Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  “Are you having the contents of her stomach analyzed?” Philip Brye asked.

  “We always do.”

  “We’d like you to check for a few things you don’t usually check for,” Gregor said. “Starting with arsenic.”

  Pete Lindner’s mouth quirked into a smile. “I already did. As soon as Phil here told me that you were coming, Mr. Demarkian. I do read the papers.”

  “You wouldn’t have had to bother,” Philip Brye said. “The way the press has been on this case, the only way you could have missed any of it was to have been blind, deaf, and dumb.”

  “True,” Pete Lindner said. “If I’d realized at the start that all this was connected with that, I would have handled the case myself. Fortunately, as I said, Kadhi is a very good man. Did the officers tell you how she was found?”

  “They said something about a neighbor calling,” Gregor said. “A neighbor heard her vomiting and called the police.”

  “She wasn’t just vomiting, she was pounding,” Pete Lindner said. “After I talked to Phil here, I went down and talked to the ambulance men. They said she was lying in her bathtub, absolutely dry and fully clothed, vomiting all over the floor and hitting the heel of her hand against the bathroom wall. That’s the wall that connects with the bathroom wall in her neighbor’s apartment. The heel of her hand was bruised black.”

  “She was still vomiting when the ambulance men got there?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Pete Lindner said. “She slipped into unconsciousness just a few minutes after they arrived. You can talk to them a little later, if you want. I’ve got them filling out forms to waste time. She didn’t say anything to anybody. She wasn’t capable.”

  “Do you know if she said anything to the police officers?” Gregor asked. “Weren’t they there first?”

  “They were definitely there first,” Pete Lindner said, “and, again, you can ask them yourself. But I don’t think she did. Once I knew that Phil was bringing you in here, Mr. Demarkian, I called in everyone I could find who was even remotely connected with this thing and told them we had a probable attempted murder on our hands. We did all try to work out what we knew so we’d be able to present it to you when you got here. Not that I told anybody it was you who was coming. The way news spreads around a hospital, information like that would have been damned near lethal.”

  Gregor agreed. He got out of his chair and walked around Pete Lindner’s office. Through the barred E-glass windows, he could see the first signs of a light snow in the lights from the line of streetlamps that marched down the sidewalk outside. This was another terrible neighborhood. The sidewalks were deserted. The paint on the streetlamps was blistered and peeling. Only the streets themselves were in good repair. Probably because they didn’t want the ambulances getting flat tires in potholes.

  “She left work early,” Gregor said, stopping near Pete Lindner’s empty desk. “I needed something over there today that she usually would have been the one to get me, and Magda Hale told me that. Traci left work at four o’clock to go to a dentist’s appointment.”

  “That can be checked out,” Philip Brye said.

  “We can check her teeth to see if anything’s been done to them,” Lindner said. “Of course, the dentist’s appointment may just have been for x-rays.”

  “I don’t think we have to go so far as to check her teeth,” Gregor said. “Is she still unconscious?”

  “Yes,” Pete Lindner said. “She’ll probably be unconscious for most of the rest of tonight. She’d had a very bad time.”

  “But you do expect her to survive?”

  “Oh, yes. Unless something very unusual happens, she should survive quite nicely.”

  “And she’ll be whole?” Gregor persisted. “She won’t have brain damage or affected speech or anything like that?”

  “There’s no reason why she should have. This isn’t lye we’re talking about here, or even strychnine. Being poisoned with arsenic shouldn’t have any long-term consequences much different from being poisoned with sleeping pills.”

  “People are in comas for years after taking overdoses of sleeping pills,” Gregor said.

  “I know, Mr. Demarkian. But Traci Cardinale isn’t in a coma now, and there’s no reason to think she’s going to be in one. Would you like to go down and see her? I was having her kept on the ward until the two of you arrived.”

  “It would probably be a good idea to keep her on the ward until Tony Bandero arrives.” Gregor sighed.

  Pete Lindner laughed. “Oh, Tony,” he said. “He’ll bring an entourage.”

  3

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN WOULD HAVE been hard-pressed to explain why he wanted to see Traci Cardinale in her hospital bed. She was wan. She was sick. She was asleep. The little information this provided him with was of no use to him whatsoever. The hospital wasn’t interesting, either. It was more or less standard, as hospitals went—maybe a little more high-tech than average, because this was a teaching and research hospital connected with Yale, instead of just a health care facility. There were too many machines with too many gauges. There was too much white and operating room green. Right outside Traci’s room, there was another of those New Year’s Eve signs, this time written in letters that were supposed to look like dripping blood. “NEW YEAR’S DEAD,” the blood letters said. Gregor thought he would spend this New Year’s Eve locked safely in his own bedroom with a television set and a cup of hot chocolate.

  The nurse sitting beside Traci’s bed stood up when Gregor and Philip Brye entered the room. Then there was a movement in the shadows and a small man appeared, dark and diffident and very serious. Dr. Rama Kadhi, Gregor realized. The doctor wore a stethoscope around his neck that had been polished so well it shone. He bowed his head first to Philip Brye and then to Gregor. Then he stepped over to the bed and pointed at the young woman lying in it. Traci Cardinale had an IV drip in her arm.

  “Dr. Lindner has told us that this woman may be the victim of a homicide attempt,” Rama Kadhi said very formally. “This is what you are thinking?”

  Rama Kadhi was looking at Philip Brye, but Gregor Demarkian answered. “This woman is connected to a case in which two homicides have already occurred,” he said. “We feel we have to be cautious.”

  “Ah,” Rama Kadhi said. “I feel I have to be cautious, too. We did start work on her in time to save her. She will be all right.”

  “Good,” Philip Brye said.

  “In the meantime, there are difficulties,” Rama Kadhi continued. “We are having a difficult time keeping her calm and quiet. It is necessary now that she stay calm and quiet. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Traci seemed calm and quiet enough to Gregor Demarkian. She seemed inert.

  “In a different kind of case, we would give her sleeping pills now to help her rest,” Rama Kadhi was going on, “but in this case it is not possible. She is unconscious. It is not indicated to give sleeping pills to a woman who is unconscious.”

  “If she’s unconscious, why does she need help to relax?” Gregor asked. “Isn’t that relaxed enough?”

  The nurse next to Traci Cardinale’s bed stirred. “She’s having dreams,” she said. “She’s having terrible dreams. She keeps calling out in her sleep.”

  Dr. Khadi shot the nurse a disapproving look. “It is not possible to have dreams while unconscious. This I was taught in India. She is quite restless, however. She does cry out.”

  “Wood,” Traci Cardinale said, quite distinctly, as if to prove the nurse’s and doctor’s point.

  The upright people stared steadily at the bed, but Traci Cardinale didn’t cry out again. She didn’t move. Her face looked as if it had been sculpted from wax.

  “Well,” Pete Lindner said. “I told you she wasn’t in a coma.”

  “Of course she is not in a coma.” Rama Kadhi said, surprised. “If she were in a coma, we would have put her in the Intensive Care Unit. Right away. The police do not come first here.”

  Gregor moved closer to the bed.


  “Wood,” Traci Cardinale said again.

  Her lips barely moved. Gregor didn’t understand why this was enough “restlessness” to worry about. She wasn’t about to pull the IV drip out of her arm with this.

  “Is wood all she ever says?” Gregor asked the doctor and the nurse.

  “Wood is all I’ve ever heard her say,” the nurse said. “I’ve been assuming she means wood as in trees. Maybe she’s saying would with a you el. As in she would or wouldn’t do something.”

  Rama Kadhi looked disapproving again. “This is very foolish,” he said stiffly. “Why would she said would with a you el? This would not make sense.”

  “I don’t think the woman has to make sense while she’s unconscious,” Philip Brye said.

  Gregor looked around the room. There was no locked cupboard or personal closet. This was the emergency ward. There was no sign of what he was looking for.

  “What happened to her things?” Gregor asked. “What was she wearing when she came in here?”

  “She was wearing a little suit,” the nurse said. “I’ve sent it upstairs already, to Ward six. There wasn’t any place to keep it down here. I don’t know if she’s ever going to be able to use it again, though. It’s covered with vomit and it’s ripped in places, too. We had to rip it just to get it off her.”

  “This was a navy blue suit with a sort of boxy jacket that came down long over her hips?” Gregor asked.

  “That’s right,” the nurse said. “It was a beautiful suit. Expensive.”

  “Was that what she was wearing when you saw her at work?” Philip Brye asked.

  Gregor nodded. “What about shoes?” he asked the nurse. “And stockings. Was she wearing those?”

  “She was not wearing shoes,” Rama Kadhi said. “I thought they had been lost in the ambulance.”

  “She wasn’t wearing stockings, either,” the nurse said. “Stockings are always the worst to get off in cases like this. We take scissors and just rip them up. It’s the only efficient way. But we didn’t have to.”

  “Wood,” Traci Cardinale said again. This time she did move, side to side, making the IV drip jiggle in its frame. The nurse bent forward quickly to steady it.

  Rama Kadhi sighed. “This woman is no longer unconscious in the medical sense. She is only in a very heavy sleep. This is the problem.”

  “In the long run, it’s not a problem,” Philip Brye said. “In the long run it means she’s going to recover. What about it, Gregor? Is there anything else you need here? We should let these people get on with what they’re doing.”

  Gregor was thinking. There wasn’t anything else he needed here. He’d picked up more than he’d expected to.

  “I’d like to go see that suit she was found in,” he said. “You might consider sending it for laboratory analysis.”

  “Good idea.” Philip Brye nodded vigorously. “I know where Ward six is. I can take you up.”

  “Point me in the direction of a bathroom first,” Gregor said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Philip Brye took him out into the hall, handed him a key, and pointed him toward where he wanted to go.

  “I have hospital privileges here,” he explained, “and those are to the staff toilets. You don’t want to use the ones available to the general public.”

  Gregor would have asked why not, but he didn’t have the heart.

  4

  IT WAS NEARLY THREE minutes later, when Gregor had just shut the water faucet off and started to put his coat back on, that he first heard the koo roo. He didn’t realize, right away, that that was what it was. He was simply aware of a sound that was distantly and vaguely familiar, and that for some reason filled him with sharp anxiety. Then he heard it again, and the sequence became brilliantly and undeniably clear.

  Koo roo, clank, whoosh, it went. Koo roo, clank, whoosh, clank, whoosh, clank, koo roo.

  I know what that is, Gregor thought suddenly. I’ve heard something make that noise.

  The staff toilet suddenly felt very claustrophobic. He went to the window above the sink and tried to force it down. It wouldn’t go. He put his ear to the glass to see if he could hear better, but he wasn’t even completely sure the sound he was hearing was coming from outside.

  Koo roo, clank, whoosh, it went. Koo roo, clank, whoosh, clank, whoosh, koo roo, koo roo.

  It was definitely coming from the outside.

  Gregor had his coat half on. He shrugged himself the rest of the way into it, unlocked the staff toilet door, and charged into the hallway. Philip Brye was waiting for him there, looking idly at the notices on a bulletin board while he did. Gregor grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around.

  “What’s on the other side of that wall?” he demanded, pointing into the staff toilet.

  “A street,” Philip Brye said, bewildered. “Gregor, what—”

  “Come on.”

  Gregor grabbed Philip Brye by the arm and pulled him a few steps before taking off on his own. All he could think of was that he had to get to that street fast, wherever it was. He still wasn’t sure what it was that made that noise, but for some reason he was convinced that if he didn’t hurry, it would disappear. He flew up the corridor, moving faster than he could remember himself doing since they had mustered him out of the army. He passed the Blood Brothers talking to a nurse and the woman and her children in an open examining room. He slammed through the swinging double doors into the waiting room—

  —and got stopped, dead in his tracks, by Tony Bandero.

  To say, as the uniformed officers had, that Tony Bandero was bringing a “circus” with him would have been putting it mildly. Tony Bandero had brought what looked like every piece of camera equipment in the Western world with him. The camera equipment and the people who operated it were blocking the doors to the emergency room. A nurse was running frantically around the lot of them, telling them in a shrill voice they had to get out of the way. Tony Bandero was holding court, like Muhammed Ali giving a press conference after a successful fight.

  “The Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio,” he was saying, “is becoming a Fountain of Death for the people who work there.”

  Gregor started to wince, but he felt his own arm grabbed and he was dragged, stumbling, to Tony Bandero’s side. Tony threw an arm around his shoulders—a good trick, since Gregor was half a foot taller than he was—and grinned for the cameras.

  “And here’s Mr. Gregor Demarkian, our expert consultant on this case, to give you a few of the details.”

  At any other time, Gregor would have bitten Tony Bandero’s hand for pulling something like that on him. Now, he almost didn’t care. For it had suddenly come to him.

  He knew where he had heard that sound before. He knew what had made it. He knew who had killed Tim Bradbury and Stella Mortimer and tried to kill Traci Cardinale. He even knew why somebody thought Tim and Stella and Traci had to die.

  Now all he had to do was prove it.

  TWO

  1

  GRETA BELLAMY HAD TO wait until after ten o’clock to find Gregor Demarkian, and by then she was frantic. It didn’t help that Christie Mulligan and her two friends hadn’t shown up for class. More and more people were dropping out, disappearing, not even saying good-bye. It made Greta feel immeasurably sad. This had been, in spite of the murder, one of the best weeks she could remember in her life. Everybody here was exactly the way she had expected them to be, and it was true what they said in all those lectures about self-esteem. If you really went to work on yourself, you could change the way you looked in the mirror. Lately, Greta had been looking a lot taller, and stronger, and smarter to herself than she had before. Once or twice, she had even looked like somebody who might have a master’s degree. It was an interesting thought. It wiped whatever nostalgic feeling she had left for Chick right out of her brain. Greta didn’t think she was ever going to see the inside of a roadhouse again. What she wanted now was a full-time membership to the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio, so that
she could come up here every other night or so on her way home from work. Chick could marry Marsha Caventello if he wanted to. Kathy could adopt Marsha as her best friend. There were at least three women in this class Greta liked better than Kathy. One of them, Dessa Carter was even trying to stay on at Fountain of Youth after the end of the week, just like Greta herself.

  Greta and Dessa and a tall, pale woman named Cindi were sitting together during the break, working out the ways in which Dessa could find the money for a Fountain of Youth membership, when Greta saw Gregor Demarkian come in with a man she didn’t know.

  “What you’ve got to do,” Cindi was saying, “is go to a doctor and get him to say that you have to have the membership for health reasons. It’s got to be a prescription, like medicine.”

  “They’re going to take a health club membership for a medicine?” Dessa asked.

  “Or a treatment, yes,” Cindi said. “For your weight. There’s not a health insurance claims adjuster alive who knows the difference between correlation and causality, they all operate on voodoo, so what you do is—”

  Greta and Dessa and Cindi were sitting on the second-floor balcony overlooking the foyer. Gregor Demarkian came in with his coat already open and his face red with cold. Greta stood up and leaned over the balcony railing. She wished they would get it fixed. It was the one wrong note in the Fountain of Youth symphony. It was even worse than the murder, because it was out in front, calling attention to itself all the time. Greta took her terry cloth sweatband off her forehead and bit her lip. Maybe it was just as well that Bennis Hannaford wasn’t with Demarkian. What would a woman like Bennis Hannaford think of someone like Greta, in a leotard?

  “Mr. Demarkian?” Greta called.

  Dessa and Cindi were bent over together, going through the ways in which Dessa might convince her company to pay for Fountain of Youth. Greta had never before known how many different ways there were to get something like this paid for.