Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  This restaurant still had its Christmas decorations up, such as they were. There were a few tinsel-fringed stars taped to the walls and a plastic bouquet of holly leaves and berries on every table. It had New Year’s decorations up, too, although those weren’t very much either. Gregor wondered why no one ever seemed to be able to come up with anything original as a decoration for New Year’s Eve. Babies in diapers with beauty pageant banners across their chests. Balloons. Champagne bottles with their corks popped. The tables here had little cards on them with champagne glasses emitting bubbles the way Chernobyl had emitted radiation. They said “HAPPY NEW YEAR” across the top of them and gave the times the restaurant would be open on the holiday, on the bottom. The champagne glass wasn’t a real champagne glass but the wide-brimmed martini glass most people thought of as a champagne glass. Real champagne glasses were tall and thin and narrow at the opening, to keep the carbonation in. This was the kind of thing Bennis Hannaford told him, late at night, when they went to Father Tibor’s to play cards. It was the kind of thing Bennis Hannaford both knew and found important. Gregor wondered how Bennis was and what she was doing. If she had been here, she would have had no patience for this restaurant. She would have wanted to be up at Fountain of Youth, getting on with things.

  Outside, a frail snow had started. It was coming down in salt grain flakes buffeted by the wind into streamers. Gregor looked down at the gravy congealing on his plate and decided it was time to go. For a hot turkey sandwich, it had actually been rather good. The problem was that by definition hot turkey sandwiches were starchy and thick and bland. Gregor checked the bill, put two dollars down on the table as a tip, and gathered his coat to take to the cash register. Like many men who had grown up poor and gotten successful only later in life, Gregor tipped too much. It would have embarrassed him, except that he knew waitresses didn’t have any money. He put the bill down at the side of the cash register with ten dollars in cash on top of it. The old woman making change made change for him and stared right past his left shoulder while she was doing it. So much for fame. Gregor shoved the dollar forty-nine he had coming to him into the pocket of his coat and went outside. The wind had really picked up. The windows in the empty storefront next door were frosted at the edges.

  Empty storefronts. Old men sitting on park benches with heavy fraying overcoats to protect them from the cold. Shreds of muddied paper lying in the gutters. Gregor crossed the New Haven Green feeling slightly depressed. It was the same everywhere, but he could never get used to it. They had cared about cities when he was young. Here there was a big stone courthouse looking out on the decay of everything. It was one of those massive gray edifices that had been built to be a Palace of Justice. It was so impressive, it demanded a better noun for itself than building could ever be. There was no way to tell if it was still in use. Near it, on the other end of the same block, a smaller, unimpressive, squat brick building was in use, but Gregor couldn’t tell for what.

  He reached a streetcorner on the other side of the Green from where the restaurant had been and pushed a button for the walk light. When it flashed, he crossed to the side of the street with three tall churches on it and nothing else. One of them was Congregational. He recognized the architecture. The other two were too far away for him to read their signs. He passed the lot of them and found himself, suddenly, in the middle of Yale.

  The week between Christmas and New Year’s is almost always a vacation week for American colleges and universities. Gregor had forgotten that. At first, the emptiness of the great stone and brick buildings spooked him. The deserted lawns and empty moats seemed futuristic: the scene the day after a clean bomb has destroyed all the people but left the buildings intact. Then he got into the spirit of things. There was something nice about there being no students around. Gregor didn’t have to look at scruffy, bearded young men trying desperately to look like enemies of the Establishment they were working so hard to join. He didn’t have to look at skeletal young women in tatters and lace. Gregor had never been fond of college Gothic, but Yale did it well. The arched entryways and low moat walls looked more real than the tired modest storefronts around the Green. Even the few more modern buildings had been designed to blend in. Every once in a while, Gregor saw an older man in a sweater or a middle-aged one in tweeds go in or out of one of the doors. They looked so much like what professors ought to look like, he hoped they were. From everything he had read, professors didn’t believe in what this seemed to represent any more: tradition, continuity, the weight and glory of shared history. Gregor didn’t know if he believed in it either—especially the glory part; the history of Armenia was chock full of the less than glorious—but walking around in a place like this, it was nice to think he did. Fireplaces with fires in them. High ceilings with heavy beams. Leaded casement windows. Dickens read aloud. The spirit of a traditional English winter. Gregor had had Dickens read out loud to him once, by a young woman he had been dating before he began dating his wife. It had bored him stiff.

  The land had gotten hillier and the sidewalks less well cared for. The sidewalks next to the buildings belonging to Yale were well repaired and clear of the slush and snow left over from whenever New Haven had had its last winter storm. Maybe it was just that the sidewalks of the nice buildings belonging to Yale were cared for that way. For all Gregor knew, all these buildings, even the really awful ones, were now part of the university. He went down one side street and then another, looking for a way to go that wouldn’t plunge his feet into mud or water. He came out on Prospect Street near the steepest swell of the hill. It finally struck him why the name Prospect Street had sounded so familiar to him, even back in Philadelphia, when he thought he’d first heard it. Years ago, when he was still an agent-in-training, a friend of his had had a son with learning disabilities and taken him to the only place on the East Coast at the time that knew anything about them. It was called the Gesell Institute, and it had had an office on Prospect Street. Gregor looked around, but he couldn’t see anything calling itself the Gesell Institute. He felt enormously frustrated. Here he was, stuck in this small city he knew nothing about, faced with a murder that seemed to require some knowledge of the area to solve. His police contact was less than no help. He knew nobody else in town. He didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about finding out what he needed to know.

  He walked farther uphill, slowly and deliberately, checking the names on the signs planted on the lawns in front of the buildings. There was a big modern high-rise thing that identified itself as a science building belonging to Yale; biology, Gregor thought, or some kind of biological research. At the crest of the hill, he passed a long, low white wall encircling a group of buildings a plaque identified as Albertus Magnus College. A Dominican nun in a short, snappy modern habit made up of a short white dress and a less-than-shoulder length black handkerchief veil was crossing the lawn at the front, coatless and gloveless, not visibly shivering. Gregor kept climbing upward until he got to Fountain of Youth. The snow was thicker up here, as if the elevation had caused more of it to fall—but that couldn’t be right. The change in elevation wasn’t that dramatic. Gregor looked down Fountain of Youth’s gravel drive and saw the tail ends of five or six cars in the parking area at the back. The New Year’s special program would be in full swing again today. It was easy to tell that New Year’s was coming to Fountain of Youth’s Victorian pile. Fountain of Youth appeared to be the only place on Prospect Street that was celebrating the event. On the stylized wrought-iron lamppost at the edge of its front walk, there was a clutch of helium-filled balloons in primary colors. Each and every one of them said: “GIVE YOURSELF A NEW YOU FOR THE NEW YEAR.”

  Well, Gregor told himself, as he went up the front walk to ring the bell. Maybe this will help. Maybe just being at Fountain of Youth without Tony Bandero around to get in my way will be enough to show me what I’m supposed to do next.

  He doubted it, but it was worth a try.

  2

  TRACI CARDINALE ANSWERED
THE door, pert and thin and ridiculously cute in a short-skirted suit of scarlet and white. She was wearing a little plastic pin on the lapel of her jacket that said: “Bring Your Body to the Fountain of Youth.” She saw Gregor through the security window and nodded vigorously. Then she opened the front door wide.

  “Mr. Demarkian. I’m so glad to see you. And after all that fuss yesterday. You never got to talk to anybody.”

  This was not entirely true. Gregor hadn’t had a chance to talk to Simon Roveter, who was the person Tony Bandero had said they were going to talk to. He had, however, talked to at least half a dozen reporters and a cameraman from WTNH News. He knew as much about how the local TV reporters went about getting the story first as any native of that region. He had a long talk about it with an extremely pleasant blond woman named Diane Smith, parts of which later showed up on television as an exclusive interview. Well, Gregor thought, it was an exclusive interview. Unlike Tony Bandero, he knew how to give one without getting himself into trouble, even if he gave it by accident.

  He shrugged off his coat and let Traci take it from him. “I didn’t get to talk to you,” he said. “You looked like you were in shock and I had too much else to do.”

  “I was hysterical,” Traci said, giggling. She hung Gregor’s coat and came back to her desk. “I was crying and weeping and carrying on all afternoon. I got over it, of course. I mean, an accident is an accident.”

  “Even so, it must have been a shock. To put your hand against a rail for safety and then to have it collapse on you.”

  Traci Cardinale looked confused. “I didn’t have my hand on the rail when it fell,” she said. “I wasn’t anywhere near it.”

  Gregor was confused, too. “But you screamed,” he said. “It was your screaming that brought us running. And you were standing on the balcony with your back against the wall the first time I saw you after it happened.”

  “Oh, I was on the balcony when the whole thing fell over,” Traci said, “but that was later. I screamed because a piece of the silly thing nearly fell on my head. Two pieces. The second one fell on my desk.”

  Gregor looked up at the railing. The gap in the railing was filled in with plywood. It was a nice wide gap. Traci was right. Some of it was almost directly over her desk.

  “Pieces of it fell first,” Gregor said.

  “That’s right. I thought at first that one of the two of you must have done it, because I’d just come from you, you know, I’d just left you in Simon’s office. Not that I thought you were throwing pieces of the balcony at me or anything. I just thought maybe Tony was tossing me a note or something.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Trace Cardinale flushed. “I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was thinking about Simon and where he could have gone to. And then the pieces fell and then I freaked.”

  “And then you ran up the stairs,” Gregor said, “to the balcony.”

  “Well, I thought somebody was up there, throwing things at me. It didn’t occur to me that there might be something wrong with the railing. I mean, an old house like this, I should have guessed, but I just didn’t. I thought someone was playing nasty games and I wanted to stop them.”

  Gregor looked at the plywood on the balcony rail again. “So when you got to the top, you put your hand on the rail—”

  “I had my hand on the rail all along, Mr. Demarkian, but if you mean did I put it right there where the rotten part was, no I didn’t. It fell all by itself.”

  “Without your touching it?”

  “That’s right. I mean, I suppose it was my fault, Mr. Demarkian. I probably shook it loose running up the stairs the way I did. But it just fell down by itself.”

  “And then you screamed again.”

  Traci winced. “It made a lot of noise. I guess I’m not too great to have around in a crisis, am I, Mr. Demarkian? I completely lost my head.”

  Gregor looked up at the plywood one more time. It was like the puffy scar you got after having a smallpox vaccination. It nagged at him.

  “Is there somebody at the reception desk all the time?” he asked. “I don’t suppose you work twenty-four hours a day—”

  “I work almost that much. Sometimes I stay until ten or eleven o’clock.”

  “And it’s always you? You don’t have somebody to relieve you?”

  “We have another girl who comes in weekends and when I need some time off or I’m sick, but mostly I work. I get time and a half after forty hours. I can use the money.”

  “Is this foyer ever left empty?”

  “Sure. Late at night and early Sunday morning. Really late on Saturday nights, the place is practically deserted. Nobody wants to hang around if they don’t have to. And if they do have to, they’re in bed, upstairs.”

  “I would be, too,” Gregor said. “When the place is deserted, as you put it, is it also locked?”

  “It’s always locked,” Traci said. “It has to be. You know the kind of thing that goes on.”

  “Do the members of the staff have keys?”

  “Some of them do. The ones that live in the house. The rest of them don’t need keys, really, because there’s always somebody to let them in. And you don’t want to have too many keys floating around. It’s bad enough with the Golden Circle Keyholders.”

  “What are Golden Circle Keyholders?”

  “They’re special members. You pay extra—a lot extra, Mr. Demarkian, about five times what a regular membership costs—and you get a key you can use twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Just in case you can only make time for exercise at three fifty on Wednesday mornings.”

  Gregor examined the foyer again: the front doors, the curved staircase, the side doors to the utility corridors. “Is that safe?” he asked. “There’s nothing to say that one of your Golden Circle Keyholders couldn’t be a thief. Or worse. Give him a key and he could get in whenever he wanted and do whatever he wanted. At the very least, you could get seriously robbed.”

  “It’s not quite that bad,” Traci Cardinale said. “All the Golden Circle Keyholders have a key to is the front door. We have a special work-out room down here, down that corridor to your left. That’s what we leave open. The rest of the house can be sealed off. We seal it off.”

  “Every night?”

  “You bet. If I’m working late, I do it myself.”

  “And these Golden Circle Keyholders do have access to this foyer?”

  “Of course.”

  “How many Golden Circle Keyholders have you got?”

  Traci Cardinale produced an elaborate, deliberately ironic shrug. “We’ve got about a dozen, but if you’re really worried about one of them skulking around here in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t bother. I’ve been here for ages now, and I’ve never known a single one of them to use their keys in the off-hours. Most of them don’t even exercise much. It’s just a status thing, like those Louis Vuitton handbags. We got a new one with this batch, you know. Virginia Hanley. She’s just the type. Look-at-how-wonderful-I-am-that-I-have-all-this-money-to-spend.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said. “But you wouldn’t necessarily know, would you, if someone came in late at night? You wouldn’t be here. From what you’ve said, neither would anybody else.”

  “Well,” Traci said, “I could say that we’d know by the way things had been moved around and the way the exercise equipment had been left, because you absolutely wouldn’t believe the mess people leave things in around here, Keyholders or not. Maybe especially Keyholders. Anyway, we’ve got video cameras.” She pointed toward the front door.

  Gregor turned around and saw it, just. It had been very artfully disguised by what looked like just another cluster of plaster fruit. He turned to the entrance to the corridor Traci had indicated was the one with the special work-out room on it and saw that there was another camera there, also disguised by fruit.

  “Is the system comprehensive?” he asked her. “No blind spots?”

  “I’m sure there could be some blind
spots, Mr. Demarkian, but I can’t see that somebody could get in and go clomping all over the place around here without getting caught by the cameras at some point. Do you?”

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “I like the security system at this place,” Traci said. “I’m the one who has to work alone in this foyer most nights, and I feel really safe. And Tony said it was a good system, too. He checked it out for me.”

  A buzzer went off on the phone on the little desk and Traci Cardinale picked up the receiver and listened. When she put the phone down again, she said, “That was the nutritional lecture getting out. Simon gives it. They all go in there together, no matter what class they’re in. Simon will go down to the kitchen now and have a cup of coffee. He’ll be on his own for at least half an hour. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind talking to you. This thing with Tim has been on Simon’s mind a lot.” Traci got up and beckoned him along. “This way. You don’t even have to go up any stairs to get there. There aren’t any balcony railings to fall down. Isn’t that a relief?”

  3

  THE KITCHEN, GREGOR THOUGHT as soon as he saw it, was a much better place to talk to a man about a murder than that office upstairs had been. It was an unpretentious space with a picnic table and windows looking out on the yard where the body had been found. There were no self-consciously tasteful prints or pretentious pieces of furniture to skew the atmosphere. Unfortunately, Simon Roveter looked capable of skewing the atmosphere all on his own. Gregor didn’t think he had ever seen a man who looked more like an actor trying to play himself. Graham Greene, that’s who Simon Roveter reminded Gregor of—not the writer but the writer’s characters. He was even wearing a tan linen suit. It should have looked out of place at this time of the year in this part of the country. But it suited Simon Roveter so well, it didn’t. He was an arresting presence, thinning hair, slack jawline, and all. So arresting, it took Gregor a moment to realize that Roveter was not alone. Standing at the far end of the picnic table, positioned a little sideways so that she could see both the kitchen door and out into the yard at the same time, was a woman in well-preserved middle-age: Magda Hale. She wore a bright green spangled leotard and bright green tights with bright green fairy boots to match. She needed to gain at least thirty pounds, just to look normal.