Festival of Deaths (12 page)

“Here,” she said, thrusting the receiver at Bennis, “hang this up. I have to get back out there. The woman in the pink dress was just describing the way her husband was so big, he punctured the inflatable doll they got him to relieve his stress.”

“I’ll be right there,” Bennis said.

“Bennis,” Gregor said.

But Bennis was gone, out there with the rest of them, thinking God only knew what, and Gregor knew it was no use.

That was his biggest problem on Cavanaugh Street.

He didn’t know how to turn anyone in the neighborhood down.

He didn’t know how to say no to women he had known as girls and old men he had known as strapping, bass-voiced pillars of the church.

He didn’t know how to say no to much of anybody.

At least they fed him right.

He got a stuffed artichoke out of the bowl of enguinar and munched on it, imagining what he was going to do if Lotte Goldman asked him to describe the sexual practices of John Wayne Gacy.

A chorus of excited squeals rose out of the crowd in the living room. Gregor Demarkian winced.

F
OR LOTTE GOLDMAN, THE
ten weeks the show spent touring America, taping in two-week sprints in five different cities, were an adventure. The first two weeks were always spent in Philadelphia, so she and anyone else from the show who wanted to could celebrate the first night of Hanukkah at David and Rebekkah’s. After that, the migration might be for anywhere. In past years, Lotte had gone to Seattle and San Francisco, Phoenix and Tulsa, St. Augustine and St. Louis. She had found a good kosher restaurant in each one and lots of little things to bring home to her niece and nephews. Lotte got tired of being cooped up in New York. She got especially tired of doing nothing but going from her apartment to the studio and back again. When she had been younger, it had been different. Newly arrived in the city, Lotte had claimed every spare moment for discovery. She had gone to the Empire State Building and the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and the zoo. Even once she’d started her long climb to what would turn out to be success, she made time for herself. In those days, she would survive on two hours of sleep just to make sure she had time to hear
Aida
performed by Maria Callas or see the El Greco exhibit sent over by the government of Spain. It was after Lotte got successful that she got dull. Taping, researching, interviewing, talking to the press: it didn’t sound like it should take so much time, but it did. The week after the show got its first forty share, Lotte went out and bought a Filofax, and she’d been addicted to it ever since. Things to do. Places to be. Phone numbers to remember. Lotte seemed to be busy all the time at the same time she seemed to be doing nothing at all.

“So take an afternoon off every once in a while,” DeAnna Kroll was always telling her. “I would if I could.”

Actually, DeAnna wouldn’t and couldn’t any more than Lotte wouldn’t and couldn’t. The real difference between DeAnna and Lotte was in how much Lotte loved leaving time. Part of that was temperament—DeAnna liked where she was now; she was suspicious of change of principle—but part of it was the nature of traveling reality for
The Lotte Goldman Show
. In that reality, Lotte rode to Philadelphia in the very front seat of whatever vehicle they were using to get there, and DeAnna did all the work.

The work DeAnna was doing this morning was the work she usually did just before they left for Philadelphia: supervising the loading of eight sofas, fifteen armchairs, twenty straight-backed chairs, twelve carpets, and ten coffee tables onto a moving van. The moving van was necessary because Shelley Feldstein refused to go anywhere without her back-up sets. “What if they don’t have anything suitable?” Shelley demanded, every time DeAnna suggested that there were plenty of furniture stores in every town they were scheduled to stop in. “What if Lotte has to tape a show on suburban prostitution with her set all in
red
?”

As a rationale for dragging the volumic equivalent of the contents of a small house all the way across the country and back again, this didn’t make much sense, but no one could talk to Shelley about it. Shelley got hysterical. Lotte didn’t remember when she and DeAnna had finally given in. Getting out of the cab now in the crisp December air, feeling the little rush she always felt being out in the city at night, it seemed to Lotte that they had been leaving this way forever. She knew it couldn’t be true. Shelley hadn’t been with them forever. Lotte couldn’t remember what it had been like before. DeAnna probably could. She could probably remember the year, day, hour, and minute when Shelley had insisted on taking the furniture for the first time.

The cab driver took off from the curb in a squeal of brakes, as if he were trying to prove something, and Lotte went around the back of the moving van to find DeAnna. She was standing on a marble-topped coffee table in a pair of skin-tight black leather leggings and a black leather tunic encrusted with flattened bullets. She had her feet in four-inch stiletto heels the color of burnished moonlight. The moving man she was talking to looked a little shell-shocked. He was young and uniformed and obviously unused to being told what to do by a woman. Lotte thought he was certainly unused to women like DeAnna Kroll, assuming there were women “like” DeAnna Kroll. DeAnna had traded her cornrows this evening for the world’s most outrageous Afro. It billowed out from her scalp like a wiry mushroom cloud with a mind of its own.

“The coffee tables have got to be wrapped in cotton,” she was saying. “If they’re not wrapped in cotton, they might get scratched, just faintly scratched, on the table-tops. If they do get scratched, no matter how minorly, my set designer is going to have a psychotic break. You got it? You wrap them in cotton, Shelley doesn’t have a psychotic break, I don’t have a bad day, everybody is happy.”

“But Ms. Kroll—”

“I don’t want to argue about it,” DeAnna said. “I don’t want to argue about anything. I just want you to do it.”

“But Ms.
Kroll
—”

“
Do
it.”

“Come talk to me,” Lotte said, over DeAnna’s shoulder. “It’s cold and you need a break.”

The moving van was backed up to the loading door at the rear of the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building. Lotte had gone there because she knew she would find DeAnna just where she had found her and because she knew it would be a good place to talk in private. The rest of the cast and crew would be meeting in the front, where Prescott Holloway and his limousine were scheduled to pick them up. Lotte got DeAnna far enough from the moving van so that the young man began to relax and then said, “Well, I have done what we discussed. I have started it. What about you?”

“I’ve done what we discussed, too,” DeAnna said. “I’ve got a friend at CBS News.”

“And?”

“And he’s legit,” DeAnna said with conviction. “Absolutely legit. There’s no hype about it.”

Lotte felt her muscles begin to unkink. It was hardly credible, but Lotte thought she had been tense ever since she found out that Maria Gonzalez had died—or at least ever since the police investigation had started, when it became more and more clear that whatever had happened had not been a standard-issue mugging. Lotte had met her share of murderers—nobody could have been living in a major city in Germany in 1942 without coming in contact with those—but all the murderers she had met had been murderers for abstraction, the sort of people who bayed for blood over matters of mistaken principle or the illusion of religion. Murderers like that Lotte had always dismissed as essentially insane. Something went wrong with their blood chemistry and it was infectious, that was the trouble. The trick was to catch the disease early, before it could spread. Insanity was how Lotte explained routine mugging murders, too. The murderers took drugs that made them temporarily insane. This thing with Maria Gonzalez was very different. That a man or a woman could murder someone they actually knew, someone they had talked to, someone they had eaten lunch with and taken messages for—it was horrible. That was what Lotte had told David on the phone. Horrible. David had told her she was naive. The Nazis had murdered people they knew, people they had talked to, people they had eaten lunch with and taken messages for and sometimes even gone to bed with. All murderers are alike.

There was a low concrete restraining wall at the edge of the short driveway leading to the loading door. Lotte sat down on it, got out her cigarette case, and lit up.

“So,” she said. “Tell me. What did your friend mean by legit?”

“He meant big-time legit,” Lotte said. “This Gregor Demarkian was an FBI agent. He did work on kidnappings for years, and he was good at it so he got assigned to Washington and the sensitive political work, problems with Senators and Congressmen and that kind of thing. Anyway, one day around, I don’t remember, 1977 or 1978, he started helping some people in Oregon and Washington with these murder investigations they had, string of young girls, looked like it was the same person. The FBI isn’t supposed to handle murder cases except in national parks or on Indian reservations, because murder isn’t a federal offense, but they got around it that time because there were two states involved, Demarkian supposedly told the director at the time that he was investigating a man who was carrying on an interstate commerce in murder. If you see what I mean.”

“Very clever,” Lotte said.

“Yeah, Lotte. I know. He is very clever. He tracked this guy for Oregon and Washington and a couple of other states, and because of the help he gave them the guy finally got caught, and that was Ted Bundy.”

“Ah,” Lotte Goldman said, sitting up a little straighter and nodding. “Mr. Bundy. I’ve heard of Mr. Bundy.”

“Everybody’s heard of Mr. Bundy,” DeAnna said drily. “He’s the most famous serial killer since Jack the Ripper. Anyway, that’s how Demarkian got what he wanted. Bundy escaped from jail—a couple of times—ending up rampaging across the Florida countryside, Demarkian gave the police down there some help and they ended up convicting Bundy—and then Demarkian went to the powers-that-were and told them that if the FBI had had the procedures in place to deal with someone like Bundy, someone like Bundy would never have been able to do the kind of damage he did.”

Lotte thought about this. “As a thesis, it’s dubious.”

“Of course it’s dubious,” DeAnna agreed, “but it’s like I said. Demarkian got what he wanted. Which was a special department of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that does nothing but track serial murderers.”

“He founded this department?”

“You got it.”

“And he headed it?”

“For ten years,” DeAnna said. “He was good at it, too. He was involved in all kinds of famous cases. He got his picture on the cover of
Time
magazine. He was a real big noise.”

“Why did he stop?”

“His wife got some really nasty form of cancer and he took a leave to look after her,” DeAnna said. “Then when she died, I guess he just didn’t have the heart for it. My guy at CBS said that people were saying at the time that Demarkian looked depressed enough to be suicidal. They were really worried.”

Depressed enough to be suicidal when his wife died—
that
spoke well for him. Lotte was amused at herself. Here DeAnna was, rattling off a string of credentials and professional accomplishments, and the first thing she says to make Lotte feel she will be able to trust this man is that he was depressed enough to be suicidal when his wife died.

“I’m getting to be an old Jewish person,” she told DeAnna. “I ought to be a grandmother, the way I think sometimes these days. What about the things we have read about? The murder in Vermont? The one this past May at the convent—”

“I’m getting to that,” DeAnna said. “Them, I guess. He does a lot of that sort of thing.”

“He’s a private detective?”

“Nope. Doesn’t have a license and tells anyone who asks that he doesn’t intend to get one.”

“Then how can he take on these investigations?”

“By the simple expedient of not charging for them. Not that money doesn’t change hands, mind you. There’s a rumor going around that right after Demarkian cleared up a murder at the chancery up in Colchester a couple of Easters ago, John Cardinal O’Bannion directed some Catholic charitable funding organization he’s head of to donate twenty-five thousand dollars to some cause Demarkian’s pet priest is involved with—”

Lotte nodded. “That would be Father Tibor Kasparian. David’s friend. Did you check into these private investigations, or whatever you’re supposed to call them? You’re sure he really did the investigating?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s got letters of thanks from police departments all over the place, including one from the police department in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, which I was actually able to check out. I talked to the guy he worked with on the Hannaford case. The guy couldn’t have been more impressed.”

The cigarette was burned to the filter. Lotte dropped it on the ground, smashed it out with her foot, and took another from her case.

“That settles it then,” she told DeAnna. “He’s just the person we’re looking for.”

“I agree.”

“Now our only problem is convincing him he wants to interest himself in our problem. Did your person at CBS News indicate that this would be difficult?”

“I didn’t ask him if it would be difficult.”

“David says Father Tibor Kasparian says Mr. Demarkian is not always anxious to be involved. Ah, I wish he were coming to us instead of us going to him. I wish he were coming to New York.” Lotte took a deep drag on her newly lit cigarette. “I can’t help thinking it would be so much more convenient. We’ll ask him to help us and then what? All the evidence will still be here.”

“Maybe,” DeAnna said.

“Ms. Kroll?” the young man from the moving van called out. “What about sofas with marble arms? Do they get wrapped in cotton too?”

DeAnna looked up and shook her head. “Duty calls,” she said. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I’m going to be fine.”

“Go in the front and entertain the troops. Next year I’m going to rent a U-Haul and get Max to load it. You sure you’re all right?”