Dear Old Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “I don’t understand what you think you’re doing with your life,” Augie said, “I never have understood it. You’re an attractive man. So you’re gay. You’re gay. You could have found somebody to settle down with.”

  “I didn’t want to find somebody to settle down with. Augie, don’t do this.”

  “Why shouldn’t I do it? Why shouldn’t I? You’re one of the few people I’m close to in this world, one of the few people I’ve ever been close to, you’re closer to me than family, and you’re going to die, die, in two or three or five years, and what for? What for? Glory holes?”

  “Augie—”

  “Don’t patronize me, Michael. I’m not some seventeen-year-old blushing virgin and I’m not some hysterical woman, either. What you’ve been doing doesn’t make sense. It never made sense.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a virgin,” Michael said.

  “I told you not to patronize me.” Augie hopped off the examining table onto the floor. Had this room always been so shabby? Augie couldn’t remember ever having paid attention to it before. Augie couldn’t remember ever having had the time. Michael was staring at her. His hands were tucked into the patch pockets of his white smock. His face was set in a serious mask. Augie had the terrible feeling that she was letting him down.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I suppose I ought to get back to work. We won’t be this quiet for long. We never are. I have things to get done.”

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “Yes, Michael. I’m going to be fine. You’re the one who’s not going to be all right.”

  “I’m going to be physically miserable, Augie, but I still think I’m going to be all right.”

  “I don’t understand how you could have gone on doing the things you did, knowing what the risks were.”

  “I never pay attention to risks, Augie, I can’t. I’m a coward. If I pay attention to risks, I get scared, and then I don’t do anything at all.”

  “I have to get out of here,” Augie said.

  And it was true. She did have to get out of there. She had to get through the door and back into the hall and then down the hall and then—where? She didn’t know. She was just glad that Michael wasn’t trying to stop her. She couldn’t see anything. Sister Kenna was in the corridor. She was saying hello. Augie felt her own head nod, stiffly, the way it used to with parents she didn’t like when she was working as the head nurse in the pediatrics ward at the last hospital her order had been able to run before Vatican II happened and the world fell apart. Augie was a little shocked at herself. She had never longed for the days before Vatican II. She was not an ecclesiastical Luddite. What was wrong with her?

  Sister Kenna was gone. The corridor was empty. There was a big walk-in linen closet just this side of the stairs. Augie jerked the door of the linen closet open and walked inside. Then she closed the door tightly on herself and sat down on a pile of folded white sheets. She didn’t want the pre-Vatican II church back. That wasn’t it. She just wanted Michael. She wanted Michael. She wanted Michael not to be sick.

  When Sister Mary Augustine was a very small child, the priest in her parish had been an immigrant from the old country with a head full of fire and brimstone. He had believed in delineating each of the separate flames in the fires of hell and in making his parishioners look on the terrible face of God. The face of God is in the tornado, Father Connaghie had said. The face of God is in the erupting volcano. The face of God is in the tidal wave engulfing the shore. The face of God is not comfort but power, unleashed and vast.

  Sister Augustine folded her arms over her knees and put her head down on them. Every blood vessel in her body was throbbing. Her mind felt as if it had been wiped clean. Augie didn’t believe in a God who would send a disease like AIDS to punish people for sex. She did believe in a God who met each and every one of his creatures face to face at the moment of death. She didn’t know if that was orthodox Catholic theology or not, but it was what she had taken away from her from Father Connaghie’s homilies, and what she had held fast to ever since. She tried to make herself imagine Michael standing face to face with God, but all she got was a terrible hole, an absolute emptiness, standing here next to her on earth where Michael should be.

  Then she tucked her head even lower, past her arms and onto her knees, and burst into tears.

  2

  IDA GREEL KNEW THAT ever since the reading of the will, Victor and Martha had been angry at her. To be precise, Victor had been vaguely annoyed, and Martha had been furious. Ida didn’t blame them. They suspected she had known about Grandfather’s intentions all along, and they were right. Ida had taken a certain amount of satisfaction in watching Grandfather string that silly twit Rosalie along. She hadn’t given a thought to how Victor and Martha would feel about it. Ida had never liked Rosalie very much. She had never liked any of her relatives, even her grandfather, but she had been especially intolerant about Rosalie. When they were all growing up, Rosalie had been the perfect one, thin, pretty, not stupid like Victor. Ida would go to her grave thinking she had heard twice as much as she needed to just how cute Rosalie was in curls.

  If it had been Rosalie who was angry at her, Ida wouldn’t have bothered to do anything about it. She wouldn’t have cared. If it had been Victor, Ida would have let it ride. Victor always came around in the end. Martha was a special case. Ida wasn’t close to Martha. Nobody could be. Still, Ida relied on her. It was a relief for Ida to have somebody at the center that she could talk to without having to mentally translate everything she said. Before coming up here to work, Ida had never realized how many differences there were in simple vocabulary between rich people and poor people. Then there were the expectations. Ida had a whole list of different kinds of behavior that she considered “normal.” She wasn’t aware of it as a list, but it was there. When she had lunch with a large group of other people and they were going to split the check, she expected to split it, to divide it by the number of people at the table, to charge everyone an equal share. Up here, split checks were pored over endlessly, the charges parceled out bit by bit, each person being responsible only for what she had actually ordered. The check took half an hour to unravel and left at least one person in tears. Then there was the little matter of the coats. Ida put her winter coat anywhere, on the back of a chair, across a desk, shoved into a locker all crumpled up. If it fell on the floor, she picked it up, brushed it off, and put it out of the way again. All the other people here were very careful to hang their coats on hangers. If those coats fell on the floor, their owners cleaned and agonized and accused. Everyone got together and tried to figure out who had caused the coat to fall onto the floor. It drove Ida crazy. The big things were easy to take in stride. Race and class, education and politics—Ida had been astonished at how little any of these things had mattered. The small things were impossible. Ida had started to refuse invitations out to lunch and dinner from the people she worked with. She had begun to steer clear of the lockers and the racks and the other places people hung their coats. She had begun to use her cousin Martha as a tranquilizer.

  Now it was fifteen minutes after twelve noon on Friday, and Ida had no one she wanted to go to lunch with. It had been a quiet morning. She had used her unusual free time to get her paperwork done and to look over the notes for her pharmacology class. Ida had something close to an eidetic memory. She could repeat her own notes back to herself verbatim, even without studying. Her mind was still on that scene in the lawyers’ offices yesterday, with Victor in shock and Martha brewing steam and vitriol. She got up and walked to the door of the nurses’ station and looked out. She went far to the other end of the hall, walking into what seemed to be the linen closet. She told herself she wasn’t getting enough sleep and searched around in the pocket of her smock for her cough drops. Michael was in his office, free for once, but Ida didn’t have anything to talk to him about. There was nobody else around.

  Ida found her cough drops, popped one into her mouth, and made up her mind.
There was a phone at the station desk. Ida picked it up, dialed the east building and asked for Martha. She didn’t say it was Ida calling because Martha might refuse to answer, just the way she had refused to answer Grandfather on the night he died. Ida said she was Augie.

  “Sister?” Martha asked, coming immediately on the line.

  “It’s not Sister Augustine,” Ida said, “it’s me. I want you to meet me in the cafeteria right away.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you,” Martha said.

  “I’ve got plenty to say to you,” Ida told her. “Stop acting like a jerk. Come on downstairs.”

  “Why should I come downstairs? Why should I talk to you at all? You knew all about it.”

  “Yes, all right. I knew all about it. That’s not the point.”

  “It’s the point to me.” Martha was working herself into a grand passion. “You let Victor and me make absolute fools out of ourselves. Victor. Your own brother.”

  “My own brother is an ass,” Ida said impatiently. “Will you listen to reason for once? It doesn’t matter what Grandfather intended to do. He didn’t get around to doing it.”

  “He might have. And Victor and I were having meetings with you, getting together to formulate strategy, intending to head him off at the pass. And you never had any interest in heading him off at the pass. You were going to pick up eight hundred million dollars and—and laugh at us.”

  “Maybe I would have and maybe I wouldn’t have. Can’t you understand that that isn’t what we have to be worried about now?”

  “No.”

  “This is just what the police want, you know, Martha. The police and the Cardinal and that Demarkian. They want us fighting with each other. They want us divided.”

  “They don’t care about us at all,” Martha said. “They think Michael did it.”

  “Maybe they did before Rosalie died, but they don’t now. And after all, Martha, I’m not the one that silly kid with the sign saw going into Michael’s first-floor office just before Grandfather died.”

  “What?” Martha said.

  There was a chair pulled up against the counter farther along toward the door. Ida got it over to where she was standing and sat down on it. She had heard the panic in Martha’s voice. It had made her feel instantaneously better. Panic was exactly what she needed.

  “What are you implying?” Martha asked now. “I was nowhere near that examining room on the night Grandfather died.”

  “He says you were,” Ida told Martha. “Robbie Yagger. That’s his name. The one who carries the sign about how abortion is the same as the Holocaust. I heard him tell Gregor Demarkian.”

  “Robbie Yagger is a loon,” Martha said indignantly. “And you couldn’t have overheard him tell Gregor Demarkian anything. I saw him the day he talked to Gregor Demarkian in the cafeteria. You weren’t anywhere around.”

  “It wasn’t in the cafeteria. It was outside on the sidewalk. They were just standing there talking.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “I don’t care who told who what,” Martha said. “The only time I was in the west building that whole night was when Victor and I went to the cafeteria. And then later I was there with you.”

  “If you came in and out by the front door the way you are supposed to, you probably went right by Michael’s examining room. I’m not denying that you didn’t go in there, Martha, I’m just telling you what Robbie Yagger said. And I’m trying to make you understand how it’s going to sound.”

  “Why should I care?”

  “Martha, for God’s sake. Of course you have to care. We all have to care. We’re in the middle of a murder investigation.”

  “You don’t have to care, do you?” Martha said. “You’re the one who never would have done it. Assuming you can prove you knew it was you Grandfather was going to change his will in favor of, instead of Rosalie.”

  Ida looked down at her nails. They were without polish, bitten to the quick. “I have a letter,” she said.

  “From Grandfather?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grandfather never wrote letters.”

  “Well, he wrote this one to me. Martha, for God’s sake. Will you please meet me in the cafeteria? For one thing, I’m starving. For another, we have to talk.”

  Out in the hallway there were footsteps, the brisk footsteps of a nurse, the halting ones of a patient coming in off the street. Ida looked at the clock and tapped her foot. If a real emergency exploded around this place, she would never get her lunch.

  “Martha?”

  “All right,” Martha said. “I’ll meet you downstairs. For a minute.”

  “For as long as it takes. Don’t be stupid, Martha. Hurry up before somebody comes along and wants you to do something.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  There was a click in Ida’s ear, sharp, too sharp. She hung up and stared at the phone. Maybe she had overplayed her hand. Martha was so impossible. Maybe she shouldn’t have made it sound so—definite—about what Robbie Yagger had said to Gregor Demarkian. If she were Martha and she were the murderer and she’d just heard something like that, she’d get Robbie Yagger into a safe place and do him in.

  Ida got off the chair she had been sitting on, stuffed another cough drop into her mouth, and went out into the corridor again. The patient she had heard was sitting at Admitting, looking morose. He was an ancient man in tattered clothes who looked as if he hadn’t had a coherent thought in years. Ida didn’t understand Michael Pride. Why did he want to save these people? What was left in them worth saving?

  She went to the back of the hall and down the stairs to the cafeteria.

  3

  OUTSIDE, AT EXACTLY ONE O’CLOCK, Robbie Yagger found himself getting tired. No, he was worse than tired. He was confused. He was confused with a confusion so violent and so lawless, it was as unlike his usual state of mental chaos as a full-grown jaguar was like a domestic feline kitten. Back at the Holly Hill Christian Fellowship, they had warned him not to talk to anybody at the center except to tell them what he wanted them to hear. Back at the Holly Hill Christian Fellowship, they had warned him that talking was dangerous, because the devil could just as easily defeat you as you could defeat the devil. Now he had been defeated, not by the devil, but by a girl, and he didn’t know what to do. He had been carrying his sign all morning, up and down, up and down, just like always. Instead of feeling like a soldier, Robbie felt like an absolute fool. Between six o’clock this morning and now, fewer than a dozen people had gone in and out of the center. Nobody paid attention to him. There had been no traffic on the street. Usually, deadness like that made him frustrated. It made him feel as if he were talking to dead air. Today, he had welcomed the emptiness. His sign looked odd to him. His attitude felt all wrong. He didn’t know what he wanted.

  The girl’s name was Shana Malvera, and Robbie supposed he shouldn’t call her a girl. Girls liked to be called women now, especially when they were all grown up, which he was sure Shana was. He didn’t think she was much more grown up than he was, though. He couldn’t be sure. She moved around a lot and talked a lot and wore a lot of jewelry. She had half a dozen charm bracelets on her left arm that made musical silver sounds when she gestured with her arm. Shana was always gesturing with her arms. Shana did not like his sign.

  It was hot out here. It had been hot this morning, and it was getting hotter. Robbie could feel the sweat on his forehead and his neck. Walking past the small, square, basement level windows of the center, he could see the reflection of his scuffed shoes and his pants legs that didn’t reach down far enough. He’d bought both new at a discount place in Brooklyn, but the discount didn’t seem to have been worth much. He was falling apart. Why would a girl like Shana Malvera, who could afford to wear all those charm bracelets, want to talk to somebody like him?

  Robbie had his jacket with him, just in case. He had a stack of leaflets stuck into one of the pockets, printed up by the Life Project Committee at Holly Hill
. These had the picture of a forlorn looking young man on the cover and the words, “FATHER’S DAY IS COMING, BUT HE’S NOT CELEBRATING.” Inside, it told the story of how the young man’s wife had wanted to fulfill herself and didn’t have time for children, so when she got pregnant she had an abortion and didn’t even tell him until afterward. Robbie had cried the first time he had ever heard that story, and he wanted to cry right now just thinking about it, but then the confusion started at the back of his brain and he didn’t know. Shana had told him a whole lot of stories that had made him want to cry, and they were nothing like this one. He didn’t know whom to believe.

  Robbie walked wearily up the front steps of the center and looked in. There was nobody around that he could see, although somebody would come out if he went inside. The door had an electric eye that rang a little bell in the back just in case all the nurses were busy. Robbie felt in the pocket of his pants and came up with fifty cents. That was just enough money for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. If he went to the cafeteria, Shana might be there.

  Down at the end of the hall, a young woman came out of one of the offices or one of the examining rooms—Robbie didn’t know which was which—and hurried toward the staircase at the back. Robbie did a double-take. It was the same young woman he had seen the night Charles van Straadt died, and she was doing now what she had been doing then. She was carrying one of those paper funnels you put in coffee machines. It looked full and sopping wet.

  Robbie stepped past the electric eye, heard the bong, and winced. Gregor Demarkian had to be right. There was nothing the least bit strange about a young woman carrying a funnel full of coffee grounds. It was just his imagination that made the scene seem so strange.

  FIVE

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