Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  The phone was on a little night table that was bolted to the wall between the two beds. All the furniture in this motel room was bolted to the wall. Gregor wondered who on earth would try to steal a bed. Next to the phone there was a little cardboard notice, tented into an open-sided pyramid, that said:

  Party All Night

  in enormous red letters. The notice was advertising a sleepover New Year’s Eve party being held in the motel. Gregor had read the notice the night before and decided that it sounded like a good idea. People who were staying over at a motel after drinking all night were at least not threatening sober drivers on the road. Gregor had been to only one New Year’s Eve party in his life—unless you wanted to count the wine-and-old-movie sessions held every year in old George Tekemanian’s apartment, which Gregor didn’t—and he’d hated it. New Year’s Eve was a nonholiday nonevent. It was a lot of people coming together in a desperate search for an excuse to get drunk, and not finding one.

  Gregor’s wallet was also on the table next to the phone. Gregor got his AT&T calling card out and began to punch numbers into the pad. He loved this new practice of making touch-pads standard on phones. His fingers had never fit comfortably into the old rotary dials. He got the bonging tone and the strange, lilting robot voice that inevitably startled him. “Thank you for calling… AT&T.” He quashed the urge he always had to tell the robot voice that he was not calling AT&T. He was calling Philadelphia. The phone was ringing on the other end of the line. It was pulsing over and over again, unanswered. Gregor had a sinking feeling that he hadn’t called early enough. Tibor was already down at the Ararat restaurant, having breakfast. It would be hours before Gregor would be able to get hold of him.

  Out in Philadelphia, the phone was picked up. A low, distracted voice mumbled something Gregor suspected was Armenian, but that was too garbled for Gregor to be sure. With Tibor, it was hard to be sure. Tibor had been born and brought up in Soviet Armenia, so he spoke both Armenian and Russian with fluency. He also spoke Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and modern Greek. He read Latin, ancient Greek, old English, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Welsh, too. When Tibor answered the phone still half asleep, he could be saying anything in any language at all.

  Gregor turned the notice about the motel’s New Year’s Eve party to the wall, so that he didn’t have to look at it. “Tibor? Did I wake you up?”

  There was what sounded like a crashing pile of books on the Philadelphia end of the line—probable, since Tibor’s small apartment behind Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church was decorated almost entirely with enormous piles of books, ranging from Aristotle’s Poetics (in the original Greek) to Mickey Spillane’s The Body Lovers (in the most garish of its paperback covers). Gregor heard Tibor mutter under his breath and smiled slightly. It was a point of honor with Tibor that he did not swear, in any language, no matter what happened to him. Gregor always wondered what it was he said instead.

  “Krekor,” Tibor said finally. “Just a minute, please. The cookbooks.”

  Cookbooks? What cookbooks? Tibor couldn’t cook. Tibor couldn’t even make instant coffee.

  “Take your time,” Gregor told him. “I thought for a moment there that I’d missed you. I thought you’d gone down to the Ararat for breakfast.”

  “I’m not going to breakfast today, Krekor. I’m blessing a house. In Ardmore. It’s Sheila Kashinian’s cousin and Sheila asked me to come.”

  Gregor stretched out on the bed again, trying to prop himself up on a pile of pillows. People did this on television all the time, and looked really comfortable. When Gregor did it in real life, he always slid down to the point where his neck and shoulders started to ache and he had to sit up again. This time, he slid down almost immediately. He curled himself up and got his feet off the side of the bed again.

  “I thought I’d call you for some advice,” he said. “I thought I’d find out how things were going back there. I’m in a motel room.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said seriously. “It reminds me of my early days with the Bureau. I didn’t like my early days with the Bureau very much. And I don’t think this should feel so natural. Being alone, I mean.”

  “It gets claustrophobic around here,” Tibor said. “Everybody means well, but they press too close. It’s not a terrible thing to want to get out on your own every once in a while. Even Lida does it.”

  “Is Lida going to California again?”

  “The day after tomorrow. Bennis is going to California just after the New Year. Krekor, you should take a real vacation instead of doing the kind of thing you’re doing.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had a real vacation.”

  “I don’t think you have, either. It’s not healthy for you, Krekor. Now you’re calling me at seven forty-five in the morning from a motel in Connecticut and your voice sounds tense.”

  “My voice is tense. I’m tense. I had a terrible day yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Gregor said, “I don’t think Tony Bandero really wants any help with this investigation. I think what he wants is a body he can throw at the press. That’s what he did yesterday. Throw me at the press.”

  Gregor explained the day before: the ride from the station, the conversation about Tim Bradbury, the cursory look around the backyard at Fountain of Youth, the falling balcony rail.

  “Every time I tried to make him get really specific about times and dates and places and names and forensics reports, he got distracted,” Gregor said. “And the way he handled the balcony rail incident—” Gregor traced gestures of exasperation in the air, that Tibor couldn’t see.

  “I thought you said he called the uniformed police in after the balcony rail incident,” Tibor said. “Isn’t that what he should have done?”

  “It wasn’t a bad idea,” Gregor conceded, “but it also wasn’t really necessary. And he wouldn’t listen to reason. When we talked to WTNH last night, he made it sound like step two in a very sinister underground plot. It was right out of something by Sax Rohmer.”

  “Sax Rohmer,” Tibor said. “I know. Fu Manchu. The Yellow Peril.”

  “Well, no Yellow Peril this time, Tibor. Just peril in general. The Forces of Evil out there. Generic.”

  “This was inaccurate, Krekor?”

  Gregor shrugged, which Tibor also could not see. “In the long run, it may be accurate. You’re the one who’s always telling me you believe in the existence of the devil. In the short run, the whole thing is incredibly, almost deliberately, idiotic. The balcony rail incident isn’t all that difficult to figure out, at least on a surface level. I knew how and I knew why within ten minutes of examining the debris. All I didn’t know was who and the why of why.”

  “The why of why. That’s wonderful, Krekor.”

  “I think it’s the central point,” Gregor said. “But the point I kept trying to make to Tony Bandero, and the one he wouldn’t listen to, is that nobody got hurt and nobody got killed and nobody was supposed to. There might have been a corpse in the backyard at the beginning of December, that might mean that there’s a killer in the vicinity who might be willing to kill again, but that business with the rail was definitely not attempted murder.”

  “Maybe it plays better in the newspapers if people think it was,” Tibor said. “Maybe your Tony Bandero is just trying to get a little extra time or money from his superiors. Maybe it has nothing to do with you.”

  “If it had nothing to do with me, Tibor, either I wouldn’t be here or he would be listening to me.”

  There were more muffled crashes and muttered exclamations on the Philadelphia end of the line. Gregor imagined Tibor in a falling rain of cookbooks, their pages opened to glossy photographs of crown roast of lamb with pearl onions and strawberry mousse surprise.

  “Tibor?”

  “Do you want to come home, Krekor? Is that what this is about? Do you want to wash your hands of this murder and come back to Philadelphia?”

  Gregor
leaned over and got his copy of Poisons and Toxicity from the other bed. Held in one hand like this, it threatened to break his wrist. He put it down in his lap.

  “I think,” he said, “that what I want to do for the moment is an end run around Tony Bandero. I want to cut him out of the loop. I want to investigate on my own.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “It might be to an extent. For a while. Eventually, I’d be stopped cold, of course.”

  “You don’t sound like you’re in the mood to worry about eventually, Krekor.”

  “No, Gregor said. “I’m not.”

  “Then I think you should do it,” Tibor told him. “You should make your end run. I know that normally you consider it unethical to work against the will of the local police—”

  “Also just plain stupid,” Gregor pointed out.

  “True,” Tibor said, “it’s probably also just plain stupid. But in this case it sounds to me that the local police brought you in under false pretenses and are now attempting to prevent you from doing the job you agreed to do. And a boy is dead. Or a young man who was not much more than a boy. It doesn’t sound to me as if the police are solving that case.”

  “The way they’re approaching this, they haven’t got a hope in hell.”

  “There then, Krekor. It’s settled. This is your priest talking. You should do what you can do for as long as you can do it, and worry about eventually when it gets here.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  Gregor could have pointed out that for Tibor to consider himself Gregor’s priest was worse than disingenuous, since Gregor was the only permanent resident of Cavanaugh Street who did not regularly attend church. He was also the only permanent resident of Cavanaugh who had doubts about the existence of God and was willing to say so. Why quibble, when Tibor was telling him what he wanted to hear?

  Poisons and Toxicity was threatening to break his kneecaps. Gregor chucked it off to his side.

  “Listen,” he told Tibor, “I’ve got to make a couple of phone calls. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Not until tonight, Krekor. Because of going to Ardmore.”

  “Not until tonight, then. Maybe not until very late tonight. I have a lot of running around to do, and I’m going to have to do it all in cabs.”

  “Good luck,” Tibor said.

  Gregor hung up. He put the phone back on the side table. He stood and went over to the other bed. The forensics report was a clipped-together mass of photocopied forms that looked like it had been scribbled over by a gang of angry children. Gregor leafed through it until he found a page with the departmental letterhead showing through reasonably clearly. Then he checked the time again. It was exactly eight o’clock. If he’d been dealing with a doctor in private practice, he wouldn’t have had a chance. Doctors employed by states and cities, though, worked on state and city schedules. He could only hope.

  He punched in the number for the New Haven medical examiner’s office. He got a phone that rang six times before it was picked up. He had expected to reach a receptionist or a switchboard operator. He got a man with a deep voice and a hacking cough.

  “Medical examiner’s office,” the man said.

  Gregor thought he might as well give it a try. “My name is Gregor Demarkian. I don’t know if that will be familiar to anyone in the ME’s office or not. I’m looking for Dr. Philip Brye.”

  The hacking cough went on and on. Either this man needed to stop smoking cigarettes, or he had the kind of cold that should have kept him home from work.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” the man said. “This is Brye. Tony Bandero told me you might call.”

  “I didn’t know if you’d be in this early in the morning,” Gregor said.

  Philip Brye chuckled. “I’m always in. Ask Tony. I’m here day and night. Since my divorce, I don’t seem to have any place else to go. My wife said I wouldn’t go any place else even when we were married. You have something you want to know?”

  “I’d like to come in and talk to you in person, if you wouldn’t mind,” Gregor said.

  “About Tim Bradbury?”

  “About Tim Bradbury.”

  “I saw all that stuff on the news last night about the accident at Fountain of Youth and I wasn’t sure. My, Tony was having himself a fine old time, wasn’t he? Did you know that Tony Bandero had aspirations on the order of turning himself into a media star?”

  “I’d begun to suspect it.”

  “Yeah, well, everybody does after about ten minutes. So come on in. I’ll send out for coffee and Danish if you haven’t had breakfast. We’ll have a talk.”

  “I haven’t had breakfast,” Gregor said.

  “Nobody really gets in around here until nine o’clock anymore anyway,” Philip Brye said. “It’s not like it was when I was starting out. We all got in early and stayed late. Now the only time this place is buzzing is on the holidays. New Year’s Eve coming up. Do you find yourself giving lectures about how different everything was when you were young and feeling about three hundred years old?”

  “Often,” Gregor said, “but I don’t think I really want the world to be like what it was when I was young.”

  “I guess I don’t either, not in most ways. Look, if Tony’s stuck you safely out of town without a car, call Bulldog Cabs. They’re a bunch of college kids and they need the money. Also, they’re reliable and they’re cheap.”

  “Bulldog Cabs,” Gregor agreed.

  “See you in a while,” Philip Brye said.

  Gregor hung up again. That hadn’t been too bad, he thought. Philip Brye hadn’t hung up on him. He even sounded like he might turn into an ally.

  Gregor got up and headed for the closet, where he had hung his three three-piece suits and his little collection of white button-down shirts: what Bennis always called his “determined to be unfashionable” wardrobe. He had taken a shower the night before, so he didn’t have to worry about that. He had at least one tie—the lemon yellow and scarlet red rep tie Donna Moradanyan had given him for Christmas—that was in reasonably good shape. It wasn’t in reasonably good taste, but Gregor tried not to ask too much of ties. It was enough that they shouldn’t be fraying. Or actually in strips.

  Gregor shed his robe and his pajamas and reached into his suitcase for a clean set of underwear. Bennis thought his underwear was “determined to be unfashionable” too, but the idea of fashionable underwear appalled him.

  What made him happy was this feeling he had now that, finally, he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t letting himself be pulled around by the nose by Tony Bandero. He wasn’t drowning in theatrics and irrelevant details. He shoved his dirty underwear into his laundry bag, put on the clean set, and reached for one of those white button-down shirts.

  Yes, he thought, he was finally doing the right thing. No matter what etiquette demanded in most times and most places, in this time and this place, he had every right in the world to do what he was doing.

  If that meant that in the long run he put Tony Bandero’s nose out of joint—so be it.

  2

  GREGOR’S MOOD LASTED UNTIL he got down to the lobby to wait for his Bulldog Cab. It had lasted through a long and rambling phone call from Tony Bandero, in which it became obvious that Tony had no intention of rescuing Gregor from the boondocks until well after lunch. Gregor didn’t bother to tell him about his imminent meeting with Philip Brye. Gregor’s mood lasted through the discovery that he had somehow managed to rip the tie Donna had given him, even though he had only had it on for a few minutes, and that he didn’t have another tie in good enough shape to replace it. Gregor’s mood even lasted through his trip downstairs, which was a nightmare of helium balloons and shrieking posters. Sometime in the night some kind of invisible line had been crossed. New Year’s Eve was suddenly an Event, a Matter of Urgent Importance, a Crisis. Signs were everywhere: advertising the motel sleepover party, wishing him Happy New Year, asking him what HE intended to do about his New Year’s resolutions. This last seemed to be
some kind of public service announcement from a local rest home specializing in “substance abuse” problems. In small type at the bottom of the poster was a line that said, “If you won’t get help from us, get help somewhere.” Gregor wished he could. The elevator was full of red and white balloons, each of them imprinted with the number of the new year. Just enough of the helium had leaked out of them to make them float at a level with Gregor’s face. He kept smashing his nose into them whenever he turned around.

  When he got to the lobby, he walked past the check-in desk to the big wall of plate glass that looked out on the front drive. He saw no sign of a Bulldog Cab, so he walked back toward the elevators and stopped at the long line of white metal newspaper vending machines. There was another notice about the motel’s New Year’s sleepover party resting on top of these. There were more helium-filled balloons, too, tied to the pull handles of one of the machines. Gregor got some change out of his pocket and bought copies of the New York Times and The New Haven Register. He didn’t think he’d have time, with everything he had to do, to get through USA Today.

  The Times had a headline about the Middle East and another about Bosnia-Herzegovina. Gregor ignored this—he was tired of depressing himself with news about perennial and unresolvable wars—and maneuvered his copy of the Register to the top. Then he looked down into an enormous picture of his own face and blinked.

  His own face.

  On the cover of the Register.

  With Tony Bandero’s face hovering around in the background behind it.

  Gregor got the paper all the way open and stared at it. The headline had been set in enormous type and said:

  DEMARKIAN IN NEW HAVEN.

  The subhead had been set in stylized italics and read:

  Famed Detective To Aid Police In Bradbury Probe