Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  “Carmencita?” he called out.

  “I’m coming right to you,” Carmencita said.

  Carmencita was only five feet tall—which suited Itzaak, who was only five seven—and she wore very high spike-heeled shoes to make herself look taller. She stopped when she got to the door of his office and looked inside, smiling when she saw the coast was clear.

  “I just wanted to make sure the dragon lady wasn’t around,” she said. “Whew. I had less trouble from the nun when my sister and I stole the money from the poor box to buy ice cream.”

  “She shouldn’t yell at you like that,” Itzaak said. “It’s not proper.”

  “I ran down to Eidelhauer’s and got pastries. You want something to eat?”

  Eidelhauer’s was a kosher bakery. Itzaak like to think Carmencita went there out of sensitivity to him, but she might not have. Lotte Goldman kept kosher, too. People who worked for the show got used to buying kosher when they wanted food for the office.

  Carmencita handed him a Danish and perched on the edge of his desk. “I wish we knew where Maria was. It’s making me crazy. She must have been the one who took the permissions out of my file. Nobody else would have bothered. I wonder where they are.”

  “They were very important?”

  “DeAnna had to get the lawyers down here to get new ones. Not having them certainly caused a lot of trouble and cost a lot of money. I don’t know. It just doesn’t make any sense. Have you seen her?”

  “I was with you,” Itzaak pointed out.

  “I know you were with me. You’re a funny man, did you know that?”

  “I wish I was. Then maybe you would laugh at my jokes.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of funny. I mean funny. I mean you don’t, well, you know. You don’t act the way men act.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Itzaak blushed. “It’s not that I don’t feel it,” he said. “It isn’t that, if that’s what you think.”

  “Of course that’s not what I think. I think just the opposite. That’s just my point.”

  “Do you want me to—to act like—ah—”

  “Of course I don’t. That’s not what I meant either. I just wish—”

  “What?”

  Carmencita sighed. “Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I have a good time when you take me out. Don’t stop.”

  Itzaak thought he was as likely to stop taking Carmencita out as a crack addict was likely to stop doing dope, but that didn’t seem to be a very delicate way to put it, so he didn’t. He took his feet off his desk and leaned forward over the blotter. It was something to do.

  “So,” he said. “What about Maria? Has nobody seen her at all?”

  “Not since we all left here this afternoon,” Carmencita said. “I rode down with her in the elevator.”

  “And?”

  Carmencita shrugged. “And nothing. We talked about this sale they’re having at Macy’s. Bathrobes and bath towels and things like that.”

  “She didn’t say where she was going for the evening?”

  “She wasn’t going anywhere for the evening,” Carmencita said. “She said she was going straight home and going to bed. She had to meet the Siamese twins here at three A.M.”

  “It seems like an odd time for anybody to be coming into the airport.”

  “It was. It was one of those chartered flights that cost a dollar ninety eight. I guess they aren’t rich Siamese transvestites. Either that, or DeAnna was having one of her moods. Maria must have turned the ringers off on her phone and then slept through her alarm.”

  “Maybe you should go up there and get her,” Itzaak said.

  Carmencita nodded. “I suggested that myself, but DeAnna sent Prescott Holloway. I’m supposed to be soothing the savage breasts of the husbands before showtime. Except now they’re all in with the lawyers and nobody wants me around. You want another Danish?”

  “No thank you,” Itzaak said. “I’m not so happy with you soothing the savages, as you put it. They sound violent.”

  “They’re very sweet, really. They’re just terribly hurt. I mean, most of them didn’t even know their wives wanted—what their wives say they want. The women just went off and joined this support group and now here they all are about to go into worldwide syndication and it’s humiliating. It’s not embarrassing for the wives, you know, because the wives will be able to look important at cocktail parties for months after we air. But for the husbands…”

  “I am sure you would never do such a thing to your husband,” Itzaak said.

  “I am sure that if I was a boss, I would never do something like this to my assistant,” Carmencita said. “Oh, well. There’s nothing but to see it out and hope for the best. I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to sit with you to watch the taping.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because even if Maria is found, we’re going to need two people to handle the guests. We can’t herd them all together in a group. They fight.”

  Itzaak shook his head. “They’re going to fight when they get home.”

  “They’re going to get divorced,” Carmencita told him, “but that’s not my responsibility. I just have to make sure they get through the next three hours. Are we going out to breakfast after this is done?”

  “We always go out to breakfast. I never want to miss going out to breakfast with you.”

  “Good.” Carmencita hopped down off the desk, looked into the pastry bag again, and came up with a third cheese Danish. Itzaak was charmed. Three. Three. This was no hard-bitten American career woman with her mind on her diet. This was a lovely, life-celebrating creature who would one day be a marvelous cook.

  “I think I’ll go see if the lawyers are done with my gentlemen,” Carmencita said. “Max is in with the ladies. They’re behaving predictably. See you later?”

  “See you later,” Itzaak said.

  “I’m really glad you’re here. If it wasn’t for you, I think I’d lose my mind.”

  Itzaak almost told her that she ought to lose her mind, she’d fit in a lot better on The Lotte Goldman Show. It was the kind of joke he knew he was supposed to tell and was so very bad at. She was gone anyway, out the door, down the hall, her heels clicking sharply even on the carpet. Itzaak wondered what it was they made the heels of women’s shoes from.

  At the last minute, he got up and went to his office door, to see if he could catch a glimpse of her walking away. He got Maximillian Dey and Lotte Goldman instead, although not in the same time or the same place. Max was coming out of the greenroom door looking a little green himself. Lotte was going in the direction of her office with a distracted look on her face. Itzaak didn’t think he could blame her for being distracted. So far, it had been a mess of a day from start to finish.

  Itzaak went back to his office, sat down at his desk, and began to fuss with the things on his blotter. He didn’t keep much—a picture of his wife and a picture of his mother, a little replica of the Israeli flag, a copy of the Torah—but what he had he treasured, and he didn’t like the feeling he sometimes got that the things on his desk had been moved around in his absence. Nothing had ever been taken. He would have noticed that. He thought it was probably just the cleaning lady, polishing up. He didn’t like it anyway.

  Today, however, nothing was missing and nothing was moved, and Itzaak decided to take it as a good omen.

  The rest of his day was going to go well, and so was Carmencita’s.

  7

  PRESCOTT HOLLOWAY HAD BEEN born and brought up in the city of New York—in Brooklyn, in fact, so that he had gone to Erasmus High School, just two years behind Barbra Streisand—but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember when The Change had happened. That was how he thought of it, as The Change, as if New York were a woman going through menopause and having some kind of fit. Prescott Holloway didn’t know much about women. He didn’t know anything about menopause. Even so, the metaphor seemed to fit. It even had an
element of hope in it. Women went through menopause and came out the other side and were normal again. Maybe New York would do that, too.

  At that moment, New York was what it had been at least since the election of the last mayor, and maybe before—meaning nuts in a totally nasty way. Prescott couldn’t remember a time when New York hadn’t been nuts. That was part of the city’s identity. It was just that lately, lately…

  That kid from Utah, chased through the subway tunnels to his death…

  That woman in Central Park…

  The Change.

  What really made Prescott nervous was the car he drove. It was Bart Gradon’s idea of the minimum necessary luxury for a major cable network, but Bart Gradon’s ideas of minimum necessary luxury had been formed on Wall Street and the Connecticut Gold Coast. Prescott was parking at the curb outside something called the Bodega Santiago in a pearl gray Cadillac stretch, longer than two ordinary cars, complete with telephone, television, VCR, radio, compact-disk player, and bar. The streets looked empty enough—it was five o’clock in the goddamn morning—but trouble could come out of anywhere, anytime, and trouble had a mean face. Especially up here. Prescott looked up the street at the lighted storefront that was the public face of the local Pentecostal church. These days, the Latinos who weren’t in gangs all seemed to be holy rolling, coming to Jesus in a whirling cloud of sweat and hair, screaming and writhing on the floor. The churches were as bad as the crack houses. They stayed open all night. Prescott could hear the hymn music from where he was sitting, faint and tinny but with a driving beat.

  If Prescott had Maria Gonzalez’s job, he would have moved downtown. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with an ethnic neighborhood like this one, any more than he had anything to do with his old neighborhood back in Brooklyn. He lived off Times Square, in a fifth floor walk-up with the bathroom down the hall, just to be in the middle of everything.

  Prescott turned the engine off and looked up and down the street again, up and down, up and down. He took his keys out of the ignition and opened the driver’s side door. Not a single shadow moved. He made a set of New York City brass knuckles anyway: the sharp point of a key sticking up between each finger of his right hand, the bunched knot of ring and leather tab pressed against his palm. All the drivers he knew carried their keys like this, ready to scratch and tear at the face of anyone who got too close. He didn’t know if anybody had ever actually tried the trick and made it work.

  He pushed the lock button on the door and then slammed the door shut. Then he checked the numbers on the buildings across the street for 586. It was hard to read anything amidst the clutter of signs. It was harder because the signs were all in Spanish. There were no Korean grocery stores here. Bodega. Lecheria. Santeria. Prescott didn’t know if he was getting that last one right, but he knew what it was. It was a store that sold voodoo magic.

  Number 586 was right next to the storefront marked Santeria. Prescott made a gesture at it that was actually the Italian ritual for warding off the evil eye—although he didn’t know that; it was just a gesture he had picked up in the old neighborhood—and walked up to 586’s front door. It opened without complaint, but beyond it there was a vestibule, and at the other end of the vestibule was another door. That one, Prescott was sure, would be locked. He tried it anyway. He found out he was right.

  On one side of the vestibule, the wall had been fitted with steel-case mailboxes and small round buzzers. The buzzers took the place of the fancy call-boards that graced the more expensive buildings downtown. The call-boards had two-way intercoms. These buzzers were connected to nothing but more buzzers upstairs. If you had an apartment in this building and somebody buzzed you, you either had to come all the way downstairs to find out if it was somebody you were willing to let in, or just buzz back and release the lock on the inner door. Prescott knew that somewhere in this building there would be a sign warning residents not to release that door without checking who was calling first. He also knew that residents would pay no attention to it. In a building like this, many tenants would be old women. Their legs would ache and their backs would creak. It would be much too painful for them to keep coming downstairs.

  Prescott found the buzzer with Maria’s name on it and pressed that one. From what he had heard in the office, he knew she lived alone. He pressed the buzzer again and waited again, not feeling much hope. If Maria had been home, she would have answered her phone. He pressed the buzzer for the third time. On the floors about him, he could hear rustles and moans. At this hour of the morning, the people who worked in the small factories in Long Island City would be getting up to go to work.

  Maria didn’t answer the buzzer this time, either. That settled it. Prescott looked at the bank of mailboxes again. Always pick a last name with a single initial, he thought. The spelled-out names were almost always names of men. The last thing he wanted at this hour of the morning was to wake a knife-wielding Hispanic crazy out of bed in a bad mood. Always pick a last name with a single initial, because those almost always belonged to women. Maria’s mailbox said, “Gonzalez, M.” Prescott found “Esposito, C.” and pressed that one, long and hard.

  Somewhere upstairs, a door opened and a man began to shout. Prescott crossed his fingers and pushed the button for “Esposito, C.” again. This time he tried shorter bursts, on the assumption that if Esposito, C. was a woman who lived alone and had been asleep, he had already woken her up. He now had only to convince her she had heard what she thought she heard. The man upstairs began to swear again. Then the buzzer on the inner door sounded, and the lock disengaged.

  Prescott let himself into the stair hall and looked up the wall. “Señora?” he called. “Señorita?”

  A spate of furious female Spanish rained down on his head. Prescott started up the stairs.

  “Señora,” he said as he climbed. “I am looking for Maria Gonzalez. I have come from Dr. Goldman, who is her employer. Maria is supposed to be at work, but she is not there, and nobody can find her. I wish to make sure she is not lying in her apartment hurt.”

  Prescott said all these things slowly and clearly and as loud as he could. He had no idea if Esposito, C. could understand him and supposed she could not. He was slightly heartened by the fact that all the sound above him had stopped. At least someone was trying to listen.

  “Señora?” he said again, as he reached the landing where the woman stood in front of her open door, a short round woman beginning to get old, careworn and suspicious. “Señora,” he said again. “Por favor.”

  That was the extent of Prescott Holloway’s Spanish.

  The extent of Esposito, C.’s English was “Hello.” She said it as soon as she saw Prescott in his uniform, and then she backed into her doorway and let out a yell. The yell brought a fat middle-aged man to the stair rail of the landing above them. He stood blocking out the stairwell light and looking Prescott over.

  “What do you want?” he asked finally, in English not nearly as accented as it ought to be, considering how stereotypically immigrant he looked.

  Prescott told him what he had told Señora Esposito on his way up.

  “So how do we know it’s true?” the fat middle-aged man demanded at the end of it. “How do we know you’re not some kind of cat burglar?”

  “In this neighborhood?” Prescott blinked.

  “People have stereos in this neighborhood,” the fat middle-aged man said. “They have VCRs. They have televisions.”

  “Sure,” another voice said—young, this time, teenage and hostile, “we’re all welfare queens in this building. We’re all getting rich off the city of New York.”

  “Don’t all of us spend all our money on crack,” another teenage voice said.

  Prescott shifted uneasily. This was what he didn’t need. Teenagers. Too many of the teenagers up here had nothing to lose.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m a chauffeur. I’m a driver. You can see for yourself. My car’s parked right across the street.”

  “How do we know
which car is yours?” the fat middle-aged man demanded.

  “Just take a look,” Prescott told him.

  Downstairs, there was a snick of opened door and the soft slap of rubber-soled shoes on linoleum. A moment later, the door-snick sound happened again and somebody laughed.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” the someone said. “You should see it. Stretch caddy half as long as a football field. Only reason it hasn’t been ripped off is that everybody’s afraid it might be booby-trapped.”

  “Maybe it is booby-trapped,” the fat middle-aged man said.

  “Look,” Prescott Holloway told the company at large. “All I’m supposed to do is check Señorita Gonzalez’s apartment and make sure she hasn’t fallen ill on the kitchen floor. That’s it. Then I can go back to my boss and let her figure out what to do next.”

  “You got keys to the apartment?” the fat middle-aged man asked.

  “Of course I don’t have keys to the apartment,” Prescott said. “I’ve got a credit card. If the door isn’t bolted from the inside, I can get in. If it is, we know we’ve got trouble. All right?”

  “She’s not lying in that apartment sick on the floor or anything,” said a young woman’s voice Prescott hadn’t heard before now. “She’s not in the apartment at all. She didn’t come home last night.”

  The fat middle-aged man seemed to make up his mind. He moved away from the stair rail and began coming down to Prescott.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll let you in. But we’re going to be standing here watching you.”

  “Fine,” Prescott said.

  “We all know Maria,” the fat middle-aged man said.

  “I know her, too. I work in the same place.”

  “We’re not going to let you take anything away.”

  “I don’t want to take anything away.”

  The fat middle-aged man looked skeptical, but he motioned to Prescott to come forward, and the two of them started down the stairs to the floor below, where Maria’s apartment was. Prescott was glad now that he had not tried to go straight to it when he was buzzed in. There were buildings where nobody wanted to know anything about anyone else, and then there were the other kind.