Festival of Deaths (39 page)

“Saving on electricity, you know,” she said. “Looking out for the environment.”

Gregor punched the call button and looked at the whitewashed concrete walls. Somebody had gone to the trouble of putting up candles cut out of construction paper and a bright silver tin foil star.

“Take a little advice from me, Sister,” Gregor said. “Stop worrying about the electric bill. And leave the environment to somebody else. Keep the lights on.”

“But—”

“Sister, you’re in a very bad place in the middle of a very tough part of Philadelphia, and in the dark the way you are you’re asking to get hurt.”

The elevator bounded down to them. The doors slid open. Gregor and Jackman stepped into the car.

“But,” Sister said again.

“Trust me,” Gregor told her.

Then he pushed the button marked “L” and the doors slid closed.

T
HE LOBBY WAS ALMOST
as deserted as the hall downstairs had been. There was one Sister at the reception desk. She recognized them and nodded them past. There was a policeman on duty in front of the north side elevator bank. He was sitting in a chair reading
The Body Lovers
by Mickey Spillane. It was an old paperback falling apart at the spine. Its cover was a 1950s hard-boiled cliché, complete with shapely high-heel-clad leg coming out of nowhere and snaking up into the cover. It was the kind of cover Tibor disguised by pasting it over with brown paper cut out of grocery bags. Tibor loved Mickey Spillane.

When they came up to the cop, he put down his book. When the cop saw who he had in front of him, he stood up.

“Hello,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I didn’t expect to be here,” John Jackman said. “Anybody go up?”

“Not for over an hour. There was a big rush between seven and eight. That was because of visiting. Since then it’s been dead. You could ask Shecker upstairs.”

“Shecker’s on duty on Five North?”

“That’s right. But I don’t think anything’s happened up there, either. I mean, except for what you would expect.”

“What would you expect?” Gregor asked.

“People from the show,” the cop said. Then he looked a little worried. “That was what I was told. They could come and go as they liked. I wasn’t supposed to stop them—”

“No, no,” Jackman said. “That’s absolutely right. We don’t have anything to stop them for. I just want to keep an eye on them. Which of that crowd has been up?”

“Well, it’s like I told you, nobody’s been up for at least an hour. Before we got a flurry or two, during visiting hours, you know. There was that black lady, you know, with the hair—”

“DeAnna Kroll.”

“Yeah. Shecker says she gives him heart palpitations. And he’s white. I mean, excuse me. I didn’t—”

“Never mind,” John said wearily, “who else?”

“Oh, the two crazy ladies. You know. Shirley and Sheila. Susan and Sandra—”

“Shelley and Sarah,” Gregor said.

“Yeah, them. They’re nuts. First one of them goes tearing up, then the other one does. Then one of them goes tearing up, then the other one does. I think they’re following each other.”

“Which was it the last time? Up or out?” Gregor asked.

“Up,” the cop said. “The tall thin one—”

“Shelley Feldstein,” John put in.

“She went up. That was just around eight o’clock.”

“What about the other one?” Gregor asked.

“The short fat one. I didn’t see her.”

“Had she gone out previously?” Jackman asked.

“Oh, yeah. But that doesn’t mean anything. You have to go through the lobby to get to the cafeteria, so she may have never left the building.”

“Wouldn’t you have seen her when she came back?” Gregor asked.

“Not if she went across the bridge on eleven. It’s a weird way around but some people—”

“That’s why we have a man on Five North,” John put in. “Because in a building this big there have to be half a dozen ways to get to any one place. It’s inevitable.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

“You want to get going?” Jackman said.

Gregor got going.

He hadn’t noticed it before, but this part of the lobby was decorated with all the feverish intensity Donna Moradanyan brought to Cavanaugh Street. There were Hanukkah candles and Stars of Bethlehem. There was a life-size statue of the Madonna cradling her Child. There was a tall wicker basket full of hard Christmas candy with a sign that said

“T
AKE SOME”

on the side. Leave it to the nuns. Not “take one,” “take some.”

“Wait a minute,” Gregor said. “Let me work this out. DeAnna Kroll is in or out?”

“In,” the cop said.

“How about Lotte Goldman?”

“Also in.”

“Sarah Meyer?”

“Out, I think.”

“And Shelley Feldstein is in?”

“That’s right.”

“I suppose that leaves Itzaak Blechmann,” Gregor said. “He should be in.”

“He should be in all night,” John Jackman said. “That Kroll woman went to no end of trouble to get permission for him to stay with Carmencita Boaz for the night. The nuns were a little uneasy because the two of them weren’t married, but Señorita Boaz is in no shape to engage in any hanky-panky, so they relented. It would be odder if he had come down and gone out.”

“All right,” Gregor said, “but it still doesn’t add up.”

“Add up to what?”

“There are too many,” Gregor said. He punched the button to summon the elevator, but he didn’t have to wait. The cars were all at lobby level. The doors opened as soon as he put his finger on the button. Gregor stepped into the nearest car and beckoned John Jackman to follow him.

“There are too many people upstairs,” he said. “You’ve got to add the cop into the equation. Our murderer is not a stupid person.”

“Maybe our murderer is waiting for the day after tomorrow,” Jackman said. “If nothing happens between now and then, we’ll pull our cop off. And there’s no reason not to wait until then. Even if Carmencita Boaz knows who hit her, she’s not going to be able to say a thing about it for at least two weeks.”

“She’s going to be able to write.”

“Not for a couple of days,” Jackman said. “Right now, she can’t sit up in bed without giving herself a headache the size of Godzilla and totally impervious to painkillers. She’s out of the game for the next good little time now.”

“She’s going to be able to point.”

“Right. This is pushing it, Gregor.”

Gregor sighed. “She doesn’t know who hit her. I’ll practically guarantee it—”

“You didn’t ask, did you?” Jackman sounded alarmed. “The doctors practically said we’d kill her if we asked tonight and I told all my people to keep their mouths shut until tomorrow—”

“I didn’t ask,” Gregor said. “I just know. She didn’t see who hit her. But she does know who promised to sell her a forged green card. And that’s all we need.”

“You mean if we can’t get a murder charge to stick, we can go to the Feds and let them charge forgery and conspiracy and all that? That’ll get our murderer five years in Danbury and he’ll be out in eighteen months.”

“The Feds couldn’t make forgery and conspiracy stick,” Gregor said. “We’d have to get some physical evidence to go along with it. Carmencita Boaz’s unsupported word won’t do it, especially since Carmencita has a forged green card of her own, and our friend didn’t get it for her.”

“Then why does it matter if she knows who promised to sell her the green card? Why is that all we need?”

“Because we can use it.”

“For what?”

To be sure
, Gregor thought, but he didn’t say it, because the doors had opened on the fifth floor and as soon as they had he could sense something off. Not wrong, not really. Not flagrantly out of place. Just
off
. He stepped out of the elevator car and looked around. They had ridden in the car with Hanukkah decorations again, but Gregor hadn’t paid attention to them. Now he saw the Christmas decorations around the elevator bank and decided to ignore those, too. Whatever was bothering him had nothing to do with any of that.

John Jackman stepped out of the car behind him and looked around.

“It seems quiet to me,” he said to Gregor.

Too quiet, Gregor thought, but he didn’t say that either, because it was too much like what one of the detectives in the mystery novels Bennis was always giving him would say. Instead he looked around and then down the short corridor to Five North proper. There was nobody and nothing to be seen. Even the nurses’ station seemed to be deserted.

“Where would your cop be, if he was where he was supposed to be?”

“Not here,” John Jackman said. “Too much could happen behind his back, and he’d bother too many people who have a right not to be bothered.”

“Where?”

“Down by Carmencita Boaz’s room.”

Gregor looked down the corridor again. “He isn’t there.”

John Jackman came to stand behind Gregor and looked, too. “Don’t panic,” he said. “He could be
in
Carmencita Boaz’s room.”

“That’s true. He could be in the bathroom.”

“If he goes to the bathroom, he’s supposed to get someone to take over while he’s gone. You know that. You’ve been on stakeouts.”

“On the kind of stakeouts I was assigned to,” Gregor said, “there was nobody to take over for us when we were gone and no place to go anyway. We used to carry these little plastic jars…”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” John Jackman said. “This doesn’t feel very good, does it?”

“No. But still—”

“Still?”

“Itzaak Blechmann is in the room with her,” Gregor said.

“Would that make a difference?”

Gregor didn’t know. He went a little farther down the corridor, being as quiet as he could, making no noise. He went past the door of the woman he had seen propped up in a chair earlier in the day. Her lights were out and she seemed to be asleep. He walked up to the edge of the nursing station and looked around.

It really was quiet. And empty. There was no sign of anything or anyone. He looked behind the nurses’ station counter and found nothing. He looked through the glass window in the door to the head nurse’s office and saw that the office was empty. What did I expect? he asked himself. Blood stains on the floor? Maybe that was exactly it.

Jackman came up behind him. “This is weird,” he whispered.

“There isn’t any need to whisper,” Gregor whispered back. “By now, anyone who isn’t asleep knows we’re on the ward.”

“Anyone who isn’t asleep or dead.”

“There should be at least one nurse somewhere on the floor,” Gregor said, “they can’t all have gone to the bathroom.”

“Maybe there’s just one nurse and she’s in with a patient. I
think
I’m going to go into Carmencita’s room now, Gregor. I think I have to.”

“Wait,” Gregor said.

For once, the “wait” had a substantive reason behind it, not just hunch and not just emotion. Gregor felt like he’d been saying “wait” now for hours, and always on the basis of some nebulous concept. But this was no nebulous concept. This was a leg.

“In the laundry bag,” Gregor said, pointing.

John Jackman followed the direction of Gregor’s finger and saw it. The laundry bag was one of those tall, rough white cotton ones hospitals always seem to use, stretched over a metal frame to facilitate the collection of dirty linen. It came about chest high on Gregor and higher than that on John Jackman. And there was most definitely a leg in it, stuffed down among the sheets.

“Jesus Christ,” Jackman said, when he realized what he was seeing. He strode over to the bag and put his hand around the ankle. “Nothing in the way of a pulse. Not the best way to check. Help me get her out of here.”

“Don’t do that first,” Gregor said. “She’s dead.”

“Maybe she isn’t.” Jackman tipped the laundry bag over and let the linen fall onto the floor. He pulled at the leg and the woman slipped out, small and crumpled. The left side of her face had been smashed to pulp.

Jackman put his fingers on the woman’s wrist, tried again in a different place, and then stood up.

“Dead,” he said.

“Your cop is going to be around here somewhere,” Gregor said.

“Also dead?”

“At least badly hurt.”

“I’ve got to go into that room now, Gregor. I can’t wait another minute. I can’t go looking for my cop first.”

Gregor Demarkian sighed. “I know,” he said. “But don’t go in. Just call out. Just in case he doesn’t realize there are two of us here.”

“He?” Jackman said.

He didn’t have time to go into it. He went out into the corridor in front of Carmencita Boaz’s door, took out his gun and assumed firing position.

“All right,” he called out, “I want whoever is in Room 507 to come out now with your hands in the air. Any and all of you. Right now. Or I’ll rush that door.”

Too late, it occurred to him that the room might be occupied by no one at all but Carmencita Boaz herself.

T
OO LATE, IT OCCURRED
to Gregor Demarkian that it was not going to work. They were not going to catch a murderer in the act. They were going to be left in the worst possible position. The only consolation they might have was that Carmencita Boaz might not be dead.

This was intuition on a scale to rival the Oracle of Delphi, but it was true. To Gregor, John Jackman seemed to be standing for endless hours with his gun cocked and pointed at the door, but it was only forty-five seconds. Then a deep voice called “I’m coming out” and the door began to open.

“Hands in the
air
,” John Jackman repeated.

Prescott Holloway had his hands in the air. Prescott Holloway was not now and had never been a fool. Prescott Holloway was convinced that he was about to get away with a great deal of murder.

“Itzaak’s in there lying on the floor,” he said in a reasonable voice. “I think someone hit him on the head. Don’t you think we ought to call a doctor?”

“Why didn’t you call a doctor?” John Jackman asked him.

“I just got here. It’s weird. There isn’t a soul around anywhere. So I went in to check on Carmencita and there was Itzaak, on the floor.”

“How is Carmencita?” Gregor asked.

“I don’t know,” Prescott Holloway said. “Sleeping, I guess. I never got a chance to look.”