Festival of Deaths(83)

Stuck in bumper to bumper on one of the long curving sweeps of overpass, Gregor looked down and saw a cluster of stores with wreaths and bells and Christmas trees in their windows. He tapped his fingers against the handle of his door in impatience.

“It’s started to bother me,” he said. “Christmas decorations without Hanukkah decorations. It doesn’t seem right.”

“Why don’t we just do away with Christmas and I solve the problem that way?” John suggested.

“I take it you’ve had a bad day.”

“They go nuts,” John said darkly. “I’m not kidding. Say holiday to these people, and they go nuts.”

“Which people?”

“All people. Race doesn’t matter. Class doesn’t matter. Sex only matters because if he goes nuts he’s likely to beat her up and if she goes nuts she’s likely to put a bullet through his arm, but that’s the difference in size talking, that’s all. I’m not talking about ordinary domestic violence here, Gregor. I’m talking about—”

“Nuts.”

“You got it.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you’ve found out about the death of Maximillian Dey,” Gregor said. “Maybe that will take your mind off the nuts.”

John patted the front of his suit jacket, didn’t find what he was looking for, and started patting his pants. Then he stuck his hands in his front left pants pocket and came out with what looked like a million sheets of computer paper compressed into a cube. The cube sprung open in his hand. It looked alive.

“These are just summaries. If you want to see the full reports, I’ve got them downtown at my regular office. I didn’t want to drag them out to—”

“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I don’t think this should be too complicated. Did you contact the police in New York?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And?”

“He’s bent,” Jackman said shortly. “The one they call Chickie. Hell, he’s so bent you could use him for a paper clip.”

“Ah. Well. Did you swallow your distaste long enough to get some information out of him?”

“Yeah, I swallowed my distaste, as you put it. And I got some information out of him. He tried to put me on to arresting this guy on The Lotte Goldman Show called Itzaak Blechmann. Did we meet him?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “He’s the lighting engineer.”

“Oh, that one. Well, with our friend Chickie, the clincher seems to be that Itzaak is not only Jewish, but Jewish from a foreign country, and besides he wears a yarmulke. Except Chickie didn’t say yarmulke. He said—”

“Funny little hat,” Gregor hazarded.

“Right. Christ, Gregor, I hated this guy. But I got his information. It wasn’t much more helpful than our own.”

The traffic had broken up just a little. They had to be doing fifteen miles an hour. Gregor leaned forward and looked out the windshield. The cars went on for miles. He sat back.

“Let me make a few guesses here,” he said. “In the first place, the murder weapon in both cases was a tire iron or something like a tire iron.”

“Right,” Jackman said. “But that was easy enough to see from the condition of the corpse. It was the kind of case that makes me wonder what we have to bother with a medical examiner for.”

“Everything was obvious from the condition of the corpse in the first case we worked together after I came back to Philadelphia,” Gregor said, “and there it turned out that the obvious was not the cause of death after all.”

“That’s true.”

“So we have to be sure,” Gregor went on, “and now that we have the report we are sure. The report was the same in New York?”

“It was.”

“What about the force of the blows? From what I saw, it looked like at least three sharp, powerful smashes to the side of the head, at least powerful enough to break the cheekbone—”

“And the skull,” Jackman said. “On Maximillian Dey, broken bones in the head included the cheekbone, the upper and lower jaw, the nose, and the cranium in two places.”

“What about Maria Gonzalez?”

“Worse. According to Chickie, her face was practically pulped.”

“What about the angles?”

John Jackman shook his head. “It won’t help. Whoever it was was either taller than both of them—considerably taller—or was standing on top of something when he struck. All the angles are more consistent with an overhead delivery rather than a right or left handedness.”

“Don’t start thinking in terms of ‘he,’” Gregor warned. “There’s nothing we have so far that would preclude a woman as perpetrator.”