Dear Old Dead(28)

Gregor opened his door and got out. The nun in the red sweatsuit had stopped at the bottom of the center’s stoop. When Gregor was safely on the sidewalk, she advanced.

“Mr. Demarkian? Mr. Gregor Demarkian?”

“That’s right,” Gregor said.

The little nun beamed. She really was little, too. Gregor thought she was barely five feet tall. She was at least significantly shorter than Bennis Hannaford, who was five feet four. Unlike Bennis Hannaford, the little nun was very round, a composition in globes and circles. She was wearing bright white sneakers with green glow-in-the-dark patches on the heels and toes.

“Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you. I’m Sister Mary Augustine, but everybody calls me Augie. It’s so much easier.”

“How do you do,” Gregor said.

Eamon Donleavy was out of the cab now, too. The cab was pulling slowly away from the curb. Gregor guessed it was about to head straight downtown. He didn’t blame Juan in the least.

“I hope everything’s been okay up here while I’ve been away,” Eamon Donleavy said to the little nun. “No hysterical calls from the Cardinal. No last-minute emergencies that require me to call the chancery immediately.”

“The Cardinal’s been as silent as the dead,” Augie said. “We haven’t had any trouble from that quarter at all. It’s other people you ought to be worried about.”

“Did we have a raid?” Eamon Donleavy looked worried.

“What kind of raid?” Gregor asked.

“No raids,” Augie said. Then she turned to Gregor Demarkian to explain. “We run something here called the refuge program. We take girls—at their request; we don’t coerce anybody into anything here—we take girls who are prostitutes and want to quit and place them, well, anywhere we can place them. The most important consideration is to get them as far away from here as possible, so we try to put them in boarding schools and halfway houses far out into the country. We have a number of orders who will take our girls and young women free of charge, but there aren’t always enough places ready when we need them, so for a while we sometimes have to keep them here. It’s not the best solution, I know, but there it is. And, of course, the pimps don’t like it. So they raid.”

“Oh,” Gregor said.

“Julie Enderson’s pimp showed up DOA at Lenox Hill night before last,” Augie said to Eamon Donleavy, “so what I was most worried about in that direction is just not going to happen. I only found out about it by accident, though. We’ve got to do something about the way we communicate with people around here.”

“We’re trying,” Eamon Donleavy said. “We’ve been trying for a decade. Didn’t you say you had trouble?”

“You have trouble,” Sister Augustine said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with me. Rosalie is here.”

“Do you mean Rosalie van Straadt?” Gregor asked.

Augie nodded vigorously. “That’s exactly who I mean. And she’s blowing a fit—well, you’ll have to see it to believe it, if she hasn’t calmed down by the time you get in there, which she may not have, because I don’t think she wants to calm down. I don’t think that’s her idea at all.”

“What does she want?” Eamon Donleavy asked.

“She wants Michael, of course. She wants what everybody else wants. We haven’t let her get at him, though. We’re smarter than that around here, even if she is a van Straadt.”

“Get Ida,” Eamon Donleavy said tensely. “Let her take care of it.”

“Oh, we’ve got Ida, Father E. We’ve got half the staff, too, and some of the girls from refuge. The next thing you know, we’re going to have the United States Marines. I think—”

“Sister Augustine!” someone shouted. “Sister Augustine, Sister Augustine. Come quick.”

Gregor looked up to the center doors just as a nun in a calf-length brown habit came rushing out of them, her veil bobbing precariously on her head, her eyes wild. She saw the little group of them standing together on the pavement and rushed down to them, holding on to her veil with one hand and her heart with the other.

“Oh, Augie,” she gasped when she reached them, “and Father E. I’m so glad I found you. You’ve got to come right along. You don’t know what’s going on in there.”

“Is Michael all right?” Eamon Donleavy demanded.

The nun looked bewildered. “I don’t know where Dr. Pride is. Is there something wrong with him?”

“Never mind,” Sister Augustine said crisply. “Just tell us what happened. What is going on in there?”