Neither Michael nor Augie was paying any attention to either of the girls. They were hurrying out into the hall. The girls stepped back to let them pass. The one with the terminal makeup job looked into Michael’s office and gave Gregor a cursory look-over. Michael got into the middle of the hall, seemed to think of something and turned back. He smiled wanly at Gregor and took a deep breath.
“If I were you,” he said, “I’d get on the phone to Manhattan Homicide and ask for Detective Sheed. We’re going to wind up with him in our laps one way or the other.”
2
THEY DIDN’T BRING HER back. Of course, it had always been impossible. Gregor had known that from the beginning. He had known it from before the beginning. In the middle of a real emergency, it was so hard to stay rational. This emergency had felt like something on television. Rescue 911. St. Elsewhere. Gregor couldn’t count the number of emergency room scenes he had been subjected to in his lifetime—and that in spite of the fact that he had been born and brought up well before the Age of Television made its debut. He couldn’t even count the number of emergency room scenes he had been subjected to in the last year. Gregor baby-sat on and off for Donna Moradanyan’s young son, Tommy. Tommy’s favorite activity—after being read to by Father Tibor Kasparian out of a book of Greek and Roman mythology—was Rescue 911 and all its clones, so that Donna had made him a videotape of two dozen of these shows with the commercials taken out. The problem with those shows was that they were rigged. The producers never seemed to pick a case in which the victim died, where all the efforts to save the woman on the stretcher proved futile. Gregor had real experience in the real world, which should have countered all this rot. He found it a little embarrassing that it didn’t.
Where his experience did come in handy was in the matter of Michael Pride’s office. Gregor had been with the FBI too long not to know that he couldn’t just pick up the phone in Michael Pride’s office and call the police, or leave the office unattended and call the police from somewhere else. He didn’t want to disturb anything at all in the office. He had no way of knowing what this Detective Sheed would find important. The two teenage girls were still in the hall. Gregor went out to them and directed his attention to the one with the scrubbed face. Looking at the other one made him a little dizzy.
“Excuse me. My name is Gregor Demarkian. I was wondering if you could do me a favor, Miss—”
“Me?” the girl said. “Oh. Enderson. Miss Enderson. Julie Enderson.”
“Miss Enderson. I was wondering if you could go into one of the offices on this hall and get me a roll of tape.”
“Tape?”
“He wants to secure the crime scene,” the one in the makeup said breathlessly. “Julie, listen: This is the PI the Cardinal hired.”
“Tape,” Julie Enderson said again. Gregor wondered if she were stupid. She didn’t look stupid. Maybe she was shell-shocked. She turned around and looked at the other side of the hall. “There might be tape in Father Donleavy’s office,” she said. “I could check in there.”
“Not Father Donleavy’s office,” the other girl chided. “Julie, be sensible. Father Donleavy wouldn’t have tape. Mrs. Biederson would.”
“Who’s Mrs. Biederson?”
The made-up girl flapped her hands. “She’s head of the office staff. But she’s on vacation this week. But her office is open. All the offices on this floor are always open. Give me a second and I’ll get you some tape.”
“Masking tape,” Gregor said. “The brown kind. Not Scotch.”
“In a flash,” the made-up girl said, pumping off across the hall. Her heels were so high, she was almost walking en pointe.
Julie watched her go and sighed. “Her name is Karida. I don’t think it’s working out for her here. Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” Gregor said.
“I overheard Augie tell Dr. Pride—well, that the cops were going to suspect him. Of killing that woman. Who was that woman?”
“Rosalie van Straadt. The granddaughter of Charles van Straadt, the man who died here—”
“—two weeks ago,” Julie finished for him. “Are the cops going to suspect Dr. Pride? Of killing the woman, I mean?”
“They shouldn’t,” Gregor said carefully. “That is, they shouldn’t suspect him of killing her directly. In fact, that would have been impossible.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Dr. Pride and I have been together continuously since seven o’clock, except for one or two trips to the bathroom. And since the trips to the bathroom took place better than sixty blocks downtown from here, they wouldn’t have been long enough to allow Dr. Pride the time to get all the way up here and give Rosalie van Straadt strychnine.”