Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  “They wouldn’t let you stay at the college,” Tara said. “You wouldn’t have any place to sleep.”

  “There are hotels in New Haven,” Christie said.

  Tara got up off the floor. “I think this is a terrible idea,” she told them. “I can’t believe either one of you is considering it. It costs five hundred dollars just to go up there, never mind what meals and room are going to run. And what for?”

  “Maybe we just want to take some time out and bounce around for a while,” Michelle said resentfully. “Why do you have to make an issue about everything? You make fun of the Women’s Revolutionary Caucus, but you’re just as bad.”

  “I’m not just as bad,” Tara said. “I’m just talking common sense.”

  Christie got up off the beanbag chair and wandered over to the common room window. Like the window in her bedroom, this one looked out on the quad. The quad was deserted.

  “It’s just talk anyway,” she said. “We haven’t actually done anything yet. Don’t get all worked up about it yet.”

  “If I don’t get all worked up about it now,” Tara said, “it will be too late to get all worked up about it later.”

  Christie put her hand up and rubbed it against her left breast. She couldn’t feel the lump through her sweater and her other clothes. It was as if it had dissolved, which was just what ought to happen to it. Maybe, if she went into her room and lay down on her bed and felt herself against her bare skin, it would be gone.

  “I think we ought to do it,” she said firmly, and then she heard her voice slide into the mechanical singsong that had been the voice of her thoughts for a week. “I think we ought to take control of our lives and fight the good fight against fatigue, aging, disease, and early death.”

  Michelle giggled.

  Tara blew a raspberry. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Give me a break.”

  7

  STELLA MORTIMER HAD BEEN working when Tim Bradbury brought the new instructor in, and she was still working half an hour later, when there were sounds in the hallway to tell her that the new instructor was not having an easy time settling in. Stella did not find this surprising. She had been working at Fountain of Youth, on and off, for fifteen years now. She always found it very uncomfortable when she had to spend the night at the Fountain of Youth house, instead of going home to her own small apartment near the cemetery and the Yale Co-op. Of course, the house was not uncomfortable in a physical sense. Magda had been born poor and only become rich in middle age. Like everyone else Stella had ever known with that kind of history, Magda liked her luxuries. Somewhere along the line, the house where Magda lived and did her work had been gutted and completely remodeled. The bathrooms were large and tiled and color coordinated in pastels. The bedrooms were large and color coordinated, too, but for those Magda preferred deeper, more soothing hues. Then there was the kitchen, a high-tech fantasy. It had two conventional ovens and two convection ovens and three microwave ovens and a whole countertop lined with different kinds of food processors in different sizes, so that anyone who wanted to could make anything they wanted to without being inconvenienced by inadequate appliances.

  In Stella’s own apartment out by the Co-op, the kitchen was a tiny galley space with only one conventional oven and no microwave at all. Her living room was smaller than the office she worked in at Fountain of Youth. Her bedroom was a loft space she was going to have to do something about soon, because now that she was in her sixties she was getting a touch of arthritis in her knees and having a hard time climbing the ladder. When the loft space went, she was going to mourn it. She had been sleeping there since she first decided to settle in New Haven, back in 1978. She’d had her first and only real love affair on the platform bed she had installed under the row of windows that looked out on her backyard. It wasn’t until the love affair was over that she had realized that her backyard was a mass of weeds and broken concrete. Beyond it, there were vacant lots and the listing hulks of wood buildings left to rot. Like the rest of New Haven, like Stella herself, this view had been getting old in secret, wearing out, giving in to time. Stella Mortimer had no patience at all for the Fountain of Youth philosophy. She thought it was ridiculous to try to stay young when you weren’t young anymore. She thought it was positively evil to punish yourself just because your skin had started to sag. Her skin was sagging and her hair was gray and her solid little body showed the thickening of menopause without complaint—but she thought she was better off than Magda, who was crazy.

  The film that was running through her viewer was all wrong. It had shots of light in it and bursting air pockets on the edges. Half of it had been shot from the wrong angle. It was supposed to show a straight-on shot of Magda leading a class of instructors in a kick-jump dance. Instead, it showed feet and legs and seldom got much higher than that. When it did get higher, what tended to appear was Magda’s face, bloated and blue looking. Stella reached around the side of the viewer and found her pack of Merit cigarettes. She was the only person at Fountain of Youth who was allowed to smoke on the premises, and she always felt guilty when she did it. That was another reason she would like to be home. In her own living room, she could smoke cigarettes and drink wine at her own pace. She wouldn’t have to face a situation like this with nothing to take the edge off the frustration.

  Stella bent over the viewer again. There were still shots of light. There were still air bubbles. There were still odd shots taken from odder angles, telling her that Robbie Boulter, their cameraman, had not been paying attention. Stella sat back again and said,

  “Shit.”

  On the other side of the office, Faith Keller, Stella’s assistant, looked up from the table where she was pasting up dummy mechanicals for a new brochure.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Having a bad night?”

  Like Stella, Faith was an older woman who had once led a more interesting life. You could read it in the lines on her face. Stella pushed herself away from the viewer and attacked her cigarette in earnest.

  “I keep telling Magda she shouldn’t hire young men,” Stella said. “Not for camera work. Not if she’s in a hurry. Their hormones get working and they forget about what they’re doing.”

  “Did he make a mess of it?”

  “Leg shots,” Stella said darkly. “Ass shots. It’s incredible.”

  “He’ll be all right by the end of the week, though,” Faith said. “It’s like working in an ice cream store when you really like ice cream. I did that once.”

  Stella tried to imagine Faith working in an ice cream store. She couldn’t. Faith was one of those tall, thin, wispy women who seemed to have been born to float.

  “I know he’ll get better,” Stella said, “but in the meantime we’re in a hurry, and this film is unusable, and we’re going to have to shoot this dance all over again. I think Simon’s being very shortsighted to put all the money around here into advertising. Advertising isn’t going to help him any if he puts out a shoddy product.”

  “You’re the one who’s putting out the product around here,” Faith said. “You and Magda. Neither one of you ever does anything shoddy.”

  “Neither one of us is getting any sleep lately, either,” Stella said. “If you want to know what I really think is stupid, it’s having Magda lead the dances on this tape and front the tour at all. She’s over fifty, I don’t care what kind of shape she’s in. She’s going to get out to Omaha or Kansas City and break an ankle, and then what are we going to do?”

  “She won’t break an ankle. She takes very good care of herself. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Bring your body to the Fountain of Youth. Eat right, do the right exercises, and you can stay young forever. Magda is certainly a great advertisement for it.”

  “If she’s lit right,” Stella said.

  Faith turned back to her mechanicals. “You shouldn’t spend so much of your time worrying about this kind of thing. Get your job done and go home. Try to relax a little. I can pick up the loose ends. I know
how much you hate to get stuck here overnight.”

  “Well, I’m stuck here overnight now.” Stella took a drag that burned her cigarette down to the filter. “It has to be after ten o’clock.”

  Faith kept her back to the viewer and to Stella, her shoulders rising and falling gently with her even, unhurried breath. Stella was struck for what felt like the millionth time by the fact that she really knew nothing at all about Faith Keller—not where she lived, not who her people were, not if she had a family. There was an address on the job application Faith had filled out when she first came to work here, stuck away in a file someplace in the main office. It wasn’t a neighborhood Stella was familiar with or an address that brought up any associations, so it might as well have been nowhere at all. She knew Faith had been married and wasn’t married anymore. That had come up once, at lunch, but Faith hadn’t gone into details. Faith didn’t mind staying late or sleeping over. That had made Stella assume that Faith must live alone. If Faith had been working at Fountain of Youth for only a few months, this would not have been extraordinary. Come just after the first of the year, though, Faith would have been working here for exactly three years.

  “Faith?” Stella said.

  Faith didn’t seem to hear. Her head was bent over the mechanicals. Her shoulders were hunched under the red-and-white patterning of her holiday reindeer sweater. The sweater was cheap and a little frayed—bought at Sears, Stella thought, and kept forever.

  “Faith,” Stella repeated. “I’m going to go down the hall to the bathroom for a minute. All right?”

  “Go right ahead.” Faith sat up a little straighter, but she didn’t turn around. “There won’t be anything for you to do around here for a while. There won’t be any crises I can’t handle.”

  Stella was about to say something stupid about how there wasn’t any crisis anywhere Faith couldn’t handle—the kind if idiotic, condescending thing men said to their secretaries, that Stella didn’t want to hear herself say at all—but she stood up instead and stretched a little to unkink her back.

  “I’ll only be a minute,” she told Faith.

  Faith didn’t answer her. Stella took one long last look at the other woman’s back and then left the office, leaving the door open just slightly to let the light spill into the hall. There were hall lights here, but almost nobody ever used them. The ceilings were high and the light fixtures were remote. The light bulbs Simon had the handymen put up there were too harsh, and cast the wrong kind of shadows.

  The better of the two bathrooms up here was on the far end of the hall, near the back stairs. Stella always thought it must have been converted from an old-fashioned walk-in linen cupboard. She walked downstairs and let herself into the outer of the two small rooms without trouble, but when she tried the inner door it was locked. Stella leaned back against the counter with the two shell-shaped blue pastel sinks in it and called out: “Is somebody in there? If you want to take your time, I can go up the hall.”

  There was the sound of a toilet flushing, harsh and swift: Simon’s infamous superplumbing. The inner door was unlocked and swung back. Stella found herself facing a tall young woman with blond hair wound into a chignon at the nape of her neck. The chignon had been braided first, the way it was done in sepia photographs from the days of the opening of the American West. Stella stood back and let the blond woman pass to the farther sink.

  “I’m sorry,” the blond woman said. “I was taking forever. I’m so tired, I guess I’m not thinking straight.”

  “You weren’t holding me up,” Stella said. “I just got here. I’m Stella Mortimer. I direct the videotapes and do the other film and production work that has to be done.”

  “I’m Frannie Jay.”

  “Step aerobics?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You don’t know how frantic they’ve been about finding someone to teach step aerobics for the tour. I don’t know why they didn’t think of asking the studios in California if they had anybody who would suit, but they didn’t. Simon’s always saying that we don’t think like an integrated corporation yet, and we’re just going to have to learn. Was it a great sacrifice for you, coming out here like this?”

  “Sacrifice?” Frannie Jay blinked. “No, it wasn’t any sacrifice. I’m from New Haven originally. My mother lives out in West Haven with my aunt.”

  “Ah,” Stella said. “You’ll be home for Christmas, then.”

  “Christmas,” Frannie repeated. She looked at her face in the long mirror that covered the wall over both the sinks. “Yes, I suppose I will be,” she repeated. “I’m afraid I’m not very religious. I haven’t put a lot of effort into celebrating Christmas up to now.”

  “Maybe it’s harder to celebrate Christmas in a place like California, where there isn’t any snow. Or were you in the north of California, where there is?”

  “I was in Berkeley,” Frannie Jay said.

  Stella had no idea where Berkeley was. She had only been out to California once, and that had been to Los Angeles. She hadn’t enjoyed the experience.

  “Well,” she said, “I hope you like it out here. I don’t know much about this business, but I do know that it seems to be very difficult to find people who do what you do in the Northeast at this point, and I don’t like seeing Magda upset. And this really is a very nice place to work, even if New Haven isn’t a very exciting place to live in.”

  I sound like a recruiting agent, Stella thought—but Frannie Jay didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her anyway. Frannie was bent over the sink, washing her face as well as her hands. Her skin was the dead white pale of someone who had just been very ill.

  “Well,” Frannie said very politely, drying her face on one of the sky blue hand towels that hung on the little rack near the door. “It was nice to meet you. I think I have to go lie down for a while now.”

  “You must be very tired,” Stella agreed.

  Frannie turned away and walked out of the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Stella stayed where she was.

  I wonder, Stella thought, why that young woman has been crying.

  8

  IT WAS AN ARTICLE of faith with all the people Greta Bellamy knew that spending your nights in bars was supposed to be fun. This was something Greta herself had believed all through high school and the two years she had spent at Southern Connecticut State College. She had at least been able to sit crammed into the corners of hardwood booths for hours without feeling either physically uncomfortable or terminally bored. Now Southern Connecticut State College had changed its name to Southern Connecticut State University, and Greta herself seemed to be going through a sea change. It’s because I’m turning thirty, Greta told herself sometimes, although she knew this couldn’t be true. Her best friend, Kathy Weddaby, was turning thirty, too, and Kathy was just as happy as she had always been to spend the hours after work investigating the relative merits of Molson Golden Ale and St. Pauli Girl light.

  Tonight, they were all sitting together in a roadhouse called the Avalon—Greta, Kathy, Frank, and Chick. Frank was Kathy’s husband. Chick was Greta’s boyfriend, and had been, ever since they were all together in the class of ’83 at Hamden High. Chick would have been Greta’s husband, if she had let him, but every time Greta got started in that direction she pulled back at the last minute. She didn’t know what she wanted out of her life, but she did know that it wasn’t what Kathy had, or what Chick was able to give her, or what was on offer here at this roadhouse with its third-rate lounge acts bused in from the city and its fat old women in stockings and garters holding up the bar. The booth they were in tonight had a window looking out on the Housatonic River. If Greta craned her neck in just the right way, she could see a row of shuttered little shacks stretching out along the water and then the Stephenson Dam. Greta had a copy of People magazine open on the booth table in front of her. She couldn’t read the words because of the dimness of the light. She had a bottle of Heineken light on the booth table in front of her too, and a glass t
o pour it in, but she had been ignoring it so long the beer had gone flat. Frank and Chick were smoking Marlboros and blowing the smoke into the circle of light cast by the side light next to the booth. The lounge act consisted of four guys in white dinner jackets and bad skin who had once cut a record for Columbia and appeared on The Andy Williams Show. Some of the women at the bar seemed to remember them, and sang along whenever they played. Greta looked down at her magazine and studied the big picture of the heavyset, Middle Eastern-looking man that took up the left-hand page. He reminded her of the men who had belonged to the Shriner’s Club with her father; and he wouldn’t have interested her at all if it hadn’t been for the woman he was with. The woman was small and dark haired and very pretty, but what got to Greta was her attitude. Here is a woman who doesn’t take shit from anyone, Greta thought. The headline on the right-hand page, in very large type but still unreadable in this dark, said:

  AMERICA’S MOST ECCENTRIC MASTER DETECTIVE PULLS OFF ANOTHER ONE

  Chick was tired of blowing smoke into the light. He turned back to the table, saw Greta’s magazine, and snorted.

  “Now she’s reading in bars,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “It’s just People,” Greta said. “And I’m not reading. It’s too dark in here. I’m just looking at pictures.”

  Kathy turned the magazine around so that it was right side up for her. “It’s that murder story again. Don’t you think that’s morbid?”

  “You’re the one who bought everything there was to read about Amy Fisher,” Greta said.

  “She bought everything there was to read about Lorena Bobbit, too,” Frank said. “Christ, I nearly took all the knives in the house and buried them in the backyard.”

  “I think Lorena Bobbit was stupid,” Kathy said. “Saying her husband raped her and so she cut off his dick. If she wanted to cut off his dick, she should have just cut it off.”

  “Well, she did,” Chick said. “That’s the point.”