Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  “I take it you put some kind of rush on the lab reports for Stella Mortimer,” he said. “Either that, or you’ve been doing them personally.”

  “I can’t do lab reports.” Philip Brye kicked open his office door and gestured Gregor inside. “I get the vapors every time I see a test tube. I did the autopsy myself.”

  “And?”

  “And what did you expect? Death consistent with poisoning by arsenic, which, by the way, is what the lab people found when they analyzed the contents of her stomach. That and traces of what was probably an English muffin, with butter. Also coffee. Stella Mortimer wasn’t much of a health food nut.”

  The lab reports were lying in the middle of Philip Brye’s desk, enclosed in a file clearly marked AUTOP: SM in red felt-tipped pen. Gregor picked them up and took them over to a chair where he could sit down and examine them. He took a large bite of Danish and flipped the file open.

  “She didn’t have to be,” he said in answer to Philip Brye’s comment about the health food. “She wasn’t hired to be a role model, like the instructors. She was hired to take the pictures. Are all these numbers down this side supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Not really. They’re for administration. Take the next page.”

  Gregor turned to the next page. This was the stomach analysis, and he understood all of it. He couldn’t count the number of stomach analyses he read while he was heading up the Behavioral Sciences Department. Eventually, he had gotten an agent trainee to read them for him. They always made him a little ill. Gregor ran through the technical language that added up to an English muffin with butter and a cup of coffee—gluten simplex, sucrose, dextrose, paraphalymides—and looked up.

  “She took a lot of sugar in her coffee.”

  “She did this time, yes.”

  “Do you think somebody made the coffee for her? The sugar would do something to hide the taste of arsenic.” Gregor sighed. “You know, I’ve investigated maybe half a dozen arsenic poisonings in my life, and you know what always bothers me?”

  “No,” Philip Brye said. “What?”

  “Arsenic tastes awful,” Gregor told him. “Arsenic tastes really, really awful. I know. I’ve tasted it. In the interests of research, if you get me. And yet people eat the stuff all the time. They eat massive quantities of it. That’s why they die.”

  “Be reasonable, Gregor. Stella Mortimer didn’t eat massive quantities of arsenic. She ate, or more probably drank, just enough to kill her. And the taste was disguised in the food she ate with it.”

  “Arsenic isn’t cyanide,” Gregor pointed out. “You need more than a drop or two.”

  “True. But arsenic is a hell of a lot easier to come by and it does the job. You wouldn’t believe how much of the stuff we have sitting around here in the evidence room. You’re not supposed to be able to buy straight arsenic without signing for it, but people do. They most certainly do. Then they go out and poison other people’s dogs with it.”

  “Is that what most of the arsenic you collect has been used for?”

  “Oh, yeah. Dogs and cats. People are incredibly nasty about other people’s pets. Dogs are as fussy as humans are about the tastes of the foods they eat. At least some dogs are. If you can disguise the taste for dogs, why couldn’t you disguise the taste for people?”

  “Maybe it’s the politeness factor. Maybe if somebody gives you something to eat, or makes it for you, maybe you feel obligated to eat it even if it tastes awful.”

  “Remind me never to do that again,” Philip Brye muttered.

  Gregor flipped through to the next page in the file. This file was much thicker than the file at Fountain of Youth, but Gregor didn’t think it was much more revealing. Height. Weight. Eye color. Hair color. He couldn’t find anything unusual. At the tune she died, Stella Mortimer hadn’t been on any of the common recreational drugs. She hadn’t been on the pill. She had gone through menopause. She had had her gallbladder removed. Gregor could have said the same things about a Park Avenue Chihuahua. He flipped another page in the file and came to the detailed physical descriptions of internal body parts. He flipped the file closed and handed it back to Philip Brye.

  “She hadn’t been dead very long when we found her,” he said. “None of the vomit was dry.”

  “None of the smell had cleared off, either,” Philip Brye said. “Now that’s something else about arsenic. It takes time. With cyanide, you hand the poison over, and seconds later, your victim is belly-up. And there you are, right on the scene. With arsenic, you have time to arrange an alibi. Or at least a getaway.”

  “Did anybody get away from Fountain of Youth yesterday?” Gregor asked.

  “You’d know more about that than me,” Philip Brye replied. “Tony Bandero is supposed to be trying to find out where she was when she ate last, but he doesn’t seem to be making much progress with it. The general assumption, from what I heard, was that people who work at Fountain of Youth eat at Fountain of Youth, because the nearest restaurant is a hefty walk away. I didn’t see anything like English muffins or butter in that kitchen, though.”

  “I didn’t either,” Gregor said, “but she could have brought all that with her. Did she have a refrigerator in her office, or anything like that?”

  “I don’t know. We could ask. The uniforms will be talking to you, even if Tony Bandero isn’t. In fact, from what I hear, the uniforms are real interested in you.”

  “Tony is real interested in me too,” Gregor said, “it’s just the wrong kind of interest. I keep wondering what it is he isn’t telling me. In spite of all the hotdogging, my guess is that he’s a better than competent cop. He’s got to know more about what’s going on here than he’s letting on.”

  “So that he can pull it out of his hat at the last minute and look like a genius? Yeah, that would be about Tony’s speed. What is it you think he might know?”

  Gregor had been considering this question for some time now. If he was looking to make a media splash and stage a public coup, a clear win over the most overhyped murder investigator of the second half of the twentieth century (which was what Gregor considered himself to be; way overhyped), what information would he hold back? What information was it that this case could not be solved without?

  “I think,” Gregor told Philip Brye, “that there may be more information than he’s been letting on about where Tim Bradbury’s body was before it showed up on the lawn at Fountain of Youth. That naked body is the single most troublesome factor in this entire case. It’s the one thing that makes this case odd.”

  “I can get you the original lab reports,” Philip Brye offered. “I can probably get you the investigating officers’ reports, too. It may not be legal, but Tony could hardly complain after all the time he’s spent talking to the television reporters about how he’s made you a full-fledged part of his team and how he’s given you complete access to all the relevant information.”

  “Could you get me transcriptions of the interviews, too? I want to know if anybody else heard this bird or car or whatever it was—have you heard about that?”

  “Koo roo. Clang. Whoosh.”

  “That, yes. I’ve got three people who say it was a bird, and one who swears it was a car. Maybe if I can find more people who heard it, they would describe it to me as other things.”

  “I suppose a car is more likely. I can’t think of any night-singing winter birds in this part of Connecticut. The car could have belonged to the killer, I suppose.”

  “If it was a car. I’d say it almost certainly did. Virginia Hanley told me that the sound she heard was the result of an exhaust system problem that is relatively common. Do you know anything about that?”

  “All I know about cars is that you put gas in them and they go,” Philip Brye said. “I’ve never had one make a koo roo sound at me.”

  “If it were a car and the problem is common, the koo roo sound doesn’t matter” Gregor said. “It wouldn’t prove anything. We couldn’t use it. If the problem is uncommon—�
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  “Is Virginia Hanley the middle-aged one who looks like she’s heading the ball committee for the American Cancer Society benefit?”

  “That’s the one, yes.”

  “She doesn’t look like someone who would know all that much about cars to me. I mean, if it’s a problem with cars and she’s heard about it, then I’d think the problem would have to be fairly common because—” The phone started ringing. “Just a minute.”

  Gregor relaxed and let Philip Brye pick up. He could see what Philip was getting at about Virginia Hanley, although you never could tell. People knew the oddest things. Philip Brye had picked up a pencil and started writing a note on his memo pad.

  “Ward six,” he was saying. “All right. All right. The emergency room first. I’ll tell him.”

  Philip Brye hung up.

  “Start of a bad night?” Gregor asked him sympathetically.

  “I don’t know.” Brye looked pensive. “That was one of my ambulance men. He was passing on what he thought was some interesting information. He’s at the emergency room over at Yale-New Haven.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “What happened is that one of the regular ambulances brought in an apparent attempted suicide about twenty minutes ago, a young woman in her twenties, vomiting all over the place, they went right to the stomach pump. There wouldn’t be anything strange about that, except that this young woman had identification in her purse saying that she worked at the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio.”

  Gregor sat up very straight in his chair. “Did you get a name?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Philip Brye said. “Traci Cardinale.”

  Part 3

  “The problem with days of auld lang syne is that they always make you look like a jerk.”

  —TIMES SQUARE REVELER,

  LIVE ON WCBS, CHANNEL 2,

  NEW YORK

  ONE

  1

  AS SOON AS GREGOR and Philip Brye entered the hospital, Gregor could smell the smoke. One corner of the waiting room was taken over by six large young men in sleeveless vests and toxic orange hats. The backs of the vests were stenciled in white paint: “BLOOD BROTHERS.” Most of the young men had tattoos on their arms, coiling snakes being a favorite. Most of them were smoking cigarettes. Philip Brye passed them without notice. Gregor thought only that it was the better option, given the several that might have presented themselves, for the staff to ignore the cigarettes. Somewhere in this building, one of the Blood Brothers was probably bleeding and might be dead. The last thing the Yale-New Haven, or any other hospital, needed was a gang war in its emergency room waiting room.

  Up at the nurse’s window, there was a stand-up cardboard sign that said: “KEEP THE NEW YEAR HAPPY. APPOINT A DESIGNATED DRIVER.” Two cops were standing next to it, looking tired. The nurse behind the window was wearing a white tunic top with a name pin over the pocket identifying her as S. Caloverdi, LPN. Also behind the window was a plump young woman with short-cropped hair in civilian dress, operating a computer. The emergency room waiting room was not too crammed, which was a kind of miracle for this time of year. Aside from the Blood Brothers there was what looked like a mother and her three young children. None of the four was visibly hurt. There was an old man with a cane. There was a young couple looking sullen. It was still early yet, too early for major gang fights or that perennial problem of American emergency medicine, drug overdoses. Why was it that so many addicts overdosed at night? Too many things happened at night, as if the division was not between rich and poor or young and old or black and white, but between daylight and darkness.

  Philip Brye stuck his head through the nurse’s window and said, “Susan? I got a call about a Traci Cardinale?”

  The LPN looked up. She was younger than Gregor had thought she was when he first saw her. Her skin was very pale and pasty looking. A line of angry red pimples ran along her jaw. Her nose was too big and too crooked to be attractive. Still, there wasn’t a single crow’s foot line at the sides of her eyes. Gregor guessed that she wasn’t more than twenty-five. If that.

  As soon as Susan Caloverdi recognized Philip Brye, she got even paler. “Oh, Dr. Brye,” she said. “Traci Cardinale? Do you mean she’s—”

  “Not as far as I know,” Philip Brye said quickly.

  Susan was relieved. “Oh, good. We really worked hard over that one. We didn’t know what was going on. But the last I heard, she was stable.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Philip Brye said.

  The two officers standing by the sign shifted on their feet. “Dr. Brye?” the taller of them asked.

  “That’s right,” Philip Brye said.

  “I’m Officer Tom Mordeck. This is Officer Ray Haraldsen. Dr. Lindner asked us to meet you here.”

  “Pete Lindner is the man I called just before we left the office,” Philip Brye told Gregor.

  Philip Brye had called several people just before he and Gregor left the office, including a take-out Chinese restaurant. Gregor put his hand out to Officer Tom Mordeck and said, “How do you do. My name is Gregor Demarkian.”

  “Oh, hell,” Officer Haraldsen said. “So that’s what all this is about.”

  “We’re not sure,” Philip Brye said.

  “It’s interesting seeing you in person,” Mordeck said, speaking to Gregor. “You look a lot bigger in person than you do on television.”

  “On television, he was standing behind Tony Bandero,” Haraldsen pointed out.

  “On television, everybody stands behind Tony Bandero,” Philip Brye said.

  “We’re the ones brought the Cardinale woman in here,” Mordeck said. “Next door neighbor heard her vomiting and called us. Don’t ask me why she didn’t call an ambulance.”

  “She told us why she didn’t call an ambulance,” Haraldsen said. “She wanted to be sure somebody had the authority to break down the door.”

  “We called the ambulance and then we waited,” Mordeck said, “and then we came right in behind them.”

  “I think they got there faster because it was us who called,” Haraldsen added.

  “Anyway, we’ve been hanging around here ever since.” Tom Mordeck looked a little guilty. “Don’t ask me why. The whole thing just felt wrong, if you know what I mean. She wasn’t having the right kind of fits. I mean—”

  “Jesus,” Haraldsen said.

  “There’s a way they have fits when they’ve taken too many tranquilizers and there’s a way they have fits when they’ve taken too much dope, and this wasn’t either of them,” Mordeck said stubbornly. “I mean, for Christ’s sake. I’ve picked up enough of these guys. I know what I’m looking at when I see it.”

  “Why don’t we just go see Pete Lindner,” Philip Brye suggested. “Have either of you two notified anybody official about this?”

  The two officers looked confused. “Who’s to notify?” Haraldsen asked. “Do you mean, have we filed a report?”

  Philip Brye shot his eyebrows up his forehead, looking at Gregor. “I hate to do this to you, but under the circumstances, I think it might be a good idea if they called Tony.”

  “I know,” Gregor said sadly.

  Tom Mordeck seemed stunned. “You want us to call in Bandero? He’ll turn the place into a circus. He’ll bring five television reporters with him. He’ll make everybody nuts.”

  “It’s his case,” Philip Brye said.

  “The only case that ever matters to Bandero is the case he’s got on himself,” Mordeck said. “Why don’t you two guys just wrap this one up and save his appearance for the press conference?”

  Gregor Demarkian could see the elegance of this course of action. It was the course he would have taken himself if he could have thought of any way to justify it. There was no way to justify it. Jurisdiction mattered, even when it was held by a publicity-seeking jerk who only wanted in so that he could get his name in the papers.

  Gregor Demarkian had known a lot of publicity-seeking jerks in his career, the most notable of them bei
ng J. Edgar Hoover himself. Before Tony Bandero, however, he had never known one who took such unhampered glee in the whole process; Even good old J. Edgar had at least pretended to be “a very private person.” Tony might be that rarity of rarities, a budding celebrity who would come out and say what everybody knew about him anyway: that he loved the hell out of publicity and wanted to live as public a life as possible.

  Tom Mordeck and Ray Haraldsen were leading the way down a gleaming polished hallway into the bowels of the emergency room, their guns bumping against their hips as they went.

  2

  DR. PETER LINDNER WAS not the doctor who had actually taken care of Traci Cardinale, and pumped her stomach, and assigned a nurse to monitor her vital signs. Dr. Lindner was the head of emergency medicine for the entire Yale-New Haven complex, which made him much too important to do any of that. He sat in a large office with charts hanging from hooks on the walls and books piled every which way on the built-in shelves, but his own desk was scrupulously clean. He was, Gregor thought, like one of those executives from the largest corporations, who proved how well they delegated responsibility by showing how little paperwork they had on their desks to do. Dr. Peter Lindner himself did not look like the head of a large corporation. In spite of the Nordic sound of his name, he was small and dark and more Italian looking than Tony Bandero. The tops of his hands were covered with dark black hairs. His eyebrows met together over the bridge of his nose. His body was short-legged and long-trunked, the standard Mediterranean peasant’s. Gregor wondered where the “Lindner” had come from.

  “It was Rama Kadhi who took care of her,” Lindner told Gregor and Philip Brye when he had gotten them both settled. He was passing out cups of coffee. Gregor didn’t know what it was, but all the police and emergency room people he ever met had near-obsessions with making sure their guests had coffee. “Kadhi’s a very good man in emergency, very competent and very calm, but I think he’s a little confused. He’s only been over from India for about two years, and then it took a while to transfer his accreditations. In fact, accreditations are the only reason I have him now. He has to complete the equivalent of an internship and residency to satisfy the board. After that, I suppose he’ll move out to the suburbs and start charging by the hour.”