Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  “Oh,” Nick said.

  Hammer Wade was on his feet. He had produced a small notebook and a pencil out of thin air. Maybe he had been holding them both all along, and Nick hadn’t noticed them. He scribbled something down with elaborate slowness, tore the page off the top of the pad and handed it to Nick.

  “Here,” he said. “That’s the address. I’ll call on ahead for you. If you need a job.”

  In the SuperHour Grocery, frozen food was limited to brands Nick had never heard of in boxes that looked old. He passed into the aisle with the potato chips in it and looked over what was there. That was better. There were Lay’s and Wise and State Line. There were Doritos tortilla chips and Fritos corn chips and the first bag of Cheese Waffies Nick had seen in years. He had gotten the job at Fountain of Youth, of course. Like everything else in this perfect day, his interview there had gone perfectly. Now his pockets were stuffed with brochures and business cards and his airline bag back at Tom’s apartment was full of scheme drawings for aerobic dance choreographies. Bring your body to the Fountain of Youth, Nick thought, and nearly started to laugh.

  He had a bag of pretzels in his hand and his mind on exercise clothes outlets—did he know where to find a Foot Locker in New Haven? Should he pick up some things when he went back to arrange his life in New York?—when he noticed the man in the aisle behind him, standing a foot away with his hands in his pockets and not doing anything at all. At first, Nick thought it was a jump. Some kid had seen him wandering around among the cholesterol killers, checked out the J. Press jacket, and decided he’d found an easy mark. Then Nick realized that the man was, in fact, a man, not a kid, and that he looked a lot like the man who had been at the checkout counter when Nick came in. Brothers, Nick thought absently. Nick looked back over his shoulder and saw the other one, still standing at the checkout counter. He was older than this one, and shorter.

  Nick put the bag of pretzels back on the shelf, very carefully. “Do you want something?” he asked the man standing behind him, very pleasantly, very calmly.

  The man looked away, toward the ceiling, toward the floor, gone. “You going to buy something?” he asked finally.

  “I’m thinking about it,” Nick said.

  “You don’t find what you’re looking for, I can help you.”

  “I don’t need any help.”

  “I help you, you’ll find what you’re looking for faster than you do it on your own.”

  “I don’t need any help,” Nick said again. “If I find something I want to eat, I’ll bring it up to the counter.”

  “You could be hours, looking for something you want to eat,” the man said. “You could leave without paying for anything. That wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  In the big stores, they were subtler than this, Nick thought. The store detectives followed you at a distance. The saleswomen hovered inches away from your elbow, but they were smart enough never to actually accuse. They had been trained in the ins and outs of lawsuits. Nick was hungry to the point where his stomach hurt. He hadn’t had a chance to eat anything substantial all day. He wasn’t hungry enough for this. He looked at the bags of Lay’s potato chips and sighed.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I think I’ll just get out of here.”

  “No,” the man at the counter said. “No, Jerry, don’t let him out of here until you see what’s under his coat.”

  The one called Jerry looked to the counter and then back to Nick. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Maybe that’s not a bad idea. Maybe I want to see what’s under your coat.”

  “Of course,” Nick said, still calm, still pleasant. “And if there doesn’t happen to be anything under my coat, anything that belongs to you, that is, I think I’ll just go see my lawyer.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” the man at the counter said. “Those people don’t have lawyers. They only got drug lawyers.”

  “I want to see what’s under your coat,” Jerry said.

  “No.”

  Move. Countermove. Impasse. Nobody knew what to do next. Nick put his hands in the pocket of his jacket—it really was only a jacket; where did these two jerks think he was supposed to be hiding a lot of bulky packages of snack food?—and started to walk toward the front door. When he got to the counter, he nodded to the man who was standing there, he didn’t know why. The man reached under the cash register and came out with a gun.

  It happened that fast. Move. Countermove. Impasse. Gun. The man behind the counter was hysterical and shaking. Nick Bannerman was scared to death.

  “Jesus Christ,” Nick said.

  “I want to see what’s under your coat,” the man behind the counter said. “Make him take his coat off, Jerry. I want to see what’s under his coat.”

  “Calm down,” Nick said. “I’m taking off my coat.”

  Nick unzipped his jacket and opened the flaps, so that the man could see. Then he took the jacket all the way off and laid it down on the counter.

  “There,” he said. “There’s nothing to see.”

  Jerry picked up the jacket and searched through it, feeling the pockets, feeling the lining. Then he put the coat down and turned away.

  “There’s nothing in it,” he told the man behind the counter.

  The man behind the counter got a mulish, angry look on his face. Nick thought he might be borderline mentally retarded. He was definitely dangerous.

  “There has to be something in it,” he insisted. “He’s been in here for five minutes. He has to have taken something.”

  “No,” Jerry said. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Search his pants,” the man behind the counter said.

  Nick picked up his jacket and put it back on again. “These pants are tight as hell,” he said. “I couldn’t hide a piece of Saran Wrap in them.”

  “Search his pants,” the man behind the counter repeated.

  Jerry reached across and grabbed the gun by the butt. He pushed at his brother’s hand until the gun was pointing at the ceiling. “Get out of here,” he told Nick. “We don’t want no niggers in here.”

  “The neighborhood is full of them,” the man behind the counter said. “They’re taking over. There isn’t going to be anybody else left.”

  Fighting this would only mean getting shot by the man behind the counter. The man behind the counter wanted to shoot something. He wanted to do it right away. Nick didn’t think he’d ever heard anybody call him that name before, never in his life. He’d heard about black people being called that name. He’d just never heard anybody actually use it.

  Nick walked out of the store. He was still hungry as hell. He was still tired. There wasn’t enough light out here and he was afraid of the dark.

  “Nigger nigger jungle bunny,” the man behind the counter screamed out after him.

  The words went bounding around the brick and concrete and old dry-wood, getting bigger and bigger, louder and louder, until no other sound seemed to be possible in the universe.

  Nick Bannerman was standing alone on a street corner at the end of his perfect day, feeling like he wanted to get his hands around the neck of the next white person he saw, and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until he heard the neck bones snap.

  6

  CHRISTIE MULLIGAN HAD BEGUN to develop a phobia for her telephone. It had started one week ago today, and now—at nine thirty on the night of Monday, December 6—it had grown into legendary wackiness, so that she couldn’t even pick up the receiver when she knew that the voice on the other end was going to be somebody she wanted to hear. Nine thirty on Monday nights was when Christie’s boyfriend called her from his dorm at the University of Chicago. That was the time they had both decided would be optimal, since it was a time when neither one of them expected ever to have anything else they wanted to do. Monday nights were dead boring in New Haven. Everybody had gotten over their weekend hangovers and gone back to work. Out in the common room, Christie Mulligan’s suitemates were quizzing each other for an anthropology test that was supposed to take place
at the end of the week. Christie was taking the same anthropology course. She ought to be out there with them, instead of lying here on her bed listening to the phone ring and ring and ring but not answering it.

  “Christie?” Tara’s voice, coming through the door, muffled. “Christie, are you all right? Your phone’s ringing.”

  “I’m fine,” Christie said. “I don’t want to answer it.”

  Consultation out in the common room. More muffled words, so muffled they were indecipherable. “Okay,” Tara said finally. “As long as we know you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine,” Christie said again.

  Her hand went to her chest, under her sweater, under her turtleneck, under the skimpy little bra she wore because she was so small-breasted she didn’t really need a bra at all. The lump was still there, in her left breast, just where it had been two weeks ago when she had gone in to see the doctor. It was less like a lump than a marble, planted just underneath the skin. It was a hard round ball that seemed to move when Christie touched it, but never went away.

  “This does not have to be the end of the world,” Dr. Hornig had said, one week ago, when the biopsy results came back. “Breast cancer is a curable condition as long as you catch it early enough to do something about it right away.”

  “Did we catch it early enough?” Christie asked.

  “Yes,” Dr. Hornig said. “We’re going to have to put you on radiation after the operation, but yes. But Christie, we have to do something about this right away.”

  Breast cancer.

  I can’t have breast cancer, Christie thought now. I’m too young to have it. Breast cancer happens to women who have been through menopause.

  The phone was sitting on a big black steamer trunk Christie had brought to Yale from her room at home in Bellmare, Ohio. The steamer trunk had belonged to Christie’s mother when she was a student at Vassar in the early 1970s. Christie’s mother had died of breast cancer at the age of twenty-seven, when Christie was five.

  The phone stopped ringing. Christie thought of David out there in Chicago, feeling half annoyed and half anxious because Christie had broken their covenant. That was what David always called what was going on between them. A covenant. David’s family were very religious Jews, and David like to give a biblical perspective to everything he could.

  Now that the phone was quiet, it was too quiet. Christie sat up and wondered if she should call David back. Then she wondered what she would talk to him about. It had been bad enough last week, when she had just found out and didn’t really believe it yet. It had been bad enough before she started to hide from the doctor.

  The doctor is only lying to me anyway, Christie told herself The doctor made a mistake. The doctor only wants to make a lot of money out of cutting me up. This thing is not really happening to me, and I won’t let them panic me into believing it is.

  Christie got off the bed and walked over to the phone. She tried to touch it and couldn’t. She walked over to the window and looked out at the quad. This was Jonathan Edwards College at Yale University, the place she had dreamed of being since she was old enough to know what a university was. She was a sophomore who was majoring in sociology. When she graduated, she was going to go to work for a congresswoman and learn how to get into politics.

  Christie went back across the room to the door that led to the common room and opened it up. Tara and Michelle were sprawled on the floor out there, two happy, slightly chubby nineteen-year-olds with a bucket of buttered popcorn sitting between them. Christie used to be slightly chubby, too, but over the last few months she had gotten bone thin.

  “Hi,” Tara said, not looking up from what she had spread across the floor to read.

  Michelle did look up. “You look sick,” she said. “You’ve been looking sick all week. Maybe you ought to check into the infirmary.”

  “We’re thinking of checking into a health club,” Tara said. “Look at what we found in the mail today. ‘A New Body for the New Year.’ Don’t you just love it?”

  “I’d love to have a new body,” Michelle said. “Six inches taller and twenty pounds thinner.”

  “The rumor’s all over campus that Dr. Bandolucci got hold of one of these and now she’s going to give a big lecture on the tyranny of slenderness. Can you imagine?”

  “Well,” Michelle said, “nobody could convict Martha Bandolucci of being oppressed by the tyranny of slenderness.”

  “Martha’s always being oppressed by something,” Tara said. “I keep waiting for her to start talking about how the shape of the banister rails in Woolsey Hall reflect the patriarchal obsession with reifying the female—”

  “Oh, my God,” Michelle said.

  “All those dykes over at the Women’s Revolutionary Caucus are going to be up in arms about it, too,” Tara said. “They’re probably going to picket. I’ve been telling Michelle we ought to sign up for this thing just to show the flag for real women.”

  “Don’t call yourself a real woman,” Michelle said. “You’ll end up getting us both in trouble for saying unnice things about homosexuals.”

  “I want to say unnice things about everybody,” Tara said. “That’s what I’m going to do as soon as I get out of here. I’m going to become the first female Howard Stern. I’m going to trash the world and get paid for it.”

  “Howard Stern makes a lot of money,” Michelle said.

  Christie sat down in the red beanbag chair and leaned over to pick up the brochure Tara had been reading. It was a full-color, first-rate professional production with the picture of a long-lined woman on the front flap that looked vaguely familiar. Christie tried to think of where she might have seen a picture of this woman before, but couldn’t. Magda Hale’s Fountain of Youth Work-Out, the smaller type said. That didn’t ring a bell, either.

  Christie dumped the brochure back on the floor. “Is that something that’s going on in New Haven?” she asked them.

  “The studio’s up on Prospect Street,” Michelle said. “I go by there every once in a while when I do tutoring at the Hispañola Center.”

  “She’s got one of those half-hour shows on cable, too,” Tara said. “I think she’s kind of famous. She’s supposed to be I don’t know how ancient, except it never shows on her, if you know what I mean.”

  “It sounds more like California than New Haven,” Christie said.

  “According to the brochure, they’ve got studios in California.” Tara stretched her legs and yawned. “It’s just the usual thing, Christie. Eat right. Exercise right. Do what you’re told to do and your life will be different. It’s all a pile of crap.”

  Michelle giggled. “It’s just that this pile of crap is getting a big push from an advertising agency, and they’re having a kind of after-Christmas sale where you can get cut rates if you sign up now. I’ve been telling Tara that we ought to go. Really. We could use something to get us motivated. We could use something to help us lose a little weight. We aren’t going to do it on our own.”

  “I don’t want to do it,” Tara said. “I don’t want to succumb to the tyranny of slenderness.”

  Christie leaned over and picked up the brochure again. Magda Hale looked twenty-six, not ancient. The models on the inside were all tall and thin and blond, if they were women, and muscular and sexy, if they were men. Diet and exercise are the keys to freedom, the text on the inside read. Freedom from fatigue. Freedom from aging. Freedom from disease and early death.

  Christie folded the brochure into its original thirds and smoothed it out on her knee. Someone had smeared popcorn butter on it.

  “I might be interested in something like this,” she said carefully.

  You would have thought she had just expressed an interest in human sacrifice. Tara narrowed her eyes. Michelle got suddenly interested in stray threads on the carpet.

  “What would you be interested in something like this for?” Tara asked. “You don’t need to lose weight. You’re too thin as it is.”

  “You’ve been losing a lo
t of weight lately,” Michelle said. “And you haven’t been eating the way you used to.”

  “I’ve been eating as much as I can,” Christie said.

  “So maybe you are sick,” Michelle said. “Maybe you really should go talk to somebody at the infirmary.”

  “We were thinking maybe you’d gotten one of those eating disorders,” Tara said bluntly. “I mean, okay, so you’re not refusing to eat. We’ve seen you eat. But maybe you’ve started throwing it all up when you’re finished.”

  “Have you ever seen me throw anything up?” Christie asked. “We head for the ladies room together half the time when we’re out. Have you ever seen me throw up anything but too much beer?”

  “That’s what I told her,” Michelle said.

  “I’ve just been tired lately, that’s all,” Christie said. “And I’ve been a little depressed. Over things with David, and you know, that junk. And things with my father. Which haven’t been going well. As usual.”

  “Oh,” Michelle said.

  “I wouldn’t go home for Christmas if I could think of a way to get out of it.” Christie suddenly realized that this was true. “I don’t want to see my father. I don’t want to see David. I keep trying to come up with an independent study project I’d have to do a lot of work on, but I haven’t been able to talk anybody into anything. Didn’t that thing say it was going on for the week between Christmas and New Year’s?”

  “That’s what it said.” Tara wasn’t really buying this. Christie could tell. “ ‘A New You for the New Year.’ I wouldn’t want to be a new me. I like the old me.”

  “That’s just advertising hype.” Christie brushed it away.

  “I wish it wasn’t just advertising hype,” Michelle said. “I’d love to be a new me. I’d love to have it all together for once. If you really want to go, Christie, I’ll come back after Christmas and go with you. It might be fun.”