Festival of Deaths (22 page)

“Demarkian is a fraud.”

“He solved that murder the nuns had a few months ago,” Sarah said. “And he solved the murder of Donald McAdam back around Thanksgiving.”

“He horned in on a perfectly legitimate police investigation and made himself look good to the media,” Shelley said sharply.

“Lotte and DeAnna have asked him to look into the deaths of Maria Gonzalez and Max Dey. Officially, you understand. For the program. He’s going to be a consultant.”

“Lotte and DeAnna need to have their heads examined.”

“Demarkian said figuring out where Max was after he left the studio with that chair is the most important part of this case. I heard him. He said figuring out where Max was then is the key to everything.”

“That’s just wonderful. I hope he finds what he’s looking for.”

“Oh, he will. Gregor Demarkian always finds what he’s looking for. That’s the point of Gregor Demarkian.”

The waitress had arrived with Sarah’s hot fudge brownie. Shelley watched horrified as it was lowered onto the table at Sarah’s place, a mountain of whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles and maraschino cherries. It looked like an illustration from that children’s game Candy Land, where every move brought players in closer contact with sugar. Sugar. Shelley was nauseated by the very thought of sugar.

“My God but that’s disgusting,” she said.

Sarah shoved an overflowing spoonful of whipped cream and sprinkles and cherry into her mouth.

“I’ll tell you what’s disgusting,” she told Shelley. “You. You’re disgusting. The things you do. The things you think you can get away with.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing you have to worry about, you think.”

“
Sarah
.”

“You shouldn’t leave the evidence lying around where people can find it,” Sarah said. “You shouldn’t think everybody’s as blind as a bat. You shouldn’t think everybody’s as dumb as your husband, either.”

“
What
are you talking about?”

This time, when Sarah dug her spoon into her hot fudge brownie, it came up dripping with ice cream and fudge as well as whipped cream and sprinkles. Sarah shoved the entire mess into her mouth—and it all got in there, Shelley noted, all of it, the woman had an enormous mouth—and grinned.

“Under the circumstances,” Sarah said, swallowing, “considering who’s dead and everything, and who you’ve been sleeping with, and how one thing might relate to the other, I think it would be a really good idea if I went and told all this to Gregor Demarkian.”

It was like having a hot flash. It really was. Shelley had never had a hot flash, but she was sure that this must be what it was like. The world going red. Getting up out of your chair and onto your feet and not remembering doing it. She was going crazy.

“You little
bitch
,” she said.

Sarah made another attack on her hot fudge brownie. “He was sleeping with Maria, too. On and off. I’ll bet Gregor Demarkian would like to know that, too.”

“Why don’t you just rent the electronic billboard in Times Square and announce it on that?”

“They’re both dead,” Sarah said pleasantly, “and nobody knows why. Maybe this is why.”

“If it is, you’re being very stupid, Sarah. If it is, you’re asking to get your head smashed in.”

“I won’t get my head smashed in. I’m too careful to get my head smashed in. You should have been more careful.”

“Maybe I’ll just kill you right here.”

“Maybe you won’t.”

“You shouldn’t lie to people, Sarah. Max wasn’t sleeping with Maria Gonzalez. He tried and she turned him down. She was a good Catholic virgin. He told me.”

“Maybe he was just trying to make you feel better. On account of your—advanced age.”

The little pile of scrap paper that constituted Shelley’s notes was still lying on the table. Shelley snatched them up and shoved them into her blazer pockets.

“You little bitch,” she said again. “If you ever, ever spill this slime to anybody I’ll kick you right in your fat ass.”

“I’ll sue,” Sarah said happily.

And that, Shelley thought, as she steamed across the atrium to the elevator bank, was the problem with the twentieth century.

In the days of Ruth and Naomi, she could have cleaved Sarah’s head with a meat ax and had a halfway decent chance of being considered justified.

I
N THE DAYS OF
Ruth and Naomi, Prescott Holloway would have been a desperado. He felt like a desperado now, walking the dark streets of a city he barely knew, looking for something he couldn’t put his finger on. It had been a long hard day and tomorrow would be a longer one. With Max gone, they would call on him to take up the slack. There would be slack to be taken up, too. Prescott knew that staff from WKMB were supposed to take over if Max was ill or incapacitated, but he also knew that Shelley Feldstein’s idea of taking over and WKMB’s were not identical. It would be just like it was back in New York. When Max got tied up, Prescott got put into play. Prescott didn’t mind it. It broke up his day.

What he wanted to break up his night was a drink, or a couple of them. He wouldn’t have minded more of that Scotch Max had had the night before. What else he wanted was a woman, but he wasn’t expecting to find one. Prescott’s ideas of safe sex had nothing to do with AIDS, but he followed them inflexibly nonetheless. So far, they’d kept him from getting arrested and they’d kept him from getting rolled. If he walked fast enough on a night like this, he could keep himself from getting mugged, too. Muggers didn’t like him. He walked too quickly and he looked too mean.

The sound of the heels of his cowboy boots on the pavement was like drumbeats.

It made him feel as if his possibilities were infinite.

T
HE HEADLINE IN THE
Philadelphia Inquirer
wasn’t bad—

POLICE INVESTIGATE GOLDMAN SEX SHOW MURDER

—but the subhead was even more embarrassing than usual, and all the way down to the Ararat that morning, Gregor Demarkian complained about it.

“‘Demarkian at Scene,’” he said to old George Tekamanian, who had decided at the last minute to have breakfast out and grabbed Gregor’s arm for support in the process. Old George Tekamanian was in his eighties somewhere, one of the last remaining members of Gregor’s mother’s generation on Cavanaugh Street. The other two were maiden lady sisters in their early nineties who lived in an apartment on the ground floor of Hannah Krekorian’s townhouse and claimed to be able to read crystal balls. Old George could remember when this neighborhood was so poor, the city didn’t like to pick up the garbage more than once or twice a week. He could remember when Lida Arkmanian’s townhouse had been a tenement carved up into fourteen one-bedroom flats. He could remember when people on Cavanaugh Street routinely lived in one-bedroom flats, in spite of the fact that they had four children and a grandmother living with them. Gregor could remember all these things, too, but unlike old George he was doing his best to forget them.

The subhead of the
Inquirer
story said: PHILADELPHIA’S POIROT FINDS BODY. At least it didn’t say “Philadelphia’s
Armenian-American Hercule
Poirot.” Gregor wasn’t sure that made a difference.

“‘Demarkian Finds Body,’” he told George, steering the old man carefully across the last intersection between their brownstone and Ararat. “That would have been all right, too. I’m not asking for anonymity.”

“You are getting upset over nothing,” George said. “
Tcha,
Krekor, you are being ridiculous. It is a compliment they are paying you.”

“It is a boost in the advertising revenue they are paying themselves,” Gregor said. “It sells papers.”

“Well, then.”

“Well, then, nothing. I wasn’t put on this earth to sell papers.”

“You should learn to walk faster, Krekor. I don’t understand how you can poke along the way you do and not freeze solid in this cold.”

The answer was, of course, that Gregor couldn’t. He couldn’t walk as fast as old George—who positively creeped along in his apartment, but picked up speed as soon as he hit a pavement; it was Gregor’s vanity that old George had to be guided anywhere or helped along any street—and he was freezing. It was early in the morning and a gray day in mid-December. The first day of Hanukkah was this coming Sunday and Christmas was five days beyond that. Cavanaugh Street was as decorated as it was going to get. Donna Moradanyan had even managed to plant her gigantic red-and-silver bow on the flagpole that stood in the courtyard in front of Holy Trinity Church. The courtyard wasn’t much more than a wide place in the sidewalk and the flagpole had been paid for by Howard Kashinian, who hated the bow, but that was all part of the coming of the Christmas season, too. Gregor wondered what life was like at this time of year for David Goldman and Rebekkah. Was Hanukkah just as crazy? Did the craziness come for some other holiday at some other time of year? Maybe David and Rebekkah always had calmness and sweet reason, the way the angels in heaven were supposed to have when they weren’t fighting territorial wars against Lucifer and his minions. Gregor wasn’t entirely sure he believed in God, but he did believe in saints, and Rebekkah Goldman was definitely one of them.

David Goldman was a lucky man. Gregor looked through Ararat’s front window and found him sitting over coffee with Father Tibor Kasparian, in the floor-level cushioned booth on the platform. Gregor hated the floor-level cushioned booth. It was very hard for him to get down on the ground like that and get up again. Tibor, on the other hand, loved it. It was what he remembered from before he came to the United States. From what Gregor could see, David Goldman at least didn’t seem to mind.

“Come on,” Gregor said to old George, grabbing him by the sleeve. He grabbed one of the wooden bars that crisscrossed Ararat’s new front door—solid mahogany, no more plate glass and textured aluminum here—and opened a passage for the two of them to go inside.

“Hi,” Linda Melajian said as they approached the front desk. “Father Tibor and his friend are waiting for you. At least they’re waiting for Mr. Demarkian.”

“It’s all right if I come along,” old George said. “Nobody cares what they say in front of me. They just assume I’m senile.”

“If you want the kosher menu, you’ve got to tell me now,” Linda said. “We can do it, but we’ve got to warn Mama in advance.”

“Kosher?” Gregor said.

Linda grabbed a couple of menus and hurried over to Tibor’s booth. “I wish we had a low-fat menu to serve you,” she told Gregor. “Honestly, hasn’t Bennis learned how to nag you? Your weight is a disgrace.”

Gregor’s weight was absolutely nothing compared to the weights of the really big master detectives, like Nero Wolfe. Gregor would have told Linda this, except that he knew it wouldn’t do any good. The denizens of Cavanaugh Street liked to live in murder mysteries except when they didn’t want to, and when they didn’t want to always seemed to start about the time they brought up the problem of his weight. Gregor didn’t think his weight was that much of a problem. He was only carrying an extra thirty pounds. And he was a big man.

He got down on the floor, planted his rear end on a cushion, and slid in behind the table next to Tibor. Old George popped down with all the grace of a fifteen-year-old gymnast and slid in next to David Goldman.

Gregor introduced old George to David and then asked them, “What was Linda talking about, the kosher menu? Since when does Ararat have a kosher menu?”

“Since I came down here to visit about two weeks ago,” David Goldman said. “Usually I wouldn’t put anyone to that kind of trouble, but there’s one thing I’ve found out. It’s an
exceedingly
bad idea to decline hospitality in this neighborhood.”

Linda Melajian came back to the table, and Gregor ordered waffles with bacon and coffee. Old George ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, grits, extra butter and tea. Gregor shook his head.

“Well,” he said. “Here we are. I hope this is worth the trip, Rabbi. I told you over the phone that I don’t really know anything yet—”

“You don’t know anything until you see the lab reports,” David Goldman said. “Yes, yes, I understand. I really didn’t come here to pump you for information. It really is something Lotte told me last night that I wanted to tell you.”

“Lotte can’t tell you herself,” Tibor said, “because she’s busy this morning taping.”

“They had to show a rerun yesterday,” old George put in, “because they couldn’t tape your show.”

Linda Melajian came back with a tray of tea and coffee. The tea and coffee came in tall pots, with empty cups on the side. Old George filled his cup half full of tea and half full of cream.

“You know,” Gregor said, taking his coffee black in reaction to old George’s extravagances, “there’s one thing that’s confused me, from the very start of this. You’re a rabbi.”

“That’s right,” David Goldman said.

“I understand there are different kinds of rabbis—”

“I’m Conservative. That’s a little less strict than Orthodox, but much more strict than Reform. And, of course, I’m much, much less strict than the Hasidim who had so much trouble here with the graffiti.”

“All right. But you’re a religious person. From what I understand from Tibor, you’re very deeply religious. And your sister—”

“Does something very public and very embarrassing?” David asked.

“Well, it’s certainly public. Do you mean to say you’re not embarrassed?”

“Of course I’m embarrassed.” David Goldman hooted. “So is Rebekkah. The day Lotte did the show where she had the five guys on who could only make love on carousels, Rebekkah threatened to hide in the closet for a week.”

“But you’re willing to help her with those shows,” Gregor said. “You’re willing to intercede with Tibor to get me to agree to appear on one.”

“Of course.”

“Of course?”

David Goldman poured himself another cup of coffee. His coffee pot was marked with a red dot. Did this mean it was kosher? Would there be a difference between kosher coffee and the other kind?

“Look,” David Goldman said, “the first clear memory I have of Lotte is from when I was three and we were leaving Heidelberg. That’s where we lived, in Germany, during the war. Anyway, we’re both lying in the trunk of a car, covered with a blanket, and she has her body completely over mine, completely, so that if the car gets stopped someone might see her in the trunk but they won’t see me. It wouldn’t have worked, of course. I know that now. But at the time she made me feel extremely safe.”