Dear Old Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “Have you talked to Gregor Demarkian in the last day or two? I haven’t talked to him at all.”

  “He’s been here almost continuously, Your Eminence.” Eamon Donleavy didn’t like Gregor Demarkian, but if he had to choose between his Cardinal Archbishop and anybody, he almost always chose anybody. “He’s been very busy. And he’s managed to gain the cooperation of the police.”

  “Is that good?”

  “I think it is, Your Eminence, yes. It saves a lot of trouble. And it gives him access to information he couldn’t get otherwise. It gives us access, too.”

  “I don’t like the way this is going,” the Cardinal said. “Demarkian’s been here almost a week. I thought it would be settled by now. When he went up to Maryville for John O’Bannion, he had the whole mess cleared up in three days.”

  “When he went up to Colchester for John O’Bannion, the mess took two weeks. I don’t think you can put time limits on murder like that, Your Eminence. It’s not a calf-roping contest.”

  “I know that.”

  “Besides, I think he’s close to a solution. He’s out in the stairwell with Detective Sheed, making Victor van Straadt run up and down and up and down, over and over again. I think it has something to do with establishing the times.”

  “For Charles van Straadt’s death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Demarkian suspects Victor van Straadt?”

  “I don’t know that he does. He asked Victor to help him out. That’s all I’m sure of.”

  “He doesn’t suspect Michael Pride?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Or you?”

  “Why would he suspect me, Your Eminence?”

  “This is New York, Father Donleavy. If they can pin it on the Catholic Church, they will. You know they will.”

  No, he didn’t. “I suppose so, Your Eminence. Your Eminence, I’m sorry to cut this short, but with all the trouble we’ve had around here lately, I’m a little backed up. I’m late for an appointment.”

  “Of course, Father Donleavy. I’ll let you go.”

  “If there’s any news here, I’ll call you, Your Eminence.”

  “That will be a novelty, Father Donleavy. But don’t strain yourself. I’ll call you.”

  Eamon Donleavy heard a click in his ear, as sharp and lethal as a gunshot. He put the phone receiver back in its cradle and stared at it. Why bother to call the Cardinal Archbishop? The Cardinal Archbishop had spies. The Cardinal Archbishop knew everything. The Cardinal Archbishop probably had the whole damn building bugged.

  Eamon got out of his chair, and went into the hall. Victor was still on the stairs, running up and down. The voices of Gregor Demarkian and Hector Sheed drifted up through the well. Eamon got the impression of calm and deliberation, but no actual words. He crossed the hall and looked into Michael’s office.

  Michael’s office looked the way it always looked. There was mess. There was clutter. There was no religion. Michael didn’t keep crucifixes on his wall. He didn’t keep prayer wheels or mezzuzahs. He didn’t have plastic statues of the Virgin on his file cabinets or a copy of the Koran tucked away on a bookshelf somewhere. Michael always said he was a man without God, and tried to mean it. What confused Eamon Donleavy was that what Michael meant by being without God was not what all the other atheists meant by it. With Michael, nothing came out right, nothing was the way it was supposed to be. With Michael, when you signed on for the ride, you never knew where you were going to end up.

  Suddenly, Eamon Donleavy spun around and slammed the door of Michael Pride’s office shut. It was too much for him, it really was. All the things he had tried so hard to hold back from himself for years were coming at him in waves. Just when he thought he was going to have a chance to breathe, they hit him again. No, Eamon thought, not them. Never them. Just it. One single sentence. Four short words. Enough to kill him as surely as strychnine had killed Charles and Rosalie van Straadt.

  Oh, Christ, Eamon thought, doubling over, nauseated, in so much pain he felt as if he had needles in his bones.

  Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ.

  I love this man.

  2

  EVERY PERSON IN RESIDENCE at the Sojourner Truth Health Center for more than two weeks on a nonmedical matter was supposed to take housekeeping duty if they were asked, and since Julie Enderson had been resident at the center for months now, she was often asked. She was asked especially often because the nuns knew she was reliable. Housekeeping duty was one of those things that was very important in the aggregate but not very important piece by piece. Seeing that the laundry was folded and put away in the linen closets, dusting the stair railings and the furniture in the common rooms, making sure the flatware was properly sorted—if any one of those things hadn’t managed to get done on any one particular day, it wouldn’t have mattered, but if all of them had been consistently left unfinished, the whole place would have gone to pot. Julie Enderson knew about places going to pot. Her mother had had a kind of genius for them, so that any apartment Steeva Enderson so much as looked at instantly became a repository of litter and peeling paint. Julie didn’t mind cleaning. The really important cleaning—meaning what had to be done in the west building in the medical facilities—was taken care of by a professional service. The service protected the center from the kind of nasty surprises health inspectors could bring. Julie was assigned only those duties directly relating either to the east building itself, or to the cafeteria and basement of the west building. Even the west building offices were taken care of by the service. In practice, Julie was assigned to sort clothes in the laundry and to sort flatware. Those two things could be accomplished while studying. Julie didn’t mind that either. She wanted the time for studying. She wanted to study and study and study until her brain fell out of her head. She was convinced that if she worked as hard as she could and then harder, she would get beyond the place where she saw worms and maggots in the mirror. She would get home.

  Today, she was sitting on a high stool at the table in the laundry, folding pillowcases. It was six thirty in the evening, hours after All That had happened, but she was still shaken. She had her history book open to the start of the chapter on the abolitionist movement. She had even read a paragraph or two. She hadn’t been able to retain anything. It was a good thing the qualifying test for the academy wasn’t due to be held for another month. The way things had been going around here, Julie was surprised she had been able to concentrate at all. She looked at the photograph of Harriet Beecher Stowe and the reprint of the illustration from the original Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The illustration showed a tiny black girl on her knees, praying to heaven in agony. It was not the first nineteenth-century illustration Julie had seen that had black people in it. All such illustrations made her wonder. Maybe black people had changed between the time these illustrations were drawn and now. Maybe black people were different. Certainly no black person Julie had ever met looked anything at all like the black people in these pictures.

  Julie took a yellow pillowcase out of the pile, folded it, and put it on the stack of yellow pillowcases. She took out a blue one, folded it, and put it on the stack of blue pillowcases. Folding pillowcases was a terrible thing to do when you couldn’t study. The nuns didn’t believe in watching television, so there was only one set in the east building, in the common room upstairs. Julie hadn’t thought to bring a novel or a magazine. She didn’t have the money for novels or magazines anyway. She put another folded yellow pillowcase on the stack of yellow pillowcases and listened, hard. The laundry room was in the basement of the east building. Julie was down here by herself. There was nothing for her to hear but the sound of herself folding pillowcases and the soft scurry of rats and mice in the walls. The nuns tried and tried, but it was no use. This was New York. If you had a basement, you had rats and mice in the walls. Period.

  Julie had folded five more pillowcases before she heard the sounds of footsteps on the basement stairs. The pile of pillowcases was half transform
ed into folded piles. Most of what was left was Julie’s least favorite color, white. She slipped off the stool and went to the door of the laundry room. There were definitely footsteps on the stairs. The rest of the basement looked dark and empty. Julie reminded herself that the door to the basement was locked. It locked automatically and could not be left unlocked without resort to burglar’s tools. The lock had been fine when Julie had used Sister Kenna’s keys to come downstairs. She stood in the doorway and looked at the dimly lighted sweep of stairway going up. She saw a man’s good brown shoes come into sight and then the crease on a pair of pants. For a second, Julie couldn’t remember who, connected to the center, could be dressed like that—except maybe for Charles van Straadt, and Charles van Straadt was dead. She ran a terrible movie through her head that had to do with ghosts in drag and corpses walking in the night, and then the rest of the man came into view, and she saw that it was Gregor Demarkian. Julie Enderson half relaxed, although she told herself she had relaxed completely. The truth of it was, Julie Enderson would never in her life feel entirely comfortable being alone in a room with a man. Any man. Even the Risen Christ himself.

  Gregor Demarkian came the rest of the way down the stairs and saw her standing in the laundry room doorway.

  “Hello,” he said. “Sister Kenna said I’d find you here. Do you have a moment to talk?”

  Julie Enderson looked back at the history textbook lying open on the table. Half an hour, and she hadn’t turned a single page.

  “Sure,” she said. “Can I fold pillowcases while I talk? I think Sister Kenna is in a hurry.”

  “It sounds all right by me.”

  Julie retreated to her stool. When he came into the laundry room, she was holding a pillowcase in the air in front of her body. She got it folded and put it on the stack and quickly reached for another one. Gregor Demarkian got another stool, pulled it up to the sorting table, and sat.

  “Robbie is going to be all right,” Julie babbled. “I heard Augie and Sister Kenna talking. Everybody is saying Michael did something with him that nobody’s ever done before, and now Michael will be in all the medical journals again, like that time a couple of years ago. I don’t know what he did a couple of years ago, just that it was important.”

  “I think this was important, too,” Gregor Demarkian said, “but I probably know less about medicine than you do. All that happened with Robbie interrupted our talk.”

  “Yes,” Julie said. “Yes, it did. I hope I wasn’t wasting your time.”

  “You weren’t wasting my time.”

  “It’s not the kind of thing everybody would think was important. People uptown, men I guess I mean, maybe even some women, I don’t think they think things like that matter. You know, that a man like Charles van Straadt owned a place like that. It would matter more to them that he was rich and that he owned the Sentinel and a radio station and had a lot of houses with rooms he didn’t use.”

  “I think it would matter to quite a few people,” Gregor told her. “It mattered to me. It—solidified something I was thinking.”

  Julie was curious. “Solidified? What does that mean? Do you mean you’re solid now about who committed the murders?”

  “Oh, I was pretty solid about that even before I talked to you this afternoon, but it was what you’d call an aesthetic solution. I knew who the killer was because I knew who the killer had to be. Given the personalities of the other people involved and the setup, there was only one possible solution. I just wasn’t too sure how it had been done.”

  “And now you know? Did sending Mr. van Straadt—the young one, Victor?—did making him run up and down the way you did tell you how it was done?” Julie blushed. “We all heard you. I mean, it was all over the center.”

  “I’m sure it was. Making Victor van Straadt run up and down the stairs told me how it hadn’t been done. I’m hoping to get something of the same kind of help from you.”

  Julie cocked her head. She must have trusted Gregor Demarkian more than she thought she did. Her folding had slowed. She was no longer being meticulously careful to keep an open pillowcase in front of her body. She picked up a white pillowcase and shook it out.

  “I don’t understand,” she said finally. “Do you mean that all that I had to say about Charles van Straadt and the place in Times Square makes something impossible? I thought it would make a lot of things possible. I thought that was the point. That a man like that would have so many people who wanted to kill him, it wouldn’t make any sense to go looking into Michael Pride.”

  “Don’t worry about Michael Pride,” Gregor told her. “At least, not on this score. No, it’s not the things you told me about the place in Times Square I want to talk about now. It’s about the things you did on the night of the murder. About the time after you saw Charles van Straadt.”

  “We talked about that already,” Julie said quickly. “In the cafeteria. I didn’t kill Charles van Straadt, Mr. Demarkian.”

  “I didn’t think you did, Julie. It’s what happened when you got to the first floor that I want to get straight here. You said you saw Ida Greel.”

  “That’s right. Ida was on duty.”

  “What was she doing?”

  Julie frowned. “She was just walking around, in the hallway.”

  “Was she near Dr. Pride’s examining room?”

  “Oh, no.” Julie’s face cleared. “Mr. Demarkian, nobody could have gotten near Michael’s examining room, not then. And not for a whole while later, either. I know. Remember how I said I was trying to find out if my mother had been caught in the fight?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, that was where I went. Down to Michael’s examining room. Because it was really late, you see, and the nuns were using it as an extra emergency room. They were using all the offices and examining rooms. I mean, if you’ve got someone bleeding on the floor, you can’t stand on ceremony. Or go by the rules. I’m not sure what I mean.”

  “I am. Now let me get this straight. When you came downstairs after seeing Charles van Straadt on the third floor, the first floor of the west building was so full of patients that Michael Pride’s examining room was being used to see cases. Was Michael Pride himself there, by the way?”

  “I don’t think so. Everybody said he was in the operating room.”

  “All right. What about Sister Augustine?”

  Julie shook her head. “Augie was in the operating room, too. At least she was when I was first there. I saw her come out about the time I decided to go back to the east building. I don’t think she saw me. She would have dissed me out.”

  “Perfect.” Gregor nodded. He reached for a white pillowcase and began to fold it. “Perfect. The examining room was occupied that way for as long as you were in the west building that night?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “At no time was the area cleared for any reason whatsoever?”

  Julie laughed. “You’ve never been around here in the middle of an emergency. Cleared how? And to where? There wouldn’t be anyplace for people to go except out in the street, and the people here are very big on how they never put anybody out in the street. In the winter when the homeless people come around, Augie won’t even call the city vans. She just gets a bunch of blankets and lets them bed down on the old furniture in the basement space off the cafeteria. That’s when they started getting exterminators out here and putting down rat poison. Augie said you couldn’t let people sleep in the basement if they were going to get bitten, and she wasn’t going to stop letting people sleep in the basement.”

  “Perfect,” Gregor Demarkian said again. He put the folded pillowcase on the pile. He got off his stool and put it back into the corner it had come from. He seemed to be bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “Thank you very much, Miss Enderson. You’ve been a great deal of help.”

  “Ms.,” Julie said automatically.

  “Ms. Enderson,” Gregor Demarkian repeated.

  “Have I really been of help? It doesn’t
seem that I told you much of anything.”

  “You helped me to cut off the avenues of escape,” Gregor said. “Law enforcement has changed since I entered it, Ms. Enderson. It used to be that all you had to do was prove a positive case. Now you have to make sure you haven’t left any gates lying open a good lawyer could drive a defense through. Now you not only have to prove that the defendant committed the crime, you have to prove as far as possible that there was no other way the crime could have been committed. If you don’t do that, the lawyers scream ‘reasonable doubt,’ and half the time the jury buys it, and off walks your murderer, free.”

  “Oh,” Julie said.

  “Thank you again,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  He backed up to the doorway, nodded to her happily, and then disappeared into the gloom. Julie stared into the space where he had gone with perplexity. In the world in which Julie Enderson lived, defendants were almost never let off by juries on grounds of reasonable doubt. Defendants were almost never let off by juries. That’s why so few of the people Julie knew who had been arrested had ever had a trial. They just got themselves lawyers from the Legal Aid Society to cut them a plea bargain. Sometimes they were guilty and sometimes they were not, but it hardly seemed to matter. Surely they had been guilty of something somewhere. Almost always they had been dealing drugs. One way or the other, they had been expecting to land in jail ever since they knew what jail was.

  Oh, well, Julie thought now. Maybe it was different for people downtown. Everything else was.

  For some reason she couldn’t pin down, she was much calmer now than she had been before she talked to Gregor Demarkian. She could almost concentrate. She didn’t want to concentrate on the abolitionists, though. Julie leaned across the table and flipped through the history text until she came to the page with the colored boxed article on her favorite person in American history.

  Sojourner Truth.

  3

  DOWNSTAIRS ON THE SECOND floor, in a room only three feet from the nurses’ station, Robbie Yagger was lying in a white-sheeted hospital bed, limp. Next to him in a green plastic molded chair was Shana Malvera, fretting. Shana had been there for nearly an hour now, ever since she had heard what had happened to Robbie and where they had taken him, and she expected to be there for a couple of hours more. Shana believed implicitly in the healing power of human connection. She had said so now at least five times. Every time she did, Robbie felt all warm and light. He was supposed to be unconscious, but he wasn’t, not quite. He was floating in something like twilight. He could hear, very clearly, everything that Shana said. He thought he might be able to see, if he could just get his eyes open. His eyes felt weighted down by lead. Mostly what he could do was remember, but it was a strange sort of remembering. Nothing was in order. Nothing was worrisome. Nothing was frightening. Nothing was at all important except the sound of Shana Malvera’s voice.