Dear Old Dead

by Jane Haddam

  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 Cat
holic 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:

  PHILADELPHIA THIS YEAR.

  TALK TO GREGOR DEMARKIAN

  Sarah wondered uneasily what sort of program a sex show could do about serial killers and then put that folder back. She was just about to go on to file cabinet three when she saw the tag on the last file in this drawer. “Idiotas.”

  Idiotas, Sarah thought.

  That meant “idiots.”

  She didn’t need to speak Spanish to figure that out.

  Sarah reached for the file folder, pulled it out and put it on top of the cabinet next to the geode. She opened it and found all the prearranged permission agreements for Lotte’s cunnilingus show. She closed the file folder. She smiled.

  Prearranged permission agreements were very important to a show like the one they were doing—sometimes because of emergencies like this one tonight, but mostly because there was some sticky legal territory in developing what were intended to be mass-marketed, commercial programs about ordinary peoples’ private lives. Lotte Goldman refused to begin any investigation on the feasibility of a topic before she had her permissions. It was one of the most important responsibilities of the talent coordinator’s office to get those permissions and make sure they were easy to find. Tonight, of course, they would be even more important, because without them they’d have to drag the lawyers out of bed and get the signatures all over again before they even started to tape.

  Sarah thought about taking the file folder itself and decided against it. Instead she took the permissions out, left the rest of the papers, and replaced the folder in the drawer. Then she folded the permissions into a thick paper square and put the square under her tunic. That was one advantage to being fat and lumpy. Nobody ever questioned the appearance of one more lump.

  Sarah let herself out of Carmencita’s office and into the hall. She was prepared with an explanation if anybody caught her, but there was nobody there. She walked down the hall and stopped again at the side corridor where she had seen DeAnna Kroll go after she first came in. DeAnna was nowhere to be seen, but Sarah could hear her. DeAnna had to be down at her own office or in Lotte’s, if Sarah could judge from the echo. She was doing her patented bellowing act on the phone.

  “Shelley, for God’s sake,” she was saying. “I’ve got a love seat. A love seat. I can’t put any of these people on a love seat.”

  Sarah walked the rest of the way to the lobby, looked around at the emptiness again, and then let herself through a door at the side of the elevator bank that led to what they called the “back hall.” The “back hall” wasn’t actually in the back of anything—it certainly wasn’t in the back of the building—but it was that kind of place, concrete and cold, dark and faintly foul. Sarah made her way around coils of wire and metal buckets and big cans of paint to the incinerator door at the back, and then she took out the wad of paper that was the permissions and looked at them.

  This was an old building with an old-fashioned incinerator. A long chute went down to the basement where a fire was kept going at all times, and anything that fell into it got burned up.

  When Carmencita couldn’t find the permissions, there would be hell to pay, there really would be. DeAnna Kroll would go positively ballistic, and Lotte Goldman would smoke in the office.

  Sarah looked at the wad of paper in her hand and unfolded it. Then she ripped it in half and in half again. Then she opened the incinerator chute and shoved the scraps down. At the last minute, she was seized by caution. It was a good thing. One of the ragged-edged pieces of paper had fallen out of her hand. It lay on the floor just next to her left foot, threatening to incriminate her. Sarah bent down, picked it up, and shoved it into the chute after the rest.

  The world might be a genuinely awful place erected for the single purpose of making Sarah Meyer miserable, but there was no reason to let it get its way all the time.

  No reason at all.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by Orania Papazoglou

  cover design by Heather Kern

  ISBN 978-1-4532-9453-6

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