Dear Old Dead(61)

“Rats in the basement of the New York Sentinel building knew that Rosalie was going to get it all,” Victor said gloomily. “It was pitiful.”

Bartram Cole looked from one to the other of them in consternation. “I don’t understand,” he said again. “I really don’t understand. You’re right, of course, that Mr. van Straadt was considering changing his will. In fact, I would say he was determined on it. But he wasn’t going to change it in favor of Rosalie van Straadt.”

“He wasn’t?” Victor asked. “Who was he going to change it in favor of?”

“If Mr. van Straadt had lived,” Bartram Cole said carefully, “he would have signed a will drawn up by me on the morning he died, leaving his entire personal fortune of eight hundred, eighty-five million dollars to his granddaughter Ida Greel.”





THREE


1


FROM WHAT GREGOR DEMARKIAN had heard about the attitude of the New York City Police Department to Michael Pride and this case, he had expected nothing but hostility from any member of the department he might run into. On the subject of himself, he had expected something worse than hostility. Shut out of the information loop, threatened with arrest for obstructing justice, lectured endlessly on the respective provinces of amateurs and professionals—Gregor had imagined all kinds of things. He knew how he would have behaved in Hector Sheed’s position. He knew how he had behaved in those few cases when, as the agent in charge of a Bureau investigation, he had been provided with the spectacle of a private investigator. Of course, Gregor told himself, technically, he wasn’t a private investigator—at least, not a private detective. You had to have a license to be one of those, and Gregor had neither gotten one nor intended to get one. He had never hung out a shingle or taken money to solve a case. He had simply fallen into things, a lot of things, over and over again. He tried to count how many extracurricular murders there had been in his life since the death of his wife, Elizabeth, had led to his early retirement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There must have been at least nine. Maybe there had been ten. It had all gone by so fast. Gregor didn’t think he had ever acknowledged the ambivalent nature of his involvement in these cases before—or the ambivalent nature of his attitude to them. Back on Cavanaugh Street, Bennis Hannaford was always telling him he didn’t know what he wanted out of his life. He was always telling her she was absurd. Here he was, a man of almost sixty. Of course he knew what he wanted out of his life. He must already have had it. Every time Bennis would lecture him like that, Gregor would go down to Father Tibor Kasparian’s apartment behind Holy Trinity Church and rant and rave for an hour, telling Tibor what an absolute pain Bennis was getting to be. Tibor would wait until he was through and then say, well, since you already know what you want out of this life, maybe you should give some consideration to what you want out of the next one.

But Hector Sheed was not hostile. He was curious. He was so curious, he made Gregor uncomfortable, walking around and around him, looking him over back to front, peering down into his face the way dim high school students peer into the eyepieces of microscopes they don’t know how to use. Except that Hector Sheed wasn’t dim. He was strange, Gregor thought, but not dim. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t so strange that Hector Sheed was strange. What did it do to a man to work day after day in an environment like this one? Manhattan Homicide was an interstation service. Hector Sheed wouldn’t necessarily spend all his time in Harlem or places like it, at least not as a matter of policy. Policy notwithstanding, Gregor was willing to bet that Hector did, in fact, spend most of his time in Harlem or places like it. That was the way the world worked. Gregor didn’t think he could have stood it, himself. Bleak urban landscapes made him tired and depressed. He needed both color and hope to keep his mind working smoothly. Maybe everybody did.

“The problem,” Hector Sheed had told Gregor that first night, after Rosalie van Straadt’s body had been taken to the morgue, “is that this is New York. It’s not like some other places. I can’t just declare you a consultant and haul you around like a fire dog, the way that guy in Pennsylvania did with the phony psychic.”

Gregor winced at the word psychic but was heartened by the word phony. Too many people believed that kind of nonsense to make him entirely happy with the mental state of the American public.

“I don’t think I have to get in your way at all,” Gregor told Hector Sheed. “If you’ll just tell me when I’m becoming a problem, I’ll accommodate. After all, I’m only here on behalf of the—”