Free Festival of Deaths by Jane Haddam

up there and the cops are furious. He wasn’t supposed to have left the scene at all. Do you think it will make the papers, because Maria is with The Lotte Goldman Show ?”
    “I think I don’t have time for this conversation,” Carmencita said. “Here comes Maximillian with the women, and you know what that means. Fights are likely to start breaking out any minute.”
    “I heard DeAnna talking to Lotte about it and they were really very mysterious. DeAnna was saying how Prescott was saying that nobody could have done it who didn’t have a key, because the lock was locked when he got there and it was one of those old-fashioned locks that won’t lock with the door open and then you can pull the door shut and there you are. It was the kind of lock you had to use the key to lock once you got the door closed.”
    “Maria lived in an old building.”
    “I told Prescott you had a key to Maria’s apartment,” Sarah said. “I remember her saying so. You have hers and she has yours. In case either of you gets locked out.”
    Carmencita turned on her heel and gave Sarah Meyer the first long, direct look she’d ever given her. She took in Sarah’s lumpy weight and Sarah’s formless features and Sarah’s rash of blackheads along her chin.
    “What,” she asked, “is all this supposed to be about?”
    If it was supposed to be about anything, Sarah wasn’t saying. She gave Carmencita a little cat smile and backed away. When she reached the intersection in the corridors she turned and hurried away.
    “ Come on,” Shelly Feldstein’s voice said from somewhere inside. “Let’s get going, Carmencita, we’ve got this run-through to do before we can let the screaming hordes up and we’re running late.”
    “Right,” Carmencita said.
    “I’m going to change Lotte’s chair to the black—no, not the black, she’ll look like a hanging judge—to the navy blue one. I’m going to run. Are all your people ready to go?”
    All Carmencita’s people were ready to die of embarrassment. There was nothing she could do about it. She marched down to the platform and looked her men over. They hulked in their chairs, looking too big and too menacing by half. Shelley Feldstein either hadn’t noticed or approved of the effect.
    “Okay,” Carmencita said. “Why don’t we try sitting up straight?”
    If Carmencita Boaz had been in the sort of position the men sitting before her were in, she would have told any silly woman who asked her to sit up straight to go straight to hell—except that she would have done it politely, of course. But North Americans were different. They didn’t think like people in the rest of the world. Maybe they didn’t think.
    “Okay,” Carmencita said again, and the men stirred in their chairs and did their best to sit up straight.
    Up in the rafters, Itzaak whistled the first few bars of “As Time Goes By,” to let her know he was watching over her, and Carmencita relaxed.
    Whatever Sarah Meyer was up to, it was creepy. Whatever had happened to Maria Gonzalez’s apartment, it was creepy, too. Carmencita could ride above it all, serene and confident in the benevolence of the future, because Itzaak protected her. That was the secret of their relationship. Itzaak protected her in a spiritual way, and as long as he was near her, she felt all right.
    What she was going to do about that—what either of them were going to do about that—considering the problems they were going to have with religion and all the rest of it, she didn’t know. She just knew that she would much rather think about Itzaak Blechmann than about what might have happened to Maria, and that was that.
    Her charges were beginning to look like lumps of Silly Putty softening in the sun. Carmencita clapped her hands again, and they came to attention.

9
    D OWN AT THE OTHER end of the office suite, DeAnna Kroll was sitting in Lotte Goldman’s office, sitting on the desk and smoking the first cigarette she’d had in two and a half