Dear Old Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “So they would have stopped talking to Ida.”

  “Yes, they would have. And at that point everything would have started to unravel. Victor may be stupid. Martha and Rosalie were not. Once Ida was separated from that contest and Martha and Rosalie had to take charge of it, all the little discrepancies would start to come out. I don’t know if Ida knew at the end her grandfather was only toying with her or if she thought he was serious. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t allow him to change his will in her favor or even to convince her cousins that he was going to change his will in her favor. She didn’t dare take the chance of finding out what he would do if he did—or had—found out about those contests.”

  “What would he have done?” Bennis asked. “Would he have prosecuted her?”

  Gregor shrugged. “I don’t know. He would have exposed her, I’m sure of that. That would probably have been enough.”

  “What about Rosalie? Would Rosalie have exposed Ida, too?”

  “My guess is that Rosalie, like Robbie Yagger, saw Ida someplace she shouldn’t have been. Fortunately for Ida, Rosalie was so obsessed with Michael Pride, she wasn’t much interested in any other solution to her grandfather’s death. Do yourself a favor and never fall in love with a man who hasn’t fallen in love with you first. That kind of thing causes women a lot of trouble.”

  “It would cause anybody a lot of trouble. I don’t fall in love with anybody.”

  “Donna Moradanyan has.” Gregor pressed his face against the living room window. Down the street, he could see Donna Moradanyan and her young son, Tommy. They were sitting on the stoop of Lida Arkmanian’s town house and holding hands. Standing in front of them was a Philadelphia plainclothes police officer named Russell Donahue. Russell Donahue had been visiting Donna Moradanyan’s apartment upstairs on a regular basis for several months now.

  “Are you keeping track of that?” Gregor asked Bennis. “Is he treating her well? Is he responsible? Does he drink?”

  “He drinks a glass of wine every night with dinner if he isn’t on duty. He loves Tommy to pieces. He brings Donna a single rose every Sunday night. Things are fine.”

  “That’s nice. How are things with you?”

  “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”

  “You ate all the food,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  The paper plate with the loukoumia on it was empty. Bennis glanced at it, shrugged her shoulders and stood up. Gregor watched her leave the living room and go into the kitchen, the shawl slipping down her back like a sheet of cashmere snow.

  Investigating extracurricular murders was all well and good, Gregor thought, but he was always very glad to be home.

  And if he stayed home long enough, Bennis and Tibor and Donna and Lida and Hannah and old George and Howard Kashinian would drive him crazy enough so that he would be chomping at the bit for another problem to investigate, anywhere in the world but here.

  If people ever started to make sense, Gregor Demarkian thought, the universe would have a nervous breakdown.

  2

  UP IN HARLEM, STARING out at the brilliant sunshine of Father’s Day morning and the children from the east building walking off hand in hand to church, Michael Pride was having his worst day yet. He had a terrible feeling it was only going to deteriorate from here. He couldn’t afford to go upstairs to rest. Both of the doctors who spelled him were off this morning, taking their ease after a particularly bad Saturday night. One of them would have stayed if he had asked them to, but Michael hadn’t wanted that. They had looked so wrung out. They had looked so discouraged. They didn’t have what he had to fall back on, that thing inside, that nameless thing that had brought him here to begin with.

  Michael Pride was sitting in one of the plastic chairs in the emergency-room waiting area in the west building. He had collapsed there after a trip to the men’s room. Now he thought about getting up and getting moving, about going down to his examining room, about finding a nun to get him a cup of coffee. He didn’t want Augie to find him here. Augie got so—irrational—about his condition.

  Michael had just managed to get himself upright, holding on to the back of the chair, when the woman walked in the front doors and stopped uncertainly in front of the admitting desk. She was a white woman with bright red hair and a slight frame. She was dressed in very expensive clothes and wearing the kind of delicate gold watch sold for Christmas presents in places like Tiffany’s. The expensive clothes were casual in an Upper East Side kind of way, fawn-colored slacks made of silk, a white silk T-shirt that had cost at least a hundred and fifty dollars at Bendel’s. Michael wondered how she’d made it all the way up here without getting mugged.

  The woman looked around, saw him, and paused uncertainly. Then she walked over to his chair. Michael had sat down in it again. It was too much of an effort to stand up.

  “Excuse me,” the woman said. “I’m looking for Dr. Michael Pride.”

  She’s in her early to mid-thirties, Michael thought to himself. She looks younger. Then he held out his hand to her and said, “I’m Michael Pride. Who are you?”

  More hesitation, more uncertainty. The woman took his hand. “My name is Marianne Kempner,” she said. “I quit my job last Friday.”

  “Quit your job?”

  “I shouldn’t put it like that. It wasn’t what people usually mean by a job. I’m a doctor. I had a private practice down on East Sixty-fourth Street.”

  “Had?”

  “Well, yes. I guess had. The building where my offices were was sold, you see, and I had until Friday to sign on to keep the suite. And I was going to. There was no reason I shouldn’t. But I didn’t.”

  “Do you have a new suite elsewhere?”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Do you have partners?”

  “I used to have a partner,” Marianne Kempner said. “My father. I took over his practice after he died. That was—eight months ago. He’d been in that same suite for twenty-four years.”

  “And now it’s gone.”

  “Yes it is. I have to be out by the end of the month.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Marianne Kempner told him. “I know this is going to sound nuts, but that’s why I’m here. I think I’ve been thinking about it for months now. I know I’ve been thinking about it all weekend. I want to work here.”

  “We don’t pay much,” Michael said. “We don’t pay hardly anything at all.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t need any money, not right away, at any rate. Didn’t I read somewhere that everyone on staff here lives here? They have rooms right at the center?”

  “They do. That’s what we pay, mostly. Room and board. Fifty dollars a month in spending money for the doctors.”

  “That’ll be fine. I own an apartment, you see, downtown, but I’m not happy there. I haven’t been happy there since I bought it. I could sell it and live here until I find another place. And I have a lot of money put by, you know, and my loans are paid off. I should be very happy, really, it’s just that I’m not. I’m… bored.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “Do you? All the way up here this morning, I’ve been telling myself I’m crazy. I must be crazy. I made three hundred thousand dollars last year. But it isn’t right, is it?”

  “What isn’t?”

  “What I see on the news. The way people live up here.”

  “No, it isn’t right.”

  “I keep pacing around my apartment, making myself sick with it, and I don’t know why. I’m thirty-four years old. I’m a reasonably intelligent woman. I’ve known about the way the world is forever.”

  Michael cocked his head. “When I first came up here, I used to walk around the streets sure that I had to be dreaming. It couldn’t be real. I knew it couldn’t be real. Even though I was standing in the middle of it.”

  “I really have very good credentials,” Marianne Kempner said. “I got my BA at Brown and my MD at Johns Hopkins. And
I did my residency at Mass General. In internal medicine.”

  “Surgery?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, of course. I could get you all my papers tomorrow. And you could check the AMA and the licensing people and all that. I really—there’s nothing wrong. I’m not in any kind of trouble or anything.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “I would think it if I were you. Somebody like me coming up here like this. It’s what all my friends are going to think. Either that, or that I’ve had a nervous breakdown.”

  “That’s what all my friends thought, too,” Michael said. “You keep forgetting I did the same thing once. I did something worse. There was no center for me to go to then.”

  “Oh, well,” Marianne Kempner said. “That’s something different. You’re some kind of a saint.”

  Michael Pride held out his arm. “Help me up,” he told Marianne Kempner. “I have AIDS, and I’m having a bad day. Get me to my office and we’ll do a little more talking.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you know what you just reminded me of? The only phrase I ever really liked from the Bible. The essence of Christianity.”

  “I’m Jewish,” Marianne said.

  “In this case, I don’t think it matters. ‘If you would be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect, then go, sell what thou hast, and give it to the poor, and come, follow me.’”

  “Follow who?” Marianne asked. “I’m not following anybody. I’m not even walking a straight line.”

  Marianne Kempner was slight, but she was strong. Michael was leaning his full weight on her left shoulder and she wasn’t even dipping to the side. He let her lead him carefully down the corridor, moving slowly, without complaint. There were so many things he wanted to tell her that he knew he couldn’t tell her, so many things he already knew that she would have to find out for herself. It wasn’t a question of passion or self-sacrifice. It wasn’t a matter of turning oneself into a saint. It wasn’t a life of renunciation or deprivation or pious punctilious giving up. Michael Pride had never been happier in his life than in the time he had spent in Harlem. He had never had a moment of regret for any of the things he was supposed to have given up. He had never for a moment believed that he was dedicating himself to a cause or going on a crusade to make the world a better place. Michael Pride was here because he wanted to be—and he wanted to be here much more than any of his partners had ever wanted to be playing golf in Scotland or lying on the beach for the season on the Costa del Sol. Actually, the idea of both of those things left Michael Pride cold.

  Michael let Marianne Kempner deposit him in the first chair she came to after they got into the examining room. Then he let her get him a cup of water. He could see that she was concerned for him, but he was not concerned for himself. This was temporary. It would be months before the real pain started, the consistent pain that he would not be able to work through. That ought to be just enough time.

  “Now,” he said, taking a sip of water. “You’d better get yourself a chair and listen hard, because I’m going to tell you what we’re going to make you do. There’s a lot of work around here.”

  “Right,” Marianne Kempner said.

  She grabbed a chair and sat down, and Michael Pride smiled.

  He had been worrying a lot lately, but he shouldn’t have been.

  He should have known that the person he needed was bound to show up.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries

  Prologue

  Friday the Thirteenth in New York

  1

  FOR DEANNA KROLL, THE crisis started at three thirty in the morning on Friday, November 13, in the lobby of the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building at Twenty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Actually, of course, the crisis had started much earlier—in another time zone, in another country—when a thick fog had rolled across the rump end of Great Britain and settled stubbornly in the hollows made by Gatwick and Heathrow airports. All flights in and out were canceled for hours, and remained canceled, even as DeAnna was getting out of her chauffeur-driven limousine onto the pavement in front of the Hullboard-Dedmarsh’s tall glass doors, muttering under her breath about how she was going to go stark raving bonkers permanently if she had to spend one more minute listening to white people. Actually, the chauffeur-driven limousine wasn’t DeAnna’s idea, and she didn’t usually categorize the problems in her life by the race of their perpetrators. Gradon Cable Systems insisted on the limousine for the middle-of-the-night runs DeAnna made to headquarters. It was the only way old Bart Gradon could be sure he wouldn’t be woken up personally because DeAnna was either stranded or (God help us) arrested. DeAnna got stranded because there wasn’t a cab driver in Manhattan who wanted to pick up a six-foot-tall black woman with the curves of a Nubian fertility goddess and the shoulders of an NFL linebacker—at least not in the middle of the night. She got arrested because a certain segment of the New York City police force was convinced that no black woman could afford to wear that much Gucci suede if she wasn’t turning tricks. DeAnna credited these arrests with having changed Bart Gradon’s mind about all the really important things. Until he’d been forced to find a lawyer to get her out of jail before dawn, he’d be fond of arguing that racism didn’t exist any more. DeAnna credited herself with having memorized his private phone number out of his executive assistant’s private phone book in the less than four seconds it had taken that assistant to pop into Bart Gradon’s private office bathroom and deposit a bar of gift soap on the Baccarat crystal soap stand.

  As for white people, DeAnna Kroll usually got on quite well with them. She got on especially well with the long-term staff of The Lotte Goldman Show, many of whom she had known for over fifteen years. The Lotte Goldman Show had been DeAnna Kroll’s own personal idea, back in the days when she was still living her job from day to day, convinced that any second now she was going to be fired and sent right back to where she’d started from. Unlike the other young women at the other desks crammed into the small square room called Programming and Development, DeAnna had not started in Rye or at Wellesley. She hadn’t even started in school. She’d been sitting in a two-room apartment on 145th Street and Lenox Avenue, counting out the twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents left of her welfare check and wondering how in God’s name she was going to feed the baby for the next two weeks, when she got word that she’d passed her high school equivalency exam. She had been eighteen years old. Her new baby had been eight months old. The baby who had provided the occasion for her dropping out of school had just turned three. There were people who made the kind of big leaps DeAnna had made in the years since who said they didn’t remember any of it, it all went by in a blur. DeAnna thought they were full of shit. She remembered all of it, thank you very much, from her first job interview to her first apartment in midtown to the endless interview with the admissions director of the Brearley School, where she wanted to send her daughters. DeAnna remembered all of it and would just as soon forget.

  The night doorman at the Hullboard-Dedmarsh was asleep in his chair. DeAnna pressed her face to the glass and rapped as sharply as she could with the edge of one of the gold rings on her right hand. On the other side of the dimly lit foyer, she could see a shapeless form stretched out on a leather couch. That would be the driver who was supposed to pick up the Siamese twins at the airport, and apparently hadn’t. In the middle of the foyer there was a bright tall sign, with red letters on a white background, leaning on a rickety wooden tripod. The sign said,

  MY SIAMESE TWIN IS A TRANSVESTITE.

  DeAnna swung cornrows over her shoulder and knocked again.

  At the check-in station, the doorman stirred. On the couch, the driver turned just enough to make DeAnna think he was going to fall off. He didn’t. DeAnna rapped for a third time and sent up a prayer that her chauffeur wouldn’t decide to take off for parts unknown. On her way up, DeAnna had thought there would be places she could get to in this city that woul
d be safe. Now she knew better.

  The doorman jerked in his chair, unbalanced himself and began to fall. The fall did what DeAnna’s rapping had failed to do and woke him up. He saw the big black face staring at him from the window and leapt to his feet, imagining God knew what. DeAnna closed her eyes and counted to ten.

  She had gotten to eight when she heard the sound of the key in the lock. She opened her eyes again and stepped back so that the doorman could let her in. Then she gave him a tight little smile—his name was Jack Pilchek, but she made a habit of not remembering it—and marched across the foyer to the couch where the driver was sleeping.

  “Prescott,” she said in her second-to-loudest voice. She saved her loudest voice for screaming fights with her younger daughter, who had just turned twenty and decided that she’d really much rather be a street person than a student at one of America’s most expensive private colleges, but she wanted to be a street person in Reeboks. DeAnna hated Reeboks. She kicked the edge of the couch with her Gucci-shod toe and said, “Prescott, come, on, wake up, tell me what’s going on here.”

  Prescott turned, stirred, sat up. His eyes were red and his face was lined. DeAnna thought he must once have been a fine-looking man, in that fine-boned Waspy way that characterized President Bush and the nonethnic presidents of Yale. She also thought he must once have had one hell of a drinking problem.

  Prescott ran his hand through his hair and yawned. “Ms. Kroll. Hi. Sorry. Just a minute.”

  “Siamese twins,” DeAnna reminded him.

  “Right.” Prescott blinked. “They weren’t at the airport.”

  “You mean they weren’t on their plane?”

  “There was no plane for them to be on. It was canceled.”

  “Canceled.”

  “I talked to the woman at the reception desk. The—whatever. The airline.”