“What time was this?” Gregor wanted to know.
“About eight,” Sister Kenna said promptly. “The infant care class starts at seven thirty and goes for an hour. It has to start that late, you see, because all our students work. And then they have to come home and get dinner and look after whoever else it is they’re responsible for in their families, which usually isn’t anybody but you never know. There could always be one with an invalid mother. So the class started at seven thirty and we’d been at it for a while when the—um—accident happened. The class was beginning to get restless and that always happens about eight.”
“And she was just sitting there,” Gregor repeated. “Doing nothing.”
“That’s right.”
“Not watching television.”
“The television wasn’t on. I told you.”
“Not reading a book or a magazine.”
“No. There are books and magazines in that room, but Rosalie didn’t have one.”
“Not doing a crossword puzzle.”
“Really, Mr. Demarkian, I meant exactly what I said. She was just sitting there.”
“You must see Mr. Demarkian’s problem,” Michael Pride jumped in. “People don’t ‘just sit there.’ It’s insupportable. Whether you realized it or not, Rosalie must have been doing something.”
“Oh,” Gregor said. “I know what she was doing. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the times are wrong.”
“What are you talking about?” Augie demanded.
Gregor didn’t have time to tell her. There were sounds in the emergency room again, although not the sounds Gregor associated with an emergency. There were no sirens or running footsteps. What Gregor heard was stiff walking with a march beat. It was the rhythm of uniformed men everywhere, in armies as well as police forces, in professional fire departments as well as the National Guard. Gregor had always been able to tell which of the men on his staff at the Bureau were spending their weekends with the Guard. For some reason, women didn’t seem to pick up the gait in the same way.
Gregor left Michael Pride and Sister Augustine and walked back along the wraparound hallway toward the Admitting desk. He ran into three men coming the opposite way. Two of these men were uniformed police officers who looked vaguely familiar, but Gregor didn’t put much credit in that. It was their uniforms that were familiar, and this situation, which Gregor had been in too many times before. The third man was a massive African-American, with massive being the operative word. Gregor was six feet four inches tall, but this man towered over him. Gregor was naturally broad shouldered, but this man looked as if he could have taken on the entire defensive line of the New York Giants and made it an interesting match. The effect was made more pronounced by the fact that the man didn’t have a single hair on his head. His baldness served to emphasize the fact that his facial features were as outsized as the rest of him. Gregor had a sudden vision of this person as a star performer in professional wrestling. The only problem with that was that this man looked far too serious. Professional wrestlers weren’t supposed to really scare anybody.
The three men came to a halt. The tall African-American looked Gregor Demarkian over from head to foot and nodded. Gregor felt the way he’d felt standing at attention while the troops were being reviewed by the local general. Gregor had spent a great deal of his time in the army standing at attention while the troops were being reviewed by one visiting dignitary or the other.
The tall African-American held out his massive hand. “I take it you’re Gregor Demarkian,” he said, in an Oxford accent so perfect that if Gregor had had his eyes closed, he would have thought he was watching Brideshead Revisited.
“Yes,” Gregor told him. “That’s right. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”
“I’m Hector Sheed, detective first grade, New York City Homicide. You look fatter than your picture in People magazine.”
“Right,” Gregor said. “Of course.”
“Never mind.” Hector Sheed sighed wearily. “Let’s see what kind of a mess Michael Pride’s gotten himself into this time.”
TWO
1
BY THURSDAY MORNING, JULIE Enderson’s head felt as if it were filled with tiny hand grenades, pins pulled, ready to explode. This was a feeling Julie had had often in her life. Right now there were a million things she could use to explain it. Two people had been found dead in Michael Pride’s office in just over two weeks. There was nothing necessarily odd about finding dead people in the west building, but these had been the wrong kind of people to end up dead. Julie was still young enough, and had been poor long enough, to think of rich people as immortal and rich-and-famous people as more immortal still. Women with money floated up above the street on cushions of electrified air, untouchable. Nobody called them “cunt” or offered them twenty dollars to get in the back of the car. They didn’t stand in front of their mirrors in the morning, wondering if the mask they were putting on would work today, wondering how long they were going to get away with hiding their awful ugliness. Julie thought about Rosalie van Straadt often. Money, looks, education. Rosalie seemed more real to Julie than Martha and Ida, who worked at the center. Ida was always too preoccupied. Martha was what Julie thought of as “a born social worker.” It was not a compliment.