Dear Old Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “A stopwatch,” Hector Sheed repeated.

  “Go,” Gregor said.

  Hector seemed to hesitate, but not for long. Gregor watched him stride purposefully through what were still aimlessly milling crowds of people. Crowds parted before Hector like hair pulled by a rat-tail comb. Nobody looked at him in surprise or amazement. Hector Sheed might be big, but he was also a familiar quantity. He’d been around here much too often in the past two weeks for anybody to be surprised at his appearance.

  Gregor turned his attention to the three people still standing next to the front doors, still clutched together, still talking. Martha van Straadt was looking resentful. Victor van Straadt was looking bewildered. Ida Greel was looking as if her patience were being sorely tried, but she was going to hang in there no matter what.

  This, Gregor thought, was an opportunity he might never have again.

  2

  EVEN IN THE DAYS when Gregor Demarkian was the second most powerful man in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he’d had problems with rich people. The chief problem he’d had with rich people was attitude. There were people who said that the rich got away with more because they had good lawyers, and that was true, to an extent. In Gregor’s experience, good lawyers only went so far. The poor and the middle class had had long experience in pleasing other people. They had bosses to make happy and spouses they depended on. The habitual criminals had a lot to prove. They struck attitudes and looked forward eagerly to cameras in court. The rich just didn’t care. They not only knew they didn’t have to give out any information, they simply didn’t want to. They didn’t care what the police detective thought of them. They didn’t care if the district attorney liked them or not. It was maddening. You asked them for their cooperation, and they said no.

  Working with no official connection to any established law enforcement office was worse. Gregor was always surprised at how willing people were to cooperate with him, relying on nothing but the rather spurious reputation he had attained in popular magazines. It was incredible to him how many people were overjoyed to spend a little time with someone they thought of as a “celebrity.” Not everyone was inclined to be that voluble, however. Gregor had met with his share of defeat, and more than his share of that inevitable question: Who do you think you are? The question was made worse by the fact that Gregor had no idea who he thought he was. He hadn’t known for years. It wasn’t the kind of thing a man wanted to ask himself at any stage of life.

  In Martha van Straadt and Ida Greel, Gregor had so far met with what he thought of as reluctant acquiescence. He had been invited here by the Cardinal Archbishop of New York and his presence had been approved by Michael Pride. Martha and Ida were willing to put up with him. Just. Gregor wanted more than that. He didn’t think he’d have much trouble out of the young man, Ida’s brother, whom he had yet to meet. Victor van Straadt looked like the kind of person who talked endlessly about himself if given half a chance.

  Martha, Ida, and Victor didn’t seem to be too happy with each other. They were as tense a group as Gregor had ever seen. Martha kept scowling from Ida to Victor and back again. Victor kept dropping the sheaf of papers he was carrying under one arm and rescuing them only a second before they scattered all over the floor. Gregor nodded a little to himself and made his way over to them. They were paying no attention to him at all.

  “Excuse me,” Gregor said, when he reached Martha van Straadt’s side. “I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Gregor Demarkian. I was wondering if I could ask for your help.”

  Victor van Straadt was the only one of the three of them that seemed to have any reaction at all to Gregor’s arrival. The other two turned to look at the man who was speaking to them, but their faces were blank.

  “I’m Victor van Straadt.” Victor put out his hand. “We haven’t met. I’m Ida’s brother.”

  Gregor shook. Victor had a good strong handclasp, the kind that was allowed only to the hero in 1930s British books. So much for that as an indication of character, Gregor thought. He looked at the papers under Victor’s arm. They were slipping again.

  “Oh,” Victor said. “Excuse me. That’s my work. I work for the New York Sentinel.”

  “He runs their contests,” Martha said sarcastically. “It’s not exactly a reporting job.”

  “Right,” Victor said. “Father’s Day. That’s the one we’re doing now. Maybe you’ve seen the announcements. We run a red banner over the masthead. It does wonders for newsstand sales.”

  “Oh, how would you know?” Martha said. “Really, you never do any work. You don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair,” Ida came in. “Victor has a very responsible position. He has to oversee the physical running of the contest itself, and keep an eye on the escrow account, and work with the publicity. It’s not as if he were Vanna White turning letters.”

  “He might as well be Vanna White turning letters,” Martha said sharply. “You know as well as I do that Victor never does any of that stuff. You and Rosalie and I do it all, one way or the other. I mean, my God, escrow accounts. The only reason Victor knows how to make out a check is that he left his bank card at home one day and the woman at the bank showed him how to write a check for his money instead. I mean, for God’s sake. He’s hopeless.”

  “He’s no more hopeless than you are,” Ida argued.

  Victor was putting his papers into a tidy pile. Gregor saw that the one on the top had a red banner printed across it. It said:

  FOR A FANTASTIC FATHER’S DAY! PLAY IT NOW!

  Victor got the pile neat, looked up, and grinned. He was a little green around the gills.

  “Well,” he said. “Help. You asked us if we could help.”

  “That’s right,” Gregor said. “Hector Sheed—the detective assigned to this case from Manhattan Homicide—Hector Sheed has just gone to get a stopwatch. He’ll be back in a minute. I need somebody who’ll be willing to do a little running around that we could time.”

  “Why?” Martha van Straadt asked.

  “Because we’re trying to figure out how long it would have taken for someone to do what had to be done on the night your grandfather was killed,” Gregor said. “I don’t know if you realize it, but for the murder to have been brought off the way it was, the murderer had to do quite a lot of running around. We’re having something of a hard time figuring out how long it all took, and when. If we knew how long, you see, we might be able to figure out when.”

  “But you know when,” Ida insisted. “Strychnine is a fast-acting poison. Grandfather must have been poisoned almost immediately before Michael found him.”

  “Not that kind of when,” Gregor explained. “It’s true your grandfather must have been poisoned very close to the time he was found, but that doesn’t mean the poison itself was acquired in the preceding few minutes. It could have been taken out of Michael Pride’s medical cabinet an hour earlier and not been given to Charles van Straadt, but hidden instead. There’s no way to know.”

  “I don’t think we ought to do this,” Martha said. “We could be incriminating ourselves.”

  “Of course we won’t be incriminating ourselves,” Ida said impatiently. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “There are dozens of people around here,” Martha shot back. “He could get any one of them to do it. It doesn’t have to be us.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Gregor told her, “but it would be convenient. You’re all young and healthy, so we don’t have to worry about giving you a stroke asking you to race up and down stairs. And none of you seem to be on duty at the moment. Of course, Miss Greel might be called on in an emergency.”

  “I go on at six,” Ida said. “I think this all sounds perfectly reasonable, Mr. Demarkian. I’m sure we’d all like to do anything we can to help.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Martha said. Her face was a little red. “I’m not going to help. I’m not going to have anything to do with this.”

  “I
think it sounds like fun,” Victor said. “I haven’t done any real running since I left college. I was on the rugby team.”

  “I should have known this was going to happen.” Martha was indignant. “You’re ganging up on me. Ida’s got all the money and Victor thinks she’ll throw him some of it, so they’re closing ranks against me. I should have realized.”

  “Oh, Martha,” Ida said. “For God’s sake.”

  Victor looked confused. “I’m not closing ranks on anyone. I just think it would be fun to run around for a while.”

  “It was supposed to be Rosalie who got all the money.” Martha swung around to Gregor Demarkian. “That’s what Rosalie thought and that’s what I thought too, but it wasn’t true. It was Ida.”

  “I didn’t get all the money,” Ida said angrily. “Martha, I mean it, for God’s sake. Grandfather died before he could change his will.”

  “And you’re trying to make it look like I killed him,” Martha snapped. “You’re trying to make it look like I fed him a lot of poison so he wouldn’t have a chance to change it.”

  “And then you poisoned Rosalie,” Ida said, “and this Robbie Yagger. What for? Obviously there’s some kind of maniac running around.”

  “I don’t care who you think is running around.” Martha had a full head of steam now. Gregor had seen cartoons where furious characters shot smoke through their ears. He had never before seen a living human being who seemed capable of replicating the feat. Martha seemed to be going feral. Her left foot was stamping rhythmically against the floor. It reminded Gregor of something large and shaggy pawing the ground.

  “I don’t care what either of you say,” Martha bit out at them. “Family solidarity. Family solidarity my foot. This family has as much solidarity as Bosnia-Herzegovina. You two do anything you goddamn well want, but don’t expect to drag me into it. I’m going to go out and hire my own attorneys.”

  “Martha.” Ida was near tears.

  Martha wasn’t listening. She pounded her foot one last time onto the hard floor, glared at Gregor Demarkian, and spun away. Then she marched straight to the front doors and out of them, out of sight. She didn’t turn around once. Ida, Victor, and Gregor watched her go. Hector Sheed watched her go, too. The detective had come up to the group with the stopwatch in his hands just moments before Martha started her last speech. Now he stared after her in astonishment.

  “What was that?” he demanded. “What was the matter with her?”

  “She didn’t want to help with the experiment,” Victor said nervously.

  “So what?” Hector was still bewildered. “She didn’t want to help, all she had to do was say so. What’s going on around here? What’s all this about? Gregor?”

  Gregor Demarkian was thinking. He was thinking as hard as he had since he first got to New York on this trip, and for once it was doing him some good. What was it Sherlock Holmes always said? “Eliminate the impossible, and what you have left, however improbable, will be the truth.” Gregor didn’t know if that was the exact quote, but it would do. Not that he put much stock in silly fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes. He was too much of a professional for that. But still. You had to take your good advice where you could find it. Anywhere.

  They were all staring at him. Hector Sheed was being especially intense. Gregor forced himself into the present.

  “Miss Greel,” he said. “Miss van Straadt just now said something about the money. About how Rosalie was supposed to ‘get it all,’ I think she put it, but instead it was you.”

  Ida looked at Victor and then at her feet. “Yes. Yes, she did. Grandfather had made arrangements to change his will.”

  “To leave everything to you?”

  “To leave the bulk of his personal fortune to me, yes.”

  “Which amounts to about eight hundred million dollars. Do you actually know for a fact that your grandfather was going to change his will in this particular way?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ida said. “He’d contacted the lawyers. Mr. Cole had already had the new will drawn up. If Grandfather had lived another day, he would have signed it.”

  “Meaning that if your grandfather had lived, you would be a much richer young woman than you are now.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Demarkian. But I don’t see that that matters much. I’m a very rich young woman now.”

  “Oh, yes.” Gregor nodded thoughtfully. “Did you know about this change?”

  “Yes,” Ida said firmly. “Yes, I did.”

  “Can you prove that you did?”

  “I think I can. Grandfather wrote me a letter about it. I have the letter. I have the envelope it came in, too.”

  “Do you have it here?”

  “Yes, I do. I have a room here, on the staff floor. The letter is there.”

  “Good,” Gregor said. “Very good. Would you do me a favor, Miss Greel? Would you go get that letter and let Mr. Sheed and I take a look at it?”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “All right,” Ida Greel said. “Certainly. Just give me a minute or two. I’ll have to use the stairs.”

  “We’ll be on the stairs ourselves,” Gregor told her. “We’ll be using your brother here to get our times straightened out.”

  “Of course.”

  Ida Greel seemed to hesitate, then shrugged her shoulders and walked away from them, in the opposite direction to the one Martha had gone. Gregor and Hector and Victor watched her disappear into the people near the back of the hall.

  Hector Sheed blew out a long stream of air. “What was that all about?” he demanded. “I’m gone for five minutes and everybody goes absolutely crazy. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Of course I know what I’m doing,” Gregor told him. “In fact, I know what I’m doing for the first time since I got here. Mr. van Straadt, I’d like you to do some running up and down the stairs.”

  “No problem,” Victor said, but he looked confused again.

  Gregor Demarkian thought Victor van Straadt would always look confused, but that was all right.

  Gregor himself no longer was.

  TWO

  1

  EAMON DONLEAVY WAS TOO good a Catholic, and too much of a rationalist, to believe in precognition, or telepathy, or auras. Nevertheless, walking into his office after the emergency-room crisis with Robbie Yagger, Eamon knew his phone was going to ring before it rang. He also knew who would be on the other end of it before he picked it up. For a split second, he considered not picking it up. To say that Eamon Donleavy was having a bad day was ludicrous. Eamon Donleavy was having a bad year. Ever since he had first heard that Michael Pride was sick, he had been in a walking coma. He did all the things he was supposed to do. He said Mass at six o’clock every morning at St. Martin Porres Roman Catholic Church three blocks downtown, for the nuns from the center and anyone else who wanted to show up. He visited the sick. He did his paperwork. He spoke to the First Communion classes and the Confirmation classes and the Interfaith Sunday School classes that were held in the east building. He just couldn’t make any of it mean anything. He had become deaf, dumb, and blind. He kept coming to in the middle of rooms and hallways, utterly unable to explain how he had gotten where he was, utterly unable to explain what he was doing there. Sometimes he found himself thinking it wasn’t Michael who was sick. Sometimes he found himself hoping that he would die first.

  Today, coming up from all that fuss in the emergency room, Eamon Donleavy was not in a walking coma. He knew where he was and where he was going. He knew what he intended to tell people if they asked him what he was doing. He passed Victor van Straadt running up the stairs—what was Demarkian up to now?—and went into his office. The surface of his desk was absolutely clear except for a maroon felt desk blotter and a little stack of lined notebook sheets held down by a crystal paperweight. In the center of the paperweight there was a tiny statue of St. Joseph and a plastic plaque with the words: “St. Joseph, Foster Father of Jesus.” On the lined not
ebook sheets were letters written by Sister Angelique’s fourth-grade Afterschool Program class, thanking Eamon for being their spiritual father. Eamon sat down and looked at all of it. In the old days, his desk had never been so clean. It didn’t seem possible that “the old days” were only the beginning of this week. He had cleaned his office out, putting his affairs in order. He had begun to eat aspirins the way children eat Pez, battling a headache that wouldn’t go away.

  Up on the wall next to his door, Eamon Donleavy had a crucifix. It had a brass corpus on a walnut cross. On the other side of the door, he had the framed print of the Constantinople Madonna that had hung next to his bed all the years he was growing up. Both these things seemed to be connected to the phone. The phone is going to ring, Eamon thought, and it did. The man on the other end is going to be that son of a bitch from the Chancery.

  Eamon Donleavy had never used the words son of a bitch in his life. He had never even thought them before.

  He picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

  There must have been something in his voice. There was hesitation on the other end of the line. There was coughing. Finally, the Cardinal Archbishop said, “Father Donleavy? Please excuse me if I’ve disturbed you at work. I hadn’t heard from you for quite some time.”

  There’s been nothing to hear, Eamon Donleavy wanted to say, but he couldn’t. That boy was downstairs, poisoned. The world was falling apart.

  “We’ve been very busy here,” he said. “We all have been.”

  “I got a call a little while ago, Father Donleavy. I was told there had been another—attack.”

  “There seems to have been another poisoning, Your Eminence, yes. The victim was a member of the Holly Hill Christian Fellowship. You know those people. He came to the center every day and carried a protest sign.”

  “A pro-life protest sign.”

  “Yes, Your Eminence.”