Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  “I’m not the one who needs Fountain of Youth,” she said. “Linda is the one who could use it.”

  Steve didn’t answer. Virginia put the flyer back down on the bar and walked out of the living room. This house was full of long, cool hallways, their blank walls dotted with framed and glass-fronted prints. The prints were all pen-and-ink life studies, picked up on the streets of Athens and Vienna for a dollar or two American apiece. That was one of the things she and Steve had done for a while, in the days when she was supposed to be trying to get pregnant. Go to Europe. Buy street art. Come back pretending that you’d stumbled over a real find. It was all crap, as far as Virginia could see, just like that business about trying to have a baby. If Steve had really wanted her to have a baby, she would have had one. She knew Steve.

  The kitchen was large and spotless and full of too many pieces of equipment. It had two refrigerators and three sinks. It had metal mold pans hanging from the beams and stainless-steel baskets full of specialty items—corn huskers, apple corers, hamburger shapers—on all the counters. There was a machine that did nothing but make heart-shaped waffles. There was another machine that did nothing but roll six different sizes of meatballs. The doors of one of the refrigerators were covered with snapshots held up by plastic novelty magnets. A snapshot of Steve and Virginia in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York was held up by a bright yellow plastic banana. A snapshot of Steve and Virginia in the Virgin Islands was held up by a plastic tomato with glasses and a mustache and a pork pie hat. Virginia opened the knife drawer and looked through it until she found the small onion chopper with its honed tip and brown wood handle. It was hardly as long as her own small hand. She put the onion chopper in the pocket of her trousers and shut the drawer. She heard Steve moving along the carpet in the hallway and went out into the center of the room, so that when he came in he wouldn’t know where she had been.

  “I just thought I’d check up on you,” he said, when he found her standing at the center island, looking through the vegetable bins in its side for a carrot to munch on. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t about to pull something.”

  “I’m just getting myself something to eat,” Virginia said. “Low fat, low calorie. Once I don’t have you around to cook for, maybe I’ll adopt the Fountain of Youth way of life.”

  “I’ll be out of here in half an hour.”

  “That’s nice. Will you be leaving me any money in the bank account? Will you be covering the credit card bills?”

  “I’ve got the finances all worked out. I’ve got a lawyer. You can have the house.”

  “There’s a mortgage on the house,” Virginia said. “And it would be impossible to sell in this market. Nobody’s buying houses like this in New England these days.”

  “We’ll work it out. You’re not going to starve, Virginia. We’re not poor. And I won’t be leaving my job for at least another year.”

  “Leaving your job,” Virginia said. “To go out and live with Linda on her horse farm.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “How nice for you.”

  Steve was finally angry. “I don’t need this sarcasm, Virginia. I don’t need this bullshit. All I’m trying to do is give myself a second chance. After all the work I’ve put in around here over the years, I think I’m due.”

  “Maybe I think I’m due a little something, too,” Virginia said.

  Steve turned his back to her. “Maybe I don’t think I have to stand here and put up with this. I’m going to pack. I’ll be out of here before you know it.”

  The kitchen door swung on its hinges. The sound of footsteps on the carpet in the hall was heavy and blunt. Virginia waited until she was sure that Steve was gone and not coming back. Then she let herself out the kitchen door into their attached garage. It was a big garage, big enough for four cars, although they only had three. The little blue Ferrari was supposed to belong to Steve. The Mercedes two-door was supposed to belong to Virginia. The Lincoln Town Car was supposed to belong to the two of them together.

  Virginia would have liked to spare her own little Mercedes, but she knew that would never work. Once she set out to do a thing, she always made sure to do it absolutely right.

  First she got the door to the kitchen locked firmly behind her. Then she got the onion chopper out of her trouser’s pocket. Then she walked over to the Ferrari and went to work on the tires.

  Virginia Hanley didn’t know what she was going to do about this situation in the long run, but she did know this: her husband wasn’t leaving this house until she was damned good and ready to see him go.

  5

  RIGHT UP UNTIL THE time he walked into the SuperHour Grocery on Tamsonville and Howe, Nick Bannerman was having a good day. In fact, he was having a great day, one of those days when everything had gone so perfectly, it seemed only a matter of time before he was able to fly, or walk on water, or live forever. Even being back in New Haven hadn’t made him depressed, and being back in New Haven almost always made him depressed. Nick Bannerman believed in burning bridges. He had been a student here, six years ago. Now he was supposed to be out in the great world, not hanging around the university as if life would never be any better than it had been the night before he graduated. Nick barely remembered the night before graduation, because he, like everybody else he knew, had been dead drunk. He did remember the guys who had come up every weekend or so for a year after they were supposed to be gone, hanging around looking like they couldn’t find anybody new to talk to. Nick wanted to be remembered on the quad at Timothy Dwight College as a winner: an affirmative action baby who had made it. The underground word at Timothy Dwight, and at all the other residential colleges at Yale, was that affirmative action babies only made it if they learned to suck the federal teat and went to work for EEOC.

  Nick Bannerman went into the SuperHour Grocery because he was close to starving, and it was the only place he could see in Tom Levardi’s dark and frightening neighborhood where he might get something to eat. There weren’t any restaurants in screaming distance and he couldn’t find a pizza place in the yellow pages that was willing to deliver. Tom Levardi had been one of Nick Bannerman’s’ suitemates at Timothy Dwight, and the first one Nick thought of when he got the call yesterday to come out and audition. Tom Levardi was still at Yale, in the graduate school now. He had been a scholarship student with no money to speak of when Nick had first known him. He was a scholarship student with no money to speak of still.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” Nick had said on the phone last night. “I’m not expecting to get this thing. I’m not even expecting to get taken seriously. I thought I’d buy us a bottle of wine and come pass out on your floor when this was all over.”

  “I’ve got a late class,” Tom had said. “You’ll have to pass out on my floor after ten o’clock.”

  The only real problem here was the time. Nick had been due at his audition at ten forty-five in the morning. That had meant he’d had to take a train out of New York at just after eight o’clock. He thought he was going to have a long day in New Haven before he was able to settle down in Tom’s living room and lick his wounds. In the end, he had decided to go about it as aggressively as possible. Being aggressive would at least take his mind off just how dire his circumstances were, which meant at least as dire as every other nonworking actor’s in New York, black or white. Nick didn’t have any money. He didn’t have any prospects of getting any money. He didn’t have a job and he didn’t have a part. It was all par for the course.

  The first he realized that his luck was going to change was at the station in New Haven, just after he got off the train. He was dressed up in his usual preppy-go-to-Yale style—necessary for the audition, he thought—but since that rarely made any difference to what other people saw when they looked at him, he was wearing comfortable rubber-soled shoes for what he was sure was going to be a very long walk uptown. He could have tried to take a bus, but it had been years since he rode the buses in New Haven. He didn’t have
the ambition to look up the schedules. He went out onto the sidewalk with his plastic Delta Airlines flight bag under his arm and turned in the direction he thought would take him up past the Knights of Columbus headquarters building, although he wasn’t sure. His grasp of the geography in this part of town was hazy. He started to cross the street in the middle of the block and was stopped by the blast of a car horn. He was jaywalking. The landscape down here was forbidding and bleak, all concrete and dirt and ancient advertising. It was the kind of place where it would be too easy to end up dead, in spite of the fact that it seemed to be inhabited by nobody at all.

  The car that was honking at him was a cab. It was still parked at the curb in front of the train station, and the driver was leaning out his window, waving his hand.

  “Hey,” the driver said, when Nick turned around. “Hey. You going up there? You going to Yale?”

  The words made sense but the context didn’t. The driver was white. White cabdrivers did not offer to pick up young black men, not even when “young” meant “twenty-something” and the young black men had bought their sports jackets at J. Press. Hell, Nick thought, black cab-drivers didn’t offer to pick up young black men, not with the way things were these days, not in New York. Things might be different in New Haven, but that difference wouldn’t explain this. Nick felt a tingle in his spine, the way he did when he thought there was somebody following him down the street back on the Upper West Side. Maybe this guy was a nut. Maybe he had a Colt automatic in the glove compartment, and he was itching to use it.

  “Hey,” the driver called again.

  Nick recrossed the street. The driver was youngish, maybe younger than Nick himself. He had thick dark hair and the rounded face of someone who was already spending too much time drinking too many beers in front of too many televised football games. Clipped to the visor over the steering wheel, Nick could see a bumper sticker that read: “Not the Bills, Not Again.”

  Nick stopped a good foot from the car. “I’m not going to Yale. I’m going to the Carlisle Theater.”

  “On foot?” the driver asked.

  “I thought it would be a nice day for a walk.”

  The driver didn’t respond to this. It was a terrible day for a walk. It was dark and cold and damp. This neighborhood was not one of those places sane people wanted to walk in.

  “The thing is,” the driver said, “I’m supposed to go off, but I’m supposed to have a fare before I go uptown, and I haven’t got a fare. I’ve been here twenty-five minutes, I still don’t have a fare. You looked like you could be going to Yale.”

  Nick explained where the Carlisle Theater was. Out past the Old College and the art museum, toward the Bowl but not that far. Turn left. Turn right. The place with the pink marquee and the mime cutouts out front. The driver consulted his city map and nodded.

  “I remember that place,” the driver said. “They did that play there last year, supposed to be about AIDS, all the actors on the stage were naked. Actresses, too. Supposed to be experimental theater.”

  “Right,” Nick said. He’d heard about that one, too.

  “I could take you up there,” the driver said. “I mean, it’s close enough, you know? I wouldn’t have to get another fare from there. And I’m beat to hell, if you get my drift.”

  Nick got his drift. He also got something else. As much as he might want a cab—and he did want one; oh, he definitely did—he had only fifty dollars and a return trip ticket to New York to his name. He really shouldn’t spend the money.

  “You could even smoke if you wanted to,” the driver said. “I mean, I don’t smoke, but I’m not one of those health Nazis. You get me?”

  What Nick got was this: there were other people coming out of the train station, white men in business suits, white women in long skirts and thin belts over their sweaters. This driver had not had to settle his hopes on Nick Bannerman. What was even more surprising was that the decision to settle on Nick Bannerman had, as far as Nick could tell, nothing at all to do with race. Nothing. Being black had not worked in Nick’s favor in this case. It had not worked to Nick’s disadvantage. It had simply been irrelevant. The driver was looking for somebody who looked like he might be on his way to Yale. Nick was dressed like somebody who might be on his way to Yale. That was it.

  Never scorn a miracle, Nick’s grandmother used to say—and Nick’s grandmother was no high cracker chewing tobacco on the porch of a shanty in South Carolina. She had graduated first in her class at Howard University and gone on to be the first black woman ever to take a medical degree from Johns Hopkins. She was a power and a personality and a principled atheist. But miracles were miracles.

  Nick opened the door behind the driver’s seat and climbed into the cab. That millennium called the race-blind society was not likely to come to fruition in Nick’s lifetime, but he saw nothing wrong with enjoying little pieces of it when they happened to show up.

  “The Carlisle Theater,” Nick said solemnly.

  The driver pulled out onto the road. “They’re going to do it again,” he said morosely. “The Buffalo Bills, I mean. Five times to the Superbowl. Five times to the pits. Wait and see.”

  After that, the day had been one miracle after another, a domino theory of miracles all the way down the line. First there was the Carlisle Theater, which was one of those places every actor in New York wanted a piece of, but most of them never got. The Carlisle didn’t pay much, and it was all the way out in Connecticut, but it had prestige. “New” and “experimental” and “important” plays were staged first at the Carlisle. Critics came out from New York in droves. The list of actors and actresses who had gone on from Carlisle productions to win Tonys and Emmys and Academy Awards was as long as a small telephone book. The list of those who had gone on to make money was as long as a decent dictionary. Getting a significant part in a play being put on at the Carlisle, even a bad play, was like picking up a little winner in the lottery. The dividends went on paying out for twenty years.

  The reason Nick hadn’t expected to get the part at the Carlisle, or even to be taken seriously there, was because he knew perfectly well that his agent hadn’t told the Carlisle’s director that Nick was black.

  “Telling him you’re black,” Sherry had said, “would just make an issue out of it. I’ve read this script, Nick. And he asked me to send him someone I thought would work for it, someone new, without a big reputation. The part isn’t black. The part isn’t white. The part is a psychiatrist.”

  In Nick’s experience, when the part was “a psychiatrist,” everybody on earth read that to mean “a white psychiatrist.” He got out of the cab prepared to be told he would have to go back to New York without ever being given a chance to read. He checked in at the box office—half an hour early, a bad move in and of itself—and went to sit in the theater to wait. It was too dark for him to read his copy of Time magazine. He was too tired to do anything serious like balance his checkbook or sort through the little stack of mail that had piled up in his apartment over the past week and that he hadn’t bothered to open yet. Most of it was past-due notices on bills, anyway. The Carlisle was a small theater with plush seats set into a steep incline. The stage was a jutting semicircular thrust that felt too big for the rest of the room.

  The director was a fat man who seemed to be dressing in imitation of Wolfman Jack. He came out onto the middle of the stage, looked Nick up and down and said, “Interesting.”

  “Interesting?” Nick asked him.

  “Sherry is an interesting woman,” the director said. “You agree with me?”

  “Sure,” Nick didn’t think of Sherry as an interesting woman. Sherry was his agent.

  “Read for me,” the director said.

  The director’s name was Hammer Wade. It probably hadn’t been, in the beginning, but Nick wasn’t going to bring that up. He got his copy of the script out of the flight bag and climbed onto the stage. He found the page Hammer Wade wanted him to read from and plunged right in. Under ordinary circ
umstances, Nick was something of a method actor. He liked to think about his motivation and have somebody cue him when he felt ready to gear up. This time, since he really didn’t think there was any chance, he just read what was on the page with as much emotion as he could manage and got it over with.

  When Nick was done, Hammer Wade sat in the first row of audience seats, drumming his fingers against his knees and looking thoughtful. Nick felt like an asshole, or a prize cow. He always did when he had to wait up on a stage while somebody stared at him. The wait went on long enough so that Nick started to get angry. He wanted to climb down into the audience and tell Hammer Wade to stuff his precious experimental script up his precious experimental ass.

  “Okay,” Hammer Wade said finally.

  “Okay, what?” Nick asked.

  “Okay you’ll do,” Hammer Wade said. “We start work in three weeks. Maybe it’s four. Right after New Year’s—”

  “It’s four,” Nick said, feeling a little dazed. “I’ll do?”

  “—We pay like shit and we don’t start paying until rehearsals get into gear,” Hammer Wade was going on, “so you’re probably going to need a job if you’re going to stay around New Haven, and I want you to stay around New Haven because I want you to do some publicity. We’re going to get great publicity. You know how to dance?”

  Nick knew how to dance. He’d taken lessons. He’d taken millions of lessons. “I didn’t think there was any dancing in this part,” he said stiffly.

  “It’s not for the part,” Hammer Wade explained. “It’s for the job. If you need a job to tide you over for the next month. It’s for Fountain of Youth.”

  Nick was feeling very dizzy. He was happy, yes, but he was definitely dizzy. He wanted to sit down and put his head between his legs.

  “Is ‘Fountain of Youth’ a play?” he asked.

  “Nah,” Hammer Wade said. “It’s one of those exercise studio places. Big deal, got branches out in California. Woman who owns the business is a friend of mine. They’ve got some deal going with a tour and special introductory classes and that kind of shit. It’s capitalist bourgeois as hell. They’re looking for an aerobics instructor.”