Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (14 page)

Magda’s bedroom was on the third floor, at the back, near the service stairwell. Some things, at least, were working in her favor. When she got to the third-floor landing, she opened the door and looked into the hall. It was empty and quiet. The intermediate class must have already gone to lunch. Magda limped out into the hall, propping herself up against the wall with one hand. Now the pain was beginning to spread into her arms. Magda thought that if it went on like this much longer, she was going to pass out.

The bedroom was five baby steps from the stairwell door. Magda counted them as she took them. Then she braced herself on the door and contorted herself sideways and backward until she could reach the spare key she left on the top of the door frame. The movement made her heave again. She got the door open and stumbled inside queasily, sucking in great gulps of air.

The air didn’t have enough oxygen in it. Magda was sure her lungs were collapsing. She got the bathroom door shut by kicking it shut. It should have hurt, but her legs had gone numb. Either that, or she was feeling as much pain as she was able to. Nothing she did could make her feel any more. She pressed her face down into the carpet and closed her eyes.
Count to ten
, she told herself.
Count to nine. Count to eight. Count to seven
. As an interior monologue, it didn’t make much sense, but it didn’t have to make much sense. It only had to work. That was what mantras were for.

Magda didn’t know how long she spent lying on the floor. It felt like forever, but it could probably have been measured in seconds. Then the pain began to drain out of her, like water going down the pipes of a sink. The sharp stabbing changed to a dull ache. Give it a minute more, she told herself. Then make yourself stand up.

Carefully, Magda rolled over on her back. She counted from ten again. She made herself breathe. Then she got herself onto her side and made herself curl into a ball. That was the way she had been taught that injured people were supposed to get themselves up.

She got herself up. She had to hold onto the side of a chair to do it, but she ended up on her feet. The ache was really terrible. It made her dizzy. She was going to have to go on holding onto furniture just to get herself across the room to the master bath.

“Magda?” someone called from the other side of the door.

Magda stiffened. It was a mistake. The pain came back again for one horrible, stabbing second. Then the stabbing evaporated, she caught her breath.

“Who is it?” she called out. Evenly, with no sign of wrongness in her voice.

“It’s Stella Mortimer. Can I come in?”

It was a million miles to the door of the master bath. Magda pushed herself in the direction of her bureau, gripped the edge of it, and let herself fall slightly. She caught herself at the last minute and made herself stand up again.

“Just a minute” she said.

The trick was to get into the bathroom quickly. The only way to do it was to go on her own two feet, and pretend that she didn’t hurt. Magda pushed herself from the bureau to the bed, wincing. Then she took a deep breath and launched herself into the middle of the carpet.

“Magda?”

Magda made it into the bathroom and got the door closed halfway. She sat down at the vanity table and put her forehead on the cool glass top.

“All right,” she said. “Stella? Come on in. I’m in the bathroom. I’ll be out in a minute.”

The master bedroom door opened and closed. Stella walked heavily across the carpet, moving without grace. Magda heard the bedsprings and knew that Stella had sat down on the side of the bed.

“Were you taking a shower?” Stella asked. “I forgot that you’d probably want to do that after a morning with the advanced class.”

“I haven’t actually gotten into the shower yet,” Magda replied. “We ran a little late. Because of all the time we lost.”

“God, yes,” Stella said. “I’ve never been more tense in my life. I wasn’t this tense when Tim died. What did you think of that man?”

“What man?”

“Gregor Demarkian. The detective. The
consultant
.”

The vanity table was built into the wall, with a mirror above it. Just to the right of mirror was the medicine cabinet. Magda opened this up and looked inside. Aspirin. Tylenol. Advil. Contac. She pushed all these aside and took down a little handful of prescription bottles.

“I don’t think I like his attitude,” Stella was saying. “And I looked him up at the library, you know, after we heard that Tony Bandero was going to call him in. I don’t think he’s the—right person for this kind of thing.”

Penicillin. Erythromycin. Amoxidyl. Magda put the bottles down and reached for another handful. “Why is that?” she asked evenly.

Stella was swinging her legs on the carpet. The movement made little swooshing sounds.

“He does—complicated murders,” Stella said. “Cases where there are all kinds of ramifications and mysteries. And I don’t care what Tony Bandero thinks. I don’t believe Tim was involved in some—plot.”

Motrin. Vitamin D. Iron supplements. Magda reached for a third handful.

“It’s hard to imagine Tim involved in a plot,” she agreed.

Stella blew a raspberry. “It’s
impossible
to imagine Tim involved in a plot. He wasn’t that kind of person. And he was only, what, twenty-two? You know as well as I do that he couldn’t have been taking serious drugs on a regular basis. He wouldn’t have been able to do his work here if he had been.”

“I think the implication was that he might have been selling drugs. People who sell drugs don’t necessarily take them, do they?”

“Tim couldn’t have been selling drugs. He didn’t know enough arithmetic.”

“Well, there has to be some reason he ended up full of arsenic and stark naked on our lawn. I can’t see it as a likely suicide.”

“Tim wouldn’t have committed suicide, either,” Stella said. “That’s as silly as thinking of him as part of a plot. All he wanted out of life was a transfer to one of our places in California. I keep feeling terribly guilty that we never gave it to him.”

“Don’t.”

“Maybe I’d feel better if we’d known more about him,” Stella said. “I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now. Do you realize how odd it is, how little we all know about each other? I don’t mean you and me. I mean most of us. I work with Faith every day. I don’t even know if she lives in an apartment or a house.”

“So ask.”

“I don’t ask, that’s the point. None of us asks. Now Tim is dead and we don’t know anything about him, and we aren’t going to find out soon because nobody is going to tell us anything. Sometimes I wish this had made a bigger splash in the newspapers. Maybe some reporter somewhere would have found something out.”

“This has been a big case,” Magda said. “It has made a splash in the newspapers. They’ve had Tim’s picture all over everything. What more do you want?”

“I don’t know,” Stella said. “Real information, maybe. Not just, well he went to high school here and his parents have left the area and he used to work as a parking lot attendant. Real information. Magda? About that thing with the railing this morning. Do you think it was an accident?”

This handful of prescription bottles was much more interesting than the previous ones. Valium. Lithium. Prozac. Percodan. Magda put these down on the glass top of the vanity and turned the last bottle over in her hands. Demerol. She remembered Demerol. Simon had been given it after his gallbladder operation last summer. It had knocked him right out.

“Magda?” Stella said one more time.

Magda shook a couple of white pills into her hands. “75 milligrams each. Take no more than one every six hours.”

“I don’t see what else it could have been,” Magda said. “I can’t see Traci pushing the thing over on purpose.”

“Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe someone cut the balcony railing apart, very carefully, and just left it there for someone to come along and get hurt by it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why, Magda, but people do that kind of thing. And you know, Magda, I think that Gregor Demarkian person had the same kind of idea. He kept walking around looking at all the junk on the foyer floor and saying it was interesting.”

“That could mean anything, saying it was interesting.”

“I know.” Stella sounded out of patience. “I wish you’d take all this seriously, Magda. You’ve got a tour coming up. We’re expanding. These kinds of things could end up causing us some seriously bad publicity.”

What would really cause them some seriously bad publicity, Magda thought, was if she fell over in the middle of a dance routine in a mall in Elyria, Ohio. She looked at the white dosage strip on the bottle again. “75 milligrams each, Take no more than one every six hours.” The words
no more than
had been underlined in blue ballpoint pen.

“I think you’re making too much out of all this stuff,” she said firmly. “Tim’s death is tragic, but it has nothing to do with us. And that thing with the balcony rail is dramatic, but it’s an accident. Things like this happen in old houses like this all the time.”

“That balcony railing wasn’t old, Magda. It was put in with the door moldings the year the major renovations were done. That was what—five years ago?”

“Six.”

“Whatever. It still wasn’t long enough ago to call that wood ‘old.’ ”

Magda took two of the pills out of her palm and put them down on the glass vanity top. She ached. She was sure she would hurt like hell if she stood up. In less than half an hour, she had to go downstairs and lead another aerobic dance, complete with high kicks.

“If I were you, I’d let the police worry about all this,” she told Stella decisively.

Then she picked the two pills up off the glass and swallowed them both.

Without water.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN WAS NOT
staying in his idea of a New Haven hotel. His idea of a New Haven hotel was the Taft, as it had existed in old movies about Broadway show lives and out-of-town openings. That was what New Haven had been famous for, besides being the home of Yale University, if it had ever been famous for anything. Producers took their new plays there to open them before they braved the critical climate in New York. Bad reviews could sink a play before it ever got to the city. Anne Baxter and George Sanders having it out in
All About Eve
. Judy Garland doubled up and tense before she had to go on with a big production number. Fred Astaire practicing tap routines in the hotel lobby. They didn’t make those movies anymore. When Hollywood made movies about Hollywood now, they were all about bad sex and worse drugs and really sinister business deals. Gregor didn’t like them. He didn’t even like the fact that movies were no longer in black and white. The problem with color was that it made it too easy for directors to use what looked like real blood.

Gregor’s New Haven hotel was not the Taft. It wasn’t even in New Haven, if by that he meant within the urban landscape. It might have been within the New Haven city limits. Whatever its address, it stood on a large sloping patch of lawn that looked out over similar buildings in similar patches of lawn. From the concrete balcony outside his sliding glass doors, Gregor could see a Ramada Inn, a Holiday Inn, a Howard Johnson hotel, and a Quality Court. He was sure their rooms all had the same twin double beds his had, the same long closets, the same comfortingly antiseptic bathrooms. He had stayed in thousands of motels like this when he had been on kidnap detail in his first years at the Bureau. These days, they had better restaurants and sometimes even room service. The prints on the walls tended toward impressionism rather than Norman Rockwell. The towels came in pastels as well as hospital white. Gregor didn’t mind the motel. He minded the location. Stuck out here without a car, with no idea at all of what direction to go in to get back to the action, he felt cut off and out of touch. The feeling was emblematic. Gregor knew what he had thought he’d done by accepting Tony Bandero’s invitation to come out here and “look at” this case. Now that he was here, he was no longer sure what Bandero had invited him out here to do. It certainly wasn’t to investigate in any way Gregor understood the term. Yesterday had been—

—what?

Gregor was lying on the double bed closest to the sliding glass doors, dressed in his pajamas and bathrobe, staring at the ceiling. It was very early morning, not even eight o’clock. The motel clock on the bedside table was glowing red. Through the double set of curtains, Gregor could see the faint patches of brightness that meant the day was not going to turn out to be completely miserable, at least as far as the weather went. Whether it was going to be completely miserable as far as Tony Bandero went was undetermined. Yesterday had been—

—frustrating, Gregor decided. Infuriating. Ridiculous. Something like that.

Gregor rolled over onto his side and sat up with his legs hanging over the edge of the bed, facing the other bed and the door to the hall. The other bed was covered with paper—computer printouts, typed reports, and lined notebook sheets Gregor had jotted points down on. There were even some books Gregor had brought up from Philadelphia, thinking he might need them, including his best physicians’ drug reference and
Poisons and Toxicity
, the world’s most authoritative volume on the ways in which people can kill each other with ingestible substances and chemicals of all kinds.
Poisons and Toxicity
was the size of an unabridged dictionary and weighed fifty-two pounds. Gregor sighed heavily in its direction and reached for the phone.

The phone was on a little night table that was bolted to the wall between the two beds. All the furniture in this motel room was bolted to the wall. Gregor wondered who on earth would try to steal a bed. Next to the phone there was a little cardboard notice, tented into an open-sided pyramid, that said:

in enormous red letters. The notice was advertising a sleepover New Year’s Eve party being held in the motel. Gregor had read the notice the night before and decided that it sounded like a good idea. People who were staying over at a motel after drinking all night were at least not threatening sober drivers on the road. Gregor had been to only one New Year’s Eve party in his life—unless you wanted to count the wine-and-old-movie sessions held every year in old George Tekemanian’s apartment, which Gregor didn’t—and he’d hated it. New Year’s Eve was a nonholiday nonevent. It was a lot of people coming together in a desperate search for an excuse to get drunk, and not finding one.