“Carmencita is doing her best to find us another serial killer, but at this point we can’t count on her being successful. Especially as long as there’s a chance that Herbert Shasta—ah—”
“Offed Max,” Sarah said helpfully.
“Whatever. You ought to be much more careful of the language you use, Sarah. You’ll never get anywhere really important if you sound like an illiterate street urchin.”
“It’s all because of my disadvantaged background,” Sarah said sweetly. “Because I went to Wellesley instead of to Hunter.”
“Lotte still wants to use Gregor Demarkian on a program,” Shelley said, “whether or not we can get a serial killer for him to debate with, but that’s going to have to wait, too. At least until the investigation is over. What we’ve decided to do is to go on tomorrow with what we were always going to go on tomorrow. The shoe fetishists.”
“Maria Maples’s manager was accused of being a shoe fetishist,” Sarah said. “Did we get him?”
“No. We have three men from the Shoe Lovers Liberation Army and four from Shoe Fetishists Anonymous.”
“Are they going to be anonymous?” Sarah asked.
“Of course they’re not.” Shelley was exasperated. “None of these people are anonymous anymore except for the real addicts, the alcohol and narcotics people. And even some of them like to go on television. These are shoe fetishists.”
“So?”
Shelley shrugged. “Lotte never goes to support groups unless she knows the people in them are ready to talk. She’s got ways of finding out. She’s good at it.”
“Lotte found Maximillian in a support group,” Sarah said, “did she ever tell you that? She found him in a support group in Queens. It was supposed to be very funny.”
“A support group for what?”
“A settlement house kind of thing, you know. Where people went to get help with their English and tell each other how to apply for jobs and things like that. Lotte went because the same social worker who ran that group ran one on self-esteem for dwarfs—”
“I remember that show.”
“—and Lotte got to the place early and there was Max. It was right after Bill Rachetti quit to move to Florida.”
“I ought to move to Florida,” Shelley said. “God, it’s awful about Max. It was awful about Maria.”
“And bad luck is supposed to come in threes,” Sarah said.
Sarah had finished her sandwich and gone to work on the potato chips that came with it. She ate them daintily and with deliberation, as if pointing out to Shelley how much she enjoyed each one.
“Let’s get back to the show,” Shelley said. “We’re going to need a split stage. I’m going to want Max—well. It won’t be Max, will it? I’m going to need someone to toss furniture for me at five A.M.”
“WKMB will supply somebody. They do when our guy is sick.”
“You better call them and tell them our guy is more than sick. Five A.M. We’ve got about thirty pairs of shoes in boxes in the truck. I’ll need them all. I’ll also need a wider than usual coffee table to put them on. And a cloth. A white tablecloth. Do we have one of those?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “I didn’t pack the truck.”
“If we don’t have one, we’re going to have to get one. The shoes won’t show up against the wood grain of the tables we’ve got. Maybe WKMB has a different kind of table. Ask.”
“Now?”
“As soon as we’re done here.”
Sarah flagged down the waitress. “I’m going to be up all night the way this is going.”
“Do you really think you ought to order dessert?”
“I’ll have a hot fudge brownie with chocolate ice cream,” Sarah told the waitress. “And yes I do think I ought to have dessert.”
“It’s your life.” Shelley shrugged.
“It was Max’s life this morning, wasn’t it? Dragging things around for you and getting himself killed.”
“What was that supposed to mean?”
“I mean nobody ever saw him come up after he took the chair downstairs,” Sarah said. “I heard the police talking about it. And that Mr. Demarkian. Max left the studio to take a chair downstairs for you, and that was the last anybody saw of him until he turned up dead.”
“And?” Shelley insisted.
“And nothing. But it’s true. They were all saying how strange it was. I mean, you could hardly miss him, could you? He’d have been carrying something heavy. He was supposed to bring up the blue chairs. But he didn’t.”