Free Festival of Deaths by Jane Haddam Page A

years, looking frazzled. Lotte was sitting in her own desk chair and putting on the persona she would have to maintain in front of the cameras. It never ceased to amaze DeAnna just how good Lotte was at this. Lotte could commit a bloody murder at noon and be ready to go on the air as if nothing had happened by 12:02.
    “You’ve got less than a minute before you’re supposed to be on the set,” DeAnna told Lotte. “You’d better get moving.”
    “I’ll get moving when I finish my cigarette. Are those policemen coming here?”
    “Later this morning.”
    “Whatever happened didn’t happen here.”
    “We don’t know that anything happened at all,” DeAnna said. “Maria might have messed up the apartment on her own. She may have taken off for Acapulco. She might have been dealing drugs or robbing us blind or doing something else we don’t know about.”
    “Maria was a very clean woman,” Lotte said. “And if the police are coming here, we have to wait for them. I’m already exhausted.”
    “You can stretch out on the couch in my office. I’ll send Sarah Meyer over to one of those boutiques on Third Avenue to buy you a pretty little afghan.”
    “Sarah Meyer will come back with a hair shirt.”
    “Come on,” DeAnna said. “We’re all set up. We’ve got an audience waiting. We’re going to get a long day. Might as well at least start to get it over with.”
    “That’s what I like about you,” Lotte said, getting up. “You’re such a comfort.” She hesitated next to the desk, stubbing her cigarette out in the crystal ashtray DeAnna had given her for Christmas last year. “Dee,” she said, “do you think something serious has happened to Maria?”
    “It looks that way, doesn’t it?”
    “Yes it does. I hate to say it, but I’m glad it didn’t happen here. Whatever it was. I’d feel responsible for it.”
    “I just feel guilty I was so damned pissed at her earlier tonight,” DeAnna said. “Is all this a bunch of sentimental crap, or what?”
    “It’s a bunch of sentimental crap,” Lotte said firmly. “Oh, dear. I’ve forgotten my flower. You know. The thing I wear to hide my microphone. I forgot to take it off after the taping yesterday and then I must have forgotten to put it back on when I left the apartment today—”
    “Never mind. We’ve got tons of that stuff in the storeroom. I’ll get you something before we tape. Go on out to the set.”
    “I will. Are you sure you can handle all this business with the police by yourself?”
    “Until they get tired of talking to me.”
    “Well, it if gets to be too much for you, send them to me.”
    “Right,” DeAnna said, pushing Lotte toward the door.
    Lotte Goldman was a dear woman, but she’d have about as much success at dealing with the NYPD as a worshiper of Kali would have had dealing with Savonarola. DeAnna pushed her out into the corridor and pointed her in the direction of the studio.
    “Go,” she said. “I’ll go get you a flower.”
    “Yes, Dee, I am going.”
    DeAnna turned away and marched off in the other direction.
    It was after six o’clock in the morning now and the office had started to bustle. The clerk typists wouldn’t be in until nine, but all the private secretaries had started to arrive, used to keeping their bosses’ hours. DeAnna passed women setting up coffee urns and putting out memo pads and yawning into makeup mirrors. She went by one young woman who was saying to another, “I can’t handle all this women’s lib shit. I’d rather be married.”
    There, DeAnna thought, was a woman who needed psychiatric help.
    DeAnna got to the corridor the storeroom was on, walked down to the end of it and opened the door. She put her hand inside to turn on the light switch and got nothing at all. Somehow it figured that the light would go out in the one place she had to get something from with less than a minute before taping. She couldn’t change the light bulb herself, not unless she knew where to find