Festival of Deaths (33 page)

“Tell each other about what?”

“About where they can get hired without too many problems,” Shelley said. “I’m not saying personnel doesn’t check. I’m sure they demand to see a birth certificate or a green card or something. But I’ll bet they don’t run a computer check.”

“You never thought it was odd? That Max was in the country illegally and Maria might have been? It wasn’t a coincidence that disturbed you?”

“I never thought it was a coincidence,” Shelley said. “It’s like I was telling you. They tell each other. They bring each other in.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Are you aware of the fact that Maximillian Dey had his pocket picked just before
The Lotte Goldman Show
left New York?”

“Of course I am. The desk clerk at Max’s hotel was probably aware of it.”

“Are you aware that among what he lost when his pocket was picked was his green card?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Would it surprise you to hear that on the very next day, before six o’clock in the morning, he had a green card?”

“No,” Shelley said, sighed. “It wouldn’t surprise me. I saw that one, too.”

“You saw the new green card Maximillian Dey was carrying on the morning he died,” Gregor said.

“Yes, I did. Max showed it to me.”

“Do you know where he got it?”

“No.”

“Do you know who he got it from?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything at all that might indicate anything at all about who might have supplied it to him?”

“Not exactly,” Shelley said. “He told me he’d found a new source, better than the one he had used in New York when he first came to this country. This source was cheaper and faster and more accommodating about the money.”

“Was this a source in Philadelphia? Or someone connected with the show?”

“I don’t know. But Max had never been to Philadelphia before. I don’t see how he could have known where to find a person like that here.”

“Maybe somebody else told him,” Gregor suggested. “Maybe Carmencita Boaz had a source in Philadelphia.”

“She’d never been to Philadelphia before either,” Shelley said. “She said so just before we left New York. She’d been on staff longer than Max had, but she’d only been Maria’s assistant. Maria’s assistant didn’t travel with us when we did the road shows.”

“Mmm,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Shelley Feldstein was still looking at the policeman called Jackman, still looking away from the round softness under Gregor Demarkian’s belt. Now she turned all the way around and looked again at Lotte and DeAnna. Lotte and DeAnna were no longer alone. Sarah Meyer was standing between them, holding her steno book and pouting.

She hasn’t been back to her room yet, Shelley thought, and knew it had to be true. If Sarah had been back to her room, there would have been a fuss big enough so that even the attack on Carmencita Boaz couldn’t have stopped the staff from talking about it. Surely DeAnna would have said something when she called Shelley to come to the hospital.

Sarah Meyer caught sight of her and smiled. Shelley smiled back and touched the cover of the diary one more time.

“Mrs. Feldstein?” Gregor Demarkian said.

“I’m sorry,” Shelley said. “I really do have to talk to Lotte and DeAnna now. Can the rest of this wait until later?”

“There really isn’t any rest of this,” Gregor said. “I was just a little worried about you. You’ve gone pale.”

“I’m tired, that’s all. Excuse me.”

Gregor Demarkian or his friend the policeman may have said something in response, but Shelley didn’t hear them. Sarah had closed her notebook and begun to move off. Shelley picked up speed to close the gap between them. Sarah walked into Carmencita Boaz’s room and disappeared.

If Lotte and DeAnna had stayed where they were, Shelley might have been held up. But they didn’t. They drifted off themselves, never realizing she was on her way. She let them go and went up to the door of Carmencita’s room, pushing her way gently between the nurses and policemen who were standing there. Inside she could see only the foot of Carmencita’s bed and the backs of the doctors that stood around it. She pushed in a little farther and caught sight of Sarah Meyer, listening to a white-coated woman and taking it all down in her notebook.

Sarah Meyer saw Shelley Feldstein and smiled.

Shelley Feldstein reached into the pocket of her coat, pulled out the diary, held it in the air and smiled back.

Sarah Meyer’s jaw dropped open far enough to let Dumbo the Elephant crawl into her mouth.

B
ENNIS HANNAFORD WAS WAITING
at the top of the front steps, outside in the cold, when Gregor Demarkian and John Jackman drove up. They were riding in a standard city of Philadelphia police car, but without the siren running. John Jackman had let the siren rip once on Cavanaugh Street. Gregor had threatened to tell the papers something cute about him if he ever did it again. He even threatened to invent the something cute.
Philadelphia Homicide Detective Wears Dinosaur Pajamas to Bed
. Right. It would be beautiful. Gregor looked out the window at Bennis with her arms wrapped around her knees and her breath blowing white in the cold. It was already dark. Up and down Cavanaugh Street, amber lights glowed steadily in curtained windows. Streetlights cast harsh circles of white on the icy pavement. It was hard-cold and nasty, without gentleness. Gregor didn’t think there would be snow for Christmas. He looked up at the facade of his building and saw that the lights in his own living room were on. He checked out the Christmas wreaths and Hanukkah menorahs arranged in clusters near his front door and saw that they were backlit with tiny Christmas lights. He wondered where Donna Moradanyan had found an outlet to plug them in. The police car braked to a full stop, causing him to bounce against his seat belt. John Jackman leaned across him, saw Bennis sitting on the stairs, and said, “Oh, shit.”

“The sentiment is probably mutual,” Gregor told him drily. “Come on. Let’s get it over with. We’ve got work to do.”

“We don’t have any work to do that couldn’t be done at my office.”

“Come
on
.”

Gregor got his door open, thanked the uniformed driver, and got out onto the pavement. Bennis stood up and started to come down the stairs to him. A few seconds later, she saw John Jackman and stopped.

There was nothing to do about this but bull through it. Gregor had bulled his way through meetings with J. Edgar Hoover himself. He’d even bulled his way through a couple with Richard Nixon. Why did dealing with Bennis always seem so much harder? He walked up to the stoop and started to climb the stairs.

“Bennis,” he said. “I thought you’d be gone by now. I thought you were going to be on your way to New York or Paris.”

“Tomorrow,” Bennis said vaguely. She was looking at John Jackman. “I was supposed to leave tomorrow.”

“Hello, Bennis,” John Jackman said.

“Hello, John.” She turned away and looked toward Gregor for the first time since she had realized that Jackman was with him. “Except now it seems I’m not. Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Gregor took her by the elbow, turned her around, and moved her up the stairs. Her skin felt thick, like gelatin congealed. She was that cold. “I thought it was definite,” he said. “I thought you wanted to get away.”

“Well, I do.” Bennis was letting herself be pushed. “I even called the travel agent. I even started to pack.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Problem,” Bennis repeated. “Well. Do you know a woman named Helena Oumoudian?”

“Oh, yes. She’s Sofie Oumoudian’s aunt. Sofie goes out with Joey—”

“Ohanian. Yes, Gregor, I know. Well, she’s in my living room.”

“Why?”

“Because Sofie Oumoudian and Father Tibor put her there,” Bennis said. “She’s got a fractured hip.”

“She’s got a fractured hip and she made it up to your apartment? Up the stoop flight and then to the second floor?”

“No. She broke her hip this afternoon. At old George’s place. They sent for the doctor.”

“That was good.” They had reached the front door. Gregor tried the knob, found that the door had been left unlocked—again—and stepped back to let Bennis go in before him. He tried to let John Jackman in before him, too, but John wasn’t having any. John wanted to take up the rear. “I don’t understand,” he said to Bennis. “If she broke her hip at old George’s place—
how
did she break her hip at old George’s place?”

“She and George were doing the tango. George was, you know, lowering her down to the floor.”

“How’s George?”

“Contrite.”

Gregor checked the mail table and noted that his mail had been retrieved already—Bennis was always doing that, so that she could check the return addresses—and that the space where the huge menorah had been was now taken up by an equally huge Santa in his sleigh. Fortunately, the reindeer were not along.

“So,” Gregor said, “that still doesn’t answer my question. Why is Helena Oumoudian in
your
living room?”

“Well, for one thing, everybody agreed—in my absence, by the way, I was not a witness to this tango—that taking her up one flight of stairs to my apartment made more sense than taking her down the stoop flight and across a few blocks and then up I don’t know how many flights to her own apartment.”

“All right.”

“And I wouldn’t have minded that,” Bennis said, “because I was going to be leaving anyway and if they wanted to use the apartment for the old lady, who cared, except that isn’t all they wanted. They wanted somebody to take care of the old lady.”

“What about Sofie Oumoudian?”

“Sofie Oumoudian is leaving tomorrow on a three-day class trip. Sunday school class. You know. They’re going to Washington to sing Carols on the steps of the capitol. As if that would help.”

“I should think Sofie would just have to stay here instead.”

“It would break her heart. According to Tibor.”

“Then there must be someone else,” Gregor insisted. “Lida. Hannah. I don’t suppose Sheila Kashinian would be any use. Howard would have a fit. How about Donna Moradanyan?”

“Donna Moradanyan has a child to raise,” Bennis said in exasperation. “And she’s busy. I took her into New York last month to show her portfolio and now she’s working on a book cover for some mystery novel Bantam is publishing. And it’s her first job and she’s got a deadline.”

“How’s the cover?”

“It’s a cover painting,” Bennis said, “and it’s wonderful. I wish they’d assign her to me. Sheila Kashinian is never any use.”

“What about Lida?”

“Lida and Hannah are preparing to go on a trip,” Bennis said. “Together, I presume. Anyway, they’re much too busy.”

“I take it they’ve annoyed you.”

“Everybody’s annoyed me,” Bennis exploded. “Tibor won’t help because besides doing all the Christmas stuff he has to for the church—and there is a lot of it, really, this year, there’s too much—anyway, on top of all that he’s helping David Goldman do a library reading for the first day of Hanukkah for the Bryn Mawr library and he spends all his time walking around his apartment rehearsing his little speech. So he won’t help. And the only good news in all this is that I haven’t already paid for the Concorde tickets.”

“You absolutely have to stay?”

“Of course I have to stay. Somebody has to stay. The old woman has to be helped out of her chair and back into it again.”

“Maybe you could hire a service. A practical nurse. That sort of thing.”

“A service would take me at least two days to set up. I might as well wait for Sofie Oumoudian. But I don’t want to wait, Gregor. I want to get out of here.”

“Don’t look at me,” Gregor said. “I’m in the middle of a murder investigation.”

Bennis gave him the kind of look that suggested he’d invented this murder investigation just to keep her from setting off for Paris and went stomping up the stairs to the second-floor landing. She was wearing her classic hanging-around-the-apartment clothes and draped in her classic hanging-around-the-apartment disarray. Her great cloud of black hair had been inadequately pinned up with bobby pins and was now half falling down. The knee-sock clad feet emerging from the legs of her jeans were wearing no shoes. She must have been freezing out there.

They got to the second-floor landing and stopped. Through the open door to Bennis’s apartment, Gregor could see past the foyer and into the living room. Helena Oumoudian was sitting in Bennis’s favorite black leather club chair, a tiny queen on an oversize throne, an Empress of the Universe whose diminutive size only underscored the force of her personality. She was dressed in the head-to-toe black lace Gregor remembered from their first meeting in the Oumoudians’ apartment. She was holding her black cane in front of her like Queen Victoria about to chastise Disraeli. Her spine was straight. Her head was held high. Gregor was sure that if he went closer, he would find her eyes as clear and sharp and bright as an evil imp’s.

“There she is,” Bennis said, looking around Gregor to see inside. “It’s intolerable, Gregor, it really is.”

“Miss Hannaford?” the sharp old lady’s voice called from inside. “Is that you now? There’s something wrong with the television set.”

“She can make the cable go out just by looking at it,” Bennis hissed into Gregor’s ear. “What am I supposed to do about this?”

“Wait a couple of days and leave for Paris,” Gregor said.

Bennis made an extremely rude gesture and said, “Thanks a lot, Gregor. That’s just what was required in my hour of need.”

“What else am I supposed to say?”

“Miss Hannaford?”

This time the voice was accompanied by a sharp crack, so much like a gunshot that John Jackman jumped.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What was that?”

“That,” Bennis said, “was Miss Oumoudian’s cane. I’m expecting to find out she’s got a whip hidden in the folds of her dress somewhere and she’s only waiting for a chance to use it.”

“Now, now,” Gregor said. “It can’t be that bad.”

Bennis shoved her hands into the pocket of her jeans and glowered.

“Yes it can be that bad, Gregor, yes it can. Trust me.”

Then she marched past him and into her apartment, slamming the door behind her. Both Gregor and John Jackman winced at the violence of the sound.