Tonight, she thought it would be enough if she could just get through Shelley Feldstein’s door without anyone seeing her do it. It was taking forever when it shouldn’t have taken any time at all. Sarah Meyer had never breached a lock with a credit card in her life. She wouldn’t have known how to go about doing it, and she wouldn’t have bet on her ability to carry it through even if she had known. When she wanted to get into somebody’s room, she did it the easy way. She knocked. She tried the door to see if it was open. She used the key. The keys to the doors in this hotel were the electronic kind, that were programmed by computer and that you put into a slot and then pulled out quickly to get the knob to turn. Sarah had taken Shelley Feldstein’s key out of Shelley Feldstein’s purse’s sidepocket when they were both heading downstairs in the elevator, and then when they reached the lobby Sarah had pretended to have forgotten something in her room and gone back up. Every woman Sarah had ever known carried her hotel key in that outside pocket of her purse if her purse had one, because every woman Sarah had ever known was more worried about being able to reach the safety of her room without delay if she was being followed than she was about someone stealing her key. If Shelley Feldstein had proved to be an exception, Sarah had backup plans.
The problem was, Sarah was no good at using electronic keys, her own or anybody else’s. She pushed them in and pulled them out and grabbed for the knob, but it took her half a dozen tries before she got there in time. The mechanism didn’t give you very long before it froze the door shut again. Sarah put the card in the slot again, pulled it out again, grabbed for the knob again. The little light on the jamb stayed green for a tantalizing few seconds and then switched again to red. The door remained locked.
“Damn,” Sarah said under her breath. “Damn, damn, damn.”
“Do you need some help with that?” someone said from behind her.
Sarah turned around to see a tall Hispanic man in a hotel uniform. She saw the napkin draped over his arm and realized that he must be from room service. DeAnna Kroll getting her shrimp, Sarah thought, and stood away from the door a little.
The man took the key card out of her hand. “Here,” he said. “These are very tricky. A great many of our guests have trouble with them.”
“Why do you use them?”
“It’s cut our burglary rate by forty percent,” the man said simply. “You can’t do better than that.” He shoved the key card in, pulled it out even more quickly, and grabbed the doorknob. It turned easily and the door swung open.
“There,” he said. “You’re in.”
“Thank you,” Sarah said.
“You’ve got to pull the card in and out very fast. Once the light goes green, the mechanism starts counting. Even though the card is still in the slot.”
“Oh.”
“You’ve only got five seconds to get the door open. Five seconds from when the light goes on. Remember.”
“I will,” Sarah said.
“Have a good night,” the man said.
He turned away from her and started hurrying toward the elevators, keeping the arm with the napkin over it at an odd angle to his body. Sarah waited for him to turn the corner and then reached for the light switch just inside Shelley’s door.
Have a good night, the man had told her.
Well, Shelley thought, she had every intention of having a good night, and with Shelley downstairs talking everything on earth over with Carmencita, she was going to have plenty of time to have a good night in.
And it figured, really, about Shelley and Carmencita.
Shelley had always been on the side of the enemy.
When Sarah had first broached the idea of taking over the job Maria Gonzalez eventually got, Shelley had told her not to be ridiculous.
SIX
1
USUALLY, WHEN THE LOTTE Goldman Show wanted to bring a guest to the studio, it sent a limousine with Prescott Holloway driving. In Philadelphia, however, it saved Prescott Holloway to do personal errands for Lotte Goldman and DeAnna Kroll and sent a local driver. On this day, Carmencita had forgotten to make arrangements with local drivers—she really should still have been an assistant, in spite of her instincts—and Prescott had to go out after all. Gregor Demarkian didn’t know anything about any of this. He knew only that it was five o’clock in the morning, that the weather was even more awful than it usually was at this time of year in Philadelphia, and that the neon menorah in Lida Arkmanian’s ground-floor parlor window was blinking on and off. It was blinking on and off with a regularity that suggested it was supposed to blink on and off. It reminded Gregor of those churches in northern Florida, carved out of cinder-block ranch houses or nestled into the hollow shells of what had once been low-rent bars, topped by neon crosses that flashed like the signs of Las Vegas casinos. Churches like that had always made Gregor vaguely ashamed of Christianity. It had been his impression that Judaism was allowed to keep much more of its dignity.