Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  “The Moral Majority is out of business,” DeAnna said, “and Bart can’t be embarrassed. I don’t know about the set. I haven’t been down to the studio.”

  “You’re not at the office?”

  “Of course I’m at the office. It’s four o’clock in the morning. Where am I supposed to be except at the office?”

  “I could say in bed with a man, DeAnna, but that would serve no purpose. What is the problem?”

  “The Siamese twins never made it. They’re stuck in the fog at Heathrow.”

  “Heathrow.” Lotte frowned. “Does the Concorde fly from Heathrow? Into New York?”

  “It does, but it’s no use. I was going to call you first thing I got up here, but I decided to do some checking first. Short of somebody on staff inventing the transatlantic equivalent of ‘Beam me up, Scottie,’ there’s no way to get those two over here in time to tape.”

  “Ah,” Lotte said. “What about Maria? What does Maria say?”

  “I can’t find Maria.”

  “It wasn’t Maria who told you the Siamese twins would not be able to tape?”

  “It was Prescott Holloway. He went to the airport and waited for hours then he tried to call Maria and he couldn’t get her either. It’s not a great night for getting people, Lotte, let me tell you. I’ve been calling the whole staff. I’ve gotten hold of maybe half of them.”

  “The other half probably have better things to do. You ought to get a better thing to do. You’re going to leave it until too late.”

  “I had it too early. That’s why I’ve got a twenty-three year old daughter and I’m only thirty-eight. Never mind the other one. The other one is giving me migraines.”

  “Your daughters will be fine,” Lotte said. She meant it. She had known both of DeAnna’s daughters since they were small children, and they seemed like very normal and psychologically healthy girls to her. They seemed especially psychologically healthy since she’d given up Freud in favor of feminism. “I suppose we’ll have to think of something to tape a show on. We couldn’t just let it ride for one day.”

  “No. We don’t have enough of a lag.”

  “We ought to have enough of a lag. Most of the other shows tape at least a week in advance.”

  “Most of the other shows don’t have our reputation for breaking news. You got anything you want to do?”

  “I don’t have anything that would constitute breaking news,” Lotte said drily. “I have a few things that are fairly provocative.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as those women I told you about. I went to their support group. The women whose husbands won’t perform cunnilingus.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, and Lotte smiled to herself. In one of the odder divisions of labor on The Lotte Goldman Show, it was Lotte herself who checked out support and self-help groups and twelve-step programs for possible guests. DeAnna had tried it and found herself to be too conspicuous, and neither Lotte nor DeAnna trusted anyone else on the staff to do the initial work. Once Lotte had found a group she thought had possibilities, she put Maria Gonzalez on the case, or whoever had Maria’s job at the moment. Talent coordinators never seemed to last long on The Lotte Goldman Show.

  “Ah,” DeAnna said on the other end of the line. “Cunnilingus.”

  “You have to admit it’s provocative,” Lotte pointed out.

  “I know it’s provocative,” DeAnna said, “but I thought we had reservations. I thought we’d decided that these women were Looney Tunes.”

  “Of course they’re Looney Tunes. If you want my private opinion, I think the leader of that particular group is a full-blow delusional schizophrenic with better-than-average coping mechanisms. But that’s not the point. This is an emergency. We have to do something very quickly. Isn’t that right?”

  “You’ve been dying to have these people on, haven’t you? You’ve just been dying to.”

  “Something like that,” Lotte admitted. “I think I can see myself, leading the discussion. How many calls do you think we can get about the explicitness of the language?”

  “How explicit do you want to be?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “No,” DeAnna said. “Let me think. We’ve got to have the husbands. That’s the key.”

  “You’re right. The husbands. It would be very good if one of them got on and said that he wanted to perform cunnilingus on his wife, but she would not let him.”

  “It would be better if one of the wives had never had an orgasm. It’s really too bad we just can’t hire actors for these things.”

  “Someday we should go on the program ourselves,” Lotte suggested, “and talk about how easy it is to do without sex and what a relief. Then we should cancel the program and take off for the south of France.”

  “I can’t take off for the south of France,” DeAnna said. “Sherleen would never forgive me. They don’t have street people there.”

  “Yes, they do, DeAnna, I have seen them. But the street people are not black.”

  “Maybe Sherleen could get interested in being French. Never mind. I’ve got to make some phone calls. Cunnilingus.”

  “Cunnilingus,” Lotte said solemnly.

  “Would you mind coming in about an hour early? You probably won’t get to do anything but sit around, but at least I’ll be able to stop worrying about having everything in place, and if I can get hold of these people we can do a quick extra format run-through. Though why we do any format run-throughs at all is beyond me. Australian Aborigines know our format well enough to duplicate it.”

  “I’ll be in an hour early,” Lotte promised. “Go do what you have to do and stop worrying. Everything will be all right. Everything always is.”

  “Everything is always all right because I worry myself to death,” DeAnna said. “Never mind that, either. I’m going to get off the phone. I’ve got to make one more stab at finding Shelley Feldstein. Cunnilingus.”

  “Cunnilingus,” Lotte repeated, for what must have been the third time. The phone went to dial tone in her ear, and she put the receiver back into the cradle.

  The Dorothy Cannell novel was lying open on her knees. Lotte picked it up, stuck a stray piece of paper from the night table into it, and put it aside. Her cigarettes were on the night table, too, a habit she had started early and been unable to break. She took one out of her silver cigarette case and lit up.

  DeAnna would go out and set up a program on cunnilingus, and they would run it, and it would rate well. Lotte knew all that to be true. She also knew that the older she got, the less interested she seemed to be in any of the things they did programs about. Sex was like eating and sleeping and shopping and all the rest of it, something people did over and over and over again, something that didn’t seem to get anyone anywhere. Just where Lotte wanted sex to get people, she didn’t know. She didn’t know where she wanted to get herself. But there it was.

  She swung her legs out of bed and stretched.

  Today she would go into the office early and that would break up the time. This afternoon she would have lunch with DeAnna at Viva Tel Aviv, and that would be a positive pleasure. This evening she would take a call from her brother, David, who would tell her it made no sense to keep kosher when she could never remember to observe Yom Kippur. Tonight she would be up too late, too restless to sleep.

  Really, life would make a great deal more sense if she could spend a great deal more of it unconscious.

  3

  SARAH MEYER WAS ASLEEP when Prescott Holloway called, but she wasn’t surprised to be wakened in the middle of the night, and she was even less surprised to be wakened by the company driver instead of her own boss. Sarah Meyer was only twenty-six years old, but she already had the world figured out, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like much of anything. Sitting up front with Prescott on the way into the office, feeling cinched and strangled by her seat belt, it occurred to her that she had a right to complain. She’d had a right to complain months ag
o, when the job she’d wanted—the one she’d slaved for, in fact, the one she deserved—had gone instead to the outsider Maria Gonzalez. Sarah had known what all that was about, and she still did, and nobody was going to talk her out of it. The least Lotte could have done was to give Sarah the job as Maria’s assistant—but that hadn’t happened either. Nothing ever happened the way Sarah wanted it to. Nothing ever had, not even when Sarah was in high school in Scarsdale, not even when she went away to college at Barnard, never. Written down on paper, Sarah’s life looked perfect. Witnessed in living color, it was a mess. Sarah didn’t even have a roommate any more. Her last one, a snippy little bitch from Baton Rouge, had packed up and moved out back in August. Sarah was not in the least bit interested in finding someone else. Whoever she did find was sure to be a first-class pain in the ass. Whoever she did find was sure to be pretty.

  Sarah rode all the way into the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building without saying more than “hello” to Prescott. She marched through the lobby to the elevators without saying more than “hello” to Jack. Since Prescott and Jack both knew her well, neither one of them tried to start a conversation. Sarah was in a bad mood, and when she was in a bad mood she was nasty. When she was in a bad mood she was ugly, even uglier than usual, and she knew it. That was Sarah’s stock in trade. She was ugly.

  When the elevator doors closed, Sarah looked up at the car ceiling and sighed. She was tired and she was cranky and she felt even fatter than she really was. Her face felt like pudding. For years, she had told herself she would win out in the end, that the process was simple, that if she followed all the rules it would work out just like all those Beverly Cleary young adult novels she borrowed from the library. There would be her sister, Linda, pretty and brainless, knocked up at nineteen and sentenced to a life of diapers and drudgery. There would be Sarah, with an Ivy League diploma under her arm, marching off to the glamorous world of television. Or art. Or something. The problem was, Linda had indeed gotten married at nineteen, but she hadn’t been sentenced to drudgery, because she’d married a student at the Harvard Medical School. Now the student was the most successful plastic surgeon in Westchester County, and Linda had maids. Sarah had one room on the Upper West Side and a closet full of mark-downs from Lerner’s. She had also stopped going out to Westchester to visit Linda, because Linda always did the same thing. She played matchmaker. And it didn’t work.

  The elevator doors opened to the twentieth floor, and Sarah stepped out to find DeAnna Kroll pacing back and forth in front of the receptionist’s desk, reading off a piece of crumpled paper and swearing to herself. Sarah could just imagine what the paper was. She could just imagine what the mess was like. She’d never trusted Maria Gonzalez herself. She’d never liked Maria’s assistant, either. Maria’s assistant was an olive-faced girl from Guatemala named Carmencita Boaz. Carmencita spoke perfect English in a lilting accent that sounded like wind chimes, and Sarah hated her.

  Sarah trundled across the lobby, the thick mounds of her hip bulges straining against the spandex of her leggings, the heavy swelling globes of her breasts bouncing and shaking under the sheer rayon of her tunic. Sometimes she wished that she were black. Black women were allowed to be fatter than white women. It was true. You only had to look at DeAnna Kroll to tell.

  DeAnna must have sensed movement in the foyer. She put down the piece of paper and looked up. When she saw Sarah, she nodded and folded her arms across her chest. Sarah was ready to spit. With anybody else, Ms. Kroll would at least have smiled and made a welcome.

  “Sarah,” DeAnna Kroll said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m having the devil’s own time finding anybody.”

  “I was home,” Sarah said.

  “Yes. Well. Do you know what this is all about?”

  “The Siamese twins never got here from London and now we don’t have a guest for the show and you can’t find Maria Gonzalez anywhere,” Sarah said, as if she were reciting it, which she was, in a way. This was what Prescott Holloway had told her when he called to wake her up, and what she had worked so hard not to talk about in the ride down in the car. It was hard to talk about it even now. Maria Gonzalez was nowhere to be found. Oh, it figured. It really figured.

  But DeAnna Kroll was going on. “I did find Carmencita,” she was saying, “and I got Itzaak Blechmann just before he got into the shower, which was luck. But I still haven’t found Shelley Feldstein, and I haven’t the faintest idea how to start looking for Maximillian Dey and I need all of them, I really need all of them. Lotte will be coming in by five.”

  “Dr. Goldman? Why?”

  “Because I’m paranoid,” DeAnna Kroll said. “Because I’m climbing the walls. Because we’ve never missed a taping. I need you to get on the phone to the husbands.”

  “Husbands,” Sarah repeated.

  “Right. We’re going to do the cunnilingus show Lotte’s been talking about forever and a day. I mean, why the hell not? We don’t have anything else. And I can promote it. I need you to get on the phone and line up the husbands.”

  “What about the wives?”

  “I’ll take care of the wives. As soon as you get an agreement from one of the husbands, send Prescott over there right away to pick him up. I don’t want anybody getting cold feet. Do you have Prescott’s car phone number?”

  “In my book,” Sarah said. “Of course I do.”

  “Well, good. Then get going. Oh, and I need as many of the husbands as you can line up. I’ve got a list of six of them I put on your desk. If we get too many we don’t have to use them all. If you finish early, come find me and I’ll give you something else to do. God only knows, in a situation like this, there’s more than enough to do.”

  “Right,” Sarah said.

  “Try to be pleasant,” DeAnna Kroll said. “I mean, these guys are going to be doing us a favor, for God’s sake. And they’re going to be embarrassing the hell out of themselves, even if they don’t realize it. But it’s your job not to let them realize it. Until it’s too late. Right?”

  “Right,” Sarah said.

  DeAnna Kroll looked doubtful. She always looked doubtful when it came to Sarah, and Sarah resented it. Sarah set her face into its best grown-up pout and waited.

  “Well,” DeAnna Kroll said after a minute. “That’s it. I guess we both better get to work.”

  “Right,” Sarah said again.

  “Right,” DeAnna Kroll repeated. Then she looked helplessly right and left, shrugged, and turned away in the direction of the inner offices.

  Sarah watched her go until she was out of sight around the corner of a plasterboard hallway, and then she followed, slowly, moving between the thin walls hung with pen-and-ink drawings from the early days of television like a small rolling ship moving through the Strait of Magellan. When she got to the place where DeAnna had turned, she stopped and looked, to make sure DeAnna was gone. Then she went straight on to the very back of the suite, where Maria Gonzalez and Carmencita Boaz had their offices.

  DeAnna Kroll had said that she had been able to get in contact with Carmencita Boaz, so Sarah didn’t think she had much time. She didn’t think she was going to have much luck, either, but she never had much luck. What luck she did have consisted in this: Maria Gonzalez had already gotten into enough trouble on her own today; she didn’t need any help from Sarah. Sarah could concentrate on Carmencita Boaz alone.

  Sarah stuck her head into Maria’s office anyway, just to wrinkle her nose at the bank of photographs in clear plastic frames that littered Maria’s desk and the Lucite vase of red silk flowers that graced the top of Maria’s file cabinet. It was all so unprofessional. Maria was so unprofessional. Maria came to work every day in flowing skirts and wild hair. Sarah backed out into the hall again and went into Carmencita’s office, which was not so enthusiastically feminine but was still feminine enough. Carmencita didn’t have as many photographs, only three or four, of her parents back in Guatemala City and her ten-year-old brother in his uniform from Catholic school. Carmencita didn’t
have any flowers, either, just a small sparkly geode from the Museum of Natural History that Itzaak Blechmann had given her for her last birthday. Itzaak was always hanging around Carmencita’s door, trying to think of something to say, trying not to look like an idiot. Sarah didn’t know how Carmencita put up with him.

  Sarah closed the door behind her and looked around the room, at the clear surfaces of the desk and the file cabinet, at the clean windows, at the bare walls. A lot of people in television kept very messy offices, with weeks-old doughnuts molding in drawers and papers strewn across the carpet. Maria and Carmencita kept their offices the way their mothers probably kept house. That could be a good sign. Sarah went to the file cabinet and looked under “Cunnilingus,” but couldn’t find anything. She couldn’t find anything under “Oral Sex,” either. Maybe that made sense. Maria and Carmencita were both Catholic as hell. They went to Mass every morning before coming to work. They were both very modest, too, very prone to blushing and embarrassment. Maybe Carmencita couldn’t look at a word like cunnilingus staring out at her every time she opened the top drawer of her file cabinet without calling for the smelling salts. Maybe the whole Lotte Goldman show was just too much for Carmencita to take. Sarah tried “Husbands and Wives, Marital Problems, Sex” and was presented with a bewildering array of genital dysfunctions, from impotence to fetishes. None of it was what she was looking for. She stood back and tried to think.

  These were a group of women who felt devastated because their husbands refused to perform one of the trendier acts of physical gratification. They met once or twice a month to “feel their rage” and “honor their pain.” If she was Carmencita, where would she file them?

  Sarah went back to the cabinet and checked carefully through all the folders in the first drawer. She looked in “Divorce” and “Dissatisfaction” and “Communication” without success. Then she went on to the second drawer and tried “Frequency” and “Gratification.” Under “Gratification” she found a set of papers titled “Serial Killers—What Do They Really Want” and marked across with red pen: