Murder Superior (35 page)

Now he sat in the big plastic-covered easy chair Michael kept just for his visits and looked around at the usual mess, at the papers strewn everywhere, at the charts tacked haphazardly to the wall and notes stuck to the side of the telephone with messages like
“call Augie @ cattle cultures”
written across them. Charles van Straadt had decided to provide major funding for the Sojourner Truth Health Center seven years ago, and in those seven years he had scrupulously kept his promise to Michael Pride not to interfere in operations, with one exception. Charles van Straadt paid for Michael Pride’s secretary, and paid well. He couldn’t stand the thought of the chaos to which Michael’s life was reduced when Michael was left to organize it alone.

Charles’s granddaughter Rosalie—his favorite one, the one he kept around him all the time—was standing on the other side of the office, looking out the windows onto the street. She wore a black turtleneck sweater and black slacks, like a Beatnik girl from the 1950s, and it was a measure of just how pretty she was that she looked good in them. Her dark hair was pulled up on her head in a knot. Her fingers were full of gold and silver rings.

“I don’t think you’re going to get to see Michael today,” Rosalie said. “There’s some kind of emergency going on down there. I wonder what could have happened.”

“Gang war,” Charles said.

“Do you think so really? It just seems so odd that people would go to all that trouble. To have a war, I mean. Why bother?”

“If you’re asking me what the issues are, I don’t know.”

“I passed Martha downstairs while I was coming in. She isn’t speaking to me. Ida and Victor aren’t speaking to me either. I don’t think any of them will ever speak to me again.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I don’t worry about it, grandfather. I just get annoyed by it. It’s so unnecessary.”

“Is that what it is?”

“You could have gone about it differently, you know. You could have set it up in secret and not let anyone know until it was over.” Rosalie’s voice was accusing.

“I can’t do anything in secret,” Charles van Straadt said. “That’s why I own a lot of newspapers.”

Actually, he owned a lot of newspapers because newspapers were what had been available for him to buy, all those years ago, and had been what he knew, too—but telling that sort of thing to his grandchildren was like trying to explain the intricacies of oil painting to a blind person. Rosalie was good with money, but she had no ear for the business. Martha and Ida and Victor weren’t even good with money. Charles looked around the office one more time and came up blank. Either Michael hadn’t read the newspapers today or he’d gotten rid of the ones he had read.

Charles took a cigar out of his inside jacket pocket and lit up. What he lit up with was a twenty-two-carat-gold cigarette lighter he’d had custom made for himself at Harry Winston. Like the custom gold cufflinks on his shirts and the custom gold buckles on his John Lobb loafers, the cigarette lighter was part of Charles’s legend. He reached over to Michael’s desk and extracted the black plastic ashtray from under a stack of forms that would have brought Michael a fair amount of money if he’d ever decided to file them with Medicaid. Michael would never decide to file them with Medicaid. Michael said that taking government money made you far too vulnerable to government regulation.

Charles put the black plastic ashtray in his lap and tapped a thin stream of cigar ash into it.

“Did you walk around the building?” he asked Rosalie. “Did you check out what I asked you to?”

“Yes I did.”

“And?”

“The gay rights protesters are gone, maybe because of all the stories this morning. The guy from the Holly Hill Christian Fellowship is still there, carrying the same old sign. Maybe he doesn’t read the papers any more than Michael does.”

“That’s unlikely. And there was a lot of television play. Nobody else?”

Rosalie shook her head. “It’s really spooky up here. It feels dangerous just to breathe the air. Maybe people are afraid to come up and harass him.”

“Well, they’re certainly harassing us,” Charles said. “I checked with the
Sentinel
office before we came down here. We’re getting fifteen calls an hour on how we’re covering up for Michael Pride. We’re not going to be able to hold off on this story forever.”

“I don’t understand why we’re holding off on it at all,” Rosalie told him. “I mean, it’s not like it really matters. This is a privately funded foundation. There isn’t some bureaucrat someplace who could get Michael fired. The only person who could force him out of here is you, and you don’t want to.”

“True.”

“I don’t see what difference it makes if he does patronize… glory holes. I think it’s gross, but I don’t see what difference it makes. Why shouldn’t the
Sentinel
make just as much of a fuss about it as everyone else?”

“Well,” Charles said mildly, “we owe Michael something, you know. The whole city of New York owes Michael something.”

“What?”

Charles van Straadt cocked his head. Was it possible that Rosalie didn’t understand what was going on here? Was it possible that his granddaughter didn’t realize how incredible it was, that a doctor of Michael Pride’s training, ability, and stature should be spending his life in this place, bringing medicine to people so poor and so poorly educated, so defeated and so paranoid, that the rest of the country had given up on them all long ago? The disturbing thing was that Rosalie probably didn’t understand—and that Martha and Ida and Victor wouldn’t understand, either. They lived in a fog, these children. The world was not what it had been when Charles van Straadt was young.

Charles took a long deep drag on his cigar and sighed.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “Go downstairs and get me one of those fudgey ice lolly things from the cafeteria. I’ll wait here for a while and think through what I want to do.”

“Do you think it’s safe?”

“Your going or my staying?”

“Your staying, of course. It’s so—deserted up here.”

“It’s deserted up here because there’s an emergency down there,” Charles said. “Take off now, I’ll be fine. I promise.”

“All right,” Rosalie said, reluctantly.

“Take off now.”

Rosalie hesitated a moment longer. Then she shrugged her elegant shoulders and strode out of the office, not looking back.

“Try not to get yourself mugged,” she told him as she slammed the door behind herself. It popped open again, refusing to catch.

Charles van Straadt took another drag on his cigar and got out of his chair. Michael’s phone was covered with Post-It notes, but it was otherwise free of debris. Charles sat down in Michael’s chair and picked up the receiver.

“I would like to speak to Martha van Straadt,” he told the house operator. “I believe she’s on duty in post-op this evening.”

The operator said something inane in half-Spanish, half-English and Charles chewed at the end of his cigar.

Crises, crises, crises, he thought.

There never seemed to be an end to crises.

U
NLIKE PRACTICALLY EVERYBODY ELSE
in the city of New York—or at least, practically everybody else who didn’t work at the Sojourner Truth Health Center—Father Eamon Donleavy had not been surprised to open his copy of the
Daily News
this morning to find Michael Pride splashed all over the front of it. He hadn’t even been surprised at the occasion for the story, which was the fact that Michael had been caught in the raid of a particularly nasty gay porno house off Times Square. Eamon Donleavy and Michael Pride had known each other all their lives. Their families had had practically identical six-room ranch houses next door to each other in Kickamer, Long Island, and they had gone straight through high school together, with Eamon two years older and more or less on track, and Michael not even old enough to drive on the day he graduated. After that, Eamon and Michael had parted. Eamon had gone on to the seminary and Michael had gone on to MIT. It had surprised neither of them when, running into each other much later, it had turned out that they had a lot in common. It had surprised Eamon not at all that Michael was “gay.” Eamon always put quotes around that word because, in Michael’s case, the situation was somewhat complicated. Eamon knew dozens of gay men. It was impossible not to, living in New York. Michael was something different, an original, a law unto himself. Michael wasn’t so much definitely gay as he was definitely crazy.

Eamon Donleavy had the newspapers spread out across his desk: the
Post,
the
Daily News,
even
The Times.
The only paper that hadn’t played up the story of Michael’s arrest was the
Sentinel,
and that was Charles van Straadt shielding his personal saint. Eamon didn’t know how long the
Sentinel
’s silence could possibly last. He didn’t know what was going to happen next, either. The center couldn’t operate without Michael. The center was Michael. Eamon didn’t think Michael could operate without the center. It was getting as crazy as Michael’s personal life.

Eamon Donleavy served as chaplain to the nuns who worked at the Sojourner Truth Health Center, and offered Mass once a day to anyone who wanted to attend, and gave classes in reading and religion to anybody who wanted to show up. He was really here to ensure that the Archdiocese of New York did not get into any serious trouble through the fact that they provided the Sojourner Truth Health Center with a good deal of money and resources. This was a tricky maneuver, because the center quite definitely did abortions (for free) and gave abortion counseling. The official position of the Archdiocese on that was that the Catholics at the center had nothing to do with abortion or birth control in any way and the money the Archdiocese sent was used for a children’s lunch program and the provision of school supplies like pencils and notebooks to children who could not afford their own. As a policy position it left a lot to be desired, as had been pointed out in everything from
The National Review
to
The New Criterion.
The Archdiocese was getting away with it because the present Archbishop had the reputation of being a conservative hard-liner. It was difficult to accuse the man of liberalism when he’d just delivered a speech on the evils of R-rated movies and nonprocreational sex. Still, it was a balancing act—and now there was this. The Archbishop had known about this long before the papers had, just as Eamon had. It didn’t make the stories any easier to take.

Eamon’s office was right across the hall from Michael’s own. Through his open door, Eamon could see Charles van Straadt making calls on Michael’s phone. Eamon didn’t like Charles van Straadt. He thought the man was dangerous. Eamon especially didn’t like the way Charles sent his grandchildren to volunteer at the center. To Eamon, Charles van Straadt’s grandchildren looked very much like spies.

“We’ve got to start working on some kind of contingency plan,” the Archbishop was saying in Eamon’s ear. “We’ve got to think of a rationale. That is, unless you want us to pull all the nuns out of there, which I don’t.”

“No, Your Eminence. Of course I don’t.”

This Archbishop was also a Cardinal. The Archbishop of New York was always a Cardinal. In Eamon’s experience, there was something about making a man a Cardinal that rendered him incapable of making a short phone call. This call had lasted half an hour so far, and it was beginning to look like a real marathon.

“How’s Michael?” the Archbishop said. “Is he keeping his mind on his work?”

“I don’t think Michael’s noticed the fuss at all, Your Eminence.”

“How could he avoid it?”

“By working.”

“Well, yes, Eamon, of course, by working, but—it’s all over the place. He couldn’t go to the corner for a cup of coffee without finding a newspaper staring him in the face.”

“You don’t go to the corner for a cup of coffee in this neighborhood, Your Eminence. At least, you don’t if you’re Anglo. Michael might be able to get away with it just because he’s Michael, but I don’t think he’d count on it.”

“People must have said things to him. There must have been phone calls.”

“The phone’s been ringing off the hook all day, Your Eminence. Augie—Sister Augustine has one of those Benedictines that came in from Connecticut answering the calls. She’s very polite and very noncommittal and she doesn’t let anything get through to Michael. There have been a few reporters hanging around, too, of course, but fewer than you’d think. This isn’t a neighborhood up here, Your Eminence. This is a war zone. It’s not safe.”

“No. No, Eamon, of course, it’s not safe. But what about Michael himself? What about the arraignment? Is there going to be a trial?”

“Well,” Eamon said drily, “it seems that the New York City Police Department has neglected to file charges—”

“What?”

“Michael hasn’t been charged, Your Eminence, and he’s not going to be. Not for something like this.”

“I see. Yes, Eamon, I see. What about his health? Not just his psychological health. His physical health.”

“I don’t know,” Eamon Donleavy said.

There was a lengthy pause on the other end of the line. Eamon Donleavy could just imagine what the Archbishop was thinking. It was what Eamon himself thought, when he let himself think, about the medical indications of Michael’s periodic bizarre behavior. A glory hole was a hole in the wall of a stall in a gay porno theater. A client entered the stall, paid his quarters for the movie, and then, if the whim took him, either stuck his own private parts into the hole for the man in the next stall to service, or serviced whatever was sticking through the hole in his own stall. The very idea made Eamon Donleavy physically ill. For Michael, in this age of AIDS, it was a death wish. For the Archbishop, it was undoubtedly more incomprehensible than genocide.

There was a cough on the other end of the phone. “Eamon? Are you as worried by all this as I am?”

“I’m worried about Michael, Your Eminence.”

“I’m worried about Michael, too. Will he be able to withstand all this publicity?”

“It depends on what the van Straadt papers do. If they pull out all the stops, he could be in trouble. Maybe not, but he could be.”