Festival of Deaths(34)

“So take an afternoon off every once in a while,” DeAnna Kroll was always telling her. “I would if I could.”

Actually, DeAnna wouldn’t and couldn’t any more than Lotte wouldn’t and couldn’t. The real difference between DeAnna and Lotte was in how much Lotte loved leaving time. Part of that was temperament—DeAnna liked where she was now; she was suspicious of change of principle—but part of it was the nature of traveling reality for The Lotte Goldman Show. In that reality, Lotte rode to Philadelphia in the very front seat of whatever vehicle they were using to get there, and DeAnna did all the work.

The work DeAnna was doing this morning was the work she usually did just before they left for Philadelphia: supervising the loading of eight sofas, fifteen armchairs, twenty straight-backed chairs, twelve carpets, and ten coffee tables onto a moving van. The moving van was necessary because Shelley Feldstein refused to go anywhere without her back-up sets. “What if they don’t have anything suitable?” Shelley demanded, every time DeAnna suggested that there were plenty of furniture stores in every town they were scheduled to stop in. “What if Lotte has to tape a show on suburban prostitution with her set all in red?”

As a rationale for dragging the volumic equivalent of the contents of a small house all the way across the country and back again, this didn’t make much sense, but no one could talk to Shelley about it. Shelley got hysterical. Lotte didn’t remember when she and DeAnna had finally given in. Getting out of the cab now in the crisp December air, feeling the little rush she always felt being out in the city at night, it seemed to Lotte that they had been leaving this way forever. She knew it couldn’t be true. Shelley hadn’t been with them forever. Lotte couldn’t remember what it had been like before. DeAnna probably could. She could probably remember the year, day, hour, and minute when Shelley had insisted on taking the furniture for the first time.

The cab driver took off from the curb in a squeal of brakes, as if he were trying to prove something, and Lotte went around the back of the moving van to find DeAnna. She was standing on a marble-topped coffee table in a pair of skin-tight black leather leggings and a black leather tunic encrusted with flattened bullets. She had her feet in four-inch stiletto heels the color of burnished moonlight. The moving man she was talking to looked a little shell-shocked. He was young and uniformed and obviously unused to being told what to do by a woman. Lotte thought he was certainly unused to women like DeAnna Kroll, assuming there were women “like” DeAnna Kroll. DeAnna had traded her cornrows this evening for the world’s most outrageous Afro. It billowed out from her scalp like a wiry mushroom cloud with a mind of its own.

“The coffee tables have got to be wrapped in cotton,” she was saying. “If they’re not wrapped in cotton, they might get scratched, just faintly scratched, on the table-tops. If they do get scratched, no matter how minorly, my set designer is going to have a psychotic break. You got it? You wrap them in cotton, Shelley doesn’t have a psychotic break, I don’t have a bad day, everybody is happy.”

“But Ms. Kroll—”

“I don’t want to argue about it,” DeAnna said. “I don’t want to argue about anything. I just want you to do it.”

“But Ms. Kroll—”

“Do it.”

“Come talk to me,” Lotte said, over DeAnna’s shoulder. “It’s cold and you need a break.”

The moving van was backed up to the loading door at the rear of the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building. Lotte had gone there because she knew she would find DeAnna just where she had found her and because she knew it would be a good place to talk in private. The rest of the cast and crew would be meeting in the front, where Prescott Holloway and his limousine were scheduled to pick them up. Lotte got DeAnna far enough from the moving van so that the young man began to relax and then said, “Well, I have done what we discussed. I have started it. What about you?”

“I’ve done what we discussed, too,” DeAnna said. “I’ve got a friend at CBS News.”

“And?”

“And he’s legit,” DeAnna said with conviction. “Absolutely legit. There’s no hype about it.”

Lotte felt her muscles begin to unkink. It was hardly credible, but Lotte thought she had been tense ever since she found out that Maria Gonzalez had died—or at least ever since the police investigation had started, when it became more and more clear that whatever had happened had not been a standard-issue mugging. Lotte had met her share of murderers—nobody could have been living in a major city in Germany in 1942 without coming in contact with those—but all the murderers she had met had been murderers for abstraction, the sort of people who bayed for blood over matters of mistaken principle or the illusion of religion. Murderers like that Lotte had always dismissed as essentially insane. Something went wrong with their blood chemistry and it was infectious, that was the trouble. The trick was to catch the disease early, before it could spread. Insanity was how Lotte explained routine mugging murders, too. The murderers took drugs that made them temporarily insane. This thing with Maria Gonzalez was very different. That a man or a woman could murder someone they actually knew, someone they had talked to, someone they had eaten lunch with and taken messages for—it was horrible. That was what Lotte had told David on the phone. Horrible. David had told her she was naive. The Nazis had murdered people they knew, people they had talked to, people they had eaten lunch with and taken messages for and sometimes even gone to bed with. All murderers are alike.