Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  “I liked the Amy Fisher thing much better,” Kathy said. “You could understand what was behind that one. Although I don’t think I’d do what Joey’s wife did. Go back to him like that, I mean. I don’t think I’d believe he had nothing to do with it.”

  “I would,” Frank said. “I think that girl was just plain crazy.”

  Greta took her magazine back from Kathy and turned it around so that she could see it again. The man’s name was Gregor Demarkian, but that wasn’t important. The woman’s name was Bennis Hannaford, and that was. Bennis Hannaford wrote novels about knights and ladies and dragons and magic trolls, and Greta had a copy of one of them—The Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia—hidden out of sight right now in her purse.

  The lounge act started on a rendition of “Moon River,” not a very good one. The piano they were using was flat. Greta took a sip of beer right out to the bottle, made a face at the sour flatness of it, and put the bottle down again. When she looked up, she found Chick staring at her, and blushed.

  “I let it go too long.” She felt slightly defensive.

  Chick flicked his fingers at the beer bottle. “You’re letting everything go too long these days. You haven’t been paying any attention to business at all for months.”

  “Oh, she’s been paying attention to business,” Kathy said sharply. “That’s how she got that promotion at work.”

  “It wasn’t a promotion,” Greta said quickly. “It was just an upgrade in title. And a little raise.”

  “Executive assistant.” Kathy made a rabbity little face. “Aren’t you important.”

  “I’m being a secretary to Mr. Wilder just the way I’ve always done,” Greta said. “It’s just that I did a lot of overtime, and some extra work when we had all that trouble just after Thanksgiving—”

  Chick lit another cigarette. He let the match burn down until the flame touched his thumb, but didn’t flinch. That was a macho thing all the boys had been into in high school. Chick had never given it up. He dumped the spent match in the ashtray in the center of the table. The ashtray was already overflowing with butts.

  “I think that’s our point here,” he said seriously. “You aren’t paying any attention to me. You aren’t paying any attention to us.”

  “It’s like you think you’re an entirely different person,” Kathy said, “It’s like you think all of a sudden you’ve gotten better than us.”

  “Just because they’re giving you a little extra money at work doesn’t mean you’re better than us,” Chick said. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, Greta. It’s not like they made you president of the company. You’re just working for chump change and playing the lottery like everybody else.”

  “She doesn’t play the lottery anymore,” Kathy said tightly. “She says she’s saving her money for something else.”

  The lounge act had moved past “Moon River” and swung into a tinny version of “My Way.” Greta looked at her flat beer and wished she had drunk it. It would really help right now to be a little numb. Chick was right. She hadn’t been paying attention to him, to any of them. That was why she hadn’t picked up on this hostility before. And yet it must have been there. The raise was new—it wouldn’t even kick in until just before Christmas—but the other things, her preoccupation and, yes, that sense of difference, those had been here for months. Now the air was thick with anger turning slowly but inexorably toward hatred, and Greta felt a little sick. The four of them had been together for years now, ever since Greta and Chick had started going out in their high school freshman year. Greta didn’t have any other friends, even at work. She didn’t have any family left, either. Her parents had died in an accident on the Merritt Parkway more than five years ago. What would happen to her if Kathy and Chick and Frank stopped talking to her, and she was on her own?

  She picked up her beer glass and put it down again. “I don’t see why I have to buy lottery tickets on a week when I’m feeling short of cash,” she said. “There’s Christmas coming up.”

  “I use my Christmas bonus to pay for Christmas,” Kathy said.

  “She’s saving up to pay her way into that health club.” Chick smiled. “Five hundred dollars, can you believe that? For this spa. For a week. Fountain of Youth, it’s called. Up in New Haven.”

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with my wanting to go to some exercise classes for a week,” Greta said. “You’re the one who’s always telling me I’m getting a fat ass.”

  “I have that week off from work,” Chick said. “I wanted us to go to Atlantic City. I even said I’d pay for the whole thing.”

  “We can go to Atlantic City any week. This was a kind of sale price deal. It’s going to happen and then it’s going to be gone. I can’t afford the prices they usually charge.”

  “You could have asked me to go with you,” Kathy said. “You could at least have thought of the idea. If they charge more than five hundred dollars a week, they must get a lot of rich woman going there. I don’t think you’re going to fit in.”

  “I don’t have to fit in,” Greta said wearily. “I just have to do a lot of aerobics and some weight lifting and listen to some lectures on nutrition. I just thought I’d try to improve myself, that’s all. I don’t understand why it’s turned into this big deal.”

  “I’m going to go up and get another beer,” Chick said. “That fat-assed waitress is nowhere.”

  Fat-assed, Greta realized suddenly, was the way Chick described every woman he was angry with. Even if the woman was as thin as a rail and built like a toothpick, if Chick didn’t like her he said she had a big butt. That must mean he doesn’t like me anymore, Greta thought, but she didn’t know what to do with that. He might not like her, but he still wanted her around. He was over at her house every night. He called her at work every lunch hour. He expected her to go out to bars with him as much as he ever had. Greta thought about all those articles in the women’s magazines that Kathy bought—Family Circle, Woman’s Day—about men who stalked women who didn’t love them anymore. That doesn’t apply to me, Greta told herself. I still love Chick. I love him more than he loves me. At least I like him.

  Without realizing it, Greta had been staring down at her magazine again, at Gregor Demarkian and Bennis Hannaford, at a blurred vision in the background that looked like a very elegant room. Greta hadn’t read the article yet, so she didn’t know what it was about. Gregor Demarkian sometimes investigated murders that took place in small towns or slums, which were boring. She hoped this murder had taken place among rich people. She put out her hand to touch the cloud of dark hair that floated around Bennis Hannaford’s head. Then she took her hand away quickly and closed the magazine.

  When Greta looked up again, Frank was gone as well as Chick, and Kathy was leaning far over the booth table, staring at her intently. Why didn’t I ever notice how mean her eyes look? Greta wondered. Kathy really did have little piggy eyes in a round and overstuffed face. She had a line of pimples along her jaw and another one at the corner of her mouth. She looked worse than angry. She looked ready to tear somebody apart.

  Greta took her magazine off the table and felt around on the booth seat for her pocketbook, so that she could put the magazine away. “I think I’ll go to the ladies room,” she said vaguely. “I think I need to run a brush through my hair.”

  “No,” Kathy said.

  “I think I can go to the bathroom when I want to, Kathy. I think you can’t stop me from doing that.”

  “I got rid of the guys so I could talk to you,” Kathy said, “and you know it. I’m not going to let you run away to the ladies room and act like I don’t exist.”

  “I’m not acting like you don’t exist. I just want to brush my hair.”

  Kathy turned sideways and propped her feet up on the bench. “I’m really sick of this. I’m really sick of the way you’ve been behaving for the past month. We’re all sick of it.”

  “You’ve all made it clear.”

  “I wouldn’t take anything for granted if I was you
,” Kathy said. “Just because Chick has been hanging around you forever doesn’t mean he’s going to go on hanging around you. You hurt his feelings when you said you wouldn’t marry him.”

  “I wasn’t ready to get married.”

  “Well, maybe Chick is ready to get married. Maybe he’s ready to settle down. Maybe if he can’t get you to go settle down with him, he’ll get somebody else.”

  “Is this a particular somebody else you’re talking about?” Greta asked. “Do you have an applicant for this position?”

  “Chick has,” Kathy said slowly. “You don’t give Chick enough credit. It’s not like it was back in high school. Chick has turned out to be a very hunky guy.”

  “That’s nice. Who thinks he’s so hunky?”

  “Marsha Caventello.” Kathy swung around so that she was facing Greta again. She was sitting back farther on the bench, in the shadows, so that Greta couldn’t see what was going on in her eyes. “Marsha Caventello has been making up to Chick for the last two weeks. Coming into the plant when she doesn’t have to. Dropping her clipboard on his feet and letting him pick it up for her. Telling him how wonderful he is. It’s beginning to do the job.”

  “That’s nice,” Greta said stiffly.

  “Frank told me that Chick told him that if you wouldn’t go to Atlantic City, he was going to ask Marsha.”

  “That’s nice,” Greta said again.

  Kathy leaned into the light. The expression on her face was feral. The smile that was spread across her mouth was as cruel as the smile of an executioner.

  “Don’t just say ‘that’s nice,’ ” she said with satisfaction. “Do something about it. Because if he goes away to Atlantic City with Marsha, Greta, he isn’t going to come back to you.”

  9

  UP AT FOUNTAIN OF Youth, at midnight, Frannie Jay was lying fully clothed on the hard mattress of her double bed, feeling that she really ought to make herself get undressed and take a shower and go to sleep. Tomorrow she had to learn two step dance routines and review the tour literature. She was supposed to be awake enough to participate in a staff meeting at nine o’clock. She had the lights in the bedroom turned off and the curtains on the windows opened. She was telling herself for the fifteenth time that she was only hurting herself by procrastinating like this, when she heard the noise outside in the drive.

  Koo roo, the noise went. Koo roo clank whoosh.

  Frannie got off her bed and went to the window. The security light on the front of the detached garage cast a wide arc of brightness onto the gravel and the lawn. There was nothing out there that Frannie could see.

  Koo roo, the noise went again. Koo roo clank whoosh clank roo.

  Frannie undid the latch on her window and pushed it up. Cold air streamed over her. She leaned out into it and looked across the yard. Empty grass. Empty gravel. A three-car garage with its doors down, closed up tight. Frannie started to back into her room again.

  Koo roo, the noise started again, but then it stopped, and Frannie stopped too. For just a moment there, she thought she had seen something, close to the house, where there was a small line, of evergreen hedges near the back door. She leaned out again, as far as she dared, and squinted into the shadows. Then she backed all the way into the room and went to sit down on the side of the bed.

  A foot, Frannie thought, feeling the start of hysterical giggles rising in her throat.

  That’s what I just saw out there.

  A naked human foot.

  Attached to a naked human leg.

  Sticking out of the evergreen hedges next to the back door.

  Frannie Jay put her head between her knees and began to heave.

  Part 1

  “New Year’s resolutions are what secular society has instead of the confessional, and they don’t work half as well.”

  —ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST,

  U.S. Catholic

  ONE

  1

  FOR MANY YEARS, GREGOR Demarkian had thought of New Year’s Eve as the celebration of the letdown that happened after Christmas. First there was the real holiday: tinseled trees, gold foil wrap and satin ribbons, carolers in the streets. Then there was the long slide into discontent and exasperation, with too many leftovers in the refrigerator and too much slush ice on the roads. Then there was the pop, the point when nobody could stand it anymore and nobody thought they ought to have to. It was that pop that caused so many fatalities on the roads and in otherwise stable marriages. Gregor had seen it through all his long twenty years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Bureau didn’t investigate local crimes, but it did rub up against them, especially in Washington and Virginia. It also had agents, who were just as susceptible to New Year’s Eve explosions as anyone else. Maybe there was something about cheap champagne that was different from all other forms of ingestible alcohol. Men who had never before shouted at a football game gave their wives black eyes. Women who had never fantasized so much as a love scene from a Barbara Cartland romance left home with itinerant carpenters. Hundreds of loose and drifting people, without family, without friends, without ties of any kind, poured into the streets—and they were people with nothing to lose.

  “Give me a guy with a job and a house and a mortgage,” Gregor’s favorite instructor out at Quantico was always saying. “Give him to me every time. That’s a guy I can count on.”

  Outside the grimed window of the train, the small Connecticut towns were going by with syncopated regularity, each more or less like the one before it. There had been a couple of small cities on the way, but those had seemed oddly unreal, too clean, too firmly placed in a rural backdrop. Gregor tried to remember if Connecticut had ever been a serious manufacturing state but got only a vision of whaling ships and wooden nutmeg. The small towns all still had their Christmas decorations up. Tinsel and colored glass lights were wound in whorls from one streetlamp pole to another, across nearly empty streets. Big, fat cardboard Santa Clauses sat in store windows. Frantic elves and drunken reindeer were scattered across town parks. Every once in a while, Gregor saw a sign announcing a New Year’s sale or a New Year’s special or a “Get Ready for the New Year Extravaganza,” but the signs lacked fire and conviction. Nobody in the shore towns of Connecticut was any more enthusiastic about ringing out the old and ringing in the new than Gregor Demarkian was.

  Nobody on this train was in any hurry to get where he was going, either. Gregor was sitting up in his seat, at the back of the car, with his hands on his brand new black leather briefcase, but the other two passengers he could see were both asleep. One of them, a young white man in baggy clothes and blunt-cut hair that had been greased to stick straight up from his skull, had his feet up on the seat across from him. The other, an elderly woman with an oversize pocketbook, was sitting upright with her arms folded around a shopping bag. Gregor found himself wondering if either one of them would have qualified as someone who “could be counted on” by his old instructor at Quantico. He wondered if he himself would have qualified. All that time was so long ago and far away. A world where women were refused appointments as special agents of the FBI as a matter of policy. A world where there were no black people or African-Americans but only Negroes—or something worse—and the Negroes were all serving drinks and carting baggage and going home on a different bus. A world where men like Gregor Demarkian didn’t retire after twenty years’ service, but got promoted into administration and were expected to stay put. Well, Gregor thought, I spent my time in administration, ten years in the formation and running of the Behavioral Sciences Department—and I didn’t like it much.

  The train began to slow down, surrounded by the debris of a cityscape again, tracks branching out in all directions and low brick buildings crammed too close together. Half the low brick buildings were empty. Half the empty buildings had their front windows smashed. Maybe the reason Gregor Demarkian didn’t like New Year’s Eve was that it was as much a nostalgia orgy as anything else it was supposed to be. Look back in befuddlement. Look forward i
n a haze of 150-proof courage. Gregor Demarkian did as much complaining as anybody else about what had happened to the world. The vandalism. The crime. The dirt. The violence. He knew better than most people how true it all was. He still didn’t want to go back. His old instructor at Quantico might not have considered him a sterling character any longer. He didn’t have a job. His wife was dead. He owned his floor-through condominium apartment free and clear. If push came to shove, he just might decide that he had nothing to lose he wasn’t willing to lose. The statistics were terrible and they were probably getting worse. He really didn’t care. He liked this world better than he had liked that one, in spite of how quiet that one had been. He liked himself better than he had liked the man who had gone to work one morning in his socks but without his shoes, because he had been too preoccupied with a case to notice what he wore. The only thing he wanted to bring back from that time was his wife, Elizabeth, and he only wanted her if he could have her without the cancer that had killed her. He wouldn’t put Elizabeth, or anyone else he knew, through pain like that again.

  The cityscape was becoming a jungle of tracks and wires and abstract shapes. The conductor came through from the back of the car, yelling, “New Haven. Last Stop. New Haven. Last Stop.” Like all conductors, he was nearly unintelligible. The boy with the greased hair stood up. The elderly woman with the shopping bag shook herself awake and checked for her pocketbook. Gregor Demarkian put his briefcase on his lap.

  The briefcase had come from Mark Cross and cost a mint. Gregor only owned it because it had been given to him by Bennis Hannaford as a Christmas present. Bennis Hannaford was the woman who owned the apartment just below his in the converted brownstone house on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia where Gregor had retired to be among people he knew. The scarf Gregor was wearing draped over the back of his neck under the collar of his Burberry topcoat was a Christmas present, too, but not an expensive one. It had been given to him by Father Tibor Kasparian, his closest friend and the priest of Cavanaugh Street’s Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. It had probably been bought, like most of Tibor’s presents were, at a charity shop in central Philadelphia run by five churches and a synagogue for the benefit of a homeless center west of Society Hill. When Gregor was still with the Bureau, he had not had the kinds of friends who gave him Christmas presents. He had had colleagues and family and the people that Elizabeth knew. In this way, now was better than then, too. Gregor sometimes surprised himself with how strange all that seemed to him now, living in isolation, living for work. He must have been out of his mind.