Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  Jackman still looked skeptical. “The third one wasn’t so exact,” he pointed out. “Carmencita Boaz is still alive.”

  “With Carmencita Boaz, he was interrupted,” Gregor said. “I’m telling you, John, there can be no other explanation. It has to be a set of serial killings.”

  John grabbed a mamoul cookie and chomped down on it. His coffee was getting cold, untouched.

  “What about all this business with the green cards,” he asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “The green cards are how this serial killer finds his victims.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Selling forged IDs that make illegal aliens look legal is big business,” Gregor said. “It’s also easy business, if you know what you’re doing. And it’s fast. I saw a report on 60 Minutes once—it might have been Inside Edition—where someone pulled up to a curb somewhere, asked for ID, and got it in less than half an hour.”

  “Got a green card,” John Jackman said.

  “And a social security card.”

  “So what you’re saying is that this serial killer of yours supplies forged IDs to illegal aliens and then bumps off his customers?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why?”

  Gregor shrugged. “There isn’t any why with these people. Not the kind of why you and I would understand, anyway. We’ll find out once he’s arrested. Assuming he’s the kind who talks.”

  “What if he isn’t the kind who talks?”

  “Then our problem is going to be just a little bit bigger.”

  “Gregor, if you really know who this person is, and if it’s really a serial killer we’re talking about here, then I think you’ve screwed around more than enough. I think you should provide me with a name and let me arrest this person.”

  Gregor sighed. “Could you? Could you arrest, with what you have now? What do you have now?”

  “Nothing,” John Jackman said reluctantly.

  Gregor took a long drink of his coffee and picked up a couple of mamoul cookies.

  “This is what happened,” he said. “Maria Gonzalez was killed at the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building, at work or just after work, and her body was stuffed somewhere for safekeeping. In the basement of the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building, maybe. Someplace temporarily safe but not safe enough. It was covered with a blanket or a plastic garbage bag. Then our killer took Maria’s keys, went up to her apartment, and ransacked the place.”

  “Why?”

  “My guess is that that forged green card wasn’t on her,” Gregor said. “The killer went up there to find it. Maybe he got angry when he was working. Maybe he just thought he’d put on a good show. At any rate, the status quo was acceptable until DeAnna Kroll sent out a hue and cry for Maria Gonzalez, and then the hiding place wasn’t safe any more. So our murderer brought the body upstairs—”

  “How did he do that without getting seen?”

  “It would have been very unlikely if the murderer had been seen,” Gregor said. “This fuss started between three and four o’clock in the morning. There wouldn’t have been that many people around. Besides, if the murderer had been seen, so what? Carrying something big and bulky wrapped in plastic—while The Lotte Goldman Show was setting up for a tape? Nobody would have noticed.”

  “Maybe not,” John Jackman conceded.

  “The murderer then put the body of Maria Gonzalez, minus her covering, into the storeroom. It must have been a blanket or something like that that Maria was wrapped in. Otherwise, why not just leave it with the body?”

  “What did happen to it?”

  “It probably went down the incinerator. Now we come to Maximillian Dey. Max was carrying chairs and other furniture for Shelley Feldstein. He went downstairs and was never seen again, until he was dead. Was he killed in that bathroom?”

  “I think so, yes. I haven’t had time to read the report in any heavy duty way, but from what I remember, there were splatters on the wall behind him, which would indicate—”

  “I know what it would indicate,” Gregor said. “That means there’s nothing we can do with Max. There’s no way to prove anything there. And the same is true of Carmencita Boaz, of course. It’s exactly the same situation. We’re going to have to rely on Maria Gonzalez.”

  “Rely on her how?”

  “Well, what I had in mind was—”

  That was the phone ringing. It was actually two phones ringing, because Gregor now had one in the kitchen as well as in the bedroom. He picked up another mamoul cookie and headed into the kitchen to pick up.

  “Just a minute,” he told John Jackman. “I’ll be right back.”

  He picked up the phone with one hand and stuffed mamoul into his mouth with the other. He said hello through a mass of crumbs and waited to see what would happen. He was absolutely convinced that what he was about to hear was a phone solicitation. What he got instead was, “Excuse me? I’m looking for Gregor Demarkian.”

  “This is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said cautiously.

  “Oh, good.” The voice sounded relieved. “You didn’t sound like yourself for a minute there. Hello, Gregor. This is Ira Ballard. I got that information you wanted.”

  “Information?” Gregor was drawing a blank.

  Ira was either used to this sort of thing or not inclined to carp on it. “I’ve got the information you wanted on the White Knights, Defenders of Race and Faith,” he said. “You know. The jerks who are bothering the synagogues.”

  Synagogues, Gregor thought, straightening up.

  In all this fuss, he’d forgotten all about them.

  His life was getting totally unmanageable.

  FOUR

  1

  PHILADELPHIA WAS NOT A small town, but Cavanaugh Street was a small town in a large city, and people there often talked and thought in ways that were more rural than urban. Ira Ballard had spent all his life in the great urban centers of the East Coast. He’d come into the Bureau about five years after Gregor had, landing on kidnapping detail at just about the time Gregor was getting himself out of it. [He had landed in the job of tracking nutcase organizations the way most Bureau agents landed in out-of-the-ordinary Bureau assignments: in a concerted attempt to have nothing at all to do with drug investigations.] Gregor had known him for what seemed like forever. Gregor had forgotten how easy it was to slip back into all that, too. The patterns of speech. The habits of thought. Three years on Cavanaugh Street and he was nearly human. Two seconds on the phone with Ira Ballard, and he was sliding back into a place where the White Knights made much more sense than Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian.

  For Gregor Demarkian, for years, Ted Bundy had made much more sense than Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian. That was why Gregor was so determined to stay on Cavanaugh Street.

  Ira Ballard was smoking a cigarette. Gregor could hear the puff and drag. There had been a lot of pressure in Gregor’s last days at the Bureau to get all agents to quit smoking. Gregor had been spared because he had never smoked, except in the army, which didn’t count. Considering the intensity of that pressure, Gregor thought Ira must be much better at resisting authority than he had ever given him credit for.

  “All right,” Ira was saying, as Gregor paced back and forth across the kitchen. “Let’s start at the beginning. The White Knights, Defenders of Race and Faith were founded in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1983. At the time, they were calling themselves the White Knights, Defenders of Our Heritage. According to a press release they sent out at the time—”

  “A press release?”

  “Everybody sends out press releases these days, Gregor. Survivalist organizations hiding out in the hills of South Dakota have contacts at the New York Times. Yes. They sent out this press release, and according to it they were formed to provide the first line of resistance to the—and I’m quoting here, this is not my prose, ‘the de-Americanification of America.’ End quote. The chief agent of the de-Americanification of America, by the way, was supposed to have been Ronald Reagan.”


  “Ronald Reagan?”

  “Well, they didn’t like Jimmy Carter, either, Gregor. They aren’t to the left. They’re just so far to the right, they make David Duke’s biography look like the history of the Cuban Communist party.”

  “I understand that,” Gregor said, “but even so—”

  “They thought Ronald Reagan was a shill,” Ira explained. “They thought he was a plant. As part of a plot by Planned Parenthood, Ted Kennedy, and the National Education Association. To take over the country.”

  “That wasn’t Ronald Reagan,” Gregor said deadpan. “That was Dan Quayle.”

  “Let’s not get into Dan Quayle.” Ira Ballard laughed. “Okay. So they sent out this press release and for a while nothing much happened. They seem to have died out in Minnesota. They resurfaced again in Markdale, Arizona, in 1985. This was apparently the result of a move. The founder of the White Knights was a man named Robert Waltrek. He moved to Arizona.”

  “And restarted the organization,” Gregor said.

  “If it needed to be restarted. He might just have decided to go public again. There were never too many people in the White Knights in Minnesota—four or five—and none of them has resurfaced on the lists of any other racialist organization. In Arizona, Robert did better. He got a group of about thirty people from Arizona and New Mexico.”

  “Where did he find that many?”

  “Survivalist conventions. Meetings of other organizations. That kind of thing. In 1987, he decided to do something smart—at least, smart for an organization like this looking to add new members. He took out classified advertisements in six different survivalist magazines. They were classics. Our educational system is a mess, Gregor, trust me. Our educational system is doomed.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “What did these advertisements say?”

  “They said, ‘WHITE MEN, DEFEND YOUR SKIN.’ In capital letters. And then they went on from there.”

  “Wonderful. Then what?”

  “Then,” Ira said, “came the convention. The first one, I mean. I told you about the one last April—”

  “In Kisco, Oklahoma.”

  “Right. Well, they’ve only been holding them in Kisco since Waltrek moved to Kisco. They held the first one in Markdale, Arizona, because that’s where Waltrek was living then. They got a hundred and fifteen people.”

  “Not bad.”

  “Not bad, and not as good as it was going to get. But close. The thing is, it was right after the convention in Markdale that the trouble started.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The usual kind. On day three of the convention, a bunch of them got drunk and went throwing rocks at the house of the only known black person in Markdale, who turned out not to be black after all but Native American. He also turned out to be a Harvard lawyer. They got caught.”

  “Did they get prosecuted?”

  “Oh, yes. Prosecuted and sued,” Ira said. “The next year they held their convention fifty miles south, in Hornby, just to stay away from the sheriff. The year after that, they moved to Kisco.”

  “How many people did they get in Kisco?”

  “A hundred fifty-three,” Ira said. “And that was it, by the way. The first convention in Kisco was in 1990. Every convention since has drawn fewer people. Last April they were back down to double digits.”

  “There’s hope for the human race yet.”

  “Most of the human race at least knows a loser when they see one,” Ira said. “And these boys are losers, Gregor, it’s pitiful. Anyway, to get to the part you want to hear about. At the Kisco convention in 1991, it was decided to form local chapters in various parts of the country so that White Knights could meet on a regular basis and try to do something about the mess the country is in. One of these chapters was formed by two young men from Philadelphia, Ricky Calverness and Ted Gressom.”

  “Wait a minute,” Gregor said. “Let me get a pen.”

  What he got was a pencil and a scrap of paper with “Hogrogian Bakery” written on one side of it. John Jackman was still sitting in the living room, eying his coffee suspiciously and looking bored. Gregor waved to him and then sat down at the kitchen table, so that it would be easier to write.

  “Give me those names again,” he told Ira Ballard.

  “Ricky Calverness,” Ira said, “and Ted Gressom. Calverness is twenty-four. He was jailed last year for three months for punching some guy out in a bar and doing it so well the guy ended up in the hospital for six weeks. That was in West Virginia. Gressom has a somewhat more interesting history. He’s twenty-six. He did two years at the Colby Work Farm for beating the girl he was living with into a coma. And I do mean girl. She was fourteen.”

  “They sound like pleasant people,” Gregor said. Colby was the most notorious work farm in all of Georgia—maybe, in law enforcement circles, in all of the United States. Gregor couldn’t remember another person who had been sent there on a domestic violence case. This must have been one hell of a case. Either that, or at least one judge in this system was finally waking up.

  “When did these two get to Philadelphia?” Gregor asked.

  “They’ve been in Philadelphia on and off for years,” Ira said. “But both of them attended high schools on the Main Line—Calverness in Wayne and Gressom in Paoli. They must have been the token poor people. Neither of them graduated. Did I need to say that?”

  “No. Are they living in Philadelphia now?”

  “They’re living on the outskirts. I’ve got addresses here, Gregor, if you want to take them down.”

  Ira gave them. Gregor took them down. They did not look familiar. Somewhere out in Bucks County, Gregor thought, and then marveled anew that there always seemed to be pockets in rich places where poor people lived.

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Are you sure these two are meeting? Are they meeting with anybody?”

  “They’re meeting with one of my agents,” Ira Ballard said. “After we talked I made a point of it. But there isn’t anybody else.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. What does your agent say?”

  “Eight fifteen,” Ira said.

  “Eight fifteen?”

  “That’s right. Eight fifteen. They’re going to hit the B’nai Shalom Synagogue on West Benverton Street at eight fifteen.”

  “Eight fifteen tonight?”

  “Of course eight fifteen tonight, Gregor. What do you think I’ve been talking about?”

  “But that’s only.” Gregor checked the wall clock. It was in the shape of a teapot and had been given to him as a housewarming present by Sheila Kashinian. It had come from Lord & Taylor and probably cost the earth. It looked surreal. “That’s only an hour and ten minutes from now,” Gregor told Ira Ballard.

  Ira was not sympathetic. “I have been trying to get you all day, Gregor. You’ve been out. I did call the Philadelphia police department and tip them off. They’ll be staking out. The eight fifteen is a gift. The White Knights don’t usually operate that early, but according to my agent the neighborhood around the synagogue isn’t very good and they’re a little nervous. Some white knights.”

  “Is the neighborhood likely to be deserted?”

  “Not of cops. Listen, Gregor, I’ve got to go. It’s late and I want to get home. This ought to at least get you started on your way to solving your problem.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Yes, Ira, this is wonderful. Thank you.”

  “Glad to help. Every little bit counts. Only, after the Philadelphia police catch these guys, you could take my agent out to dinner or something. He’s getting that tone in his voice my guys get when they have to spend too much of their time around morons. Say hello to your lady friend for me. And keep in touch.”

  Ira Ballard was out of touch. The phone was buzzing in Gregor’s ear.

  Gregor replaced the receiver and walked into the living room, thinking. John Jackman had eaten all the mamoul cookies. It was late and neither of them had eaten dinner and Gregor didn’t blame him. Jackman sat up a
s soon as he realized Gregor was in the room and stretched his legs.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Why don’t we go to that restaurant down the street that Bennis took me to. If it’s still in business.”

  “It’s still in business. It’s been in business since 1938. It’s called Ararat.”

  “Good. It was great. Let’s go. I’m starving.”

  Gregor sat down on one end of the couch and rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. “John,” he said, “if I wanted to sit in on a stakeout, could you arrange that for me?”

  “A stakeout? When?”

  “Tonight. At eight fifteen, to be exact.”

  Jackman checked his watch. “You’ve got to be crazy.”

  “I don’t want to sit in with the official presence,” Gregor said patiently. “I just want to be on hand and out of sight when the arrest is made.”

  “You’re worse than crazy.”

  “Tom Reilly could do it for me.”

  “Gregor, what are you talking about?”

  “I’m going to call Tom Reilly,” Gregor said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  John Jackman was staring at him, half-angry and half-astounded. Gregor turned his back on the living room while he dialed. If he got what he wanted, John wasn’t going to get any dinner any time soon, and it was just too bad.

  John didn’t even know what all this was about.

  2

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER liked stakeouts. He had never even liked the idea of stakeouts. Something in him—the Aristotelian, logical part of his soul—said that stakeouts shouldn’t be necessary. There was a crime. There was a criminal. There was evidence linking the criminal with the crime. Surely that evidence was out there, somewhere, if they were only smart enough to find it. Surely they should be able to think their way through problems instead of attacking them with frostbitten fingers and brute force. It just never worked out that way. Gregor couldn’t count the hours of his life that had been spent on stakeouts. Especially in the beginning, when he was assigned to kidnapping detail, his time in cars had seemed to him to be endless. There was a crime. There was a criminal. There was evidence linking the criminal to the crime. The problem was, the way the jury system was set up, nobody would believe it.