by Jane Haddam
“What did you intend to do for money after the twenty-two thousand dollars ran out?”
“I didn’t let myself think about it.”
“New York is full of people who didn’t let themselves think about it, Dr. Pride. Bag ladies. People sleeping on the street.”
“That’s not how people end up sleeping on the street, Mr. Demarkian, you should know that. And it’s not the same thing. People like me do not end up on park benches, not unless we take to liquor and refuse to do anything about it. People like me have something to give. If we give it, the world gives back. Which isn’t to say it gives back very well. I’ve slept with my share of bedbugs.”
The waiter was back, except that it was a different waiter. Maybe. Gregor gave his order and then sat back to listen to Michael Pride order enough shrimp to populate an ocean. Gregor hadn’t realized there were that many different kinds of shrimp on the menu. Gregor’s wine was gone. He asked for a bottle of Chardonnay and the waiter disappeared.
“The wine waiter will be back to create a fuss,” Michael warned him. “Where were we? Oh. At the beginning of my brilliant career.”
“I think the question is why you didn’t continue with your brilliant career,” Gregor said. “Your credentials are very impressive. In fact, they’re spectacular. You had started out with what sounds like a lucrative partnership. You’re probably right, you probably could have been a millionaire several times over if you’d stuck with it. Why didn’t you stick with it?”
“Why should I bother?”
“Money,” Gregor suggested.
Michael Pride nodded. “I like money as well as anybody else, that’s true. I like lots of shrimp in the Four Seasons and a dozen other luxuries I could name. I’ve had this jacket for fifteen years. I’ve never replaced it because I couldn’t afford to replace it with anything this well made. But everybody likes money, Mr. Demarkian. Most people don’t have it. As long as they’re not destitute, they survive well enough. They’re even happy.”
“If they’ve got a chance of getting money, though, they usually take it.”
“True.” And then they’re stuck with what I’ve always thought of as the fate worse than death.”
“What’s that?”
“Boredom.”
“Were you bored, in that partnership of yours, Dr. Pride?”
“Very. And I would have gone on being bored. I would have had regular hours and regular days and an apartment on the Upper West Side and a house on Martha’s Vineyard, and I would have lived for the two days every three years that a difficult case came up. What’s worse, I would have done heart surgery after heart surgery after heart surgery. That was my specialty. Heart surgery without end.”
“That kind of experience is necessary, isn’t it?” Gregor asked. “Specialists specialize because it makes them better at what they do.”
“Some of them specialize for that reason, yes. And the best ones do work they couldn’t have done any other way and that nobody else on earth can do. Maybe I would have been one of them. But my eyes glaze over even thinking about it. And thinking about the patients I would have had to put up with is worse.”
The wine steward came with the Chardonnay. He did indeed make a fuss, which Gregor endured with as much grace as possible. There were swishings and smellings Gregor didn’t understand at all. There were bowings and assurances that only made him feel ridiculous. Gregor drank Chardonnay because he liked the taste of Chardonnay. He didn’t know what it was supposed to go with and he couldn’t tell the good stuff from the bad, except at the extreme ends of the scale. Every time the wine steward raised his voice in a question, Gregor made indecipherable grunts he hoped would suit. They apparently did. The wine steward backed off and gave a final bow. Then he disappeared into that limbo where Four Seasons waiters went until the instant they were wanted by their tables, at which point they reappeared instantaneously, like genies out of lamps.
“Told you he’d make a fuss,” Michael said.
Gregor poured himself a new glass of wine. He had a new wineglass to pour it in. The Four Seasons would never have let him pour Chardonnay into a glass that had held Chablis.
“So,” Gregor said, “all this is very interesting, but none of it seems discreditable to me. I can’t believe this is what you meant when you said that people were deliberately withholding information about you from me.”
“It isn’t.” Michael Pride smiled. “I think I was just trying to head you off at the pass, stop you from doing what everybody else does. I was just trying to convince you that I’m not a saint.”
“With that résumé? With that résumé I could press your case in Rome, tomorrow.”
“Oh, no, you couldn’t. That’s my point here, Mr. Demarkian, and it’s a very important point. I’m not a crusader, I’m not Robin Hood, I’m not Mother Teresa—whom I’ve met, by the way. She came to tour our operation a couple of years ago. There’s a saint. No, Mr. Demarkian, I’m like anybody else. It’s just that I’m not afraid of the same things most people are. I’m afraid of other things.”
“Boredom.”
“Boredom. Waking up when I’m sixty-five years old and not being able to explain what I’ve done with my life, not being able to remember it. That’s what happened to my father, you know. He was a brilliant surgeon, too. But by and large saints are ascetics, Mr. Demarkian, and I am no ascetic. Just watch me with the shrimp tonight. And later at dessert with the chocolate. Just what do you know about me, Mr. Demarkian, aside from what I’ve told you?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Gregor said. “The Cardinal told me you were a homosexual.”
“Oh, homosexual.” Michael waved this away. “My brother Larry is a homosexual. He’d say gay. He’s living with the same lover he’s been living with for the past twenty years. They bought an apartment in the West Seventies and they’re more married than our parents were. Homosexual is not the point. Do you know what happened to me the night before Charles van Straadt was murdered?”
“No.”
“I got arrested.”
“For what?”
“I got arrested in a raid. On a gay porno theater in Times Square. It was not an upmarket porno theater. It took quarters and there were glory holes. When the police hit I was using one of the glory holes.”
What, Gregor wondered, did you say to a confession like this? Especially because Michael Pride didn’t look like he was confessing anything. He was using the tone of voice people use to describe minor irritating problems with their bosses or run-ins with their stepmothers.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Gregor asked him. “I don’t mean because you might get arrested. I mean medically.”
“I’m very careful, medically. I wasn’t always, but I am now. No, Mr. Demarkian, at the moment, the chief problem I have in relation to my activities in this direction is definitely legal, although not legal in the everyday sense. I got arrested in that raid, Mr. Demarkian, but I did not get booked and I did not get charged.”
“The district attorney was doing you a favor?”
“The district attorney was doing the city of New York a favor, or so he thought. Everybody seems to think the clinic will collapse if anything happens to me. Whatever. The problem was, I got arrested in that raid, and I got photographed being led out into the paddywagon, and the photographs ended up on the front pages of both the New York Post and the Daily News.”
“Not on the front page of the New York Sentinel.”
“No,” Michael said. “That’s what Charlie van Straadt was doing at the center on the night he died. He’d made sure that the Sentinel and that television station he owns kept strictly off the story of my arrest. He was a good contributor to the center and Charlie and I went back a long way. He couldn’t just let it go, though, and we both knew it. He came uptown that night to talk to me.”
“Yes.” Gregor nodded. “That’s in the Cardinal’s report, not as a fact but as a conjecture. Still, everybody seems to have assumed it.”
>
“They ought to. What nobody knows is that Charlie called me, in the afternoon, before he came up.”
“He did?”
“Oh, yes, and that’s the funny part. I’ve been thinking about it ever since and I just haven’t been able to sort it out. Charlie was upset about the publicity, of course. I was upset about it, too. I may not have intended to start a clinic, but I have started one and I think the neighborhood would be in even worse shape than it is now—good God, can you imagine worse shape?—if we were forced to close. In spite of the insinuations the police made, I wasn’t worried about Charlie and his money. There were never any secrets between Charlie and me. It was our position with the Archdiocese of New York that was making me antsy. We walk a tightrope with them every day.”
“Because the clinic does abortions.”
Michael shook his head. “Believe it or not, the abortions are a sore point only in a technical sense. Our position and the position of the Archdiocese is that the abortions are performed by the Sojourner Truth Family Planning Clinic, which is a separate corporation from the Sojourner Truth Health Center, and no nuns or recognized practicing Catholics work in family planning. Were you in favor of Roe v. Wade?”
“I don’t think I ever thought about it,” Gregor said. “It’s not an issue that comes up often in my life. Abortion, I mean. The only young woman I’ve known in the past ten years or so who’s gotten pregnant when she didn’t want to be decided she did want to be in no time at all.”
“Well, I was in favor of Roe,” Michael said. “I’m still in favor of it. The black churches don’t like it. They think it’s a form of genocide. It’s an argument that makes me uneasy sometimes. However, getting to the here and now and the Archdiocese of New York and the center’s abortion practices, the fact is that making abortion safe and legal was a wonderful idea as far as I am concerned, but making abortion legal didn’t exactly make it safe in the kind of neighborhoods the center serves. New York State pays for abortions for indigent women and the hospitals in the area do them, but in spite of those two things, most abortions performed in Harlem and Spanish Harlem and the less desirable neighborhoods of the Bronx are still performed by back-alley abortionists. Except now, the back-alley abortionists have offices right out in the open and there’s no way to know whether you’re in the wrong place until it’s too late. They convicted one of these guys a couple of months ago, but he’d killed a few women before they got hold of him and his arrest isn’t going to do his victims any good. Now the Archdiocese is opposed to legal abortion and I am in favor of it, but we both are opposed to the kind of butchery that goes on in the offices of these quacks. And we both know that there isn’t any other way to stop it except to drain off as many clients as can be drained. The state and the city don’t move in Harlem until they absolutely have to. So. The Archdiocese looks one way. I look another. The high-wire act is successful for one more day.”
“But it’s precarious,” Gregor said.
“It is definitely precarious,” Michael agreed. “Especially with this new Cardinal. People used to complain about the old one, you know, and say he was intolerant. But he wasn’t, really. He was just orthodox. This one is intolerant.”
“I didn’t like him either.” Gregor poured himself another glass of wine. “Were you worried that your arrest would give him a chance to change the Archdiocese’s relationship with the center?”
Michael snorted. “Worried? No, I wasn’t worried. I was scared to death. Not about the funding. I can always make up the funding elsewhere. I don’t care about the money. But the nuns. Ever since my face ended up on the front page of the Post, I’ve been lying awake nights, wondering when Augie is going to walk through my office door to tell me that the Cardinal has issued a ban on clergy and religious working at the center. We couldn’t survive without nuns. We couldn’t survive without Augie. She can work fifteen hours straight, take fifteen minutes off for a cup of coffee, and do it all over again. And she works for less than I do. There’s nothing in the world for getting work like we do done and done right than nuns.”
Gregor sat back. “But the Cardinal didn’t withdraw the nuns from the center,” he said. “And the murder and your arrest are two weeks gone. He’s not likely to withdraw them now unless something else happens.”
“I know. Something else could always happen. I told you I wasn’t an ascetic, Mr. Demarkian. I meant it.”
“Are you at least attempting to protect yourself from being caught in raids?”
“Raids are very rare in New York, I’m thankful to say. The one I got caught in only came off because the proprietor was enmeshed in a RICO action.”
“Still.”
“I know. I know. That’s what Eamon said. But there’s more, as I said. More about the night Charlie died. I’m not worried, at the moment, about everything blowing up in my face because of my tastes in extracurricular activities. I’ve got some control over those. I don’t worry about what I know. I worry about what I don’t know.”
“Charlie called you in the afternoon before he came down to the center,” Gregor repeated. “And you didn’t think the reason he wanted to see you that night was entirely concerning the publicity around your arrest.”
“I know it wasn’t.”
“Then what was it about?”
Michael’s Perrier water was gone. He picked up the glass it had come in and rolled it back and forth between his palms. Gregor thought he looked even more tired than he had when they had first come in. Relaxation had been a mistake. Now that his guard was down, Michael had nothing to keep him going. The creases in his forehead were as deep as riverbeds.
“Charlie was laughing,” Michael Pride said carefully, “the way he laughed when he had something going in business. He’d call me up and tell me about real estate and loans and laugh like that. Don’t ask me why, why he told me or why he laughed. I never understood half of it. This time, though, it wasn’t about business. It was about people.”
“What people?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “Charlie told me that he’d done a brilliant thing, because he’d given someone just what he didn’t want. That was the ticket. He’d told this person he was going to give him this thing, whatever it was, and the person couldn’t say he didn’t want it, because it would sound crazy, but the person didn’t want it and it was going to cause no end of trouble. And then everything would come out, and it would all be to the advantage of the center in the end. And then he laughed even harder and said, ‘Happy Father’s Day, Michael, Happy Father’s Day.’ I’m sorry I’m not being more coherent, Mr. Demarkian, but to tell you the truth, I had my mind on other things at the time. My face was all over the New York papers. And there had been rumors all morning that we were on our way to a shoot-out sometime later in the day.”
“Hmm,” Gregor said.
“Here come the hors d’oeuvres. You could have done better than that, you know.”
Gregor sat back and allowed one of the waiters to put a small plate of smoked salmon in front of him. The waiter put a large platter of fried shrimp in front of Michael Pride.
“Are you really going to be able to eat all this food?”
“Sure. The way you look, you ought to be able to do just as well.”
“Not without gaining forty pounds,” Gregor said. Actually, at this point in his life, he couldn’t do that well at all. No one could do that well unless they had gone hungry for a while. Michael Pride must have gone hungry for a while. Either that, or he was at the start of being seriously ill.
Gregor nibbled on a bit of salmon and then decided to get back to business. “Let’s start from the beginning,” he told Michael Pride. “Maybe if we go over it all in detail, we can make it make sense.”
Michael Pride was better than halfway finished with his shrimp.
2
GREGOR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that starting at the beginning would be useless. It was the kind of thing that worked for the great detectives in the books Ben
nis gave him to read, but that never had worked for him. Three and a half hours after the arrival of the hors d’oeuvres, after Michael Pride had dispatched with countless shrimp, mounds of green vegetables, boatloads of rice and a dessert that had to be lit on fire before it could be eaten, Gregor was no closer than he had been to discovering what had been on Charles van Straadt’s mind the afternoon before he died. Gregor had come to the conclusion that he would like to take Michael Pride back to Cavanaugh Street. Gregor knew a lot of middle-aged women whose mission in life seemed to be to feed the people around them as much food as possible. Michael Pride would be a wonderful subject for their attentions. And they were more sophisticated on Cavanaugh Street than they used to be. They wouldn’t blink an eye when they found out Michael was gay. Lida Arkmanian would just switch her efforts from trying to find Michael a nice Armenian girl to trying to find him a nice young man of the same persuasion. In Gregor’s experience, those women were incorrigible on Cavanaugh Street.
It was Michael’s idea that they should both go up to the Sojourner Truth Health Center and look through the things he had of Charles van Straadt’s, tucked away in his third-floor office. It was after eleven o’clock, but Michael Pride quite obviously had no sense of time. This, too, Gregor should have expected.
“He used to come in and talk to me and leave debris lying everywhere,” Michael said. “He’d come in and just talk and talk and talk. I have a file cabinet drawer I keep it all in. In case he ever wanted it back.”
“But he never did?”
“No. It’s not likely any of it is of any importance. Charlie liked props, that’s all. He liked to tell me how he took revenge on people who tried to cheat him and he liked to wave things around while he did it. Have you ever noticed how rich men are obsessed with the idea of people wanting to cheat them?”
“It’s probably a very practical form of paranoia. A lot of people probably are trying to cheat them.”
“Maybe. That’s another reason not to want to be rich.”