Dear Old Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “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.”

  THREE

  1

  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.

  The phone was ringing and ringing in his ear. No one was answering. Bennis must be out. Gregor hung up and drummed his fingers against the desk. Frustration didn’t even begin to describe it. He felt bottled up.

  He got up and went over to the window to look outside. The Archdiocese of New York had more clout than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had a room overlooking Sixth Avenue. Down on the street, cars were bright colored blobs. They looked like they were having a hell of a lot more fun than he was.

  They’re probably all down there hating the traffic, Gregor told himself, but the thought wouldn’t stick. He had to get out of this room. It was driving him crazy.

  He had taken his wallet and his change and his keys out of his pants the night before and put them on the night table next to his bed. Now he picked them up and stuffed them into his pockets again. A walk, that was what he needed. A walk would clear his head.

  If anything could.

  2

  WHETHER GREGOR DEMARKIAN’S WALK cleared his head or not was a moot point. He took a very long one, going down Fifth Avenue to look in the windows of Bergdorf Goodman and Saks, clucking indulgently at all the silly looking clothes Bennis would probably buy six of and never wear. He went west to Times Square and looked at the bright fronts of the theaters and the neon jumpiness of the adult entertainment centers. The adult entertainment centers seemed to be operating twenty-four hours a day. After a while, he began to walk slowly up Central Park West. He had gotten explicit directions to the Akareeba Restaurant from Hector Sheed. He had been a little worried about how difficult it would be to find a cab that would take him there. In New York, when you didn’t know the neighborhoods, it was difficult to know what you were getting yourself into. In the end, Gregor decided not to worry. He was involved in walking. He would go on walking. He walked up past the Dakota and the San Remo and the other great apartment buildings on Central Park West, and then farther, past buildings just as large and just as grand but without the famous names. The buildings got more and more run down and the people got shabbier and shabbier the farther north he went, but the energy level actually seemed to be rising. These people were poor but not destitute, that was it. This was poverty as Gregor had known it, growing up. Here the broad sidewalk of Central Park West was cluttered with people selling from blankets and garbage bags spread across the pavement. He was offered watches and sunglasses and books and ties in the space of half a block.

  “Traditional for Father’s Day,” a very young man with black skin and the almond eyes and fine-boned jaw line of a Thai watercolor portrait. “Ties for every occasion.”

  Gregor reached the Akareeba Restaurant in a much better mood than any he had been in since he had arrived from Philadelphia. He believed in the melting pot, he really did, especially since nothing was ever completely melted in it. A friend of his at the Bureau had once described the United States as a kind of pudding stone. There was a mass of glue and then a plethora of different rocks. The rocks were stuck together in the glue, but never dissolved in it.

  If I go on like this, I’m going to start singing “America the Beautiful” on street corners, Gregor told himself. The Akareeba was only one block north of Central Park North. Gre
gor walked that block, made the right turn he had been told to, and found himself face to face with a gaudy front that took up a third of the commercial space along that side of the street. “AKAREEBA” the sign said in shiny foil letters. The letters were made up of tiny sequins in half a dozen colors that shivered and jumped in the wind. The windows were painted over with African scenes that featured large numbers of bare-breasted, monumentally well-endowed women. Gregor could just imagine what the wives and girlfriends of the men who came here said about those. He found the door, four steps down from the street, and went in through it. He found himself at the edge of a large room full of dark wood tables and presided over by a long, ebonywood bar. The bar was out of a 1930s movie. There was more glass behind it than there was in Gregor’s bathroom in the Hilton. There were enough bottles and glasses and siphons and tumblers to cater a Washington political wedding. There was no hostess. Gregor moved into the gloom and looked around. It was only eleven fifteen. Maybe Hector wasn’t here yet.

  Hector was here. The detective came towering out of the darkness, looking shocked and a little exasperated.

  “How did you get here?” he demanded. “I’m sitting right over there by the window. I didn’t see a cab come into the street.”

  “I didn’t take a cab. I walked.”

  “Walked?” Hector was worse than shocked. “Check your pants. Make sure you still have your wallet.”

  Gregor checked. He still had his wallet, as he knew he would, but he checked anyway. “I’m not a complete babe in the woods,” he said dryly. “I was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation for twenty years.”

  “Twenty years of insulation, that’s what that was,” Hector said. “You can’t just walk around the city like that. Especially not in this neighborhood when you’re so—uh—”