Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  The train was gliding to a stop under a tangled web of lights and structural beams. Gregor stood up and shook out his coat and headed for the open space in front of the sliding doors. Of course, he thought, there was one small problem with the self-analysis he had been doing this morning, one little kink in the reasoning that just wouldn’t go away and leave him alone. If he was so content on Cavanaugh Street and delighted not to be obsessed with work—why was it that it had taken only a single phone call to get him out of his living room and on a train to New Haven, Connecticut?

  There was a big banner hanging over the platform next to which the train had stopped that said “HAPPY NEW YEAR AND WELCOME TO NEW HAVEN.” It looked tattered and old, as if it had been dragged out of a trunk somewhere after several years’ hard use and no trips to the dry cleaner. The train doors slid open; a blast of cold air rushed in. Gregor helped the elderly woman with the shopping bag across the little gap onto the platform.

  “It gets wider and wider every time,” the elderly woman told him. “People just don’t think.”

  Gregor was thinking that Bennis Hannaford would have thought of the same question he just had, and that before he went back to Philadelphia and had to face her he ought to think up a fairly good answer. Of course, if he waited long enough to get back to Philadelphia, she would be gone, out to Los Angeles for a month to talk to the people who were turning her series of fantasy novels into a video game.

  One of the things Gregor had found out in his retirement but didn’t like to mention was that he loved video games. He especially loved really violent video games where the good guys did impossibly grotesque things to the bad guys, like tear out their hearts and turn their eyes into blood fountains.

  “Law enforcement is frustrating,” that same old instructor at Quantico used to say.

  Gregor Demarkian could only suppose that it must have been.

  2

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER met Tony Bandero, or even seen a picture of him, but coming up into the main body of New Haven Station, he had no trouble picking him out of the crowd. There was, surprisingly, a fairly large crowd. Gregor’s train had been so deserted, he had assumed that the New Haven Railroad had the same problem Amtrak did: not enough passengers to make it profitable. He had forgotten that the New Haven was a commuting line to and from New York City and that most of the people who lived down here, on what was called Connecticut’s Gold Coast, worked in New York. New Haven did not look like it was possessed of much gold. The station was large because it had been built in the days when stations were built large. It was clean because the railroad was putting serious effort into keeping it that way. Otherwise, it was just like all the other large old stations Gregor had had the occasion to be in over the last few years. The waiting room was overrun with homeless people. The legitimate passengers were all crowded around the gates to the platforms or in lines at the ticket counters. The waste-baskets were full of crumpled newspapers and torn candy wrappers. The advertisements that hung as posters on the wall were faded, even though Gregor knew that some of them had to be new. If you moved quickly and in the wrong direction, you caught sight of a junkie before he had a chance to scuttle away. Gregor wondered what the laws of vagrancy were in this state. In New York, they had all been declared unconstitutional. If a man who belonged in a mental institution but couldn’t get a place because there was no money to keep him there decided to take up residence on the stoop of your elegant East Side brownstone, you were stuck with him.

  Gregor Demarkian recognized Tony Bandero because Tony Bandero looked like a cop, a good old-fashioned cop, a cop circa 1954. Bandero was tall and broad and potbellied, with a bald spot on the back of his head and a badly fitting brown wool suit. He had thick hairy hands and frayed shirt cuffs and a Timex watch that looked like it had taken some battering. Gregor was tall and broad, too—at six foot four, considerably taller than Tony Bandero—but a different physical type. Tony Bandero was heavyset. Gregor Demarkian was massive.

  People were rushing into the gate, trying to get to a train whose arrival had been announced while Gregor was still waiting to get off his. There was a banner over the ticket counters in the station that said “HAPPY NEW YEAR” in glitter-stuck letters on a white background. Gregor had seen the same banner in a Hallmark store. He tucked his briefcase up under his arm to avoid hitting shorter people in the side with it. The shorter people were all in a massive hurry and not paying any attention to where they were going. Tony Bandero was surrounded by shorter people, all women, who seemed to be waiting for passengers from Gregor’s train. The women all wore those short cloth coats with the rough surfaces that came in such odd colors, like powder blue and copper-washed metallic green. Gregor made his way over to the little group and stuck out his hand.

  “Tony Bandero?” he said. “I’m—”

  Tony Bandero was carrying a copy of The New Haven Register. He shoved it under his left arm and stuck his right hand out to catch Gregor’s own.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Mr. Demarkian. I recognized you from your pictures.”

  “Gregor,” Gregor said.

  “The bishop said I should call you Mr. Demarkian,” Tony Bandero said. “Not that I take the bishop’s word as gospel in everything, you understand, but he called you for me. I figure I owe him a little courtesy.”

  “Actually,” Gregor said, “your bishop called John Cardinal O’Bannion in Colchester. It was Cardinal O’Bannion who called me.”

  “Whatever. The church is the church. She’s been taking a hell of a beating lately—deservedly, in some cases, if you ask me; who the hell can figure all those child abuse cases—but she still comes through when you need her. The bishop said I was to tell you there wasn’t anything religious about this case.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “Health clubs. Diet gurus.”

  “It’s more like exercise gurus.” Tony Bandero shook his head. “The bishop said you might shy away from it if you thought it was a religious murder. He said you might have had enough of religious murders for a while. Three, he said you were involved in. You couldn’t get me to touch a religious murder with a ten-foot pole. They don’t think like us, you know, bishops don’t. They get trained out at the Vatican and they don’t think like Americans.”

  All the Roman Catholic bishops Gregor had ever known, and especially John Cardinal O’Bannion, had thought like hyper-Americans. O’Bannion practically snored “The Star Spangled Banner” in his sleep. There was a whole raft of beggars at the front doors to the station, standing in a row that reminded Gregor crazily of a debutante receiving line.

  “I take it New Haven’s having the same problems every place else is,” Gregor said.

  Tony Bandero examined the row of beggars and frowned. Then he turned away from them and hurried through the doors onto the sidewalk outside. His coat was a dirty trench that looked too light for the cold of the day. It flapped in the breeze as he walked.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “We got the same problems as every place else. We got beggars. We got drugs. We got street gangs. Twice a month we pick up some high school kid who’s just offed his best friend because they had an argument over the coolest color for a pair of sneakers. Does this kind of thing make any more sense to you than it does to me?”

  “No,” Gregor said.

  They had reached a battered Ford Fairlane, its color the same brown as Tony Bandero’s suit.

  “The thing is,” he said, “I used to like being a cop. It was dangerous, but it was fun. There were the good guys. There were the bad guys. The good guys chased the bad guys. Sometimes the good guys won. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure.”

  Tony unlocked the passenger-side door of the Fairlane and motioned Gregor in. “Now I pick up these kids, thirteen, fourteen years old, sometimes twelve, they’ve just offed somebody, they’ve just raped some old lady and bashed her head in with a lead pipe, they’re dealing six thousand dollars a week, and they want to pay me off, they just don’t give a
shit. Then I go up to the house, and what do I get? They’ve got this mother, she hasn’t been straight since she was thirteen herself, she’s turning tricks out of the back bedroom, she’s got an eleven-year-old daughter turning tricks out of the hall closet, she’s got a boyfriend who’s pimping the both of them. Then we take the kid in and send him through medical, and it turns out his arm has been broken six times and the doctors know the breaks didn’t happen the day before yesterday. Does this make any sense to you?”

  “I don’t think it’s supposed to make sense,” Gregor said. There was a little plastic statue of the Virgin Mary glued to the dashboard and a St. Christopher medal hanging from the back of the rearview mirror.

  Tony Bandero went around the front of the car and got in the other side. He started the engine and the car immediately began to make a series of very odd noises. First it squeaked in a way that sounded like a bird mating. Then it clanked. Then it let out a long hiss, as if all its tires were losing air at once.

  “The thing is,” Tony Bandero said, “I don’t hold with these liberals who don’t want to lock anybody up, but I can see some of the points they make. I mean, for God’s sake, what can you expect?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Half the time, I want to lock the mothers up along with the kids, only then it turns out the mothers had mothers and it was just as bad and you’ve got to go back to our generation practically before you find anybody who was making any sense, and then of course what you find is dope. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. Lock everybody up. Drop bombs on Colombia. Torch the Thailand poppy fields. Which is why I think I’m so hyped on this case I got you out here for.”

  “I didn’t think this case had anything to do with dope.”

  “It doesn’t.” Tony Bandero was definite. “It doesn’t have anything to do with dope. It doesn’t have anything to do with prostitution. It doesn’t have anything to do with battered child syndrome. It is not a mess.”

  “I thought you couldn’t solve it,” Gregor said.

  “I can’t. I haven’t got the faintest idea in hell what’s going on here. But, Mr. Gregor Demarkian, let me tell you this. In this case there are good guys and there are bad guys and the good guys are going to chase the bad guys and if the good guys catch the bad guys, I’m not going to spend a month lying awake nights wondering if I shouldn’t quit the force and become a priest so I can do something about all this shit. I’m going to go out to a damned good steakhouse and celebrate.”

  The Ford Fairlane edged out onto the road. The cabs in the cab rank hooted their horns at it. Gregor restrained himself from pointing out the obvious. If it were true that Tony Bandero didn’t know anything at all about how to solve this case, then this case could turn out any which way. It could be about dope. It could be about prostitution. It could be about battered child syndrome. When he got to the end of it, Tony Bandero might not like what he saw any better than he liked what he saw in the rest of his work.

  Tony Bandero was easing himself into the traffic. The traffic was picking up in volume and noise. Tony was bouncing happily behind the steering wheel, singing something to himself that Gregor couldn’t put a name to, but that he definitely connected to Frank Sinatra.

  “Listen,” Tony said. “This time, we’ve got it made.”

  3

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, GREGOR Demarkian got a look at why Tony Bandero thought they had it made. The Ford Fairlane was parked in the gravel driveway of a tall Victorian house on something called Prospect Street. All around them, the bare branches of tall trees bent in the wind and fat little evergreen bushes shuddered. The house was not only tall but elegant—Civil War vintage, Gregor thought, with a curving black mansard roof and elaborate wrought-iron grillwork balconies at all the windows. The glass at the windows, however, was new and thick and expensive looking—E glass, Gregor thought—and the rest of the house was expensive looking, too. Someone had done a first-class renovation here, careful and detailed. The place looked new, without looking newly built, and old, without looking decrepit. The lawn looked clipped and cared for even in the middle of winter.

  They were parked well to the back, near the matching detached garage that might once have been a carriage house or could just as easily have been newly built at the time the renovation was done. The yard back here looked wide and blank, and to either side of the back door were thick collections of evergreen bushes, cut into gumdrop shapes. The arrangements looked like they had been copied from a landscaping magazine.

  Tony Bandero climbed out of the car and looked around. The yard was deserted. The house looked deserted, too, but Gregor thought it probably wasn’t. Tony had said something about a course of exercise workshops due to start inside today. It was only eight fifteen in the morning. Maybe the bouncing and stretching hadn’t started yet. Gregor got out of the car himself and walked over to where Tony was standing, facing the back door.

  “It was found over there,” Tony said, pointing to the clump of evergreens to the left of the door. “Actually, it was seen before it was found. From one of the bedrooms on the third floor. A young woman named Frannie Jay—it was originally something Polish and she changed it—anyway, she looks out her window around midnight and sees what she’s sure is a naked leg and foot sticking into the yard, so she goes to investigate.”

  “And found the body of Tim Bradbury?” Gregor asked.

  “That’s right. The naked body of Tim Bradbury, I may add, if that wasn’t in the report I sent you—”

  “It was.”

  “Anyway, it’s lying in there under the bushes, sort of pushed back in there, and I have the word from forensics that it was naked when it was pushed. It wasn’t shoved back in there and stripped.”

  “Why would anybody do that?”

  Tony Bandero shrugged. “Why would anybody do anything? He was poisoned, by the way. With arsenic. But not here.”

  “Did you ever find out where?”

  “Nope. No signs of vomiting down here. None in his room. None in any other part of the house. None in the garage.”

  “Are you sure he did vomit? I know it’s usual with arsenic, but usual doesn’t mean universal—”

  “He vomited,” Tony Bandero said. “I got that from forensics, too. Apparently, when you vomit you bring up a lot of acid and it strips the lining of your throat and does things to your tooth enamel. That’s why bulimics have such bad teeth.”

  Gregor walked over to the bushes and poked at them. “The vomit could have been cleaned up,” he pointed out. “Did anyone on the investigating team notice a strong smell of disinfectant anywhere in the house, or cleaning fluid, or lime—”

  “Why lime?”

  “It’s a good cover for vomit in terms of the scent. It’s a good cover for a lot of things. Lime and water is what people use when they want to get rid of the smell of cats in old houses.”

  Tony shrugged. “I asked about disinfectants,” he said, “and everybody told me they smelled no such thing, but I don’t really know if they would have noticed when they weren’t notified in advance that they were supposed to notice. You can ask them yourself later. I’ve set up a time for you to meet the whole team. As for the lime—even I didn’t know about the lime.”

  Gregor stepped back and looked up at the house. “Which window did she look down from?”

  “That one.” Tony pointed to the third to the left from the line of the back door.

  “Why?” Gregor asked.

  “She said she heard a noise,” Tony told him. “That much I know is in the report, but the noise was weird. It said koo koo or something like that, like a bird noise, except she said she could tell it wasn’t a bird. So she opened her window and leaned out to see if she could spot what it was.”

  Gregor nodded. The windows back here didn’t have wrought-iron grills or little balconies. “This was at midnight?” he asked Tony.

  “That’s right.”

  “But Tim Bradbury didn’t die at midnight.”

&
nbsp; “That’s right, too. Autopsy says no later than eleven o’clock. There needed to be at least an hour for the abrading to take place in the throat to the extent it had. You know how that is. That’s an estimate.”

  “I know. Bradbury was absolutely dead when she found him?”

  “He was dead by the time the ambulance got here. I don’t think he was twitching or anything by the time she found him. She would have said.”

  “Did anybody else see him?”

  “Sure.” Tony jerked his head toward the house. “Half the people in there saw him. She screamed.”

  “Right away?”

  “She says.”

  “And when they came out, they all saw what they thought was a dead body.”

  “Actually,” Tony said, “you can ask them yourself, too. I meant it when I said I wanted to bring you into this investigation as close to officially as possible. I’ve got you clearance to talk to anybody you want. Of course, they don’t have to talk back, unless they work for us. Lawyers are lawyers.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  And that was true, of course, lawyers were lawyers—but Gregor didn’t think they were going to have any trouble with lawyers this early in a case like this. In his experience, the stranger the cases were, the less intelligent the people involved in them were about keeping their mouths shut when they were talking to the police. This case was shaping up to be very strange indeed.