential about this,” Victor said. “Everybody on earth knows that Grandfather was only a day away of leaving everything to Rosalie. You wouldn’t be telling the police anything new.”

“I don’t understand,” Bartram Cole said.

“You ought to go right ahead and talk to the police about Grandfather’s changing his will,” Martha explained patiently. “It’s perfectly all right with us, because it isn’t really a secret. We knew all about it all along. And of course we told the police all about it, too. So you wouldn’t be betraying a confidence or anything like that.”

“Rats in the basement of the New York
Sentinel
building knew that Rosalie was going to get it all,” Victor said gloomily. “It was pitiful.”

Bartram Cole looked from one to the other of them in consternation. “I don’t understand,” he said again. “I really don’t understand. You’re right, of course, that Mr. van Straadt was considering changing his will. In fact, I would say he was determined on it. But he wasn’t going to change it in favor of Rosalie van Straadt.”

“He wasn’t?” Victor asked. “Who was he going to change it in favor of?”

“If Mr. van Straadt had lived,” Bartram Cole said carefully, “he would have signed a will drawn up by me on the morning he died, leaving his entire personal fortune of eight hundred, eighty-five million dollars to his granddaughter Ida Greel.”

FROM WHAT GREGOR DEMARKIAN
had heard about the attitude of the New York City Police Department to Michael Pride and this case, he had expected nothing but hostility from any member of the department he might run into. On the subject of himself, he had expected something worse than hostility. Shut out of the information loop, threatened with arrest for obstructing justice, lectured endlessly on the respective provinces of amateurs and professionals—Gregor had imagined all kinds of things. He knew how he would have behaved in Hector Sheed’s position. He knew how he had behaved in those few cases when, as the agent in charge of a Bureau investigation, he had been provided with the spectacle of a private investigator. Of course, Gregor told himself, technically, he wasn’t a private investigator—at least, not a private detective. You had to have a license to be one of those, and Gregor had neither gotten one nor intended to get one. He had never hung out a shingle or taken money to solve a case. He had simply fallen into things, a lot of things, over and over again. He tried to count how many extracurricular murders there had been in his life since the death of his wife, Elizabeth, had led to his early retirement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There must have been at least nine. Maybe there had been ten. It had all gone by so fast. Gregor didn’t think he had ever acknowledged the ambivalent nature of his involvement in these cases before—or the ambivalent nature of his attitude to them. Back on Cavanaugh Street, Bennis Hannaford was always telling him he didn’t know what he wanted out of his life. He was always telling her she was absurd. Here he was, a man of almost sixty. Of course he knew what he wanted out of his life. He must already have had it. Every time Bennis would lecture him like that, Gregor would go down to Father Tibor Kasparian’s apartment behind Holy Trinity Church and rant and rave for an hour, telling Tibor what an absolute pain Bennis was getting to be. Tibor would wait until he was through and then say, well, since you already know what you want out of this life, maybe you should give some consideration to what you want out of the next one.

But Hector Sheed was not hostile. He was curious. He was so curious, he made Gregor uncomfortable, walking around and around him, looking him over back to front, peering down into his face the way dim high school students peer into the eyepieces of microscopes they don’t know how to use. Except that Hector Sheed wasn’t dim. He was strange, Gregor thought, but not dim. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t so strange that Hector Sheed was strange. What did it do to a man to work day after day in an environment like this one? Manhattan Homicide was an interstation service. Hector Sheed wouldn’t necessarily spend all his time in Harlem or places like it, at least not as a matter of policy. Policy notwithstanding, Gregor was willing to bet that Hector did, in fact, spend most of his time in Harlem or places like it. That was the way the world worked. Gregor didn’t think he could have stood it, himself. Bleak urban landscapes made him tired and depressed. He needed both color and hope to keep his mind working smoothly. Maybe everybody did.

“The problem,” Hector Sheed had told Gregor that first night, after Rosalie van Straadt’s body had been taken to the morgue, “is that this is New York. It’s not like some other places. I can’t just declare you a consultant and haul you around like a fire dog, the way that guy in Pennsylvania did with the phony psychic.”

Gregor winced at the word
psychic
but was heartened by the word
phony.
Too many people believed that kind of nonsense to make him entirely happy with the mental state of the American public.

“I don’t think I have to get in your way at all,” Gregor told Hector Sheed. “If you’ll just tell me when I’m becoming a problem, I’ll accommodate. After all, I’m only here on behalf of the—”

“Of the Cardinal. I know. The Catholic Church in New York may not be what it once was, Mr. Demarkian, but it’s still a political force about the size of King Kong. The city will go head to head with the Cardinal when it feels like it has to, or when there’s another constituency just as powerful with closer ties to the mayor’s office. The city does not pick fights with a Cardinal Archbishop for the hell of it.”

“Protesting interference in this case by me would constitute picking a fight for the hell of it?”

“Of course it would. You’re not interfering. You’re helping the department with its investigation. What’s the phrase they use in all the English murder mysteries? ‘Helping the authorities with their inquiries.’”

“That means you’ve been arrested,” Gregor said.

“Oh. Sorry. I don’t really like English murder mysteries. They’re not realistic. My wife reads them the way kids eat cotton candy. My line on you is that you’re our conduit to all the people at the center we don’t know much about. I’ll find a better way to put it if I have to talk to the media about you.”

“That’s good. What you just said didn’t make any sense to me.”

“Well, don’t worry about it, Mr. Demarkian. It’ll all be perfectly painless. You can conduct this entire case by running around the center asking questions and meeting me for a beer at the Akareeba Restaurant to give me the answers.”

Gregor was intrigued. “The Akareeba Restaurant. Is that African?”

“Nah,” Hector Sheed said. “It’s a steak and fries place off Central Park North. You might as well get ready to be the only white guy in the place. They won’t mind.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“So ask questions I’m going to want to hear the answers to. I’ll get back to you later.”

Now it was bright and early on Friday morning, with the sun streaming through the plate-glass window of his sixteenth-floor room at the New York Hilton, and Gregor found himself wondering how he’d been working out. With one thing and another, he hadn’t had a chance to meet Hector Sheed at the Akareeba Restaurant. Their first meeting there was supposed to be today, for lunch, at eleven thirty. Hector had apologized for the early hour. He couldn’t help it. He had to get in to work. Gregor merely felt frustrated. Hector had his reasons, Gregor was sure. The murders at the Sojourner Truth Health Center would not be Hector’s only responsibility. Gregor could only imagine what a detective’s caseload at Manhattan Homicide was like. Gregor could make no such excuses for himself. In the time since Rosalie van Straadt had been found dying in Michael Pride’s office, he seemed to be going around in circles. Talk to Michael. Talk to Augie. Talk to Father Donleavy. Talk. Talk. Talk. Nobody ever seemed to say anything important, or even sensible.

The room at the Hilton was being paid for by the Archdiocese of New York. Gregor had stayed there once or twice before, when the Bureau was paying for it. He found the rooms much too large and much too luxurious. The bathrooms were always meticulously clean and startlingly high-tech. There were never any claw tubs or visible plumbing at the Hilton. Getting out of the shower, he caught himself in the wall-long vanity mirror. He did not have the kind of body that lent itself well to being looked at in wall-size mirrors. Gregor wrapped himself in a towel. If he had still been with the Bureau, they would have sent him out to get into shape again—or tried to. From what Gregor had remembered, they had tried to, several times, and he had always been able to come up with enough work to make the project impossible. He went to his suitcase and got out a clean set of underwear and put it on. Then he went to his closet and found a pair of good gray slacks and a shirt. A few days in New York had disabused him of the notion that the city was always cold. Yesterday, sitting in the main branch of the New York Public Library, going through ten years of microfilmed magazine stories on Charles van Straadt, Gregor had been sweating in spite of the air-conditioning. Now he reached for a jacket and tie anyway. He couldn’t help himself. If he wasn’t on vacation, he was supposed to be in a suit.

He opened the door to his room and found his papers waiting for him in the hall. He paged through the
Post,
the
News,
and
The New York Times
and came to rest for a moment on the
Sentinel.
The murder of Rosalie van Straadt wasn’t front-page fodder for any of the papers. The
Sentinel,
however, seemed to have gone off the news beat altogether. There was another red banner over the masthead, announcing their Father’s Day contest—
ONLY THREE MORE DAYS TO ENTER!!!
—and a headline that simply said, “
Aww…
” in really gigantic type. The subhead read: “
This pathetic pooch is a miracle worker. See page 17
.” Gregor flipped through the other papers again. President Clinton had held a press conference on the state of the economy, which was bad. Bosnia-Herzegovina had exploded in round 2,224,667,998 of their civil war. The government of the Ukraine had voted to install a monarchy, or something very much like it. On the front page of the
Sentinel
there was a picture of a miserable looking dachshund in a baseball cap.

Gregor walked back into the center of his room, threw the papers onto his still-unmade bed, and sat down in the chair next to the desk. Then he picked up the phone there and dialed. If this had been Philadelphia, not only would the van Straadt case still have been all over the papers, he himself would have been all over them, too. He could just imagine what the
Philadelphia Inquirer
was saying about him right this minute: “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot Takes on the Big Apple.” That would be about right. It depressed Gregor mightily to be in a place where murder was so common that even the sequential killings of two members of an internationally prominent family couldn’t hold the attention of the public for three days. Well, maybe that wasn’t quite fair. The public was probably still interested. They just weren’t interested enough to get the professionals interested. What would it take to get them off their rear ends and moving? The World Trade Center blast had done it. Maybe they could get really involved in something like a flying saucer landing in Central Park. Or maybe not. Maybe New Yorkers would look on Martians as just one more set of damn tourists.