Festival of Deaths (41 page)

“Is Shecker the cop who was found in the utility closet?”

“That’s the one.”

“That must have been embarrassing,” Bennis said.

“It was all embarrassing.” Gregor sighed. “What else we were supposed to do, though, I just don’t know. You really can’t arrest someone on the kind of speculation I had. You really can’t.”

“I know,” Bennis said. “Did your lie with the dreidel work? Did he talk?”

“For six hours,” Gregor said. “You should have heard him. And I thought he was going to be one of the minority who keep their mouths shut.”

“He talked about killing illegal immigrants,” Bennis said.

“Oh, yes. About how they are the cause of all the trouble. They come here and expect us to wait on them. They take good jobs away from American working people because they are willing to work for nothing. They are trying to turn us into some kind of primitive culture instead of an advanced Western one and that’s why they want the schools to teach Spanish instead of English and on and on—do you really have to hear all of this?”

“No. But why was he supplying them with fake green cards and social security numbers if he hated them so much?”

“So that he could find them.”

“What?”

“I got caught by this in the beginning,” Gregor said. “When I realized that Max Dey had managed to replace his green card in much less than twenty-four hours—never mind the weeks it takes if you go through INS—I knew that Max’s card had to have been forged and that what had happened was that he’d gotten himself another forged one. I also knew he had to have gotten it from someone on
The Lotte Goldman Show
, because he didn’t know anybody in Philadelphia and also because the card was replaced in the dead of night. Would you go wandering around a strange city looking to buy something like that? Never mind the fact that if you got it from someone you didn’t know, you’d also have to supply cash on the barrelhead, and we know that Max didn’t have any cash. His wallet was stolen and his cash was in it. Not only his green card.”

“Okay,” Bennis said slowly, “but—”

“You’ve got to turn it around,” Gregor said. “It wasn’t that Prescott Holloway happened to work in a place with an unusually large number of illegal immigrants. It was that an unusually large number of illegal immigrants were on staff at
The Lotte Goldman Show
because Prescott Holloway worked there. With the exception of Carmencita Boaz, he brought them in.”

“Who brought Carmencita Boaz in?”

“Maria Gonzalez. They lived in the same neighborhood and were friends. That’s how Carmencita knew where to go for a forged green card when she got word from her family that one was needed in a hurry. We’ve got the cops in New York checking the staff lists for
The Lotte Goldman Show
going back to when Prescott Holloway started working there. We’re expecting to find a number of abrupt disappearances with Spanish names attached to them.”

“Max Dey wasn’t Spanish. He was—”

“Portuguese. I know,” Gregor said.

“And there’s one more thing,” Bennis told him. “Why did he wait? Why didn’t he just kill them when they came asking for their forged green cards?”

Gregor was astonished. “Because he wanted the money,” he said. “He was making a very good thing out of his little business. He wasn’t making himself a millionaire, but he was doing all right. His ties were more expensive than mine.”

“A Bowery bum has ties more expensive than yours,” Bennis said.

“There was another way you could tell it had to be Prescott Holloway,” Gregor said, ignoring her. “He was the only one who had the mobility. Maria’s apartment was trashed. Maria’s body was moved from one place to another. Who else could have gone tearing around town like that without it becoming obvious?”

“I think it’s all very depressing,” Bennis said. “The only thing that isn’t is that Carmencita and Itzaak are getting married, and I can hardly get a thrill out of that because I’ve only just met them. Never mind. At least I get to get out of the country at last. I was beginning to think I was going to lose my mind.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

Down on the stage, John Stewart Pell had disappeared—in the direction of further incarceration, Gregor truly hoped—and Lotte and DeAnna had gathered the staff on the stage in what seemed to be a sort of celebration. Carmencita and Itzaak were not present, of course. Carmencita was still not well enough to leave and Itzaak spent all his time at the hospital. Shelley Feldstein was there, though, and Sarah Meyer, and a few other people Gregor recognized as minor support staff. On the coffee table that had hidden the handcuff on John Stewart Pell’s leg, there was a cake.

DeAnna Kroll came to the edge of the platform and waved. “Come on down,” she said. “We’re celebrating Carmencita and Itzaak. Or something. Lotte’s got little menorahs all over this cake. Come eat some.”

“Do I have time?” Bennis asked Gregor.

“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Gregor said. “I ordered the car for you for eight o’clock.”

“Cake for breakfast,” Bennis said. Then she got up and went over to the platform.

Gregor Demarkian watched her go. So far so good, he thought. Now if he could only get himself through the next fifteen minutes.

T
HE FIRST SIGNS OF
trouble came when Bennis Hannaford was halfway through her piece of cake, sitting cross-legged on the club chair nearest the coffee table and jabbing rhythmically at the wisps or hair that kept escaping from the pins she had put it up in. She was talking to DeAnna Kroll, as she had been for the last three minutes. She was playing with the plastic menorah that had been on her piece of cake and talking about high-heeled boots and whether they inevitably hurt your toes. That was when DeAnna Kroll asked, “What about that old lady you were telling me about last week? Is she still holed up in your apartment?”

Gregor backed away instinctively and held his breath. Bennis put down her cake fork.

“It was the oddest thing,” she said. “Day before yesterday, she just got up and walked away. At least, I assume she did. I went to the grocery store and when I got back she was gone.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“Oh, yes. Her niece came and got her. Her niece had been away, you see, on some sort of class trip or something. I don’t know. Anyway, I called and the niece said the old lady was all right and safely home, but I don’t really understand it. Maybe I would if I’d talked to the doctor.”

“I thought you did talk to the doctor.”

“I wasn’t home. It all happened in the apartment directly underneath mine, you see, but she couldn’t stay there because the man who lives there is in his eighties and he couldn’t take care of her. They brought her up to my place while I was out. Do things like this happen to you?”

“Constantly,” DeAnna Kroll said.

Bennis nodded. “I got the impression this place was like a floating Cavanaugh Street. I don’t mind, you understand. I mean, she was a really terrifying old lady and there were times I thought I could use a chair and a whip, you know, like a lion tamer, but in the long run I didn’t mind. But I’m glad to be able to get off. I really need this trip.”

“Which of the old ladies is she?” DeAnna Kroll asked. “The tall one with the black hair or the short round one with the gray hair and face like Moondog Kelly?”

Bennis looked confused. “The short one with the gray hair and the face like Moondog Kelly sounds like Hannah Krekorian. But how could you have met Hannah Krekorian? She didn’t come to either of the tapings.”

“She’s downstairs in the car,” DeAnna Kroll said.

“In what car?” Bennis asked her. Then she turned around to look at Gregor Demarkian and Gregor Demarkian winced.

Bennis put her feet down on the floor and her plate of cake on the coffee table.

“Gregor,” she said warningly. “What car?”

“A black stretch limousine from Society Hill Rentals.”

“Wonderful, Gregor. And what’s Hannah Krekorian doing in this car? And who else—Lida?”

“Well,” Gregor conceded, “Lida, too.”

“Who else?”

Gregor sighed. “Donna Moradanyan and Tommy. Sheila and Howard Kashinian. Mary Ohanian. Oh, and old George will be coming too, but in another car with his grandson Martin and Martin’s wife.”

“Coming where?” Bennis demanded.

“To the airport,” Gregor said.

“Gregor, the airport is in New York.”

“I know.”

“Isn’t that a bit of a drive for all these people to take just to see me off?”

“They’re not just going to see you off. Neither am I.”

“Oh,” Bennis said. “You’re in on it, too. And where are you going?”

“We’re all going the same place you’re going. To Paris.”

“To Paris,” Bennis repeated. “Why?”

“We didn’t want you to be lonely.”

“You didn’t want me to be lonely…”

“It’s going to be all right,” Gregor told her, “really. Lida rented the entire fifth floor of the Georges V—I think there was a problem with that, but one of Lida’s sons is in the diplomatic service, so it got worked out—anyway, we have the entire floor and Lida wants to go to Notre Dame for Christmas Eve Mass and I think we’ve rented some restaurant for Christmas Eve dinner. Tibor wanted to come, by the way, but he has to be at Holy Trinity for Christmas Day.”

Bennis took a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, took a cigarette out of the pack, took her matches out of another pocket and lit up. She did all this very, very slowly, so that Gregor got the impression that it was only manners that prevented her from braining him.

“Gregor,” she said finally, “if all you wanted was to make sure I wasn’t lonely, why didn’t you just ask me to come along yourself?”

“Yes. Well—”

“Why did you bring along all these other people? I mean, I love them, I don’t mind, but this is going to be a circus.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well.”

“I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor, what are we going to do with them all?”

“They’re going to serve a very useful purpose.”

“As what?”

“Chaperons,” Gregor said grimly.

He said it quickly, before he thought of the trouble it might cause, and as soon as it came out of his mouth he got ready to take a body blow. It was just the kind of thing Bennis got ready to kill him for.

Fortunately for Gregor’s physical well-being, that was when the real trouble started. That it came from an entirely unsuspected corner—at least unsuspected by him—made it all that much better.

This is what happened: Just as Bennis Hannaford was about to start ripping Gregor Demarkian up one side and down the other, Shelley Feldstein walked over to Sarah Meyer and punched the younger woman in the nose.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries

“B
ENNIS,” FATHER TIBOR KASPARIAN
said, his Russian-accented voice coming over the speakerphone in thick bright blobs, like elasticized marmalade. “Bennis, you have to help me. I have finally been arrested and now I want to get out.”

It was seven o’clock on the evening of Friday, February 1, and Bennis Hannaford was hunched over her brand-new Macintosh, putting the finishing touches on last year’s operating budget for Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. She had a Benson & Hedges menthol in an ashtray near her left hand. It had been burning away, untouched, for a good three minutes. She had a mug of coffee near her right hand. It was half drunk but stone cold. On the display screen in front of her she read:

NOVEMBER 16TH 9:22 PM—$28—GIVEN TO ANNIE LEMBECK, HOMELESS PERSON, KNOCKED ON RECTORY BACK DOOR. OFFERED DINNER. WAS REFUSED. OFFERED APPLE. WAS ACCEPTED. LISTENED ONE HALF HOUR TO STORY OF ALIENS TAKING OVER MAYOR’S OFFICE. STORY MAY HAVE MERIT.

There were hundreds of entries like this one. They filled up the little stack of computer disks Father Tibor had turned over to her on New Year’s Eve. Bennis had spent weeks reading them and wondering if Father Tibor had anything else to do. She knew perfectly well Father Tibor had something else to do. He had to get arrested, for one thing. She wondered where he found the time.

The entry under the entry she had just read said:

NOVEMBER 16TH—9:25 PM—ONE APPLE—GIVEN TO ANNIE LEMBECK, HOMELESS PERSON…

Bennis picked up her cigarette, tapped away the long column of ash that had accumulated on the end of it, and took a drag.

“It’s seven o’clock,” she said. “I thought you told me you were going to get arrested at three.”

Father Tibor sighed. “Father Ryan said we would get arrested at three. I think Father Ryan is a little out of date.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means protesting restrictions against street vendors in downtown Philadelphia is not the same as protesting the Vietnam War in front of the Pentagon. Everybody was very nice until the very last minute, and then it was our fault.”

“What was your fault?”

Father Tibor sighed again. “It was Stephen Hartnell from First Congregational. He had taken some cold medicine and he got sleepy. He got so sleepy he fell over, and he’s a big fat man, so the thing he was standing next to fell over, and the thing was a big flimsy can full of glass bottles to be recycled, and the next thing we knew there was glass all over the road, and they made a big crash, and this policeman panicked and shot his gun into the air, and then there was a dog—”