Festival of Deaths (28 page)

“You told your sergeant a lie,” Gregor protested. “She won’t know where to find you.”

“She can call my beeper,” John said. “Come on. I want to get out of here before anybody thinks up anything else for me to do.”

“Where are we going?”

“To WKMB. I’ve got the lab reports—I’ve got them on me—”

“You’re not wearing a coat.”

“I never wear a coat. Here’s the car, Gregor. In.”

Gregor got in. It was an ordinary police car, but there was only one uniformed officer in the front instead of two. The uniformed man waited until both Gregor and John Jackman were seated and John had the door pulled shut. Then he peeled out. Gregor hated peeling out. He kept getting crystal clear images of a car peeling right into the side of a building somewhere and leaving pieces of itself all over the sidewalk.

“You seen my publicity?” John asked him. “Or have you been too busy reading your own?”

“I’ve been too busy reading my own,” Gregor told him. “What did they say about you?”

“They called me a cross between Virgil Tibbs and Sidney Poitier. And then they said that if this city had any sense, it would make me the next chief of police.”

“So?”

“So they only said it because I’m black, Gregor. And at the moment, we
have
a chief of police who happens to be a
good
friend of mine and in no hurry to
retire
, for God’s sake, and he isn’t going to
like
this.”

“He’ll live with it.”

“Yeah. Give me a second, here, Gregor and we’ll start on the lab reports. Sidney
Poitier
, for God’s sake. Virgil
Tibb
s.”

Gregor had always thought Sidney Poitier was a very fine actor. This didn’t seem to be the time to say so.

P
HILADELPHIA IS RINGED BY
highways and linked together by concrete overpasses. On a good day, this system makes travel from one side of the city to the other a snap. This was not a good day. With Hanukkah falling so late this year—practically in the lap of Christmas—the usual seasonal traffic had been doubled. Everywhere the roads were full of drivers who came into the city only one day out of three hundred and sixty-five and who didn’t have the faintest idea where they were going. Everywhere the roadsides were crowded with vehicles disabled by their owners’ stupidities. The traffic was maddening. Gregor tried to sit back and ignore it. He couldn’t, because their driver was as tense as a cop about to break up a domestic argument. John Jackman was irritated as well. Gregor thought cops had to deal with too much frustration over important things. They deserved a break from the Almighty on side issues like the traffic. They weren’t going to get it.

Stuck in bumper to bumper on one of the long curving sweeps of overpass, Gregor looked down and saw a cluster of stores with wreaths and bells and Christmas trees in their windows. He tapped his fingers against the handle of his door in impatience.

“It’s started to bother me,” he said. “Christmas decorations without Hanukkah decorations. It doesn’t seem right.”

“Why don’t we just do away with Christmas and I solve the problem that way?” John suggested.

“I take it you’ve had a bad day.”

“They go nuts,” John said darkly. “I’m not kidding. Say
holiday
to these people, and they go nuts.”

“Which people?”

“All people. Race doesn’t matter. Class doesn’t matter. Sex only matters because if
he
goes nuts he’s likely to beat her up and if
she
goes nuts she’s likely to put a bullet through his arm, but that’s the difference in size talking, that’s all. I’m not talking about ordinary domestic violence here, Gregor. I’m talking about—”

“Nuts.”

“You got it.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you’ve found out about the death of Maximillian Dey,” Gregor said. “Maybe that will take your mind off the nuts.”

John patted the front of his suit jacket, didn’t find what he was looking for, and started patting his pants. Then he stuck his hands in his front left pants pocket and came out with what looked like a million sheets of computer paper compressed into a cube. The cube sprung open in his hand. It looked alive.

“These are just summaries. If you want to see the full reports, I’ve got them downtown at my regular office. I didn’t want to drag them out to—”

“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I don’t think this should be too complicated. Did you contact the police in New York?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And?”

“He’s bent,” Jackman said shortly. “The one they call Chickie. Hell, he’s so bent you could use him for a paper clip.”

“Ah. Well. Did you swallow your distaste long enough to get some information out of him?”

“Yeah, I swallowed my distaste, as you put it. And I got some information out of him. He tried to put me on to arresting this guy on
The Lotte Goldman Show
called Itzaak Blechmann. Did we meet him?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “He’s the lighting engineer.”

“Oh, that one. Well, with our friend Chickie, the clincher seems to be that Itzaak is not only Jewish, but Jewish from a foreign country, and besides he wears a yarmulke. Except Chickie didn’t say
yarmulke.
He said—”

“Funny little hat,” Gregor hazarded.

“Right. Christ, Gregor, I hated this guy. But I got his information. It wasn’t much more helpful than our own.”

The traffic had broken up just a little. They had to be doing fifteen miles an hour. Gregor leaned forward and looked out the windshield. The cars went on for miles. He sat back.

“Let me make a few guesses here,” he said. “In the first place, the murder weapon in both cases was a tire iron or something like a tire iron.”

“Right,” Jackman said. “But that was easy enough to see from the condition of the corpse. It was the kind of case that makes me wonder what we have to bother with a medical examiner for.”

“Everything was obvious from the condition of the corpse in the first case we worked together after I came back to Philadelphia,” Gregor said, “and there it turned out that the obvious was not the cause of death after all.”

“That’s true.”

“So we have to be sure,” Gregor went on, “and now that we have the report we are sure. The report was the same in New York?”

“It was.”

“What about the force of the blows? From what I saw, it looked like at least three sharp, powerful smashes to the side of the head, at least powerful enough to break the cheekbone—”

“And the skull,” Jackman said. “On Maximillian Dey, broken bones in the head included the cheekbone, the upper and lower jaw, the nose, and the cranium in two places.”

“What about Maria Gonzalez?”

“Worse. According to Chickie, her face was practically pulped.”

“What about the angles?”

John Jackman shook his head. “It won’t help. Whoever it was was either taller than both of them—considerably taller—or was standing on top of something when he struck. All the angles are more consistent with an overhead delivery rather than a right or left handedness.”

“Don’t start thinking in terms of ‘he,’” Gregor warned. “There’s nothing we have so far that would preclude a woman as perpetrator.”

“What about the force?”

Gregor shook his head. “You’ve just told me that the angles are consistent with an overhead delivery. That would give the murderer leverage. And you can’t discount the extra force inherent in extreme anger.”

“Somebody was extremely angry with Maximillian Dey and Maria Gonzalez?”

“Yes,” Gregor said thoughtfully. “I think they were.”

“Why?”

“I’ll have to check through a few things first. I just have a—feeling. Did you know Maximillian Dey had his wallet stolen the day before yesterday?”

“Yeah, I heard about it. Do you think it’s connected?”

“Not directly, no. I mean, I believe it was an ordinary pocket picking with no broader implications in and of itself.”

Jackman scowled. “You’re being cryptic, Gregor. I don’t like it when you’re cryptic.”

“Let’s go back to the tire iron,” Gregor said. “Have you looked around for it? Have you found it yet?”

“My people naturally looked around for a murder weapon,” John Jackman told him, “but we didn’t find one. And you keep saying tire iron, but we don’t know if that’s really—”

“It’s a tire iron. You’ll find it in the trunk of one of the limousines
The Lotte Goldman Show
drove down from New York. I believe they said there were two. Limousines, that is.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because it makes sense,” Gregor said. “I take it no weapon was found in the Gonzalez case, either.”

“No, no, it wasn’t.”

“From what Elkham told me about the Gonzalez case, Maria Gonzalez’s body was moved around and nobody was ever sure where. Well, where’s the most likely place?”

“You mean in the trunk of a car,” Jackman said. “But Gregor—”

“No buts. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there doesn’t seem to me to be anywhere else her body could have gone to. And the trunk of the company limousine is not a place the police would necessarily think of to search unless there was an obvious reason for it. You didn’t search the limousines yesterday, did you?”

“No,” Jackman said.

“There, then. And the wounds are consistent with a tire iron. And the thing about a tire iron is that you can just put it back where you got it—meaning in its place in the car—and you don’t have to worry about it looking out of place. Then later, when you have a little extra time, you can dispose of it. You can throw it in the river.”

“Fine,” Jackman said. “But it’s an incredible risk to take.”

“So what? So this murderer just killed a man in the men’s room of a busy office suite. I don’t think we can accuse him of being afraid to take risks.”

“Are you sure the tire iron will still be there? In the limousine? If we look?”

“No. He might have gotten rid of it already. He might not have had time. I couldn’t say.”

“You’re using
he
.”

“It’s for convenience.”

“Are you trying to tell me that the murderer is one of the drivers? Do you have a reason to think—”

“Of course the murderer doesn’t have to be one of the limousine drivers,” Gregor said impatiently. “He—or she—just has to be someone with access to the vehicles, which means with access to the keys. The person who comes immediately to mind is that secretary, Sarah Meyer. I’ll bet anything she has keys to every door, box, and vehicle connected to that show. And she’s got mobility, too. She wanders around a lot. It’s part of her job. People expect it.”

“What reason would she have for killing Dey and Gonzalez?”

“Maybe there was a love triangle,” Gregor suggested. “Maybe Sarah was in love with Max and Max was in love with Maria, and Sarah killed Maria in the hopes that Max would turn to her in his bereavement, and when he didn’t she killed Max himself in a rage.”

“Not bad,” Jackman said. “But it sounds more like something on
Days of Our Lives
than real life.”

“All right then. Try Dr. Goldman or DeAnna Kroll. Either one of them might have something in their past they don’t want anyone to know about—”

“Saints in heaven,” Jackman groaned, “not a deep dark secret from the past.”

“Make it something in the present instead,” Gregor said. “My point is that they’ve got access, too, and mobility. And people do have reasons.”

“It helps if they have reasons that would convince a jury,” Jackman said. What’s that up there? My God. I do believe the traffic is about to get moving.”

“The traffic is about to get moving,” the uniformed man in the front seat said. “Look. Do me a favor. Let me run the siren.”

John Jackman took a look at his watch. “Okay,” he said. “Run the siren. But only for as long as it takes to get out of this mess. Turn it off as soon as we get to town.”

“Right,” the uniformed man said. He put the car into gear and turned on the noise, producing a whooping wail that reminded Gregor of the death throes of whooping cranes.

Gregor Demarkian hated sirens and everything that went with them. He shut this one out of his consciousness as far as that was possible and turned to John Jackman so he wouldn’t have to look out the windshield at the progress they were suddenly making.

“Now let me tell you something,” he said. “David Goldman came to see me this morning, to tell me all about a curious little item called an Israeli dreidel.”

T
HE HALLS AND CORRIDORS
of WKMB were neither more nor less busy than they had been when Gregor had first seen them early yesterday morning, but the halls and corridors of that part of WKMB now assigned to
The Lotte Goldman Show
were almost deserted. Gregor and John Jackman went in together, without bringing the uniformed man along. This was only a semiofficial visit. John Jackman wanted to check out the scene one more time, now that the crisis was over and he could investigate in relative calm. Gregor had a few questions he wanted to ask. Studio C looked forlorn. The furniture that had served for this morning’s taping was still strewn across the platform. Prescott Holloway was picking up a small round coffee table just as Gregor and John came in. He paused in his work as Gregor and John walked toward him. Gregor thought he was probably handier at this than Maximillian Dey had been. He was certainly stronger. Gregor and John stopped at the edge of the platform and said hello.

“Everybody’s gone,” Prescott told them. “Everybody except DeAnna, that is. She’d down in her office.”

“DeAnna will be fine,” Gregor told him. “We really just want to look around.”

“Yeah. Well. Have a good time. I really want them to hire another set man. I want them to hire two. I was getting drafted into this shit all the time back in New York, and Max was alive and kicking then.”

Prescott raised the coffee table a little higher and wedged one curved edge of it against his hip. Then he hopped off the platform and headed for the doors to the outside. Gregor and John Jackman went in the other direction, to the doors at the back of the stage, and let themselves into the corridor that led to the offices and the greenroom and the other temporary accommodations for
The Lotte Goldman Show.
Prescott had been absolutely right when he said the place was deserted. Gregor and John passed door after door, open on empty offices.