Festival of Deaths(97)

Shelley had not, however, come out of Sarah’s room empty-handed. She had had a stroke of luck, the momentousness of which she never expected to be repeated as long as she lived. The fact that she had never even suspected the existence of such a thing made the luck even better. She wouldn’t have found it if she had gone looking for it. She had simply opened the zippered compartment in Sarah’s suitcase where Sarah kept her underwear—Sarah was just the sort of person who wouldn’t unpack her underwear—and there it was. Black. Leather-bound. Stamped in gold. Bought at Mark Cross.

A diary.

Shelley was at the hospital now half because she was supposed to be, but half because she had this book to carry around. DeAnna had called her, as DeAnna had called everyone else, expecting a great convergence without wondering why it should happen. Under any other conditions, Shelley would have stayed at home and made her excuses afterward. DeAnna would never notice who had come and who had not—and if she did, in the cold light of sweet reason, she would realize it made sense for Shelley not to be there. But Shelley had the diary. And she wanted to get a good clear look at Sarah Meyer’s face.

Gregor Demarkian was standing with his friend the black policeman when Shelley came down the hall. Otherwise, she would have passed him by without a greeting. The policeman made her feel compelled to do something polite. The compulsion made her angry. Farther down the corridor, she could see Lotte and DeAnna with their heads together, looking more relieved than grave. So Carmencita would be all right. That was good. Shelley had nothing against Carmencita. She did wonder about Itzaak, though. Usually when a woman was battered, it was her husband or boyfriend who had battered her.

Gregor Demarkian and the policeman had fanned out from the wall, blocking her path. Shelley nearly told them to get the hell out of her way. Then she thought better of it. No need to antagonize the police, no matter how much she would like to antagonize Gregor Demarkian. She hated to look at anyone who was so obviously fat. She put her hand in the pocket of her trench coat and felt the patterned leather cover of Sarah’s diary. It made her feel better.

“Well?” she said.

The black policeman looked about ready to explode. “Well,” he said. “Well. What am I supposed to do with well.”

“Nobody has asked you to do anything with it,” Gregor said.

“We want to ask you a few questions,” the black policeman said.

Jackman, Shelley thought. That was his name. Something Jackman. She looked up the hall again, but there was no sign of Sarah, and Sarah was all she wanted to see. She knew that Sarah would be here, because Lotte and DeAnna acted like infants whose formula had been taken away any time they had a crises and Sarah wasn’t in attendance to be ordered around. Lotte and DeAnna would have thought of a million things they wanted Sarah to write down in her notebook and a million people they wanted her to call, and then when all this was over they would forget all about it. That, in Shelley Feldstein’s experience, was the way all bosses behaved. It was a psychological abnormality that was conferred by the board of directors along with the title.

There was still no sign of Sarah anywhere in the hall. Shelley shifted from foot to foot and said, “What do you want?” She said it directly to Mr. Jackman. She didn’t look at Gregor Demarkian at all.

Even so, it was Gregor Demarkian who spoke. Shelley resigned herself to it. The policeman called Jackman was spineless. He’d behaved just like this after Max’s body was found. He let Demarkian do all the talking.

“What we want to know,” Gregor Demarkian said, “is whether or not you were aware of the fact that Maria Gonzalez was in the United States illegally.”

Oh, shit, Shelley Feldstein thought. She touched the cover of Sarah’s diary again.

“If I did know that Maria was an illegal alien,” she said crisply, “I’d hardly tell the police, would I? I could get in trouble.”

“This is a murder investigation,” Jackman said. “I don’t care what kind of trouble—”

“You couldn’t get in trouble,” Gregor said. “Whoever hired her might.”

“Lotte?”

“Or the personnel department of Gradon Cable Systems.”

“I didn’t know she was an illegal alien,” Shelley said. “I suspected.”

“What about Maximillian Dey?”

“With Max I knew, yes.”

“That he was in the United States illegally?”

“Yes.”

“What about Carmencita Boaz?”

“Was she really?” Shelley looked up the corridor again. “I suppose it figures. They all know each other. It’s like an underground community. Is Itzaak illegal, too?”