“Mr. Shasta,” Gregor said.
“Yeah,” DeAnna said. “Exactly.”
“Where would Mr. Dey have taken this chair?” Gregor asked them. “Is there a storeroom here, too?”
“There is, but he wouldn’t have taken the chair there,” DeAnna said. “It wasn’t a chair that belonged to WKMB. It was a chair that belonged to us. We brought it from New York.”
Gregor raised his eyebrows. DeAnna shrugged.
“I told you Shelley was crazy. She really gets into the stuff. Of course, she’s also good.”
“She’s the best in the business,” Lotte said.
“Any day now, she’s going to start freelancing and we’re not going to pay enough to stay on her schedule.” DeAnna was glum. “Doesn’t that figure?”
“Back to Maximillian Dey,” Gregor told her. “Where would he have taken that chair?”
“To our truck,” DeAnna said. “It’s parked downstairs. There’s enough furniture in it to set up a couch franchise.”
“Fine. He would have taken this chair all the way down to street level to the truck, and then what?”
“He’d have left that chair in the truck and gotten whatever chair it was Shelley wanted and brought it up,” DeAnna said.
“Did he do that?”
“Did he do what?” Lotte asked.
“Did he bring the new chair up from the truck? Did he even get the old chair down to the truck? Do either of you know?”
DeAnna and Lotte looked at each other. “No,” they said.
“Of course,” DeAnna ventured, “Shelley didn’t come to me to complain. So I suppose he must have at least—”
“At least what?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t know,” DeAnna admitted. “Shelley being Shelley, you’d have to ask her. Maybe Max brought the old chair down and the new chair up and that’s why she didn’t complain, or maybe she had her mind on something else.”
“Mr. Shasta arrived just a little after Mr. Demarkian did,” Lotte reminded DeAnna. “Perhaps her mind was taken up with him.”
“Perhaps everybody’s mind was taken up with him,” DeAnna said. “What a weird little man.”
“Can you think of any reason why anybody would have wanted to kill Maximillian Dey? Any harm he might have done anyone? Any information he might have it might have been dangerous for him to know?”
“Maximillian Dey was less than twenty years old,” Lotte Goldman said. “The only harm he ever did anyone was the heart palpitations he gave girls his own age the first time they saw his face. And as for information—”
“He moved furniture,” DeAnna said flatly. “Anything he knew, everybody else knew.”
There was a knock on the door. Lotte Goldman dumped the burned-to-the filter stub she was holding into the ashtray and reached for another cigarette.
“Come in,” she said.
Sarah Meyer stuck her head through the door and looked them all over.
“The police are here,” she announced. “There’s a big black guy looking for Gregor Demarkian.”
3
HIS NAME WAS JOHN Henry Newman Jackman, and he was not what most women would describe as “a big black guy,” in spite of the fact that he was both big (six two, two hundred and ten) and black. When women looked at John Henry Newman Jackman, they tended to get specific. The first time Gregor had ever seen him—when Jackman was a rookie cop assigned to a serial killer task force Gregor was coordinating—Gregor had wondered in awe how he ever managed to get anybody to take him seriously. John Henry Newman Jackman had the most physically perfect face Gregor had ever seen, on anybody, male or female, black or brown or red or yellow or white or green. It was so perfect it was almost an abstraction, The Human Face As Intended, as if God had decided to do it right just once so that everybody would know how it was supposed to be. Bennis always said that standing in front of John Jackman was like standing in front of a painting in a museum—but when John and Bennis were together, Bennis never looked to Gregor like museums were what she was thinking of.
All that was years ago, Gregor told himself firmly, and Bennis Hannaford’s love life is none of my business. He turned the corner into the main corridor and was pleased to see that John was not only there but doing him proud. Usually, the police turned up at the scene of a homicide in a haphazard and uncoordinated fashion. The uniforms got there and called for the rest of the necessary personnel. The medical examiner’s people and the fingerprint men and then evidence baggers and the homicide detectives all drifted through on no particular schedule. From what Gregor could see, John had organized this foray the way a general would organize a battle. The door to the men’s room was open and guarded by a man in uniform. The evidence men were standing in the hallway, holding onto their equipment and waiting their turn. The medical examiner’s people were already with the body. John Jackman himself was just coming out of the men’s room, scratching his head.