Dear Old Dead(70)

“It’s the point to me.” Martha was working herself into a grand passion. “You let Victor and me make absolute fools out of ourselves. Victor. Your own brother.”

“My own brother is an ass,” Ida said impatiently. “Will you listen to reason for once? It doesn’t matter what Grandfather intended to do. He didn’t get around to doing it.”

“He might have. And Victor and I were having meetings with you, getting together to formulate strategy, intending to head him off at the pass. And you never had any interest in heading him off at the pass. You were going to pick up eight hundred million dollars and—and laugh at us.”

“Maybe I would have and maybe I wouldn’t have. Can’t you understand that that isn’t what we have to be worried about now?”

“No.”

“This is just what the police want, you know, Martha. The police and the Cardinal and that Demarkian. They want us fighting with each other. They want us divided.”

“They don’t care about us at all,” Martha said. “They think Michael did it.”

“Maybe they did before Rosalie died, but they don’t now. And after all, Martha, I’m not the one that silly kid with the sign saw going into Michael’s first-floor office just before Grandfather died.”

“What?” Martha said.

There was a chair pulled up against the counter farther along toward the door. Ida got it over to where she was standing and sat down on it. She had heard the panic in Martha’s voice. It had made her feel instantaneously better. Panic was exactly what she needed.

“What are you implying?” Martha asked now. “I was nowhere near that examining room on the night Grandfather died.”

“He says you were,” Ida told Martha. “Robbie Yagger. That’s his name. The one who carries the sign about how abortion is the same as the Holocaust. I heard him tell Gregor Demarkian.”

“Robbie Yagger is a loon,” Martha said indignantly. “And you couldn’t have overheard him tell Gregor Demarkian anything. I saw him the day he talked to Gregor Demarkian in the cafeteria. You weren’t anywhere around.”

“It wasn’t in the cafeteria. It was outside on the sidewalk. They were just standing there talking.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “I don’t care who told who what,” Martha said. “The only time I was in the west building that whole night was when Victor and I went to the cafeteria. And then later I was there with you.”

“If you came in and out by the front door the way you are supposed to, you probably went right by Michael’s examining room. I’m not denying that you didn’t go in there, Martha, I’m just telling you what Robbie Yagger said. And I’m trying to make you understand how it’s going to sound.”

“Why should I care?”

“Martha, for God’s sake. Of course you have to care. We all have to care. We’re in the middle of a murder investigation.”

“You don’t have to care, do you?” Martha said. “You’re the one who never would have done it. Assuming you can prove you knew it was you Grandfather was going to change his will in favor of, instead of Rosalie.”

Ida looked down at her nails. They were without polish, bitten to the quick. “I have a letter,” she said.

“From Grandfather?”

“Yes.”

“Grandfather never wrote letters.”

“Well, he wrote this one to me. Martha, for God’s sake. Will you please meet me in the cafeteria? For one thing, I’m starving. For another, we have to talk.”

Out in the hallway there were footsteps, the brisk footsteps of a nurse, the halting ones of a patient coming in off the street. Ida looked at the clock and tapped her foot. If a real emergency exploded around this place, she would never get her lunch.

“Martha?”

“All right,” Martha said. “I’ll meet you downstairs. For a minute.”

“For as long as it takes. Don’t be stupid, Martha. Hurry up before somebody comes along and wants you to do something.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

There was a click in Ida’s ear, sharp, too sharp. She hung up and stared at the phone. Maybe she had overplayed her hand. Martha was so impossible. Maybe she shouldn’t have made it sound so—definite—about what Robbie Yagger had said to Gregor Demarkian. If she were Martha and she were the murderer and she’d just heard something like that, she’d get Robbie Yagger into a safe place and do him in.

Ida got off the chair she had been sitting on, stuffed another cough drop into her mouth, and went out into the corridor again. The patient she had heard was sitting at Admitting, looking morose. He was an ancient man in tattered clothes who looked as if he hadn’t had a coherent thought in years. Ida didn’t understand Michael Pride. Why did he want to save these people? What was left in them worth saving?