Dear Old Dead(38)

“I couldn’t use these to get up to the third floor offices, for instance?”

“Oh, no. You’d have to take the stairs.”

“Thank you,” Gregor said.

The girl said “you’re welcome” in her clear, firm voice and continued toward the front of the building, where she’d been headed when Gregor stopped her. Gregor followed her directions and made his way to the basement and the cafeteria. It was an involved and frustrating walk. If he had known what he was doing, it wouldn’t have been so involved. Most of his feelings of confusion came from the fact that he was in unfamiliar territory. The frustration, he thought, would have been with him no matter what. This building had not been built to serve as a hospital. It had been renovated as well as it could be, but renovations always left something to be desired. What these renovations hadn’t managed to accomplish was an adequate amount of storage space. Gregor kept bumping into packing boxes and newly delivered crates. On a hunch, Gregor began to read the descriptions on the outsides of the boxes. It was a useless hunch. The boxes said things like “500 rolls sterile adhesive tape” and “15 lb sterile cotton net.” Nothing had been left lying around that could be even imagined to be dangerous. Gregor supposed that if a murderer were really determined, he might be able to use a length of sterile cotton net to strangle someone, but that was pushing it. Gregor missed Bennis Hannaford. Bennis was very good at pushing it.

Gregor got down to the basement and looked around. The way the stairwell was positioned next to the cafeteria doors, it looked as if the cafeteria took up almost every square foot on this level, with just a small cushion of space for men’s and ladies’ rooms and for the stairwell and entryway. Gregor knew that couldn’t be right. There had to be storage space down here, too. He wondered how you got to it.

He went into the cafeteria and looked around. It was standard hospital issue, small but otherwise indistinguishable from its counterparts at every hospital in every city in the United States. There was a food service line with silverware and paper napkins at one end, everything from evil-looking fruit in gelatin-molds to wilted-skinned chicken legs to cardboard apple pie in the middle, and packets of Sweet ’n Low and pats of butter near the cash register. The shelf made of stainless-steel tubing to push your tray along on, so that you didn’t accidentally drop it, even though four or five people a year would drop their trays anyway. There was a ferocious looking woman in a cap and apron standing at the cash register, looking bored while a shriveled young man counted pennies to pay for his coffee. The young man looked decidedly down at heel, and ashamed of it, too. It was the shame that piqued Gregor’s interest. This was Harlem, and the young man was not only white but practically Nordic. He had none of the casual assumption of belonging that would have marked him as a center volunteer. He didn’t look sick, except in the sense that he looked hungry. Gregor put a Danish on his tray and moved up the line. That was when he saw that the young man had more than coffee. He had a jelly doughnut on a round paper plate. While Gregor watched, he counted his change twice, sighed, and then put the doughnut on the stainless-steel counter next to the Sweet ’n Low. The woman at the cash register looked bored.

“If you’re not going to take the doughnut,” she said, “you ought to put back the doughnut.”

“Right,” the young man said.

Gregor was still coming up behind him, but the young man didn’t notice. His face was bright red. Shame was too calm a word to put on what he was feeling. This was a form of agony. The young man had the paper plate with the doughnut on it in his hand. It was a small enough doughnut, oozing jelly at one end. Under the cover of slightly lowered lashes, the young man was eyeing it with desperation. It hurt Gregor just to look at him.

“Stop,” he said, when the young man reached him. “Turn around.”

The young man looked up and blinked. “Excuse me. I have to put this doughnut back.”

“Never mind. Go back to the cash register. I’ll buy you a doughnut and a cup of coffee. I’ll buy you two doughnuts.”

“Oh.” The young man blushed harder. And harder. Gregor thought the color in his face was going to go right off the red spectrum into orange. “Oh,” the young man said again. “Thank you. But I can’t. I really can’t. I mean, I’m not hungry.”

“Take three doughnuts,” Gregor said. “Never mind the doughnuts. Eat lunch.”

“Oh,” the young man said. “But—”

“Chicken or roast beef?”