Dear Old Dead (37 page)

As for white people, DeAnna Kroll usually got on quite well with them. She got on especially well with the long-term staff of
The Lotte Goldman Show,
many of whom she had known for over fifteen years.
The Lotte Goldman Show
had been DeAnna Kroll’s own personal idea, back in the days when she was still living her job from day to day, convinced that any second now she was going to be fired and sent right back to where she’d started from. Unlike the other young women at the other desks crammed into the small square room called Programming and Development, DeAnna had not started in Rye or at Wellesley. She hadn’t even started in school. She’d been sitting in a two-room apartment on 145th Street and Lenox Avenue, counting out the twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents left of her welfare check and wondering how in God’s name she was going to feed the baby for the next two weeks, when she got word that she’d passed her high school equivalency exam. She had been eighteen years old. Her new baby had been eight months old. The baby who had provided the occasion for her dropping out of school had just turned three. There were people who made the kind of big leaps DeAnna had made in the years since who said they didn’t remember any of it, it all went by in a blur. DeAnna thought they were full of shit. She remembered all of it, thank you very much, from her first job interview to her first apartment in midtown to the endless interview with the admissions director of the Brearley School, where she wanted to send her daughters. DeAnna remembered all of it and would just as soon forget.

The night doorman at the Hullboard-Dedmarsh was asleep in his chair. DeAnna pressed her face to the glass and rapped as sharply as she could with the edge of one of the gold rings on her right hand. On the other side of the dimly lit foyer, she could see a shapeless form stretched out on a leather couch. That would be the driver who was supposed to pick up the Siamese twins at the airport, and apparently hadn’t. In the middle of the foyer there was a bright tall sign, with red letters on a white background, leaning on a rickety wooden tripod. The sign said,

MY SIAMESE TWIN IS A TRANSVESTITE.

DeAnna swung cornrows over her shoulder and knocked again.

At the check-in station, the doorman stirred. On the couch, the driver turned just enough to make DeAnna think he was going to fall off. He didn’t. DeAnna rapped for a third time and sent up a prayer that her chauffeur wouldn’t decide to take off for parts unknown. On her way up, DeAnna had thought there would be places she could get to in this city that would be safe. Now she knew better.

The doorman jerked in his chair, unbalanced himself and began to fall. The fall did what DeAnna’s rapping had failed to do and woke him up. He saw the big black face staring at him from the window and leapt to his feet, imagining God knew what. DeAnna closed her eyes and counted to ten.

She had gotten to eight when she heard the sound of the key in the lock. She opened her eyes again and stepped back so that the doorman could let her in. Then she gave him a tight little smile—his name was Jack Pilchek, but she made a habit of not remembering it—and marched across the foyer to the couch where the driver was sleeping.

“Prescott,” she said in her second-to-loudest voice. She saved her loudest voice for screaming fights with her younger daughter, who had just turned twenty and decided that she’d really much rather be a street person than a student at one of America’s most expensive private colleges, but she wanted to be a street person in Reeboks. DeAnna hated Reeboks. She kicked the edge of the couch with her Gucci-shod toe and said, “Prescott, come, on, wake up, tell me what’s going on here.”

Prescott turned, stirred, sat up. His eyes were red and his face was lined. DeAnna thought he must once have been a fine-looking man, in that fine-boned Waspy way that characterized President Bush and the nonethnic presidents of Yale. She also thought he must once have had one hell of a drinking problem.

Prescott ran his hand through his hair and yawned. “Ms. Kroll. Hi. Sorry. Just a minute.”

“Siamese twins,” DeAnna reminded him.

“Right.” Prescott blinked. “They weren’t at the airport.”

“You mean they weren’t on their plane?”

“There was no plane for them to be on. It was canceled.”

“Canceled.”

“I talked to the woman at the reception desk. The—whatever. The airline.”

“And?”

“And there’s some kind of awful fog in London, so there aren’t any planes leaving from there. There haven’t been all night. Our night. I mean—”

“I know what you mean. Did you call Maria Gonzalez?”

“I tried. I called her office and I called here.”

“And?”

Prescott shrugged. “No answer. No answer. No answer. So I came back here and Jack and I went looking around the building, but you’re usually the first one here on tape days and Ms. Gonzalez wasn’t, so we called you.”

“Right,” DeAnna said. She passed back to the check-in desk and tapped her long red fingernails against the laminated edge. Maria Gonzalez was the talent coordinator for
The Lotte Goldman Show.
She was supposed to discover the talent, book the talent, and make sure the talent got to the studio to tape. DeAnna supposed it was wrong to call Maria’s charges
talent,
but she didn’t have any other word for them.
The Lotte Goldman Show
had a problem format. People got on and poured out their most intimate secrets, their most exquisite pain. People cried and screamed and broke down into convulsive fits. People told other people how their lives had been ruined and how they needed something more than what they had to want to go on living. What most of them seemed to need was more and more sex.

And more athletic sex.

And more unusual sex.

And more ecstatic sex.

And—

For DeAnna Kroll, sex was a highly inadvisable activity prone to landing a woman with God only knew how many problems, not the least of which was a man who wanted more, but DeAnna Kroll was not a fool. Her original idea for
The Lotte Goldman Show
had been “Dr. Ruth with pizzazz.” Her development of it had been somewhat eclectic, but her eyes had remained firmly on the goal. Sex, scandal, and celebrities, that was the ticket. That was how DeAnna Kroll had made
The Lotte Goldman Show
the most successful talk show in the history of television. One week a station in St. Louis had thrown Lotte up against Cosby and
Star Trek,
and Lotte had still pulled down a thirty-five share.

At the moment, Lotte was in danger of pulling down no share at all, because Lotte was in danger of having no show to tape for this afternoon. The Siamese twins were stuck in London. Maria Gonzalez—

DeAnna picked up Jack’s phone and dialed Maria at home. The phone rang and rang and wasn’t answered. DeAnna hung up and dialed Maria’s office upstairs. There was no answer there, either. Then DeAnna wondered for a moment if she ought to be worried. Maria was a relatively new hire. She wasn’t very dependable and she hadn’t been working out too well. She was also very nearly as sex obsessed as the show’s fans. She was probably asleep in some man’s bed. Even so, New York being New York, it usually made sense to worry.

DeAnna rubbed her hands against her face. “Okay,” she said, to nobody in particular. “We start from square one. Prescott?”

“Yes, Ms. Kroll?”

“I want you to go get Sarah Meyer. She lives on the East Side—just a minute, I’ve got the address in my book—Call her from the car and tell her we’ve got an emergency and then bring her here. Can you do that?”

“Yes, Ms. Kroll.”

“When you get Sarah here, wait. I’m going to need you to do a few more things. Can you work overtime tonight?”

“It’s this morning. Of course I can work overtime. I like the money.”

“Good. Go get Sarah. We’re going to have to think of something quick and then we’re going to have to set it up. God, I’ve got to
think
.”

“I’ve got to go,” Prescott said.

“Go.” DeAnna picked up Jack’s phone again. Then she put it down again. She really ought to go up to her office. She really ought to make this next phone call in a private place. She really ought to get up close to Maria’s files to see who it might be possible to get at the last minute. She really ought to do something about this screaming headache. Maybe there was nothing she could do about the headache. She was too phobic about drugs to take aspirin.

She stalked away from Jack’s desk to the elevators and called back over her shoulder: “If Maria comes in, tell her I want to see her ASAP.”

She stepped through the elevator doors and punched the button for the twentieth floor.

The next thing she had to do was call Lotte.

L
OTTE GOLDMAN HAD COME
to the United States from Israel when she was nineteen years old. She had come to Israel from Germany when she was eight. That first trip was something she remembered in great detail, but it was like staring into a blinding white light. First there was the big black English car that had driven up to the back door of their house in Heidelberg. Then there was the thick brown blanket Lotte’s mother had wrapped around her before laying her in the car’s trunk. First there was Lotte’s small brother David, whimpering in the dark. Then the door of the trunk came crashing down over their heads and Lotte had her larger hands around David’s small ones, holding tight as she whispered, “
shh, shh, shh
.” That was the fall of 1942, and if they had waited even a month longer it would have been too late. It had been too late for both of Lotte’s parents, who had disappeared from the face of the earth, never to be seen or heard from again. All Lotte had left of them was a pair of photographs that said nothing to her at all. The stiff tall man didn’t look like anyone she had ever known. The pretty woman with her wide face and gentle eyes was just another antique picture. The memory of escape had blotted out everything around it. It had obliterated all of Lotte’s earliest life. David professed to remember, and she supposed that she believed him. She never could.

When the call came from DeAnna Kroll, Lotte was already awake, sitting up in bed, reading her way through a novel by Dorothy Cannell. Dorothy Cannell wrote murder mysteries of the humorous, rational sort, which was the sort Lotte liked. There had been very little reason and very little humor in her life. There had also been very little sleep. In the early days after the escape, Lotte had been unable to sleep because of nightmares. Then the world war had ended and the Israeli War of Independence had begun, and she had been awakened every night by gunfire and tears. Then there had been coming to America, and college and graduate school, and—it was thoroughly incredible how many things there were in life that could keep a person awake. Of course, by now, all those things had been eliminated. Lotte didn’t have to worry about money any more. The show seemed to generate the stuff out of thin air, so that now in her old age Lotte was not just financially secure, but positively rich. She owned this enormous Park Avenue apartment and a house in the Catskills. She had a closet full of idiotically expensive clothes and a financial consultant who took her to lunch at the Four Seasons to discuss aggressive strategies for capital maximization. Lotte didn’t have to worry about David any more, either. He was a rabbi with a big congregation on the Philadelphia Main Line. He had a wife and three children and a black Persian cat. His wife kept a kosher home and invited Lotte to it at regular intervals. In fact, David’s wife did better than that. Once a year, Lotte took the show on the road for a ten-city series of location programs. One of those programs was always filmed in Philadelphia during Hanukkah. When then happened, Rebekkah invited the entire cast and crew and really threw a party.

No, Lotte thought, there was really no worry in her life to keep her awake. She was just used to being awake. She went to bed late. She rose early. There was nothing she could do about it. She only wished she could convince DeAnna Kroll of that, because DeAnna Kroll always apologized too much when she called in the middle of the night.

The truth was, Lotte Goldman liked DeAnna Kroll very much. She had liked DeAnna Kroll from the moment the two of them met, in the back of a classroom at Columbia University, where Lotte was teaching a class on abnormal psychology. It had been an auspicious meeting if there ever was one. DeAnna had needed her score, as she put it, to make it necessary for Bart Gradon to promote her. She had been very direct about that aspect of the proposition. In return, Lotte had found herself being very direct about her side of it all. Her own honesty had astonished her. She had told DeAnna Kroll just how sick she was of psychiatry, and how much stupidity she thought it was. She had told DeAnna Kroll just how sick she was of Columbia University. There was something pinched and ungiving about the academic life that Lotte had never liked. On the day DeAnna Kroll had walked into her classroom, Lotte had just received her promotion to full professor, and it had left her in despair. The whole situation was crazy. It was very wrong to despise the good things life gave you when so many people had nothing at all. Lotte hadn’t been able to help herself. It was not logical to be depressed about good fortune. Lotte didn’t think she cared.

“Listen,” DeAnna Kroll had told her, with a sharp wind coming through an open window at their backs and making them both shiver, “it probably won’t work. But if it does work, there’s no place it can’t go.”

Well, it had worked.

It had worked in spades.

And so had Lotte and DeAnna.

There was no accounting for it, but DeAnna Kroll was the closest friend Lotte Goldman had ever had, and she had a feeling that the compliment was returned. For some reason or the other, they fit.

When the phone rang, Lotte put down her book and picked up without a second’s worry that what might be coming on the other end of the line was bad news about David or Rebekkah or the children. It was going to be DeAnna Kroll, and Lotte knew it.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, without bothering to say hello, “a saboteur got onto the set and blew it up. Bart Gradon saw yesterday’s show and died of embarrassment. We have been invaded by representatives of the Moral Majority.”