Dear Old Dead Read Online Free PDF

through the building. I keep running into her in the oddest places. You don’t want them to catch you here.”
    “Why are they here?”
    “Grandfather comes up to check things out every once in a while. I suppose he’s here tonight because of all that publicity about Dr. Pride. You have seen something of the publicity about Dr. Pride?”
    Victor had seen it. More to the point, he had heard a violent argument between the city editor and one of the Sentinel ’s top reporters about the fact that the Sentinel was not reporting any of the news about Dr. Pride. This, he was caught up on.
    “That explains why grandfather’s here,” he said, “but it doesn’t explain why Rosalie’s here. Is she going everywhere with him these days?”
    “Something like that.”
    “One of us should have gotten a degree in accounting. I should have. We’re going to have to meet on this sooner rather than later, Martha. We can’t wait on it forever. Eventually he’s going to stop talking about changing his will and actually go do it.”
    “It’s not that I want any more money than I’ve already got,” Martha told him. “It’s just that I don’t want to see it all go to her. God, she’s a poisonous woman. She was a poisonous child.”
    “If you had all that money, you could start your own clinic like this,” Victor suggested. “You could be Mother Teresa with your own funds. That would have to be more amusing than sleeping on a board. Isn’t that what Mother Teresa does? Sleep on a board?”
    “I don’t know. What are you talking about?”
    Victor hadn’t the faintest idea. He was babbling. He often babbled. “Look,” he said, “as long as I’m here, I might as well get a cup of coffee or something. I gave my driver two hours off. I can call him back, of course, but he really hates that. He gets sullen.”
    “I don’t have time to have a cup of coffee. I have work to do.” Martha sounded irritated.
    “I know, I know. It’s all right. I’ll go down and get a cup on my own. I know where the cafeteria is.”
    “Rosalie—”
    Victor put on a brave smile. “So, maybe I’ll run into Rosalie. Maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe she’ll go back and tell grandfather that I’m finally taking an interest in the family charity.”
    “Don’t be an idiot.”
    “I’m not. Maybe it would be a good thing if Rosalie did get the idea that we were plotting something. Maybe it would be a good thing if grandfather got that idea, too. Why not? The old man’s a paranoid. He’d probably be terribly impressed that we’d suddenly acquired so much practical intelligence. It couldn’t hurt.”
    “Don’t be an idiot,” Martha said again, but she was beginning to smile, faintly, and that made Victor feel better. Getting Martha to smile was as easy as convincing Newt Gingrich that Mikhail Gorbachev would make a good president of the United States.
    “Look,” Victor said to her, “try to see it in the best possible light. You know what this place is like. Maybe one of the juvenile delinquents they have roaming through the halls around here will stumble over grandfather on his own, and mug him.”

6
    R OBBIE YAGGER WAS NOT a very intelligent man. He wasn’t even a streetwise smart one, like some of the boys he had grown up with out in Queens, where the same child who failed miserably at every mathematics test could compute the odds on fifteen different horses in a Monmouth Park trotter race in his head. Robbie Yagger had been the kind of earnest, dim young boy who works very hard to get nowhere and works harder to get half a step ahead, only to be squashed flat the first time he stops to take a rest. For Robbie Yagger, thinking was like swimming through a polluted river in a fog. It was hard to do. It didn’t get him very far. It made him feel awful. He only went on doing it because he felt that he had to.
    It was now seven o’clock in the evening and, May or not, it had started to get cold. Robbie stopped watching the