Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  “Worse. According to Chickie, her face was practically pulped.”

  “What about the angles?”

  John Jackman shook his head. “It won’t help. Whoever it was was either taller than both of them—considerably taller—or was standing on top of something when he struck. All the angles are more consistent with an overhead delivery rather than a right or left handedness.”

  “Don’t start thinking in terms of ‘he,’” Gregor warned. “There’s nothing we have so far that would preclude a woman as perpetrator.”

  “What about the force?”

  Gregor shook his head. “You’ve just told me that the angles are consistent with an overhead delivery. That would give the murderer leverage. And you can’t discount the extra force inherent in extreme anger.”

  “Somebody was extremely angry with Maximillian Dey and Maria Gonzalez?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said thoughtfully. “I think they were.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll have to check through a few things first. I just have a—feeling. Did you know Maximillian Dey had his wallet stolen the day before yesterday?”

  “Yeah, I heard about it. Do you think it’s connected?”

  “Not directly, no. I mean, I believe it was an ordinary pocket picking with no broader implications in and of itself.”

  Jackman scowled. “You’re being cryptic, Gregor. I don’t like it when you’re cryptic.”

  “Let’s go back to the tire iron,” Gregor said. “Have you looked around for it? Have you found it yet?”

  “My people naturally looked around for a murder weapon,” John Jackman told him, “but we didn’t find one. And you keep saying tire iron, but we don’t know if that’s really—”

  “It’s a tire iron. You’ll find it in the trunk of one of the limousines The Lotte Goldman Show drove down from New York. I believe they said there were two. Limousines, that is.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Because it makes sense,” Gregor said. “I take it no weapon was found in the Gonzalez case, either.”

  “No, no, it wasn’t.”

  “From what Elkham told me about the Gonzalez case, Maria Gonzalez’s body was moved around and nobody was ever sure where. Well, where’s the most likely place?”

  “You mean in the trunk of a car,” Jackman said. “But Gregor—”

  “No buts. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there doesn’t seem to me to be anywhere else her body could have gone to. And the trunk of the company limousine is not a place the police would necessarily think of to search unless there was an obvious reason for it. You didn’t search the limousines yesterday, did you?”

  “No,” Jackman said.

  “There, then. And the wounds are consistent with a tire iron. And the thing about a tire iron is that you can just put it back where you got it—meaning in its place in the car—and you don’t have to worry about it looking out of place. Then later, when you have a little extra time, you can dispose of it. You can throw it in the river.”

  “Fine,” Jackman said. “But it’s an incredible risk to take.”

  “So what? So this murderer just killed a man in the men’s room of a busy office suite. I don’t think we can accuse him of being afraid to take risks.”

  “Are you sure the tire iron will still be there? In the limousine? If we look?”

  “No. He might have gotten rid of it already. He might not have had time. I couldn’t say.”

  “You’re using he.”

  “It’s for convenience.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that the murderer is one of the drivers? Do you have a reason to think—”

  “Of course the murderer doesn’t have to be one of the limousine drivers,” Gregor said impatiently. “He—or she—just has to be someone with access to the vehicles, which means with access to the keys. The person who comes immediately to mind is that secretary, Sarah Meyer. I’ll bet anything she has keys to every door, box, and vehicle connected to that show. And she’s got mobility, too. She wanders around a lot. It’s part of her job. People expect it.”

  “What reason would she have for killing Dey and Gonzalez?”

  “Maybe there was a love triangle,” Gregor suggested. “Maybe Sarah was in love with Max and Max was in love with Maria, and Sarah killed Maria in the hopes that Max would turn to her in his bereavement, and when he didn’t she killed Max himself in a rage.”

  “Not bad,” Jackman said. “But it sounds more like something on Days of Our Lives than real life.”

  “All right then. Try Dr. Goldman or DeAnna Kroll. Either one of them might have something in their past they don’t want anyone to know about—”

  “Saints in heaven,” Jackman groaned, “not a deep dark secret from the past.”

  “Make it something in the present instead,” Gregor said. “My point is that they’ve got access, too, and mobility. And people do have reasons.”

  “It helps if they have reasons that would convince a jury,” Jackman said. What’s that up there? My God. I do believe the traffic is about to get moving.”

  “The traffic is about to get moving,” the uniformed man in the front seat said. “Look. Do me a favor. Let me run the siren.”

  John Jackman took a look at his watch. “Okay,” he said. “Run the siren. But only for as long as it takes to get out of this mess. Turn it off as soon as we get to town.”

  “Right,” the uniformed man said. He put the car into gear and turned on the noise, producing a whooping wail that reminded Gregor of the death throes of whooping cranes.

  Gregor Demarkian hated sirens and everything that went with them. He shut this one out of his consciousness as far as that was possible and turned to John Jackman so he wouldn’t have to look out the windshield at the progress they were suddenly making.

  “Now let me tell you something,” he said. “David Goldman came to see me this morning, to tell me all about a curious little item called an Israeli dreidel.”

  3

  THE HALLS AND CORRIDORS of WKMB were neither more nor less busy than they had been when Gregor had first seen them early yesterday morning, but the halls and corridors of that part of WKMB now assigned to The Lotte Goldman Show were almost deserted. Gregor and John Jackman went in together, without bringing the uniformed man along. This was only a semiofficial visit. John Jackman wanted to check out the scene one more time, now that the crisis was over and he could investigate in relative calm. Gregor had a few questions he wanted to ask. Studio C looked forlorn. The furniture that had served for this morning’s taping was still strewn across the platform. Prescott Holloway was picking up a small round coffee table just as Gregor and John came in. He paused in his work as Gregor and John walked toward him. Gregor thought he was probably handier at this than Maximillian Dey had been. He was certainly stronger. Gregor and John stopped at the edge of the platform and said hello.

  “Everybody’s gone,” Prescott told them. “Everybody except DeAnna, that is. She’d down in her office.”

  “DeAnna will be fine,” Gregor told him. “We really just want to look around.”

  “Yeah. Well. Have a good time. I really want them to hire another set man. I want them to hire two. I was getting drafted into this shit all the time back in New York, and Max was alive and kicking then.”

  Prescott raised the coffee table a little higher and wedged one curved edge of it against his hip. Then he hopped off the platform and headed for the doors to the outside. Gregor and John Jackman went in the other direction, to the doors at the back of the stage, and let themselves into the corridor that led to the offices and the greenroom and the other temporary accommodations for The Lotte Goldman Show. Prescott had been absolutely right when he said the place was deserted. Gregor and John passed door after door, open on empty offices.

  DeAnna Kroll was in the very last office at the back. Her door was open too, but what it revealed was chaos. It did not seem to Gregor to be the kind of controlled chaos very creative people
were supposed to prefer to work in. It looked like an outrageous mess she had been helpless to prevent. Papers and envelopes were spilling off the desk onto the floor. Half-filled polystyrene coffee cups were balanced on chairs and arranged in a pattern on the file cabinet top. Bits and pieces of Hanukkah and Christmas paraphernalia kept popping up in the oddest places. A plastic crèche with babe in manger was nestled in the folds of a gray flannel scarf that had somehow fallen to the floor. One of those ubiquitous little plastic menorahs with nine supposedly already-lit plastic candles was coming out of the pocket of the pea jacket DeAnna had hung over the top of the office door. Gregor checked out the pea jacket and saw that it had been bought at Ralph Lauren Polo. DeAnna went on talking into the phone.

  “I know it’s impossible to get Marianna here from Sarajevo by Monday,” she was saying, “but you have to get Marianna here by Monday from Sarajevo and that’s that. … Well, I know they’re having political difficulties, everybody over there is having political difficulties, but. … Well, bribe them Bribe all of them. … Bribe enough of them to get a cease-fire Wait, I can’t. … Shit!” DeAnna dropped the phone into the cradle. “He hung up on me. Can you believe that? Long distance from Vienna and he hung up on me.”

  Gregor could believe it.

  “What was that all about?” John Jackman asked. “Is Marianna a guest you want for the show?”

  “Marianna is a show,” DeAnna said. “She wrote a book called Masturbation as an Art Form. Now she’s coming out with one called Masturbation as a Political Act. Lotte can do an hour with Marianna standing on her head. And with the way things have been going around here, we need—oh. You should sit down. Do you want to sit down?”

  There was nowhere to sit down. All the chairs were covered with papers, or worse. Gregor tried perching himself on the arm of something that looked a little fragile, but might do. John Jackman continued to stand. DeAnna stared at the phone as if she were willing it to ring.

  “Wars,” she said. “People ought to give up having wars. They’re a damned nuisance.”

  “That’s a thought,” Gregor said blandly. “Would you mind answering a few questions for us? Right now? We realize this is a little spur of the moment, and you might be busy—”

  “Oh, I’m busy enough,” DeAnna said, “but I’m not going anywhere. I have to wait for that idiot to call back. And he will call back. He always does. What do you want to know? I don’t have an alibi.”

  “An alibi isn’t necessary at the moment,” Gregor said. “Do you know anything about Maximillian Dey’s having had his pocket picked—”

  “Well, of course I know about that,” DeAnna interrupted. “Everybody knows about that. He went on and on about it.”

  “Good,” Gregor told her. “Now. When did it happen?”

  “As he was getting off the subway when he was coming down to meet the rest of us so we could all take off for Philadelphia. We all came down in two cars.”

  “Limousines?”

  “Of course limousines.”

  “Fine. So Max got his pocket picked. It was just his wallet that was missing? Nothing else?”

  “Well,” DeAnna said, “with Max, his wallet would have been enough. He kept his life in there. Pictures from back in Portugal. A fake ID saying he was twenty-one so he could drink. Everything.”

  “Everything,” Gregor repeated. “Fine. Max was an immigrant, am I correct?”

  “Yes, of course. From Portugal.”

  “He’d been in this country how long?”

  “I don’t know. A little more than a year, I think, but don’t quote me. It’s just a guess.”

  “You never asked him?”

  “Well, Max didn’t have what you’d call a position of trust,” DeAnna said. “And we don’t ask those kinds of questions. Gradon Cable Systems does that. It’s just that we wouldn’t mind.”

  “Wouldn’t mind what?”

  “Wouldn’t mind that his English was a little sketchy and that he didn’t know enough about the city to really operate,” DeAnna said. “Lotte is always taking on stray kittens, if you know what I mean. Immigrants, especially, because she was an immigrant. But it isn’t only immigrants. We have about six inner-city high school kids as interns on the show every summer. Lotte is like that.”

  “That’s very commendable, but that’s not exactly what I’m getting at,” Gregor said. “About the contents of this wallet. Do you know what else might have been in there besides a fake ID and some family pictures from Portugal?”

  “Money,” DeAnna said.

  “What about his green card? He did have a green card? He wasn’t a citizen yet?”

  “He wasn’t a citizen yet,” DeAnna said, “and he definitely lost his green card. He went on and on about it. About how difficult it was going to be to replace.”

  “That was the day before yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure, Mr. Demarkian. What are you getting at?”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “when I arrived here yesterday morning, I walked into Studio C to find Max lifting a chair into the air and the contents of his pockets falling on the floor. I picked up a number of the things he dropped and gave them back to him. One of those things was a green card.”

  “It was?” DeAnna looked confused. “Maybe he was wrong, then. Maybe he had it someplace else and didn’t realize it, and then he found it later.”

  “Maybe he did,” Gregor conceded, although he didn’t believe it for a minute. “What about after he left me? I know we went over this yesterday—”

  “And over it and over it.” DeAnna was irritated. “I can’t tell you anymore than I already have told you. He brought the chair downstairs and put it in the truck. We know that because the chair was in the truck and Prescott saw him at the truck. After that we just don’t know.”

  “That’s right,” Gregor said. “We don’t know. Between yesterday and today you haven’t remembered anything else on this score? Nobody has come to you and said, oh, by the way, I forgot, but—”

  “No,” DeAnna said. “There’s been nothing like that.”

  “You haven’t found anything anywhere that might have belonged to him in an unexpected place? The back stairs? Another bathroom? Somebody’s office?”

  “I haven’t found anything that belonged to him, period.”

  “Has anybody else?”

  “No.”

  “What about messages? Did Max ever get any? Just before you came up here? On the trip? Since you got here?”

  “People like Max don’t get messages,” DeAnna said. “Not on a regular basis. If they do, they get fired.”

  “Meaning you would have remembered if he had gotten a message.”

  “Meaning I would have and so would anyone else, and somebody would have made a remark about it.”

  “Fine,” Gregor said. “No messages.”

  “Gregor?”

  John Jackman’s voice sounded oddly strangled, and it came as a surprise. Gregor had been so intent on questioning DeAnna Kroll, and thinking about Maximillian Dey, he’d forgotten John was there. Now he felt a little guilty about it. John was the professional. This was his case. Gregor was only along for the ride.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to John.

  But John wasn’t looking at him. He was staring in the direction of the office door. As Gregor turned to see what John was looking at, he realized DeAnna was staring in that direction, too.

  Itzaak Blechmann was standing right in the middle of the office doorway, his hands wrapped around his bloodstained chest, his legs shaking, his face covered with tears.

  “Come and see,” he said, in English so heavily accented it would have been hard to understand, except for the intensity of the emotion behind it. “Come and see. Carmencita is—Carmencita is on the floor, and she is dead.”

  PART THREE:

  Lady Chatterley’s Demarkian

  ONE

  1

  CARMENCITA
BOAZ WAS NOT dead. There were times in the next half hour when Gregor and John Jackman both thought she was going to die. There were times when they even thought she had, slipping away from them as they did all the frantic things people do when they have been trained in first aid so long ago they don’t remember most of it. God only knew, she ought to have been dead. Gregor couldn’t remember seeing a face in a worse mess than this one on a live person. He had to keep reminding himself about the peculiarities of head wounds. Head wounds bled. He had to keep reminding himself that nothing terrible had happened to Carmencita’s eyes. Eyes were the most vulnerable place, except for the softnesses inside the ear. Carmencita’s eyes opened every once in a while, when the pain pierced her shock and made her twitch, and they were a beautiful, shiny blue that made Gregor think of polished lapis lazuli.

  Carmencita was lying on the floor just beyond the fire door next to the elevators that went down to the lobby and opened on this floor to the reception desk for WKMB. It was a utility area and not much frequented by WKMB staff or casual visitors. It wasn’t much frequented by anybody except the cleaning people, and they weren’t likely to show up in force before six or seven o’clock. Even so, it was a risky place for whoever it was to have pulled this sort of stunt. There was always the chance that something would need to be fixed, sending a janitor up from the basement offices of the Maintenance Department. There was always a chance that some hotshot on the rise who wanted to get in shape was taking the stairs as a form of aerobic exercise. There were all kinds of chances, including the one that had come to pass. Itzaak had been worried. Itzaak had opened every door he could find.

  Itzaak was covered with blood. His shirt was a sodden mass of it and his pants looked as if they had been splattered with ketchup and vinegar. He had lost his yarmulke and didn’t seem to have noticed.

  “We have to find a priest from her church,” he kept saying. “We have to find a priest from her church.”

  Gregor and John Jackman were most interested in finding a doctor from the hospital. Itzaak was useless. The only reason he hadn’t collapsed from shock was that the fact of Carmencita’s being alive had given him a last jolt of energy. As soon as they had Carmencita in competent hands and he no longer had anything he might be called on to do, Itzaak was going to collapse. It made more sense to rely on DeAnna Kroll.