Dear Old Dead(48)

“It is definitely precarious,” Michael agreed. “Especially with this new Cardinal. People used to complain about the old one, you know, and say he was intolerant. But he wasn’t, really. He was just orthodox. This one is intolerant.”

“I didn’t like him either.” Gregor poured himself another glass of wine. “Were you worried that your arrest would give him a chance to change the Archdiocese’s relationship with the center?”

Michael snorted. “Worried? No, I wasn’t worried. I was scared to death. Not about the funding. I can always make up the funding elsewhere. I don’t care about the money. But the nuns. Ever since my face ended up on the front page of the Post, I’ve been lying awake nights, wondering when Augie is going to walk through my office door to tell me that the Cardinal has issued a ban on clergy and religious working at the center. We couldn’t survive without nuns. We couldn’t survive without Augie. She can work fifteen hours straight, take fifteen minutes off for a cup of coffee, and do it all over again. And she works for less than I do. There’s nothing in the world for getting work like we do done and done right than nuns.”

Gregor sat back. “But the Cardinal didn’t withdraw the nuns from the center,” he said. “And the murder and your arrest are two weeks gone. He’s not likely to withdraw them now unless something else happens.”

“I know. Something else could always happen. I told you I wasn’t an ascetic, Mr. Demarkian. I meant it.”

“Are you at least attempting to protect yourself from being caught in raids?”

“Raids are very rare in New York, I’m thankful to say. The one I got caught in only came off because the proprietor was enmeshed in a RICO action.”

“Still.”

“I know. I know. That’s what Eamon said. But there’s more, as I said. More about the night Charlie died. I’m not worried, at the moment, about everything blowing up in my face because of my tastes in extracurricular activities. I’ve got some control over those. I don’t worry about what I know. I worry about what I don’t know.”

“Charlie called you in the afternoon before he came down to the center,” Gregor repeated. “And you didn’t think the reason he wanted to see you that night was entirely concerning the publicity around your arrest.”

“I know it wasn’t.”

“Then what was it about?”

Michael’s Perrier water was gone. He picked up the glass it had come in and rolled it back and forth between his palms. Gregor thought he looked even more tired than he had when they had first come in. Relaxation had been a mistake. Now that his guard was down, Michael had nothing to keep him going. The creases in his forehead were as deep as riverbeds.

“Charlie was laughing,” Michael Pride said carefully, “the way he laughed when he had something going in business. He’d call me up and tell me about real estate and loans and laugh like that. Don’t ask me why, why he told me or why he laughed. I never understood half of it. This time, though, it wasn’t about business. It was about people.”

“What people?” Gregor asked.

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “Charlie told me that he’d done a brilliant thing, because he’d given someone just what he didn’t want. That was the ticket. He’d told this person he was going to give him this thing, whatever it was, and the person couldn’t say he didn’t want it, because it would sound crazy, but the person didn’t want it and it was going to cause no end of trouble. And then everything would come out, and it would all be to the advantage of the center in the end. And then he laughed even harder and said, ‘Happy Father’s Day, Michael, Happy Father’s Day.’ I’m sorry I’m not being more coherent, Mr. Demarkian, but to tell you the truth, I had my mind on other things at the time. My face was all over the New York papers. And there had been rumors all morning that we were on our way to a shoot-out sometime later in the day.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said.

“Here come the hors d’oeuvres. You could have done better than that, you know.”

Gregor sat back and allowed one of the waiters to put a small plate of smoked salmon in front of him. The waiter put a large platter of fried shrimp in front of Michael Pride.

“Are you really going to be able to eat all this food?”

“Sure. The way you look, you ought to be able to do just as well.”

“Not without gaining forty pounds,” Gregor said. Actually, at this point in his life, he couldn’t do that well at all. No one could do that well unless they had gone hungry for a while. Michael Pride must have gone hungry for a while. Either that, or he was at the start of being seriously ill.