Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  The fat middle-aged man stopped in front of a door marked “2B Gonzalez, M.” and stepped back to let Prescott do his stuff. Prescott got his Citibank automatic teller card out of his wallet and slid it into the crack in the door. There were plenty of security doors now where the locks could not be opened with plastic no matter what, but this wasn’t one of them. Prescott didn’t think anything in this building had been replaced since 1959, except light bulbs.

  The lock trembled, shuddered, jerked and sprung. Prescott pushed the door in and looked at the darkness.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Don’t swear in front of the women,” the fat middle-aged man said.

  Then the fat middle-aged man reached an arm over Prescott’s shoulder and a hand through the door, and Maria’s small apartment was full of light.

  It was full of everything else imaginable, too. It was full of feathers and scraps of cloth. It was full of pastry crumbs and chipped stoneware plates. It was full of shredded bits of ancient carpet and peeling strips of plastic lampshades.

  The place had been trashed.

  8

  CARMENCITA BOAZ HEARD ABOUT the destruction of Maria Gonzalez’s apartment at ten minutes to six, and it bothered her, but she didn’t have time to think about it. Later she knew it would bother her a lot, like so much about living in the city did. She had told Itzaak that her dream was to move somewhere small and countrified, like New Hampshire, and he had laughed, but she had meant it. There might not be much in the way of Hispanic culture in New Hampshire, but Carmencita wasn’t sure she minded that. She’d had quite enough of Latin America when she’d been living in Latin America. Her New York neighborhood reminded her so much of Guatemala City, it made her want to cry. Carmencita didn’t like cities at all, and she wasn’t very fond of hot weather. She could just see herself in the New Hampshire countryside with the snow falling on her hair. She could see herself making maple syrup and apple cider and bringing up a pack of children who could all say the Pledge of Allegiance without Spanish accents.

  The six men who were supposed to be on the show today were sitting in Carmencita’s office, looking dejected. A couple of them had come in breathing fire, but it hadn’t lasted. Carmencita had known it wouldn’t. The lawyers had gotten to them. The lawyers always did. There was something about hearing your most private obsessions spelled out in the language of tort law that took the starch right out of a man.

  “It’s worse than getting a divorce,” one of the men complained, after it was over. “With a divorce, at least you know what it’s all about. With this, it’s like they just did it because they felt like it.”

  The sentiment might be expressed a little inarticulately, but Carmencita knew what the man meant. Carmencita was not a feminist. It was her private opinion that the women in this case were what her friend at her neighborhood branch of the New York Public Library would call “grade-A number one ball busters.”

  Ball busters was not an expression Carmencita Boaz used, except in the privacy of her mind. Nastiness was not a modus operandi she had been brought up to adopt. When she saw the women in the hallway, she was unvaryingly polite. When she talked about them to Itzaak, she was blunt without being obscene. In Carmencita Boaz’s background there were legions of nuns, nuns who had been her teachers, nuns who had been her aunts, nuns who had watched over her in playgrounds and at Mass, every last one of them repeating over and over again, “Carmencita, you must be a lady.”

  Carmencita checked her watch, looked over her dejected brood, and tried her best encouraging smile.

  “We’re going to go out to the set in just five minutes,” she said. “We will seat you around a low coffee table, on which will be placed pitchers of ice water and glasses in case your throats get dry. We’re going to try out a few seating arrangements—”

  “Just don’t sit me next to Darlene,” one of the men said. “I’ll break her neck.”

  “They always sit the husbands and the wives together,” another said. “Don’t you ever watch this show? The husbands and wives just sit there holding hands and calling each other the worst names—”

  “I’m being accused of refusing to do something I never even heard of,” a third man said. “I’m being accused of doing something I can’t even pronounce.”

  “You don’t think anybody watches this show,” the second man said, “but you’re wrong. All the wives watch it. And they talk to each other.”

  “Oh, God,” the first man said.

  Carmencita would have liked a drink of ice water herself. She would have liked a long talk with Itzaak, but Itzaak wouldn’t be available. He’d be up in the rafters playing with the lights. She opened her office door and motioned the men to go through it.

  “Let’s get an early start,” she told them. “It can’t do any harm and you’re getting much too nervous. You’ll all be fine.”

  “Of course I won’t be fine,” the third man said. “I’ll be the laughingstock of Port Chester, New York.”

  Since this was undoubtedly true, Carmencita decided not to try to answer it. Instead, she made another falsely hearty gesture at the door, and was gratified when the men got slowly to their feet and headed in her direction. They looked like prisoners on the way to the electric chair, but then in a way that was exactly what they were. Carmencita got them into the hall in a ragtag cluster and headed down the hall for the set.

  Sarah Meyer was standing at the set door, frowning. Sarah Meyer was always frowning. Carmencita paid no attention to her.

  “DeAnna wants to see you,” Sarah said when Carmencita arrived at the door. “I think it’s supposed to be important.”

  Out on the set, single seats had been arranged in a half circle facing the benches for the studio audience. If everything was running on schedule, that audience would be down in the lobby, clutching their tickets and wondering out loud why The Lotte Goldman Show had to tape so early. Carmencita often wondered the same thing herself.

  “I would like you to go down and take the seats on the left-hand side of the platform,” Carmencita told her charges. “Start with the one farthest left as you face the stage from the audience. The gray chair in the middle is where Dr. Goldman is going to sit. Will you do that for me now, please?”

  “Oh, shit,” one of the men said.

  The others drifted into the studio, and the complaining man followed. Carmencita knew why they taped so early. It was because they aired the same day. She just thought it was silly.

  “What did DeAnna want?” she asked Sarah Meyer. “Did she say?”

  “She didn’t say to me,” Sarah said. “All she said to me was go get a ream of typing paper from the storeroom and if you see Carmencita tell her I want her. She didn’t even tell me what she wanted the typing paper for.”

  “Maybe she wanted to type.”

  “DeAnna doesn’t type. DeAnna doesn’t even answer her own phone.”

  “Maybe she wanted to make paper airplanes and shoot them out the window of her office at the traffic,” Carmencita said. “I’ve got something to do right now. I’ll find DeAnna when I’m done.”

  Sarah Meyer sniffed. “She’s in there on the phone with the cops who are at Maria’s apartment. She had to send Prescott all the way back up there and the cops are furious. He wasn’t supposed to have left the scene at all. Do you think it will make the papers, because Maria is with The Lotte Goldman Show?”

  “I think I don’t have time for this conversation,” Carmencita said. “Here comes Maximillian with the women, and you know what that means. Fights are likely to start breaking out any minute.”

  “I heard DeAnna talking to Lotte about it and they were really very mysterious. DeAnna was saying how Prescott was saying that nobody could have done it who didn’t have a key, because the lock was locked when he got there and it was one of those old-fashioned locks that won’t lock with the door open and then you can pull the door shut and there you are. It was the kind of lock you had to use the key to lock once you got the door closed
.”

  “Maria lived in an old building.”

  “I told Prescott you had a key to Maria’s apartment,” Sarah said. “I remember her saying so. You have hers and she has yours. In case either of you gets locked out.”

  Carmencita turned on her heel and gave Sarah Meyer the first long, direct look she’d ever given her. She took in Sarah’s lumpy weight and Sarah’s formless features and Sarah’s rash of blackheads along her chin.

  “What,” she asked, “is all this supposed to be about?”

  If it was supposed to be about anything, Sarah wasn’t saying. She gave Carmencita a little cat smile and backed away. When she reached the intersection in the corridors she turned and hurried away.

  “Come on,” Shelly Feldstein’s voice said from somewhere inside. “Let’s get going, Carmencita, we’ve got this run-through to do before we can let the screaming hordes up and we’re running late.”

  “Right,” Carmencita said.

  “I’m going to change Lotte’s chair to the black—no, not the black, she’ll look like a hanging judge—to the navy blue one. I’m going to run. Are all your people ready to go?”

  All Carmencita’s people were ready to die of embarrassment. There was nothing she could do about it. She marched down to the platform and looked her men over. They hulked in their chairs, looking too big and too menacing by half. Shelley Feldstein either hadn’t noticed or approved of the effect.

  “Okay,” Carmencita said. “Why don’t we try sitting up straight?”

  If Carmencita Boaz had been in the sort of position the men sitting before her were in, she would have told any silly woman who asked her to sit up straight to go straight to hell—except that she would have done it politely, of course. But North Americans were different. They didn’t think like people in the rest of the world. Maybe they didn’t think.

  “Okay,” Carmencita said again, and the men stirred in their chairs and did their best to sit up straight.

  Up in the rafters, Itzaak whistled the first few bars of “As Time Goes By,” to let her know he was watching over her, and Carmencita relaxed.

  Whatever Sarah Meyer was up to, it was creepy. Whatever had happened to Maria Gonzalez’s apartment, it was creepy, too. Carmencita could ride above it all, serene and confident in the benevolence of the future, because Itzaak protected her. That was the secret of their relationship. Itzaak protected her in a spiritual way, and as long as he was near her, she felt all right.

  What she was going to do about that—what either of them were going to do about that—considering the problems they were going to have with religion and all the rest of it, she didn’t know. She just knew that she would much rather think about Itzaak Blechmann than about what might have happened to Maria, and that was that.

  Her charges were beginning to look like lumps of Silly Putty softening in the sun. Carmencita clapped her hands again, and they came to attention.

  9

  DOWN AT THE OTHER end of the office suite, DeAnna Kroll was sitting in Lotte Goldman’s office, sitting on the desk and smoking the first cigarette she’d had in two and a half years, looking frazzled. Lotte was sitting in her own desk chair and putting on the persona she would have to maintain in front of the cameras. It never ceased to amaze DeAnna just how good Lotte was at this. Lotte could commit a bloody murder at noon and be ready to go on the air as if nothing had happened by 12:02.

  “You’ve got less than a minute before you’re supposed to be on the set,” DeAnna told Lotte. “You’d better get moving.”

  “I’ll get moving when I finish my cigarette. Are those policemen coming here?”

  “Later this morning.”

  “Whatever happened didn’t happen here.”

  “We don’t know that anything happened at all,” DeAnna said. “Maria might have messed up the apartment on her own. She may have taken off for Acapulco. She might have been dealing drugs or robbing us blind or doing something else we don’t know about.”

  “Maria was a very clean woman,” Lotte said. “And if the police are coming here, we have to wait for them. I’m already exhausted.”

  “You can stretch out on the couch in my office. I’ll send Sarah Meyer over to one of those boutiques on Third Avenue to buy you a pretty little afghan.”

  “Sarah Meyer will come back with a hair shirt.”

  “Come on,” DeAnna said. “We’re all set up. We’ve got an audience waiting. We’re going to get a long day. Might as well at least start to get it over with.”

  “That’s what I like about you,” Lotte said, getting up. “You’re such a comfort.” She hesitated next to the desk, stubbing her cigarette out in the crystal ashtray DeAnna had given her for Christmas last year. “Dee,” she said, “do you think something serious has happened to Maria?”

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes it does. I hate to say it, but I’m glad it didn’t happen here. Whatever it was. I’d feel responsible for it.”

  “I just feel guilty I was so damned pissed at her earlier tonight,” DeAnna said. “Is all this a bunch of sentimental crap, or what?”

  “It’s a bunch of sentimental crap,” Lotte said firmly. “Oh, dear. I’ve forgotten my flower. You know. The thing I wear to hide my microphone. I forgot to take it off after the taping yesterday and then I must have forgotten to put it back on when I left the apartment today—”

  “Never mind. We’ve got tons of that stuff in the storeroom. I’ll get you something before we tape. Go on out to the set.”

  “I will. Are you sure you can handle all this business with the police by yourself?”

  “Until they get tired of talking to me.”

  “Well, it if gets to be too much for you, send them to me.”

  “Right,” DeAnna said, pushing Lotte toward the door.

  Lotte Goldman was a dear woman, but she’d have about as much success at dealing with the NYPD as a worshiper of Kali would have had dealing with Savonarola. DeAnna pushed her out into the corridor and pointed her in the direction of the studio.

  “Go,” she said. “I’ll go get you a flower.”

  “Yes, Dee, I am going.”

  DeAnna turned away and marched off in the other direction.

  It was after six o’clock in the morning now and the office had started to bustle. The clerk typists wouldn’t be in until nine, but all the private secretaries had started to arrive, used to keeping their bosses’ hours. DeAnna passed women setting up coffee urns and putting out memo pads and yawning into makeup mirrors. She went by one young woman who was saying to another, “I can’t handle all this women’s lib shit. I’d rather be married.”

  There, DeAnna thought, was a woman who needed psychiatric help.

  DeAnna got to the corridor the storeroom was on, walked down to the end of it and opened the door. She put her hand inside to turn on the light switch and got nothing at all. Somehow it figured that the light would go out in the one place she had to get something from with less than a minute before taping. She couldn’t change the light bulb herself, not unless she knew where to find a stepladder, which she didn’t. Somewhere in the building there was a janitor who would fix it for her, but that would take half an hour, and she didn’t have half an hour. She went back up the corridor and stopped at the first secretary she found.

  “Do you have a flashlight? The light’s burned out in the storeroom and I have to get something quick.”

  The secretary was a young black woman named Marsha, who carried one of those tote bags that looked as if it was big enough to move furniture. She contemplated the idea of a flashlight for a moment. Then she nodded, plunged into her bag, and came up with two.

  “This one is really tiny.” She held up something that looked like a pen but flashed on and off by some mechanism DeAnna couldn’t determine. “This one ought to be all right.”

  The second flashlight was the standard-issue detective-story variety. Deanna took it and said, “Call maintenance. We’ll still need somebody to fix t
hat light.”

  “On the phone right away,” Marsha said.

  DeAnna went back to the storeroom, wondering what else Marsha kept in that bag. Tuna fish sandwiches. Hand grenades. The Hope diamond.

  The storeroom door had swung closed. DeAnna pushed it open again. Then she switched the flashlight on and went inside. It was incredible how dark a room was when it didn’t have any windows. Even the light from the corridor didn’t do much to help.

  The silk flowers were in a box on a shelf on the left-hand side near the back. DeAnna had seen them herself less than a week ago, when she had come in here searching for Liquid Paper after everybody else had gone home. She trained the flashlight on the shelves and found boxes marked “ball point pens” and “felt tipped pens” and “paper clips.”

  “Shit,” she said under her breath. Then she moved even deeper into the room, wondering how far back it went, there was no way to tell in all this gloom. She swung the light around to see if she could find the back wall and get her bearings, and then she stopped.

  It was only a glimpse, really, a split second where everything had been suddenly, terribly, irretrievably wrong, but a glimpse was enough. Once she’d seen she couldn’t go back to the point where she hadn’t seen. She could do anything but swing the flashlight back, and stop, and contemplate.

  She contemplated long and hard.

  She thought about the show, and how it could be disrupted.

  She thought about Lotte, and Lotte’s blood pressure, and Lotte’s peace of mind.

  She thought about her old neighborhood and all the things that used to go on there, the things she used to accept as a matter of course.

  She wondered if she was getting soft.