Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (11 page)

“Nope. No signs of vomiting down here. None in his room. None in any other part of the house. None in the garage.”

“Are you sure he did vomit? I know it’s usual with arsenic, but usual doesn’t mean universal—”

“He vomited,” Tony Bandero said. “I got that from forensics, too. Apparently, when you vomit you bring up a lot of acid and it strips the lining of your throat and does things to your tooth enamel. That’s why bulimics have such bad teeth.”

Gregor walked over to the bushes and poked at them. “The vomit could have been cleaned up,” he pointed out. “Did anyone on the investigating team notice a strong smell of disinfectant anywhere in the house, or cleaning fluid, or lime—”

“Why lime?”

“It’s a good cover for vomit in terms of the scent. It’s a good cover for a lot of things. Lime and water is what people use when they want to get rid of the smell of cats in old houses.”

Tony shrugged. “I asked about disinfectants,” he said, “and everybody told me they smelled no such thing, but I don’t really know if they would have noticed when they weren’t notified in advance that they were supposed to notice. You can ask them yourself later. I’ve set up a time for you to meet the whole team. As for the lime—even I didn’t know about the lime.”

Gregor stepped back and looked up at the house. “Which window did she look down from?”

“That one.” Tony pointed to the third to the left from the line of the back door.

“Why?” Gregor asked.

“She said she heard a noise,” Tony told him. “That much I know is in the report, but the noise was weird. It said
koo koo
or something like that, like a bird noise, except she said she could tell it wasn’t a bird. So she opened her window and leaned out to see if she could spot what it was.”

Gregor nodded. The windows back here didn’t have wrought-iron grills or little balconies. “This was at midnight?” he asked Tony.

“That’s right.”

“But Tim Bradbury didn’t die at midnight.”

“That’s right, too. Autopsy says no later than eleven o’clock. There needed to be at least an hour for the abrading to take place in the throat to the extent it had. You know how that is. That’s an estimate.”

“I know. Bradbury was absolutely dead when she found him?”

“He was dead by the time the ambulance got here. I don’t think he was twitching or anything by the time she found him. She would have said.”

“Did anybody else see him?”

“Sure.” Tony jerked his head toward the house. “Half the people in there saw him. She screamed.”

“Right away?”

“She says.”

“And when they came out, they all saw what they thought was a dead body.”

“Actually,” Tony said, “you can ask them yourself, too. I meant it when I said I wanted to bring you into this investigation as close to officially as possible. I’ve got you clearance to talk to anybody you want. Of course, they don’t have to talk back, unless they work for us. Lawyers are lawyers.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

And that was true, of course, lawyers were lawyers—but Gregor didn’t think they were going to have any trouble with lawyers this early in a case like this. In his experience, the stranger the cases were, the less intelligent the people involved in them were about keeping their mouths shut when they were talking to the police. This case was shaping up to be very strange indeed.

Suddenly, there was a high-pitched pulsing whine in the air. Tony Bandero reached into his inside jacket pocket and came out with a beeper. He shut the sound off and put the beeper back in his pocket.

“Don’t you have to call in or something now that you’ve heard that?” Gregor asked him.

“Nah,” Tony Bandero said. “I’ll get around to it later.”

G
REGOR HAD NEVER BEEN
in a health club of any kind—not in a spa or an exercise studio or a hotel weight room. Most of the men he knew didn’t exercise. Most of the women he knew didn’t bother with health clubs when they did exercise. Donna Moradanyan, his upstairs neighbor back on Cavanaugh Street, had a few tapes she jumped around to from time to time. Gregor thought one of them had been put out by Jane Fonda. He remembered a background that had been made to look like a roof in a not-very-well-off part of a city. Television aerials, low-rising utility chimneys, security netting and arc lights: none of it went with Ms. Fonda herself, who was dressed from neck to ankle in black stretch lace. Some of the high school boys he knew worked out with weights to build themselves up for sports. Gregor didn’t know if it did much good. The Armenian-American community hadn’t produced a plethora of sports stars, except for Ara Parseghian, who coached instead of doing the grunt work. Coaching seemed to Gregor the best part of any sport. You got to sit down for most of the games, eat what you wanted when you wanted, and be boss of the whole enterprise. Gregor thought being head of the Olympic committee or commissioner of baseball would be even better.

The Fountain of Youth Work-Out didn’t look like it would suit Jane Fonda any more than the roof had. Coming around to the front, Gregor saw that the deliberate Victorian reconstruction had been even more carefully executed here. The heavy brass knob and knocker on the front door were either antiques or were custom-made to mimic antiques. The curving trim around the windows had been cut to follow the curving scrollwork of the wrought-iron window guards. The two big concrete planters on either side of the front door had been molded with friezes of fruit around their bases, like the plaster fruit that adorned so many Victorian ceilings. A lot of money had gone into this, or a lot of debt. Did the women who came to Fountain of Youth for diet and exercise advice want to live in a Victorian fantasy? Weren’t diet and exercise and the healthy foods movement much more modern than that? Wouldn’t it have been a better use of funds to put the money into better equipment or bigger exercise rooms or a new advertising campaign? Of course, it was possible that money was no object. There was that. That would put a different complexion on things entirely.

Tony Bandero had marched up to the front door and rung the bell. “They’ve got one of those buzzer systems here, the same as everyplace else,” he said. “Nobody lets anybody in the front door without seeing who they are first.”

The buzzer system was well disguised. Gregor couldn’t find the camera, which had to be hidden somewhere over his head. There was a long angry hum and the door popped open with a mechanical clack. Tony pushed it the rest of the way in.

“This is Traci.” Tony motioned to the young girl behind the small desk. “Traci Cardinale. She’s the receptionist here. This is Gregor Demarkian.”

“Oh, yes,” Traci Cardinale said. “The detective who was coming about Tim. Isn’t it awful about Tim? I was working that night, too, right here until eleven o’clock. But I didn’t see anything except the usual.” She sounded sad.

“What’s the usual?” Gregor asked her.

Traci shrugged. “Members coming in and out. Members losing half their stuff—we put up all these signs about how they ought to be careful and not leave their purses lying around on benches and things, but they do it anyway. I mean, they think that just because this place is expensive, nobody who comes here is going to steal. It’s stupid. Oh, yes. The fat lady was here, too.”

“The fat lady?” Gregor asked.

Traci Cardinale nodded. “I know I shouldn’t call her the fat lady. It would hurt her feelings. But she is a fat lady, you know, really, really fat, not just overweight. Anyway, she came in around nine thirty that night to sign up for the course this week. She’s upstairs right now with the beginners’ class. She’s really a very nice lady.”

“She was on her way home from working the second shift at the Braxton Corporation,” Tony said. “She lives in Derby with her father. He’s got Alzheimer’s.”

“She really is a very nice lady,” Traci said again. “She paid her deposit in cash and then she came in about a week later with the rest of the money in cash, too. I’d almost forgotten about her in all the fuss about Tim, but there she was. I’m glad she came to the course this week. A lot of them just put their money down and then never show up. You’d be amazed. We get five, six thousand dollars like that every time we run a course. People pay for it and then just disappear. They don’t even ask for refunds. But Dessa Carter came. She really needs to do something about herself.”

There was a long, thin window with frosted stained-glass panels in the wall to Traci Cardinale’s right. Gregor went to it and tried to look out. He caught a glimpse of the drive and the wrought-iron fence that separated this property from the one just a little way down the hill. The glimpse wasn’t much, and Gregor thought it would have been even less in the dark. Traci Cardinale was staring at him as if she thought he, too, needed to do something about himself. Gregor went back to her desk and tried to pretend she wasn’t staring.

“You can’t see very much from here,” he told her. “You were here all that night?”

“Until eleven o’clock,” Traci said. “Only, I was answering both doors.”

She gestured toward the stained-glass window. Gregor saw that there was indeed another door back there, smaller and down a couple of steps to the side.

“That’s the members’ private entrance. People have keys to it. Not everybody, of course. People who sign up for the Golden Circle memberships. They pay about three times as much as everybody else does and they can come and go as they want, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Not that they do much of it, though. Nobody wants to be driving around in the dark on their own with all these car-jackings going on. Especially not Golden Circle members. They just come in at the regular times like everybody else.”

“None of the Golden Circle members came in that night?”

Traci shook her head. “The only person who came to that door was Dessa Carter. I think she got confused about where she was supposed to go. We had advertisements on the radio and directions in these brochures we were giving out, but I don’t think the directions were too clear. Dessa wasn’t the only one who came to the wrong door or called the wrong phone number or got the dates mixed up.”

“But she was the only one who came that night,” Gregor said.

“The only one,” Traci agreed.

“And you didn’t see anything? Or hear anything? You didn’t hear the strange sounds the other young woman reported?”

“Not a thing.” Traci Cardinale sighed. “We all thought it was a mugging, you know, after it happened. With him lying out there in the bushes and all. And then there was all that stuff about him being naked and poisoned and all that, and we didn’t know what was going on. We were all very upset—the staff here, I mean, all of us. And Tim was from around here, too, and that made it worse.”

“Bramford,” Tony Bandero said helpfully. “About twenty minutes away.”

“We didn’t any of us know him before he started working here,” Traci said, “but I don’t see that that should matter much. It wasn’t like he was some stranger from Vermont. And nobody knows why it happened even now, so we’re all walking around thinking it could have been anybody, it could have been
us
. If you see what I mean.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, because he did see what she meant. It was the most common reaction people had when they found out that someone they knew had been killed. What he didn’t see was what good wandering around this foyer was going to do him. There were two tall, thin windows with plain glass in them on either side of the front door, but they looked out only on the front walk and on Prospect Street. There was that stained-glass window to Traci’s right, but the limitations to looking through that had already been determined. Traci Cardinale could not have seen the Royal Welsh Fusiliers doing marching practice on the back lawn—and she might not have been able to hear them, either.

Gregor went back to Traci’s desk. He seemed to be walking in circles. To Traci Cardinale’s left, a curving staircase with a fluted rail swept to the balcony on the second floor. Three stories above his head, the stairwell ceiling was covered with those plaster fruits.

“What do we do next?” he asked Tony Bandero.

It was Traci Cardinale who answered. “You have an appointment with Simon Roveter,” she said, picking up the receiver on her house phone and beginning to punch buttons. “Simon’s the head of everything here. Magda’s husband. You’re supposed to see Magda one of these days, too, but not now because she’s leading aerobic dance. Just a minute.”

G
REGOR HADN’T GIVEN MUCH
thought to what someone who did what Simon Roveter did would look like. He knew what Magda Hale looked like, because along with the cursory police report Tony Bandero had sent him after Gregor agreed to at least consider the possibility of looking into the death of Tim Bradbury, Tony had sent some Fountain of Youth brochures. Gregor remembered these now as Traci Cardinale led both him and Tony up the curving staircase to the second floor. On the balcony there, placed just far enough back so that it couldn’t be seen from the foyer, was a life-size stand-up cardboard poster of Magda Hale holding a sign that said, “C
OME TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH, BE A NEW YOU FOR THE NEW YEAR.”
This was the same picture that appeared on one of the brochures. Magda Hale looked twenty-six and full of infinite energy. Traci Cardinale went past the stand-up poster and opened a set of double doors. The balcony was suddenly full of noise. There was fast, driving music with a heavy bass backbeat. There was the sound of something heavy being smashed against wood. Gregor was now sure that Traci Cardinale could not have heard anything that might have been going on in the backyard on the night Tim Bradbury died. Either the foyer was soundproof, or it was terminally well built.

“That’s the beginner’s class,” Traci said, moving them along a hall carpeted in pearl gray pile. She stopped at the first door on the left and opened it up. The noise got louder. Added to the sounds Gregor had heard from the balcony was a woman’s high, insistent voice commanding: “Leg up leg up leg up. Switch right.”

“Come look,” Traci Cardinale said.

Gregor expected to walk through the door and find himself in the middle of a lot of jumping women. Instead, he found himself in a little viewing area, installed several feet above the floor of the work-out studio itself, outfitted with half a dozen fixed plush chairs like a very tiny movie theater. In the studio, a dozen women stood in rows and moved in unison, following the lead of a woman standing alone at the front. The woman had her back to the class and was facing a long wall of mirrors. Gregor thought he had seen walls of mirrors like that in pictures of ballet practice studios. But there was nothing ballet-like about what these women were doing. They jumped. They turned. They marched. They loped from side to side. Most of them were heavyset and most of them were not graceful.