Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  Getting old.

  I’m not getting old, Magda told herself now, pulling the keys from the ignition and climbing out onto the asphalt. There was a wind blowing in swiftly from the east. It was very cold. All of Magda’s joints ached. She hadn’t wanted to take more pills when she was coming down here. How would she be able to tell the doctor where it hurt? She was just so afraid of the pain. If Jimmy Fleck wouldn’t give her more Demerol, she wasn’t sure what she would do. High-impact aerobics was the most important part of her day. Leaping and bouncing, stomping and twirling: there were people who said they got high from that alone; the more vigorous the workout, the better it sold. She couldn’t go out on the road and do only the geriatric stuff, or the yoga, or the lectures on how to stay young forever. Nobody would listen to her.

  I’m not getting old, Magda told herself again, and then, because the Demerol hadn’t completely worn off, she hurried across the parking lot to the medical center’s front doors, forcing her legs to move swiftly in the chill. She had two more Demerol in her purse, just in case she needed them. There were six more in the little brown plastic prescription bottle back home. Already, her legs were beginning to send out warning signs of sharp shooting pains waiting under the dull ache.

  Jimmy Fleck’s office was on the first floor: a good thing, because Magda wasn’t sure she wanted to climb stairs. Magda gave her name to the receptionist. The receptionist was new in the last six months and not somebody who knew her. Jimmy Fleck always had new receptionists. He couldn’t seem to keep women working for him. Magda wondered why that was.

  The waiting room was empty. There was a small artificial Christmas tree on a table in one corner, covered with tinsel and glowing with tiny white lights. There was a pile of magazines on the coffee table that could not have belonged to anyone intimately connected to Jimmy Fleck’s life: Woman’s Day Christmas Crochet Patterns and Family Circle’s 1001 Things to Make for the Holidays. Magda started to sit down, and Jimmy Fleck himself appeared in the doorway to the offices, looking concerned.

  “Magda?”

  Magda forced herself to stand up straighten Jimmy Fleck was at least fifteen years younger than she was. He didn’t look forty. Magda always felt slightly anxious around him, as if he were judging her, as if the judgments of young men were somehow what really mattered. In all likelihood, Fleck only judged the swiftness with which her bills were paid.

  Magda held out her hand to shake and winced. Her hip was acting up again.

  Jimmy cocked his head. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is that the leg you were telling me about?”

  “Leg, hip, back, everything,” Magda said, catching her breath. “I think I must have strained something. And I have the introductory seminar this week. And a tour that starts next week.”

  “You’ve been working?”

  “Of course I’ve been working. I have to work. Working with me personally is what people pay for when they come to these seminars.”

  “Have you been taking some kind of painkiller?”

  The dull ache was definitely giving way now to sharp shooting pains. The pains were starting in her hips and snaking up her back.

  “I found some Demerol in the medicine cabinet. I’ve been taking those when I needed them.”

  “Do you need them often?”

  “I need them when I work. The last few days, when I work, I’m in pain.”

  Jimmy Fleck stepped back, contemplated her from one end to the other, and shook his head. He was a tall man with a slight stoop and too much thick black hair. He wore wire-rimmed glasses like the prep school boys at Yale.

  “All right,” he said. “Come on back with me.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re going to take some x-rays. We’re going to take quite a lot of x-rays.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “Then I’m going to pull at you a little, to see what I can find. Have you taken any of that Demerol recently?”

  “Not since ten o’clock.”

  “Good.”

  He led her thought the rabbit-warren maze of cubicles that all doctor’s offices seemed to be these days. The more Magda walked, the harder she found it to go on moving. The walls of the cubicles were covered with posters exhorting her to quit smoking, lose weight, do a monthly breast exam, count her cholesterol. The x-ray room was at the very back, in one of the only two rooms in the warren with real walls instead of just partitions. The other one was Jimmy Fleck’s own office. Why was it, when doctors made so much money they wouldn’t spend it on decent renovations?

  “Marie?” Jimmy Fleck called out.

  Marie was Jimmy Fleck’s nurse, the one woman he had been able to keep in his employ. Magda thought she must have been with the practice forever. She was an older woman who believed in older things. Marie still wore a white dress and white stockings and white shoes and the fancy winged white cap she had been given at her hospital nursing school. Now she appeared out of nowhere, impassive but ready.

  “Oh, Marie,” Jimmy Fleck said. “Magda here needs a set of x-rays done. Both legs. All angles. Both hips. All angles. Her back—Magda, does this pain ever start in your back?”

  “No.”

  “Do a set anyway,” Jimmy Fleck told Marie. “We might as well be sure. When you’re done, send her down to my office. Use a wheelchair, if necessary.”

  “I won’t need a wheelchair,” Magda snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I only said ‘if necessary,’ ” Jimmy Fleck told her. “You forget. I’ve seen a lot of sports injuries.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I’ve especially seen a lot of aerobics injuries. Especially in older women. And you are an older woman, Magda. No matter what your publicity says.”

  “I know I’m over fifty. You don’t have to rub it in. But I’m in very good shape, Jimmy.”

  “I know you are.”

  “And I’m not going to stop working. Not this week. I can’t. I only came in because I thought you could prescribe some more painkillers. To get me through.”

  “More Demerol.”

  “More whatever. The Demerol works well enough.”

  “The Demerol is dangerous,” Jimmy Fleck said grimly. “Especially taken on a regular basis. We give Demerol to terminal cancer patients on a regular basis.”

  “I said it didn’t have to be Demerol, Jimmy.”

  “We’ll see. If you’re badly injured and you go on working, Demerol won’t help you much. You’ll end up hospitalized.”

  “I won’t let myself be hospitalized,” Magda said, and meant it.

  “Why don’t you come in here and lie down on the examining table,” Marie said. “We might as well get these x-rays over and done with.”

  Magda let herself be let into the x-ray room, away from Jimmy, away from the bright lights of the corridor. Her legs hurt terribly now. Jimmy disappeared down the corridor and Marie closed the x-ray room door.

  “Here we go.” Marie handed Magda the heavy lead-filled chest protector she would have to wear while her legs were being photographed.

  Magda lay down on the examining table and put the chest protector on. If Jimmy wouldn’t give her any more painkillers, she would just have to make other arrangements. The one thing she couldn’t do was stop working. Not this week. Not this month. Not this year. Not ever. If Jimmy didn’t understand that, she would just have to find somebody who did.

  Magda stretched out her legs the way Marie wanted her to and winced. The ache was now almost all gone. The shooting pains were excruciating. She wanted to take the Demerol she had brought with her out of her purse and swallow them right now.

  “Here we go,” Marie said. “I’ll just step out of the room for a minute. Don’t move that leg while I’m gone.”

  Magda couldn’t have moved that leg if she had wanted to. It felt like it was burning up.

  2

  DESSA CARTER KNEW THAT something was wrong as soon as Mrs. O’Reilly picked up the phone.
She could hear all the danger signs in Mrs. O’Reilly’s voice, including the oddly grammatical stiltedness that crept into it when Dessa’s father was not only very bad, but listening. It was a shame. Dessa had only called home out of a sense of duty. When she had called at lunch-time, everything had been all right. Now she had been invited out “for Perrier and a salad or beer and pizza” by Traci Cardinale, and she wanted to go. It had been years since she’d had dinner out with a friend. It had been years since she’d had a friend to have dinner out with. Until Traci Cardinale asked her to go out, Dessa hadn’t even realized how completely her life had been eaten up by what had happened to her father. She had been fat in high school, but not this fat. She’d had only a few friends, but she’d had those few. Now she had nothing but her job (which she hated) and her food (which she wasn’t all that fond of anymore either) and her father, who was something worse than dead.

  Once Dessa heard Mrs. O’Reilly on the phone, she had no choice. She had to tell Traci that she wouldn’t be able to go along. She had to get into her car and point it in the direction of Derby. She had to do the right thing, take the responsibility, lead the cavalry to the rescue. There was no one else. She spent the entire drive home wishing she had never made that phone call in the first place. She hadn’t been obligated to make it. Her agreement with Mrs. O’Reilly was clear. One phone call at lunch. That was it. If Mrs. O’Reilly had an emergency, she could call Fountain of Youth.

  When Dessa pulled into the driveway of the house in Derby, everything seemed to be quiet. All the lights were on on the first floor, but Mrs. O’Reilly sometimes did that when she was alone with Dessa’s father. Dessa sometimes did it, too. When her father got really spooky, it helped not to have to talk to him in the dark. Dessa got out of the car and half ran to the back door. She got her keys and let herself into the kitchen. One of the things she had been afraid of, when she talked to Mrs. O’Reilly, was that the problem here would not be with her father but with the kids in the neighborhood. Too many of the kids around here knew that Dessa’s father had Alzheimer’s disease. Too many of them were wild. Every once in a while, the kids would come tapping at the windows and rattling at the doors, trying to make the old man scream and shout.

  The old man was not screaming and shouting now. There was no sound in the house at all. Dessa walked out of the kitchen and down the hall to the living room. She could see Mrs. O’Reilly standing next to her father’s chair. Mrs. O’Reilly saw her too and nodded.

  “Shitfire,” the old man said suddenly.

  Dessa Carter stopped in her tracks. Oh, no, she thought. Not this. Not now. The bottom dropped out of her stomach. All the muscles in her back curled into painful knots. Mrs. O’Reilly walked around the old man’s chair and came out into the hallway.

  “I’ve got the rope out,” Mrs. O’Reilly said briskly. “Maybe we’re not too late.”

  “You should have called the ambulance,” Dessa said. “You should have forced them to come.”

  “Nothing forces an ambulance to come to this neighborhood on anything less than an hour’s notice,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “People bleeding in the street, that doesn’t force them to come. I didn’t want to try it on my own. I didn’t think I could imagine it.”

  “Shitfire,” the old man repeated.

  Mrs. O’Reilly ducked into the bathroom and came out with a long length of rope.

  “We’ve got to come at him from behind,” she said. “If he sees us on the way, he’ll really start screaming.”

  He would really start screaming anyway, Dessa knew that. The only way they could stop him was to gag him, and they had never done that. They had tied him up. They had even tied him up and left him in the bathtub, where it was safest. They had never gagged him.

  “Take this end and try not to let him see you,” Mrs. O’Reilly said.

  Dessa Carter didn’t need instructions in this from Mrs. O’Reilly. She took one end of the rope and began to move, slowly, into the living room. Her father was sitting in his chair, his hands gripping the arms, his back to the hallway. Dessa could see the veins in his hands, blue-black and popping out.

  Move slowly. Move carefully. Don’t panic. The rope felt slippery and prickly in Dessa’s hands, like wet nettles.

  “Shitfire,” the old man said.

  He was so loud and so unexpected, Dessa jumped. In the moment that she jumped, he seemed to see her. He seemed to see something. It was hard to know what he saw anymore. It was impossible to know who he thought she was.

  “Shitfire,” the old man screamed at the top of his lungs. Then he leapt to his feet and spun around, picking up the flimsy occasional table beside the chair as he came. It was incredible, how fast it happened. One minute he was sitting with his back to them, more or less calm. The next minute he was on his feet, crouched and wild. He held the table over his head and then brought it crashing to the floor. It was made of plywood and spit and splintered on contact.

  “Shitfire and hellfire and fire up your ass you little cunt you big fat cunt you little whore.”

  The occasional table broke in two and the old man flung it away. Mrs. O’Reilly began to. back up along the hallway. Dessa stayed where she was. The old man pushed his chair out of the way and went for the coffee table. He lifted it without difficulty and heaved it in the direction of the front window. The glass shattered. Shards went everywhere.

  “Shitfire and hellfire and cuntfire and I’m gonna go home you goddamned suckers I’m gonna go home—”

  “I’m going to call the police,” Mrs. Reilly announced.

  The old man picked up the coffee table again and threw it at the other front widow. The glass broke there, too, and scattered. Dessa could see great piles of sharp-edged pieces glittering in the light of the overhead fixture. The old man was wearing only slippers on his feet, the kind of slippers that have no backs. As he walked through the glass, he got cut. His heels and ankles were bleeding. He picked up the coffee table again and smashed it into the floor, smashed it once, smashed it twice, smashed it three times, gutting the carpet and the wood floor underneath it, making shards of coffee table wood to go with the shards of glass.

  “Shitfire shitfire shitfire shitfire shitfire,” he screamed.

  Mrs. O’Reilly grabbed Dessa by the arm. “Get out of the way,” she hissed, pulling Dessa along. “Get out of the way before he sees you.”

  Dessa couldn’t get out of the way. She couldn’t move. He was so strong. That was what she could never get over. His mind was as weak as marshmallow fluff, but his body was as strong as it had ever been, stronger maybe, getting stronger by the day. She remembered him at the Danbury State Fair when she was young, lifting the big hammer to ring the bell and get her a Teddy bear from the booth. She remembered him the day the floor rotted out from the upstairs bathroom and the bathtub fell halfway through. He’d stood in the downstairs hall and kept it up there until the emergency plumber came. He had always been strong. His strength was all he had ever had. Now it was all he had left except for his jumble of dreams about a war only he was left to fight.

  “Shitfire hellfire cuntfire shitfire home I’m gonna go home I’m gonna go right through you suckers and I’m gonna go home.”

  “Get out of here,” Mrs. O’Reilly said.

  It was too late. He had seen her. Dessa knew that look in his eyes. He hadn’t really seen her at all, of course. He had seen some German soldier on a ridge in eastern France, or some Italian tank commander in the Alps, or a sniper on a ridge in Alsace-Lorraine. Dessa didn’t know enough about the war her father had lived through to pinpoint it. She only knew that he had met the enemy and engaged them, and now he was meeting that same enemy again. He threw away the coffee table and picked up the big brass floor lamp that stood next to the fireplace that was never lit. He ripped the lampshade off the top of it and pulled the plug out of the wall. The coffee table crashed against the sofa and cracked in two. Somewhere far away, police sirens were blasting into the air, whooping and screaming.

&n
bsp; The old man put his hands around the lightbulb now exposed in the lamp and crushed it. His hands ran with blood, but he was smiling.

  “I’m gonna go right through you suckers,” he said.

  And then he started coming, the heavy lamp held out in front of him like a sword, his free hand clawing at the air. He was more than halfway across the room to her. His eyes were lit up and eager and blank. Dessa felt a thick hot acid wash of vomit rising into her throat.

  “Suckers,” the old man said.

  Dessa spun around and ran into the bathroom. She slammed the door shut and leaned against it. There was no way to lock this door from the inside. There was nothing to do but to lean against it and hope she was too heavy for him, or that Mrs. Reilly could hold him off, or that the police would come soon. She heard him stop on the other side of the door and begin to bellow again. Then what must have been the base of the lamp began to smash against the wood next to her ear.

  “Let the police come now let the police come now let the police come right this second,” Dessa prayed, out loud, into the air, into the sound of his screaming.

  The base of the lamp slammed down against the bathroom door again and again and again, until the door began to crack just like the coffee table had.

  Dessa buried her face in the side of her arm and started to cry.

  3

  FOR CHRISTIE MULLIGAN, THE pain started during the very last step aerobics routine of the day, almost at the very end, during the part where the music got slower. Pain was a bad sign, she knew that. Pain meant the bubble was getting bigger and the problem had spread. For the routine, she was supposed to hold her hands up over her head and wave them in the air. This was called “making like a palm tree” and supposed to be fun. Christie put one hand on her breast and felt for the bubble instead. It hadn’t gotten any bigger, as far as she could tell. It hadn’t gotten any smaller, either. It was just there, there there there, and—