Festival of Deaths(87)

“You haven’t found anything anywhere that might have belonged to him in an unexpected place? The back stairs? Another bathroom? Somebody’s office?”

“I haven’t found anything that belonged to him, period.”

“Has anybody else?”

“No.”

“What about messages? Did Max ever get any? Just before you came up here? On the trip? Since you got here?”

“People like Max don’t get messages,” DeAnna said. “Not on a regular basis. If they do, they get fired.”

“Meaning you would have remembered if he had gotten a message.”

“Meaning I would have and so would anyone else, and somebody would have made a remark about it.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “No messages.”

“Gregor?”

John Jackman’s voice sounded oddly strangled, and it came as a surprise. Gregor had been so intent on questioning DeAnna Kroll, and thinking about Maximillian Dey, he’d forgotten John was there. Now he felt a little guilty about it. John was the professional. This was his case. Gregor was only along for the ride.

“I’m sorry,” he said, turning to John.

But John wasn’t looking at him. He was staring in the direction of the office door. As Gregor turned to see what John was looking at, he realized DeAnna was staring in that direction, too.

Itzaak Blechmann was standing right in the middle of the office doorway, his hands wrapped around his bloodstained chest, his legs shaking, his face covered with tears.

“Come and see,” he said, in English so heavily accented it would have been hard to understand, except for the intensity of the emotion behind it. “Come and see. Carmencita is—Carmencita is on the floor, and she is dead.”





PART THREE:


Lady Chatterley’s Demarkian





ONE


1


CARMENCITA BOAZ WAS NOT dead. There were times in the next half hour when Gregor and John Jackman both thought she was going to die. There were times when they even thought she had, slipping away from them as they did all the frantic things people do when they have been trained in first aid so long ago they don’t remember most of it. God only knew, she ought to have been dead. Gregor couldn’t remember seeing a face in a worse mess than this one on a live person. He had to keep reminding himself about the peculiarities of head wounds. Head wounds bled. He had to keep reminding himself that nothing terrible had happened to Carmencita’s eyes. Eyes were the most vulnerable place, except for the softnesses inside the ear. Carmencita’s eyes opened every once in a while, when the pain pierced her shock and made her twitch, and they were a beautiful, shiny blue that made Gregor think of polished lapis lazuli.

Carmencita was lying on the floor just beyond the fire door next to the elevators that went down to the lobby and opened on this floor to the reception desk for WKMB. It was a utility area and not much frequented by WKMB staff or casual visitors. It wasn’t much frequented by anybody except the cleaning people, and they weren’t likely to show up in force before six or seven o’clock. Even so, it was a risky place for whoever it was to have pulled this sort of stunt. There was always the chance that something would need to be fixed, sending a janitor up from the basement offices of the Maintenance Department. There was always a chance that some hotshot on the rise who wanted to get in shape was taking the stairs as a form of aerobic exercise. There were all kinds of chances, including the one that had come to pass. Itzaak had been worried. Itzaak had opened every door he could find.

Itzaak was covered with blood. His shirt was a sodden mass of it and his pants looked as if they had been splattered with ketchup and vinegar. He had lost his yarmulke and didn’t seem to have noticed.

“We have to find a priest from her church,” he kept saying. “We have to find a priest from her church.”

Gregor and John Jackman were most interested in finding a doctor from the hospital. Itzaak was useless. The only reason he hadn’t collapsed from shock was that the fact of Carmencita’s being alive had given him a last jolt of energy. As soon as they had Carmencita in competent hands and he no longer had anything he might be called on to do, Itzaak was going to collapse. It made more sense to rely on DeAnna Kroll.

“Make some phone calls,” Gregor instructed her, as soon as John Jackman had leaned over the body and pronounced it alive. “St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. We need an ambulance. We have a—no, don’t tell them that. Tell them we have a woman who’s been hit with a tire iron and her skull’s caved in—”

“But—”

“I know it’s not strictly the truth,” Gregor said, “but we want to get them here.”