Festival of Deaths(81)

Sarah had a little Hanukkah display on the top of her tall bureau. There was a little menorah and a palm-size book with the story of the festival in it. Shelley recognized both as gifts from Lotte. Shelley had a pair herself. In spite of the fact that she wanted to smash everything in this room, she decided not to smash this. She might not be religious, but like many other people who had drifted into agnosticism for no particular reason, she was leery of the possible power of religious objects. Or she was sometimes. Maybe it was just that right now she was more than a little on edge.

She found the letters right off, in the otherwise empty center drawer of the room’s desk. She pulled the drawer open and there they were. If she had been going about this logically, she would have left Sarah’s room then and there.

Shelley Feldstein was not going about this logically. She knew just how much time she had—more than half an hour, now, before the cutting session broke up and Sarah was free to come back to the hotel. Shelley had all the time in the world. And she didn’t want to waste a moment of it.

She stuffed the letters down the front of her shirtwaist dress, under her belt, so that they would stay put. Then she headed for Sarah’s suitcases.

One real suitcase. One briefcase full of papers. One overnight bag with cosmetics and bath supplies.

Shelley upended both the suitcase and the briefcase, spilling their contents on the floor. Then she took a bottle of Max Factor foundation out of the overnight bag, opened it, and poured the contents into the mess of clothes and papers at her feet.

Good, she thought, very good.

By the time she got done with this room, Sarah Meyer would have been taught a lesson. By the time she got done with this room, nothing would ever put it back together again. By the time she got done with this room…

What?

Shelley went into the bathroom, got Sarah’s bottle of shampoo and her bottle of conditioner, and came back into the main room to dump the contents of both on the mess she’d already made.

She was no longer doing this for revenge or to teach Sarah a lesson or to strike a blow in the holy war for a right to privacy.

Shelley was doing it because pulling a stunt like this on a fat slob bitch like Sarah Meyer was fun.





SIX


1


IT WAS THREE THIRTY when Gregor Demarkian showed up at the precinct where John Henry Newman Jackman was spending his afternoon, and three thirty-one when he decided that he was glad he had never been an ordinary local police officer. Why was it that local police stations were always so depressing, even when they were in the middle of big-money, low-crime districts? This one was not in the middle of a big-money, low-crime district. It was in the middle of a slum that was rapidly metamorphosing into what the cops had started to call “UFO territory.” UFO territory was the bastard child of the drug wars. Poor neighborhoods were full of drugs these days. Everybody expected them to be. There was a point, however, when a neighborhood got too full of drugs. There was a moment when the nonaddicted and the uninvolved decided they would rather be homeless than live around this. That was when things started to get really bad. The buildings emptied out. The windows got broken and the bricks began to crumble. There would be a rash of fires. Gregor had seen whole blocks burn in a matter of days and weedy vacant lots sprout from the ruins overnight. This neighborhood was not quite there yet. The blackened bricks strewn across the lumpy ground of the lot next to the station house testified to at least one fire, but the tenement directly across the street was still full of people. Gregor even saw children straggling down the pavement, probably on their way home from school. Several of them wore Catholic-school uniforms, which meant somebody around here was still trying. Gregor didn’t think the trying was doing much good or that it would continue much longer. Up at the corner there was a building with shattered windows and splintered doors. Passing it, Gregor had heard the giggles and the sighs. The sounds were so soft, they might have been made by ghosts. Maybe they had been. The building was crammed full of hibernating junkies.

The glass in the station house door had a crack in it. Gregor ran his hand across it, clucking like an Armenian grandmother just quietly enough so that no one could hear him, and then went inside. He walked up to the counter and gave his name to the desk sergeant. She was a heavy woman in her forties who looked like she’d just stepped out of a raging tornado. Her wiry, salt-and-pepper hair was standing up from her scalp and corkscrewed in every direction. The collar of her blouse was pulled sideways and her rolled-up sleeves were wrinkled into accordion pleats. Her eyes were wild. Gregor stood politely in front of her and let her look him over. He didn’t think much of anything about him was actually sinking in. Her mind was on an altercation taking place on her side of the dividing rail. Two cops had a young man in custody and were trying to ask him questions. The young man would sit silently for a minute or two and then leap to his feet and yell “Bungeeee!” at the top of his lungs. The young man was as crazy as a loon, and the two police officers knew it, but they slogged on bravely anyway, as if they had a hope in hell of getting something done. The desk sergeant turned her back to Gregor and looked at them. Then she turned to face Gregor again and sighed.