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Dear Old Dead(75)



“That about sums it up,” Gregor said dryly.

“He was sitting in the reception room over in the east building for a while, but that was later on at night. I don’t remember what time that was, either, Mr. Demarkian. Karida said she saw all three of them except Rosalie down in the cafeteria that night, but you’d have to ask Karida. I didn’t have the guts to come down in here. I got my information and then I went back home.”

“Had something happened to your mother?”

“Not as far as I could tell. I don’t even know if she’s alive, Mr. Demarkian. We’ve lost touch.”

Julie had finished the french fries. Gregor still had a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich. He offered her half. Julie took the half unselfconsciously and began eating.

“You know,” Julie said, “if this was all, I wouldn’t have bothered you. I mean, this isn’t much. What keeps bugging me is what I know about Charles van Straadt that nobody else seems to. I mean, I keep hinting and hinting, but nobody picks up on it.” She stared at the ragged edge of her half-eaten half sandwich. “I don’t know about Dr. Pride. I haven’t had a chance to bring it up with him.”

“I should think everybody on earth knew who Charles van Straadt was,” Gregor said. “He’s had one of the most spectacularly public careers in the history of capitalism.”

Julie shook her head. “Some of it may be public, Mr. Demarkian, but all of it isn’t. Look, when I was about twelve or thirteen years old, I used to work in this revue in the Square. It was a musical thing, you know, but this one was all kids all under fourteen, some of us as young as eight or nine, and we’d dance to things like ‘Big Spender’ and then we’d strip. And then later, you know, the place made private arrangements with the guys who came to see us.” Julie’s face broke into a big grin. “After I came here, Michael and Augie helped me set it up so that the place got raided, and half a dozen people got arrested and now they’re probably going to go to jail. Of course, another place just like it probably opened up a week later and a block away, if you know what I mean, but there isn’t anything I can do about that.”

Surely there had to be something somebody could do about it, Gregor thought, but nobody seemed to.

“Was Charles van Straadt one of the clients?”

“Oh, no,” Julie told him. “An old man like that, if I saw him on the street and I was hooking, I wouldn’t even bother to ask. He just doesn’t care. You can tell. No, it wasn’t like that. It was this one night. A really dead night. There had been a whole lot of raids over the month before and business was slow. The cops don’t really care about what goes down in the Square, and they really, really don’t care about the prostitutes, but every once in a while they try to clean up the kiddie stuff because they do care about that. And they stage raids on the gay stuff, too, you know, because it gets their rocks off. Excuse my language. Augie keeps trying to teach me to talk right but I just go on and on like I was ignorant or something.”

“I’m not worried about your language,” Gregor said. “Keep going.”

“Yes, well, the thing is, it was a slow night, as I said, but slow or not the deal was that the bar had to cash out every two hours, because we were always getting robbed, you know, if we didn’t do that. I mean, everybody always says that nobody robs the Mafia, but they’re wrong. Junkies do it all the time. Nobody can find them afterward, and they’re half dead anyway. So, it was about ten o’clock and the bar cashed out and the bartender put the money in this black metal box that locked up and he gave the black metal box to me and told me to go up to the manager’s office and get a receipt for it. So I took the box and I went. But I didn’t go the way I was supposed to go. I didn’t go up the back stairs. I hated the back stairs. They were dark, and sometimes you’d find johns on them, jerking off—excuse me—you know what they were doing. And if they caught you there when they were like that you didn’t know what was going to happen. And they wouldn’t pay you for it afterward. And then if the guys who owned the place found out they’d say you gave it away for free and beat you up. So I didn’t use the back stairs. I went around to the front and up that way. Which was how I saw him.”

“Charles van Straadt,” Gregor said.

“Right. He was standing in the door of the manager’s office when I got to the top of the stairs. He really stuck out. Nobody down there dresses like that. If they get a lot of money or they’re really good at lifting stuff they go for the expensive flash. This guy’s clothes were just quality. You could tell.”