Authors: Jane Haddam

Dear Old Dead (39 page)

“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:

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.

cover design by Heather Kern

ISBN 978-1-4532-9453-6

This 2013 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

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