Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  3

  IN THE DAYS OF Ruth and Naomi, Prescott Holloway would have been a desperado. He felt like a desperado now, walking the dark streets of a city he barely knew, looking for something he couldn’t put his finger on. It had been a long hard day and tomorrow would be a longer one. With Max gone, they would call on him to take up the slack. There would be slack to be taken up, too. Prescott knew that staff from WKMB were supposed to take over if Max was ill or incapacitated, but he also knew that Shelley Feldstein’s idea of taking over and WKMB’s were not identical. It would be just like it was back in New York. When Max got tied up, Prescott got put into play. Prescott didn’t mind it. It broke up his day.

  What he wanted to break up his night was a drink, or a couple of them. He wouldn’t have minded more of that Scotch Max had had the night before. What else he wanted was a woman, but he wasn’t expecting to find one. Prescott’s ideas of safe sex had nothing to do with AIDS, but he followed them inflexibly nonetheless. So far, they’d kept him from getting arrested and they’d kept him from getting rolled. If he walked fast enough on a night like this, he could keep himself from getting mugged, too. Muggers didn’t like him. He walked too quickly and he looked too mean.

  The sound of the heels of his cowboy boots on the pavement was like drumbeats.

  It made him feel as if his possibilities were infinite.

  THREE

  1

  THE HEADLINE IN THE Philadelphia Inquirer wasn’t bad—

  POLICE INVESTIGATE GOLDMAN SEX SHOW MURDER

  —but the subhead was even more embarrassing than usual, and all the way down to the Ararat that morning, Gregor Demarkian complained about it.

  “‘Demarkian at Scene,’” he said to old George Tekamanian, who had decided at the last minute to have breakfast out and grabbed Gregor’s arm for support in the process. Old George Tekamanian was in his eighties somewhere, one of the last remaining members of Gregor’s mother’s generation on Cavanaugh Street. The other two were maiden lady sisters in their early nineties who lived in an apartment on the ground floor of Hannah Krekorian’s townhouse and claimed to be able to read crystal balls. Old George could remember when this neighborhood was so poor, the city didn’t like to pick up the garbage more than once or twice a week. He could remember when Lida Arkmanian’s townhouse had been a tenement carved up into fourteen one-bedroom flats. He could remember when people on Cavanaugh Street routinely lived in one-bedroom flats, in spite of the fact that they had four children and a grandmother living with them. Gregor could remember all these things, too, but unlike old George he was doing his best to forget them.

  The subhead of the Inquirer story said: PHILADELPHIA’S POIROT FINDS BODY. At least it didn’t say “Philadelphia’s Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” Gregor wasn’t sure that made a difference.

  “‘Demarkian Finds Body,’” he told George, steering the old man carefully across the last intersection between their brownstone and Ararat. “That would have been all right, too. I’m not asking for anonymity.”

  “You are getting upset over nothing,” George said. “Tcha, Krekor, you are being ridiculous. It is a compliment they are paying you.”

  “It is a boost in the advertising revenue they are paying themselves,” Gregor said. “It sells papers.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Well, then, nothing. I wasn’t put on this earth to sell papers.”

  “You should learn to walk faster, Krekor. I don’t understand how you can poke along the way you do and not freeze solid in this cold.”

  The answer was, of course, that Gregor couldn’t. He couldn’t walk as fast as old George—who positively creeped along in his apartment, but picked up speed as soon as he hit a pavement; it was Gregor’s vanity that old George had to be guided anywhere or helped along any street—and he was freezing. It was early in the morning and a gray day in mid-December. The first day of Hanukkah was this coming Sunday and Christmas was five days beyond that. Cavanaugh Street was as decorated as it was going to get. Donna Moradanyan had even managed to plant her gigantic red-and-silver bow on the flagpole that stood in the courtyard in front of Holy Trinity Church. The courtyard wasn’t much more than a wide place in the sidewalk and the flagpole had been paid for by Howard Kashinian, who hated the bow, but that was all part of the coming of the Christmas season, too. Gregor wondered what life was like at this time of year for David Goldman and Rebekkah. Was Hanukkah just as crazy? Did the craziness come for some other holiday at some other time of year? Maybe David and Rebekkah always had calmness and sweet reason, the way the angels in heaven were supposed to have when they weren’t fighting territorial wars against Lucifer and his minions. Gregor wasn’t entirely sure he believed in God, but he did believe in saints, and Rebekkah Goldman was definitely one of them.

  David Goldman was a lucky man. Gregor looked through Ararat’s front window and found him sitting over coffee with Father Tibor Kasparian, in the floor-level cushioned booth on the platform. Gregor hated the floor-level cushioned booth. It was very hard for him to get down on the ground like that and get up again. Tibor, on the other hand, loved it. It was what he remembered from before he came to the United States. From what Gregor could see, David Goldman at least didn’t seem to mind.

  “Come on,” Gregor said to old George, grabbing him by the sleeve. He grabbed one of the wooden bars that crisscrossed Ararat’s new front door—solid mahogany, no more plate glass and textured aluminum here—and opened a passage for the two of them to go inside.

  “Hi,” Linda Melajian said as they approached the front desk. “Father Tibor and his friend are waiting for you. At least they’re waiting for Mr. Demarkian.”

  “It’s all right if I come along,” old George said. “Nobody cares what they say in front of me. They just assume I’m senile.”

  “If you want the kosher menu, you’ve got to tell me now,” Linda said. “We can do it, but we’ve got to warn Mama in advance.”

  “Kosher?” Gregor said.

  Linda grabbed a couple of menus and hurried over to Tibor’s booth. “I wish we had a low-fat menu to serve you,” she told Gregor. “Honestly, hasn’t Bennis learned how to nag you? Your weight is a disgrace.”

  Gregor’s weight was absolutely nothing compared to the weights of the really big master detectives, like Nero Wolfe. Gregor would have told Linda this, except that he knew it wouldn’t do any good. The denizens of Cavanaugh Street liked to live in murder mysteries except when they didn’t want to, and when they didn’t want to always seemed to start about the time they brought up the problem of his weight. Gregor didn’t think his weight was that much of a problem. He was only carrying an extra thirty pounds. And he was a big man.

  He got down on the floor, planted his rear end on a cushion, and slid in behind the table next to Tibor. Old George popped down with all the grace of a fifteen-year-old gymnast and slid in next to David Goldman.

  Gregor introduced old George to David and then asked them, “What was Linda talking about, the kosher menu? Since when does Ararat have a kosher menu?”

  “Since I came down here to visit about two weeks ago,” David Goldman said. “Usually I wouldn’t put anyone to that kind of trouble, but there’s one thing I’ve found out. It’s an exceedingly bad idea to decline hospitality in this neighborhood.”

  Linda Melajian came back to the table, and Gregor ordered waffles with bacon and coffee. Old George ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, grits, extra butter and tea. Gregor shook his head.

  “Well,” he said. “Here we are. I hope this is worth the trip, Rabbi. I told you over the phone that I don’t really know anything yet—”

  “You don’t know anything until you see the lab reports,” David Goldman said. “Yes, yes, I understand. I really didn’t come here to pump you for information. It really is something Lotte told me last night that I wanted to tell you.”

  “Lotte can’t tell you herself,” Tibor said, “because she’s busy this morning taping.”
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br />   “They had to show a rerun yesterday,” old George put in, “because they couldn’t tape your show.”

  Linda Melajian came back with a tray of tea and coffee. The tea and coffee came in tall pots, with empty cups on the side. Old George filled his cup half full of tea and half full of cream.

  “You know,” Gregor said, taking his coffee black in reaction to old George’s extravagances, “there’s one thing that’s confused me, from the very start of this. You’re a rabbi.”

  “That’s right,” David Goldman said.

  “I understand there are different kinds of rabbis—”

  “I’m Conservative. That’s a little less strict than Orthodox, but much more strict than Reform. And, of course, I’m much, much less strict than the Hasidim who had so much trouble here with the graffiti.”

  “All right. But you’re a religious person. From what I understand from Tibor, you’re very deeply religious. And your sister—”

  “Does something very public and very embarrassing?” David asked.

  “Well, it’s certainly public. Do you mean to say you’re not embarrassed?”

  “Of course I’m embarrassed.” David Goldman hooted. “So is Rebekkah. The day Lotte did the show where she had the five guys on who could only make love on carousels, Rebekkah threatened to hide in the closet for a week.”

  “But you’re willing to help her with those shows,” Gregor said. “You’re willing to intercede with Tibor to get me to agree to appear on one.”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course?”

  David Goldman poured himself another cup of coffee. His coffee pot was marked with a red dot. Did this mean it was kosher? Would there be a difference between kosher coffee and the other kind?

  “Look,” David Goldman said, “the first clear memory I have of Lotte is from when I was three and we were leaving Heidelberg. That’s where we lived, in Germany, during the war. Anyway, we’re both lying in the trunk of a car, covered with a blanket, and she has her body completely over mine, completely, so that if the car gets stopped someone might see her in the trunk but they won’t see me. It wouldn’t have worked, of course. I know that now. But at the time she made me feel extremely safe.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Eight,” David Goldman said. “Later, when we were living in what was at first Palestine and is now Israel, all during the war and then the War of Independence later, when we were very poor and there was very little food, I always had more than most people, because Lotte always gave me half of hers. And I never went without a blanket, because Lotte always found me one. And later when the fighting was momentarily over and Lotte came to the United States, the first thing she did after she got her graduate degree was bring me over and put me through the rabbinical program at Yeshiva University. Of course, Lotte is an atheist.”

  “I had noticed that,” Tibor said sadly.

  “Everybody notices it,” David Goldman said. “But there used to be a joke in Yiddish when I was younger. A young man comes back from a sojourn in the big city and marches up to the rabbi who taught him for years in his small town and says, ‘Rabbi, my entire life is changed. I no longer believe in God.’ The rabbi shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘That’s all right. God still believes in you.’ Well, that’s how I feel about Lotte. God still believes in her. And will go on believing in her, in spite of the fact that she probably gives Him ulcers.”

  “Besides,” Tibor said, “the Good Lord’s ulcers may not be so critical as you think. Lotte Goldman is at heart a very conservative woman.”

  “Conservative?” old George Tekamanian said.

  “She always comes down on the side of very traditional morality in the end,” Tibor said. “She talks about these crazy things, but she does not approve of them.”

  Linda Melajian leaned over and put down a plate of waffles in front of Gregor. Then she began unloading heaping plates in front of old George Tekamanian.

  “Good God,” Gregor said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “It’s my grandson Martin and my granddaughter-in-law,” old George said. “They are coming this afternoon to bring me food and make sure I have a healthy lunch. I do not know why it is, Krekor, but food that is healthy for you always seems to taste awful.”

  2

  GREGOR DIDN’T KNOW IF healthy food always tasted awful. He made it a matter of principle never to eat self-consciously healthy food. He didn’t know if Lotte Goldman was in her heart a conservative, either. From what he’d seen of her show, he thought she was a nut case. What he did know was that everybody seemed to need a break, himself included. In spite of the fact that David Goldman had come down here specifically to tell Gregor Demarkian something relevant to at least one of the cases of murder that had occurred among the people associated with his sister’s television show, he wasn’t ready to talk.

  The situation made Gregor Demarkian a little antsy. He was not a sociable man, in the ordinary sense of the term. He spent almost every morning of his life these days having breakfast in the Ararat with Tibor, but the two of them read their respective papers and made comments on the world in general. They didn’t have “conversations” of any formal kind. Even Gregor and Bennis didn’t have conversations of any formal kind. When he went down to visit her, or she came up to visit him, they talked about his work or hers or Cavanaugh Street, but mostly they talked about each other. Gregor knew everything about Bennis’s latest Zed and Zedalia novel. That was what Bennis did for a living. She wrote fantasy novels full of knights and ladies and dragons and unicorns set in the imaginary countries of Zed and Zedalia, which would have been ridiculous if she hadn’t been making so much money doing it. Gregor knew that Ulrich of Rolandia was about to kidnap the evil Queen Allisandra to harness her magic powers for his unjust aggressive war against the Crown Prince of Zed. He didn’t know anything at all about the young man who had taken Bennis to dinner last week and didn’t want to know. Bennis knew all about Gregor’s last case—he always filled her in when the cases were over, he didn’t want her trying to be an amateur detective, but he did like to hear her comments once the coast was clear—but nothing about his visits to Elizabeth’s grave. Gregor didn’t know if that was all right with her or not. Sometimes he worried that he didn’t do more talking to Bennis in the way men usually talk to women they are close to because he was afraid to. What would he talk about, if Bennis insisted? The fact that they now spent more time with each other than most people who were married? The fact that except for one minor technicality, they might as well be married? On second thought, that technicality wasn’t so minor after all. What was also not minor was the fact that he seemed to have wound his life around an extremely rich, extremely pretty, extremely impetuous, relatively young woman on whom he had no real hold at all.

  That was the kind of thing he thought about, early in the morning, when he was not thinking about cases or the excruciating things the Inquirer was saying about him or the problems that had to be cleaned up on Cavanaugh Street. That was why he didn’t like to take time off for these little relaxations. Besides, once he was on a case he liked to get on with it, and this case especially struck him as urgent. Sometimes the feel he got for the thing was that the main murder had been committed and any violence that followed would essentially be panic. That had to be taken into consideration, but in cases like that it was sometimes possible to calm the murderer’s mind, so that nothing new would happen while you were nailing the evidence to put him away for the old. Sometimes the feel was more electric. That was the feeling he had here. He couldn’t shake the conviction that he was in the middle of an ongoing endeavor, and that if he didn’t do something quickly it would be no time at all when he would find another corpse in his lap.

  Tibor and David were discussing soup kitchens. They both participated in the running of one in the center of Philadelphia. Actually, Temple B’nai Shalom and Holy Trinity Church participated, along with half a dozen other churches in the area. It was one of those no
ndenominational, interfaith efforts that made the six o’clock news every once in a while on a slow day when the anchors wanted to look compassionate.

  “It’s the schizophrenics who worry me,” David Goldman was saying. “Your idea is working very well with the temporarily displaced, but there’s just nothing you can do about the schizophrenics. They get disoriented.”

  “What are they talking about?” Gregor asked George.

  “Homeless people.” George tucked into his second order of hash browns. “There are homeless people and then there are homeless people.”

  “There are the hard-core alcoholics,” Tibor said, “and you have to watch them, Krekor, because they will take the food and hide it in their clothes and go out on the street and sell it to get money for bad wine.”

  “There are also people who are just down on their luck,” David Goldman said. “That includes some of the bag ladies. Tibor here put a process into place—”

  “I had an idea,” Tibor objected. “‘Put a process into place.’ What kind of talk is that?”

  “Tibor set up a housing bank,” David Goldman said. “The churches and Temple B’nai Shalom each adopt between one and six of these people at a time—”

  “We do six,” Tibor said, “because if we really need money I talk to Howard Kashinian and to Bennis. With Bennis, I ask. With Howard, I threaten.”

  “We do six, too,” David Goldman said. “We find them an apartment, sometimes two of them together, give them the security deposit and a month’s rent, help them get a job or deal with the government agencies—”

  “But we can’t do it with the schizophrenics,” Tibor said, “because they get confused and then they wander off. These people are not integrated, Krekor. It is a terrible thing. And the insane asylums will not have them.”

  “We don’t have insane asylums in America,” David Goldman said. “We call them psychiatric hospitals. Or mental institutions.”