Dear Old Dead(62)
“Of the Cardinal. I know. The Catholic Church in New York may not be what it once was, Mr. Demarkian, but it’s still a political force about the size of King Kong. The city will go head to head with the Cardinal when it feels like it has to, or when there’s another constituency just as powerful with closer ties to the mayor’s office. The city does not pick fights with a Cardinal Archbishop for the hell of it.”
“Protesting interference in this case by me would constitute picking a fight for the hell of it?”
“Of course it would. You’re not interfering. You’re helping the department with its investigation. What’s the phrase they use in all the English murder mysteries? ‘Helping the authorities with their inquiries.’”
“That means you’ve been arrested,” Gregor said.
“Oh. Sorry. I don’t really like English murder mysteries. They’re not realistic. My wife reads them the way kids eat cotton candy. My line on you is that you’re our conduit to all the people at the center we don’t know much about. I’ll find a better way to put it if I have to talk to the media about you.”
“That’s good. What you just said didn’t make any sense to me.”
“Well, don’t worry about it, Mr. Demarkian. It’ll all be perfectly painless. You can conduct this entire case by running around the center asking questions and meeting me for a beer at the Akareeba Restaurant to give me the answers.”
Gregor was intrigued. “The Akareeba Restaurant. Is that African?”
“Nah,” Hector Sheed said. “It’s a steak and fries place off Central Park North. You might as well get ready to be the only white guy in the place. They won’t mind.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“So ask questions I’m going to want to hear the answers to. I’ll get back to you later.”
Now it was bright and early on Friday morning, with the sun streaming through the plate-glass window of his sixteenth-floor room at the New York Hilton, and Gregor found himself wondering how he’d been working out. With one thing and another, he hadn’t had a chance to meet Hector Sheed at the Akareeba Restaurant. Their first meeting there was supposed to be today, for lunch, at eleven thirty. Hector had apologized for the early hour. He couldn’t help it. He had to get in to work. Gregor merely felt frustrated. Hector had his reasons, Gregor was sure. The murders at the Sojourner Truth Health Center would not be Hector’s only responsibility. Gregor could only imagine what a detective’s caseload at Manhattan Homicide was like. Gregor could make no such excuses for himself. In the time since Rosalie van Straadt had been found dying in Michael Pride’s office, he seemed to be going around in circles. Talk to Michael. Talk to Augie. Talk to Father Donleavy. Talk. Talk. Talk. Nobody ever seemed to say anything important, or even sensible.
The room at the Hilton was being paid for by the Archdiocese of New York. Gregor had stayed there once or twice before, when the Bureau was paying for it. He found the rooms much too large and much too luxurious. The bathrooms were always meticulously clean and startlingly high-tech. There were never any claw tubs or visible plumbing at the Hilton. Getting out of the shower, he caught himself in the wall-long vanity mirror. He did not have the kind of body that lent itself well to being looked at in wall-size mirrors. Gregor wrapped himself in a towel. If he had still been with the Bureau, they would have sent him out to get into shape again—or tried to. From what Gregor had remembered, they had tried to, several times, and he had always been able to come up with enough work to make the project impossible. He went to his suitcase and got out a clean set of underwear and put it on. Then he went to his closet and found a pair of good gray slacks and a shirt. A few days in New York had disabused him of the notion that the city was always cold. Yesterday, sitting in the main branch of the New York Public Library, going through ten years of microfilmed magazine stories on Charles van Straadt, Gregor had been sweating in spite of the air-conditioning. Now he reached for a jacket and tie anyway. He couldn’t help himself. If he wasn’t on vacation, he was supposed to be in a suit.
He opened the door to his room and found his papers waiting for him in the hall. He paged through the Post, the News, and The New York Times and came to rest for a moment on the Sentinel. The murder of Rosalie van Straadt wasn’t front-page fodder for any of the papers. The Sentinel, however, seemed to have gone off the news beat altogether. There was another red banner over the masthead, announcing their Father’s Day contest—ONLY THREE MORE DAYS TO ENTER!!!—and a headline that simply said, “Aww…” in really gigantic type. The subhead read: “This pathetic pooch is a miracle worker. See page 17.” Gregor flipped through the other papers again. President Clinton had held a press conference on the state of the economy, which was bad. Bosnia-Herzegovina had exploded in round 2,224,667,998 of their civil war. The government of the Ukraine had voted to install a monarchy, or something very much like it. On the front page of the Sentinel there was a picture of a miserable looking dachshund in a baseball cap.