Polterheist(11)

We sifted through a rack of Santa costumes and soon found one that looked the right size for Saturated Fats.

"It's a few years old," said the costume mistress. "A little different than the style we use now. See how broad the cuffs and collar are? But Santa's look is always pretty much your basic red suit with white trim, so this will work." She tugged and twitched the fabric, checking for stains or weak seams. "If this were the start of the season, I'd have him come upstairs for a proper fitting. But since he only needs to get through a few shifts, it'll have to do."

"I think it'll be fine," I said, hefting the suit in my arms.

She asked, "What the hell happened, anyhow?"

"He had an accident," I said vaguely. "I'm fuzzy on the details."

After we exited the storage room, I realized there was something else I needed to do before returning to the floor. I asked, "Where's the nearest bathroom?"

She pointed further down the hall, past her workshop. Then she leaned forward and whispered, "It was Mr. Powell's private bathroom."

I didn't immediately understand the significance of this. "Who was Mr . . . Oh! That Mr. Pow-"

"Shh! We don't say the name out loud around here."

I nodded. This was one of the unwritten but well-known rules of Fenster & Co. It had slipped my mind, having no real relevance to my sojourn at the store, but Jingle had taught me the rule and explained its origin.

For decades, this company had been known as Fenster & Powell. When Constance, a pretty society debutante, had married into the Fenster family some sixty years ago, the profits and the power were shared equally by the company's two founders, one of whom was Constance's father-in-law. Mr. Fenster died a few years later, and Constance's husband took over his family's half of the business. A few years after that, he died, too-in a hotel room in Atlantic City. There was quite a whiff of scandal about it, but the family managed to ensure that very few facts were ever known.

Then Constance, a widow in her thirties with four young children, surprised everyone by taking her husband's place in the family business. She also disappointed the dismissive predictions that she'd soon wind up either selling out to the Powells or else bankrupting the company. Constance proved to be a dedicated, talented, and ruthless businesswoman. The founding Powell's immediate successor butted heads with her for about a decade before selling his shares to his nephew and leaving the company. Several more Powell men took his place over the years, but Constance increasingly became the captain of the ship and the driving force behind the retail empire's expanding success.

As I headed to the bathroom, I recalled that Helen's second husband had been a Powell. "And the less said about that, the better," Jingle had told me-before proceeding to say quite a bit about it. The Fenster-Powell marriage, which had been encouraged (or, rather, engineered) by Constance, soon spiraled into notorious public quarrels, private mutual loathing, and blatant infidelities.

It was through that hellacious marriage, followed by the divorce settlement a few years later, that Constance changed the balance of power by acquiring company stock that had always belonged to the Powells. That gave her the foothold she needed to start gradually squeezing them out of the business. Her strategy included taking their name off the company, which she reorganized as Fenster & Co. It took years of additional maneuvering to achieve her goal; but finally, the Iron Matriarch, who was by then in her seventies, ejected the Powells completely from the retail company which their family had co-founded and helped build into a business empire.

Ever since then, according to Jingle, "Around here, it's not a good idea to say a word that even rhymes with Powell."

Predictably, Constance's coup led to years of legal battles between the two families. But the Iron Matriarch fought the Powells so shrewdly that all their efforts eventually floundered. In the final years of her life, Jingle said, Constance seemed to have beaten them.

However, the Powells may have been biding their time rather than accepting defeat. They were reputedly planning a new legal assault on the Fensters, now that the Iron Matriarch was safely in her grave and the company was in the hands of her bickering heirs, none of whom had inherited her cool-headed business acumen (though I thought some of them had probably inherited her highly flexible morality). I suddenly realized, based on something he had said earlier, that Preston considered a new lawsuit a serious possibility.

But I wondered why the Powells would bother? It had all occurred years ago, and the woman behind those events was dead now. Why not just let the past go and move on? What could the Powells hope to gain from yet another legal battle after all this time?

Money and power, said a killer's voice in my head. It's always about money and power.

That was probably an accurate assessment of the bitter Powell-Fenster feud in all its permutations; but I recognized that voice and didn't like hearing it in my imagination. So I gave myself a hard mental shake and tried to think of something else. Nothing else came to mind, though.

Months after she had tried to kill me on a storm-swept promontory in Harlem, that awful woman was still haunting me, I realized. She had murdered three men, and she came far too close to killing the man I . . . Well, she came far too close to killing him, too. Because of me.

"Be honest with yourself, Esther," she said. "Would he be lying in agonized paralysis awaiting his death now if not for you?"

"He's still alive, and you're not," I muttered aloud to my private demon. "So get out of my head already, would you?"

Feeling a little shaky, I splashed cold water on my face in what had once been the private Powell bathroom. I supposed the stress of this weird day was getting to me, and the result was that she crept into my head again. Or maybe I'd opened the door to her by thinking about Constance Fenster, who was a similarly merciless woman (though presumably not a similarly homicidal one).

As I washed my hands in what had been the private bathroom of the last Powell who'd been a partner of the Fensters, I reflected that I wasn't sorry that the Iron Matriarch had died a few months before I ever came to work here. Jingle said she succumbed to pneumonia, a complication that arose after she'd undergone surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. I suspected that, although very ill and in her eighties by then, she had been a formidably ruthless employer, enemy, and mother right up until her dying breath.
                       
       
           



       
5





I took Satsy's new costume back down to the men's locker room on the fourth floor, where I tapped on the door and called hello before letting myself in. Life in the performing arts forces you to shed conventional physical modesty pretty quickly, so I didn't think any of the guys would be upset if I caught them in their briefs; but I wanted to give anyone who was naked a chance to cover up.

"I'm the only one here, and I'm perfectly decent," was the friendly reply to my warning. I recognized Super Santa's voice.

"Hi, Rick." I pushed open the door, entered the room, and went to hang up Satsy's replacement costume in his locker. Rick had evidently just arrived, since he was still in his street clothes. I said, "I see Miles tracked you down."

"Hi, Esther." He hung up his winter jacket in his locker. "It sounds like you guys had quite a morning."

"You heard what happened?"

"I was just in the break room. Twinkle and Satsy told me about it." He paused. "Their story was a little confusing. I'm still not really sure what happened."

"I feel the same way, and I was there."

Rick smiled at that. He had a solid, amiable face; nothing handsome or remarkable, but pleasant. Though still in his twenties, his hairline was receding, and it was easy to guess what he'd look like in middle age. He was a few inches under six feet tall, with a square, stocky build. What people mostly noticed about Rick, though, was his calm, reassuring manner.

"Actually," I said, "I told Satsy I'd check out the freight elevator. His story is so disturbing that . . . Well, it really seems like someone should take a look. And experience suggests we can't rely on Fenster's to do it."

Rick looked at his watch. "Jeff hasn't been on the floor that long, and I haven't clocked in yet-so, officially, I'm not even here. Why don't I come with you?"

"I was kind of hoping you'd offer," I admitted. The experience Satsy had described made me anxious about investigating the elevator on my own.

"Then let's go take a look," Rick said. "You're right about both things: Someone needs to do this, and Fenster's won't bother until someone actually gets hurt."

The store was keen on profits, obsessed with shoplifters, rigid about rules and punctuality . . . and very slack about safety.

I said, "Yeah, I'll bet you that despite Miles' promise to Jonathan's mother to have security ‘scour' this floor, they never even showed up."

"Who's Jonathan?"

"Oh. I guess Satsy didn't tell you that part of the story? Come on, I'll tell you on the way to the elevator."

Following the route which Satsy had mentioned to me earlier, we cut behind the solstice mural and then proceeded across the fourth floor, finally going through the "Employees Only" doors at the other end of Solsticeland and coming to a halt at the freight elevator. I pressed the button to call it-and saw from the numbers that lit up on the panel that it was currently down on the same level as the docks. So it had evidently been used since Satsy's scary experience. I wondered if anyone else had been terrorized inside its confines.