Festival of Deaths(76)

Every drop of blood.

So she was one of those old ladies.

Gregor decided not to care.

He was too wrapped up in the thought that he’d finally hit on a plan that would fool Bennis Hannaford.





FIVE


1


DEANNA KROLL THOUGHT ABOUT violent death differently than most of the people she worked with. Murder didn’t seem as unreal to her as it did to Shelley Feldstein and Sarah Meyer. For a long time DeAnna had thought that this was a result of a better than passing acquaintance with death in general. Now she knew it wasn’t true. Poor people die more easily than richer ones do, even in countries with national health systems and publicly administered prenatal care. Malnutrition and disease, depression and accident: DeAnna remembered reading once about a man in Tupelo, Mississippi, who died by falling into a well he’d dug on the edge of his property. It was broad daylight, he was stone cold sober and the well was marked. Nobody had any idea why he’d fallen into it. Things like that never happened to lawyers’ wives in Scarsdale or plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills. It was as if God passed out the freak accidents based on whose bank account was the thinnest. The only kind of death he allowed to be an equal-opportunity employer was death by traffic accident. Whatever it was that got a man on the highway was just as likely to kill him as it was to kill anybody else. That was why DeAnna Kroll didn’t drive.

Death by deliberate murder, though, was different. Before Maria Gonzalez died—and before Max—DeAnna had thought there would be similarities between that kind of thing and what Lotte or Itzaak Blechmann had lived through. Holocaust and political persecution seemed like variations of deliberate murder to her. Now she knew that they weren’t, at least in terms of the effects they had on the people who survived them. Lotte and Itzaak were both terribly upset. Lotte had been sick to her stomach after she’d seen the body of Maria Gonzalez. Itzaak had cried for half an hour after Max’s body was taken away. To this day, DeAnna could remember what it had been like the first time she had been in an apartment whose windows were sprayed with bullets. It was years ago, long before drive-by shootings got to be a kind of national ghetto sport. She was sitting on the floor with both babies crawling over her feet on the worn carpet when the craziness started. It was nuts. There was the sound of a car pulling up to the curb downstairs—the wrong sound, complete with squealing brakes and a honk. Then someone with a boy-man’s voice had started screaming some words DeAnna couldn’t make out and somebody else had let loose with a machine gun. Whoever it was was not a very good shot. He did very little damage to the apartment above DeAnna’s, which was the one he wanted. He blew out all of DeAnna’s windows and cut her pendulum cuckoo clock off the wall and into shards. He killed a three-year-old girl who had been watering the flowers in the window box of the apartment downstairs. The police came later and managed to look shocked, but that didn’t make them effective. It was impossible for them to be effective when nobody would tell them anything. Nobody ever told the police anything in the neighborhood DeAnna lived in before she got successful enough to move downtown. One of the hardest adjustments she had to make when she got the apartment in Turtle Bay was in her attitude toward the police. People in Turtle Bay called the police all the time. And the police came.

Itzaak and Lotte were upset. Shelley and Sarah were nervous. Prescott Holloway seemed to want to fade into the background, which was where he belonged, anyway. DeAnna Kroll felt as if she were coming home. DeAnna Kroll felt as if nothing had happened to her that wasn’t perfectly normal. DeAnna Kroll thought she was going nuts. Maybe this was the flaw in the fabric of the American Dream. Maybe you could get your body out of the ghetto and into the upper middle class, but your head always slept in the bed it had been born to. That was a terrible way to describe it, but DeAnna knew what she meant. Maria and Max were dead and that felt just about right, for a death rate, among the group of them, in this period of time. Maria and Max were dead and all DeAnna could think about was how to devise ways to ensure that she never got left in the ladies’ room without at least two other women for company.

Now the taping was over for the day and the studio was dark. Since The Lotte Goldman Show had rented not only Studio C but the entire cluster of offices around it for their two-week stay in Philadelphia, nobody would be coming in to produce a game show or give the weather report between now and the time they were ready to tape the next Lotte Goldman show, tomorrow morning. This was the shoe fetishists show they had done today. It had come off better than DeAnna had expected. DeAnna wasn’t sure what she had expected. The Shoe Lovers Liberation Army. Shoe Fetishists Anonymous. It wasn’t drive-by killings or the murders of Maria and Max that made her think the entire country was going insane. She wrapped up the paperwork she had been doing through lunch—hot pastrami on a roll with Russian dressing; guest roster for the show on sex therapists who say their clients make them frigid—and put it under her paperweight for Sarah to find. She thought about leaving a nasty note under there for Sarah to find—but she thought about doing that every day, and she never did. She got up and grabbed her tote bag and went into the hall. All she had to do now was watch the tape, make sure anything that needed fixing got fixed and sign off on the show. After that, she could go back to the hotel and have a good stiff drink.