by Jane Haddam
Suddenly, there was a high-pitched pulsing whine in the air. Tony Bandero reached into his inside jacket pocket and came out with a beeper. He shut the sound off and put the beeper back in his pocket.
“Don’t you have to call in or something now that you’ve heard that?” Gregor asked him.
“Nah,” Tony Bandero said. “I’ll get around to it later.”
TWO
1
GREGOR HAD NEVER BEEN in a health club of any kind—not in a spa or an exercise studio or a hotel weight room. Most of the men he knew didn’t exercise. Most of the women he knew didn’t bother with health clubs when they did exercise. Donna Moradanyan, his upstairs neighbor back on Cavanaugh Street, had a few tapes she jumped around to from time to time. Gregor thought one of them had been put out by Jane Fonda. He remembered a background that had been made to look like a roof in a not-very-well-off part of a city. Television aerials, low-rising utility chimneys, security netting and arc lights: none of it went with Ms. Fonda herself, who was dressed from neck to ankle in black stretch lace. Some of the high school boys he knew worked out with weights to build themselves up for sports. Gregor didn’t know if it did much good. The Armenian-American community hadn’t produced a plethora of sports stars, except for Ara Parseghian, who coached instead of doing the grunt work. Coaching seemed to Gregor the best part of any sport. You got to sit down for most of the games, eat what you wanted when you wanted, and be boss of the whole enterprise. Gregor thought being head of the Olympic committee or commissioner of baseball would be even better.
The Fountain of Youth Work-Out didn’t look like it would suit Jane Fonda any more than the roof had. Coming around to the front, Gregor saw that the deliberate Victorian reconstruction had been even more carefully executed here. The heavy brass knob and knocker on the front door were either antiques or were custom-made to mimic antiques. The curving trim around the windows had been cut to follow the curving scrollwork of the wrought-iron window guards. The two big concrete planters on either side of the front door had been molded with friezes of fruit around their bases, like the plaster fruit that adorned so many Victorian ceilings. A lot of money had gone into this, or a lot of debt. Did the women who came to Fountain of Youth for diet and exercise advice want to live in a Victorian fantasy? Weren’t diet and exercise and the healthy foods movement much more modern than that? Wouldn’t it have been a better use of funds to put the money into better equipment or bigger exercise rooms or a new advertising campaign? Of course, it was possible that money was no object. There was that. That would put a different complexion on things entirely.
Tony Bandero had marched up to the front door and rung the bell. “They’ve got one of those buzzer systems here, the same as everyplace else,” he said. “Nobody lets anybody in the front door without seeing who they are first.”
The buzzer system was well disguised. Gregor couldn’t find the camera, which had to be hidden somewhere over his head. There was a long angry hum and the door popped open with a mechanical clack. Tony pushed it the rest of the way in.
“This is Traci.” Tony motioned to the young girl behind the small desk. “Traci Cardinale. She’s the receptionist here. This is Gregor Demarkian.”
“Oh, yes,” Traci Cardinale said. “The detective who was coming about Tim. Isn’t it awful about Tim? I was working that night, too, right here until eleven o’clock. But I didn’t see anything except the usual.” She sounded sad.
“What’s the usual?” Gregor asked her.
Traci shrugged. “Members coming in and out. Members losing half their stuff—we put up all these signs about how they ought to be careful and not leave their purses lying around on benches and things, but they do it anyway. I mean, they think that just because this place is expensive, nobody who comes here is going to steal. It’s stupid. Oh, yes. The fat lady was here, too.”
“The fat lady?” Gregor asked.
Traci Cardinale nodded. “I know I shouldn’t call her the fat lady. It would hurt her feelings. But she is a fat lady, you know, really, really fat, not just overweight. Anyway, she came in around nine thirty that night to sign up for the course this week. She’s upstairs right now with the beginners’ class. She’s really a very nice lady.”
“She was on her way home from working the second shift at the Braxton Corporation,” Tony said. “She lives in Derby with her father. He’s got Alzheimer’s.”
“She really is a very nice lady,” Traci said again. “She paid her deposit in cash and then she came in about a week later with the rest of the money in cash, too. I’d almost forgotten about her in all the fuss about Tim, but there she was. I’m glad she came to the course this week. A lot of them just put their money down and then never show up. You’d be amazed. We get five, six thousand dollars like that every time we run a course. People pay for it and then just disappear. They don’t even ask for refunds. But Dessa Carter came. She really needs to do something about herself.”
There was a long, thin window with frosted stained-glass panels in the wall to Traci Cardinale’s right. Gregor went to it and tried to look out. He caught a glimpse of the drive and the wrought-iron fence that separated this property from the one just a little way down the hill. The glimpse wasn’t much, and Gregor thought it would have been even less in the dark. Traci Cardinale was staring at him as if she thought he, too, needed to do something about himself. Gregor went back to her desk and tried to pretend she wasn’t staring.
“You can’t see very much from here,” he told her. “You were here all that night?”
“Until eleven o’clock,” Traci said. “Only, I was answering both doors.”
She gestured toward the stained-glass window. Gregor saw that there was indeed another door back there, smaller and down a couple of steps to the side.
“That’s the members’ private entrance. People have keys to it. Not everybody, of course. People who sign up for the Golden Circle memberships. They pay about three times as much as everybody else does and they can come and go as they want, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Not that they do much of it, though. Nobody wants to be driving around in the dark on their own with all these car-jackings going on. Especially not Golden Circle members. They just come in at the regular times like everybody else.”
“None of the Golden Circle members came in that night?”
Traci shook her head. “The only person who came to that door was Dessa Carter. I think she got confused about where she was supposed to go. We had advertisements on the radio and directions in these brochures we were giving out, but I don’t think the directions were too clear. Dessa wasn’t the only one who came to the wrong door or called the wrong phone number or got the dates mixed up.”
“But she was the only one who came that night,” Gregor said.
“The only one,” Traci agreed.
“And you didn’t see anything? Or hear anything? You didn’t hear the strange sounds the other young woman reported?”
“Not a thing.” Traci Cardinale sighed. “We all thought it was a mugging, you know, after it happened. With him lying out there in the bushes and all. And then there was all that stuff about him being naked and poisoned and all that, and we didn’t know what was going on. We were all very upset—the staff here, I mean, all of us. And Tim was from around here, too, and that made it worse.”
“Bramford,” Tony Bandero said helpfully. “About twenty minutes away.”
“We didn’t any of us know him before he started working here,” Traci said, “but I don’t see that that should matter much. It wasn’t like he was some stranger from Vermont. And nobody knows why it happened even now, so we’re all walking around thinking it could have been anybody, it could have been us. If you see what I mean.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, because he did see what she meant. It was the most common reaction people had when they found out that someone they knew had been killed. What he didn’t see was what good wandering around this foyer was going to do him. There were two tal
l, thin windows with plain glass in them on either side of the front door, but they looked out only on the front walk and on Prospect Street. There was that stained-glass window to Traci’s right, but the limitations to looking through that had already been determined. Traci Cardinale could not have seen the Royal Welsh Fusiliers doing marching practice on the back lawn—and she might not have been able to hear them, either.
Gregor went back to Traci’s desk. He seemed to be walking in circles. To Traci Cardinale’s left, a curving staircase with a fluted rail swept to the balcony on the second floor. Three stories above his head, the stairwell ceiling was covered with those plaster fruits.
“What do we do next?” he asked Tony Bandero.
It was Traci Cardinale who answered. “You have an appointment with Simon Roveter,” she said, picking up the receiver on her house phone and beginning to punch buttons. “Simon’s the head of everything here. Magda’s husband. You’re supposed to see Magda one of these days, too, but not now because she’s leading aerobic dance. Just a minute.”
2
GREGOR HADN’T GIVEN MUCH thought to what someone who did what Simon Roveter did would look like. He knew what Magda Hale looked like, because along with the cursory police report Tony Bandero had sent him after Gregor agreed to at least consider the possibility of looking into the death of Tim Bradbury, Tony had sent some Fountain of Youth brochures. Gregor remembered these now as Traci Cardinale led both him and Tony up the curving staircase to the second floor. On the balcony there, placed just far enough back so that it couldn’t be seen from the foyer, was a life-size stand-up cardboard poster of Magda Hale holding a sign that said, “COME TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH, BE A NEW YOU FOR THE NEW YEAR.” This was the same picture that appeared on one of the brochures. Magda Hale looked twenty-six and full of infinite energy. Traci Cardinale went past the stand-up poster and opened a set of double doors. The balcony was suddenly full of noise. There was fast, driving music with a heavy bass backbeat. There was the sound of something heavy being smashed against wood. Gregor was now sure that Traci Cardinale could not have heard anything that might have been going on in the backyard on the night Tim Bradbury died. Either the foyer was soundproof, or it was terminally well built.
“That’s the beginner’s class,” Traci said, moving them along a hall carpeted in pearl gray pile. She stopped at the first door on the left and opened it up. The noise got louder. Added to the sounds Gregor had heard from the balcony was a woman’s high, insistent voice commanding: “Leg up leg up leg up. Switch right.”
“Come look,” Traci Cardinale said.
Gregor expected to walk through the door and find himself in the middle of a lot of jumping women. Instead, he found himself in a little viewing area, installed several feet above the floor of the work-out studio itself, outfitted with half a dozen fixed plush chairs like a very tiny movie theater. In the studio, a dozen women stood in rows and moved in unison, following the lead of a woman standing alone at the front. The woman had her back to the class and was facing a long wall of mirrors. Gregor thought he had seen walls of mirrors like that in pictures of ballet practice studios. But there was nothing ballet-like about what these women were doing. They jumped. They turned. They marched. They loped from side to side. Most of them were heavyset and most of them were not graceful.
“That’s Dessa Carter.” Traci Cardinale pointed to a very fat woman in the last row of dancers.
Traci had not been exaggerating. Dessa Carter was enormous. She was not, however, silly. She was wearing a plain black leotard and plain black tights and black running shoes that looked less expensive than the ones worn by the women around her. Her body hung in folds and globes and shivered violently in the air every time she moved. She still had a great deal of plain old-fashioned human dignity. There were more normal-size women around her who did not hold up to scrutiny so well. Dessa Carter, Gregor thought, looked like a woman he might like to know.
“This is an aerobic dance class,” Traci explained. “Most of our members spend most of their time on aerobic dance, but we offer other things. Weight training and weight machines. Step aerobics. Yoga and stretch. Interval work.”
Machines screeched. Music blared. Feet crashed into hardwood.
“Is it all this loud?” Gregor asked.
“Yoga is pretty quiet.” Traci motioned them to follow her back into the hall. When they were all outside, she closed the doors to the studio viewing area again. In terms of noise, it didn’t help much.
“We have everything we can soundproofed and protected,” she said, “but it seems like there’s no way to soundproof a door without spending the kind of money the Pentagon does, so the only soundproof doors we’ve got are the ones on the film room upstairs and the ones on the studio where we make the videotapes. Those have to be soundproof. You get used to the noise after a while, though. You’ll see.”
Gregor didn’t think he would. Now that they were farther down the hall, he could hear other pounding and other music. He wondered how many studios Fountain of Youth ran. It was a big house, but there were more than studios in it. How many classes could Fountain of Youth fill at any one time? How many women were there in New Haven who were willing to put themselves through that kind of physical trauma at—Gregor checked his watch—twenty-five minutes to nine on a Monday morning?
Traci reached the door at the end of the hall and knocked. When nobody answered, she knocked again.
“Sometimes Simon puts his earphones on so he can’t hear any of it,” she explained. She turned the knob on the door and opened up. She stuck her head in and looked around. “He’s not here,” she said, in some confusion. “He’s supposed to be here. He knew you were coming.”
“Maybe we should go back downstairs and wait,” Gregor suggested.
Traci shook her head and pushed the door open wider. “There’s no need for you to do that. There are chairs for visitors to sit in. You should go in and take a seat and give me a minute while I go look for him. He’s probably just gone down the hall to the bathroom.”
Gregor looked over at Tony Bandero, to see if this setup was making him uncomfortable, too. Toward the end of Gregor’s time with the Bureau, there had been new procedural guidelines issued for dealing with suspects and property belonging to suspects. One of those guidelines had stressed the necessity for any agent or group of agents entering a suspect’s room or place of work or residence to have an invitation, a warrant, or a witness. It was too easy for defendants to claim illegal search in other circumstances. Surely, Gregor thought, Simon Roveter must be a suspect in this case. The dead man had worked for him. The dead man’s body had been found on his own back lawn. Tony Bandero didn’t seem to care. He had gone into Simon Roveter’s office and begun to walk slowly around it, looking at the framed hunting prints that hung in clusters on the paneled walls. It was, Gregor had to admit, quite an office. Tall arched windows set in the wall opposite the door overlooked a scene of bare tree branches and cloud-occluded sky. A desk with its back to this wall was six feet long and made of deeply polished oak. That, Gregor was convinced, was a replica. The desk had pigeon holes and odd-shaped little specialty drawers rising from the front of it. It had lots and lots of embossed fluted ornamentation. Like everything else self-consciously Victorian about this house, it must have cost a mint and a half and then some.
“Good,” Traci Cardinale said when she saw that Tony Bandero was satisfied. “I’ll be right back. Don’t worry about a thing.”
She went trotting off back down the hall, the thin heels of her high-heeled pumps catching in the carpet pile. Gregor turned his attention back to Tony Bandero.
“Well,” he said. “This is an interesting place. Have you been in here before?”
“Yep,” Tony Bandero said.
“And?” Gregor prodded.
Tony shrugged. “And I think these people throw around a lot of money,” he said, “which is what you think, too. I also wonder where it all comes from, which you wonder, too. I also want
to know if this business is really doing this well and if these people are in a lot of debt and if the late Tim Bradbury had anything to do with it. The questions are obvious. I’ve asked all the questions. It’s the answers I don’t have.”
“You haven’t been able to get hold of the financial records?”
Tony made a face. “This isn’t the FBI. We can’t just call up the IRS and demand to see a lot of tax returns. We have to have a whole lot of probable cause.”
“You’d have to have a whole lot of probable cause even if you were the FBI. You’ve got a dead body.”
“I’ve got a dead body, the one thing we know for sure about it was that it wasn’t murdered on the premises. This is not the kind of thing that looks good when you ask the judge for access to private files.”
“True,” Gregor said, “but you could milk the rumors. You could talk to the people who do business with them. Suppliers, those kinds of people. Isn’t there a local newspaper? The New Haven Register? You could talk to the financial reporter there.”
“We tried. Maybe you could talk to her. Maybe she’d be more comfortable with a man in a suit than she was with a cop.”
Gregor went over to look at one of the clusters of hunting prints. They were pen-and-ink reproductions, not originals. This Simon Roveter, whoever he is, hadn’t let himself go that far. Still. These reproductions were good reproductions. They hadn’t come cheap.
“I think one of the things we’re going to have to do pretty soon,” Gregor said, “before I start going off half-cocked myself and speculating about things I can’t begin to understand, is to—what’s that?”
That was the sound of something creaking, creaking and creaking, like a rusty hinge being pulled violently back and forth. Tony Bandero had heard it at the same time Gregor did. He had turned away from the scrollwork he had been examining at the front of the desk. He was frozen in the middle of Simon Roveter’s office, his head up, listening.
