Dear Old Dead(34)

Robbie Yagger was smoking a cigarette when Rosalie van Straadt came out. He had his sign leaning up against the handrail of the stoop and his hand cupped around the lit end of his butt. The wind was the same as always up here, meaning ferocious. His cigarette always seemed to burn down to the filter too fast. He took a drag, blew out smoke, took another drag. He looked at the doors of the center and wondered what he should do.

Robbie Yagger might not be very bright, but he was honest, painfully honest, and he always had been. In the two weeks since Charles van Straadt had been murdered, he had been feeling unrelievedly guilty. He had been in the center, that night, after all. He had been wandering in and out of the rooms on the first floor. He had—well, seen things, maybe. The problem was, he wasn’t sure what it was he had seen, or if it was important, or what would happen to him if he told the police or anybody else official about it. He’d said so many things about the center and the abortions that went on there and about Dr. Pride. The man who was killed was the center’s biggest benefactor. Maybe the police would think that Robbie had killed Charles van Straadt himself, to stop the van Straadt money from going to abortions. Maybe they would think Robbie was the kind of suspect they would really like to have, meaning somebody not very important, somebody expendable. Robbie Yagger always felt expendable.

He finished his cigarette and picked up his sign again. It felt futile, carrying it back and forth when nobody came up here except the center’s clients and half of them couldn’t read English. More than half of them couldn’t read.

I’m going to have to do something about this, Robbie told himself, shouldering his sign bravely, beginning to pace back and forth in front of the center’s front door in the wind.

I’m going to have to think of some way to tell somebody what it was I saw.





FOUR


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD ALWAYS had the cooperation of the local police in his investigations of what he thought of as extracurricular murders. He had always had it in his investigations with the FBI, too. He preferred to run his life that way. Cooperating with the local police had advantages beyond the obvious one, meaning aside from the fact that it kept you from getting arrested for one reason or another. There was the question of feasibility. The Cardinal Archbishop of New York was a good source. He had come through with copies of all the police lab reports. Gregor didn’t know how he’d gotten them. He wasn’t going to ask. They were both helpful and necessary. They just weren’t enough. He would have given a great deal to be able to sit down with the technicians or the medical examiner (was it a coroner in New York City?) and go over the details, especially after everything he had heard today on the subject of where the strychnine had been and what it had taken to get to it. Then there was the question of information. Gregor already had a lot of information about this case, but all of it was from secondary sources. He had read the Cardinal’s report. He had read a slew of magazine and newspaper articles, pulled together from a two-day search of the reading room of the downtown branch of the Philadelphia Public Library, both on the murder itself and on Charles van Straadt. He had been able to find much more on Charles van Straadt than on van Straadt’s murder, in spite of the fact that the death of a man that rich was always international news. Reporters didn’t know what questions to ask. They thought in terms of headlines instead of solutions. Standing in the middle of Michael Pride’s first floor examining room-office, Gregor thought that they weren’t even very good at thinking in headlines. Rosalie van Straadt was the murdered man’s granddaughter. She was obviously extremely upset about something. There hadn’t been a word of what she might be upset about in any of the press reports Gregor had read.

There was a frozen moment after Rosalie left the room, but it was only a pause for breath. The red sweatsuited nun exploded almost immediately.

“That woman,” she said. Then she spun around and looked into the crowd. “Sister Karen Ann? Get a broom, Sister, and get Mindy and Steven and clean this mess up. You’re going to have to go somewhere else for the next hour or two, Michael. I’m very sorry. All the rest of you get out of here. Out of here. You’d think you’d never seen blood on the floor, the way you rubberneck.”

There was no blood on the floor, but Gregor wasn’t going to be picky. He started to drift out at the back of the crowd. The crowd was dispersing with uncanny quickness and unnatural quiet. That’s what the authority of a real old-fashioned nun could do, sweatsuit or no sweatsuit. Gregor supposed they’d all start gossiping like crazy as soon as they got out of Augie’s earshot.