Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  “Here we are,” she said, stopping in front of a plain door. Gregor was a little disappointed. He’d expected to see a star pasted on it. DeAnna knocked loudly and called out, “Lotte?”

  “Come right in,” a soft, thickly accented voice said. “I have been waiting.”

  DeAnna Kroll opened the door and pushed Gregor through it. “I came as fast as I could. That friend of his went off to call the police.”

  Lotte Goldman’s office—or dressing room, or whatever it was—was far less alien territory than the rest of the studio had been. For one thing, it reminded Gregor a little of Cavanaugh Street when Donna Moradanyan had been at work on it. Lotte Goldman might only be occupying this space for a couple of weeks. She might have taken possession of it only a few hours ago. She had already taken pains to decorate it. A carved wooden menorah sat on the desk with nine unlit candles standing in the holders. The candles were white and sleek and slim, like abstract impressionist swans. At one side of her desk, Lotte had a book stand of the kind usually sold to hold large dictionaries. Open on top of it was an ornately illustrated book—illuminated, in the medieval sense—that promised to tell “The Story of the Victory of the Maccabees.” Gregor’s Jewish history was sketchy, but he knew that Hanukkah was the holiday that commemorated the miracle of a single jar of oil that had been only enough to last for one day but that had lasted for eight. After that, he got a little confused. He made a mental note to ask David Goldman to explain it all to him before the season was over.

  On the window that looked out on the gray Philadelphia morning, Lotte Goldman had a bouquet of evergreen branches tied with a bright green ribbon. Since it was not a wreath, Gregor supposed it was suitably removed from the celebration of Christmas not to be offensive. Lotte had been standing next to this bouquet when Gregor and DeAnna walked in. She crossed the room to her desk, put her cigarette down in a glass ashtray, and held out her hand.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “I am Dr. Lotte Goldman.”

  “How do you do,” Gregor said.

  “We really don’t have a lot of time to be polite,” DeAnna said. “The police are likely to be here any minute.”

  Lotte Goldman picked up her cigarette and took a nice, deep drag. “I heard it was Max,” she said slowly, “Max dead in the bathroom. Sarah came by—”

  “Sarah would,” DeAnna said.

  “—and said that his face had been smashed in. Just like Maria’s.”

  Gregor cleared his throat. “Dr. Goldman,” he said carefully, “I think, at this point, that it might make sense not to jump to conclusions. It’s possible, of course, that you’re correct. That the two deaths are similar and therefore in some way connected—”

  “Similar,” DeAnna Kroll said.

  “DeAnna found the body of Maria Gonzalez,” Lotte Goldman said.

  “And similar isn’t the word for it.” DeAnna had grabbed Lotte’s cigarette pack and taken out a cigarette to light herself. “Identical, that’s what I’d call it. Exactly the same kind of wound on exactly the same place on the head. And the cheekbone smashed—Lotte, I’m sorry.”

  “No,” Lotte said. “Don’t be sorry. We have to tell him. If we don’t tell him, what good will he be able to do us?”

  “We could get the New York police to tell him.”

  “Pffut.” Lotte waved this away. “You remember the New York police. That awful man. That anti-Semite. He is only interested in annoying Itzaak.”

  “Itzaak is our lighting man,” DeAnna explained. “He immigrated here from Israel and to Israel from the Soviet Union—”

  “I know somebody who did the same thing,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah. Well. Lots of people did the same thing. Before the Soviet Union fell, anyway.” DeAnna sighed. “Lotte’s right. This guy in New York is just—well, he is just, that’s all. Going on and on about how Itzaak might be an illegal alien.”

  “Is Itzaak an illegal alien?” Gregor asked.

  “Of course not,” Lotte said. “David was his sponsor. I know all about how Itzaak got here. This man in New York is just—”

  “A bigot,” DeAnna said definitely. “The bodies did look alike, Mr. Demarkian. I’m not saying that just to get you involved in this.”

  Gregor thought it over. “What about the body of Maria Gonzalez? Wasn’t that in a closet?”

  “It was in the main storeroom in our studio in New York,” Lotte said. “But the police told us the body did not start out there, and I think they were right. There were people going in and out of that storeroom for hours before the body was discovered.”

  “Before I discovered the body.” DeAnna made a face. “And before you ask, the answer is no. There was no place to hide a body in that storeroom. If it had been there, somebody would have seen it.”

  There was a stiff, formal little chair in front of Lotte’s desk. Gregor sat down on it. “Think back about it. About the studio where the body was found in, say, the hour before it was found. Was the studio crowded?”

  “Not crowded,” DeAnna Kroll said. “There were people around.”

  “In the last half hour it was getting very full,” Lotte corrected. “Some of the secretaries had started to come in.”

  “But it wasn’t as crowded as it would have been once the regular day crew arrived,” DeAnna put in.

  “What about in comparison to right here, right now,” Gregor asked them. “Was it as crowded as this?”

  “Oh, no.” Lotte shook her head. “Here you have our people and also the regular people from WKMB. This studio is connected to six others and four of them are in use. In New York, we have only the one studio and the one crew to service it.”

  “A station like WKMB rents studio space,” DeAnna explained. “In the off hours, which these are. They’re not really used for anything but a show like ours or the local news. So here you’ve got us, and people from WKMB, and the renters.”

  “If what he wants to know is if it would have been easy for the murderer to move Maria’s body into the storeroom,” Lotte said, “the answer is no.”

  Actually, Gregor wasn’t worried about how Maria Gonzalez’s body had been moved into the storeroom. He could think of a dozen ways that could have been done, by the right kind of person with a good grip on his nerves. He was more interested in the timing of this murder and what that said—combined with the murder of Maria Gonzalez and assuming the two had been committed by the same murderer—about this murderer’s state of mind.

  “It’s as if he likes crowds,” Gregor said. “It’s as if he were a magician used to working in danger of exposure. I saw this boy, this Max—”

  “Maximillian Dey,” DeAnna said. “He was from Portugal.”

  “Yes. Well, I saw him when I arrived. He was carrying a chair and complaining about having his wallet stolen.”

  “He had his pocket picked on the subway in New York,” Lotte said. “Just before we came down here—just before. He was on his way to meet us when it happened.”

  “Why was he moving a chair?”

  “Because Shelley Feldstein’s crazy,” DeAnna said. “She kept changing the set. She’s our set designer. She was worried that you were going to look too menacing, you know, being as—uh—tall as you are. Next to Lotte and—um—”

  “Mr. Shasta,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah,” DeAnna said. “Exactly.”

  “Where would Mr. Dey have taken this chair?” Gregor asked them. “Is there a storeroom here, too?”

  “There is, but he wouldn’t have taken the chair there,” DeAnna said. “It wasn’t a chair that belonged to WKMB. It was a chair that belonged to us. We brought it from New York.”

  Gregor raised his eyebrows. DeAnna shrugged.

  “I told you Shelley was crazy. She really gets into the stuff. Of course, she’s also good.”

  “She’s the best in the business,” Lotte said.

  “Any day now, she’s going to start freelancing and we’re not going to pay enough to stay on her schedule.” DeAnna was glum.
“Doesn’t that figure?”

  “Back to Maximillian Dey,” Gregor told her. “Where would he have taken that chair?”

  “To our truck,” DeAnna said. “It’s parked downstairs. There’s enough furniture in it to set up a couch franchise.”

  “Fine. He would have taken this chair all the way down to street level to the truck, and then what?”

  “He’d have left that chair in the truck and gotten whatever chair it was Shelley wanted and brought it up,” DeAnna said.

  “Did he do that?”

  “Did he do what?” Lotte asked.

  “Did he bring the new chair up from the truck? Did he even get the old chair down to the truck? Do either of you know?”

  DeAnna and Lotte looked at each other. “No,” they said.

  “Of course,” DeAnna ventured, “Shelley didn’t come to me to complain. So I suppose he must have at least—”

  “At least what?” Gregor asked.

  “I don’t know,” DeAnna admitted. “Shelley being Shelley, you’d have to ask her. Maybe Max brought the old chair down and the new chair up and that’s why she didn’t complain, or maybe she had her mind on something else.”

  “Mr. Shasta arrived just a little after Mr. Demarkian did,” Lotte reminded DeAnna. “Perhaps her mind was taken up with him.”

  “Perhaps everybody’s mind was taken up with him,” DeAnna said. “What a weird little man.”

  “Can you think of any reason why anybody would have wanted to kill Maximillian Dey? Any harm he might have done anyone? Any information he might have it might have been dangerous for him to know?”

  “Maximillian Dey was less than twenty years old,” Lotte Goldman said. “The only harm he ever did anyone was the heart palpitations he gave girls his own age the first time they saw his face. And as for information—”

  “He moved furniture,” DeAnna said flatly. “Anything he knew, everybody else knew.”

  There was a knock on the door. Lotte Goldman dumped the burned-to-the filter stub she was holding into the ashtray and reached for another cigarette.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Sarah Meyer stuck her head through the door and looked them all over.

  “The police are here,” she announced. “There’s a big black guy looking for Gregor Demarkian.”

  3

  HIS NAME WAS JOHN Henry Newman Jackman, and he was not what most women would describe as “a big black guy,” in spite of the fact that he was both big (six two, two hundred and ten) and black. When women looked at John Henry Newman Jackman, they tended to get specific. The first time Gregor had ever seen him—when Jackman was a rookie cop assigned to a serial killer task force Gregor was coordinating—Gregor had wondered in awe how he ever managed to get anybody to take him seriously. John Henry Newman Jackman had the most physically perfect face Gregor had ever seen, on anybody, male or female, black or brown or red or yellow or white or green. It was so perfect it was almost an abstraction, The Human Face As Intended, as if God had decided to do it right just once so that everybody would know how it was supposed to be. Bennis always said that standing in front of John Jackman was like standing in front of a painting in a museum—but when John and Bennis were together, Bennis never looked to Gregor like museums were what she was thinking of.

  All that was years ago, Gregor told himself firmly, and Bennis Hannaford’s love life is none of my business. He turned the corner into the main corridor and was pleased to see that John was not only there but doing him proud. Usually, the police turned up at the scene of a homicide in a haphazard and uncoordinated fashion. The uniforms got there and called for the rest of the necessary personnel. The medical examiner’s people and the fingerprint men and then evidence baggers and the homicide detectives all drifted through on no particular schedule. From what Gregor could see, John had organized this foray the way a general would organize a battle. The door to the men’s room was open and guarded by a man in uniform. The evidence men were standing in the hallway, holding onto their equipment and waiting their turn. The medical examiner’s people were already with the body. John Jackman himself was just coming out of the men’s room, scratching his head.

  “Gregor, for God’s sake, what is this? I expected the queen of England, at least.”

  “Not the queen of England,” Gregor told him. “The Lotte Goldman Show.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The Lotte Goldman Show,” Gregor repeated.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “There’s a minor league serial killer named Herbert Shasta in one of the rooms down there,” Gregor pointed over his shoulder, “and before the show left New York they seemed to have had a murder that was just like this one, and that’s only for starters—”

  “You’re giving me a migraine.”

  “—and Bennis is around somewhere—”

  “Ouch.”

  “So I think we’d better talk.”

  John Henry Newman Jackman heaved out a sigh that would have done credit to Moses going up the mountain to collect the Ten Commandments for the second time.

  “You’re right,” he said. “We really had better talk.”

  TWO

  1

  HANUKKAH IS ALSO CALLED the Festival of Lights, and because of that Rebekkah Goldman took the liberty of bathing her own house in lights, even though they were what other people would call Christmas lights. The house was in Radnor, in a “good” neighborhood that was not really expensive. Expensive houses in Radnor tended to run to eight thousand square feet and cost two million five. Anyone driving by would have thought Rebekkah was just another Christmas decoration enthusiast. She had lights strung around the pillars on her front porch. She had lights strung wound around the evergreen bushes that made up the hedge that bordered the road next to her front yard. She even had lights on her roof. She also had a Star of David, solid and glowing, at the end of her driveway, but Lotte thought that was rather funny. The Star of David would have had to have been the size of the Liberty Bell to have had any effect against that background of electric twinkles. It was a good thing that the members of David’s congregation were Conservative and not Orthodox, with leanings that sometimes drifted toward Reform. At any rate, they didn’t mind. David and Rebekkah’s children did mind, but in another way. They wanted more lights, not fewer, and if they were going to have Jewish decorations they wanted one of those big electric menorahs the delis had downtown. Like all children, they were less interested in symbolism than they were in ostentation.

  Like most women getting on in years, Lotte Goldman was exhausted at the end of an ordinary day. At the end of a day like this—Maximillian dead, God help us, and the police, and Itzaak getting hysterical and confusion everywhere—she felt as if her bones had turned to chalk. She felt it even sitting in David and Rebekkah’s living room, which was the one place on earth where she was truly comfortable. It always came as such a surprise to her to realize she was old. In her dreams, she was still no more than eight and still in the trunk of that car. Waking up in the morning, she always headed for the bathroom of the first apartment she had ever had in New York, when she was in her twenties and had so little money she had to choose between toothpaste and bread.

  David and Rebekkah wanted to hear everything that had happened. David had been on the phone to his friend Father Tibor Kasparian for an hour, but now he wanted to hear it all again from Lotte’s mouth. The problem was that no one wanted to discuss it in front of the children. The children were all still very young, because Rebekkah was still young. David told Lotte once that he thought he’d done it on purpose, married this woman who had not even been born on the night he left Germany, who had not been born in 1948 when the War of Liberation was going on in Israel, who had not been born in 1957 when David had fallen in love for the first time. Lotte told David it was a damn fool thing to be guilty about. Rebekkah was a beautiful woman who had given him beautiful children and he was lucky to have her.

  Rebekkah finally got the children in bed at n
ine thirty. They were supposed to be tucked in an hour earlier than that, but with Lotte in the house they were more than a little overexcited. They were also not stupid. Lotte didn’t know why adults thought children didn’t listen to what was going on on the evening news. With the television blaring through the house the way it did and their own aunt’s name mentioned right there in the leader. Abraham, especially, wanted to know all the details. Abraham was twelve and convinced of his capacity to understand far more than any adult ever could. Lotte also suspected him of watching her show on afternoons when Rebekkah was out at the store or meeting with one of his teachers. Abraham didn’t have to be in bed by eight thirty, or even by ten, but he was supposed to be up in his room “reading or resting,” as David put it. Lotte assumed he would creep downstairs at just the right moment and eavesdrop.

  Lotte waited until all the children were upstairs, even though she thought it would be useless, and then brought her coffee into the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table. This was one of those oversize houses that had been built in the 1980s, with too much closet space and a kitchen the size of Fort Ord. The kitchen opened onto a family room with a cathedral ceiling and a fieldstone fireplace. Even with the homey touches Rebekkah was so careful to add to every room in her house—the photographs of children and other family in silver frames; the souvenirs of the last trip she and David had taken to Jerusalem—Lotte felt she had nothing to anchor herself to. Lotte needed the walls to be closer to her, like plaster skin.

  David and Rebekkah came down together, having said their good nights. When Rebekkah came into the kitchen, she picked up a plate full of cake crumbs that had been left on the counter next to the refrigerator and put it in the sink for the maid to find in the morning. Rebekkah had a maid to clean but not a woman to cook or a nanny for the children. She didn’t trust anybody to be as kosher as she was herself.