Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  “Make some phone calls,” Gregor instructed her, as soon as John Jackman had leaned over the body and pronounced it alive. “St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. We need an ambulance. We have a—no, don’t tell them that. Tell them we have a woman who’s been hit with a tire iron and her skull’s caved in—”

  “But—”

  “I know it’s not strictly the truth,” Gregor said, “but we want to get them here.”

  “Shouldn’t I call nine one one?”

  “Nine one one serves the entire city. St Elizabeth’s will be faster. John, do you want to call in to your people yourself?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

  “Good,” Gregor said. “That will be faster, too. Go on now, Ms. Kroll. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  DeAnna Kroll looked in the direction of Carmencita Boaz’s body, which meant she looked at John Jackman’s back, because it was blocking her view.

  “Is she going to die? Is she—”

  “She is if the ambulance doesn’t get here soon,” Gregor said.

  “The ambulance,” DeAnna said. “Yes. And I have to call Lotte.”

  Gregor didn’t know what good Lotte was going to do. DeAnna probably didn’t know either. She hurried off. Gregor went over to John Jackman. He was doing all the right things for head wounds and concussion. Hard as it was to believe, what had happened to Carmencita Boaz was going to be technically called a concussion. To Gregor, concussion was what boys got playing sandlot baseball when they came from families too poor to afford helmets.

  “Go,” Gregor told John. “Let’s get this moving. I’ll take over here.”

  “Right,” John Jackman said. He turned Carmencita Boaz over to Gregor and straightened up. Gregor was relieved to see that the woman was breathing more regularly now, and more deeply, if still not deeply enough. When they had first arrived on the scene, Carmencita had had the hitching, shuddering breath of someone in the throes of tachycardia.

  John Jackman disappeared through the fire door. Itzaak moved in beside Gregor and looked into Carmencita’s face.

  “She is breathing,” he said, and even though he must have known she would be, he sounded awed.

  Gregor found himself wondering how long it would be before they could calm Itzaak down and question him.

  2

  HAVING THE MOST FAMOUS homicide cop in the city and the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot on the case had its advantages. The ambulance responded with alacrity, and four pairs of uniformed cops showed up at the scene in one and a half minutes flat. Gregor was glad to see every one of them. Being an FBI agent is a manner of being a policeman. The Bureau as federal police force was a concept much stressed when Gregor was training at Quantico. The first time Gregor had ever been present at an actual crime scene, he had discovered the difference. The FBI was always coming in after the Sturm und Drang was over: after the kidnapping had happened and somebody was needed to set up and monitor a ransom drop; after six local police forces in three states had racked up a string of seemingly related killings and needed someone to coordinate an interstate hunt. When the FBI wasn’t doing that, it was dealing with paper crime. The FBI was very good at paper crime. A well-trained Bureau agent to track the course of a million dollars in drug money from the streets of New York to the bank vaults of the Cayman Islands. Of course, he couldn’t actually get his hands on any of it. International banking regulations would keep him from doing that.

  The first time Gregor had stumbled onto a real crime scene, he had been astounded. All the blood and confusion and mess: How did they work under such conditions? He had also been a little embarrassed. There he was, the expert, the country’s most famous specialist in murder, with his picture on the cover of Time—and he hadn’t known a damn thing. That the murders he was an expert in were the serial kind—or that his expertise in solving them depended heavily on computers—hadn’t seemed to absolve him. He had thought he ought to know something. He had thought he should at least not feel out of place.

  The first crime scene Gregor had stumbled onto had contained the body of Bennis Hannaford’s father. The investigating officer had been John Henry Newman Jackman. It had all happened in Bryn Mawr three years ago.

  Carmencita Boaz was going out into the foyer on a stretcher. She was not conscious, and Itzaak, walking along beside her, wasn’t exactly conscious either. Gregor saw one of the stretcher men turn to say something to Itzaak and decided to intervene.

  “Let him go with you,” Gregor said. “If you don’t, you’ll have two cases of shock on your hands besides the concussion.”

  “It’s against regulations,” the stretcher man said.

  Itzaak looked like he was going to cry. At that moment, DeAnna Kroll came up to him, put her arm around his shoulder, and whispered in his ear. Itzaak brightened immediately.

  “Watch that woman get a limousine to bring the two of them to the hospital,” John Jackman said. Behind him, uniformed cops and teenies and a lot of other people were milling around, taking samples, trying for fingerprints. There was no sign of the murder weapon and Gregor didn’t expect there to be any. He didn’t expect there to be much physical evidence, either. It wasn’t that kind of crime and it wasn’t that kind of crime scene.

  Gregor drew John Jackman away from the scene and the cops and the techies and into the foyer near the elevators. In the few seconds that he had had his head turned, the crowd around Carmencita Boaz had disappeared. Gregor found himself wondering how the stretcher had fit into the elevator. It was a slightly oversize elevator, so maybe the crush hadn’t been too bad. It was only very slightly oversize, so maybe it had. Obviously, Gregor thought, he wasn’t doing any better at thinking straight than anyone else.

  Gregor shut the fire door on the techies swearing at each other—they did it so well, Gregor sometimes imagined they had to take a test for it; if you couldn’t think of thirteen ways to use the F word in one sentence, you had to give up your dreams of being a techie and go into library work—and said, “Well? What do you think?”

  “Itzaak Blechmann walked in on it,” Jackman said. “Either that, or he did it.”

  “He didn’t do it,” Gregor said. “Our friend got lucky.”

  “You mean because Itzaak didn’t see him? Maybe. But he got unlucky, too. The woman’s alive.”

  “Alive and unconscious,” Gregor said. “And there’s nothing to say she saw her attacker. And even if she did, she may not remember.”

  “Gee, Gregor. Don’t work too hard at making me feel good. I might get overconfident and think I was having a good day.”

  “Don’t be facetious,” Gregor said impatiently. “Look at our situation here. In the first place, I think this time we may be able to find the weapon.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there wouldn’t have been time to get rid of it. Our friend is in a bind. The plan was to kill Carmencita Boaz in a place where she was unlikely to be found for several hours, therefore making time for all the housekeeping details so necessary to bringing off a successful homicide. But there wasn’t any time. Our friend lifted the tire iron—”

  “Are you really sure it was a tire iron?”

  “I’m positive. Our friend lifted the tire iron and began to bring it down on Carmencita’s head. Then our friend heard Itzaak, not passing across the foyer to the elevators but coming closer, or maybe our friend heard Itzaak’s hand on the knob of the fire door—”

  “That would have been close,” John Jackman said.

  “Whatever our friend heard, it was enough. Enough to interrupt the blow. Enough to leave Carmencita Boaz alive. And then what?”

  “What?”

  “Well, John, there would hardly be time for our friend to go tearing off to throw the tire iron in the river, especially since our friend is not a resident of Philadelphia and doesn’t know the city well. Our friend might, but there’s no reason to suppose it’s so. And with Carmencita found, of course, we’re in the middle of an emergency.”

  “So?”

/>   “So our friend’s services are going to be required. Have you noticed that everyone we’ve met who works on The Lotte Goldman Show carries beepers?”

  “Yeah,” Jackman said. “Even the chauffeurs carry beepers.”

  “People carry beepers when they’re expected to be on call. Which our friend is. Which means there is no time for our friend to go chasing around the city, getting rid of the murder weapon.”

  “So where is it?”

  “In the trunk of one of the limousines, I would expect. Tire irons go in trunks. The limousines are parked right downstairs where anybody can get at them. I’ll bet half a dozen people have keys to the trunks, too. DeAnna Kroll. Sarah Meyer.”

  “Why Sarah Meyer?”

  “Because secretaries are always being asked to carry things. Of course, this is the third murder. If our friend didn’t start out with a set or keys to those limousines, by now—”

  “Do you know who ‘our friend’ is?” John Jackman demanded. “Do you have a name?”

  “I know who it must be,” Gregor said. “That is, if one last speculation of mine turns out to be right. Then there’s only one person it could be.”

  “Good. Why don’t you give me a name?”

  “Why don’t you send somebody to find that tire iron? It won’t be much use to you. It won’t have any fingerprints on it. Our friend is not a fool. But it would be good to have.”

  “Gregor—”

  “Then we’ll go to the hospital and talk to Itzaak Blechmann,” Gregor said. “There are a few things he may know that nobody else would. Then we’ll figure out what to do. We’re going to have to do something. We can’t just wait for Carmencita Boaz to open her eyes. She may not have the information we need. And once our friend realizes she isn’t going to die, our friend may bolt.”

  “If our friend is so damned smart,” John said, “why doesn’t our friend bolt right this minute? Why doesn’t he or she or it just hit you over the head for all this ‘our friend’—”

  “When I give you pronouns, you get ideas,” Gregor interrupted patiently. “Go send somebody for that tire iron. You may have to chase it to the hospital. What was that we were saying about how DeAnna Kroll was going to get Itzaak there? Whatever. And then let’s go. It doesn’t make any sense for us to be standing around here. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Work to do,” John Jackman muttered. “Sometimes I think I’m crazy ever to talk to you.”

  Then he stalked back across the foyer, opened the fire door, and stuck his head through.

  “Pilsudski! Estavez! Get over here. I’ve got something I want you to do.”

  3

  ONE OF THE THINGS Gregor always forgot between murder investigations was the media, by which he meant the Philadelphia Inquirer and the local television news. He didn’t forget that the media were there. He got the paper every morning and he watched the evening news at least once or twice a week. What he forgot was the way they behaved when they scented blood, and how much worse they were when the blood they scented had a tinge of celebrity in it. A murder and an attempted murder among the staff of The Lotte Goldman Show—with yet another murder, back in New York, to use for atmosphere—was just what these people liked the best. By the time Gregor and John Jackman got to St. Elizabeth’s hospital, the place was literally coated with reporters and photographers and stringers from the wire services with connections to the suburban weeklies. Gregor wondered how they had heard about this, who had called them. Monitoring the police band all by itself wouldn’t do. Monitoring the police band, they would have known there was an attempted murder. They would not have known there was this attempted murder. Gregor saw a young man in black sweats and black sneakers with a badge on his chest that said CBS. Whether he was really from CBS or just trying to crash the party, there was no way to know. Gregor saw a thin young woman with a half dozen cameras slung over her shoulders get knocked against a lamppost by another thin young woman with a notebook in her hand. A third thin young woman got out of the second thin young woman’s way before she could be knocked to the side herself.

  “Wonderful manners these people have got,” Gregor commented.

  John Jackman grunted.

  They had come down to the hospital in a patrol car with the siren blasting. The siren was still blasting, but nobody was paying any attention to it. The entrance to St. Elizabeth’s parking garage was blocked by people. No amount of extra beeping and blooping would get them to move. They were stuck almost directly opposite St. Elizabeth’s front doors. The front doors were at the top of a long flight of shallow marble steps that led down to a gently curving drive that made a kind of smiley face in the road it came off of. Smiley face. Now Gregor knew he was losing it. A young man leaped onto the top of the police car and plastered himself against the windshield, peering inside. Even with the heater going and the siren wailing and the cop behind the wheel honking his horn to get the young man off, Gregor could hear what the young man had to say.

  “It’s Demarkian!” he was shouting at the top of his lungs. “Right in here! It’s Demarkian!”

  “Maybe I’ll get out and fire a warning shot,” John Jackman said.

  Gregor sincerely doubted that a warning shot would do any good. Not a single person in the crowd would believe John Jackman meant it. Killing somebody would do some good or even wounding them a little, but neither of those things was a politically viable alternative. Moving the police car into the parking garage wasn’t a materially viable alternative. Now that they knew who was in it, the crowd would never let it pass. Gregor had never in his life felt so much in need of the National Guard.

  “I think we’re going to have to make a run for it,” Gregor said.

  “Run where?”

  “Right up to the front doors. They won’t push too hard, John. These are not people who are used to getting hurt.”

  “Maybe we could get them used to it.”

  “On the count of three, I’m going to open this door and bolt. Be ready.”

  “Why? Nobody is interested in me.”

  “Three,” Gregor said.

  So many people were leaning against the door, he almost couldn’t open it. Then someone out there realized what was happening and stepped back. Gregor shoved hard with his shoulder and the door sprang open. Gregor stuck his legs out into the street and a young woman fell into his lap.

  “Excuse me,” he said, lifting her off.

  “Mr. Demarkian!” someone in the crowd yelled. “Have you caught the murderer? Are you going to make an arrest?”

  “I can’t make an arrest,” Gregor said. “I’m not a police officer.”

  “Get out of the way,” John Jackman said. “Get out of the way. If you don’t get out of the way, I’m going to fire this thing.”

  “Get a picture of the cop with his gun in the air!” somebody else yelled.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” the first someone yelled. “Is it true that Lotte was on the scene when the attack on Carmencita Boaz occurred?”

  “As far as I know, Lotte Goldman was visiting relatives on the Main Line when the attack on Carmencita Boaz occurred. Will you please get out of my way?”

  “Get a picture of Demarkian going up the stairs,” somebody else yelled.

  It was like swimming in molasses, except that molasses wouldn’t have been hostile, and Gregor definitely felt some hostility in this crowd. They kept pulling at him. People grabbed at his suit jacket tugging and crushing. Somebody tore his jacket pocket on the left side. Somebody else got hold of his tie and nearly strangled him. It suddenly struck Gregor that he was extremely glad that none of these people were liquored up.

  “Hey Mr. Demarkian,” somebody yelled. “Look this way and glower.”

  Glower. He was at St. Elizabeth’s front doors. He pushed on one and couldn’t make it budge. He pushed on the other and couldn’t make it budge either. He looked through the glass and saw that there were a set of keys in the lock on the other side.

  “Knock,” John Jackman said,
coming up behind him.

  Gregor knocked. An older woman in an abbreviated nun’s habit—full-body white apron over a pale blue dress; tucked-back white veil starched into immobility and falling just below her shoulders—came to the door and shook her head. John Jackman leaned past Gregor and held out his badge.

  The nun hesitated, looked worriedly at the crowd, and then nodded.

  “They can’t lock a hospital,” Gregor said. “What will happen to the sick people?”

  “The ones who want to get in will just have to go down to Quaker General. Here we go. Be fast.”

  Gregor was fast. The door opened a very tiny crack. John Jackman pushed him from behind. Gregor stumbled through the doors and past the nun into a large blue-carpeted lobby. In fact, from what he could see, everything at St. Elizabeth’s was blue. Then he remembered. Blue was the color of the Virgin Mary. St. Elizabeth was supposed to have been Mary’s cousin and John the Baptist’s mother. Catholics didn’t make any more sense to him than television people did. The nun was locking the doors behind them with a series of sharp clicks that seemed to give her limitless satisfaction. She turned around to them when she was done and said, “You two gentlemen will want the fifth floor, north wing. That’s where we put her. And enough police officers to start our own department.”

  “They’re no better than reporters sometimes,” John said.

  “You’re Mr. Gregor Demarkian, aren’t you?” the nun said. “I’m Sister Mary Vincent. Sister Scholastica Burke is my second cousin.”

  “Oh,” Gregor said.

  “I’ve heard a great deal about you,” Sister Mary Vincent said. “I think you must be quite an unusual man.”

  “He is,” John Jackman snickered.

  Sister Mary Vincent didn’t seem to have heard the snicker. She was marching to the elevators. She was pushing the call button to get them a car. Gregor looked across the lobby at the desk and saw a crèche on the counter there, with the manger empty. Catholics always left the manger empty until Christmas day.