Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  Tony Bandero thumped the phone receiver down. “It’s all set up,” he announced. “The tech men are on their way. Some uniforms are on their way. An ambulance is on its way. Does that satisfy everybody?”

  “It’s a start,” Gregor said.

  Tony Bandero’s face reddened. “At this point the procedures are routine,” he said. I’m sorry I don’t share your sense of emergency, Demarkian, but there’s no emergency here. We don’t have a bunch of terrorists holding hostages on the roof. We’ve got a dead body that isn’t going to be going any place soon.”

  Traci Cardinale hadn’t moved in minutes. Now she did, slowly at first, then faster and faster, unfolding herself and standing straight up at the same time. She was shaking and her face was streaked with tears, but she didn’t looked anguished as much as she looked angry. In fact, she looked furious.

  “You,” she spat out in the direction of Tony Bandero. “I can’t believe you. How can you be so callous? How can you be such a—such a son of a bitch?”

  It might have been interesting to find out what Tony Bandero had to say to all that, but nobody got the chance. Because Traci Cardinale walked up to him, reared back her right arm, and slapped him resoundingly across the face. Then she whirled on her heel and marched out of the kitchen.

  2

  TONY BANDERO MUST HAVE called the press at the same time he called the tech men. The press arrived first, in the form of a WTNH mobile news van that pulled up the drive and parked right in front of the front door. Then the reporter for The New Haven Register arrived and parked his ancient Volkswagen Beetle behind the mobile news van, blocking any chance it had of being able to turn around and get out on the street again. Then the van for the CBS affiliate showed up and parked behind the Volkswagen Beetle. Nobody went to the back, where there was a sizable parking lot filled with the cars of people who would not be allowed to be in a hurry. When the tech men arrived, they had to go back there. The ambulance had to park on the street.

  “It’s one of Phil Brye’s ambulances,” Bandero told Gregor. “Don’t worry about that. I’m not having the body sent to Yale New Haven.”

  Gregor hadn’t been worried about it. What he was worried about was getting the tech men and the other official people into the house without letting in a lot of reporters and letting out half the attendees at the Fountain of Youth’s New Year’s special exercise week. The attendees were getting particularly frantic. The seeds of the panic mentality had been planted. Ever since the murder of Stella Mortimer had become generally known—which had taken no time at all, really; Gregor could never believe how fast these things spread—rumors had been jumping from one class to the next. There was a serial killer loose in the house. There was poison in the food. The house was being used as a center for drug gangs. It didn’t matter how preposterous the theories were. They all sounded real enough to a crowd of women who had been exercised into exhaustion and half starved to death all day. Gregor watched the ripples of fear and worry spread through the classes like fault lines. Give any one of them a push in the wrong direction, and the plates would start moving, whatever weak bulwark of calmness and control was left would come tumbling down.

  The head of the mobile crime unit was not a tech man, but a tech woman. Gregor let her in through the back door, both because it was the door closest to where the van had parked and because the reporters were waiting around the front. The women in the classes were around at the front, too, spread out across the foyer and up the stairs to the second-floor balcony, just as they had been after the railing fell the morning before. Philip Brye himself pulled in behind the mobile crime unit van. He drove a Volvo so battered it looked like it ought to have been awarded battle medals. When he got out of the car, he was wearing a large enameled pin on his coat that said: “DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE, BE ALIVE TO SEE IN THE NEW YEAR.” Gregor stood at the back door, holding it open as the doctor ran the last few steps. Tony Bandero stood behind him in the first-floor hallway, snorting.

  “Phil,” Tony Bandero said, as the medical examiner stepped inside. “I’m surprised. Didn’t think you made house calls anymore.”

  Philip Brye unbuttoned his coat. “I’m taking an interest in this case,” he replied. Then he held his hand out to Gregor. “Hello, Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

  “Again,” Tony Bandero said.

  “Mr. Demarkian came to see me at the morgue this morning. You did tell me I was supposed to answer any questions he put to me, Tony. You told everyone in the department.”

  “I didn’t know Demarkian had been out this morning, that’s all. I thought he was sleeping in this morning.”

  “I never told you I was sleeping in,” Gregor said.

  Two ambulance men appeared around the back of the house, carrying a collapsed stretcher between them. Gregor opened the back door for them, too.

  “The thing is,” Tony Bandero said, “stuff around here seems to be getting out of control. We’re not coordinated, that’s the problem. We’ve got to let each other know what we’re doing or we’re going to be stepping on each other’s toes.”

  “I take it that the scene of the crime is this way.” Philip Brye pointed in the direction the tech woman had gone in.

  Actually, Gregor thought, the scene of the crime could have been anywhere on this floor. Men and women in white coats seemed to be everywhere he looked, taking fingerprints, photographing floorboards, measuring the distances between nails in the walls. Gregor knew that all the things they did were important. Cases had failed because of inadequate or incompetent tech work. He just didn’t understand exactly what it was the tech people did.

  He went back into the kitchen. Magda Hale and Simon Roveter had been ordered out. They had probably gone to sit in the foyer with their work-out students. Tech people were attacking the kitchen, too, and the pantry door was open. As Gregor watched, Philip Brye backed out of there, shaking his head. The stench was worse than awful now. It had soured and spread.

  “Well?” Gregor asked Philip Brye.

  “Poisoned,” Philip Brye said. “That’s virtually certain. Arsenic would be a good guess.”

  “That’s what I told Tony Bandero.”

  “And?”

  “He told me I couldn’t possibly know that until the lab reports came in.”

  “Well, that’s true enough. That doesn’t mean you have to act like you never saw a dead body before. And there’s one relief here, at least. It’s not like Tim. We don’t have to wonder where this woman died or how her body got here. And she is, thank God, fully clothed.”

  “I wonder what she took the arsenic in,” Gregor said. “And when. And where.”

  “Assuming it was a good strong dose, she took it half an hour ago or so, that’s when. As to where, I wouldn’t know. As to in what—well, the lab reports will probably tell us. We’ll do a stomach content analysis.”

  “What had Tim Bradbury taken the arsenic in?”

  “Hot chocolate. Very sweet hot chocolate.”

  Gregor considered this. “Do you know what’s always bothered me about poisoners?” he asked. “Poison is not like a gun, or a knife. You can’t aim it at somebody and let it go from there. A poisoner has two choices. Either he can put the poison in something in his victim’s possession. Or he can feed the poison to his victim himself. Those are the only two things he can do. “But they both have drawbacks,” Gregor continued. “If the poisoner puts the poison in something his victim already owns, then the first thing that happens is that he loses control of the time schedule. Some are on regular medication or take vitamin capsules at a scheduled time every day, but most people don’t. And some people who do do one or the other take pills instead of capsules, and it’s damned hard to put poison in a pill.” He sighed. “Then you have the innocent bystander factor. Unless the poisoner is dealing with prescription medication, there’s always the chance that somebody else will end up dead instead of the intended victim. The victim’s girlfriend decides to take one of his
time-release cold capsules and gets the wrong one. The victim’s mother decides she needs a little herb tea this morning and opens the wrong box. It gets messy. I think that’s why, in all the years I’ve been working, I’ve only known of one case where the poisoner operated that way.”

  “In your experience, most murderers like to watch their victims die,” Philip Brye said.

  Gregor was startled, but not completely surprised. “You know,” he said, “I think that’s true. Not only of the poisoners I’ve known in my career, but of all the other murderers, no matter what kind of murderer they were. I knew someone once who poisoned a man with lye and stood right there and watched him drink it.”

  “Ouch. How did he get conned into drinking it?”

  “That’s the problem the direct poisoner has,” Gregor said. “He makes coffee for himself and his victim. He puts the poison in his victim’s coffee. Now what he’s got to do is get his victim to drink it. Which means, in the first place, that the victim can’t suspect that the murderer would go so far as to kill him.”

  “Most people wouldn’t suspect that,” Philip Brye pointed out.

  “True,” Gregor said, “but most people who end up murdered in complicated and deliberate ways such as this do know that their murderers hate them, or have a reason to fear them, or want something out of them. They’re not entirely without a clue. And what if we’re not talking about the first victim?”

  “Do you think victims always suspect?”

  “Well,” Gregor, said. “Let’s look at what we have here. First, Tim Bradbury is poisoned and his nude body is dumped in the yard. Then, yesterday, a piece of the balcony railing falls down and causes havoc, on the premises and in the media. These are both high-profile events.”

  “True.”

  “So,” Gregor went on, “what we have here is, we have a house in a crisis atmosphere, part of something that probably looks to the people who are living here to be creepy and maybe nearly supernatural. You can see the mood people are in.”

  “Now.”

  “Now it’s worse, yes, but it was bad when I was here yesterday. Especially after that railing fell.”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at.” Phil Brye was coughing again.

  “What I’m getting at is, either this woman died because she ate or drank something arsenic had been placed in or she was fed arsenic by someone who did not make her think that she might be at risk. If she ate or drank something poison had been placed in, we have a very serious situation here, because that would mean we have a poisoner who just doesn’t care.”

  “But that isn’t what you think,” Philip Brye said.

  “No,” Gregor admitted, “it isn’t. I think she took something from somebody, something she was deliberately handed. I wish I knew more of what she was like, if she was a suspicious person or a pragmatic one, if she was optimistic or pessimistic. I wish I knew whether the chances were good or poor that she would have felt it necessary, in the present circumstances, to look out for herself.”

  “My guess is that the chances are nil,” Tony Bandero put in.

  Gregor and Philip Brye turned to him in surprise. He must have been standing there for quite some time, Gregor realized, and he must have been very interested in hearing what Gregor had to say. When Tony Bandero wasn’t interested, he interrupted. Now he was rocking back and forth on his feet with his hands stuck into the pockets of his pants, his red face getting redder with every moment.

  “The chances are nil,” he repeated, even more positively this time. “In my experience, nobody ever expects to get murdered except the professionals. The professionals are always watching out for it. But everybody else—” Tony gave a massive shrug. “Some woman starts nagging at her husband, putting him down, screaming and yelling at him, one day he takes out a forty-five and shoots her dead, and you can see it in her face, she was surprised.”

  In Gregor’s experience, this was not the usual scenario when husbands killed wives. He let it go.

  “It’s really useless to speculate about this anyway,” he said. “We don’t know anything about her yet. Dr. Brye hasn’t even gotten confirmation that this was an arsenic poisoning.”

  “I haven’t even asked for one.”

  “Maybe it’ll turn out to be a stroke or something,” Tony said. “If it doesn’t, I think we’ve got to go with the idea that what we’ve got here is a nut. That’s what you’re really the expert in, Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it? Nuts?”

  Gregor was expert enough on the subject of what Tony Bandero called “nuts” to know that these two deaths didn’t have the shape or feel of the start of a serial murder case. He let this go, too.

  “Why don’t we just let your technical people do their work,” he told Tony Bandero. “We can talk this all out later, when we finally have something to say.”

  TWO

  1

  THERE WERE POLICE IN the house again, and Frannie Jay was in a state of paralysis. Again. That was what she couldn’t help thinking about, sitting on the stairs in the foyer, listening to the sounds of them at the back of the first floor. This was happening to her again. How many times was it going to happen to her before she just lost it, before she went so rigid at the terror of it that she couldn’t move anymore? She thought of herself answering questions at the table after Tim Bradbury died: When did you meet him? How long had you known him? What were you doing looking out the window that made it possible for you to see his foot? There were all those gleaming copper molds hanging from the beams in the kitchen. There were all those stainless-steel bowls sitting on the kitchen counters. She thought of herself sitting on the back steps of the house in California, the steps that led to the beach: Where were you? What were you doing? What happened next? The policeman in California had been young and grim and very angry. He had made it clear to her from the beginning that he thought it was all her fault. Frannie remembered only the little silk flower he had worn through one of the buttonholes on his blue shirt, a poppy in honor of Veteran’s Day. The smell coming in from the ocean was high and rank. The air was wet and cold. Out here it was always cold. Frannie had been freezing since the moment she stepped off her bus. How long was it going to take them to think of the obvious? Before she came, everything was fine. Since she came, two people had been murdered. She might even have murdered them.

  It was late now, after five. The work-out students had had their names and addresses taken by the police and had been sent home. Half a dozen of them or so would not be back, but most of them would. Frannie knew how it worked. Most people didn’t really believe it could happen to them. Most people were not smart enough to be afraid. They were excited. They imagined telling the story to friends and acquaintances, when it was over. Do you remember those murders at the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio? Well, I was taking a class there at the time…

  The foyer was empty, except for the occasional policeman or lab technician passing through to one of the vehicles outside. Most of the press vans had been forced out of the driveway into the road. There were still reporters and cameramen out there, but they were on foot. WTNH had a delay-remote setup out on Prospect Street. When the local news came on this evening, the pretty black woman who had already stopped her three times (Can you tell us what the feelings of the staff are at this moment?) would be standing in front of the house, holding a microphone to her lips and pretending that she wasn’t being chilled to pneumonia by the wind. Frannie wondered where the rest of the staff had gone. Magda and Simon were holed up in their bedroom. That was to be expected. Nick Bannerman and Traci Cardinale and Cici Mahoney and Susan Dietz and all those people seemed just to have disappeared. Maybe they had gone out for pizza without asking her to come along. Maybe it would be here like it was in California, after it was all over. Maybe she would functionally cease to exist.

  A young patrolman carrying a white paper bag came through from the back, glanced without interest at Frannie sitting at the bottom of the stairs, and went out the front door. He was walking ve
ry fast and looking very distracted. Frannie stood up and flexed her knees. She couldn’t really tell if she was stiff from fear or from too much exercise. If everyone else had gone out without her, there was nothing she could do about it. If she confronted them with it, they would only deny it. They would say that they hadn’t been able to find her or that they hadn’t thought she would be interested. In California, after her picture had been in the paper, there were people who hadn’t been able to find her when she was sitting next to them on the bus.

  Frannie went up the steps and onto the landing. From there she could see through the fan window over the front door and out onto the lawn that sloped to Prospect Street. That police detective, Tony Bandero, was standing in the middle of a crowd of people, apparently giving an interview. He always seemed to be giving interviews. Frannie went through the doors onto the second floor proper. She passed the exercise studio where the beginners’ class worked out and went to the door to the back staircase. Somebody, probably Simon, had gotten ambitious between yesterday and today. The walls on this floor were now decorated with life-size cardboard cutout posters of Magda Hale, the new ones where she was standing on a double-decker pyramid of words that read; “THE BEST NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION YOU’LL EVER MAKE.”

  Frannie climbed up past the third floor, where Magda and Simon were, to the landing that led to her own bedroom. The hallway was dark. The window at the other end of it was heavily curtained and the curtains were closed. Frannie shook her head. What difference did it make if the curtains were closed? It was evening and January. The hallway would be dark even if the curtains were wide open and the sashes were all the way up. She found a light switch and used it. Little globe lights made to look like nineteenth-century gas lamps sprang on in two long lines on either side of the hall. They didn’t do much good, but at least they showed the path to Frannie’s bedroom door. After this, I’ll have to lock it when I leave it, she thought. It wasn’t locked now. She went down to it, opened up, and turned on her overhead light.