Festival of Deaths(7)
But DeAnna Kroll was going on. “I did find Carmencita,” she was saying, “and I got Itzaak Blechmann just before he got into the shower, which was luck. But I still haven’t found Shelley Feldstein, and I haven’t the faintest idea how to start looking for Maximillian Dey and I need all of them, I really need all of them. Lotte will be coming in by five.”
“Dr. Goldman? Why?”
“Because I’m paranoid,” DeAnna Kroll said. “Because I’m climbing the walls. Because we’ve never missed a taping. I need you to get on the phone to the husbands.”
“Husbands,” Sarah repeated.
“Right. We’re going to do the cunnilingus show Lotte’s been talking about forever and a day. I mean, why the hell not? We don’t have anything else. And I can promote it. I need you to get on the phone and line up the husbands.”
“What about the wives?”
“I’ll take care of the wives. As soon as you get an agreement from one of the husbands, send Prescott over there right away to pick him up. I don’t want anybody getting cold feet. Do you have Prescott’s car phone number?”
“In my book,” Sarah said. “Of course I do.”
“Well, good. Then get going. Oh, and I need as many of the husbands as you can line up. I’ve got a list of six of them I put on your desk. If we get too many we don’t have to use them all. If you finish early, come find me and I’ll give you something else to do. God only knows, in a situation like this, there’s more than enough to do.”
“Right,” Sarah said.
“Try to be pleasant,” DeAnna Kroll said. “I mean, these guys are going to be doing us a favor, for God’s sake. And they’re going to be embarrassing the hell out of themselves, even if they don’t realize it. But it’s your job not to let them realize it. Until it’s too late. Right?”
“Right,” Sarah said.
DeAnna Kroll looked doubtful. She always looked doubtful when it came to Sarah, and Sarah resented it. Sarah set her face into its best grown-up pout and waited.
“Well,” DeAnna Kroll said after a minute. “That’s it. I guess we both better get to work.”
“Right,” Sarah said again.
“Right,” DeAnna Kroll repeated. Then she looked helplessly right and left, shrugged, and turned away in the direction of the inner offices.
Sarah watched her go until she was out of sight around the corner of a plasterboard hallway, and then she followed, slowly, moving between the thin walls hung with pen-and-ink drawings from the early days of television like a small rolling ship moving through the Strait of Magellan. When she got to the place where DeAnna had turned, she stopped and looked, to make sure DeAnna was gone. Then she went straight on to the very back of the suite, where Maria Gonzalez and Carmencita Boaz had their offices.
DeAnna Kroll had said that she had been able to get in contact with Carmencita Boaz, so Sarah didn’t think she had much time. She didn’t think she was going to have much luck, either, but she never had much luck. What luck she did have consisted in this: Maria Gonzalez had already gotten into enough trouble on her own today; she didn’t need any help from Sarah. Sarah could concentrate on Carmencita Boaz alone.
Sarah stuck her head into Maria’s office anyway, just to wrinkle her nose at the bank of photographs in clear plastic frames that littered Maria’s desk and the Lucite vase of red silk flowers that graced the top of Maria’s file cabinet. It was all so unprofessional. Maria was so unprofessional. Maria came to work every day in flowing skirts and wild hair. Sarah backed out into the hall again and went into Carmencita’s office, which was not so enthusiastically feminine but was still feminine enough. Carmencita didn’t have as many photographs, only three or four, of her parents back in Guatemala City and her ten-year-old brother in his uniform from Catholic school. Carmencita didn’t have any flowers, either, just a small sparkly geode from the Museum of Natural History that Itzaak Blechmann had given her for her last birthday. Itzaak was always hanging around Carmencita’s door, trying to think of something to say, trying not to look like an idiot. Sarah didn’t know how Carmencita put up with him.
Sarah closed the door behind her and looked around the room, at the clear surfaces of the desk and the file cabinet, at the clean windows, at the bare walls. A lot of people in television kept very messy offices, with weeks-old doughnuts molding in drawers and papers strewn across the carpet. Maria and Carmencita kept their offices the way their mothers probably kept house. That could be a good sign. Sarah went to the file cabinet and looked under “Cunnilingus,” but couldn’t find anything. She couldn’t find anything under “Oral Sex,” either. Maybe that made sense. Maria and Carmencita were both Catholic as hell. They went to Mass every morning before coming to work. They were both very modest, too, very prone to blushing and embarrassment. Maybe Carmencita couldn’t look at a word like cunnilingus staring out at her every time she opened the top drawer of her file cabinet without calling for the smelling salts. Maybe the whole Lotte Goldman show was just too much for Carmencita to take. Sarah tried “Husbands and Wives, Marital Problems, Sex” and was presented with a bewildering array of genital dysfunctions, from impotence to fetishes. None of it was what she was looking for. She stood back and tried to think.