Festival of Deaths (32 page)

“Mr. Demarkian,” she said, “would you please tell me—
me,
not DeAnna and not that silly man Itzaak Blechmann—what you can possibly be thinking of to even conceive of the idea that Itzaak might do anything to harm Carmencita? Itzaak, of all people.”

“I agree,” Gregor told her politely. “I don’t think Itzaak Blechmann will harm Carmencita Boaz.”

“Well,” Lotte said. “Well.”

“I don’t think he will, either,” John Jackman said. “I just know how easy it would be to get lynched if he happened to. If you see what I mean.”

“No,” Lotte said.

“I don’t blame you,” Gregor said, and Lotte found herself thinking that he was a very attractive man. Not physically attractive, exactly—he could take off some weight—but attractive in his person. “Are you going to go in to talk to the doctors now?” he asked her. “Do you have a couple of minutes to talk to us?”

Lotte looked back at Carmencita’s room. She would, of course, have to talk to the doctors. She would have to see Carmencita and comfort Itzaak. She had always hated hospitals. She had always hated sickness, too, and she had a positive phobia about death. Maybe that was why she did a television show about sex. She was old enough to be of that generation that still connected the act of sex with making babies. Making babies was the ultimate commitment to life. She turned back to Gregor Demarkian.

“I don’t have to go there now,” she said. “What is it you wanted to ask me? When Carmencita was hurt I was—”

“At your brother David’s,” Gregor said. “I know. It isn’t about Carmencita I wanted to talk to you. It’s about Maria Gonzalez and Maximillian Dey.”

“I don’t think the police are really looking into the death of Maria Gonzalez,” Lotte said. “DeAnna and I have been very disturbed about it. We were going to ask you—”

“To investigate?” Gregor nodded. “That probably would have been impossible, you know. It took place in another city. The police would have been hostile to any intrusion from me—at least from what I’ve heard.”

“The policeman in charge of the case is a bigot and a fool.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well. Let’s not worry about that for a moment. Were you told anything at all about the police investigation into the death of Maria Gonzalez?”

“A little.”

“Were you told whether anything was found in her pockets? Driver’s license. Social security card. Anything—”

“It was all gone,” Lotte said. “We were told all about that. Her purse was gone. It was in the papers.”

“They never found anything of the sort that normally goes into a wallet? Social security card? Green card?”

“Oh, no. We would have heard about it, I think.”

“All right,” Gregor said, “now think for a moment about Maximillian Dey. I have heard from several people that on the night you all left New York, he had his pocket picked.”

“Oh, yes. He was complaining about it nonstop.”

“He had his wallet stolen.”

“Exactly.”

“Would you know if his green card was in that wallet?”

“Of course I would know,” Lotte said. “Anybody would. Max complained bitterly about all the expense and fuss it was going to take to replace it. I even offered to loan him the money for the service fees. What was expensive to Max would not, of course, have been expensive to me. But he only wanted to complain. He was not truly interested in seeking help. Which was of course his privilege.”

“Of course,” Gregor agreed. “But you’re sure. His green card was in that wallet?”

“I’m positive.”

“Fine. Let’s look at something else. You came to the United States from Israel. Do you ever go back?”

“Oh, yes. Every other year or so. I have friends there.”

“Has anybody else on your staff been to Israel in the last, say, two or three years?”

“Is this about the dreidels?” Lotte asked him. “I’ve been very worried about those dreidels. They aren’t the kind of thing I buy. Although I have a dreidel. A big one. It’s enameled. I keep it in my apartment in New York.”

“I’m a little worried about the dreidels,” Gregor said. “But I’m not yet sure in what way.
Had
anybody on your staff been to Israel in the last two or three years?”

“DeAnna came with me about three years ago,” Lotte said. “She met a man. DeAnna will be the first to tell you that men are useless, but she always meets a man. She’s that kind of women. Men are attracted to her. Her daughters came with us.”

“Anybody else?”

“Sarah Meyer,” Lotte said hesitantly. “I’m not sure, though, when it was. It might have been more like five years ago. She went with her mother. If you want my opinion, Sarah would be a much more pleasant person if she never went anywhere with her mother.”

“Itzaak also came here from Israel,” Gregor said. “Has he been back?”

“Not that I know of.”

“What about the others? What about Shelley Feldstein?”

“Shelley went in 1973. War broke out right in the lobby of her hotel and she swore she’d never go back.”

“Prescott Holloway.”

“Prescott Holloway.” Lotte blinked. And then she laughed. “Oh, dear. I don’t think he’s gone, but with Prescott you never know. He’s our mystery man, you know. We speculate about him.”

“Why?”

“Well, he hardly seems the kind of man who would end up being a chauffeur. He’s too intelligent and too sophisticated and too—I don’t know what. DeAnna thinks he was an executive somewhere once and lost it all due to drink. Sarah Meyer thinks he gambles, but Sarah will say anything if she’s in the wrong mood. You mustn’t take all this seriously. It’s probably just the army.”

“The army?”

“Prescott was in the army, yes,” Lotte said. “For a good long time, if I remember correctly. The army will put a veneer of sophistication on a certain kind of man. It’ll give him an air of authority. It’s just that Prescott looks like Jack Palance, so he’s intriguing.”

“Let’s go at this from another angle,” Gregor said. “Money. Do you know roughly what the people on your staff make?”

“Of course.”

“Is there any one of them who has more money to spend than he should have? More money than you pay him?”

“But of course they do,” Lotte said, surprised. “Shelley Feldstein is married to a very successful man. And Sarah Meyer’s parents are rich people. I think Sarah still has an allowance. And Sarah’s mother sends her things, too, of course. Like the cashmere snow hats last December. Six of them in six different colors, seventy-five dollars apiece at Saks. I saw them.”

“What were you doing on the night Maria Gonzalez died?”

“I was home in bed,” Lotte said, with some amusement. “Alone. I have reached that time in my life when I am allowed to retire from the sex wars, and I have.”

“I find it very interesting,” Gregor said, “that there is no one—no one—who seems to have a verifiable alibi for the time of Maria Gonzalez’s death. It’s as if the woman was killed at high noon on Fifth Avenue.”

“I don’t find that odd at all,” Lotte said. “We were taping. That’s the way things always are when we’re taping.”

“Do you tape five days a week? All year?”

“We tape five days a week for thirty-nine weeks a year. The rest of the time, the show is in reruns. And we all need the rest. Let me tell you.”

“There’s a doctor up there with DeAnna Kroll. I think they’re trying to get your attention.”

Lotte turned around and saw that it was true. DeAnna was standing with a man in a white coat and waving at her frantically. The man in the white coat was just waving. He looked too exhausted to make any more effort than that. Lotte felt her stomach turn over. She really did hate hospitals. She really did.

“I hope it isn’t bad news,” she said.

“They wouldn’t be behaving like that if it was bad news.”

Lotte hoped he was right. She said good-bye and started walking away. She got halfway down the corridor to DeAnna and her white-coated companion before she stopped. Crises always got like this for her, stuck in a groove of feelingless efficiency. She wondered how long it would take, this time, for her cool control to collapse into headaches and insomnia and a second martini before she went to bed.

She turned around to get another look at Gregor Demarkian—whose cool control seemed to her to be the kind that would never collapse at all—but he was gone.

S
HELLEY FELDSTEIN’S TAKE ON
Gregor Demarkian hadn’t changed a whit since she’d first seen him after the death of Maximillian Dey, and it wasn’t going to change now, when she was in a bad mood and tired to death and wishing to be home in New York instead of stuck out here in the boondocks with some kind of nut. That was how Shelley was explaining the deaths of Maria Gonzalez and Maximillian Dey to herself, and the attack on Carmencita Boaz—although on that last she had alternative theories. That a nut was responsible for Maria and Max, though, she had no doubt. Shelley had tried very hard, earlier today, to find some proof that that nut was Sarah Meyer, but she had been unsuccessful. She had torn up enough cashmere to build her own goat. She had poured enough perfume on enough carpet to stink up that small corner of the Sheraton Society Hill until the coming of the Messiah. She had ripped the covers off enough paperback books to become a one-woman rack jobber. She had found nothing that would convict Sarah Meyer of plotting or executing two violent deaths.

Shelley had not, however, come out of Sarah’s room empty-handed. She had had a stroke of luck, the momentousness of which she never expected to be repeated as long as she lived. The fact that she had never even suspected the existence of such a thing made the luck even better. She wouldn’t have found it if she had gone looking for it. She had simply opened the zippered compartment in Sarah’s suitcase where Sarah kept her underwear—Sarah was just the sort of person who wouldn’t unpack her underwear—and there it was. Black. Leather-bound. Stamped in gold. Bought at Mark Cross.

A diary.

Shelley was at the hospital now half because she was supposed to be, but half because she had this book to carry around. DeAnna had called her, as DeAnna had called everyone else, expecting a great convergence without wondering why it should happen. Under any other conditions, Shelley would have stayed at home and made her excuses afterward. DeAnna would never notice who had come and who had not—and if she did, in the cold light of sweet reason, she would realize it made sense for Shelley not to be there. But Shelley had the diary. And she wanted to get a good clear look at Sarah Meyer’s face.

Gregor Demarkian was standing with his friend the black policeman when Shelley came down the hall. Otherwise, she would have passed him by without a greeting. The policeman made her feel compelled to do something polite. The compulsion made her angry. Farther down the corridor, she could see Lotte and DeAnna with their heads together, looking more relieved than grave. So Carmencita would be all right. That was good. Shelley had nothing against Carmencita. She did wonder about Itzaak, though. Usually when a woman was battered, it was her husband or boyfriend who had battered her.

Gregor Demarkian and the policeman had fanned out from the wall, blocking her path. Shelley nearly told them to get the hell out of her way. Then she thought better of it. No need to antagonize the police, no matter how much she would like to antagonize Gregor Demarkian. She hated to look at anyone who was so obviously fat. She put her hand in the pocket of her trench coat and felt the patterned leather cover of Sarah’s diary. It made her feel better.

“Well?” she said.

The black policeman looked about ready to explode. “Well,” he said. “
Well
. What am I supposed to do with
well
.”

“Nobody has asked you to do anything with it,” Gregor said.

“We want to ask you a few questions,” the black policeman said.

Jackman, Shelley thought. That was his name. Something Jackman. She looked up the hall again, but there was no sign of Sarah, and Sarah was all she wanted to see. She knew that Sarah would be here, because Lotte and DeAnna acted like infants whose formula had been taken away any time they had a crises and Sarah wasn’t in attendance to be ordered around. Lotte and DeAnna would have thought of a million things they wanted Sarah to write down in her notebook and a million people they wanted her to call, and then when all this was over they would forget all about it. That, in Shelley Feldstein’s experience, was the way all bosses behaved. It was a psychological abnormality that was conferred by the board of directors along with the title.

There was still no sign of Sarah anywhere in the hall. Shelley shifted from foot to foot and said, “What do you want?” She said it directly to Mr. Jackman. She didn’t look at Gregor Demarkian at all.

Even so, it was Gregor Demarkian who spoke. Shelley resigned herself to it. The policeman called Jackman was spineless. He’d behaved just like this after Max’s body was found. He let Demarkian do all the talking.

“What we want to know,” Gregor Demarkian said, “is whether or not you were aware of the fact that Maria Gonzalez was in the United States illegally.”

Oh, shit, Shelley Feldstein thought. She touched the cover of Sarah’s diary again.

“If I did know that Maria was an illegal alien,” she said crisply, “I’d hardly tell the police, would I? I could get in trouble.”

“This is a murder investigation,” Jackman said. “I don’t care what kind of trouble—”

“You couldn’t get in trouble,” Gregor said. “Whoever hired her might.”

“Lotte?”

“Or the personnel department of Gradon Cable Systems.”

“I didn’t
know
she was an illegal alien,” Shelley said. “I
suspected
.”

“What about Maximillian Dey?”

“With Max I knew, yes.”

“That he was in the United States illegally?”

“Yes.”

“What about Carmencita Boaz?”

“Was she really?” Shelley looked up the corridor again. “I suppose it figures. They all know each other. It’s like an underground community. Is Itzaak illegal, too?”

“Not as far as we know,” Gregor said.

“Well, maybe that figures, too. Max was Portuguese, of course, and not Spanish. You never call a Portuguese person Spanish. He’s likely to want to hit you. Still. They tell each other, I think.”