Gregor nibbled on a bit of salmon and then decided to get back to business. “Let’s start from the beginning,” he told Michael Pride. “Maybe if we go over it all in detail, we can make it make sense.”
Michael Pride was better than halfway finished with his shrimp.
2
GREGOR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that starting at the beginning would be useless. It was the kind of thing that worked for the great detectives in the books Bennis gave him to read, but that never had worked for him. Three and a half hours after the arrival of the hors d’oeuvres, after Michael Pride had dispatched with countless shrimp, mounds of green vegetables, boatloads of rice and a dessert that had to be lit on fire before it could be eaten, Gregor was no closer than he had been to discovering what had been on Charles van Straadt’s mind the afternoon before he died. Gregor had come to the conclusion that he would like to take Michael Pride back to Cavanaugh Street. Gregor knew a lot of middle-aged women whose mission in life seemed to be to feed the people around them as much food as possible. Michael Pride would be a wonderful subject for their attentions. And they were more sophisticated on Cavanaugh Street than they used to be. They wouldn’t blink an eye when they found out Michael was gay. Lida Arkmanian would just switch her efforts from trying to find Michael a nice Armenian girl to trying to find him a nice young man of the same persuasion. In Gregor’s experience, those women were incorrigible on Cavanaugh Street.
It was Michael’s idea that they should both go up to the Sojourner Truth Health Center and look through the things he had of Charles van Straadt’s, tucked away in his third-floor office. It was after eleven o’clock, but Michael Pride quite obviously had no sense of time. This, too, Gregor should have expected.
“He used to come in and talk to me and leave debris lying everywhere,” Michael said. “He’d come in and just talk and talk and talk. I have a file cabinet drawer I keep it all in. In case he ever wanted it back.”
“But he never did?”
“No. It’s not likely any of it is of any importance. Charlie liked props, that’s all. He liked to tell me how he took revenge on people who tried to cheat him and he liked to wave things around while he did it. Have you ever noticed how rich men are obsessed with the idea of people wanting to cheat them?”
“It’s probably a very practical form of paranoia. A lot of people probably are trying to cheat them.”
“Maybe. That’s another reason not to want to be rich.”
Michael had called a cab from a restaurant phone brought directly to their table. There was no use, he assured Gregor, in trying to get an ordinary street cab to take them where they wanted to go at this time of night. The cab that drove up was a yellow medallion and not a gypsy, but its “off duty” sign was on and its meter was off. The driver was a virtual clone of Juan Valenciano, but not Juan himself. Michael spoke to the driver in rapid Spanish and was answered with a lengthy disquisition on something or the other. Michael sat back, looked at Gregor and shrugged.
“All quiet on the western front, so to speak. No big emergencies, no big accidents, no big shoot-outs uptown. We might actually have half an hour or so to talk before somebody wants me for something.”
“Good.”
“Ricardo here was saying this is his last week. He and his family are going to close on a candy store in Queens this coming Friday. They all get out as soon as they can, all the people up there. Not that I blame them. I just worry there’s going to be nothing left some day except the junkies and the children.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said, because he had nothing to say to that.
The cab shot northward recklessly, seeming to catch every green light, seeming to make the lights turn green. The buildings went from imposing and solid to imposing and deteriorating to imposing and dilapidated to just plain bad. In no time at all, Gregor found himself in a landscape of broken windows, darkened street corners, scattered garbage, echoing emptiness. The street the center was on was a little better because the area immediately around the center was so well taken care of. Either the city or the center staff had decided that that small stretch of sidewalk was much too valuable to waste. The rest of the block was just as bad as the blocks around it. Gregor wondered where all the garbage came from, when all the buildings were abandoned. Nobody lived here. Who was putting cardboard and tissue paper into big green plastic bags and throwing them off the curbs?
The doors to the east building were still open. Light spilled out of the doorway and down from a powerful arch light positioned between the second and third floors of the building. The sidewalk immediately around the center’s front entrances was as well lit as a movie set during filming. Michael said something to the driver and he pulled up in front of the west building. The doors there were closed, but the entrance was just as well lit.