Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  Time to reload, Virginia told herself. She got her ammunition out and fussed with the gun. It hadn’t been hard to learn to operate it. It hadn’t been hard to learn to shoot straight, either. She just spread her legs apart and held onto the Colt with both hands, just like on Hill Street Blues.

  Virginia took the gun and the paper bag into the living room. She took out three more of the New Year’s Eve streamers and draped them over the fireplace mantel, catching them on the heads of exposed nails. Everything here needed to be repaired. Everything needed to be renovated. The couch was worn in dozens of places and the springs in the chair were showing through underneath. Steve was insane if he thought he could really live like this. He would absolutely hate it.

  Virginia aimed at the coffee table in front of the fireplace and made three skidding holes in its already splintered surface. She aimed at the five bottles of Scotch lined up on a bookshelf that was supposed to substitute for a bar and got three of them. The room was full of the smell of liquor.

  Time to reload again, Virginia told herself. She had started to hum, the “Off to Work We Go” song from the Disney version of Snow White. Someone had been talking about Snow White just the other day—the black man who worked as an instructor at Fountain of Youth. How odd.

  Virginia went into the bedroom. It was a terrible bedroom. The mattress and the box spring looked firm and new, but the rest of the room was a disaster. The four-poster bed was splintered. The canopy frame was bare without a canopy. Virginia hung the rest of the Happy New Year streamers from the canopy frame. Then she blasted the hell out of the vanity table mirror. It was a good thing there weren’t any neighbors close by. If there had been, they would have called the police by now.

  Virginia put the gun down on the night table next to the bed and took off her shoes, and her stockings, and her dress. Then she took off her bra and her panties, too. Then she got in under the covers and picked up the gun again.

  When they came back home tonight, she would be waiting for them.

  She would be lying right here, where they couldn’t miss her.

  She would take care of the both of them, once and for all.

  Virginia put the barrel of the gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Three

  1

  ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES of never having gotten a private detective’s license was that you were able to bend the rules when you needed to. The problem was to decide how far to bend the rules. The courts were strict. Information obtained outside of normal channels was not information at trial. Information obtained in a way that could be considered illegal could get half a dozen people fired. Gregor could hardly plead ignorance in the event of a mess. His name was sitting in the amicus curiae briefs filed in a half a dozen cases heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Then there was the question of just what evidence would be deemed inadmissible, once the court discovered that the rules had been bent. If it was just the details, Gregor could live with it. If it was the fact that anything had been found at all—

  “The problem,” Gregor told Philip Brye and Connie Hazelwood, sitting over cups of coffee just before noon in that little restaurant he had found on the Green, “is to get into that house to search it without alerting the present owner of that house that we’re going to search it.”

  Philip Brye frowned. “But you have to present a search warrant. Who are you going to present the search warrant to, if not the owner of the house?”

  “I need to be more clear,” Gregor said. “There is, in this case, an owner of record and a real owner. I don’t care one way or the other about alerting the owner of record—”

  “Who is who?” Connie Hazelwood asked.

  “Who is Alissa Bradbury,” Gregor said. “Alissa Bradbury’s the name on the deed. She’s the name on the tax polls. She pays the tax bills. And all the other bills, too, I’d imagine. At least, she does in theory.”

  “I take it that means you don’t think she does in reality.” Philip Brye signaled the waitress for another cup of coffee.

  “I don’t see how she could. And since she is the owner of record, I’m sure a court would issue a search warrant in her name. What I’m not so sure is that the court would issue a search warrant for one of us—say, for Dr. Brye here—without also insisting that we inform Detective Bandero. And if we inform Detective Bandero—”

  “It will be a media event,” Connie Hazelwood said. “Everybody in the state of Connecticut will know.”

  “Exactly,” Gregor said.

  Philip Brye shook his head. I don’t understand the need for all the secrecy. What difference does it make if the owner of this house does know what you’re doing? He’s going to have to know eventually. Or she is. Do you mean you think someone’s going to go into the house and remove the evidence you’re looking for?”

  “No. At this late date, that wouldn’t be possible. It’s not a marble we’re going for here. It couldn’t be carried out of there in a pocket. If we want to make sure nothing gets taken out of that house that we don’t want out, all we have to do is post a guard. It’s the element of surprise I’m worried about. Just finding what I’m looking for isn’t going to be enough.”

  “I keep hoping that Traci Cardinale will wake up tomorrow and just tell us who gave her that poison,” Philip Brye said. “That would solve the whole thing.”

  “It would,” Gregor said, “assuming she does in fact know, and also assuming she could prove it. I had dinner with so-and-so and the next thing I knew I was falling over’ won’t quite do it. First, I want to search that house. Then I want to dig through a few of the public records. Marriage and divorce certificates. Real estate transactions. Hospital admissions. I’m not expecting to find anything. Everything’s been done very carefully up to now. We may have some luck just because all this has been going on for so long. There’s nothing to say everybody involved in it was careful all the time.”

  “If we’re not likely to find any of these records,” Connie Hazelwood objected, “then you’re back to saying what Dr. Brye thought you were saying in the first place. That this whatever-it-is you’re looking for is the only thing you need. Because if it isn’t the only thing you need and all these records you’re talking about aren’t going to do any good, then it isn’t going to matter how you get into that house, you aren’t going to be able to catch the murderer. Not catch him to arrest him, anyway. And what’s the point of catching him if you can’t arrest him?”

  “I can’t arrest anybody,” Gregor pointed out. “But I do have at least one other piece of evidence to use in this case, and given the element of surprise—I’m back to surprise again—I can use it to good advantage. But it’s not going to be of use to anybody at all if the murderer knows it’s coming.”

  “So what do you intend to do?” Philip Brye said. “Hide in this guy’s closet and then leap out at him while he’s getting into his pajamas with your evidence at the ready?”

  Gregor had finished his coffee. He looked up and signaled the waitress, an older woman in a white polyester uniform and white orthopedic shoes. The come-celebrate-New-Year’s-Eve card in the sugar holder looked like someone had bitten it. There were unmistakable teeth marks in the upper right hand corner. The waitress came to the table with her Pyrex pitcher full of coffee and filled all their cups, even Connie Hazelwood’s, whose cup wasn’t half empty. Gregor took a long sip of coffee and nearly scalded his mouth.

  “What I’m going to try to do,” he said, “is what everybody always expects me to do. I’m going to set up a confrontation scene.”

  Connie Hazelwood brightened. “You mean like in Agatha Christie murder mysteries?” Where you get all the suspects into one room and tell the story of the murder and then name the murderer?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” Philip Brye said. “You’ll get shot.”

  “Where are we supposed to have this confrontation?” Connie Hazelwood looked eager.

  Gregor had thought this over on their way to t
he restaurant. “The Fountain of Youth living room, the one on the first floor next to the foyer. It could be the foyer itself, but there aren’t enough places to sit. We’ll have to ask Magda Hale’s permission. Then we’ll have to invite the people who need to be there.”

  “You’ve got a list?” Philip Brye asked skeptically.

  Gregor took the pen out of his jacket pocket and a napkin out of the napkin holder. The restaurant was full up for lunch. They should probably order some instead of taking up a table having nothing but coffee. The owner probably didn’t want to bother two men in good suits. All the rest of the customers were dressed rough. There were a lot of dark-colored workmen’s uniforms. There were a lot of jeans and sweaters, too, but not designer jeans and J. Crew cotton sweaters. Too many of the men had grease caked into their fingers and streaked through their hair. This was not a hangout for history professors from Yale.

  Or maybe it was.

  Gregor wrote on the top of the napkin:

  Magda Hale

  “The more people, the better I like it,” he explained, “so Magda can bring Simon Roveter if she wants. Actually, we couldn’t keep him out. He owns half the house. Then I want to get invitations to, let’s see.”

  Gregor wrote down the napkin in a list:

  Dessa Carter

  Frannie Jay

  Nicholas Bannerman

  Christie Mulligan

  Greta Bellamy

  He hesitated. “I want to write Virginia Hanley down here, because of that remark about the car, but I’m not sure. She’s not strictly necessary, and she’s an annoying woman.”

  “Leave her out, then,” Philip Brye said. None of this was making him happy. “What are you going to do when you finally get all these people into a single room?”

  “Ah, well,” Gregor said. “Then we’re going to need the cooperation of Detective Bandero. He’s certainly going to have to be there. And we don’t have to tell him what I’m up to in advance. That may head off the media blitz to a certain extent. I just wish there was some way to get in touch with him at the last minute.”

  “You can get in touch with him any time you want,” Philip Brye said. “He’s got one of those beeper things. You call his work number and the beeper goes off and he finds a phone and calls in for your message. All the detectives have them these days, in case of emergencies.”

  Gregor thought about it. He had seen Tony Bandero with a beeper, that first day he had come to Fountain of Youth. The beeper had gone off and Tony had said something about dealing with it later. That did not bode well for getting in touch with the man on short notice. Maybe they would just have to give it up and invite Tony well in advance, just like everybody else. Maybe that was one of the risks Gregor was going to have to take.

  Gregor folded the napkin and put it into the pocket of his jacket along with his pen.

  “None of this,” he said, “is getting us into that house, and if we don’t get into that house, we might as well give up on the rest of it. I wish Tony hadn’t made such a big public deal out of hiring me as a consultant. If I were a little less official, I could just go over there and break in. I might even get away with it.”

  “You’d lose your element of surprise if you didn’t get away with it,” Connie Hazelwood pointed out. “You’d get arrested and be in all the papers.”

  Philip Brye drained the coffee from his cup and put the cup very precisely back into its saucer.

  “I think,” he said carefully, “that I may know of a way to get into that house. Perfectly legally. And without letting Tony Bandero know about it.”

  2

  IF THE DRUG WAR were a real war, it would have command centers as well as armies, bunkers as well as ordnance. Of course, the drug war was supposed to have all those things. Presidents kept appointing drug czars. Drug czars kept setting up offices. Policy kept switching between “punishment and detention” and “prevention and treatment” with no known effect whatsoever. Nobody seemed to notice that “punishment and detention” got more and more people arrested and more and more people in jail without shrinking the addict population one iota. Nobody seemed to notice that students who graduated from the most popular high school drug prevention program had a rate of drug use higher than students who didn’t or that there wasn’t a single drug rehabilitation program with a recidivism rate under 96 percent. Gregor Demarkian had spent his life as a federal cop, not a politician, so he knew numbers most people never saw. That was how he had ended up chasing serial killers. He would have allowed himself to end up pushing paper in an office in Salt Lake City if it had protected him from having to work on drug cases. Almost every agent he had known in the Bureau had felt the same way. Somebody had to like chasing drug dealers and picking up addicts. There were drugs squads in police departments across the country. There was a Drug Enforcement Agency. As far as Gregor knew, these projects had no trouble attracting personnel. But he couldn’t imagine doing the work himself. He didn’t think it really had anything to do with criminal justice, in the classic sense, or with fighting crime. In 1800, cocaine had been both legal and widely available in the United States, and almost nobody had wanted it. Now it was not only illegal but dangerous to acquire, too often involving guns and gangs and bad neighborhoods, and the tide of addicts seemed to get higher every year.

  The drug war in New Haven, Connecticut, was represented by a short, slight, bookish-looking man named Roger Dornan. There were also police officers on the regular force who investigated drug cases and a group of social workers who provided “drug education” in the public schools, but Roger Dornan was New Haven’s official liaison with the federal drug enforcement programs, and that had made him somehow “official.” When the papers needed a quote for a story having anything to do with drugs in the New Haven area, they went to Roger Dornan. When the television news people had to identify Roger Dornan to the public, they said he was “head of drug enforcement operations for the city of New Haven.” This was inaccurate, but it suited everybody involved. There was no one else in town who wanted to be “head of drug operations for the city of New Haven.”

  “It’s a dismal job to have,” Philip Brye had explained to Gregor, unnecessarily, on their way over to Roger Dornan’s office, “because you never do anything but lose.”

  Roger Dornan didn’t look like the head of anything. His office was a cubbyhole in an administrative building otherwise filled with women who worked for social services departments. He had a desk and one chair and a lot of bookshelves crammed with papers. Gregor and Philip Brye had left Connie Hazelwood circling the block in her taxi searching for a parking space. Gregor thought the state of Roger Dornan’s office was indicative of what was wrong with the drug war. It was cramped. It was dark. It was overworked. And nobody else in the building wanted to go near it.

  Roger Dornan had listened to Gregor and Philip Brye explain their problem and ask their favor, fiddling all the time with a five-by-five inch stand-up cardboard sign that said: “MAKE IT TO THE NEW YEAR, DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE.” Gregor had gotten so used to these signs, he had almost stopped seeing them. This was the way city and state officials celebrated New Year’s Eve. They got ready to deal with the carnage.

  Roger Dornan said, “Forty-seven Stephenson,” and stood up. He took a big blue plastic spiral notebook off the shelf behind him and opened it on the desk.

  “Forty-seven Stephenson,” he said again, paging through a stack of plastic-coated maps. “That’s Derby, I think. Just inside the Derby town line. We’ll have to ask the Derby police. It might be Oxford. That’s the next town over.”

  “Would that be a problem?” Gregor asked. “If it was in Oxford instead of Derby?”

  “No, no,” Roger Dornan said. “It’s just a question of who we ask the favor of, that’s all. I like Derby a little better than I like Oxford because I know Hank Balderak fairly well. I don’t have to be too polite about what I want from him. It helps that you’re looking for something in that particular neighborhood.”


  “You’ve been having drug problems in that neighborhood?” Gregor asked.

  Roger Dornan smiled wanly. “I don’t have any problems with that neighborhood. It’s not in my jurisdiction. The town police forces have a problem with it, though. All kinds of problems. Have you been out there, Mr. Demarkian?”

  “Once.”

  “Once might not have been enough to do it. To get the full flavor of it, you’d have to go out there on a Saturday night. Or on New Year’s Eve. Now, that would be an experience. You do understand, though, that this particular house, number forty-seven, hasn’t been involved in any drug investigations so far.”

  “Can you be sure?” Gregor asked.

  Roger Dornan turned the map book around so that Gregor could see it. The maps were in black and white, with little red crosses dotted over them. Roger Dornan pointed to a spot on the middle of the left-hand page. Looking closer, Gregor could see a snaking black line that was meant to represent the Housatonic River.

  “No red,” Roger Dornan said. “Every time we go into any place in the area on a drugs call, we mark the location on these maps with a red ex. And we keep each other informed. Derby. Oxford. Stepney. Branford. We’re not exactly computer literate and technologically coordinated, but we do try.”

  “Would you have any other information on that house?” Gregor asked curiously. “Do you keep records on fires and arrest calls and that sort of thing?”