Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  As far as Gregor knew, Tony Bandero had nothing. On the other hand, Tony could have everything and just be keeping it to himself. Gregor positioned the file on his lap so that it wouldn’t fall off and opened it up.

  The first thing in the file was a glossy eight-by-eleven black-and-white photograph of what looked like a shack, boarded up and deserted. The second thing in the file was another eight-by-eleven photograph of the same shack. The third thing in the file was yet another photograph of the same shack—but here Gregor could see a difference. In this third photograph, there was very distinctly a lit kerosene lamp in the one gap in the boards that covered the windows of what Gregor thought was, or had been, a glassed-in porch. Gregor raised this picture in Philip Brye’s direction and then raised his eyebrows, too.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “That,” Philip Brye said, “is Tim Bradbury’s mother’s house. If you look closely at the last picture, you’ll be able to see the Housatonic River in the background. The house was built originally—all the houses on that part of the river were built originally—as summer places. This would have been at the end of World War Two. The houses are small and they’re not insulated. Most of them were built without heating systems on the assumption that they would only be used in the summer. But it didn’t work out that way.”

  “Absentee landlords got hold of them.”

  “Yep. And people who were really too poor to afford to keep up a house got hold of them, too. I checked about Tim’s mother. She owns her place. Such as it is.”

  “It looks boarded up,” Gregor said.

  Philip Brye shrugged. “It’s cheaper to nail driftwood over a broken window than to replace the glass. The place is boarded up. It looks empty. But it isn’t.”

  “Tim Bradbury’s mother lives there alone?”

  “She’s got two cats. Otherwise she lives there alone. Tim moved out right after he graduated from high school.”

  Gregor looked over the last picture of the shack again. “I don’t suppose you can blame him for that,” he said. “It isn’t anyplace I’d want to live if I didn’t have to.”

  “Me, either. What I find significant, though, is that Tim had apparently left that house emotionally long before he left it physically. I guess that’s a polite way of saying he lied about his background. Consistently. To everyone.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said his parents had left the area,” Philip Brye said. “Emphasis on parents, plural.”

  “I take it he didn’t have parents, plural,” Gregor said.

  “I got hold of his birth certificate. On the line for ‘father’ all it says is ‘unknown.’ ”

  “That doesn’t mean that the father was necessarily actually unknown. The mother must have known who he was. She may have been in contact with him for years. Was the family on welfare?”

  “No. No welfare. No social security. No social workers.”

  “The mother had a job, then,” Gregor said.

  “Not as far as I could find out,” Philip Brye said. “You’re the detective and I’m the amateur. I’ve probably missed something obvious that you’ll pick right up. It will turn out she was slinging hash in a diner someplace, and there’s no mystery about it at all. But the thing is, what really got me going looking into this beyond the fact that Tim was somebody I knew, was that I had this talk with this woman who’s now a staff assistant here in the department. Five years ago, she was a guidance counselor at the high school in Derby. That was Tim Bradbury’s senior year.”

  Gregor scratched the side of his face. “I take it this has a punch line,” he said. “She had some startling revelation that Tony Bandero wouldn’t listen to.”

  “Bandero won’t listen to anybody, but this isn’t a startling revelation, no. But it is indicative. This woman was a guidance counselor, right, so she had access to Tim Bradbury’s files. Father, unknown. Mother’s occupation, housewife.”

  “I’m surprised she remembers all this. Even with the murder, it sounds like she can recall a lot of detail. Too much detail, maybe.”

  Philip Brye smiled wanly. “She’s not an inaccurate witness, Mr. Demarkian. And she’s not the sort of person who’s prone to making things up. No, she remembers what she remembers because it was an issue at the time. Tim was an issue at the time. Tim’s mother was an issue at the time. How strange she was.”

  “She came to teachers’ conferences and that kind of thing?”

  “Not on a regular basis, no, I don’t think so. Mrs. Conyer—that’s the ex-guidance counselor—says she came in once and looked just the way you’d expect her to. Acted just the way you’d expect her to, too. Very overweight. Very slovenly. Dressed in a big polyester tent and shoes run over at the heels. Not too recently bathed. White trash.”

  “Another good reason for Tim Bradbury to want to move out as soon as he could,” Gregor pointed out. “Especially since, from everything you’ve told me about him, he wasn’t the same type.”

  “Mrs. Conyer said the mother came as quite a shock to the teachers. Tim was always neat, polite, clean, very well behaved. He wasn’t a world beater. He didn’t make it into the top third of his class and sail out with a scholarship to an important college. He was just a stable, industrious kid. I know it’s not fashionable to say so these days, but in my experience family counts for a lot. I get the children of mothers like the one Mrs. Conyer described in here all the time. Anyway, I get their bodies in here. Dope. Liquor. Knife fights. Not jobs teaching weight training for Fountain of Youth.”

  “Are you absolutely sure he was never on drugs?”

  “No. I can be absolutely sure that I never saw him on drugs, and I saw him a fair amount. I can be absolutely sure he wasn’t on drugs on the night he died.”

  “What about dealing drugs? Dealers don’t often use. Not if they’re smart.”

  “True,” Philip Brye said, “and, of course, there would be know way to be positive that he wasn’t dealing, because there isn’t any way to prove a negative. But my take on this was that he just didn’t have enough money. I don’t know about checking accounts and savings accounts and that kind of thing. I don’t think anyone has checked yet—”

  Gregor snorted.

  “However,” Philip Brye said, “Tim didn’t live like a drug dealer. He didn’t even live like a part-time dealer. That job he had was no piece of cake. It required a great deal of physical effort. Why bother to do that if you’ve got five, six hundred dollars a week, minimum, coming in on the side?”

  “He could have been trying to launder the money,” Gregor suggested.

  “He could have laundered the money by waiting tables or tending her or working in the library. Part time. Instead of that, he had a full time, job at Fountain of Youth. There’s also the evidence of what he didn’t have. No seventy-five dollar designer jeans. No hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar Timberland boots. Just good old Levi’s and Stride Rites.”

  “Let me try one more thing,” Gregor said. “Let me try the possibility that he was just one very smart young man. Smart enough to know how to hide. Smart enough to know he had to bank his money because dealing drugs gets old fast and drug dealers don’t stay alive if they try to stay too long in the business.”

  “No,” Philip Brye said. “If Tim was the kind of smart that that kind of behavior would have made him, then he was the greatest actor since Laurence Olivier. He might have played a game like that and gotten away with it if he were the sort of kid nobody notices, but he wasn’t. He was the sort of kid people like me tend to mentally adopt. Here’s a good kid, we say. From a modest background. Really determined to make his way up. Let’s give the kid a hand, we say. Let’s at least take an interest in how he’s doing. I think that’s what happened at Fountain of Youth, don’t you? They have some of their staff living in the house, but they don’t have all of it. I think Tim got asked because he was—affecting.”

  “Possibly,” Gregor said.

  Actually, the secret ingredient in the lives of mos
t successful psychopaths was precisely the fact that they were—affecting. Charming. Bashful. Boyish. Eager. Vulnerable. All on the surface, but all perfectly plausible. People want to believe in the struggling young man determined to make good. There were even some struggling young men out there worth believing in.

  Most of the struggling young men Gregor had known, however—especially the boyish, affecting, vulnerable kind—had been struggling mostly to hide their rage. On the evidence of what was in this file folder, Tim Bradbury had had a lot to be legitimately enraged about. It bothered Gregor that nobody had ever picked up any such emotion in him.

  Gregor leafed through a few more pages of the folder. Most of its bulk was made up of repetitions. Three pictures of the house. Four pictures of what looked like Tim Bradbury as a ten-year-old boy. Two copies of Tim Bradbury’s page from the high school yearbook. Most of it would turn out not to mean anything.

  Even so, Gregor thought, this was more than he had had when he got up this morning—a lot more. It was enough for him to move on with. It was a start.

  Gregor hadn’t realized it before this, but he had been desperately looking for a start ever since that piece of balcony rail had gone crashing to Fountain of Youth’s polished hardwood foyer floor.

  SIX

  1

  FOR NICK BANNERMAN, THE idea of leaving Fountain of Youth for an hour in the afternoon to have lunch or go to the Co-op was appalling. Ever since the incident at the SuperHour Grocery, Nick had developed an odd kind of situation-specific agoraphobia. He had been at Yale for four years. There were still restaurants he knew and where he was known, stores whose owners he knew by sight and others whose owners he knew by name. There was also the strip out on Dixwell Avenue: the chain stores and the franchises, the malls whose managements had New York legal help and knew too much about liability and law suits to pull anything like what he’d been subjected to at the SuperHour. Not that that would necessarily do him any good. There was a black judge in Pennsylvania suing Bloomingdale’s right now, because they’d had him arrested on suspicion of credit card fraud. Somebody in their security department had apparently decided that fraud was the only possible reason a black man could have a credit card. There were other things like that floating around in the air, too, in New York and Baltimore and Miami and San Francisco and Washington. Once Nick started thinking about it, he was shocked at how many incidents he could come up with. Incidents. It felt like the wrong word. An incident was the time you drank too much at dinner with your girlfriend’s mother and threw up on your shoes, or the time you stopped paying attention in the K mart parking lot and dented your fender on a lamp pole. It wasn’t this… creeping slime, that hid in the shadows and got you when you weren’t looking. That was what frightened him. It was out there waiting for him. It would get him if he didn’t watch out. He felt exactly the way he had when he was six years old and had first had to sleep in his bedroom in the new house in Larchmont, the one where the closet door would never entirely close.

  The problem with me, Nick told himself, as he came out of his third dance of the morning—the intermediates, meaning he’d actually had to work up a little sweat—is that I’ve led a much too sheltered life. He wended his way through the women dressed in leotards in the corridor and headed for the stairway. He had grown up in Larchmont, not in Harlem. His father had been the first black man ever promoted into a vice presidency at IBM. He knew as little about the ghetto as any sorority president cheerleader at the University of Kansas. The only time he had ever seen a gun, except on a cop, was when he’d been mugged. Until the SuperHour, of course. The SuperHour had changed everything. Except that it probably hadn’t changed anything at all. He’d been followed by store detectives, ignored by sales clerks, dismissed by bank tellers. He’d had teachers, even at prep school and Yale, who had behaved as if his vocabulary were restricted to words of one syllable. There had been a thousand and one little things and a hundred and one not so little ones, but nothing, ever, anywhere, anything like what had happened at the SuperHour.

  If you went down the service stairs far enough, you got to a swinging wood door that led to the service hallway and what was still, after a hundred years and six renovations, the pantry. Nick pushed his way in there and looked around at the shelves. It was twelve o’clock and he was starving. He was also in no mood to sit down in the dining room again with all those women. Doing that yesterday it had given him a headache. It was incredible what some women could be like, when they wanted to be. There was the middle-aged one who had squeezed his thigh while they were waiting on line at the salad bar. There was the young one who had cornered him for an earnest conversation about the Problems of the Underclass and then been furious with him when she realized that he didn’t actually know anybody in the underclass. She’d had her hand on his knee until she had gotten angry with him. Then, before getting up and stalking away, she had dug the tips of her very long nails right into the vulnerable place under his kneecap.

  There was a can of tuna fish on the shelf and a bag of onions in the top bin of a stack of plastic bins. The bins underneath the onions all seemed to be full of beans. Nick took a can of tuna and an onion and a loaf of four-grain bread and looked around for some mayonnaise. He found six different kinds of vegetable oil and sixteen different kinds of vinegar. The vinegar surprised him so much, he had to count the bottles twice. Then he decided that Fountain of Youth must be out of mayonnaise, because the only glass jars of anything like it he could find were filled with tofu paste. Nick took the tuna fish and the bread and the onion out of the pantry and into the kitchen. The kitchen was one of those big empty places, built to be used by several people at one time, where all the appliances were too far apart.

  Nick put his food down on the long wood picnic table that sat next to a row of windows overlooking the back lawn and went to the refrigerator. There was a second kitchen, a little smaller but much more efficient, where the group meals were prepared for the women who were taking the classes upstairs. That kitchen would be full of frantic people at this time of day. This kitchen was a haven. Nick didn’t define to himself exactly a haven from what. He looked through the jars on the refrigerator shelves. More tofu paste. Eight different kinds of mustard. All-natural organic ketchup. The door to the hall swung open.

  If Nick had been living at the house, he would have recognized her immediately. Since he was only there for the working day and she was not sociable, it took him a minute. His first reaction was simple surprise. She was so pretty, he almost dropped the jar he was holding. Tall. Thin. Blond. Perfect. The epitome of everything in the world of women that Nick Bannerman knew he should not want. He felt the stiffening in his pants and sidled hastily toward the refrigerator door, to make sure he was covered. God only knew, exercise clothes wouldn’t cover him much. He looked at the jar he was holding and wondered why he had picked it up. It contained something called anise pickles.

  “Ah,” he said. “Hi. Well. Um. It’s Frannie, isn’t it?”

  The blond woman had stopped dead as soon as she had seen him. She looked pale and frozen. When Nick spoke, she jumped a little. When he finished, she walked toward the middle of the room, slowly and deliberately, as if she were making herself do it.

  “That’s right. Frannie Jay. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  “You didn’t bother me,” Nick told her. “I was looking for some mayonnaise.”

  “I won’t bother you much longer,” Frannie Jay said. “I just want to get a bottle of mineral water. As soon as I get a bottle of mineral water, I’ll get right out of here.”

  Anise pickles. Nick put them back on the shelf, next to a jar of 100 percent all-natural carob sauce. It said it like that, in big jokey letters, as if it were a can of SpaghettiOs. The healthy foods movement meets American mass marketing. The palms of Nick’s hands were wet with sweat. He wiped them off, as discreetly as he could, on the back of his T-shirt.

  “You don’t have to get out of here,” he said. “Stick around and I’ll m
ake you some lunch. That’s why I was looking for the mayonnaise. Tuna fish.”

  “I don’t eat lunch,” Frannie Jay said.

  Frannie Jay didn’t look like she ate much of anything at all. She wasn’t anorexic, exactly. She had good muscle tone and rounded, strong calves. Still you could see every bone in her rib cage. Nick felt his erection wilt and then stiffen again.

  He closed the refrigerator door. “If you don’t want to spend the hour upstairs, you could stay here and keep me company,” he suggested. “I could use a little company. I spend all my time either bouncing around or commuting.”

  Frannie looked toward the wall of windows next to the picnic table and blinked. “I don’t really like this room. Those windows. I don’t really like to look out there when I don’t have to.”

  “That’s right,” Nick said. “You’re the one who—ah—”

  “Found the body.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I didn’t really find the body. I only found the foot. It was sticking out of the bushes.”

  Maybe this was some kind of posttraumatic stress disorder. Nick had played a Vietnam veteran with posttraumatic stress disorder once. Frannie had moved farther into the kitchen and was staring out the window.

  “Did you meet that man who was here yesterday?” she asked suddenly. “That Gregor Demarkian person, the detective?”

  “Briefly.” Nick was confused.

  “It said in the paper that he was good at secrets. All the cases he’s ever solved were full of secrets.”

  Nick had read this article. What it had actually said was that Gregor Demarkian was good at uncovering guilty secrets.

  “I don’t think the police brought him in here because he was good at secrets,” Nick told her. “I think they were taking a lot of heat about not solving the case and not really doing anything to get themselves anywhere and Demarkian was a good bone to throw at public opinion. He’s got a reputation.”