Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor let Magda Hale lead him to one of the theater chairs on the platform overlooking the studio floor. On the studio floor itself, the same rows of women he had observed the first time were now moving back and forth in front of little black plastic platforms, led by a young woman with long blond hair who was facing the mirror at the front of the room. Gregor assumed the mirror must be for the benefit of the instructor. He couldn’t see that it was doing the students any good. If he was a woman who thought she needed to lose weight, he would have hated looking at himself in it.

  “To the right. To the middle. To the left. To the middle. And step,” the blond instructor said.

  The women stepped. Gregor wondered how they managed to stay in sync like that. He recognized Dessa Carter in the back row, because she was unmistakable. The fat one.

  “This is called step aerobics,” Magda said, leaning against the low rail that separated the viewing area from the studio proper. “It’s this year’s miracle discovery. There’s always a miracle discovery. A couple of years ago, it was the ultra-low-fat diet. We were all supposed to keep our fat intake down to ten or fifteen percent of our total calories. Then we could eat as much as we wanted without ever gaining weight.”

  “I take it it didn’t work,” Gregor said.

  “Oh, it worked just fine,” Magda told him. “The problem is, nobody could stand to stay on the diet for long. No butter. No cheese. No oils except in very minimal amounts. No yogurt. No milk except skim. No ham or dark meats, ever. No chicken skin.”

  “What was left?”

  “Rice and beans. Potatoes eaten plain. Raw green vegetables and steamed vegetables. Oh, and pure sugar sweets. Cakes and cookies have too much fat in them, but if you wanted to you could sit down with a jar of orange marmalade and eat it with a spoon. People did.”

  “And they still lost weight?”

  “Sure. Ultra low fat was basically just another calorie restriction diet, another variation on a theme. There isn’t anyone on earth who can eat enough rice and beans in combination to exceed, say, two thousand calories a day. Even if you’re adding marmalade to that, you won’t go much above twenty-five hundred. Since most women with serious weight-loss needs are doing at least thirty-five hundred, you get—”

  “Weight loss,” Gregor said.

  “Exactly. Then there’s the Puritan factor. The women who go on a diet like that who don’t really need to lose weight tend to be obsessives. They won’t eat the marmalade even though the diet says they can. They won’t eat until they’re full, either. They’ll sit there with a little plate of rice and beans all calculated to USDA portion sizes, when everybody knows that USDA portion sizes aren’t big enough to satisfy a hamster. So you see, one way or another, everybody lost weight while it lasted, but it didn’t last. Life isn’t much fun if you can never have butter on your mashed potatoes.”

  Gregor cocked his head toward the women on the studio floor. “This isn’t a diet.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Magda agreed. “For the last ten years or so, we’ve been very big on exercise. There’s nothing really wrong with that, of course. We could all use more exercise, except maybe for exercise instructors, who could probably use less. But the theory is, of course, that exercise can help you keep weight off and probably even help you take it off. And, if you’re in reasonably good shape when you start, you can dress up for it.”

  The women in this class didn’t seem to be dressed up for exercise. Most of them were wearing plain black leotards and plain black tights. The instructor, however, was wearing a silver and silver-blue lame striped leotard, silver-blue tights, and a silver-blue Greek fisherman’s cap. Gregor could see what Magda Hale meant.

  “I suppose I didn’t expect you to be so cynical about it,” he said finally. “From your advertisements and the other material I’ve seen around here, I thought you’d be a true believer.”

  “Oh, but I am.” Magda Hale shook her head. “I believe in diet and exercise, especially for keeping yourself young and healthy. But most of the women who come to these courses don’t give a damn if they’re healthy. They only care if they’re thin. And that, you see, is the dirty little secret of the whole diet industry.”

  “What is?”

  “That some people can’t be thin. Not on a long-term basis. No matter what they do. I’m not saying they have to be as fat as Miss Carter.” Magda and Gregor looked across the room at Dessa Carter. “Most women aren’t that heavy and won’t get to be that heavy no matter what they do. I’m saying that there are a lot of perfectly normal women who are twenty pounds heavier than the charts say they should be—the old charts, that is—and nothing they ever do is going to change that.”

  “Are there new charts?”

  “Oh, yes,” Magda said. “And we don’t have any of them out here. In fact, I don’t know a single diet or exercise business that does have the new charts anywhere where the clients can see them. According to the new charts, it’s just fine for a forty-year-old woman who’s five four to weigh as much as a hundred and fifty pounds. According to the old charts, the outside limit is about one hundred thirty, and the recommended weight is more like one twenty or one fifteen. That means that eighty-five percent of American women over forty are too heavy. That means that they’re also unhealthy, and getting unhealthier every year. Never mind minor little facts like the one that says American women are living longer every year.”

  “You do sound cynical.”

  Magda shrugged. “You don’t tell potential clients about the new charts. You don’t tell them they’re wrong to want to lose weight, even if they’re anorexic as hell and ready for a hospital. You don’t tell them they’ve simply got a body type that doesn’t fit the present fashions and is never going to. You always hold out hope of salvation through fasting and discipline. And if you don’t do that, if you try to be honest about what you can do for people, you go out of business.”

  “I take it you’re not in any danger of going out of business.”

  “No, I’m not,” Magda Hale said, “but at least I haven’t gone as far as some people go. I’d probably have been ready to expand a long time ago if I had.”

  “How far do people go?”

  “Well,” Magda Hale said, “a couple of the diet companies used to dress their salespeople up in white coats and not quite say they were doctors and not quite say they weren’t, if you see what I mean. So that people thought they’d had a medical consultation or a session with a nutritionist. Congress held an investigation and had a fit. Did you hear about it?”

  “No.”

  Magda Hale smiled. “Of course you didn’t. Practically nobody did. The regular press didn’t cover it. The women’s magazines didn’t cover it either, because they get huge amounts of advertising money from the diet centers and the fitness clubs. And most people just didn’t want to know. Tell the average American woman these days that she’s never going to lose the extra twenty pounds, and she’s going to think you just sentenced her to death. Hell, most of the people we get here would rather be sentenced to death. They’d rather hear that they had cancer than that they were always going to be what they call fat.”

  “Step up,” the blond woman at the front of the group insisted. “Step up. Step up. Step right. Step middle. Step left. Step up.”

  Magda Hale checked her watch. “One more sequence and then the cooldown. You wouldn’t believe how hard we work to make this sound all New Age and professional, nothing at all like those futile exercise programs your mother went on when you were a kid. God, I don’t understand people sometimes. Especially women.”

  “Step up. Step up. Step right. Step middle. Step left. Step middle. And breathe,” the blond woman said.

  3

  DESSA CARTER WAS THE fat one. Christie Mulligan was the extremely thin one. Virginia Hanley was the fortyish woman who looked like she ought to be presiding over the latest meeting of the local Junior League. When the class had finished their step routine to “Shake Your Body,” Magda Hale called
a time-out and separated these three from the rest and called them over to talk to Gregor. Christie Mulligan’s friends didn’t like it. The one called Tara even threatened to call a lawyer, on the assumption that Christie was about to be questioned by a hostile government force who might suspect her of a crime and, therefore, needed the protection of official representation. When Christie herself turned this suggestion down, Tara moved as close as she could to the platform, so that she could listen to everything that was said. Gregor didn’t care if the entire class listened to everything that was said. He was, in fact, a little put off by the way Magda Hale had arranged things. It was all too organized. He didn’t want to come off as the school principal, ferreting out miscreants in the girls’ rooms.

  Dessa Carter and Virginia Hanley sat on chairs. Christie Mulligan sat on the floor, her legs folded under her in a quasilotus position. All three women looked solemn, as if they were invited guests at a funeral. Virginia Hanley looked bored, too.

  Now there’s somebody who wouldn’t surprise me if she turned out to be a serial killer, Gregor thought. Aside from looking bored and solemn, Virginia Hanley also looked smug. Serial killers were always smug.

  Gregor leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. “What I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, “was something each of you said to the detectives doing the questioning yesterday afternoon. You may remember that I sat in on some of those interviews.”

  “You sat in on mine,” Virginia Hanley said. “I didn’t like it. I almost registered a protest.”

  Of course you did, Gregor thought. He said, “Yes. Well. What I want to do now is get more specific about just a single point. Each of you were talking about the period of time just around lunch, and you said you were on your way to the dining room—”

  “We were late,” Christie Mulligan said crisply. “At least, I was. Tara and Michelle and I were in the bathroom so long, we missed the line.”

  “I was late, too,” Dessa Carter said, looking tired. “I had to call home.”

  Gregor looked at Virginia Hanley and Virginia shrugged. “I was probably late, too,” she said. “I stopped to look at the brochures about the new line of exercise clothes.”

  “Fine,” Gregor said. “Fine. Did the three of you see each other when you were going upstairs?”

  “We saw Dessa,” Christie Mulligan said. “She was on the landing ahead of us.”

  “I heard them coming up behind me,” Dessa said.

  “I didn’t see anybody,” Virginia said.

  “All right,” Gregor told them, “now. From what I remember, Miss Carter, when you were asked if you heard or saw anything out of the ordinary, you said that the only thing you could fix on was a bird—”

  “Oh,” Christie Mulligan said. “Did you hear that, too? Wasn’t that odd?”

  “I didn’t hear a bird,” Virginia Hanley said.

  Dessa Carter shifted her bulk around in her chair. She was almost fat enough to need two chairs. Gregor thought she would be much more comfortable in something without arms.

  “It went koo roo,” Dessa said. “Like that. And then there was this odd metallic sound—”

  “A clank,” Christie Mulligan put in.

  “Right. A clank. And then this other sound that went whoosh. Like air being let out of a chamber.”

  “That stuff didn’t sound like a bird,” Christie Mulligan said, “and that was what was so odd,, because every time you got the bird noises, you got the clank and the whoosh. As if they were connected somehow.”

  “That’s right,” Dessa Carter said.

  “Excuse me,” someone else said.

  They all looked up—Dessa Carter, Virginia Hanley, Christie Mulligan, Magda Hale, and Gregor—to find the tall blond step aerobics instructor leaning across the rail to them. She looked pale.

  “Excuse me,” the instructor said again. “My name is Frannie Jay?” She made the statement a question. We talked yesterday. I don’t know if you remember?”

  “I remember. Did you hear this bird or whatever it was yesterday afternoon, too?”

  “Not yesterday, no. It was the night Tim Bradbury died, the night I came here. I was the one who found Tim Bradbury’s body.”

  “I remember that, too,” Gregor told her. What he didn’t remember was anything about a koo roo or a clank or a whoosh in any of the reports Tony Bandero had given him. Tony was either keeping information from him again, or engaging in sloppy police work. Unless Frannie Jay hadn’t mentioned the sound at the time.

  Gregor asked. “Did you tell the police about this the night Tim Bradbury died?”

  “Oh, yes,” Frannie Jay replied. “Such an odd noise. Koo roo, clank, whoosh. Over and over again. Just like that. I thought it was some kind of bird, too.”

  “Except for the clank whoosh part,” Christie Mulligan interjected.

  “After a while, I just got spooked,” Frannie Jay said. “I—it just sounded so odd. So eerie. In the dark like that. So I went over to my window to look out and see if I could spot it, and I saw—I saw—well, the leg. Tim Bradbury’s leg. Instead.”

  “Oh,” Christie Mulligan said. “Maybe it’s a sound a corpse makes, and when we were going upstairs we were hearing that Stella Mortimer woman. Hearing her dead body, I mean.”

  “I don’t know when you went upstairs,” Virginia Hanley said decisively, “but I went upstairs nearly an hour before they found the body. Maybe more.”

  “Maybe she’d been dead for an hour by the time they found the body,” Christie Mulligan suggested.

  “I don’t think dead bodies say koo roo,” Dessa Carter objected. “I don’t think they say anything.”

  “What time was it when you came upstairs?” Gregor asked them, trying to keep to the point.

  “Just about twelve o’clock exactly,” Dessa Carter told him. “I saw the clock on Traci Cardinale’s desk before I started up.”

  “I was going to say I didn’t know,” Christie Mulligan said, frowning, “but we were just behind Dessa, so it must have been around the same time. Somehow, wearing a watch doesn’t seem to go with wearing exercise clothes,” she explained.

  “Wearing a watch goes with wearing my exercise clothes,” Virginia Hanley said. She held her right arm in the air, displaying an intricately worked gold band. It was the kind of watch that went with full formal evening dress, not thirty minutes of step aerobics.

  Gregor turned his attention to Virginia Hanley. “You reported hearing a noise yourself. I remember hearing you do it. Was it this same noise?”

  “It went koo roo,” Virginia Hanley said. “It went clank and whoosh, too, but it wasn’t a bird, for God’s sake. It wasn’t a corpse talking, either. That was just ridiculous.”

  “Everything anybody says around here that she doesn’t agree with is just ridiculous,” Christie Mulligan told Gregor. “You should hear her on the subject of the vegetarian menu. And she doesn’t even have to eat it.”

  “You should hear her on the subject of my weight,” Dessa Carter contributed. “If I wasn’t used to that kind of thing, I would have decked her by now.”

  “You should deck her the next time you feel she deserves it,” Christie Mulligan said. “It will be very good for your self-esteem.”

  “I don’t think I have a problem with my self-esteem,” Dessa Carter told her icily.

  Gregor didn’t want to get caught in the trap of discussing everybody’s self-esteem. “Mrs. Hanley,” he said. “Please. You were where when you heard this noise?”

  “Halfway up the stairs between the first and second floors, on the half-landing.”

  “And this noise was coming from the first floor, from the direction of the kitchen or the pantry?”

  Virginia Hanley looked surprised. “Of course not. How could it possibly have been coming from there?”

  “That’s where I thought it was coming from,” Christie Mulligan said.

  “That’s where I thought it was coming from, too,” Dessa Carter said. “You know, Virginia, it�
�s just possible, just remotely possible, that every once in a while, you might be wrong.”

  “Well, I’m not wrong about this,” Virginia Hanley said. “I can’t see how it would have gotten into the kitchen, never mind the pantry. And I can’t see that no one would have noticed.”

  “That no one would have noticed what?” Gregor asked, slightly bewildered.

  “Why, the car, of course,” Virginia Hanley said. “That’s what it was. A car with an exhaust system problem. I forget what it’s called, but it’s very common. It happened to me just last year. And really, after all the trouble it cost me, I’d know that sound anywhere.”

  FIVE

  1

  THE WORST THING, MAGDA Hale decided as she eased her bright red Toyota Corolla more or less into a parking space in the empty back corner of the lot at the Fleck Medical Group in Orange, wasn’t her reaction times, but caring about her reaction times. She could make the stops at red lights and respond to other drivers wanting to change lanes, but the whole procedure seemed infinitely silly, useless, utterly unimportant. She longed to put her head down on the steering wheel and go to sleep. She longed to think about floating. She longed to go back to her bedroom and take another one of these pills, because the ones she had taken at ten o’clock this morning were beginning to wear off.

  It was now three thirty in the afternoon, and every part of Magda Hale’s body ached. She had spent the entire morning with her advanced aerobics class. To be here now, she had to hand that same class over to Cici Mahoney for the afternoon. She didn’t like to do it. Cici had begun to notice how many corners she was cutting, how much time she was spending slacking off. All the young instructors had. If Magda wasn’t careful, Simon would start to notice, too. Magda didn’t know what she would do then. Fountain of Youth was Simon’s entire life. It belonged to him more than it did to Magda, no matter what the legal papers said, because it had been his idea at the beginning and his idea to incorporate and his idea to expand. Fountain of Youth was certainly Simon’s entire life with Magda. Magda didn’t think they had talked about anything else for years. What would they say to each other if Magda couldn’t be part of the business anymore? What would the clients say if they found out Magda was getting old?