Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  The article had been set in ordinary type and started with a quote from Tony Bandero.

  “Sometimes, you have no choice but to bring in the best talent you can find,” Detective Tony Bandero said today in an exclusive interview with the Register…

  Horseshit, Gregor thought angrily. Bandero hadn’t given an exclusive interview to anybody. Bandero had talked to every single human being he could find who had a notebook or a microphone in his hand. Or hers. Now Gregor realized he must have been promising exclusives all over the lot.

  Gregor Demarkian did not like publicity. Any tendency he might ever have had to like it had been bred out of him at Quantico. The Bureau liked its men gray, boring, and utterly anonymous. Even so, he was not a babe in the woods. He had worked on enough high-profile cases even while he was still with the Bureau to know how the press operated. He most surely knew enough not to cross them.

  Cross the press was just what Tony Bandero had done—crossed them big time and in the stupidest possible way. Gregor himself had listened to the “exclusive interview” Tony had given to WTNH last night. Now here was another “exclusive interview.” How many more were out there?

  The automatic doors at the front of the motel’s lobby sucked open. Gregor saw a young woman in blue slacks and a blue-and-white sweater with a bulldog appliqued on it walk in. The young woman came directly over to where Gregor stood and thrust out her hand.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” she asked. “I’m Connie Hazelwood. From Bulldog Cabs.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. Shortly. And ungraciously. He couldn’t help himself.

  Connie Hazelwood tilted her head sideways. “Are you all right, Mr. Demarkian? You look a little flushed.”

  “I’m fine,” Gregor said.

  “Well, good,” Connie Hazelwood said. “Good. It’s a big thrill for me to be driving somebody as famous as you are. Shall we go?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said again.

  “Well, good,” Connie Hazelwood said, also again. She had begun to look desperate.

  Gregor felt sorry for her, he really did, but for the moment there was nothing he could do to help her. There wasn’t even anything he could think of to do to calm himself down.

  Connie Hazelwood walked back out the front doors, leading the way to her cab, and Gregor followed her.

  He was still steaming.

  FIVE

  1

  THE NEW HAVEN MEDICAL examiner’s office was in a long, low red brick building that looked like a small factory, set among more of the two- and three-story wood frame houses Gregor had come to think of as “typical” of New Haven. There was Yale. There was Prospect Street. There were a few blocks of churches and stores around the Green. Other than that, the entire city seemed to be made up of these double and triple deckers. Gregor let Connie Hazelwood jockey her cab into a tight parking space at the curb in front of the medical examiner’s building’s doors and considered the neighborhood. He knew his impression had to be wrong. Somewhere in New Haven there would be at least one rich neighborhood and probably several very poor ones. There would be a red-light district and a shopping strip. He just hadn’t happened to run into them. The interesting thing about this neighborhood was that it was not as bad as Gregor had expected it to be. The houses were not noticeably dilapidated. One or two had sagging porches. Several had paint peeling off their sides. Everything looked a little sad and tired, but nothing looked desperate. There was something Gregor had noticed about official municipal buildings over the past few years—police stations, town halls, administration buildings, city hospitals. Such buildings had become a magnet for the derelict and insane. Homeless old women slept on their steps. Drugged and violent men paced back and forth in the gutters in front of them. The houses and stores in the vicinity emptied out. Nobody wanted to live or work near people who could not be counted on to answer a smile with a smile and a good morning with a good morning. Nobody wanted to take the chance of getting knifed or shot because of some demon no one could see inside the head of a person no one could talk to.

  Well, Gregor thought, it hadn’t gotten that bad around here. Maybe the wanderers were spooked. The ME’s offices were in the same building as the morgue. Down at the other end of the building, toward the middle of the block, Gregor could see the bays for the morgue ambulances and vans. They were closed. He got his wallet out of his back pocket and asked Connie Hazelwood what he owed her.

  “Three dollars even,” she replied.

  Gregor assumed it was some kind of set rate. From this part of the city to that part of the city for three dollars even. It surprised him because New Haven was so urban, and set rates were such a small-town thing to do. He took out four dollar bills and passed them into the front seat.

  “Thank you very much,” he said, opening his door to get out.

  Connie Hazelwood pocketed the money and took out a business card. “Ask for me if you call again,” she said, slipping the card into the breast pocket of his suit jacket through his open coat. “I’m not always free, but I can always try.”

  Gregor got a sudden vision of Connie Hazelwood dumping an old lady shopper on an icy sidewalk to free herself up to take his call. He pushed it out of his head.

  “Thank you,” he said again. Then he stepped out onto the pavement and looked around.

  No Christmas decorations. No holiday door wreaths. No sprightly red-and-white posters announcing commercial New Year’s Eve parties. This neighborhood might not be dilapidated, but it was a little like a college student with a case of clinical depression. It wasn’t engaged with the world, to put it the way Donna Moradanyan would. It wasn’t even engaged with itself. Gregor wanted to throw a little tinsel on the nearest utility pole.

  He went up to the building’s front doors and let them slide open in front of him. He found himself in a wide, narrow front room with filthy vinyl on the floor and cork bulletin boards screwed into every wall. The cork bulletin boards were covered with signs that commanded: DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE—HAVE A SAFE NEW YEAR’S EVE. Opposite the front doors, there was a security desk with a guard at it. The guard was old and tired looking and very, very Irish. He was wearing an N.H.P.D. uniform, with the top button of the shirt undone.

  Gregor walked up to the desk. “My name is Gregor Demarkian. I’m here to see Dr. Philip Brye.”

  Maybe the guard didn’t read the newspapers. Or watch local television. He showed no flicker of recognition at all at the sound of Gregor’s name.

  “Phil Brye,” he said, tapping numbers into his phone. Somebody must have picked up on the other end. The guard said, “Gregory Demark for Phil Brye,” listened for a minute, and then said, “Okay.”

  Gregor thought about becoming Gregory Demark. It had its points.

  “You can go on through,” the guard told him. “Office is right there on this floor, all the way to the back, just keep walking till you run into a secretary. Secretary is a guy. We have guy secretaries in the department these days.”

  “Okay,” Gregor said.

  “We have girl patrolmen, too,” the guard said. “I’m retiring at the end of the summer. Maybe they’ll replace me with a girl guard.”

  “Maybe,” Gregor said, edging toward the inner door.

  “It’s more than I can do to keep up with it,” the guard said.

  Gregor got through the door into the hallway. Like the front room, the walls were lined with cork bulletin boards. The posters here, though, were far more explicit than the ones at the front. HAPPY NEW YEAR, one of them announced in bold black letters—right under the picture of a dead man spilling out of a wrecked car with his leg severed. It was a real dead man and a real wrecked car and a real severed leg, too. Gregor checked. It made his stomach turn. Where would they have gotten a picture like that? And what the hell did they think they were doing, using it on a poster? What was a poster like that supposed to accomplish?

  DONT DRINK AND DRIVE, the next poster said.

  Gregor walked past it without looking at its picture. Whatever
the picture was of required the exhibition of a lot of very red blood. Gregor caught that much out of the corner of his eye.

  The secretary turned out to be a clerk in a police officer’s uniform. He was young and very efficient looking and obviously bored. Gregor wondered what he’d done to get stuck with duty like this. There was another bulletin board on the wall here. The poster on it said AULD LANG SYNE. It showed a young black man bleeding to death on a sidewalk with a knife in his back.

  “Somehow,” Gregor said, “you people around here don’t have the same New Year’s spirit as the rest of the country.”

  “That’s because we pick up the pieces of the New Year’s Eve spirit all through the hours of New Year’s Day,” the clerk said. “You know how many deaths we had in this town last New Year’s Eve? Fifty-seven!”

  Gregor was startled. “Murders?”

  “Nah,” the clerk said. “Car accidents mostly. People are perfectly sane three hundred sixty-five days a year, gets to New Year’s Eve and they down a couple of big bottles of champagne and go for a drive. We get other accidents, too. Glass.”

  “Glass?”

  “Yeah. You wouldn’t believe how many people go through windows. Second-story windows. Fifth-story windows. Plate-glass windows in stores they’re trying to rob only they’re too damned smashed to do it right. People get cut up and they bleed to death. Alcohol is worse than crack. It gets more people into more trouble. Believe me.”

  “I will.”

  “Doc Brye went down to the theater for a minute. Not to do an autopsy, you understand, just to check in on somebody. Come on down the hall, and I’ll let you into his office.”

  The clerk got up and motioned Gregor down another hallway, limping a little as he went. Gregor followed him, staying a little behind. The limp explained a few things. The clerk was either temporarily or permanently disabled. That was why he was a clerk, in spite of being both competent and young.

  The clerk stopped at the door of the corner office at the back, opened up and looked inside.

  “Still not back yet,” he said. “Why don’t you go in and sit down, and I’ll get you a cup of coffee. Phil’s always got coffee hanging out somewhere. Also food. You want something like a cheese Danish? Or a chocolate doughnut?”

  A chocolate doughnut? First thing in the morning? “A cheese Danish will be fine,” Gregor said.

  “Back in a minute.”

  The clerk went out, and Gregor took the opportunity to look over Philip Brye’s office. It was a huge, square room with a disintegrating acoustic ceiling and a vinyl floor that looked like someone had gone at it with a fish scaler. Instead of a desk, it had a long wood work table shoved into one corner, entirely covered with papers and books and files. There were cork bulletin boards in here, too, but they didn’t have posters on them. They had lists. DUTY ROSTER NEW YEAR’S EVE, one said, and another, CALL LIST NEW YEAR’S EVE. All the available display space was taken up with lists of people who could be counted on to come in on New Year’s Eve.

  It was, Gregor thought, less like a doctor’s office than the command post for an army under siege.

  2

  BY THE TIME PHILIP Brye got back from the theater, still wearing his white lab coat and one surgical glove, Gregor Demarkian was established in the office’s sole shabby club chair, bolstered by a plastic foam cup full of instant coffee and a cheese Danish the size of Detroit. He had finished about half the Danish, but it still looked the size of Detroit. He had no idea where Philip Brye bought his pastries, but he wanted to learn.

  Philip Brye turned out to be a short man with bad skin and a very bad haircut. It was one of those haircuts that had been cut too closely at the back of the neck, so that the skin there was red and raw and peeling. The skin on the knuckles of Philip Byre’s one exposed hand was peeling, too. Coming into the office, Philip Brye stripped off his remaining surgical glove, opened the top of a bright red wastebasket, and held his other hand out to Gregor.

  “I would have been more careful about washing up,” he said blandly, “but I didn’t actually touch anything in there except a clipboard. I take it you’re Mr. Gregor Demarkian, America’s greatest living detective.”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “I’m Gregor Demarkian, anyway.”

  Philip Brye laughed and coughed and took a seat on the edge of his work table. “I’ve been checking out your publicity on and off since last night. You look like your photographs, oddly enough. People almost never do. I take it Tony’s gotten you into a lot of trouble.”

  “It looks that way,” Gregor agreed.

  “He got the psychic into a lot of trouble, too. He probably didn’t tell you about the psychic. That was last year, over a child murder we had—nasty piece of work and quite straightforward, really, except that Tony saw a way to grab himself some publicity, and he took it. And took it and took it and took it.”

  “Did the psychic do any good?”

  “No. She put a good face on it, though, especially the way Tony got her played up on the six o’clock news. Murderer turned out to be the kid’s stepfather, which is what we expected. It usually is.”

  “Stepfathers specifically?” Gregor asked curiously. “Not fathers or uncles or brothers?”

  “Stepfathers and boyfriends,” Philip Brye answered. “Especially with eleven- and twelve-year-old girls. It’s practically a syndrome. I take it child murders were out of your field of expertise at the Bureau.”

  “Those kinds of child murders were. I worked on a couple of serial murder cases with child victims.”

  “Oh, lovely.”

  “I retired,” Gregor said. “At the first possible opportunity.”

  Philip Brye coughed for a moment. “I keep telling myself I’m going to retire at the first possible opportunity, too,” he said, “but I probably won’t. I figure I’m addicted to this place. Did Tony tell you anything at all about what happened to Tim Bradbury?”

  Gregor nodded. “He was poisoned. With arsenic. But not where he was found, because there were signs of a vomiting episode in his throat but none in the vicinity of his body, even taking the word vicinity loosely. No sign of a sickness episode on the grounds, in the garage, or in the house at the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio—”

  “Do you know to take that with a grain of salt?” Philip Brye asked sharply. “Tony and his people aren’t always exactly thorough. The evidence of an episode might have been cleaned up, and they might not have spotted the cleanup.”

  “That had occurred to me.”

  “Good.”

  Gregor went on. “The body was found in a small area of evergreen bushes next to the Fountain of Youth Work-Out’s back door. It was naked, and there was no sign of the clothing Tim Bradbury might have been wearing at the time he died. He had been dead at least an hour when he was found. I think that’s it.”

  Philip Brye considered this. “That’s all? Nothing about Bradbury himself? Nothing about his people? Or his background?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing about—the kind of speculation that’s been going on since Tim showed up dead?”

  “Tony sent me some newspaper clippings,” Gregor said. “They contained a few theories.”

  “I’m sure they did. They weren’t the theories I was thinking of.” Philip Brye jumped off the edge of his work table, wheezed, then walked over to his single, overstuffed file cabinet. The cabinet was so overstuffed, none of the drawers would close. “I suppose it figures,” he said. “Tony never tells anybody anything interesting if he can help it. Still, it’s a little raw.”

  “Do you mean the forensic information wasn’t complete?”

  “Oh, the forensic information’s complete enough. The forensic information isn’t the point. Just a minute and I’ll get you what I’ve got.”

  Dr. Brye began to search patiently and systematically through the second file drawer from the top. Files came out and were shoved onto the file cabinet’s cluttered surface. Files went back in, crammed until they bent against other
files that had already been crammed. Gregor Demarkian finished the rest of his cheese Danish and sipped at his coffee.

  “Here we go,” Philip Brye said after a while. “My personal file on the death of Tim Bradbury. Did you know he was a local boy?”

  “I think it was in one of the newspaper clippings. Branford, I think it said. Or something like that.”

  “North Branford, yes, that’s where he had his apartment before he moved in at Fountain of Youth, but that isn’t the kind of local I meant,” Philip Brye said. “He was born and brought up in the area, out in Derby. He started working in and around New Haven when he was a teenager. He took shit jobs at Yale. Dishwasher. Parking lot attendant. Road construction work when he could. We call that Connecticut’s own state college scholarship plan. Every summer, the crews are full of kids working their way through college. Not that you really can work your way through college anymore. The prices are prohibitive. Anyway, my point here is that a lot of us knew him—not well, you understand, not as a friend, but enough to recognize him on the street and say hello to. New Haven isn’t a small town anymore. Everybody doesn’t know everybody. But some people do get around. Tim Bradbury was one of them.”

  “Did Tony Bandero know him?”

  Philip Brye shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think Tony’s that much of a shit. However, the thing is, I knew Tim, maybe better than most people did. When I was still married, my wife and I had a house out in Hamden. Tim did our yard work and our snow plowing one year. Good kid. Very responsible. Came to work on time. Got down in good order. Gave value for money. Always polite. So, when all this happened, and I saw what Tony was turning it into, I decided to check it all out for myself.”

  “And?”

  Philip Brye had a thick file folder in his hands. He walked back across the office and dumped it in Gregor’s lap. “Take a look through that. That’s the result of the first, and God knows I hope the last, detective investigation I have ever conducted. It’s probably a mess, but it’s got to be a whole hell of a lot better than anything Tony Bandero has got.”