Festival of Deaths(58)

“Similar,” DeAnna Kroll said.

“DeAnna found the body of Maria Gonzalez,” Lotte Goldman said.

“And similar isn’t the word for it.” DeAnna had grabbed Lotte’s cigarette pack and taken out a cigarette to light herself. “Identical, that’s what I’d call it. Exactly the same kind of wound on exactly the same place on the head. And the cheekbone smashed—Lotte, I’m sorry.”

“No,” Lotte said. “Don’t be sorry. We have to tell him. If we don’t tell him, what good will he be able to do us?”

“We could get the New York police to tell him.”

“Pffut.” Lotte waved this away. “You remember the New York police. That awful man. That anti-Semite. He is only interested in annoying Itzaak.”

“Itzaak is our lighting man,” DeAnna explained. “He immigrated here from Israel and to Israel from the Soviet union  —”

“I know somebody who did the same thing,” Gregor said.

“Yeah. Well. Lots of people did the same thing. Before the Soviet union   fell, anyway.” DeAnna sighed. “Lotte’s right. This guy in New York is just—well, he is just, that’s all. Going on and on about how Itzaak might be an illegal alien.”

“Is Itzaak an illegal alien?” Gregor asked.

“Of course not,” Lotte said. “David was his sponsor. I know all about how Itzaak got here. This man in New York is just—”

“A bigot,” DeAnna said definitely. “The bodies did look alike, Mr. Demarkian. I’m not saying that just to get you involved in this.”

Gregor thought it over. “What about the body of Maria Gonzalez? Wasn’t that in a closet?”

“It was in the main storeroom in our studio in New York,” Lotte said. “But the police told us the body did not start out there, and I think they were right. There were people going in and out of that storeroom for hours before the body was discovered.”

“Before I discovered the body.” DeAnna made a face. “And before you ask, the answer is no. There was no place to hide a body in that storeroom. If it had been there, somebody would have seen it.”

There was a stiff, formal little chair in front of Lotte’s desk. Gregor sat down on it. “Think back about it. About the studio where the body was found in, say, the hour before it was found. Was the studio crowded?”

“Not crowded,” DeAnna Kroll said. “There were people around.”

“In the last half hour it was getting very full,” Lotte corrected. “Some of the secretaries had started to come in.”

“But it wasn’t as crowded as it would have been once the regular day crew arrived,” DeAnna put in.

“What about in comparison to right here, right now,” Gregor asked them. “Was it as crowded as this?”

“Oh, no.” Lotte shook her head. “Here you have our people and also the regular people from WKMB. This studio is connected to six others and four of them are in use. In New York, we have only the one studio and the one crew to service it.”

“A station like WKMB rents studio space,” DeAnna explained. “In the off hours, which these are. They’re not really used for anything but a show like ours or the local news. So here you’ve got us, and people from WKMB, and the renters.”

“If what he wants to know is if it would have been easy for the murderer to move Maria’s body into the storeroom,” Lotte said, “the answer is no.”

Actually, Gregor wasn’t worried about how Maria Gonzalez’s body had been moved into the storeroom. He could think of a dozen ways that could have been done, by the right kind of person with a good grip on his nerves. He was more interested in the timing of this murder and what that said—combined with the murder of Maria Gonzalez and assuming the two had been committed by the same murderer—about this murderer’s state of mind.

“It’s as if he likes crowds,” Gregor said. “It’s as if he were a magician used to working in danger of exposure. I saw this boy, this Max—”

“Maximillian Dey,” DeAnna said. “He was from Portugal.”

“Yes. Well, I saw him when I arrived. He was carrying a chair and complaining about having his wallet stolen.”

“He had his pocket picked on the subway in New York,” Lotte said. “Just before we came down here—just before. He was on his way to meet us when it happened.”

“Why was he moving a chair?”

“Because Shelley Feldstein’s crazy,” DeAnna said. “She kept changing the set. She’s our set designer. She was worried that you were going to look too menacing, you know, being as—uh—tall as you are. Next to Lotte and—um—”