Dear Old Dead(20)

“What time is it?” he asked Bennis. “I’m supposed to catch the two forty-five train.”

“It’s only half past one. Are you sure you want to wear that sweater?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you hot?”

“I’m hot here,” Gregor said, “but I’m always cold in New York. Do I have everything I’m supposed to have?”

“Your briefcase is on the kitchen table. Are you going to take it?”

“I’m going to have to. The Archbishop sent me all kinds of things, press clippings, the transcript of a radio show, pictures. I suppose I’d better have them on me if I want to look even halfway competent. Not that they were any use to me.”

“It seems so odd that no one’s been able to solve that murder,” Bennis said. “It seems so odd that there’s any kind of murder to solve. Don’t you read the reports and think it was just some kind of mugging, some stray lunatic and Charles van Straadt was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“A mugging done with strychnine?”

“You know what I mean,” Bennis said in exasperation. “I mean it didn’t happen in the high-rent district, did it? It happened in a medical center full of hard cases, psychopaths, and loonies all over the place—I mean, all right, strychnine might be pushing it a bit, but so what? There was probably a ton of strychnine in that place. Aren’t there medical uses for strychnine?”

“One or two.”

“So there.”

“So there?” Gregor got the suitcase up off his bed and put it on the floor. Bennis was exasperating him a little. The tone in her voice was so stubbornly superior. It was as if she thought any damn fool ought to be able to see this thing the way she saw it—and what was most annoying about that, Gregor admitted to himself, was that he had to agree with her. There were undoubtedly facets of this case he knew nothing about. If he had been dealing with John O’Bannion, Cardinal Archbishop of Colchester, he would have expected full disclosure. Instead, he was dealing with an unknown quantity. There were holes in the report the Archdiocese of New York had sent him. As long as those holes were not filled in, Bennis had more than a point. Why weren’t the police assuming that the murder had been committed by one of the myriad misfits and crazies that infested a neighborhood like the one Sojourner Truth Health Center was supposed to inhabit?

Of course, maybe they were.

Gregor took his suitcase out of his bedroom, down the hall, across the living room and into the foyer. He dropped it next to his front door and went into his kitchen. His briefcase was indeed lying on the table there, open and organized. Gregor’s briefcases were always organized. It was his life that was a mess.

Gregor snapped the briefcase up and stood it on its end. Bennis was leaning against the door jamb with her bare feet comfortably on his kitchen floor tiles. She was shaking her head dolefully and rhythmically, as if he were a small child about to embark on a patently stupid adventure.

“I think you’re kidding yourself she said. “I think you’re going to get to New York and find yourself in the middle of an absolute firestorm of publicity. I think the police commissioner is going to be ready to kill you. I think the Daily News is going to be on the commissioner’s side. I think—”

“You think too much,” Gregor interrupted. “I’ve been asked to do the Cardinal a favor. I’m going to do the Cardinal a favor. You should try to relax.”

“I should come with you to keep you out of trouble.”

“Bennis, when you come with me, you never keep me out of trouble.”

Bennis pushed herself away from the kitchen door. Then she turned around and walked back out toward the foyer, clucking to herself. Gregor heard his own front door open and close and more clucking going on out in the hall. Bennis’s clucks could be as loud as a jackhammer when she wanted them to be. Gregor waited until the clucks had died away. Then he went into his living room and looked out on Cavanaugh Street.

Years ago—so many years ago now, he didn’t want to remember; my God, he was nearly sixty—when Gregor Demarkian had been growing up, Cavanaugh Street had been just another Philadelphia ethnic neighborhood, a few ramshackle blocks of tenements dotted here and there with groceries and shoe stores, dry cleaners and religious supply shops. Back in the 1960s, when Gregor first joined the Bureau, it had begun that characteristic slide of American urban neighborhoods, that descent into carelessness and decay. Gregor remembered coming back for his mother’s funeral. The steps of Holy Trinity Church were crumbling. The gold paint on its double front doors was chipped and peeling. The building where Gregor’s mother had lived was in fairly good repair, but the building next to it was abandoned on the top two floors. Pacing the sidewalks on the night of the wake, getting away from the endless stream of condolences delivered to him by people he didn’t know any more, Gregor had accidentally turned the wrong corner and found himself face to face with a porno bookstore. Porno bookstores hadn’t been then what they became later. Decadence hadn’t been fashionable enough then. Gregor knew that porno bookstore was a sign, the mark of the beast, the beginning of the end.