Festival of Deaths (23 page)

“How old was she?”

“Eight,” David Goldman said. “Later, when we were living in what was at first Palestine and is now Israel, all during the war and then the War of Independence later, when we were very poor and there was very little food, I always had more than most people, because Lotte always gave me half of hers. And I never went without a blanket, because Lotte always found me one. And later when the fighting was momentarily over and Lotte came to the United States, the first thing she did after she got her graduate degree was bring me over and put me through the rabbinical program at Yeshiva University. Of course, Lotte is an atheist.”

“I had noticed that,” Tibor said sadly.

“Everybody notices it,” David Goldman said. “But there used to be a joke in Yiddish when I was younger. A young man comes back from a sojourn in the big city and marches up to the rabbi who taught him for years in his small town and says, ‘Rabbi, my entire life is changed. I no longer believe in God.’ The rabbi shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘That’s all right. God still believes in you.’ Well, that’s how I feel about Lotte. God still believes in her. And will go on believing in her, in spite of the fact that she probably gives Him ulcers.”

“Besides,” Tibor said, “the Good Lord’s ulcers may not be so critical as you think. Lotte Goldman is at heart a very conservative woman.”

“Conservative?” old George Tekamanian said.

“She always comes down on the side of very traditional morality in the end,” Tibor said. “She talks about these crazy things, but she does not approve of them.”

Linda Melajian leaned over and put down a plate of waffles in front of Gregor. Then she began unloading heaping plates in front of old George Tekamanian.

“Good God,” Gregor said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s my grandson Martin and my granddaughter-in-law,” old George said. “They are coming this afternoon to bring me food and make sure I have a healthy lunch. I do not know why it is, Krekor, but food that is healthy for you always seems to taste awful.”

G
REGOR DIDN’T KNOW IF
healthy food always tasted awful. He made it a matter of principle never to eat self-consciously healthy food. He didn’t know if Lotte Goldman was in her heart a conservative, either. From what he’d seen of her show, he thought she was a nut case. What he did know was that everybody seemed to need a break, himself included. In spite of the fact that David Goldman had come down here specifically to tell Gregor Demarkian something relevant to at least one of the cases of murder that had occurred among the people associated with his sister’s television show, he wasn’t ready to talk.

The situation made Gregor Demarkian a little antsy. He was not a sociable man, in the ordinary sense of the term. He spent almost every morning of his life these days having breakfast in the Ararat with Tibor, but the two of them read their respective papers and made comments on the world in general. They didn’t have “conversations” of any formal kind. Even Gregor and Bennis didn’t have conversations of any formal kind. When he went down to visit her, or she came up to visit him, they talked about his work or hers or Cavanaugh Street, but mostly they talked about each other. Gregor knew everything about Bennis’s latest Zed and Zedalia novel. That was what Bennis did for a living. She wrote fantasy novels full of knights and ladies and dragons and unicorns set in the imaginary countries of Zed and Zedalia, which would have been ridiculous if she hadn’t been making so much money doing it. Gregor knew that Ulrich of Rolandia was about to kidnap the evil Queen Allisandra to harness her magic powers for his unjust aggressive war against the Crown Prince of Zed. He didn’t know anything at all about the young man who had taken Bennis to dinner last week and didn’t want to know. Bennis knew all about Gregor’s last case—he always filled her in when the cases were over, he didn’t want her trying to be an amateur detective, but he did like to hear her comments once the coast was clear—but nothing about his visits to Elizabeth’s grave. Gregor didn’t know if that was all right with her or not. Sometimes he worried that he didn’t do more talking to Bennis in the way men usually talk to women they are close to because he was afraid to. What would he talk about, if Bennis insisted? The fact that they now spent more time with each other than most people who were married? The fact that except for one minor technicality, they might as well be married? On second thought, that technicality wasn’t so minor after all. What was also not minor was the fact that he seemed to have wound his life around an extremely rich, extremely pretty, extremely impetuous, relatively young woman on whom he had no real hold at all.

That was the kind of thing he thought about, early in the morning, when he was not thinking about cases or the excruciating things the
Inquirer
was saying about him or the problems that had to be cleaned up on Cavanaugh Street. That was why he didn’t like to take time off for these little relaxations. Besides, once he was on a case he liked to get on with it, and this case especially struck him as urgent. Sometimes the feel he got for the thing was that the main murder had been committed and any violence that followed would essentially be panic. That had to be taken into consideration, but in cases like that it was sometimes possible to calm the murderer’s mind, so that nothing new would happen while you were nailing the evidence to put him away for the old. Sometimes the feel was more electric. That was the feeling he had here. He couldn’t shake the conviction that he was in the middle of an ongoing endeavor, and that if he didn’t do something quickly it would be no time at all when he would find another corpse in his lap.

Tibor and David were discussing soup kitchens. They both participated in the running of one in the center of Philadelphia. Actually, Temple B’nai Shalom and Holy Trinity Church participated, along with half a dozen other churches in the area. It was one of those nondenominational, interfaith efforts that made the six o’clock news every once in a while on a slow day when the anchors wanted to look compassionate.

“It’s the schizophrenics who worry me,” David Goldman was saying. “Your idea is working very well with the temporarily displaced, but there’s just nothing you can do about the schizophrenics. They get disoriented.”

“What are they talking about?” Gregor asked George.

“Homeless people.” George tucked into his second order of hash browns. “There are homeless people and then there are homeless people.”

“There are the hard-core alcoholics,” Tibor said, “and you have to watch them, Krekor, because they will take the food and hide it in their clothes and go out on the street and sell it to get money for bad wine.”

“There are also people who are just down on their luck,” David Goldman said. “That includes some of the bag ladies. Tibor here put a process into place—”

“I had an idea,” Tibor objected. “‘Put a process into place.’ What kind of talk is that?”

“Tibor set up a housing bank,” David Goldman said. “The churches and Temple B’nai Shalom each adopt between one and six of these people at a time—”

“We do six,” Tibor said, “because if we really need money I talk to Howard Kashinian and to Bennis. With Bennis, I ask. With Howard, I threaten.”

“We do six, too,” David Goldman said. “We find them an apartment, sometimes two of them together, give them the security deposit and a month’s rent, help them get a job or deal with the government agencies—”

“But we can’t do it with the schizophrenics,” Tibor said, “because they get confused and then they wander off. These people are not integrated, Krekor. It is a terrible thing. And the insane asylums will not have them.”

“We don’t have insane asylums in America,” David Goldman said. “We call them psychiatric hospitals. Or mental institutions.”

“Insane asylums,” Tibor said.

Gregor poured his cup full of coffee again. “I think,” he said, “that it’s time to get back to business. It’s not that I want to rush you or anything—”

“Of course you want to rush us,” David Goldman said. “You’re a busy man.”

“Krekor is not busy today,” Tibor protested. “He has only to go with me for lunch to see Helena Oumoudian.”

Gregor could have said something about having a life that stretched beyond the confines of Cavanaugh Street, but he didn’t, because he didn’t know if it would be true. Instead, he drank half the coffee in his cup and put the cup back into the saucer with inordinate care. He’d seen serial killers use delaying tactics like this as soon as they were brought in for questioning. It bothered him to think he might have picked up something from them besides a lot of professional pain.

“When you called last night,” he said, “you said that your sister, Lotte, had figured out—”

“Not figured out,” David Goldman said quickly. “It was something she’d found. Actually, she found one of them and Shelley Feldstein found the other. And it was strange.”

“They found these things around the body of Maximillian Dey?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, no,” David Goldman said. “They’d have mentioned it. It was nothing like that.”

“They found them around the body of Maria Gonzalez?”

“They didn’t find them around bodies at all,” David said. “That’s the point, you see. There’s no way to know if they’re connected. There’s no way to know if they’re important at all.”

“If
what
are important at all?”

David Goldman hesitated, looking as if he’d dearly like to go back to his discussion of the homeless. Then he plunged his hands into the pockets of his jacket and came up with a double handful of dreidels. Dreidels, Gregor thought, blinking in astonishment. Ordinary wooden dreidels. He watched in disbelief as David Goldman looked through the piles and singled out two he apparently liked better than the rest.

“There they are,” he said. “The strange ones.”

“Strange ones,” Gregor repeated. “Rabbi Goldman, those are dreidels. You can buy them on any street corner in Philadelphia at this time of year.”

“In New York, too,” David Goldman said. “But you can’t buy them like these two. Look.” David grabbed a third dreidel from the pile and began to turn it slowly.
“Nūn, gīmel, hē, shīn,”
he recited. “That’s for
Nes gadol hay ah sham.
‘A great miracle occurred there.’ The miracle of the oil, you know.”

“All right,” Gregor said.

“Now look at these.” David grabbed one of the two he had pushed out front.
“Nūn, gīmel, hē, pē. Nes gadol hayah poh.
‘A great miracle occurred
here.
’”

“I don’t understand,” Gregor said.

“Here,” David Goldman insisted. “Here. In Israel. These two are Israeli dreidels.”

“Israeli dreidels?”

“Shelley found the first one in the carpet on the stage at the studio in New York, before Maria Gonzalez’s body was found but after she was dead, I’m sure, since I think the police said she’d died hours before. Anyway, it was just there, and Shelley picked it up and looked it over and thought it was defective. Then she gave it to Lotte.”

“And Lotte knew what it was,” Gregor said. “Because Lotte had lived in Israel.”

“Well, a lot of people who haven’t lived in Israel would know what it was,” David said. “It’s not a state secret. It would depend on how tied into the community they were, or their parents were. Shelley came from a rather heavily assimilationist family.”

“Lotte didn’t tell the New York police about this dreidel? And Ms. Feldstein didn’t either?”

“There was nothing to tell. I mean, it was getting to be the time of year. There are dreidels all over the place, especially in New York.”

“But this one?”

“Well, plenty of people who work for Lotte’s show have been to Israel. And Itzaak Blechmann lived in Israel after he left the Soviet Union.”

“What about the second one?” Gregor asked.

David Goldman poured himself more coffee and nodded vigorously. “It was the second one that stuck in Lotte’s mind,” he said, “because if there were two there should have been three, you see.”

“No,” Gregor said.

“I’ll get there. Lotte found the second one in her temporary office yesterday after the police had left. She says she almost didn’t realize what it was, because by now there really are dreidels all over the place and they’re small and they just go wandering away—I live in a house with children, Mr. Demarkian, I can attest to the fact that they wander away—so she almost didn’t look at it. And then she did.”

“And it was one of these Israeli dreidels.”

“With the
pē,
yes, and not the
shīn.”

“And there should have been three?”

“You can see why she didn’t tell the police about it,” David Goldman said. “It was in her office. There wasn’t anything about the death of Max that was connected to a dreidel. What could she have told the police even if it had occurred to her. Why would it have occurred to her?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor admitted.

“I’ll tell you now, I don’t see why it would be significant, either,” David Goldman said, “but when you were talking to us yesterday, you and that police detective—”

“John Jackman.”

“You both said we should bring up anything at all that we found strange. And here this is. Lotte thought the dreidels belonged to Itzaak, but he says they don’t. He says he didn’t bring anything of that kind to the United States at all. And I think he might be telling me truth.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s very religious,” David Goldman said. “He isn’t the kind of person who would use even something as religiously insignificant as a dreidel as a souvenir. If he wanted to bring a souvenir from Israel, he would have brought an Israel flag or one of those snowballs with the parliament building in it.”

“Why should there have been three of them?” Gregor was desperately trying to get back to what he still dimly thought might be the point.

“Because they’re sold in sets of three,” David Goldman said triumphantly. “Oh, I don’t mean every dreidel in Israel is sold that way. Of course it isn’t. But all the kiosks have sets of three all during the Hanukkah season, because tourists like to have more than one to bring home. And the sets are cheaper than buying the same number of dreidels one by one. But that’s why the second one stuck in Lotte’s mind, you see. You find one, you don’t think anything of it. You find two, under the circumstances, you naturally start wondering where the third one is.”