Festival of Deaths (7 page)

Prescott let himself into the stair hall and looked up the wall. “Señora?” he called. “Señorita?”

A spate of furious female Spanish rained down on his head. Prescott started up the stairs.

“Señora,” he said as he climbed. “I am looking for Maria Gonzalez. I have come from Dr. Goldman, who is her employer. Maria is supposed to be at work, but she is not there, and nobody can find her. I wish to make sure she is not lying in her apartment hurt.”

Prescott said all these things slowly and clearly and as loud as he could. He had no idea if Esposito, C. could understand him and supposed she could not. He was slightly heartened by the fact that all the sound above him had stopped. At least someone was trying to listen.

“Señora?” he said again, as he reached the landing where the woman stood in front of her open door, a short round woman beginning to get old, careworn and suspicious. “Señora,” he said again. “
Por favor
.”

That was the extent of Prescott Holloway’s Spanish.

The extent of Esposito, C.’s English was “Hello.” She said it as soon as she saw Prescott in his uniform, and then she backed into her doorway and let out a yell. The yell brought a fat middle-aged man to the stair rail of the landing above them. He stood blocking out the stairwell light and looking Prescott over.

“What do you want?” he asked finally, in English not nearly as accented as it ought to be, considering how stereotypically immigrant he looked.

Prescott told him what he had told Señora Esposito on his way up.

“So how do we know it’s true?” the fat middle-aged man demanded at the end of it. “How do we know you’re not some kind of cat burglar?”

“In this neighborhood?” Prescott blinked.

“People have stereos in this neighborhood,” the fat middle-aged man said. “They have VCRs. They have televisions.”

“Sure,” another voice said—young, this time, teenage and hostile, “we’re all welfare queens in this building. We’re all getting rich off the city of New York.”

“Don’t
all
of us spend all our money on crack,” another teenage voice said.

Prescott shifted uneasily. This was what he didn’t need. Teenagers. Too many of the teenagers up here had nothing to lose.

“Look,” he said. “I’m a chauffeur. I’m a driver. You can see for yourself. My car’s parked right across the street.”

“How do we know which car is yours?” the fat middle-aged man demanded.

“Just take a look,” Prescott told him.

Downstairs, there was a
snick
of opened door and the soft slap of rubber-soled shoes on linoleum. A moment later, the door-
snick
sound happened again and somebody laughed.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” the someone said. “You should see it. Stretch caddy half as long as a football field. Only reason it hasn’t been ripped off is that everybody’s afraid it might be booby-trapped.”

“Maybe it is booby-trapped,” the fat middle-aged man said.

“Look,” Prescott Holloway told the company at large. “All I’m supposed to do is check Señorita Gonzalez’s apartment and make sure she hasn’t fallen ill on the kitchen floor. That’s it. Then I can go back to my boss and let her figure out what to do next.”

“You got keys to the apartment?” the fat middle-aged man asked.

“Of course I don’t have keys to the apartment,” Prescott said. “I’ve got a credit card. If the door isn’t bolted from the inside, I can get in. If it is, we know we’ve got trouble. All right?”

“She’s not lying in that apartment sick on the floor or anything,” said a young woman’s voice Prescott hadn’t heard before now. “She’s not in the apartment at all. She didn’t come home last night.”

The fat middle-aged man seemed to make up his mind. He moved away from the stair rail and began coming down to Prescott.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll let you in. But we’re going to be standing here watching you.”

“Fine,” Prescott said.

“We all know Maria,” the fat middle-aged man said.

“I know her, too. I work in the same place.”

“We’re not going to let you take anything away.”

“I don’t want to take anything away.”

The fat middle-aged man looked skeptical, but he motioned to Prescott to come forward, and the two of them started down the stairs to the floor below, where Maria’s apartment was. Prescott was glad now that he had not tried to go straight to it when he was buzzed in. There were buildings where nobody wanted to know anything about anyone else, and then there were the other kind.

The fat middle-aged man stopped in front of a door marked “2B Gonzalez, M.” and stepped back to let Prescott do his stuff. Prescott got his Citibank automatic teller card out of his wallet and slid it into the crack in the door. There were plenty of security doors now where the locks could not be opened with plastic no matter what, but this wasn’t one of them. Prescott didn’t think anything in this building had been replaced since 1959, except light bulbs.

The lock trembled, shuddered, jerked and sprung. Prescott pushed the door in and looked at the darkness.

“Shit,” he said.

“Don’t swear in front of the women,” the fat middle-aged man said.

Then the fat middle-aged man reached an arm over Prescott’s shoulder and a hand through the door, and Maria’s small apartment was full of light.

It was full of everything else imaginable, too. It was full of feathers and scraps of cloth. It was full of pastry crumbs and chipped stoneware plates. It was full of shredded bits of ancient carpet and peeling strips of plastic lampshades.

The place had been trashed.

C
ARMENCITA BOAZ HEARD ABOUT
the destruction of Maria Gonzalez’s apartment at ten minutes to six, and it bothered her, but she didn’t have time to think about it. Later she knew it would bother her a lot, like so much about living in the city did. She had told Itzaak that her dream was to move somewhere small and countrified, like New Hampshire, and he had laughed, but she had meant it. There might not be much in the way of Hispanic culture in New Hampshire, but Carmencita wasn’t sure she minded that. She’d had quite enough of Latin America when she’d been living in Latin America. Her New York neighborhood reminded her so much of Guatemala City, it made her want to cry. Carmencita didn’t like cities at all, and she wasn’t very fond of hot weather. She could just see herself in the New Hampshire countryside with the snow falling on her hair. She could see herself making maple syrup and apple cider and bringing up a pack of children who could all say the Pledge of Allegiance without Spanish accents.

The six men who were supposed to be on the show today were sitting in Carmencita’s office, looking dejected. A couple of them had come in breathing fire, but it hadn’t lasted. Carmencita had known it wouldn’t. The lawyers had gotten to them. The lawyers always did. There was something about hearing your most private obsessions spelled out in the language of tort law that took the starch right out of a man.

“It’s worse than getting a divorce,” one of the men complained, after it was over. “With a divorce, at least you know what it’s all about. With this, it’s like they just did it because they felt like it.”

The sentiment might be expressed a little inarticulately, but Carmencita knew what the man meant. Carmencita was not a feminist. It was her private opinion that the women in this case were what her friend at her neighborhood branch of the New York Public Library would call “grade-A number one ball busters.”

Ball busters
was not an expression Carmencita Boaz used, except in the privacy of her mind. Nastiness was not a modus operandi she had been brought up to adopt. When she saw the women in the hallway, she was unvaryingly polite. When she talked about them to Itzaak, she was blunt without being obscene. In Carmencita Boaz’s background there were legions of nuns, nuns who had been her teachers, nuns who had been her aunts, nuns who had watched over her in playgrounds and at Mass, every last one of them repeating over and over again, “Carmencita, you must be a lady.”

Carmencita checked her watch, looked over her dejected brood, and tried her best encouraging smile.

“We’re going to go out to the set in just five minutes,” she said. “We will seat you around a low coffee table, on which will be placed pitchers of ice water and glasses in case your throats get dry. We’re going to try out a few seating arrangements—”

“Just don’t sit me next to Darlene,” one of the men said. “I’ll break her neck.”

“They always sit the husbands and the wives together,” another said. “Don’t you ever watch this show? The husbands and wives just sit there holding hands and calling each other the worst names—”

“I’m being accused of refusing to do something I never even heard of,” a third man said. “I’m being accused of doing something I can’t even pronounce.”

“You don’t think anybody watches this show,” the second man said, “but you’re wrong. All the wives watch it. And they talk to each other.”

“Oh, God,” the first man said.

Carmencita would have liked a drink of ice water herself. She would have liked a long talk with Itzaak, but Itzaak wouldn’t be available. He’d be up in the rafters playing with the lights. She opened her office door and motioned the men to go through it.

“Let’s get an early start,” she told them. “It can’t do any harm and you’re getting much too nervous. You’ll all be fine.”

“Of course I won’t be fine,” the third man said. “I’ll be the laughingstock of Port Chester, New York.”

Since this was undoubtedly true, Carmencita decided not to try to answer it. Instead, she made another falsely hearty gesture at the door, and was gratified when the men got slowly to their feet and headed in her direction. They looked like prisoners on the way to the electric chair, but then in a way that was exactly what they were. Carmencita got them into the hall in a ragtag cluster and headed down the hall for the set.

Sarah Meyer was standing at the set door, frowning. Sarah Meyer was always frowning. Carmencita paid no attention to her.

“DeAnna wants to see you,” Sarah said when Carmencita arrived at the door. “I think it’s supposed to be important.”

Out on the set, single seats had been arranged in a half circle facing the benches for the studio audience. If everything was running on schedule, that audience would be down in the lobby, clutching their tickets and wondering out loud why
The Lotte Goldman Show
had to tape so
early.
Carmencita often wondered the same thing herself.

“I would like you to go down and take the seats on the left-hand side of the platform,” Carmencita told her charges. “Start with the one farthest left as you face the stage from the audience. The gray chair in the middle is where Dr. Goldman is going to sit. Will you do that for me now, please?”

“Oh, shit,” one of the men said.

The others drifted into the studio, and the complaining man followed. Carmencita knew why they taped so early. It was because they aired the same day. She just thought it was silly.

“What did DeAnna want?” she asked Sarah Meyer. “Did she say?”

“She didn’t say to me,” Sarah said. “All she said to me was go get a ream of typing paper from the storeroom and if you see Carmencita tell her I want her. She didn’t even tell me what she wanted the typing paper for.”

“Maybe she wanted to type.”

“DeAnna doesn’t type. DeAnna doesn’t even answer her own phone.”

“Maybe she wanted to make paper airplanes and shoot them out the window of her office at the traffic,” Carmencita said. “I’ve got something to do right now. I’ll find DeAnna when I’m done.”

Sarah Meyer sniffed. “She’s in there on the phone with the cops who are at Maria’s apartment. She had to send Prescott all the way back up there and the cops are furious. He wasn’t supposed to have left the scene at all. Do you think it will make the papers, because Maria is with
The Lotte Goldman Show
?”

“I think I don’t have time for this conversation,” Carmencita said. “Here comes Maximillian with the women, and you know what that means. Fights are likely to start breaking out any minute.”

“I heard DeAnna talking to Lotte about it and they were really very mysterious. DeAnna was saying how Prescott was saying that nobody could have done it who didn’t have a key, because the lock was locked when he got there and it was one of those old-fashioned locks that won’t lock with the door open and then you can pull the door shut and there you are. It was the kind of lock you had to use the key to lock once you got the door closed.”

“Maria lived in an old building.”

“I told Prescott you had a key to Maria’s apartment,” Sarah said. “I remember her saying so. You have hers and she has yours. In case either of you gets locked out.”

Carmencita turned on her heel and gave Sarah Meyer the first long, direct look she’d ever given her. She took in Sarah’s lumpy weight and Sarah’s formless features and Sarah’s rash of blackheads along her chin.

“What,” she asked, “is all this supposed to be about?”

If it was supposed to be about anything, Sarah wasn’t saying. She gave Carmencita a little cat smile and backed away. When she reached the intersection in the corridors she turned and hurried away.

“
Come
on,” Shelly Feldstein’s voice said from somewhere inside. “Let’s get going, Carmencita, we’ve got this run-through to do before we can let the screaming hordes up and we’re running late.”

“Right,” Carmencita said.

“I’m going to change Lotte’s chair to the black—no, not the black, she’ll look like a hanging judge—to the navy blue one. I’m going to run. Are all your people ready to go?”

All Carmencita’s people were ready to die of embarrassment. There was nothing she could do about it. She marched down to the platform and looked her men over. They hulked in their chairs, looking too big and too menacing by half. Shelley Feldstein either hadn’t noticed or approved of the effect.

“Okay,” Carmencita said. “Why don’t we try sitting up straight?”

If Carmencita Boaz had been in the sort of position the men sitting before her were in, she would have told any silly woman who asked her to sit up straight to go straight to hell—except that she would have done it politely, of course. But North Americans were different. They didn’t think like people in the rest of the world. Maybe they didn’t think.