Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  DeAnna opened the side pocket of the double-zip and came up with a bottle of Glenlivet Scotch. She didn’t much like Scotch and she especially didn’t like Glenlivet, but she always got a Christmas present of the stuff from the women in the typing pool, and she didn’t want to hurt their feelings. She handed the bottle to Max and said, “There. Go drink that.”

  “Thank you,” Max said. He shoved the bottle into the pocket of his jean jacket. “Thank you very much.”

  “Get a little smashed and get some sleep,” DeAnna said.

  “If you don’t mind, I will share this with Prescott and the truck driver,” Max said. “If I tried to drink all the liquor in a bottle of this size, I would be very sick.”

  DeAnna didn’t care if he shared it with a pet rabbit and a stray cockroach, as long as he went somewhere else before he got started. She pushed him gently toward the door.

  “I’ll see you at four thirty in the morning at WKMB.”

  “Four thirty. WKMB.”

  “Don’t be too hung over.”

  “I am never hung over. I am a man.”

  DeAnna pushed him into the hall. “I am a woman, and no one ever lets me get any sleep,” she said. “Go, Max. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He was out in the hall. DeAnna gave him another gentle shove, just to make sure. Then she retreated into her room and shut and locked the door. For a moment, she was afraid he would knock and insist on talking some more, but it didn’t happen. She heard him say something under his breath, and then he was gone.

  DeAnna went back to the bed, sat down again, and picked up the phone. She had the room service menu in this hotel memorized. She knew exactly what she wanted. She was going to order enough food for a family picnic and eat until she passed out.

  She picked up the dreidel and spun it, watching it whir like the top it was across the polished surface of the night table.

  There were always a lot of dreidels around for Hanukkah, but this year there were millions of them.

  The situation was ridiculous.

  2

  CARMENCITA BOAZ WAS GLAD that Shelley Feldstein did not keep kosher. Carmencita had nothing against keeping kosher. Itzaak kept kosher and she accommodated him, as she accommodated him in everything. If it had been Itzaak she had been intending to have dinner with tonight instead of Shelley, Carmencita would have found some place that served kosher food and gone to it, even if it took a cab ride halfway to the Ohio border. Since it was past ten thirty and she was tired and hungry, though, she was just as happy that she and Shelley would be able to eat right here in the hotel, with no need to go out into the awful weather. Carmencita wouldn’t have thought that the weather in the United States could get much worse than it got in New York, but she would have been wrong. This was her first trip to Philadelphia, and it was a shock. Cold. Wet. Slush. Muck. It bothered her that there were so many fewer decorations here than she remembered from New York, both in her old neighborhood and in the streets around the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building. Her neighborhood was so Hispanic, it took celebrating Christmas as its cultural birthright, and said so whenever city officials began to make grumbling noises about the separation of church and state. The people who occupied the buildings around the Hullboard-Dedmarsh, and who occupied the Hullboard-Dedmarsh itself, were mostly Jewish and entirely determined not to let the Christmas spirit overwhelm their own. They decorated for every Jewish holiday on the calendar except Yom Kippur. Of course, Carmencita told herself, there were probably neighborhoods in New York that were even more barren than this one was, and neighborhoods in Philadelphia that could put her New York paragons to shame. It was just that she had seen what she had seen, and she couldn’t very well change her opinion until she’d seen something different.

  The Sheraton Society Hill was built around a courtyard, with restaurant seating right in the middle of the big open space. Coming out of the elevators, Carmencita saw Shelley sitting at a table, looking over the notes she had written on a yellow legal pad. Shelley was Carmencita’s vision of what it meant to be a Real New York Lady. Her pen was sterling silver and from Tiffany’s. She kept her yellow legal pads in a thick black leather writing folder that had been bought at Mark Cross. Shelley’s clothes made Carmencita want to cry. It wasn’t that they were good. Carmencita believed that if she worked hard and did right, she would have the money to buy good sooner or later. It was that Shelley’s clothes were so obviously suited only to a woman who was tall and spare, instead of small and round like Carmencita herself. Carmencita didn’t know if there were sophisticated clothes for five-foot-tall, hourglass-figured Spanish women. Somehow, she doubted it.

  She made her way around a large potted plant and up to the table where Shelley was still hunched over her notes, oblivious. When Carmencita sat down, Shelley looked up and blinked.

  “Oh,” she said. “There you are. I have this almost worked out, I think.”

  “Good,” Carmencita said, “one less thing to worry about. I have been upstairs, pacing back and forth, worrying that I have forgotten something.”

  “All you have to remember is to get Mr. Demarkian on the set on time. Do you have the permissions yet?”

  “No, I don’t have the permissions. There is a great deal wrong with this plan, Shelley, if you ask me. Things that should have been worked out back in New York have not been worked out. As far as I can tell, this Mr. Demarkian isn’t even sure if he wants to go on.”

  “Rebekkah said he’d go on,” Shelly pointed out. “Rebekkah is never wrong.”

  “You’re probably right.” Carmencita sighed. “Still. I sometimes think I should not be doing this job. Someone with experience should be doing this job. I should be doing the job I was hired to do originally.”

  Shelley cocked her head. “DeAnna was going to make a suggestion to you. Did she make it?”

  “About what?”

  “About making Sarah Meyer your assistant. That still wouldn’t get you back to doing the job you were hired to do, as you put it, but Sarah’s been around for quite a while. She might know things that could help you.”

  “If she did, she wouldn’t tell me,” Carmencita said sourly.

  “There is that.”

  “When Itzaak and I talk about who might have murdered Maria Gonzalez, who might have had a motive, the only one we can come up with is Sarah Meyer. She didn’t like Maria. And she doesn’t like me.”

  “She’s just jealous, that’s all.” Shelley waved this off. “I don’t know what to do about Sarah. Lotte doesn’t know what to do about her, either. How do you tell a person that she’s killing herself with her own attitude?”

  “I don’t tell her anything,” Carmencita said. “She snaps at me, and I’m half out of my mind all the time now as it is. Not that I don’t appreciate the vote of confidence. Not that I don’t appreciate the promotion, either. But even so.”

  “You’re doing a fine job. A better job than Maria was doing, if you want to know the truth. At least you don’t turn off your beeper every time you have a date.”

  “Mmm,” Carmencita said.

  “What’s that mmm supposed to mean?”

  Carmencita shrugged. “Maria always said she didn’t turn off her beeper. Not on purpose, at any rate. I don’t think she was trying to put herself out of reach. I think she was just bad with machines.”

  “Maybe. And, of course, that last night—” Shelley shuddered. “That last night. Do you think Gregor Demarkian will agree to put on his suit of armor and ride to the rescue?”

  “I don’t see how he could,” Carmencita said reasonably. “Maria was murdered there, and we’re here.”

  “I know. But anything would be better than that police detective. Or whatever he is. That awful man.”

  Carmencita agreed that he was an awful man. “He bothers Itzaak all the time, and it’s just not right. Itzaak has his head full of images of the old Soviet Union and the secret police. He can’t handle it.”

  “I don’t think our friend Chickie likes Jews.”


  “Whatever it is he doesn’t like, he ought to keep a better lid on it. It’s bad enough having the police around every minute of the day, and Maria dead.”

  “And the one time something happens that we need the police for, they’re not there.” Shelley laughed. “Poor Max and his wallet.”

  Carmencita dismissed Max and his wallet. She dismissed Itzaak, too, in her mind, because if she started thinking about Itzaak she would never get anything done. She was feeling very guilty about Itzaak right now. He had asked her to have dinner with him on the bus, and he had been very insistent. She had already agreed to have dinner with Shelley, and it was a dinner to work, so she said no, but she wished she hadn’t had to. When Itzaak got that insistent, he always had something to tell her that he considered important.

  She had brought her briefcase down with her from her room. It was not a very good briefcase. She had picked it up cheap in a pawn shop on the edge of Harlem, but it had been cheap even when new. She got out the file she’d labeled “Demarkian—Details.” Before she’d taken over Maria’s job, she’d had no idea how many particulars there were to gather on every invited guest. What Lotte didn’t need, Shelley did, and what Shelley didn’t need, Itzaak did. Carmencita kept expecting to see someone rush into her office, waving papers in the air and declaring an emergency, demanding to have the guest’s blood type the day before yesterday. It would have made as much sense as some of the things people did ask for.

  The particulars on Gregor Demarkian that Carmencita had for Shelley Feldstein were height, weight, hair color, eye color, waist circumference, and shoe size. She also had a measurement she didn’t usually take, but that she’d come across accidently and immediately seen was important. The measurement was of Gregor Demarkian’s chest. Carmencita had found it in an ancient copy of People magazine, in a story about a murder Demarkian had solved during a Fourth of July party at the summer home of a movie star. That was a little intimidating, that was. That Gregor Demarkian went to Fourth of July parties at the summer homes of movie stars.

  Carmencita pushed the detail sheet across the table until it was right under Shelley’s nose.

  “Chest measurement,” she said. “That’s what I wanted you to look at.”

  “Very big,” Shelley nodded. “Yes, it is. We’ll have to be careful with that. If we aren’t, he’ll make Lotte look like a China doll.”

  “I’m not worried about Lotte,” Carmencita said. “If she looks like a China doll, it’s just fine, at least according to DeAnna, that is. It was the first thing I worried about when I saw the measurements. He is so big. Lotte is so small. But we don’t have to worry about that. DeAnna said.”

  “What do we have to worry about?”

  “Herbert Shasta.”

  “Herbert Shasta?”

  “He’s the other guest. We were supposed to have four of them. Serial killers, I mean, but we couldn’t get the prison system to go along with it. You should have heard what the warden at the Florida State Penitentiary said. Anyway, all we got was Herbert Shasta, who was called the Allegheny Apache until the Apaches complained. Mr. Shasta used to murder very fat women and—um—commit acts on their dead bodies.”

  “Oh,” Shelley said. “Well.”

  “Yes. Well. This is the problem. Mr. Shasta, you see, is very small.”

  “How small?”

  “Five feet one inch tall. And slight.”

  “How slight?”

  “One hundred and twenty-five pounds.”

  “One hundred and twenty-five pounds. I weigh more than one hundred and twenty-five pounds.”

  “Lotte weighs more than one hundred and twenty-five pounds,” Carmencita said. “There are twelve-year-old boys who weigh more than one hundred and twenty-five pounds.”

  “Oh, dear,” Shelley said.

  “It would have been better if we could have gotten one of the other ones,” Carmencita said. “There was a man in Texas who killed only women with red hair. He was six ten and built like King Kong. He would have been good. There was a man in Chicago who preferred Asian women in white jeans. He was six two and fat. He would have been good, too.”

  “Don’t these guys ever kill anyone but women?”

  “Of course they do. But we didn’t ask them to be on the show, because the show is called—”

  “‘Sex and the Serial Killer,’ yes, I know.”

  “Mr. Demarkian is going to be sitting on that stage looking like a gorilla,” Carmencita said. “He’s going to make this Mr. Shasta look sympathetic. If we don’t do something.”

  “Well,” Shelley said with determination. “We’ll just have to do something, won’t we?”

  “We’ll have to do something for more reasons than you know,” Carmencita said, “because you see, when Mr. Demarkian shows up at the studio tomorrow, he’s going to get something of a surprise.”

  “What kind of a surprise?”

  “He doesn’t know yet that Mr. Shasta is going to be on the program.”

  Shelley Feldstein cocked her head and grinned. “You know, Carmencita, I think you’re going to make a world-class talent coordinator.”

  “If I don’t get killed between six and noon and tomorrow morning,” Carmencita said. “Can you fix this?”

  “I don’t know if I can fix it, but I can certainly help. Here comes the waitress. Think of something that you want to eat.”

  Carmencita didn’t really want anything to eat, but she thought it would be impolite not to have something, so she ordered a chef’s salad. Carmencita was the kind of person who ate when she was nervous and wasn’t much interested when she was not, and now that Shelley seemed to be taking this little problem in stride, Carmencita was calmer than she’d been since she climbed into the limousine in New York.

  Now if she could only think of some way to resolve all her problems with Itzaak, life would be perfect.

  3

  FOR SARAH MEYER, LIFE would only be perfect if she woke up one morning and found out she was someone else. Dorothy Hamill. Madam Curie. Michelle Pfeiffer. Her own sister. Sometimes Sarah thought it would be enough to be herself, but transformed. Taller. Thinner. Smarter. Prettier. Something.

  Tonight, she thought it would be enough if she could just get through Shelley Feldstein’s door without anyone seeing her do it. It was taking forever when it shouldn’t have taken any time at all. Sarah Meyer had never breached a lock with a credit card in her life. She wouldn’t have known how to go about doing it, and she wouldn’t have bet on her ability to carry it through even if she had known. When she wanted to get into somebody’s room, she did it the easy way. She knocked. She tried the door to see if it was open. She used the key. The keys to the doors in this hotel were the electronic kind, that were programmed by computer and that you put into a slot and then pulled out quickly to get the knob to turn. Sarah had taken Shelley Feldstein’s key out of Shelley Feldstein’s purse’s sidepocket when they were both heading downstairs in the elevator, and then when they reached the lobby Sarah had pretended to have forgotten something in her room and gone back up. Every woman Sarah had ever known carried her hotel key in that outside pocket of her purse if her purse had one, because every woman Sarah had ever known was more worried about being able to reach the safety of her room without delay if she was being followed than she was about someone stealing her key. If Shelley Feldstein had proved to be an exception, Sarah had backup plans.

  The problem was, Sarah was no good at using electronic keys, her own or anybody else’s. She pushed them in and pulled them out and grabbed for the knob, but it took her half a dozen tries before she got there in time. The mechanism didn’t give you very long before it froze the door shut again. Sarah put the card in the slot again, pulled it out again, grabbed for the knob again. The little light on the jamb stayed green for a tantalizing few seconds and then switched again to red. The door remained locked.

  “Damn,” Sarah said under her breath. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  “Do you need some help with t
hat?” someone said from behind her.

  Sarah turned around to see a tall Hispanic man in a hotel uniform. She saw the napkin draped over his arm and realized that he must be from room service. DeAnna Kroll getting her shrimp, Sarah thought, and stood away from the door a little.

  The man took the key card out of her hand. “Here,” he said. “These are very tricky. A great many of our guests have trouble with them.”

  “Why do you use them?”

  “It’s cut our burglary rate by forty percent,” the man said simply. “You can’t do better than that.” He shoved the key card in, pulled it out even more quickly, and grabbed the doorknob. It turned easily and the door swung open.

  “There,” he said. “You’re in.”

  “Thank you,” Sarah said.

  “You’ve got to pull the card in and out very fast. Once the light goes green, the mechanism starts counting. Even though the card is still in the slot.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’ve only got five seconds to get the door open. Five seconds from when the light goes on. Remember.”

  “I will,” Sarah said.

  “Have a good night,” the man said.

  He turned away from her and started hurrying toward the elevators, keeping the arm with the napkin over it at an odd angle to his body. Sarah waited for him to turn the corner and then reached for the light switch just inside Shelley’s door.

  Have a good night, the man had told her.