Festival of Deaths (27 page)

“I don’t care about the government. I’m worried about what I told you I was worried about. And I’m worried about your going to meet this person alone, when there have been two deaths and we don’t know who has been committing the murders.”

Carmencita shifted uneasily in her seat. “It’s broad daylight.”

“Max was killed in broad daylight.”

“There will be lots of people around, lots of people in shouting distance. There will. And it won’t take very long to get the business over and done with.”

“So,” Itzaak said. “You are worried about this person. You are not sure this person is safe.”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“This is why you look so sick to your stomach,” Itzaak said. “It is because you are so sure.”

“I just don’t like to think about the things that have been going on around here,” Carmencita said. “Around the show, I mean. In New York and here. I get so confused. And I hate to think about them.”

“So do I.”

“But I am sure about this person, Itzaak, I really am. I’m certainly not worried that this person is going to kill me. It would be bad for business, wouldn’t it? Killing off your customers.”

“And you won’t tell me who it is?”

“No, Itzaak, I won’t.”

“Or where you will be meeting?”

“Of course not. You’d come.”

“Or when?”

“It’s much better the way it is now,” Carmencita said. “Really, Itzaak, it really is. When is sometime this afternoon, and that’s all you have to know. When I’m finished with it, I’ll come and get you and we can have a drink at the Israeli nightclub you told me about.”

“Then it will be late this afternoon,” Itzaak said, and then he sighed, and put his hands up to his face, and rubbed his eyes. He looked suddenly very old, much older than he really was, and Carmencita’s heart went out to him. She put her hand on the thick hairy pad of his wrist.

“Don’t do this to yourself,” she said. “I’ll be all right. I really will. You can’t protect me from everything in the world.”

“I don’t want to protect you from everything in the world. I only love you.”

“I know,” Carmencita said. “I love you too.”

Itzaak put his hands on the table. “This is not how I had imagined saying it to you for the first time. In a place like this. Worried sick that you are going to get yourself killed. I saw us in a restaurant with candles and a tablecloth.”

“I don’t need a restaurant with candles and a tablecloth.”

“I don’t know what you need,” Itzaak said. “Maybe this Mr. Demarkian will be the genius he is reported to be. Maybe this will all be cleared up in a few days and we can go on with things.”

“Maybe we ought to go on with things now.”

“Even if Mr. Demarkian is the greatest genius that ever lived, still I will not like it. That you have to do with people like this, who deal in illegalities.”

“I know.”

“I blame you for none of it. But Lotte Goldman is a rich and famous woman, with powerful friends. After we know who has done these terrible things to Max and Maria, you should go to talk to her. You should tell her everything. She may be able to help you.”

“If she can’t help me, I will have to go back.”

“If you have to go back, I will go with you. Here. You can’t go all day only on potato chips. Sit here and I will find you some food.”

“I can find food for myself.”

“No. Sit. There may not be much I can do for you, but I can at least do this. I will be right back, Carmencita. You take a rest.”

Carmencita didn’t want to take a rest, but it all seemed so important to him, and he seemed so sad and discouraged, she sat where she was and let him go. When he was gone, she opened the other bag of potato chips and began to nibble on them.

She had told him as much of the truth as she had dared, but she hadn’t told him the whole truth. She hadn’t wanted him to worry, and it wasn’t as if she had anything specific to hang her uneasiness on in the first place. It was just that so many things were…

Out of whack, that was the phrase she wanted. Good old American slang. There wasn’t anything really wrong. There wasn’t any big discrepancy she had to consider. It was just that there were a few things, about Max and the things that had happened to Max…

Carmencita would be much more relaxed once she had Alejandro’s faked green card and social security card and driver’s license tucked safely away at the back of her wallet. She would be much more relaxed once she was quit of this person and quit for good. This person gave her the creeps worse than the voodoo ladies ever had at home.

Once this way over, she would think of nothing at all except for the fact that Itzaak had told her he loved her. She would leave the detecting to the police and the investigating to Mr. Demarkian and the worrying over the morality of helping illegal aliens look legal to whoever it was that wanted it.

She could see both sides of the issue herself. She always ended up making up her mind on the basis of what she wanted and needed and hoped for herself, and she thought everybody else probably did that, too.

S
HELLEY FELDSTEIN HAD EARNED
a certain reputation for subtlety in her life, and a larger one for sophistication, but on this early afternoon she was employing her talent for neither. To get into Shelley Feldstein’s room, Sarah Meyer had sneaked and schemed and stolen a key. To get into Sarah Meyer’s room, Shelley Feldstein marched right up to the front desk, said her name was Sarah Meyer, and announced that she had lost her room key. The hotel staff couldn’t have been more helpful. They recognized her as a bona fide guest. They couldn’t see any reason why she’d be asking for the key to anybody’s room but her own. A nice young man in a crisp dark uniform got her a brand new key card and then came all the way upstairs to make sure the door opened with it. The door did and Shelley tipped him a dollar for his trouble. Then she closed the door behind her and got to work.

When Sarah Meyer had searched Shelley Feldstein’s room, she had been extremely careful to keep the place neat, to put things back where she’d found them, not to tip her hand. Shelley took no such precautions. Shelley didn’t give a hoot in hell if Sarah knew she’d been in here searching around. In fact, she intended to make a point of ensuring that Sarah knew just that. She didn’t give a hoot in hell if Sarah knew something was missing, either. Obviously, there was going to be something missing. The three letters Sarah had stolen from Shelley’s room were going to be missing, calf-love missives from an infatuated and sex-crazed Max. Shelley had half a mind to set fire to them right in the middle of Sarah Meyer’s floor.

Sarah had a little Hanukkah display on the top of her tall bureau. There was a little menorah and a palm-size book with the story of the festival in it. Shelley recognized both as gifts from Lotte. Shelley had a pair herself. In spite of the fact that she wanted to smash everything in this room, she decided not to smash this. She might not be religious, but like many other people who had drifted into agnosticism for no particular reason, she was leery of the possible power of religious objects. Or she was sometimes. Maybe it was just that right now she was more than a little on edge.

She found the letters right off, in the otherwise empty center drawer of the room’s desk. She pulled the drawer open and there they were. If she had been going about this logically, she would have left Sarah’s room then and there.

Shelley Feldstein was not going about this logically. She knew just how much time she had—more than half an hour, now, before the cutting session broke up and Sarah was free to come back to the hotel. Shelley had all the time in the world. And she didn’t want to waste a moment of it.

She stuffed the letters down the front of her shirtwaist dress, under her belt, so that they would stay put. Then she headed for Sarah’s suitcases.

One real suitcase. One briefcase full of papers. One overnight bag with cosmetics and bath supplies.

Shelley upended both the suitcase and the briefcase, spilling their contents on the floor. Then she took a bottle of Max Factor foundation out of the overnight bag, opened it, and poured the contents into the mess of clothes and papers at her feet.

Good, she thought, very good.

By the time she got done with this room, Sarah Meyer would have been taught a lesson. By the time she got done with this room, nothing would ever put it back together again. By the time she got done with this room…

What?

Shelley went into the bathroom, got Sarah’s bottle of shampoo and her bottle of conditioner, and came back into the main room to dump the contents of both on the mess she’d already made.

She was no longer doing this for revenge or to teach Sarah a lesson or to strike a blow in the holy war for a right to privacy.

Shelley was doing it because pulling a stunt like this on a fat slob bitch like Sarah Meyer was
fun
.

I
T WAS THREE THIRTY
when Gregor Demarkian showed up at the precinct where John Henry Newman Jackman was spending his afternoon, and three thirty-one when he decided that he was glad he had never been an ordinary local police officer. Why was it that local police stations were always so depressing, even when they were in the middle of big-money, low-crime districts? This one was not in the middle of a big-money, low-crime district. It was in the middle of a slum that was rapidly metamorphosing into what the cops had started to call “UFO territory.” UFO territory was the bastard child of the drug wars. Poor neighborhoods were full of drugs these days. Everybody expected them to be. There was a point, however, when a neighborhood got too full of drugs. There was a moment when the nonaddicted and the uninvolved decided they would rather be homeless than live around this. That was when things started to get really bad. The buildings emptied out. The windows got broken and the bricks began to crumble. There would be a rash of fires. Gregor had seen whole blocks burn in a matter of days and weedy vacant lots sprout from the ruins overnight. This neighborhood was not quite there yet. The blackened bricks strewn across the lumpy ground of the lot next to the station house testified to at least one fire, but the tenement directly across the street was still full of people. Gregor even saw children straggling down the pavement, probably on their way home from school. Several of them wore Catholic-school uniforms, which meant somebody around here was still trying. Gregor didn’t think the trying was doing much good or that it would continue much longer. Up at the corner there was a building with shattered windows and splintered doors. Passing it, Gregor had heard the giggles and the sighs. The sounds were so soft, they might have been made by ghosts. Maybe they had been. The building was crammed full of hibernating junkies.

The glass in the station house door had a crack in it. Gregor ran his hand across it, clucking like an Armenian grandmother just quietly enough so that no one could hear him, and then went inside. He walked up to the counter and gave his name to the desk sergeant. She was a heavy woman in her forties who looked like she’d just stepped out of a raging tornado. Her wiry, salt-and-pepper hair was standing up from her scalp and corkscrewed in every direction. The collar of her blouse was pulled sideways and her rolled-up sleeves were wrinkled into accordion pleats. Her eyes were wild. Gregor stood politely in front of her and let her look him over. He didn’t think much of anything about him was actually sinking in. Her mind was on an altercation taking place on her side of the dividing rail. Two cops had a young man in custody and were trying to ask him questions. The young man would sit silently for a minute or two and then leap to his feet and yell “
Bungeeee
!” at the top of his lungs. The young man was as crazy as a loon, and the two police officers knew it, but they slogged on bravely anyway, as if they had a hope in hell of getting something done. The desk sergeant turned her back to Gregor and looked at them. Then she turned to face Gregor again and sighed.

“It’s like this all the time now,” she said in a wondering voice. “It’s amazing. Where do they get the energy?”

“Detective Jackman,” Gregor reminded her.

She picked up her phone and punched a couple of buttons. Then she said, “Guy named Gregor Demarkian here for John” and waited. A second later, she put down the phone.

“He’ll be here in a minute,” she said. “You can take a seat, if you like.”

The seats were all made of plastic and cracked. They were also filthy. “That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I’ll stand.”

“
Bungeeeee
!” the young man in the back said, hopping around on one foot.

One of the cops standing next to him reached out, grabbed his shoulder, and pushed him down into his chair. “Jesus Christ,” the cop said. “What did I ever do to deserve this?”

“Wait a minute,” the desk sergeant said. “Aren’t you the one they call the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot?”

“I’m the one they call the black Cardinal Cushing,” John Jackman said, coming through the propped-open fire doors to the left of the counter and grabbing Gregor by the arm. “I’m going to take this man upstairs, sergeant. If I get calls from anybody lower than the chief for the next thirty minutes, I don’t want to know about them.”

Gregor supposed that this meant that John Jackman did not now have a wife or a girlfriend or a lover, but that was the kind of question he should save for later, and he appreciated what John was doing for him. What John was principally doing for him was providing him with an escape from having to answer the sergeant’s question about the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. Gregor hated answering questions about the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. He wasn’t all that fond of the original Hercule Poirot. If the newspapers had to nickname him after some character in crime fiction, they could at least have chosen one of the characters Gregor actually liked.

John Jackman was pushing Gregor through the fire doors he had come through himself, but not up the stairs. There was a door beyond the fire doors that led outside to a parking lot. John shoved Gregor through that and stumbled out into the cold after him.