Dear Old Dead(82)
They were all staring at him. Hector Sheed was being especially intense. Gregor forced himself into the present.
“Miss Greel,” he said. “Miss van Straadt just now said something about the money. About how Rosalie was supposed to ‘get it all,’ I think she put it, but instead it was you.”
Ida looked at Victor and then at her feet. “Yes. Yes, she did. Grandfather had made arrangements to change his will.”
“To leave everything to you?”
“To leave the bulk of his personal fortune to me, yes.”
“Which amounts to about eight hundred million dollars. Do you actually know for a fact that your grandfather was going to change his will in this particular way?”
“Oh, yes,” Ida said. “He’d contacted the lawyers. Mr. Cole had already had the new will drawn up. If Grandfather had lived another day, he would have signed it.”
“Meaning that if your grandfather had lived, you would be a much richer young woman than you are now.”
“That’s right, Mr. Demarkian. But I don’t see that that matters much. I’m a very rich young woman now.”
“Oh, yes.” Gregor nodded thoughtfully. “Did you know about this change?”
“Yes,” Ida said firmly. “Yes, I did.”
“Can you prove that you did?”
“I think I can. Grandfather wrote me a letter about it. I have the letter. I have the envelope it came in, too.”
“Do you have it here?”
“Yes, I do. I have a room here, on the staff floor. The letter is there.”
“Good,” Gregor said. “Very good. Would you do me a favor, Miss Greel? Would you go get that letter and let Mr. Sheed and I take a look at it?”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
“All right,” Ida Greel said. “Certainly. Just give me a minute or two. I’ll have to use the stairs.”
“We’ll be on the stairs ourselves,” Gregor told her. “We’ll be using your brother here to get our times straightened out.”
“Of course.”
Ida Greel seemed to hesitate, then shrugged her shoulders and walked away from them, in the opposite direction to the one Martha had gone. Gregor and Hector and Victor watched her disappear into the people near the back of the hall.
Hector Sheed blew out a long stream of air. “What was that all about?” he demanded. “I’m gone for five minutes and everybody goes absolutely crazy. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Of course I know what I’m doing,” Gregor told him. “In fact, I know what I’m doing for the first time since I got here. Mr. van Straadt, I’d like you to do some running up and down the stairs.”
“No problem,” Victor said, but he looked confused again.
Gregor Demarkian thought Victor van Straadt would always look confused, but that was all right.
Gregor himself no longer was.
TWO
1
EAMON DONLEAVY WAS TOO good a Catholic, and too much of a rationalist, to believe in precognition, or telepathy, or auras. Nevertheless, walking into his office after the emergency-room crisis with Robbie Yagger, Eamon knew his phone was going to ring before it rang. He also knew who would be on the other end of it before he picked it up. For a split second, he considered not picking it up. To say that Eamon Donleavy was having a bad day was ludicrous. Eamon Donleavy was having a bad year. Ever since he had first heard that Michael Pride was sick, he had been in a walking coma. He did all the things he was supposed to do. He said Mass at six o’clock every morning at St. Martin Porres Roman Catholic Church three blocks downtown, for the nuns from the center and anyone else who wanted to show up. He visited the sick. He did his paperwork. He spoke to the First Communion classes and the Confirmation classes and the Interfaith Sunday School classes that were held in the east building. He just couldn’t make any of it mean anything. He had become deaf, dumb, and blind. He kept coming to in the middle of rooms and hallways, utterly unable to explain how he had gotten where he was, utterly unable to explain what he was doing there. Sometimes he found himself thinking it wasn’t Michael who was sick. Sometimes he found himself hoping that he would die first.
Today, coming up from all that fuss in the emergency room, Eamon Donleavy was not in a walking coma. He knew where he was and where he was going. He knew what he intended to tell people if they asked him what he was doing. He passed Victor van Straadt running up the stairs—what was Demarkian up to now?—and went into his office. The surface of his desk was absolutely clear except for a maroon felt desk blotter and a little stack of lined notebook sheets held down by a crystal paperweight. In the center of the paperweight there was a tiny statue of St. Joseph and a plastic plaque with the words: “St. Joseph, Foster Father of Jesus.” On the lined notebook sheets were letters written by Sister Angelique’s fourth-grade Afterschool Program class, thanking Eamon for being their spiritual father. Eamon sat down and looked at all of it. In the old days, his desk had never been so clean. It didn’t seem possible that “the old days” were only the beginning of this week. He had cleaned his office out, putting his affairs in order. He had begun to eat aspirins the way children eat Pez, battling a headache that wouldn’t go away.