Free Dear Old Dead by Jane Haddam Page A

decorated in the same kind of red-and-white streamers Gregor’s own town house was decorated in. Donna Moradanyan had been active over there, too. Gregor tilted his head and looked down the street. There was a Saint Joseph display on the steps of Holy Trinity Church, and red-and-white streamers wound around every lamppost from here to there. Donna was definitely outdoing herself this time. Gregor wondered if Tommy Moradanyan was going to buy Russell Donahue a Father’s Day present, and if so, what that would mean. God only knew, he was as anxious as any of the old ladies on the street to see Donna Moradanyan married to a responsible man.
    Gregor backed away from the window. He went to the kitchen phone and called a cab. He had to watch himself around this place. It was too easy to turn into a matchmaker on Cavanaugh Street. It was too easy to turn into a gnome who thought the most important thing in life was who married who and what they wore when they did it. It was maddening.
    The kitchen clock said it was two, on the nose. The cab company said it would take ten minutes to get a taxi to Gregor’s front door. Gregor said fine and hung up.
    It was past time for him to take a little trip, that was the truth. He was getting something worse than stale.
    Gregor opened his briefcase again. Press clippings, magazine stories, the transcript of a radio program—lots and lots of paper, but not a single piece of information he couldn’t have gotten on his own in one long day at the main branch of the Philadelphia Public Library. Gregor had the feeling that, unlike John O’Bannion, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York was something of a conspiracy theorist.
    And that could mean nothing but trouble.
2
    A N HOUR AND A HALF later, sitting in first class on the Amtrak train speeding toward New York City—why he bothered to travel first class for this short a trip, Gregor didn’t know—Gregor opened his briefcase again. Bennis was right about more than the fact that this murder should have been put down to random violence and the investigation abandoned at least a week ago. She was right about the kind of snake pit he was about to land himself in. Gregor had put a brave face on it back at the apartment, but he knew the truth. Unless the Archdiocese of New York was willing to smuggle him into this case trussed up in feathers in the back of an armored car, there was going to be no way to keep his presence in New York and his connection to the ongoing inquiry into the death of Charles van Straadt secret. The NYPD was going to be pleased at his arrival only for public consumption. When you were failing miserably at making headway in a high-profile crime, it was to your advantage to seem as if you were willing to accept any help you could get. In private, Gregor knew they were going to be ready to shred him with their teeth, and he didn’t blame them. Things were bad enough as they stood. New York City Homicide didn’t want a man who was now—no matter what he might have been before—an amateur coming in and making them look like fools. Unfortunately, on one or two occasions, Gregor had made the men of one police department or another look like fools.
    He went through the mass of press clippings, came to the one he wanted, and pulled it out. This was the one that worried him. He looked down at a grainy black-and-white picture of a tall, thin man in hospital whites, surrounded by a sea of faces so ethnically diverse they could have served as a public relations poster for multiculturalism in New York City. Underneath the picture, a caption in thick italic lettering read,
Dr. Michael Pride, standing on the steps of the Sojourner Truth Health Center, the morning after Charles van
    Gregor picked the picture up and put it down again. He looked into the face of the tall, thin man and discovered nothing. He looked into the faces of one or two of the others and found only that they hadn’t been looking at the camera. It was impossible to find