Festival of Deaths(21)

“DeAnna wants to see you,” Sarah said when Carmencita arrived at the door. “I think it’s supposed to be important.”

Out on the set, single seats had been arranged in a half circle facing the benches for the studio audience. If everything was running on schedule, that audience would be down in the lobby, clutching their tickets and wondering out loud why The Lotte Goldman Show had to tape so early. Carmencita often wondered the same thing herself.

“I would like you to go down and take the seats on the left-hand side of the platform,” Carmencita told her charges. “Start with the one farthest left as you face the stage from the audience. The gray chair in the middle is where Dr. Goldman is going to sit. Will you do that for me now, please?”

“Oh, shit,” one of the men said.

The others drifted into the studio, and the complaining man followed. Carmencita knew why they taped so early. It was because they aired the same day. She just thought it was silly.

“What did DeAnna want?” she asked Sarah Meyer. “Did she say?”

“She didn’t say to me,” Sarah said. “All she said to me was go get a ream of typing paper from the storeroom and if you see Carmencita tell her I want her. She didn’t even tell me what she wanted the typing paper for.”

“Maybe she wanted to type.”

“DeAnna doesn’t type. DeAnna doesn’t even answer her own phone.”

“Maybe she wanted to make paper airplanes and shoot them out the window of her office at the traffic,” Carmencita said. “I’ve got something to do right now. I’ll find DeAnna when I’m done.”

Sarah Meyer sniffed. “She’s in there on the phone with the cops who are at Maria’s apartment. She had to send Prescott all the way back up there and the cops are furious. He wasn’t supposed to have left the scene at all. Do you think it will make the papers, because Maria is with The Lotte Goldman Show?”

“I think I don’t have time for this conversation,” Carmencita said. “Here comes Maximillian with the women, and you know what that means. Fights are likely to start breaking out any minute.”

“I heard DeAnna talking to Lotte about it and they were really very mysterious. DeAnna was saying how Prescott was saying that nobody could have done it who didn’t have a key, because the lock was locked when he got there and it was one of those old-fashioned locks that won’t lock with the door open and then you can pull the door shut and there you are. It was the kind of lock you had to use the key to lock once you got the door closed.”

“Maria lived in an old building.”

“I told Prescott you had a key to Maria’s apartment,” Sarah said. “I remember her saying so. You have hers and she has yours. In case either of you gets locked out.”

Carmencita turned on her heel and gave Sarah Meyer the first long, direct look she’d ever given her. She took in Sarah’s lumpy weight and Sarah’s formless features and Sarah’s rash of blackheads along her chin.

“What,” she asked, “is all this supposed to be about?”

If it was supposed to be about anything, Sarah wasn’t saying. She gave Carmencita a little cat smile and backed away. When she reached the intersection in the corridors she turned and hurried away.

“Come on,” Shelly Feldstein’s voice said from somewhere inside. “Let’s get going, Carmencita, we’ve got this run-through to do before we can let the screaming hordes up and we’re running late.”

“Right,” Carmencita said.

“I’m going to change Lotte’s chair to the black—no, not the black, she’ll look like a hanging judge—to the navy blue one. I’m going to run. Are all your people ready to go?”

All Carmencita’s people were ready to die of embarrassment. There was nothing she could do about it. She marched down to the platform and looked her men over. They hulked in their chairs, looking too big and too menacing by half. Shelley Feldstein either hadn’t noticed or approved of the effect.

“Okay,” Carmencita said. “Why don’t we try sitting up straight?”

If Carmencita Boaz had been in the sort of position the men sitting before her were in, she would have told any silly woman who asked her to sit up straight to go straight to hell—except that she would have done it politely, of course. But North Americans were different. They didn’t think like people in the rest of the world. Maybe they didn’t think.

“Okay,” Carmencita said again, and the men stirred in their chairs and did their best to sit up straight.

Up in the rafters, Itzaak whistled the first few bars of “As Time Goes By,” to let her know he was watching over her, and Carmencita relaxed.