by Jane Haddam
“I don’t want to hear about it,” John Jackman said. “This doesn’t feel very good, does it?”
“No. But still—”
“Still?”
“Itzaak Blechmann is in the room with her,” Gregor said.
“Would that make a difference?”
Gregor didn’t know. He went a little farther down the corridor, being as quiet as he could, making no noise. He went past the door of the woman he had seen propped up in a chair earlier in the day. Her lights were out and she seemed to be asleep. He walked up to the edge of the nursing station and looked around.
It really was quiet. And empty. There was no sign of anything or anyone. He looked behind the nurses’ station counter and found nothing. He looked through the glass window in the door to the head nurse’s office and saw that the office was empty. What did I expect? he asked himself. Blood stains on the floor? Maybe that was exactly it.
Jackman came up behind him. “This is weird,” he whispered.
“There isn’t any need to whisper,” Gregor whispered back. “By now, anyone who isn’t asleep knows we’re on the ward.”
“Anyone who isn’t asleep or dead.”
“There should be at least one nurse somewhere on the floor,” Gregor said, “they can’t all have gone to the bathroom.”
“Maybe there’s just one nurse and she’s in with a patient. I think I’m going to go into Carmencita’s room now, Gregor. I think I have to.”
“Wait,” Gregor said.
For once, the “wait” had a substantive reason behind it, not just hunch and not just emotion. Gregor felt like he’d been saying “wait” now for hours, and always on the basis of some nebulous concept. But this was no nebulous concept. This was a leg.
“In the laundry bag,” Gregor said, pointing.
John Jackman followed the direction of Gregor’s finger and saw it. The laundry bag was one of those tall, rough white cotton ones hospitals always seem to use, stretched over a metal frame to facilitate the collection of dirty linen. It came about chest high on Gregor and higher than that on John Jackman. And there was most definitely a leg in it, stuffed down among the sheets.
“Jesus Christ,” Jackman said, when he realized what he was seeing. He strode over to the bag and put his hand around the ankle. “Nothing in the way of a pulse. Not the best way to check. Help me get her out of here.”
“Don’t do that first,” Gregor said. “She’s dead.”
“Maybe she isn’t.” Jackman tipped the laundry bag over and let the linen fall onto the floor. He pulled at the leg and the woman slipped out, small and crumpled. The left side of her face had been smashed to pulp.
Jackman put his fingers on the woman’s wrist, tried again in a different place, and then stood up.
“Dead,” he said.
“Your cop is going to be around here somewhere,” Gregor said.
“Also dead?”
“At least badly hurt.”
“I’ve got to go into that room now, Gregor. I can’t wait another minute. I can’t go looking for my cop first.”
Gregor Demarkian sighed. “I know,” he said. “But don’t go in. Just call out. Just in case he doesn’t realize there are two of us here.”
“He?” Jackman said.
He didn’t have time to go into it. He went out into the corridor in front of Carmencita Boaz’s door, took out his gun and assumed firing position.
“All right,” he called out, “I want whoever is in Room 507 to come out now with your hands in the air. Any and all of you. Right now. Or I’ll rush that door.”
Too late, it occurred to him that the room might be occupied by no one at all but Carmencita Boaz herself.
3
TOO LATE, IT OCCURRED to Gregor Demarkian that it was not going to work. They were not going to catch a murderer in the act. They were going to be left in the worst possible position. The only consolation they might have was that Carmencita Boaz might not be dead.
This was intuition on a scale to rival the Oracle of Delphi, but it was true. To Gregor, John Jackman seemed to be standing for endless hours with his gun cocked and pointed at the door, but it was only forty-five seconds. Then a deep voice called “I’m coming out” and the door began to open.
“Hands in the air,” John Jackman repeated.
Prescott Holloway had his hands in the air. Prescott Holloway was not now and had never been a fool. Prescott Holloway was convinced that he was about to get away with a great deal of murder.
“Itzaak’s in there lying on the floor,” he said in a reasonable voice. “I think someone hit him on the head. Don’t you think we ought to call a doctor?”
“Why didn’t you call a doctor?” John Jackman asked him.
“I just got here. It’s weird. There isn’t a soul around anywhere. So I went in to check on Carmencita and there was Itzaak, on the floor.”
“How is Carmencita?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t know,” Prescott Holloway said. “Sleeping, I guess. I never got a chance to look.”
“You look,” John Jackman said.
Gregor walked around Prescott Holloway to Carmencita’s door, being careful not to blunder into the line of fire. He looked Prescott over as he passed. The verdict wasn’t good. A quick once-over was never conclusive. The techies had a lot of equipment and they might find something in the end. In Gregor’s experience, however, a suspect who looked clean usually turned out to be clean. Prescott Holloway was clean. There was no blood on him anywhere. There was no mud. There were no signs of strain of any kind.
Gregor went into Carmencita Boaz’s room. Carmencita was sleeping peacefully, her body limp, her breathing regular and deep, the gift of Demerol. Itzaak was lying on the floor just inside the door with an enormous welt on the side of his head. Gregor took his pulse. It was too rapid but not impossibly so. Would he remember who had hit him when he woke up? Would he have seen? There was no way to tell. From the way Prescott Holloway was behaving, the probable answer to both of those questions was no. But there was no way to tell about that either.
Gregor stepped back over Itzaak’s body and into the corridor again. “Blechmann needs a doctor,” he told John Jackman, “but Carmencita seems to be perfectly all right.”
“I think I got here just in time,” Prescott Holloway said.
John Jackman ignored him. “Gregor?” he said. “There are a pair of handcuffs in the inside pocket of my suit jacket. Will you please take them out and use them on Mr. Holloway.”
“It always amazes me where police detectives can hide handcuffs.”
“I’ve been caught short before,” Jackman said. “Just do it.”
Gregor did it. He got the handcuffs. He got Prescott Holloway’s hands behind his back and secured. Prescott Holloway cooperated and the whole operation took less than one and a half minutes.
“I can understand what you guys are thinking,” Holloway said. “But I didn’t do anything. I just came up to see where everybody was and found Itzaak in there lying on the floor.”
“Put him in a chair,” John Jackman said. Gregor escorted Prescott Holloway to the chairs beside the nurses’ station and sat him down. Prescott did some more cooperating and ended up with his legs stretched out across the vinyl floor, twisted into that strange body kink that is the only way to sit comfortably in a chair when your hands are cuffed behind your back. Gregor made a note of the fact that it was a maneuver Prescott Holloway seemed perfectly familiar with. He didn’t have to fumble around and he didn’t have to be told.
John Jackman was behind the nurses’ station counter and on the phone. Gregor could hear him giving directions in his patented police command bark.
“Tell the nun at the desk we need some doctors up here. We’ve got at least one person dead and at least one person seriously hurt and I want someone to check out Carmencita Boaz just in case. And get up here yourself. Shecker’s missing. And get me some uniforms and the techies and the mobile crime unit and do it in the next ten seconds
because I need help up here and I need it right away.”
Gregor left Prescott Holloway where he was sitting—it was not easy to get out of a chair from that position; it took work—and went around to John. He watched Prescott Holloway every second of the way. The bland smirk on the face. The smooth fall of rep stripes under the perfect knot of the tie. The little bulge in the pocket of his shirt where it looked as if he’d stuffed one of the nuns’ hard candies. The brass buckle on his good leather belt. Gregor had heard people describe Prescott Holloway as someone who had “seen better days,” but that wasn’t accurate. Prescott Holloway was a man whose days were pretty good right now.
Gregor came to a rest beside John and looked down at the back of Prescott’s head. John was staring at the phone, looking morose.
“Come here,” he said, gesturing toward the head nurse’s office. When they were out of Prescott Holloway’s way and had a decent chance at not being overheard Jackman went on.
“It isn’t going to work is it?” he asked Gregor. “We’re going to arrest him. And they’re going to prosecute him. But we’re not going to get him.”
“I don’t know what they have in New York,” Gregor said, “but here you’ve got Herbert Shasta to contend with. Herbert Shasta was a known serial killer and he was found standing right next to the body. That’s reasonable doubt.”
“Right,” Jackman said, “and unless Carmencita saw him hit her—which she probably didn’t—the defense is just going to say she would testify to anything to get out from under being deported, and if we don’t get her out from under being deported, she might not be here to testify. God, this is a mess.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “I know.”
“Sometimes I think I want to go into the army, Gregor, I really do. Get a rifle. Shoot the sons of—”
“Skip it,” Gregor said. “Shouldn’t we be looking for your cop?”
“I can’t leave him. You could look.”
“Maybe I will. Just in case we got lucky and we don’t have another dead body on our hands.”
“Good luck.”
“I hope your uniforms get here soon,” Gregor said. And then he stopped. He stopped dead in his tracks. He ran the memory of his last look at Prescott Holloway through his mind one more time, and he nearly laughed.
“What is it?” John Jackman demanded.
“It isn’t hard candy,” Gregor said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Good luck charms.”
Gregor went back around the nurse’s station counter and stood in front of Prescott Holloway again. He looked at the bulge in Prescott’s shirt pocket and smiled.
“Excuse me,” he said, reaching in and taking out the dreidel. “I’m making a note to Mr. Jackman here that I removed this dreidel from your shirt pocket. That’s for the chain of evidence report.”
“Chain of evidence for what?” Prescott Holloway demanded. “That’s a plain ordinary wooden dreidel. It’s practically Hanukkah. I work for a Jewish woman. Why shouldn’t I have one?”
“No reason at all,” Gregor said. “Except that this isn’t an ordinary dreidel.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This is an Israeli dreidel,” Gregor said. “It’s of a kind that can only be bought in Israel, not in the United States. See? You can tell. Dreidels sold in the United States have the letters nūn, gīmel, hē, and shīn on them. For the first letters of the Hebrew words that make up the sentence ‘A great miracle occurred there.’ But in Israel, instead of the last shīn, we have pē—for the Hebrew word for here. ‘A great miracle occurred here.’ Do you see the difference?”
“I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“Have you ever been to Israel, Mr. Prescott?”
“I’ve been to Israel. I was stationed in Greece when I was in the army. Everybody on the show has been to Israel.”
“Not everybody on the show was found standing over the body of an attempted murder victim with one of these dreidels in his possession.”
“So what?”
“So these dreidels are sold in packages of three. And we found the other two.”
“Where?”
“Where do you think, Mr. Holloway? We found one next to the dead body of Maximillian Dey. The other was picked up next to the body of Maria Gonzalez. You’ve been very careless, Mr. Holloway.”
“Bullshit.”
“It isn’t bullshit at all. I would suggest you have exactly two choices. You can either have a nice long talk with Mr. Jackman here, or he can use this dreidel,” Gregor held it up and spun it by its handle, “to put you right into the electric chair.”
“Bullshit,” Prescott Holloway said again, but he sounded different now. Gregor could hear the waver in his voice.
They’re all stupid in the end, Gregor told himself. That’s why we win as often as we do. They’re all stupid in the end.
Gregor tossed the dreidel in the air, and caught it, and smiled. Then he tossed the dreidel in the air again, and caught it again, and smiled again. That was when Prescott Holloway lunged.
It turned out that it was easier to get out of a chair from that position than Gregor thought.
Fortunately, Prescott Holloway was not only handcuffed, but a victim of very bad timing.
Just as he made it to his feet, the elevator doors on the other end of the corridor opened and let out a crowd of white-coated young doctors on the run.
That was when all hell broke loose.
Epilogue
Another Friday (Fortunately Not the Thirteenth) This Time in Philadelphia
1
“BUT IT WASN’T TRUE, WAS it?” Bennis asked later. “About the dreidel? The dreidels weren’t found with the bodies at all.”
They were sitting in the first row of audience seats in Studio C at WKMB, waiting to be told that Gregor could go home and Bennis could be off to New York to take the Concorde. The whole mess had been over for days, and Gregor had just taped the show Lotte Goldman had wanted him to do from the beginning. He did not think it had been a very good show. Herbert Shasta had not been available for a repeat performance. His warden had understandably felt that The Lotte Goldman Show was not capable of taking very good care of him. DeAnna Kroll had dug up a much better prospect—if by better you meant both more attractive and more murderous. This was John Stewart Pell, the twenty-six-year-old executioner of eight women in Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, West Virginia, and Maryland, the one all the papers had called “The Choir Boy.” To Gregor’s mind, Pell did not look like a choir boy. He looked like a cross between James Dean and the kind of tenth-string Hollywood actor who made most of his contacts at the beach. He looked smarmy as hell. Gregor couldn’t understand what any woman would see in him. That only went to prove he knew nothing at all about women. A great many women had seen a great deal in John Stewart Pell. At least eight had been willing to go off alone with him on no acquaintance at all.
John Stewart Pell’s particular perversion was anal sex with dead bodies. His position on The Lotte Goldman Show was that dead bodies had nothing to do with it. He liked anal sex, but society had stigmatized the practice to the point where he had repressed it. And you know what repression leads to. Repression always leads to violence.
John Stewart Pell had been handcuffed to his chair throughout the taping of the show. He had been handcuffed by a single ankle, made invisible by the placement of a cedar block coffee table, but he had been handcuffed. This was good, because every time he talked to one of the younger women who asked questions from the audience, his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides, compulsively. Gregor had seen them.
John Stewart Pell now had his hands handcuffed behind his back and his legs free. He was standing up at the back of the stage, talking to Lotte Goldman and DeAnna Kroll. He was being very charming. From what Gregor could tell, Lotte and DeAnna weren’t buying it.
“Gregor,” Bennis said.
“Of course it was a lie,” Gregor told her. “W
hy shouldn’t I tell a lie?”
“It isn’t usually your kind of thing.”
“You try solving a murder case on nothing but logic and then wondering what you’re going to do about it. Do you know how I knew it had to be Prescott Holloway who was committing those murders?”
“How?”
“Because Maximillian Dey was dead,” Gregor said. “I told John Jackman this—don’t wince, for heaven’s sake, he isn’t here—anyway, I told him, just after Dey’s body was found and we were looking back at the death of Maria Gonzalez. The key to this whole thing was that whoever was committing those murders had to be able to move the body of Maria Gonzalez to that storeroom after she was dead. In the first place, it’s not easy to move dead bodies around. They’re heavy and they don’t cooperate. That made the murderer more likely to be a man than a woman. Though DeAnna Kroll could probably have managed it physically.”
“She wouldn’t have to,” Bennis said. “She’d say ‘move,’ and the body would get up and walk. It wouldn’t dare not.”
“The more important aspect,” Gregor went on, “was that he had to be able to move that body through the halls of the offices and studios of The Lotte Goldman Show in New York without anybody remarking on how odd it was that he was wandering around carrying a big unwieldy thing on his shoulders. Of course, as it turned out, nobody saw him. But think about it. You have a body. You wrap it up—it turned out to have been wrapped up in plastic garbage bags, by the way, that was in his statement; he was trying to make it look like a length of stage carpet—anyway, you wrap it up and you throw it over your shoulder and then you go marching into a place that isn’t crammed full of people, but isn’t empty, either. If you’re Sarah Meyer, for instance, and somebody sees you, what do you say?”
“Oh, I see,” Bennis said. “Even if you have a decent explanation, it would be odd, and once the body was found someone would remember.”
“Exactly. Even if someone had seen Prescott Holloway carrying his load, though, he wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Prescott Holloway often got called into service to move props and furniture when there was an emergency. And there was an emergency. They’d just discovered that the people who were supposed to be the guests on their show were not going to make it, and they were in the middle of putting together a new show to tape on the spot.”
