Dear Old Dead(90)

There were half a dozen elevator doors lined up on the far wall, marked everything from “1 to 10” to “Express to 22—22 to 42.” As far as Gregor could tell, no single elevator would allow you to stop at each and every floor on the way up or down. Gregor remembered the days when only military installations had elevators like these. Maybe a military installation was what this was.

The elevator was manned. The elevator operator had a holster and a .45 just like everybody else working in the lobby. Gregor got into the elevator car, asked for the forty-second floor, got checked off on another clipboard, and sighed. Hector Sheed was taking it all in stride. Gregor didn’t know what to make of it. Were New Yorkers becoming used to living in an armed camp?

The elevator shot up so fast, Gregor’s ears rang. When it came to a stop at the forty-second floor, it bounced a little and rattled. Gregor didn’t like elevators. He couldn’t keep himself from imagining terrible things happening to them. Cords breaking. Safety systems disintegrating into dust. Once, at the FBI training school at Quantico, an instructor had described in detail the mess that had resulted when an elevator car, broken free of its cables by a small explosion, had dropped thirty stories in its shaft with twenty people inside. Gregor Demarkian had a very vivid imagination. It was so vivid, he could still recall the exact picture that had been emblazoned into his brain with this instructor’s description. He could still see himself lying bleeding in the wreckage. He didn’t like what this building was doing to him. It was making him remind himself of Bennis.

When the door opened on the forty-second floor, they were met again. This man had a clipboard but no visible gun. Gregor did a quick check for weapons bulges and didn’t find any. The man with the clipboard nodded at his list and said, “Mr. Geraldino’s office. Come this way, please.”

Hector Sheed heaved an enormous sigh. “It would be easier to get in to see the president of the United States,” he said, “than it is to get in to see Mr. Dave Geraldino.”

The man with the clipboard didn’t see any humor in this at all. His face remained perfectly blank.

“Mr. Geraldino is a very important man,” he said solemnly. “Come this way, please.”

Gregor and Hector both decided to come this way. It was easier than arguing.

Gregor caught a glimpse through a doorway of the re porters’ bullpen, fully staffed even at this hour on a Friday night. In the middle of the bullpen, a rickety tripod held a blown-up, grainy, black-and-white photograph of Charles van Straadt.





3


FORTUNATELY FOR GREGOR’S EQUILIBRIUM, Dave Geraldino was considerably less pompous, portentous, and self-important than his security staff. In fact, it would have been difficult for Dave Geraldino to be pompous at all. He was a small muscular man, barely five feet two, who looked like the second lead in a prize-fighter movie from the 1930s. When the man with the clipboard ushered Gregor and Hector Sheed into his office, Dave Geraldino leapt up from the chair behind his desk, hurried to the door, and shook both their hands. Then he pulled chairs from their resting places and placed them close to his desk. Dave Geraldino’s office was the kind with glass walls. The walls looked out on the bullpen. His desk held a copy of the New York Sentinel logo carved into crystal for a paperweight. Gregor recognized it as the kind of thing owners give their chief operating officers after a particularly good year.

Dave Geraldino had been taken aback for a moment at the sight of Hector Sheed, but only for a moment. Now he was waving them both into the chairs.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said. “Lisa will be here in just a minute. Mr. Demarkian, you don’t know how glad I am to meet you at last. I already know so much about you. At least, I know so much about your professional life.”

Gregor tried to remember what the Sentinel had had to say about the Baird case, or any of the other cases he had taken on since he had retired from the Bureau, but he couldn’t. He supposed the Sentinel had said something. All the papers had.

“I’m very glad to meet you, too,” Gregor said. “This is Hector Sheed, detective first grade—”

“Manhattan Homicide.” Dave Geraldino was pacing around and around the perimeter of the office. “In charge of the van Straadt case. I know. I know. I do read my own paper.”

“Good,” Hector rumbled.

“You don’t know how thrilled we are that you have agreed to this interview,” Dave Geraldino continued. “An interview like this in the middle of a case is an extraordinary thing for a paper to have. An extraordinary thing. Especially from you, Mr. Demarkian. You have such a reputation for refusing to give interviews at all.”