Dear Old Dead(92)

Gregor thought it over. Carefully. “Do you often have people who don’t want to be photographed?”

Lisa Hasserdorf shrugged. “It runs two to one in favor of getting your picture in the paper. But it’s not unusual for someone not to want to be photographed. Of course, we do put their names in the paper, and their boroughs. It isn’t illegal in New York State to insist on that.”

“How long has Victor van Straadt been running these contests?” Gregor asked. “Is this his first one?”

“Oh, no,” Lisa said. “Victor’s been with the paper two years now, and quite frankly, we put him on the contests right away, right after the secretary who used to handle them quit. Victor had been with us about six months then. He’s really hopeless.”

“Lisa,” Dave Geraldino scolded.

“Well, he is,” Lisa said. “In fact, hopeless may not be a strong enough word. I know he’s a van Straadt, but really. He didn’t inherit any of his grandfather’s talent for newspaper work. I don’t even know if he reads newspapers. We couldn’t fire him, considering who he was, but we couldn’t leave him running around loose, either. So we gave him the contests. Any idiot could do what he does. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t have the brains God gave a donkey. In fact, the contests just don’t matter.”

“It would matter if there were any irregularities, wouldn’t it?” Gregor asked. “Most states have very strict laws about that kind of thing.”

“That would matter, yes,” Lisa agreed. “But Victor isn’t dishonest, Mr. Demarkian. He’s just stupid. And in my opinion, he’s much too stupid to devise any—irregularities—that wouldn’t be picked up immediately by one of the rest of us.”

“All right,” Gregor said. He certainly couldn’t argue that Victor van Straadt was not stupid. That would be like arguing that the ocean wasn’t wet. “Just one more thing. How many of these contests would you say Victor van Straadt has run?”

“Nine,” Lisa answered promptly. “We do six a year.”

“Of this nine, how many would you say have involved winners who have not wanted to be photographed for the paper?”

Lisa frowned. “I don’t know. It’s not the kind of thing I keep track of. Is it really important that you know?”

“Yes, I think it is.” Gregor nodded slowly. “It would also help if I knew who among the winners had and who had not shown up for the drawings and the names and addresses of the winners who had not been photographed for the paper. Do you think you could get me all that?”

Lisa Hasserdorf was bewildered. “Yes, of course I could. It’s all on the computer. But Mr. Demarkian, I just don’t understand. How is all that going to help solve the murder of Charles van Straadt?”

“That’s the question I’ve got, too,” Hector Sheed said. “You got an answer to it, Gregor?”

Gregor stood up to stretch and looked reproachfully at Hector Sheed in the process.

“The murder of Charles van Straadt is solved, Hector. That was the easy part. Now is when the real work has to be done.”

“Oh, marvelous,” Dave Geraldino said gleefully. “Just the way they described it in People magazine.”





FOUR


1


IT WAS MARTHA VAN Straadt’s idea that her brother Victor should go down to the offices of the New York Sentinel after Gregor Demarkian and Hector Sheed to find out what they were up to, and it was Martha van Straadt who waited at the door of the east building hour after hour until Victor came back. Actually, it was only about an hour and forty-five minutes. It just felt as if it were taking forever. The wait was made worse by the fact that Martha had been left utterly alone. Ida had agreed with this project, in principle, when Martha had first brought it up. Ida had behaved the way Ida always behaved, deliberating calmly, coming to reasoned conclusions. Martha hated Ida’s reasonableness the way she hated Robbie Yagger’s conversion. Martha liked change only in the abstract. She liked Social Change, which to her meant reaching the point where all the stupid people in the world who believed things Martha found anathema would be forced to recognize both their own stupidity and Martha’s dazzling advancedness. In her daily life, she preferred routine, predictability, assurance. Martha remembered Ida as a child, volatile and spiteful, imperious and volcanic. In Martha’s mind, Ida should have stayed the way she had begun, the way Victor had.

Ida’s excuse was that she had work to do. She was on duty in the emergency room. It was Friday night. What did Martha expect? Martha expected a great deal more than she got. Unlike the doors to the west building, which were almost always kept open, the doors to the east building were almost always kept locked. Martha had to stand in the long thin window next to the door and look out that way, or go into the reception room and look out the windows there. Martha preferred the long thin window. The reception room was too public. People saw you there and thought you were available for conversation. Martha didn’t want to talk to anybody. She watched the moving shadows in the street and listened to the low sharp voices coming out of the darkness. It happened every Friday night. The street was full of people again. The people were invisible, uncatchable, out of sight—but they were there. Martha had no idea where they came from. What she could see was a big black pit of nothing, crowded in by hulking outlines in brick and stone. The pools of light at the entrances to the east and west buildings were empty.