Dear Old Dead (8 page)

Gregor had no idea what had happened between then and the time, three and a half years ago now, that he had come back to live in this place. He had seen urban neighborhoods turn around before. The Upper West Side of Manhattan had gone from Mostly Undesirable to Very High Rent in no time at all. Cavanaugh Street was the only urban neighborhood he had ever heard of that had turned itself around on purpose. Urban renewal failed. Enterprise zones were less than useless. Revitalization projects shot themselves in the foot. Here, the grandmothers had wanted to stay and the grandchildren had decided to help them. The tenements had been torn down and replaced by neat brick replicas of Federal houses. The brownstones had been converted either into floor-throughs, like the one he lived in, or one-family town houses with living rooms that took up their entire second floor. There was still a grocery store—Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store—but it sold as much to tourists coming in from the Main Line as it did to people in the neighborhood. People in the neighborhood liked Armenian food, but they also ate their share at Burger King and McDonald’s. The religious supply store was gone. If you wanted an oil lamp or a picture of the Virgin, you had to talk to Father Tibor Kasparian and listen to a lecture on why you really ought to give that money to the poor. Even Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School was less insolently ethnic than it appeared. Its students were mostly refugees who had come to America from Armenia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its stated purpose was to get those students ready to take their places beside their thoroughly Americanized cousins at Groton and The Hill.

From the window of his living room, Gregor could see across the street into the living room of Lida Arkmanian’s town house, which was on the third floor instead of the second. When they were growing up, Lida had been the prettiest girl on Cavanaugh Street, and Gregor had been in love with her. Now he looked down to the street and saw Donna Moradanyan and her son, Tommy, coming out of Lida’s front door. They were being met on the stoop by Russell Donahue, Donna’s steady “friend” and seen off by Lida herself, looking magnificent in something bright red and flowy. Cavanaugh Street always looked best in this kind of weather. It was a place of bright emotions and happy thoughts, like the world seen through fairy dust in
Peter Pan.
It never seemed suited to the nasty darkness that made up so much of Philadelphia’s climate.

Lida Arkmanian’s town house was decorated in the same kind of red-and-white streamers Gregor’s own town house was decorated in. Donna Moradanyan had been active over there, too. Gregor tilted his head and looked down the street. There was a Saint Joseph display on the steps of Holy Trinity Church, and red-and-white streamers wound around every lamppost from here to there. Donna was definitely outdoing herself this time. Gregor wondered if Tommy Moradanyan was going to buy Russell Donahue a Father’s Day present, and if so, what that would mean. God only knew, he was as anxious as any of the old ladies on the street to see Donna Moradanyan married to a responsible man.

Gregor backed away from the window. He went to the kitchen phone and called a cab. He had to watch himself around this place. It was too easy to turn into a matchmaker on Cavanaugh Street. It was too easy to turn into a gnome who thought the most important thing in life was who married who and what they wore when they did it. It was maddening.

The kitchen clock said it was two, on the nose. The cab company said it would take ten minutes to get a taxi to Gregor’s front door. Gregor said fine and hung up.

It was past time for him to take a little trip, that was the truth. He was getting something worse than stale.

Gregor opened his briefcase again. Press clippings, magazine stories, the transcript of a radio program—lots and lots of paper, but not a single piece of information he couldn’t have gotten on his own in one long day at the main branch of the Philadelphia Public Library. Gregor had the feeling that, unlike John O’Bannion, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York was something of a conspiracy theorist.

And that could mean nothing but trouble.

A
N HOUR AND A HALF
later, sitting in first class on the Amtrak train speeding toward New York City—why he bothered to travel first class for this short a trip, Gregor didn’t know—Gregor opened his briefcase again. Bennis was right about more than the fact that this murder should have been put down to random violence and the investigation abandoned at least a week ago. She was right about the kind of snake pit he was about to land himself in. Gregor had put a brave face on it back at the apartment, but he knew the truth. Unless the Archdiocese of New York was willing to smuggle him into this case trussed up in feathers in the back of an armored car, there was going to be no way to keep his presence in New York and his connection to the ongoing inquiry into the death of Charles van Straadt secret. The NYPD was going to be pleased at his arrival only for public consumption. When you were failing miserably at making headway in a high-profile crime, it was to your advantage to seem as if you were willing to accept any help you could get. In private, Gregor knew they were going to be ready to shred him with their teeth, and he didn’t blame them. Things were bad enough as they stood. New York City Homicide didn’t want a man who was now—no matter what he might have been before—an amateur coming in and making them look like fools. Unfortunately, on one or two occasions, Gregor had made the men of one police department or another look like fools.

He went through the mass of press clippings, came to the one he wanted, and pulled it out. This was the one that worried him. He looked down at a grainy black-and-white picture of a tall, thin man in hospital whites, surrounded by a sea of faces so ethnically diverse they could have served as a public relations poster for multiculturalism in New York City. Underneath the picture, a caption in thick italic lettering read,

Dr. Michael Pride, standing on the steps of the Sojourner Truth Health Center, the morning after Charles van

Gregor picked the picture up and put it down again. He looked into the face of the tall, thin man and discovered nothing. He looked into the faces of one or two of the others and found only that they hadn’t been looking at the camera. It was impossible to find out anything serious from a photograph, except for the kinds of photographs taken by security systems in banks.

The reason this clipping worried him had less to do with the clipping itself than with something the Cardinal Archbishop of New York had said to him on the phone, the first and only time they had talked. Gregor hadn’t liked the Cardinal Archbishop’s voice. It wasn’t like O’Bannion’s voice, or like this Cardinal Archbishop’s predecessor’s. There was something smooth and hard about it that reminded Gregor of political appointees in the Department of Justice. Besides, the Cardinal Archbishop was in no way a New Yorker. The Cardinal Archbishop had been trained in Catholic seminaries and canonical universities from Los Angeles, California, to Rome, but he still had the Mississippi drawl in his voice. It was faint but unmistakable, like a fashionable woman’s mist of perfume.

“What do you know about Dr. Michael Pride?” the voice had asked him—and Gregor hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that he was being asked to rat to the Inquisition, in spite of the fact that he’d never met Michael Pride in his life. “I suppose they’ve heard of Michael even out there in Philadelphia,” the Archbishop had said.

They had certainly heard of Michael Pride in Philadelphia. They had heard of him in Calcutta and Madrid and São Paulo, too. The question was ingenuous. Gregor thought the Cardinal was trying to ask something else but was not willing to put that something else into words. Did it matter who had heard of Michael Pride? All the same people had heard of Charles van Straadt.

“Of course I’ve heard of Dr. Pride,” Gregor said. “It would be difficult not to.”

“I suppose that’s true. Have you been aware of any… news about him lately?”

“I’ve been aware of his connection with this murder, Your Eminence. I could hardly have avoided it. This is a national story.”

“Yes. Yes, I know. You may not be aware of it, Mr. Demarkian, but Michael Pride has a long association with this Archdiocese. A very long association. The Sojourner Truth Health Center was a special project of my immediate predecessor’s. He was very fond of Michael. And very involved in the center’s activities. Much more involved than simply signing off on the money the Archdiocese donated to help with the center’s operations. And then, of course, there are the nuns.”

“I remember reading somewhere that there were nuns who work at the center, Your Eminence.”

“Yes. Yes, there are several. Not a single order, you understand. The center isn’t the project of any single order, the way Covenant House is with the Franciscans. But there are a number of nuns who do nursing and social work there.”

“They probably work cheap,” Gregor suggested.

“They probably do. I will admit something to you, Mr. Demarkian. If it had been up to me, if I hadn’t arrived on the scene here to find that the bonds of connection between the center and this Archdiocese were so firmly established, I do not think I would have allowed such bonds to grow up. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have allowed the Archdiocese to come to the aid of the center. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t have allowed the association to become so strong and so close.”

“I take it there are things going on at the center that you don’t like.”

“A number of things, Mr. Demarkian. The fact that part of the facility dispenses family-planning information, including abortion information, and that the gynecological department performs abortions through the second trimester. This is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. I do have a stand my people in Rome expect me to take. Even the most liberal of the bishops in this country don’t use church money to fund abortion clinics.”

“No, Your Eminence. I can see that.”

“Did you know that Michael Pride was a homosexual?”

Gregor had been taking this phone call in his kitchen, sitting in the chair at the kitchen table closest to the wall phone, picking at a plate of
yaprak sarma
Lida Arkmanian had left him just that morning. Now he stood up and began to pace.

“Is that really relevant, Your Eminence? That Michael Pride is a homosexual?”

“No,” the Cardinal said. “In and of itself, it’s not relevant at all. In spite of all the fuss we’ve had out here with the St. Patrick’s Day parade and ACT-UP and all the rest of that nonsense, the church is likely to leave matters of sexual orientation or sexual preference or whatever you want to call it strictly alone, unless she’s pushed. You know, before 1985, I don’t think I ever heard a discussion of homosexuality in any Catholic facility anywhere, except for three days in the seminary when it was covered under sexual morality and the moral law. As I remember it, the word was used in a long list of words meant to detail practices considered to be contrary to full fruitfulness. I came away with the distinct impression that practice of homosexual sex and the use of a diaphragm were more or less on a par where sin was concerned. I definitely got the impression that knowingly receiving communion on less than four hours fast was worse than both. I suppose that was a more innocent age.”

“Maybe.”

“The problem with Michael isn’t that he’s a homosexual. The problem with Michael is that he’s a homosexual the way he is everything else. Michael Pride is a man who doesn’t know how not to go to extremes.”

“Do you mean that he’s effeminate?” Gregor ventured. He was mystified.

“No, I don’t mean that he’s effeminate. He’s anything but. I mean that he’s outrageous. Of course, that’s not an entirely negative trait, is it, Mr. Demarkian? A project like the Sojourner Truth Health Center would never get started, and would never go on running, if there wasn’t someone behind it who was willing to do anything, no matter how insane, no matter how bizarre, to make it real. Do you know how the Archdiocese first came to be involved with the center?”

“No.”

“Michael ran out of money about year three of the operation. He couldn’t go to the state. One of the avowed purposes of that center is to keep its clients out of the clutches of social workers, and I don’t blame either the center or the clients. He didn’t have enough money to run a mail-order fund-raising campaign, either. When I say they were broke, I mean they were broke. So Michael looked around for someone who might have some cash, and he found us. He tried the usual way to get money out of us at first, and he didn’t get any. For obvious reasons. So he decided he had to talk to the Cardinal himself. This is old Cardinal Hessart we’re talking about here. It was the last three years of the Cardinal’s life. Do you know what Michael did when Hessart wouldn’t see him?”

“No,” Gregor said again.

“He set himself up on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and held a tag sale of all his worldly goods. And I do mean all of them. He had his medical degree from Harvard in a nice frame priced at one ninety-five. He had his underwear in little piles. I was assigned to the chancery here that year, and I went down to see it. It was incredible. I suppose these days we wouldn’t think anything of it, but then—good heavens. The fuss it made. And Cardinal Hessart met with him, of course. And they worked out an arrangement. And the arrangement is still in force.”

“Dr. Pride sounds like an interesting man.”

“Oh, Michael’s interesting enough, all right, but he isn’t sane. He isn’t sane at all. That’s what we really want you to help us out with.”

“I don’t think I could do anything about a man’s sanity, Your Eminence. I don’t have much expertise at anything except solving murders.”

“If you solve this murder, you’ll do a great deal for my sanity, Mr. Demarkian. You’ll do a great deal for Michael’s sanity, too. Of course, the police think he did it.”

“Because the body was found in his office,” Gregor said.

“No, not because of that. If that was all there was, I wouldn’t be worried. I’ll see you up here on the first of June, Mr. Demarkian?”