Dear Old Dead(85)

Gregor Demarkian came the rest of the way down the stairs and saw her standing in the laundry room doorway.

“Hello,” he said. “Sister Kenna said I’d find you here. Do you have a moment to talk?”

Julie Enderson looked back at the history textbook lying open on the table. Half an hour, and she hadn’t turned a single page.

“Sure,” she said. “Can I fold pillowcases while I talk? I think Sister Kenna is in a hurry.”

“It sounds all right by me.”

Julie retreated to her stool. When he came into the laundry room, she was holding a pillowcase in the air in front of her body. She got it folded and put it on the stack and quickly reached for another one. Gregor Demarkian got another stool, pulled it up to the sorting table, and sat.

“Robbie is going to be all right,” Julie babbled. “I heard Augie and Sister Kenna talking. Everybody is saying Michael did something with him that nobody’s ever done before, and now Michael will be in all the medical journals again, like that time a couple of years ago. I don’t know what he did a couple of years ago, just that it was important.”

“I think this was important, too,” Gregor Demarkian said, “but I probably know less about medicine than you do. All that happened with Robbie interrupted our talk.”

“Yes,” Julie said. “Yes, it did. I hope I wasn’t wasting your time.”

“You weren’t wasting my time.”

“It’s not the kind of thing everybody would think was important. People uptown, men I guess I mean, maybe even some women, I don’t think they think things like that matter. You know, that a man like Charles van Straadt owned a place like that. It would matter more to them that he was rich and that he owned the Sentinel and a radio station and had a lot of houses with rooms he didn’t use.”

“I think it would matter to quite a few people,” Gregor told her. “It mattered to me. It—solidified something I was thinking.”

Julie was curious. “Solidified? What does that mean? Do you mean you’re solid now about who committed the murders?”

“Oh, I was pretty solid about that even before I talked to you this afternoon, but it was what you’d call an aesthetic solution. I knew who the killer was because I knew who the killer had to be. Given the personalities of the other people involved and the setup, there was only one possible solution. I just wasn’t too sure how it had been done.”

“And now you know? Did sending Mr. van Straadt—the young one, Victor?—did making him run up and down the way you did tell you how it was done?” Julie blushed. “We all heard you. I mean, it was all over the center.”

“I’m sure it was. Making Victor van Straadt run up and down the stairs told me how it hadn’t been done. I’m hoping to get something of the same kind of help from you.”

Julie cocked her head. She must have trusted Gregor Demarkian more than she thought she did. Her folding had slowed. She was no longer being meticulously careful to keep an open pillowcase in front of her body. She picked up a white pillowcase and shook it out.

“I don’t understand,” she said finally. “Do you mean that all that I had to say about Charles van Straadt and the place in Times Square makes something impossible? I thought it would make a lot of things possible. I thought that was the point. That a man like that would have so many people who wanted to kill him, it wouldn’t make any sense to go looking into Michael Pride.”

“Don’t worry about Michael Pride,” Gregor told her. “At least, not on this score. No, it’s not the things you told me about the place in Times Square I want to talk about now. It’s about the things you did on the night of the murder. About the time after you saw Charles van Straadt.”

“We talked about that already,” Julie said quickly. “In the cafeteria. I didn’t kill Charles van Straadt, Mr. Demarkian.”

“I didn’t think you did, Julie. It’s what happened when you got to the first floor that I want to get straight here. You said you saw Ida Greel.”

“That’s right. Ida was on duty.”

“What was she doing?”

Julie frowned. “She was just walking around, in the hallway.”

“Was she near Dr. Pride’s examining room?”

“Oh, no.” Julie’s face cleared. “Mr. Demarkian, nobody could have gotten near Michael’s examining room, not then. And not for a whole while later, either. I know. Remember how I said I was trying to find out if my mother had been caught in the fight?”

“I remember.”

“Well, that was where I went. Down to Michael’s examining room. Because it was really late, you see, and the nuns were using it as an extra emergency room. They were using all the offices and examining rooms. I mean, if you’ve got someone bleeding on the floor, you can’t stand on ceremony. Or go by the rules. I’m not sure what I mean.”