Dear Old Dead(87)

“Dr. Pride says you’re going to be in bed for about three days,” Shana was saying, “and then you’re going to be able to get up and around a bit. If we thought you had somewhere decent to go, we’d send you home, but we’re worried about you, Robbie, yes we are. We’re very worried about you. So what Augie decided was, when it was time for you to do your convalescence, you could come over to the east building and do it there. You’ll like it. Just wait and see. Lots of women to wait on you. Lots of good things to eat. Dr. Pride says you haven’t been eating anywhere near as well as you should.”

I don’t want a lot of women, Robbie Yagger thought. Women make me nervous. I just want you.

Of course I haven’t been eating enough, Robbie Yagger thought. I haven’t had any money for food. I haven’t had any money for anything.

The sheets on the bed were warm, warm, warm. The pillow was soft. Shana’s voice was soft, too, and very soothing. Robbie thought about himself looking down into his cup of coffee and about the things floating in it and how he hated it that way and how he hadn’t wanted to drink it, but the coffee had been a gift, he remembered that, it had been free and he had wanted to be polite. Who had given it to him? He couldn’t remember.

“Stuff,” Robbie tried to say, but there was something in his throat, one of those tubes, and he couldn’t.

Shana got up and leaned over the bed to listen to him breathing.

“Did you try to say something?” Shana asked him. “You shouldn’t try to say anything. You have to rest now.”

Yes, Robbie thought, I have to rest now. But I wish I could explain.

The problem was, at the moment, he couldn’t even explain it to himself. He wished Gregor Demarkian would come to visit him. Gregor Demarkian would know. Gregor Demarkian could stand here and explain it all to him, while Shana sat in her chair and held Robbie’s hand.





THREE


1


“YOU CAN’T JUST WALK into a New York City newspaper and start asking questions,” Hector Sheed said, when he heard what Gregor Demarkian wanted to do. “They’ll make you get a court order. They won’t talk to you. And it’s Friday night, for God’s sake. Nobody you want to talk to will be there. What do you think you’re going to accomplish?”

Actually, Gregor thought he had already accomplished a good deal. After talking to Julie Enderson, he had made a series of phone calls. Some of them had not worked out as well as he had hoped. It was Friday night. A good many of the people he needed confirmations from had gone home. A good many others were in no mood to discuss this matter before Monday. If Gregor had been the police commissioner or still with the Bureau, he might have been able to force the issue. If he had been able to, he probably would have. Now he thought it might be just as well. It wasn’t as if he wouldn’t be able to get the information he needed tonight, right away. If he had any luck at all—and any right to call himself both an intelligent man and a detective—he would. What would be the point of upsetting the weekend plans of so many people, when they wouldn’t be definitively needed until the case came to trial? Assuming the case ever did come to trial. Gregor tried to think his way into the mind of this murderer and couldn’t do it. He could never do it. He couldn’t count the books he had read where the Great Detective closes his eyes and becomes the man he is stalking. Gregor had never understood those books. If he could become one of the people he stalked, he would be one of the people he stalked. It was one thing to try to think yourself into the mind of a man or woman who had killed in anger or fear, on the spur of the moment, impulsively. Anybody could end up in that position. Gregor even understood the battered-woman defense. If someone four inches taller than you are and fifty pounds heavier beats you bloody every time he’s drunk, and you can’t get a police officer or a judge to do anything about it, then it made perfect sense to Gregor that you would be in enough of a panic when the man was drunk that you’d blow his head off. This was not a battered-woman murder or an impulsive one. This murder had been planned and carried out by a cool head. That Gregor didn’t understand at all.

Hector Sheed had an unmarked police car parked at the curb at the front of the center. Gregor led him out to it, down the front stoop and into the darkness of the street. There were two street lamps directly in front of the center’s two buildings that worked, but the street lamps on the rest of the block were broken. The unmarked police car was surrounded by marked ones. Uniformed patrolmen were leaning against the hoods, waiting to be told what to do.