Festival of Deaths

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Festival of Deaths Page 14

by Jane Haddam


  Well, Shelley thought, she had every intention of having a good night, and with Shelley downstairs talking everything on earth over with Carmencita, she was going to have plenty of time to have a good night in.

  And it figured, really, about Shelley and Carmencita.

  Shelley had always been on the side of the enemy.

  When Sarah had first broached the idea of taking over the job Maria Gonzalez eventually got, Shelley had told her not to be ridiculous.

  SIX

  1

  USUALLY, WHEN THE LOTTE Goldman Show wanted to bring a guest to the studio, it sent a limousine with Prescott Holloway driving. In Philadelphia, however, it saved Prescott Holloway to do personal errands for Lotte Goldman and DeAnna Kroll and sent a local driver. On this day, Carmencita had forgotten to make arrangements with local drivers—she really should still have been an assistant, in spite of her instincts—and Prescott had to go out after all. Gregor Demarkian didn’t know anything about any of this. He knew only that it was five o’clock in the morning, that the weather was even more awful than it usually was at this time of year in Philadelphia, and that the neon menorah in Lida Arkmanian’s ground-floor parlor window was blinking on and off. It was blinking on and off with a regularity that suggested it was supposed to blink on and off. It reminded Gregor of those churches in northern Florida, carved out of cinder-block ranch houses or nestled into the hollow shells of what had once been low-rent bars, topped by neon crosses that flashed like the signs of Las Vegas casinos. Churches like that had always made Gregor vaguely ashamed of Christianity. It had been his impression that Judaism was allowed to keep much more of its dignity.

  Bennis was standing next to him in the foyer of their building when the limousine drove up. When it was safely parked at the curb, she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out on the stoop.

  “Let’s go,” she said, “before you lose your nerve.”

  “Where’s Tibor?”

  “He’ll be here in a minute.”

  From the stoop, Gregor could see down Cavanaugh Street to Holy Trinity Church fairly clearly, in spite of the fact that there was a slight fog. As he watched, Tibor came out of the alley at the church’s side that led to the rectory apartment at the back and came toward them at a brisk trot, the hem of his cassock waving. Gregor wondered what he was going to make the viewing public think of when the camera panned The Lotte Goldman Show studio audience. Of course, Tibor wasn’t going to be the only clergyman present or even the only one in uniform. Gregor had laid down a few rules about this television appearance of his. One of them was that there had to be a reasonable number of people in the audience who were on his side. Rabbi David Goldman had promised to be there (in mufti). So had Father Ryan (in a Roman collar) and Father Yorgos Stephanopoulos (in full Greek Orthodox regalia). Gregor harbored the secret hope that all Lotte Goldman’s planning would come to naught, the show he was supposed to be on would collapse, and what they would tape today would be a full hour of Lotte asking the priests about the sexual repercussions of wearing funny clothes.

  The driver got out of the limousine just as Tibor reached it. The driver looked first at Tibor and then at Gregor and then walked up to the stoop where Bennis was standing.

  “How do you do,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Prescott Holloway.”

  “Bennis Hannaford,” Bennis said.

  “Father Tibor Kasparian,” Tibor said.

  “I’m Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said, and men wondered if it was customary in New York for limousine drivers to shake hands with the people they drove. Prescott Holloway looked like one of those men of whom it is said that they have “once seen better days.” Maybe he was just trying to maintain his old sense of self-respect in the day-to-day grind of a job that had to be very difficult on the ego.

  Prescott Holloway was opening the street-side passenger door of his limousine and helping Bennis in.

  Father Tibor climbed into the car after Bennis. Gregor followed Father Tibor, waving away Prescott Holloway’s offer of help.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ve gotten in and out of these things before.”

  “There’s a television in this one,” Father Tibor said, as Gregor settled himself into the rumble seat, “but not a VCR as there was in the one Bennis rented last year. Do you think there is a difference because of that, in the amount of money the car costs to rent?”

  Prescott Holloway was just sliding in behind the wheel. “Actually, this car isn’t rented. It belongs to The Lotte Goldman Show. We brought it down from New York.”

  “Does the show usually bring its own limousine when it travels?” Gregor asked.

  “It depends on where it’s traveling to,” Prescott Holloway told him. “We brought two down here to Philadelphia, because Dr. Goldman would rather drive than take a train and she hates small planes. And, of course, if we drive we can do anything we want to the schedule, we don’t have to depend on somebody else’s departure times.”

  “It still sounds expensive,” Bennis said.

  “It’s only to cities that are close. Philadelphia, of course. And Boston when we go there. And places in New Jersey and Connecticut. After we leave Philadelphia this year, everybody but me is going to get on a plane. Next stop, Kansas City.”

  “It’s too bad that you don’t get to go,” Bennis said.

  Prescott Holloway shrugged. “I got as much travel as I ever wanted when I was in the army. When the show goes on the road like this, I get to play backup driver for Mr. Bart Gradon himself, which means I get paid a great deal of money to do practically no work. It’s a living.”

  “I suppose it is,” Bennis said.

  “Look at this,” Father Tibor said. “In the window of Lida Arkmanian’s front parlor. They are watching us.”

  Bennis took out a cigarette and lit up. “Of course they’re watching us,” she said. “They’re all watching us. They probably set their alarm clocks to make sure they didn’t miss us when we went. I wish we’d go.”

  “We’ll go,” Prescott Holloway said, shifting the limousine into gear.

  That was the first Gregor realized that the car had not been turned off while it stood at the curb. Prescott Holloway had gotten out and handed his passengers in with the motor humming every minute. Surely that couldn’t be safe? Bennis took a long drag on her cigarette and tapped her ash into the little silver cup imbedded in the armrest.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  “I haven’t had enough sleep,” he said. “My mind has started to think it’s in a Columbo episode.”

  “What?”

  The car was pulling away from the curb, into the street, into the fog. Gregor closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Never mind. I just seem to be going senile.”

  2

  THE FIRST THING GREGOR Demarkian noticed about the people at the WKMB studio where The Lotte Goldman Show was taping was how tense they were. The next thing he noticed was how many of them had not been born in the United States. Gregor did not jump to that kind of conclusion easily. He understood that children born and brought up in certain Hispanic neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles spoke English with an accent as thick as that of anyone growing up in San Juan. It was getting to be a Stateside regional variation. In spite of being Hispanic, however, the young man who met them at the door of Studio C was definitely not American born and bred. He had the wrong kind of Spanish accent. The older man who was climbing through the beams above their heads hadn’t been born in the United States, either. Gregor could recognize that accent anywhere. It was Russian.

  The young woman who had brought them up from the street, Ms. Carmencita Boaz, also had the wrong kind of Spanish accent, but they already knew all about her. She had told them everything she needed to know as she was bringing them up in the elevator.

  “People who don’t work for Dr. Goldman don’t realize what a wonderful person she is,” Ms. Boaz had said. “They don’t realize how
compassionate and fair she is in every dealing she has. They see her on television and they hear her ask the questions that must be asked—because, of course, she is very professional, Dr. Goldman, that is why she has been so successful—but they hear her on television and they think she is tough.”

  Gregor saw Bennis and Tibor shoot glances at each other. He heard Bennis cough.

  “All you have to do is look at our staff to see she isn’t like that at all,” Carmencita was going on. “Dr. Goldman is in the business of giving lifetime chances, really. To me. I came from Guatemala. I could have ended up working in a typing pool somewhere. To Itzaak. He had to escape from the Soviet Union back when there was a Soviet Union. His life was nearly destroyed. Even to Maria Gonzalez.”

  “Maria Gonzalez?” Gregor said.

  “The one who died.” Bennis sounded shocked.

  Carmencita Boaz opened the door to Studio C and shrugged. “It is very bad that Maria was killed, yes, but that doesn’t change the way she was hired. Dr. Goldman was an immigrant, you see. She understands immigrants. She looks after us.”

  “Only immigrants?” Gregor asked curiously.

  A shadow seemed to cross Carmencita Boaz’s face. “There are others, like Sarah Meyer, I suppose. But Sarah is none of my business.”

  Gregor was about to ask Carmencita Boaz what she meant by that, when the young man came to the door, hesitated for a moment, and then seemed to stagger. Gregor realized he was carrying a chair on his back. The chair was small enough to be mostly hidden when the young man faced front, but heavy enough to tilt him off balance. As Gregor watched, he dropped the chair and fell down hard on his rear end.

  “Ouch,” he said. It was a very Latin ouch.

  Carmencita Boaz clucked her tongue. “Look at you, Max, you’ve come all apart again. You’re all over the floor.”

  She meant the contents of Max’s pockets were on the floor. Gregor leaned over and retrieved three dollar bills, a green card and a plastic wallet calendar with a picture of a naked woman on one side from the floor. He handed them over to Max and thought that the young man looked more than a little hung over.

  “There you go,” he said.

  “Is this the detective?” Max said. “The one everybody says is going to investigate the death of Maria Gonzalez?”

  “What?” Gregor asked.

  Max stuffed the things Gregor had given him back into his pockets. “I could use a detective. I could use a very private detective who worked only for me.”

  Carmencita Boaz grabbed Gregor firmly by the arm. “No more of that,” she said. “Max had his pocket picked just before we left New York, and he’s been obsessed with it ever since.”

  “No,” Max said. “It’s not about that.”

  “Mr. Demarkian is due in makeup,” Carmencita said firmly. “Aren’t you supposed to be taking that chair someplace?”

  Max looked at the chair for a minute and then picked it up again. “Shelley wants the blue chairs now. Is this believable? They’re all the way downstairs in the truck.”

  Max staggered under the weight of the chair one more time and lurched past them out the door of Studio C and toward the elevators. Carmencita kept her hold on Gregor’s arm and steered him—and in consequence Tibor and Bennis—across a floor crisscrossed with cables to another door at the back. It gave Gregor a chance to look at the set, which was nothing more than a platform with a few chairs and a coffee table on it, and a plain Sheetrock back wall holding up a small square painting of water lilies in a blond wood frame. Did it really matter what color the chairs were on a set like this?

  The door at the back led to a corridor lined with Sheetrock that looked as if it had never been painted. There were no decorations of any kind hung on it. At the very back was a room with a glass wall looking out on the corridor. Through this glass wall Gregor could see a room furnished with cheap green couches and canvas director’s chairs. Past the bad furniture was another door, also open. Through it, Gregor could see the kind of high-tech padded chair favored by dentists and beauticians.

  “Right in here,” Carmencita Boaz said, shooing them in toward the director’s chairs. “You may have makeup put on your face or not, Mr. Demarkian. It is your decision.”

  “Not,” Gregor said definitely.

  “I do have to tell you that makeup can make a large difference in the way you are perceived by a television audience. If you remember the stories about the presidential race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy—”

  “I voted in the presidential race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.”

  “Yes,” Carmencita said. “Well. I should tell you that other guests may decide to be madeup just as you have decided not to. This decision on their part may have an impact on the way the television audience perceives—”

  “—the other guests,” Gregor finished up for her. “I know. Why do you sound like you’re reading me my Miranda rights?”

  Carmencita looked startled. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, no. I did not mean anything like that. I am very sorry if I have been offensive.”

  “You haven’t been offensive,” Gregor said. “It’s just that—”

  “Now there are these papers that have to be signed,” Carmencita interrupted him. She seemed to pull the papers out of nowhere, as if she had them up her sleeve. “For legal reasons, as you must understand, we cannot begin taping until we have your permission to tape. If you would sign on the third page and initial in the lower right-hand corner of every previous page.”

  “I’ll have to read this,” Gregor said cautiously.

  Behind him, Bennis Hannaford snorted. “You’ve already read it,” she said. “You’ve read it three times. I’ve read it twice. If you’d signed the one they sent you at the apartment, you wouldn’t have to go through all this now.”

  “Maybe we should talk this over some more.”

  Carmencita was holding the papers in the air with one hand and a pen in the air with the other. Bennis grabbed both and held them out to Gregor.

  “Sign the stupid thing. You can’t get all the way to this point and back out. I’d kill you.”

  “I would also kill you,” Tibor said. “Just before David Goldman killed me.”

  “Which would happen just before Rebekkah Goldman killed David. Gregor, you just can’t do these things at the last minute. You just can’t.”

  Gregor took the papers and pen out of Bennis’s hands, initialed the lower right-hand corner of each page, signed on the line on the third page, and handed the whole mess back to Carmencita Boaz. She visibly relaxed.

  “Well,” she said. “There.”

  Gregor wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t signed, but in a way he knew the answer to that question, so he didn’t have to ask it. Tibor would stop speaking to him. Bennis would start yelling at him. Women up and down Cavanaugh Street would knock on his door for weeks, wanting to know why he had disappointed them in this terrible way for no reason at all. He doubted if The Lotte Goldman Show would have folded or that Carmencita Boaz would have lost her job, but he wasn’t unaware that the suggestion that both things might happen if he did not cooperate had been floating in the air since he first shook hands with Ms. Boaz. He didn’t really mind. Carmencita was undoubtedly paid to suggest such things.

  “Well,” she was saying again. “I will have some food sent down for you. Some coffee and some fruit. One of you would prefer tea?”

  “I would prefer tea,” Tibor said.

  “Fine. That is fine. Some fruit and some tea and some pastry, then. We will need Mr. Demarkian on stage in about fifteen minutes, for lighting. That will be Mr. Demarkian alone.”

  “Of course it will,” Bennis said. “I’m not going on television.”

  “I mean Mr. Demarkian without Dr. Goldman or the other guest,” Carmencita corrected. “We will light again with all of you together in half an hour.”

  “Wait,” Gregor said. “What other guest?”

  Carmencita was backing toward the d
oor. “Fifteen minutes,” she repeated. “Only fifteen minutes. There’s nothing to worry about at all.”

  “I’m not—” Gregor said.

  Carmencita was already out the door. As her heels hit the hard floor of the corridor she began to move faster, so that she looked a little like those backup reels the silent movies had used to buy cheap laughs in the days before all that audiences wanted to see was one more bucket of blood in Rambo LXVII.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she said again.

  Then she turned on her heel and ran down the rest of the corridor to the studio door.

  3

  THE FOOD CAME JUST as Carmencita Boaz said it would, in less than five minutes, on a big silver cart, with Tibor’s tea in an elegant pewter pot nestled in a tiny electric blanket. The problem was that it was brought in by the sourest young woman Gregor had ever met, who introduced herself as Sarah Meyer and made it clear that bringing tea and oranges was far more menial work than anything she should have been doing. Her body language was so explicit it practically screamed. When it wasn’t shouting about how shamefully she was underemployed, it was shrieking her dislike of Bennis Hannaford. Even Tibor noticed that, which meant it must have been blatant indeed. Gregor noticed that Bennis didn’t seem to mind. It occurred to him that Bennis must have elicited a fair number of such responses in her time.

  Bennis poured Tibor a cup of tea and handed it to him. It was black and evil looking and made Tibor smile. Then she poured Gregor a cup of coffee and handed it to him. What she got for herself was another cigarette, long and slim and taken from the sterling-silver Tiffany cigarette case her brother Chris had given her for her birthday a few years back. Bennis never took cigarettes from that case. She had a crumpled paper pack of Benson & Hedges Menthols in the pocket of her skirt. Gregor could only conclude that she had taken a dislike to Sarah Meyer equal to the one Sarah had taken to her. Bennis was pulling out all the stops.

  If Sarah Meyer had noticed the bit with the cigarette case, she gave no indication. She was looking over the fruit on the cart and fiddling with a grapefruit knife. She fiddled long enough for Tibor to finish his cup of tea and hand the empty china back to Bennis for a refill. She fiddled long enough for Tibor to get his refilled cup and for Bennis to finish smoking. Then she put the grapefruit knife down on a butter dish and said to Gregor, “Look. I know I’m not supposed to bother you. I’m only a secretary. I’m not supposed to bother anybody. But I want to.”

 

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