Festival of Deaths (29 page)

DeAnna Kroll was in the very last office at the back. Her door was open too, but what it revealed was chaos. It did not seem to Gregor to be the kind of controlled chaos very creative people were supposed to prefer to work in. It looked like an outrageous mess she had been helpless to prevent. Papers and envelopes were spilling off the desk onto the floor. Half-filled polystyrene coffee cups were balanced on chairs and arranged in a pattern on the file cabinet top. Bits and pieces of Hanukkah and Christmas paraphernalia kept popping up in the oddest places. A plastic crèche with babe in manger was nestled in the folds of a gray flannel scarf that had somehow fallen to the floor. One of those ubiquitous little plastic menorahs with nine supposedly already-lit plastic candles was coming out of the pocket of the pea jacket DeAnna had hung over the top of the office door. Gregor checked out the pea jacket and saw that it had been bought at Ralph Lauren Polo. DeAnna went on talking into the phone.

“I know it’s impossible to get Marianna here from Sarajevo by Monday,” she was saying, “but you have to get Marianna here by Monday from Sarajevo and that’s that. … Well, I know they’re having political difficulties, everybody over there is having political difficulties, but. … Well, bribe them Bribe all of them. … Bribe enough of them to
get
a cease-fire Wait, I can’t. …
Shit
!” DeAnna dropped the phone into the cradle. “He hung up on me. Can you believe that? Long distance from Vienna and he hung
up
on me.”

Gregor could believe it.

“What was that all about?” John Jackman asked. “Is Marianna a guest you want for the show?”

“Marianna is a show,” DeAnna said. “She wrote a book called
Masturbation as an Art Form
. Now she’s coming out with one called
Masturbation as a Political Act
. Lotte can do an hour with Marianna standing on her head. And with the way things have been going around here, we need—oh. You should sit down. Do you want to sit down?”

There was nowhere to sit down. All the chairs were covered with papers, or worse. Gregor tried perching himself on the arm of something that looked a little fragile, but might do. John Jackman continued to stand. DeAnna stared at the phone as if she were willing it to ring.

“Wars,” she said. “People ought to give up having wars. They’re a damned nuisance.”

“That’s a thought,” Gregor said blandly. “Would you mind answering a few questions for us? Right now? We realize this is a little spur of the moment, and you might be busy—”

“Oh, I’m busy enough,” DeAnna said, “but I’m not going anywhere. I have to wait for that idiot to call back. And he will call back. He always does. What do you want to know? I don’t have an alibi.”

“An alibi isn’t necessary at the moment,” Gregor said. “Do you know anything about Maximillian Dey’s having had his pocket picked—”

“Well,
of course
I know about that,” DeAnna interrupted. “Everybody knows about that. He went on and on about it.”

“Good,” Gregor told her. “Now. When did it happen?”

“As he was getting off the subway when he was coming down to meet the rest of us so we could all take off for Philadelphia. We all came down in two cars.”

“Limousines?”

“Of course limousines.”

“Fine. So Max got his pocket picked. It was just his wallet that was missing? Nothing else?”

“Well,” DeAnna said, “with Max, his wallet would have been enough. He kept his life in there. Pictures from back in Portugal. A fake ID saying he was twenty-one so he could drink. Everything.”

“Everything,” Gregor repeated. “Fine. Max was an immigrant, am I correct?”

“Yes, of course. From Portugal.”

“He’d been in this country how long?”

“I don’t know. A little more than a year, I think, but don’t quote me. It’s just a guess.”

“You never asked him?”

“Well, Max didn’t have what you’d call a position of trust,” DeAnna said. “And we don’t ask those kinds of questions. Gradon Cable Systems does that. It’s just that we wouldn’t mind.”

“Wouldn’t mind what?”

“Wouldn’t mind that his English was a little sketchy and that he didn’t know enough about the city to really operate,” DeAnna said. “Lotte is always taking on stray kittens, if you know what I mean. Immigrants, especially, because she was an immigrant. But it isn’t only immigrants. We have about six inner-city high school kids as interns on the show every summer. Lotte is like that.”

“That’s very commendable, but that’s not exactly what I’m getting at,” Gregor said. “About the contents of this wallet. Do you know what else might have been in there besides a fake ID and some family pictures from Portugal?”

“Money,” DeAnna said.

“What about his green card? He did have a green card? He wasn’t a citizen yet?”

“He wasn’t a citizen yet,” DeAnna said, “and he definitely lost his green card. He went on and on about it. About how difficult it was going to be to replace.”

“That was the day before yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure, Mr. Demarkian. What are you getting at?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “when I arrived here yesterday morning, I walked into Studio C to find Max lifting a chair into the air and the contents of his pockets falling on the floor. I picked up a number of the things he dropped and gave them back to him. One of those things was a green card.”

“It was?” DeAnna looked confused. “Maybe he was wrong, then. Maybe he had it someplace else and didn’t realize it, and then he found it later.”

“Maybe he did,” Gregor conceded, although he didn’t believe it for a minute. “What about after he left me? I know we went over this yesterday—”

“And over it and over it.” DeAnna was irritated. “I can’t tell you anymore than I already have told you. He brought the chair downstairs and put it in the truck. We know that because the chair was in the truck and Prescott saw him at the truck. After that we just don’t know.”

“That’s right,” Gregor said. “We don’t know. Between yesterday and today you haven’t remembered anything else on this score? Nobody has come to you and said, oh, by the way, I forgot, but—”

“No,” DeAnna said. “There’s been nothing like that.”

“You haven’t found anything anywhere that might have belonged to him in an unexpected place? The back stairs? Another bathroom? Somebody’s office?”

“I haven’t found anything that belonged to him, period.”

“Has anybody else?”

“No.”

“What about messages? Did Max ever get any? Just before you came up here? On the trip? Since you got here?”

“People like Max don’t get messages,” DeAnna said. “Not on a regular basis. If they do, they get fired.”

“Meaning you would have remembered if he had gotten a message.”

“Meaning I would have and so would anyone else, and somebody would have made a remark about it.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “No messages.”

“Gregor?”

John Jackman’s voice sounded oddly strangled, and it came as a surprise. Gregor had been so intent on questioning DeAnna Kroll, and thinking about Maximillian Dey, he’d forgotten John was there. Now he felt a little guilty about it. John was the professional. This was his case. Gregor was only along for the ride.

“I’m sorry,” he said, turning to John.

But John wasn’t looking at him. He was staring in the direction of the office door. As Gregor turned to see what John was looking at, he realized DeAnna was staring in that direction, too.

Itzaak Blechmann was standing right in the middle of the office doorway, his hands wrapped around his bloodstained chest, his legs shaking, his face covered with tears.

“Come and see,” he said, in English so heavily accented it would have been hard to understand, except for the intensity of the emotion behind it. “Come and see. Carmencita is—Carmencita is on the floor, and she is dead.”

C
ARMENCITA BOAZ WAS NOT
dead. There were times in the next half hour when Gregor and John Jackman both thought she was going to die. There were times when they even thought she had, slipping away from them as they did all the frantic things people do when they have been trained in first aid so long ago they don’t remember most of it. God only knew, she ought to have been dead. Gregor couldn’t remember seeing a face in a worse mess than this one on a live person. He had to keep reminding himself about the peculiarities of head wounds. Head wounds bled. He had to keep reminding himself that nothing terrible had happened to Carmencita’s eyes. Eyes were the most vulnerable place, except for the softnesses inside the ear. Carmencita’s eyes opened every once in a while, when the pain pierced her shock and made her twitch, and they were a beautiful, shiny blue that made Gregor think of polished lapis lazuli.

Carmencita was lying on the floor just beyond the fire door next to the elevators that went down to the lobby and opened on this floor to the reception desk for WKMB. It was a utility area and not much frequented by WKMB staff or casual visitors. It wasn’t much frequented by anybody except the cleaning people, and they weren’t likely to show up in force before six or seven o’clock. Even so, it was a risky place for whoever it was to have pulled this sort of stunt. There was always the chance that something would need to be fixed, sending a janitor up from the basement offices of the Maintenance Department. There was always a chance that some hotshot on the rise who wanted to get in shape was taking the stairs as a form of aerobic exercise. There were all kinds of chances, including the one that had come to pass. Itzaak had been worried. Itzaak had opened every door he could find.

Itzaak was covered with blood. His shirt was a sodden mass of it and his pants looked as if they had been splattered with ketchup and vinegar. He had lost his yarmulke and didn’t seem to have noticed.

“We have to find a priest from her church,” he kept saying. “We have to find a priest from her church.”

Gregor and John Jackman were most interested in finding a doctor from the hospital. Itzaak was useless. The only reason he hadn’t collapsed from shock was that the fact of Carmencita’s being alive had given him a last jolt of energy. As soon as they had Carmencita in competent hands and he no longer had anything he might be called on to do, Itzaak was going to collapse. It made more sense to rely on DeAnna Kroll.

“Make some phone calls,” Gregor instructed her, as soon as John Jackman had leaned over the body and pronounced it alive. “St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. We need an ambulance. We have a—no, don’t tell them that. Tell them we have a woman who’s been hit with a tire iron and her skull’s caved in—”

“But—”

“I know it’s not strictly the truth,” Gregor said, “but we want to get them here.”

“Shouldn’t I call nine one one?”

“Nine one one serves the entire city. St Elizabeth’s will be faster. John, do you want to call in to your people yourself?”

“Yeah, I’ll do it.”

“Good,” Gregor said. “That will be faster, too. Go on now, Ms. Kroll. We don’t have a lot of time.”

DeAnna Kroll looked in the direction of Carmencita Boaz’s body, which meant she looked at John Jackman’s back, because it was blocking her view.

“Is she going to die? Is she—”

“She is if the ambulance doesn’t get here soon,” Gregor said.

“The ambulance,” DeAnna said. “Yes. And I have to call Lotte.”

Gregor didn’t know what good Lotte was going to do. DeAnna probably didn’t know either. She hurried off. Gregor went over to John Jackman. He was doing all the right things for head wounds and concussion. Hard as it was to believe, what had happened to Carmencita Boaz was going to be technically called a concussion. To Gregor, concussion was what boys got playing sandlot baseball when they came from families too poor to afford helmets.

“Go,” Gregor told John. “Let’s get this moving. I’ll take over here.”

“Right,” John Jackman said. He turned Carmencita Boaz over to Gregor and straightened up. Gregor was relieved to see that the woman was breathing more regularly now, and more deeply, if still not deeply enough. When they had first arrived on the scene, Carmencita had had the hitching, shuddering breath of someone in the throes of tachycardia.

John Jackman disappeared through the fire door. Itzaak moved in beside Gregor and looked into Carmencita’s face.

“She is breathing,” he said, and even though he must have known she would be, he sounded awed.

Gregor found himself wondering how long it would be before they could calm Itzaak down and question him.

H
AVING THE MOST FAMOUS
homicide cop in the city and the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot on the case had its advantages. The ambulance responded with alacrity, and four pairs of uniformed cops showed up at the scene in one and a half minutes flat. Gregor was glad to see every one of them. Being an FBI agent is a manner of being a policeman. The Bureau as federal police force was a concept much stressed when Gregor was training at Quantico. The first time Gregor had ever been present at an actual crime scene, he had discovered the difference. The FBI was always coming in after the Sturm und Drang was over: after the kidnapping had happened and somebody was needed to set up and monitor a ransom drop; after six local police forces in three states had racked up a string of seemingly related killings and needed someone to coordinate an interstate hunt. When the FBI wasn’t doing that, it was dealing with paper crime. The FBI was very good at paper crime. A well-trained Bureau agent to track the course of a million dollars in drug money from the streets of New York to the bank vaults of the Cayman Islands. Of course, he couldn’t actually get his hands on any of it. International banking regulations would keep him from doing that.

The first time Gregor had stumbled onto a real crime scene, he had been astounded. All the blood and confusion and mess: How did they work under such conditions? He had also been a little embarrassed. There he was, the expert, the country’s most famous specialist in murder, with his picture on the cover of
Time
—and he hadn’t known a damn thing. That the murders he was an expert in were the serial kind—or that his expertise in solving them depended heavily on computers—hadn’t seemed to absolve him. He had thought he ought to know something. He had thought he should at least not feel out of place.