Festival of Deaths(96)

“Shelley went in 1973. War broke out right in the lobby of her hotel and she swore she’d never go back.”

“Prescott Holloway.”

“Prescott Holloway.” Lotte blinked. And then she laughed. “Oh, dear. I don’t think he’s gone, but with Prescott you never know. He’s our mystery man, you know. We speculate about him.”

“Why?”

“Well, he hardly seems the kind of man who would end up being a chauffeur. He’s too intelligent and too sophisticated and too—I don’t know what. DeAnna thinks he was an executive somewhere once and lost it all due to drink. Sarah Meyer thinks he gambles, but Sarah will say anything if she’s in the wrong mood. You mustn’t take all this seriously. It’s probably just the army.”

“The army?”

“Prescott was in the army, yes,” Lotte said. “For a good long time, if I remember correctly. The army will put a veneer of sophistication on a certain kind of man. It’ll give him an air of authority. It’s just that Prescott looks like Jack Palance, so he’s intriguing.”

“Let’s go at this from another angle,” Gregor said. “Money. Do you know roughly what the people on your staff make?”

“Of course.”

“Is there any one of them who has more money to spend than he should have? More money than you pay him?”

“But of course they do,” Lotte said, surprised. “Shelley Feldstein is married to a very successful man. And Sarah Meyer’s parents are rich people. I think Sarah still has an allowance. And Sarah’s mother sends her things, too, of course. Like the cashmere snow hats last December. Six of them in six different colors, seventy-five dollars apiece at Saks. I saw them.”

“What were you doing on the night Maria Gonzalez died?”

“I was home in bed,” Lotte said, with some amusement. “Alone. I have reached that time in my life when I am allowed to retire from the sex wars, and I have.”

“I find it very interesting,” Gregor said, “that there is no one—no one—who seems to have a verifiable alibi for the time of Maria Gonzalez’s death. It’s as if the woman was killed at high noon on Fifth Avenue.”

“I don’t find that odd at all,” Lotte said. “We were taping. That’s the way things always are when we’re taping.”

“Do you tape five days a week? All year?”

“We tape five days a week for thirty-nine weeks a year. The rest of the time, the show is in reruns. And we all need the rest. Let me tell you.”

“There’s a doctor up there with DeAnna Kroll. I think they’re trying to get your attention.”

Lotte turned around and saw that it was true. DeAnna was standing with a man in a white coat and waving at her frantically. The man in the white coat was just waving. He looked too exhausted to make any more effort than that. Lotte felt her stomach turn over. She really did hate hospitals. She really did.

“I hope it isn’t bad news,” she said.

“They wouldn’t be behaving like that if it was bad news.”

Lotte hoped he was right. She said good-bye and started walking away. She got halfway down the corridor to DeAnna and her white-coated companion before she stopped. Crises always got like this for her, stuck in a groove of feelingless efficiency. She wondered how long it would take, this time, for her cool control to collapse into headaches and insomnia and a second martini before she went to bed.

She turned around to get another look at Gregor Demarkian—whose cool control seemed to her to be the kind that would never collapse at all—but he was gone.





2


SHELLEY FELDSTEIN’S TAKE ON Gregor Demarkian hadn’t changed a whit since she’d first seen him after the death of Maximillian Dey, and it wasn’t going to change now, when she was in a bad mood and tired to death and wishing to be home in New York instead of stuck out here in the boondocks with some kind of nut. That was how Shelley was explaining the deaths of Maria Gonzalez and Maximillian Dey to herself, and the attack on Carmencita Boaz—although on that last she had alternative theories. That a nut was responsible for Maria and Max, though, she had no doubt. Shelley had tried very hard, earlier today, to find some proof that that nut was Sarah Meyer, but she had been unsuccessful. She had torn up enough cashmere to build her own goat. She had poured enough perfume on enough carpet to stink up that small corner of the Sheraton Society Hill until the coming of the Messiah. She had ripped the covers off enough paperback books to become a one-woman rack jobber. She had found nothing that would convict Sarah Meyer of plotting or executing two violent deaths.