by Jane Haddam
“I had Christmas by myself this year,” the woman said suddenly. “I put up a tree. I took it right off a bush next to the river. It wasn’t a bush what belonged to anybody.”
“I’m glad you had a tree.”
“It wasn’t nothing I could get in trouble for. It wasn’t a bush what belonged to anybody.”
“Even if it was, I don’t think they’d mind.”
“You can get in trouble, taking what isn’t yours. I don’t do it no more.”
“Good for you.”
“Only thing is, I had to have a fish. For my dinner. I caught it in the river. You can’t get a turkey from the store without you have money.”
“That’s true.”
“I don’t have no money. And I don’t know how to cook a turkey, neither, because it’s hard and you have to use the oven. I know how to cook a fish.”
“I’m sure you cook a very good fish.”
“I would’ve liked to’ve had company, though. That wasn’t right. Being all by myself on Christmas.”
“Maybe next Christmas will be better.”
The woman reared back and pointed at the boarded-up shack. “Ali’s not there any more, but her husband comes. He comes and makes fires.”
Kerosene lamps, Gregor thought. Father: unknown.
“You mean a man comes to this house and stays in it?”
“He comes and makes fires,” the woman said definitely. “He’s going to burn the place down and he’s going to burn me with it. I been telling him and telling him.”
“Has he been here recently? Last week? Last year?”
“He comes all the time. He was here before Christmas. I was trying to be nice to him. I asked him to come and spend Christmas with me.”
“But he wouldn’t do it.”
“He wasn’t nice to me,” the woman said. “He just comes and makes fires.”
“Do you know what this man looked like? How tall he was? What color hair he had?”
But the woman seemed to have had enough. She turned around in a little circle on her brand new porch steps—who cared enough about her to build those steps for her, but not to keep her company on Christmas?—and ended by keeping her back to him.
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” she said. “I want to watch television.”
“That’s fine,” Gregor said.
“I got a little television I got for a present. I didn’t steal it from nobody.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
“I’m going to go in the house now.”
The woman opened the screen door at the top of her steps and went inside. The last Gregor saw of her was the massive expanse of her back, covered with sprigged flowers and teased by wisps of hair. Then the inner door slammed shut, and she was gone.
Gregor slowly and very deliberately made first one and then another circle of the house. He checked every inch of the surface he could see. Then he walked around the two spindly trees that bordered the place on the road side and checked them. There was nothing. No paper notice. No board notice. No warning sign. Nothing.
Gregor climbed back up the hill to where Connie Hazelwood waited for him.
“I want to find the Derby town hall,” he told her. “Either that, or the Derby tax assessor’s office. Can you do that for me?”
“Sure. Why?”
Gregor motioned back over his shoulder. “That’s a house. Taxes have to be paid on a house. No matter how awful a house is.”
Connie Hazelwood blew a raspberry. “If taxes have to be paid on that house, Derby is ripe for violent revolution. The Derby town hall, huh?”
“The Derby town hall.”
Connie climbed back into the car and fired the engine. “I just hope this isn’t in one of those neighborhoods Derby’s got. Drive-by shootings. Hookers shooting up in broad daylight. Of course, we’ve got those neighborhoods in New Haven now, too, but we don’t like to talk about them. You got your seat belt on?”
Gregor had his seat belt on.
“Go,” he told her.
3
IT TOOK LONGER THAN Gregor expected it would. Property tax records are defined as information available to the public, like filed wills. The problem was not in getting someone to let him see the records on number forty-seven, but in figuring out where those records were kept and how to locate them in the computer. The days when property tax records were kept in large ledgers on a corner of the tax assessor’s desk were long gone. Gregor found the Derby records in a squat modern building that looked a little like an elementary school and a little like a highway rest stop. The woman in the records office was enormously cheerful and enormously accommodating, but she wasn’t really much help. She had moved to Derby only four years ago, from California, because her husband had been hired as an administrator down at Electric Boat.
“We got this absolutely huge house for practically no money, especially by California standards, and it wasn’t until six months later that we realized we couldn’t have chosen a worse location. It’s like living directly above the San Andreas fault with a big gaping hole in your backyard.”
“Try D for ‘Derby Road,’ ” Connie Hazelwood suggested. “That’s what it used to be called when I was growing up.”
“Oh, people call the roads all sorts of things in Connecticut,” the woman in Records said. “Only mostly, the names aren’t official. And have you ever noticed how there are practically no street signs outside the center cities? We try to tell people how. to get to where we are and we can’t say ‘Turn right at Hoolihan Road’ or ‘Turn left at Mortlake Place,’ because there aren’t any signs to tell you which road is Hoolihan and which is Mortlake Place.”
“That’s to foil robberies,” Connie Hazelwood said. “If the burglars don’t have any signs to go by, they can’t find their way around.”
“The burglars in this state can find their way around much better than I can,” the woman in records snapped. “They were born and raised here.”
She tapped a couple of route numbers into the computer, came up blank, and tapped in a couple of more. Then she tapped in “Stephenson” and sat back.
“Oh,” she said. “There it is. Stephenson Road. That’s the town name for it. Did you say number forty-seven?”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
She tapped a few more things into her computer. “Oh, this is very nice. Very nice indeed. Taxes all paid up and current. And they have been for absolutely years.”
“What’s the name of the deedholder on the house?” Gregor asked.
The woman in records squinted at her screen. “Alissa Bradbury.”
“Who do the tax bills get sent to?” Gregor asked. “And where do they get sent to?”
“They get sent to Alissa Bradbury at number forty-seven, Stephenson Road.”
“When was the last one paid?”
“Three days before Christmas.”
“Cash? Check? Money order?”
“Check.”
“Do you photograph the checks?” Gregor asked her.
The woman shook her head. “Oh, no. I know some places do it, but it would be much too expensive for Derby.”
Gregor ran a hand through his hair. He had assumed, when he was talking to the mentally retarded woman, that the “husband” she kept talking about was actually Alissa Bradbury’s son, Tim Bradbury, come back to help his mother out off and on. But Tim Bradbury had died the first week of December. Who had paid Alissa Bradbury’s taxes three days before Christmas? And if Alissa Bradbury had paid them herself, then where was she? Gregor knew he couldn’t count on the testimony of the woman he had talked to. She was confused, and her sense of time lacked precision. But he could count on the evidence he had seen with his own eyes. Kerosene lamps burning on the screened-in porch in Philip Brye’s photograph notwithstanding, nobody could be living in that shack. Not on a day-to-day basis. Not with the shape it was in.
“Was that everything you needed to know?” the woman in records asked brightly.
I
t didn’t begin to be everything Gregor Demarkian needed to know, but he didn’t want to say that.
FOUR
1
ONE OF THE PROBLEMS with working outside of official police sanction is that you can never know when you are covering old ground or when the ground you are covering is already known to be—because of factors you have no knowledge of—a dead end. In the detective novels Bennis Hannaford and Father Tibor were always pressing on Gregor Demarkian, the detective was always operating outside official police sanction, and he always knew more than the cops did. Even Miss Marple, Bennis Hannaford’s favorite and, in Gregor’s opinion, the most ludicrously unbelievable character in the history of detective fiction, figured out more about a case while she was knitting baby booties than the forces of Scotland Yard did while running all over the English countryside. In real life it was not like that. Tony Bandero might be a jerk—a world-class jerk, as Bennis would say—but he would also have access to vital information Gregor needed but had no way of getting on his own. Philip Brye would be able to get him some of it, and that was a comfort, but there was no way around the time-delay factor. If Gregor wanted to waste the day, he could call Dr. Brye, tell him what was needed, and wait until Dr. Brye both got hold of it and was able to deliver it. Gregor didn’t want to waste the day. There was something about this situation that made him very nervous. It wasn’t just the obvious. Of course it was nerve-wracking to have a poisoner running around loose. It was nerve-wracking to have any kind of a murderer running around loose. It was statistically correct that most homicides were not committed by psychopaths. It was also statistically correct that any unexplained homicide could have been committed by a psychopath. It was the randomness factor that was terrifying. A murderer with a known motive was a calculable risk, to an extent. If you knew someone was killing the heirs to the Hipplewhooper fortune and you were one of those heirs, you could take steps to protect yourself. It wasn’t so easy when there was only pattern, because you could never be sure that you had the pattern right. A serial killer who has been described as preying on young women with long brown hair parted in the middle might actually be preying on young women wearing sea green sweatshirts. Practically every young college woman in the country had long brown hair parted in the middle. A serial killer who is said to favor little old ladies in tennis shoes may actually favor little old ladies in horn-rimmed glasses. There could be no real answers until the killer was caught, and sometimes he (or she) wasn’t.
Of course, Gregor thought, gathering his coat together as Connie Hazelwood pulled up in front of Fountain of Youth’s big Victorian house, there was no question of a serial killer here. The signs were all wrong, and getting even wronger the more Gregor looked into them. That wasn’t what was making him so nervous. He wasn’t entirely sure what was. It was all just—off, that was the problem. Off. That balcony. The first body, naked in the bushes, appearing out of nowhere. It was an article of faith with Gregor Demarkian that, the conventions of the murder mystery notwithstanding, real killers in real life did not hatch elaborate plots with bizarre twists in them unless there was absolutely no other way to get what they wanted to have. That meant there had to be a reason for Tim Bradbury’s body to have been found the way it was, a perfectly logical and straightforward reason. It was like looking for a perfectly logical and straightforward reason for crows to start painting themselves red.
Gregor got out of the car and looked around. There was no sign of Tony Bandero. There was no sign of the gentlemen and women of the press, either. Gregor thought this was sensible, since Tony and the press seemed to be joined at the hip. Yesterday, the doorway at Fountain of Youth had sported a tired-looking Christmas wreath. Now the wreath was gone, and nothing had been put in its place. Gregor missed Donna Moradanyan, his upstairs neighbor, who had once decorated their brownstone for Valentine’s Day by wrapping the entire five-story facade of the building in shiny pink foil and big red aluminum hearts.
“You sure you don’t want me to stick around?” Connie Hazelwood asked. “Just in case you need to make a quick getaway?”
Gregor could easily imagine himself wanting to make a quick getaway, especially if Tony showed up. He noted that there were no cars parked under the porte cochere. There were several in the parking lot out back, but there ought to be. It was ten o’clock in the morning and classes were in full swing.
“Go have lunch or do your homework,” Gregor told her. “Come back to get me at two.”
“It’s too early for lunch,” Connie Hazelwood said, “and I’m too old to have homework.”
“Go,” Gregor said.
Connie Hazelwood sighed heavily and revved the engine. Gregor went up the walk to the front door and rang the bell. Deep in the foyer, Traci Cardinale must have checked him out in the security camera. The intercom next to the door crackled on. Traci said, “Hello, Mr. Demarkian” in what sounded like a garbled and slightly nasal way. The door clicked open. Gregor went inside and closed it again.
“Goodness,” Traci Cardinale said. “I didn’t expect to see you here this morning, Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t think we were going to have anybody here from the police until later this afternoon.
Gregor was not exactly “from the police,” in spite of Tony Bandero’s invitation, but he wasn’t going to point that out to Traci Cardinale.
“Is that the official word?” he asked her. “Later this afternoon?”
“That’s what that policeman told me. That detective who was here at the end last night. The one in the uniform. Mr. McKay.”
“He wasn’t a detective. He was a patrolman.”
“Oh. I thought all policemen were detectives. Anyway, I wasn’t expecting you. Is there something I can do to help?”
The balcony railing had still not been repaired. Gregor wondered how long it would take.
“I wanted to talk to three of your students, if they’re here,” he said. He fished around in his coat pockets for the note he had written to himself. He had to stop writing notes to himself and putting them in his pockets. He lost half of them. He always ended up reminding himself of Columbo. He really hated Columbo. It was bad enough that so many cops were stupid. It was worse that there was one who was supposed to want to look stupid. It was nonsense that looking stupid would get you more information than looking smart. He had to start getting more sleep. He was going off on tangents again.
He found the note he had written to himself. “Dessa Carter,” he read off. “Christie Mulligan. Virginia Hanley. Are they here today?”
“Oh,” Traci said. “Well. None of them has canceled. They’re all in the beginners’ class.”
Gregor had thought they might be all in the same class. The best way for three people to witness more or less the same thing was to be in more or less the same place at more or less the same time.
“Why don’t you tell me where the beginners’ class is meeting,” Gregor said, “and I’ll just go up there and wait until they’ve finished with whatever it is they’re doing.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Traci said quickly. “Not everybody in a class likes to be observed. And the instructor may object to it, too. Are you—I mean, are these women suspects or something? Do you think one of them killed Stella?”
“No. It’s just something I overheard during the questioning yesterday afternoon that I would like to clarify.”
“Oh.” Traci Cardinale looked uncomfortable. “Well. The thing is, Mr. Demarkian, I mean, I’m not really authorized to make a decision like this and, well, everybody is in class right now—”
“I’m not in class right now,” Magda Hale said.
Gregor and Traci looked up. Magda Hale was leaning over the balcony a little to the side of the plywood barrier. She looked tired and—Gregor was sure of this—a little high.
“That’s Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it? Do you want to take an exercise class?”
“He wants to talk to some of the women,” Traci said. “Miss Carter and Miss Mulligan and Ms. Hanley. I’ve tol
d him I didn’t really think he ought to do that—”
“Why not?” Magda Hale interrupted.
“Oh,” Traci said. “Well, I don’t know. It didn’t seem right. And I didn’t even know if they were all here today.”
Magda Hale brushed this off. “They’re all here today. They’re in the beginners’ class, aren’t they? That’s step aerobics this morning. It’s not the students I’d worry about if I were you, Traci. It’s Frannie Jay. For someone who spends her life jumping up and down in front of dozens of stranger in a leotard, she’s awfully touchy about her privacy. Are the beginners’ still in the second-floor studio today?”
“Yes,” Traci said. “Yes, they are.”
“Then come on up, Mr. Demarkian. You can witness your first step aerobics class.”
Gregor shoved himself out of his coat, handed it to Traci Cardinale, and climbed the stairs to the second-floor balcony.
2
“WHAT YOU HAVE TO remember about an operation like this,” Magda Hale said as she led him down the second-floor hall to the studio he had been in on his first day at Fountain of Youth, “is that no matter what else you’re offering women, you have to offer them a method of losing weight. That’s the bottom line. You can talk all you want to about staying young and staying fit and staying healthy. The staying young part might even be a draw for some of the older women. Most of your clients, though, are going to want one thing and one thing only, and that is to get thinner fast. It doesn’t matter how much they weigh, either. Twenty pounds overweight or twenty pounds underweight, they all want to get thinner fast.”
They stopped at the door to the studio and Magda Hale opened up and poked her head inside. Music rolled out.
“That’s ‘Shake Your Body,’ and it’s just started,” she said. “This version takes about twelve minutes. Come in and sit down, Mr. Demarkian.”
