Dear Old Dead(30)

He reached the fifth floor and the day-care center. Forty children between the ages of two and five were running back and forth across the central corridor, into one room and out of another. A cluster of six children around the age of three were sitting in a semicircle around Sister Rosalita, singing the alphabet song. The stairway down was blocked. Michael waited while Kanistra Johnson came over and removed the block for him.

“You going down to see the great detective?” Kanistra asked.

“Something like that.”

“Sister Joan Kennedy was up here a while ago saying that Rosalie was downstairs having a fit.”

Michael smiled wanly and continued down the stairs. He passed four without stopping. He stopped on three just long enough to make sure that his own and all the other offices were empty. He stopped on two to check out the room of one Carmelita Gomez, who had given birth the night before under what could only be described as seriously bizarre conditions. Her grandmother—a full-blown schizophrenic who was just cunning enough to appear placid any time she got in front of a social worker—had decided that the baby was taking too long, it was bottled up in there, they had to release it. Then she had gotten a great big kitchen knife and stabbed Carmelita in the top of the abdomen.

Carmelita wasn’t in her room. She was supposed to go in for a new set of x-rays today. Maybe she was down there. Michael stopped at the nursery and saw that Carmelita’s baby was well and sleeping comfortably. Amazingly enough, it had not been damaged at all, at least that he could see, by the insane circumstances surrounding its delivery. The baby was a boy, whom Carmelita had named Juan, after her grandmother. Carmelita’s grandmother’s name was Juanita.

There’s really no way I’m going to be able to get out of this, Michael thought. I’m going to have to go down there and do something about it. Augie and Eamon Donleavy did their best to shield him from annoyances. They meant well and they often did him a service by affording him protection. Sometimes they were attempting the impossible. And much as he didn’t like the idea, he was going to have to meet the Cardinal’s private detective eventually. No, Michael didn’t like that idea at all. Ever since he’d first heard Demarkian was coming, he’d been having a very difficult time calming down. It was a bad idea, bringing a man like that to a place like this. It was an especially bad idea to bring a man like that into a life like his. Michael Pride had no illusions about himself. Other people called him a saint. He knew he was a fanatic with a socially approved obsession. His other obsessions weren’t socially approved at all.

As soon as he got to the first floor, he could hear it: the breaking of glass; the sound of voices coming from his office, raised in anger. The stairs rose against the back wall of the building. When these buildings had originally been built, they had each had another set of stairs at the front, off the little vestibule with the mailboxes in it. In the east building, these stairs were still standing. In this building, they had been removed to provide space for one of the elevators. Michael’s office was at the center of the floor along the east side, near the main emergency examining rooms and only a step or two from the elevators. It was one of the smallest rooms on the floor, but also one of the most conveniently located. The door to Michael’s office was open. Staff people were spilling out of it—or maybe crowded into it would be a better description. Patients were indulging their curiosity, too. A man with his arm in a sling edged closer and closer to the back of the crowd in the door even as Michael watched him. A very pregnant young woman was sitting on a gurney swinging her legs in the air, taking in every word.

Michael went up to the two women at the very back of the crowd—Sarah Cavanieri and Judy Hedge, both nurses—and nudged them aside. They both blushed bright red when they recognized him. Judy Hedge tapped the woman in front of her. The woman was not somebody Michael knew, but she was somebody who knew him. She blushed too and moved aside just as quickly as the other two had. This was what it meant to have charisma, Michael decided. You could part crowds the way God parted the Red Sea.

Up at the front, the principals were much too interested in Rosalie van Straadt’s fit to take any notice of Michael. Michael stopped one layer of people short of the front to take it all in. There was Eamon Donleavy in his damned orange T-shirt, furious. There was Sister Augustine, proving once again that being a nun had less to do with what you wore than with what you were. Bright red sweatsuit notwithstanding, Augie was radiating all the authority of the Reverend Mothers of Michael’s dim childhood memory. He’d always thanked God and the devil that he hadn’t been born Catholic whenever he ran into one of those Reverend Mothers. The tall, heavy man in the suit and sweater Michael thought must be Gregor Demarkian. He had seen pictures of Gregor Demarkian in newspapers and magazines, but those didn’t count. Michael could never recognize people from magazine photographs. He had once stood next to Christie Brinkley for fifteen minutes in the Pasta and Cheese on East Sixty-first Street and not known who she was. Gregor Demarkian did not look formidable, but Michael wasn’t fooled by that. Stephen Hawking did not look formidable. Niels Bohr had been a small round man whom strangers often mistook for a shoe salesman. Michael wondered for a moment if this Demarkian man wasn’t hot—why the sweater?—and turned his attention to Rosalie.