Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  “I had therapy coming out of my ears when I was in jail. They were real big on it.”

  Nick opened his eyes. “Do you know why I came here?”

  “No.”

  “I thought that since both of us were supposed to be at that meeting tomorrow morning, and since neither of us is leading any classes tomorrow, you might, you just might, want to go out for a drink.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Drink,” Nick interrupted. “I should have guessed. You can have a cup of tea. I can have a drink. I’m beginning to think I need one.”

  “Do you really think Gregor Demarkian is going to unmask the killer tomorrow morning?” Frannie asked. “Do you think it’s going to be just like Hercule Poirot where the killer leaps up out of the crowd and tells the whole story?”

  “I doubt it. That son-of-a-bitch is going to be there, you know. Detective Bandero. He’s probably going to give a little lecture on why it is that African-Americans are more likely to commit murder than white people are. Then he’s going to arrest me on the spot.”

  “Oh,” Frannie said.

  Nick reached across the space between them and touched her lightly on the knee. “Frannie? Do you want to go out?”

  “Yes,” Frannie said softly. “I think I do.”

  “Good. Go get your coat and we’ll get out of here.”

  “All right.”

  “It will be just like the last time, you know. Three guys will ask you why you’re wasting your time on the homeboy. Never mind the fact that I wouldn’t know a homeboy from a hero sandwich?”

  “I didn’t mind that. They were just stupid.”

  Nick got off of his chair.

  “We’ll talk about the other stuff later,” he said, “when I’ve got a glass of Scotch in front of me. Maybe once we both calm down, we can figure out where to go from here.”

  Frannie hadn’t known there was anywhere to go from here, except out, or further on, or gone.

  She got her coat.

  FIVE

  1

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN DIDN’T REALLY believe in confrontation scenes. He liked them—in the books Bennis gave him to read, the confrontation scenes always seemed to be the least confusing part—but his thinking ran along the lines Philip Brye’s did: it was a wonder one of these fictional “detectives” hadn’t been shot. Especially Nero Wolfe. Gregor’s personal favorite among fictional detectives was Nero Wolfe, who sat in his favorite chair all day and ate perfect food and solved impossibly complicated crimes without ever leaving his house. If Gregor had been able to choose a method of detection for himself, that would have been it. The problem with it was the problem with all the other methods of detection in all the other books Bennis gave him. Eventually, it required the Great Detective to meet the murderer face to face and make an accusation. Philip Brye was right. In real life, the Great Detective would have been shot, time and again, and stabbed, too, and pushed out of high windows. Murderers in real life didn’t kill people just because they “knew too much”—or, at least, amateur murderers didn’t. Murdering somebody was messy and dangerous. Still, having someone jump up in front of your face and declare that he had the evidence to convict you of murder was something else. Your first impulse could easily be to take care of the problem in the next split second. Your next impulse might be to laugh. Gregor had had that happen to him a couple of times. Everybody watched the cop and court shows on television these days. Everybody knew it had become almost impossible to convict anybody of anything in the United States of America.

  The Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio didn’t look like a place where anybody would get murdered, or arrested, or even confronted with a violent crime. Sitting in the pale sunlight of this cold mid-morning, it looked like the setting for an English children’s book, all fancy grillwork and gingerbread details. Gregor got out of Connie Hazelwood’s taxi and looked it over. Connie intended to park out of sight somewhere and come in for what she called “the festivities.” Gregor wanted to tell her that there was nothing festive about playing a nasty trick on someone, even someone you didn’t like. When you played one on someone you did like, it could leave a bad taste in your mouth for weeks.

  Gregor went around to the side, to see the place where Tim Bradbury’s corpse had been found. Then he went to ring the bell on the front door. As he did, Tony Bandero’s Ford pulled up, squeaking and whirring and clanking and complaining all the way.

  “Hey,” Tony shouted through the window. “Right on time. What’s the big production about, anyway?”

  Gregor waved him along—park in back; come ahead and talk to me—and rang the bell. The door was opened almost immediately by an excited-looking Greta Bellamy in a sky blue leotard and sky blue tights. Over the leotard and tights she had a fuzzy sky blue mohair sweater, and on the sweater she was wearing a pin that said: “I GOT A NEW BODY FOR THE NEW YEAR.” Cold air blew in on her and she swiped hair out of her face with the side of her hand.

  “Everybody’s in the living room,” she said in a rushed whisper. “Nobody can sit still. We’re all so glad you’re finally here.”

  “Everybody’s here?” Gregor asked her. “Dr. Brye, too?”

  “Oh, no,” Greta said, her face falling. “He isn’t. Does this mean we can’t start until he gets here?”

  “He’ll be along in a minute,” Gregor promised her. “What about the phone? I asked Simon Roveter and he said there was a jack in the living room, and he would—”

  “Put a phone in,” Greta interrupted. “This is the first time I’ve been in the living room, but there’s a phone in there now. You should see it. All white and gold and a fancy receiver with brass flutes. It’s gorgeous.”

  “As long as it works.”

  “Magda Hale already made a phone call on it. It’s got a rotary dial. I haven’t seen a rotary dial in years.”

  A car pulled up to the curb outside and Philip Brye got out. Connie Hazelwood started to walk up the drive. Gregor waved to them both and went the rest of the way into the foyer. Up on the second-floor balcony, the railing was still not repaired—but, like the rest of the foyer, it had been decorated. Indeed, everything Gregor could see had been decorated. Long streamers of red, white, and blue crepe paper had been wound around the railing posts and hung from the high ceiling and twisted to fall like animated water from the chandelier. Why red, white, and blue, Gregor didn’t know. Silver and gold crepe paper had been fashioned into a sculpture of a woman’s naked body, with high breasts and long legs and flowing silver paper hair. The plywood safety board in the gap in the balcony railing was obscured by a large sign, painted in glitter on white cardboard and festooned with glitter shooting stars, that said: “NEW YEAR. NEW BODY. NEW LIFE. WELCOME TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH.” It made Gregor think of that movie Bennis Hannaford and Donna Moradanyan were so fond of: Night of the Living Dead. He could see the zombies rising up from their graves this minute, dressed in leotards and tights.

  As Gregor stood in the foyer, the doors to the living room opened and Magda Hale stuck her head out. Even at this distance, Gregor could tell that she was high as a kite. Higher. The door to the street opened behind him again and Philip Brye and Connie Hazelwood came in.

  “What are you all waiting for?” Magda Hale demanded. “Don’t you want to get started? Do you want to keep us here all day?”

  “We’re waiting for Detective Bandero,” Gregor said.

  Magda Hale made a face. “I think that’s too damned bad,” she said. Then she disappeared back into the living room.

  Philip Brye and Connie Hazelwood were standing together, shifting uneasily on their feet and confused about what to do next. Gregor was about to tell them both to go into the living room when he heard Tony Bandero humming somewhere in the back of the first floor. He must have parked in the lot and come in through the back door. His big feet pounded against the hardwood floor in the side corridor. He came into the foyer wearing his perennial rumpled brown suit and one of those MAKE-IT-TO-THE-NEW-YEAR—DON’T-DRINK-
AND-DRIVE buttons Gregor had seen all over the morgue. Gregor wondered what it was about New Year’s that made people feel they needed to put up signs and sport buttons, to declare themselves on one side of an issue or another. Not that there was another side to this issue. Gregor hadn’t seen anyone wearing a SMASH-UP-YOUR-CAR-AND-GET-IT-OVER-WITH button yet.

  “So what’s all this?” Bandero said. “What’s going on?”

  “Everybody else is waiting in the living room,” Gregor said. “We were just about to go in there.”

  Bandero’s eyebrows twitched. He went to the doorway to the living room and looked in. He came back to where Gregor was standing in the foyer and shook his head.

  “I can’t believe this,” he said. “I really can’t believe this. You’re going to stage some kind of confrontation scene.”

  “Something like that, yes,” Gregor admitted.

  “You should have notified me in advance,” Tony Bandero said. He was getting red. “We could have got the people from Channel eight out here. Nobody stages confrontation scenes in real life. It could be great TV.”

  Gregor devotedly hoped it wouldn’t be. “Let’s just go in and get it over with,” he said. “I’ve acquired a burning ambition to be home in Philadelphia for the holiday.”

  Tony Bandero went back to the living room doors again, looked in again, and came back to Gregor in the foyer again.

  “Quite a collection. I would never have suspected any of them. Not for real.”

  “I thought you suspected Nick Bannerman,” Philip Byre said.

  “That was just for the newspapers. You have to give the newspapers something or they turn you into hamburger.”

  Gregor was hot. He shrugged his coat off his shoulders and folded it over one arm. He wasn’t wearing any buttons or signs at all. It made him feel a little out of step. Even Connie Hazelwood was wearing a message sweatshirt: “THE DEAD ARE ONLY GRATEFUL WHEN THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO LIVE FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE.”

  “Why don’t we all go inside and get started,” he said. “Magda Hale wants everything back to normal around here as soon as possible, and I don’t blame her.”

  “Nothing is going to be normal around here for hours if you’ve really got something to tell us,” Tony Bandero said. “I’ll have to make an arrest. I’ll have to call in some blues. The news will be all over the police band. Reporters are going to descend on us like locusts.” He sounded gleeful.

  “We’ve already got some blues,” Philip Brye said coldly. “We’ve got two of the officers assigned to my office. Maybe you could let them make an arrest. Then the reporters wouldn’t descend on us like locusts.”

  Tony Bandero’s face reconfigured itself into a mask of sadness. “Phil, Phil,” he said. “You just don’t get it. Police work is at least sixty percent public relations these days. If you don’t blow your own horn, the civilians start to think you aren’t doing anything, and the next thing you know, your appropriation has been slashed.”

  Gregor couldn’t imagine that Detective Bandero’s department’s appropriation amounted to that much. New Haven wasn’t New York. He didn’t want to go on with this conversation. If it continued long enough, Tony might get the idea of calling in the press right away. Gregor was a little surprised that he hadn’t suggested it already.

  “Let’s go,” Gregor said. “You can call Channel eight when it’s over if you want to. I’m just going to get this finished and go home.”

  Tony Bandero sniffed. “I don’t have to go to Channel eight,” he said. “They come to me.”

  2

  EVERYBODY BUT TONY BANDERO had been informed that this was a confrontation scene. Gregor found them sitting in a jagged semicircle near the massive stone fireplace, artfully arranged as an audience. The patrolmen from Philip Brye’s office were standing on either side of the doors to the foyer, their hands clasped behind their backs. They looked like guards—an impression Gregor thought was unfortunate. He didn’t want anyone to think he was jailed in here. Gregor watched as Greta Bellamy scooted across the room to sit in the empty space on the couch next to Dessa Carter. Dessa looked more tired than Gregor could remember seeing her before, but also calmer. In fact, most of the people here looked calmer than Gregor could remember them being in all the short partial week he had known them. Frannie Jay and Nick Bannerman were sitting side by side in a chair that was really too small to hold both of them. They seemed to be collapsed in on each other, as if they were melting together. Christie Mulligan looked worse than tired, worse even than exhausted, with great black crescents under her eyes and deep hollows under her cheekbones. What she did not look was frantic, which was the way Gregor remembered her from the couple of times he had spoken to her. Her two friends looked as if an electric charge had drained out of her and into them. It was only Magda Hale who seemed tenser than she had been before—and that, Gregor thought, might be the result of whatever drugs she was taking. Her tenseness seemed to have infected Simon Roveter. His Graham Greene-character charm came off as being a thin film over the surface of a personality soon to be out of control.

  Dessa Carter and Greta Bellamy were sitting together trying to make themselves inconspicuous. Philip Brye and Tony Bandero moved in behind Gregor, facing the Fountain of Youth staff and students like the members of a chorus line review. Gregor put his coat over a table near one of the officers at the door and cleared his throat.

  “So,” he said. “Here we are. I have to thank you all for coming here just because I asked you. You didn’t have to.”

  “We all want to know who the murderer is,” Christie Mulligan’s friend Tara said. “That’s what we’re doing here. You are going to tell us, aren’t you?”

  “I am going to tell you,” Gregor promised, “but before I do, I want to tell you a few other things.”

  “About Tim Bradbury?” Frannie Jay asked. She was very pale.

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “About Tim Bradbury, and also about his mother, because this is mostly a story about Tim Bradbury’s mother. Which is ironic in a way, because Alissa Bradbury—that was her name, Alissa Bradbury—was not the kind of woman who usually has stories told about her. She was, in fact, what is commonly referred to as white trash. By the time she died, she was a big, fat, slovenly, alcoholic mess. The only two things she’d ever had in her life were her son and her house. Her house was falling apart and her son was barely speaking to her—for good reason. Alissa Bradbury was not a woman who cared for other people, even for her own child. She did what she had to do to get what she needed to have. Then she locked herself up and refused to talk to anybody about anything until she needed something again. The few times she did try to get out of herself and do the normal things she was expected to do as a mother, she created disasters. When she came to see Tim perform in a choir, she was loud and abusive and embarrassing. When she showed up for teachers’ conferences, she was a disgrace. Tim got to the point where he pretended she didn’t exist. He told people that his ‘parents’ had moved away from the area—that’s ‘parents’ plural, in spite of the fact that his father was legally listed as ‘unknown’ on his birth certificate and nobody had ever seen him with a man who could have been his father. There are people who had seen Alissa with a man they presumed to be her husband, but these people aren’t exactly reliable. Most of them are neighbors. One is a woman who quite definitely has Down’s syndrome. She isn’t too clear or too convincing about much of anything.”

  “Poor Tim,” Magda Hale murmured. “What a mess.”

  “It was a mess,” Gregor agreed. “And on the surface, the most remarkable thing about it was that Tim turned out so well. He didn’t turn to drink or drugs or gangs or crime. He just went on his way, working as hard as he had to, and he ended up with a good job and a lot of people who liked him very much and were rooting for him even harder. Under the surface, though, there was a lot more that was strange about the circumstances of Tim Bradbury’s—and especially his mother’s—life. There was, for one thing, the money.”

&
nbsp; “It doesn’t sound like Alissa Bradbury had any money,” Dessa Carter said. Her hands were clenched tightly in her lap.

  “Well, she didn’t, in the way we usually mean that phrase,” Gregor said. “What she did have was more money than she ought to have had. There was, for instance, the house at forty-seven Stephenson Road.”

  “Stephenson Road?” Frannie Jay asked sharply. “People who live on Stephenson Road don’t have money. That’s a slum.”

  “It most certainly is a slum,” Gregor agreed. “But the fact remains that it costs money to own property even in a slum. And Alissa Bradbury did own the property she lived on at forty-seven Stephenson Road. She bought it free and clear, for eight thousand five hundred dollars, the year her son Tim was born. Tim, by the way, was born at the old St. Mary’s Hospital in Derby as the son of a charity patient. The medical fees were picked up by the Community Health Project of the Diocese of Bridgeport.”

  “My, my,” Tony Bandero said. “You have been busy. This must have taken you days.”

  “No, Tony, it didn’t take me days. It just took me most of last night and some help from some people at the Diocesan offices and the Derby police. And I knew what I was looking for, of course, because I had already run across one or two strange items in Alissa Bradbury’s financial affairs. There was the fact, for instance, that she was not on welfare. Not when Tim was a child. Not even later, in the late 1970s and early 1980s when, according to my contacts in the Derby police, the eligibility rules were relaxed in this state and it was easier to get on the rolls. No welfare. No food stamps. No Medicaid. Not ever.”

  Greta Bellamy was frowning furiously. “But I don’t understand. Did she have a job? I saw her myself a few times. I can’t think who would have hired her?”

  “Nobody hired her as far as lean tell,” Gregor said. “No welfare and no job.”

  “Maybe she was engaging in prostitution,” Simon Roveter said.