Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  Simon Roveter looked confused when Traci ushered Gregor in, but as soon as he got an introduction, he brightened.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Excellent. You don’t know how glad I am that you came back to talk to us. After all that mess yesterday—”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much confusion,” Magda Hale said. “I still don’t think it was really necessary to have the police here with their sirens and everything, and I don’t know who notified the reporters. It was a circus.”

  “They made us sound like the Fountain of Death on the news,” Simon Roveter said. “This is a bad time for bad publicity, in case you didn’t know. We’re going national in a week. We’ve got a forty-city tour lined up. We’re opening studios in sixteen new cities across the Midwest and South. We’re starting a line of exercise wear. From a business point of view, Tim’s death was bad enough. But this—”

  “It’s not that we look at Tim’s death mainly from a business point of view,” Magda Hale put in quickly. “We were all very fond of Tim. And, of course, we saw a lot of him.”

  “He was living in the house,” Simon Roveter explained. “Temporarily.”

  “We often have members of our staff living in the house,” Magda Hale put in. “Especially high-level members we really need to keep. We can’t always pay a lot in absolute cash terms, but this is a lovely place to live. In a good neighborhood. It’s a great incentive.”

  “Tim wasn’t here on that basis, though,” Simon Roveter said. “He was just temporarily between apartments.”

  “He had to get out of his last one because they tore the building down,” Magda Hale said. “I think it might have been condemned.”

  If the staff had to live in buildings that were about to be condemned, Fountain of Youth must need an incentive like rooms in the house to keep good people. Gregor wondered how much this pair kept for themselves. He didn’t have the expertise to judge the relative costs of exercise clothes, but those would surely be considered a business expense in this case. The tan linen suit was off the rack, but not cheap.

  Gregor walked over to the picnic table and looked out the window into the backyard. “I’ve just been talking to Miss Cardinale about your security systems. The cameras. The Golden Circle Keyholders. If you’d ever asked me about it, I would have told you it wasn’t a very good idea.”

  Simon Roveter nodded. “The Golden Circle Keyholders, you mean. I agree with you. I’m afraid we just got stuck with it. It started with our studio out in California, which is just a regular studio without a house attached to it, and then one of our members from out there moved out here.” He shrugged.

  “People are really very, very picky,” Magda Hale said. “I tried to explain that to the detective; that Mr. Bandero, but I just couldn’t seem to get across. I don’t think he’s a man who listens very well, do you?”

  “He’s a policeman,” Simon Roveter said. “He has a job to do. He isn’t supposed to listen to us complain about our clients.”

  “I’m not complaining about our clients.” Magda spoke sharply. “I’m just explaining something. I don’t feel we’ve been served very well by the police in this matter.”

  She’s older than she looks, Gregor thought. She’s at least as old as I am. He stood awkwardly at the table, wondering what he was supposed to do next. That was the trouble with not having been brought fully into the police case. He didn’t know what these people had been asked. He didn’t know what blind alleys Tony Bandero had already stumbled into. He wished these two people didn’t make him so uncomfortable.

  Gregor moved away from the table and walked around the room. It was a nice but perfectly ordinary kitchen. Refrigerator. Cook top. Oven. Microwave. Sink. He stopped at a door at the back of the room.

  “Where does this go?” he said. “To the backyard?”

  “No, no,” Simon Roveter told him. “The door to the backyard is down the hall you came through to get here. That’s the door to the pantry.”

  “It’s a wonderful walk-in pantry,” Magda Hale said. “You should take a look at it. This house has been gutted and renovated at least six times before we did it, but nobody’s ever renovated the pantry. I don’t know why they don’t design them into houses these days. I’m sure the women of America could use them.”

  Gregor opened the pantry door and stuck his head inside. It was too dark to see, but he could smell a sharp sourness that he imagined must be rotting vegetables. It was strong enough to make him queasy.

  “There’s a light switch right there on the wall next to the door to your right,” Magda Hale said. “You’ll never see anything in the dark.”

  Gregor reached around and found the switch. The smell was really awful, thick and wet and sharp. A triple row of track lights embedded in the ceiling sprang on. The room was full of muted pinks and greens directed at bins of vegetables and shelves of other vegetables in cans. Nothing was directed at the body on the floor, but the body was there, crumpled into a heap, and there was no doubt at all that it was dead.

  “Oh, my God,” Magda Hale said, coming up beside Gregor. “It’s Stella Mortimer.”

  Gregor must have stepped back when he saw what was in there on the floor. He didn’t remember doing it, but he was now out of the way of the door, giving everyone in the kitchen a clear look at what he had found.

  He had forgotten that Traci Cardinale was still in the room. Now she rushed up to the door, took one look at the corpse lying on the floor, and started screaming again.

  Dear Jesus Christ, Gregor thought. Doesn’t this woman ever do anything else?

  Part 2

  “Nobody really wants to turn over a new leaf and start a whole new life. They’d only make just as much of a mess of it as they’ve made of the one they have.”

  —ALTERNATIVE PSYCHOTHERAPIST,

  Psychology Today

  ONE

  1

  TONY BANDERO WAS IN the house. He had been in the house for hours. The enormity of this—that Tony had gotten him all the way out from Philadelphia and then cut him out of the loop; that Tony had made him look like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe in the newspapers and then done everything possible to ensure that he could not perform even as well as he normally did—did not strike Gregor at first. There was too much to do. Gregor had never been in on a scene of the crime when he was an agent with the Bureau. The Bureau didn’t work that way. Even when Gregor was chasing serial killers, all he ever really did was to sit at a computer, or at the head of a table full of people who knew more about computers than he did, and talk about things that had happened miles away in Seattle and Salt Lake. Every once in a while, he had gone out to the places where crimes had happened months, or even years, before. He had stood at the edge of a ditch where a soft-spoken young man who worked for the phone company and collected Mickey Mouse cartoons on videotape had buried sixteen five-year-old boys. He had walked around the edges of dense thicket of brush where a drifter with a record as long as the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary had murdered the college sorority girl he had kidnapped three states away. The scenes were always sanitized and past’ usefulness, spiritual journeys instead of professional ones. Gregor hadn’t seen an actual murder scene, with the body on the floor and the tech men trying to measure the distances between ruts in the carpet, until he was retired and living on Cavanaugh Street. That was his first extracurricular murder and the case that had introduced him to Bennis Hannaford. That was also the case that had started The Philadelphia Inquirer calling him “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” By now, everybody had picked up on “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” a circumstance that made Gregor a little crazy. He wasn’t anything like Hercule Poirot. He wasn’t small. He wasn’t short. He wasn’t fussy. He didn’t go around telling everybody what a wonderful brain he had, because he often wasn’t sure that his brain was that wonderful. He couldn’t think of a fictional detective he was anything like. They were all much too sure of themselves. He knew which fictional detectiv
e he would like to be. Nero Wolfe got to sit in a chair and eat all day. He was never present at the scenes of crimes where middle-aged women seemed to have strangled on their own vomit.

  Stella Mortimer hadn’t strangled on her own vomit. Gregor knew enough about how people died from arsenic poisoning to know that. She would have been sick, yes. She would have had cramps. She would have been violently and painfully ill for at least half an hour. She wouldn’t have fallen flat over until the very end, and then it would have been too late for her to strangle on anything. She would have been dead. This was different from cyanide, where the victim died right away, and from taxine, where the effect was so slow that strangling would have been eminently possible. Stella Mortimer hadn’t died from either cyanide or taxine. She wasn’t blue along her jawline. Her face hadn’t turned that odd color, like ecru dough. He couldn’t really know for sure until the lab tests had been done, and the medical examiner had made his pronouncements: but under the circumstances, he thought he had a right to make a guess. Tim Bradbury had died of arsenic poisoning. It was going to turn out that Stella Mortimer had died of it, too.

  Tony Bandero came in while Gregor was on the kitchen phone, trying to arrange for the right New Haven cops to arrive at this scene—looking, in fact, for Tony himself. The door to the pantry was closed tight. So was a door to the pantry that came in on the other side, from some kind of servants’ staircase. Gregor had gone around the long way and shut it. Of course, the scene wasn’t secure. Gregor didn’t know enough about these people to have any sense of who he might be able to trust. It was better than nothing. He had even been careful to use a handkerchief when closing the pantry’s back door, just in case there were useful fingerprints on the doorknob.

  By the time Tony Bandero came in, Gregor was talking to Philip Brye, asking for instructions.

  “I’ll make the call myself,” the medical examiner was saying. “It’s not that complicated if you know what you’re doing.”

  Obviously, Gregor wanted to say, I don’t know what I’m doing. Why should I?

  Then Tony Bandero was there, swaying in the kitchen doorway, his thick flabby bulk rippling the surface of his brown wool suit. His suit, if anything, was more wrinkled and creased than it had been the day before. It was like he was pretending to be Colombo and making a bad job of it. Gregor gave Philip Brye the news of Tony’s arrival and hung up. Then he turned to Tony and demanded, “Just where did you come from?”

  It was Magda Hale, not Tony Bandero, who answered. She sounded puzzled. “He’s been here since quarter to nine this morning,” she said, “interviewing people. We were all so disappointed that you couldn’t come, too.”

  “Couldn’t?” Gregor asked.

  Tony Bandero pushed his way across the room to where Gregor was standing and then beyond him. Traci Cardinale was still screaming, but he didn’t even look at her.

  “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  It was Magda Hale who answered, again. “It’s Stella Mortimer. She’s in the pantry.”

  “Dead,” Gregor added.

  Tony looked from Gregor to Magda Hale to Simon Roveter to Traci Cardinale, whose screaming had become background noise, unheard and unimportant. Then he went to the pantry door and opened it up.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” Gregor said.

  Tony closed the pantry door. “I’ll call myself,” he said. “Even if she just got sick and died—”

  “She was poisoned,” Gregor said firmly.

  “You can’t possibly know that,” Tony shot back.

  “I know it as well as I know anything,” Gregor told him. “I’m the one who’s good at poison, do you remember? That was supposedly one of the reasons you wanted me to come out here.”

  “You can’t tell if somebody’s been poisoned unless you see them die.” Tony was stubborn. “And even then, you’re making a guess.”

  “She was poisoned. I’ll bet my life on it. She was poisoned with arsenic. I’ll bet my left leg on it. You should call your cops in, Tony. We need the tech men.”

  “I didn’t say we weren’t going to call the tech men,” Tony said. “Under the circumstances, I’d call the tech men if a butterfly farted around here. I’m only saying—”

  “Oh, stop arguing,” Magda Hale said desperately. “Please stop arguing. I don’t think I can stand it anymore.”

  Traci Cardinale had stopped screaming. Gregor didn’t know when. She had backed up until she was flat against the wall next to the windows looking out on the backyard, sat down on the floor, and rolled into a ball. Magda Hale was crying.

  “All right,” Tony said. “I’m going to make a call.”

  Gregor got away from the phone. “Go right ahead.”

  Tony picked up, turned his back to the rest of them, and started dialing.

  “Good God,” Simon Roveter said.

  Gregor sat down on the bench at the picnic table. “Who was she?” he asked Magda and Simon. It would have been useless to ask Traci Cardinale anything. “A guest? A member? One of the staff?”

  “Stella was our videotape director,” Simon Roveter said. “We make exercise tapes here that you can buy to bring home with you. So you can work out even if you can’t get into the club.”

  “She’s been with us absolutely forever,” Magda Hale said. “Since about the fifth year we were in operation, and we’ve been open for nearly twenty. Of course, it wasn’t videotapes back then. It was commercials for the local stations. Stella made them for us.”

  “She had a background in film?” Gregor asked.

  “She made a couple of highly acclaimed documentaries when she was younger,” Simon Roveter replied. “One on what she called the Bubba drug culture. Rednecks with long hair who smoke dope. That was back in ’68 or ’70. One on welfare mothers. That was a couple of years later.”

  “You can’t make any money on documentaries,” Magda explained. “Unless you’re doing really sensationalistic ones on murder trials or executions or something. I think by the time she came to us, she was tired of scrambling around for cash.”

  “Did she live here, in the house?”

  Magda Hale shook her head. “Oh, no. Stella wouldn’t have liked that. She was a very reclusive person. She had an apartment out near the Co-Op someplace.”

  “Alone? With a husband? With a lover?”

  “Alone,” Magda said definitely. “I know she was never married. She always said she didn’t approve of it. And I know she wasn’t living with a lover, because I don’t think—” Magda stopped.

  “What is it?” Gregor asked her.

  Magda waved her hands helplessly in the air. “It’s just odd,” she said. “I was just going to say that I didn’t think Stella believed in lovers any more than she believed in husbands, and then I realized that I didn’t really know that. I’ve known the woman for fifteen years, and I didn’t really know that. I’m not even sure, if Stella ever had a lover, I’m not even sure what sex the lover would be.”

  “Oh, God,” Simon Roveter groaned.

  Magda turned to him. “But Simon, it’s true. It’s really true. I never asked and she never said, never once in all those years. And it’s even odder, because yesterday we were talking about that, about how we all work here but we don’t really know very much about each other, about what goes on on the outside. Stella said our relationship with each other was different, but now I’m not so sure it was.”

  “What got you started talking about that kind of thing?” Simon looked bewildered.

  Magda made another of her helpless gestures. “It was Tim, of course. Stella was all upset because we knew so little about him. I think she thought there was something disrespectful in that, disrespectful to the dead, or maybe just that it was a wrong way to be about somebody you knew who had died. She kept saying that she wished the papers would be better about it, so that we could find out what his life had been like.”

  “We know what his life was like,” Sim
on said. “He lived right here in the house.”

  “She meant what his life was like outside.”

  “There wasn’t anything to know about Tim Bradbury’s life outside. He was a local kid who wanted to go to California.”

  Magda Hale sighed. “You always make it sound so easy and uncomplicated, Simon, but it isn’t. People have histories. Even people like Tim. Stella only wanted… to feel like she’d been more of a friend, I think.”

  “She wasn’t a friend. She barely knew him. None of us knew him. He taught weight-training sessions.” Simon sounded impatient. “—The kind of knowing you’re talking about is the kind that only happens between confidants. Or lovers.”

  “Oh, Simon. You don’t have to be a confidant, or a lover, to know if somebody’s parents are alive or if they tried out for their high school basketball team or if they dated women or men. Casual acquaintances know that much about each other sometimes.”

  “My casual acquaintances don’t.”

  “Simon is a very private man,” Magda said to Gregor. “If he were a Catholic, he would only go to confession to a priest who had been struck dumb.”