Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (17 page)

“Did the psychic do any good?”

“No. She put a good face on it, though, especially the way Tony got her played up on the six o’clock news. Murderer turned out to be the kid’s stepfather, which is what we expected. It usually is.”

“Stepfathers specifically?” Gregor asked curiously. “Not fathers or uncles or brothers?”

“Stepfathers and boyfriends,” Philip Brye answered. “Especially with eleven- and twelve-year-old girls. It’s practically a syndrome. I take it child murders were out of your field of expertise at the Bureau.”

“Those kinds of child murders were. I worked on a couple of serial murder cases with child victims.”

“Oh, lovely.”

“I retired,” Gregor said. “At the first possible opportunity.”

Philip Brye coughed for a moment. “I keep telling myself I’m going to retire at the first possible opportunity, too,” he said, “but I probably won’t. I figure I’m addicted to this place. Did Tony tell you anything at all about what happened to Tim Bradbury?”

Gregor nodded. “He was poisoned. With arsenic. But not where he was found, because there were signs of a vomiting episode in his throat but none in the vicinity of his body, even taking the word
vicinity
loosely. No sign of a sickness episode on the grounds, in the garage, or in the house at the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio—”

“Do you know to take that with a grain of salt?” Philip Brye asked sharply. “Tony and his people aren’t always exactly thorough. The evidence of an episode might have been cleaned up, and they might not have spotted the cleanup.”

“That had occurred to me.”

“Good.”

Gregor went on. “The body was found in a small area of evergreen bushes next to the Fountain of Youth Work-Out’s back door. It was naked, and there was no sign of the clothing Tim Bradbury might have been wearing at the time he died. He had been dead at least an hour when he was found. I think that’s it.”

Philip Brye considered this. “That’s all? Nothing about Bradbury himself? Nothing about his people? Or his background?”

“No.”

“Nothing about—the kind of speculation that’s been going on since Tim showed up dead?”

“Tony sent me some newspaper clippings,” Gregor said. “They contained a few theories.”

“I’m sure they did. They weren’t the theories I was thinking of.” Philip Brye jumped off the edge of his work table, wheezed, then walked over to his single, overstuffed file cabinet. The cabinet was so overstuffed, none of the drawers would close. “I suppose it figures,” he said. “Tony never tells anybody anything interesting if he can help it. Still, it’s a little raw.”

“Do you mean the forensic information wasn’t complete?”

“Oh, the forensic information’s complete enough. The forensic information isn’t the point. Just a minute and I’ll get you what I’ve got.”

Dr. Brye began to search patiently and systematically through the second file drawer from the top. Files came out and were shoved onto the file cabinet’s cluttered surface. Files went back in, crammed until they bent against other files that had already been crammed. Gregor Demarkian finished the rest of his cheese Danish and sipped at his coffee.

“Here we go,” Philip Brye said after a while. “My personal file on the death of Tim Bradbury. Did you know he was a local boy?”

“I think it was in one of the newspaper clippings. Branford, I think it said. Or something like that.”

“North Branford, yes, that’s where he had his apartment before he moved in at Fountain of Youth, but that isn’t the kind of local I meant,” Philip Brye said. “He was born and brought up in the area, out in Derby. He started working in and around New Haven when he was a teenager. He took shit jobs at Yale. Dishwasher. Parking lot attendant. Road construction work when he could. We call that Connecticut’s own state college scholarship plan. Every summer, the crews are full of kids working their way through college. Not that you really can work your way through college anymore. The prices are prohibitive. Anyway, my point here is that a lot of us knew him—not well, you understand, not as a friend, but enough to recognize him on the street and say hello to. New Haven isn’t a small town anymore. Everybody doesn’t know everybody. But some people do get around. Tim Bradbury was one of them.”

“Did Tony Bandero know him?”

Philip Brye shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think Tony’s that much of a shit. However, the thing is, I knew Tim, maybe better than most people did. When I was still married, my wife and I had a house out in Hamden. Tim did our yard work and our snow plowing one year. Good kid. Very responsible. Came to work on time. Got down in good order. Gave value for money. Always polite. So, when all this happened, and I saw what Tony was turning it into, I decided to check it all out for myself.”

“And?”

Philip Brye had a thick file folder in his hands. He walked back across the office and dumped it in Gregor’s lap. “Take a look through that. That’s the result of the first, and God knows I hope the last, detective investigation I have ever conducted. It’s probably a mess, but it’s got to be a whole hell of a lot better than anything Tony Bandero has got.”

As far as Gregor knew, Tony Bandero had nothing. On the other hand, Tony could have everything and just be keeping it to himself. Gregor positioned the file on his lap so that it wouldn’t fall off and opened it up.

The first thing in the file was a glossy eight-by-eleven black-and-white photograph of what looked like a shack, boarded up and deserted. The second thing in the file was another eight-by-eleven photograph of the same shack. The third thing in the file was yet another photograph of the same shack—but here Gregor could see a difference. In this third photograph, there was very distinctly a lit kerosene lamp in the one gap in the boards that covered the windows of what Gregor thought was, or had been, a glassed-in porch. Gregor raised this picture in Philip Brye’s direction and then raised his eyebrows, too.

“Well?” he asked.

“That,” Philip Brye said, “is Tim Bradbury’s mother’s house. If you look closely at the last picture, you’ll be able to see the Housatonic River in the background. The house was built originally—all the houses on that part of the river were built originally—as summer places. This would have been at the end of World War Two. The houses are small and they’re not insulated. Most of them were built without heating systems on the assumption that they would only be used in the summer. But it didn’t work out that way.”

“Absentee landlords got hold of them.”

“Yep. And people who were really too poor to afford to keep up a house got hold of them, too. I checked about Tim’s mother. She owns her place. Such as it is.”

“It looks boarded up,” Gregor said.

Philip Brye shrugged. “It’s cheaper to nail driftwood over a broken window than to replace the glass. The place is boarded up. It looks empty. But it isn’t.”

“Tim Bradbury’s mother lives there alone?”

“She’s got two cats. Otherwise she lives there alone. Tim moved out right after he graduated from high school.”

Gregor looked over the last picture of the shack again. “I don’t suppose you can blame him for that,” he said. “It isn’t anyplace I’d want to live if I didn’t have to.”

“Me, either. What I find significant, though, is that Tim had apparently left that house emotionally long before he left it physically. I guess that’s a polite way of saying he lied about his background. Consistently. To everyone.”

“What did he say?”

“He said his parents had left the area,” Philip Brye said. “Emphasis on parents, plural.”

“I take it he didn’t have parents, plural,” Gregor said.

“I got hold of his birth certificate. On the line for ‘father’ all it says is ‘unknown.’ ”

“That doesn’t mean that the father was necessarily actually unknown. The mother must have known who he was. She may have been in contact with him for years. Was the family on welfare?”

“No. No welfare. No social security. No social workers.”

“The mother had a job, then,” Gregor said.

“Not as far as I could find out,” Philip Brye said. “You’re the detective and I’m the amateur. I’ve probably missed something obvious that you’ll pick right up. It will turn out she was slinging hash in a diner someplace, and there’s no mystery about it at all. But the thing is, what really got me going looking into this beyond the fact that Tim was somebody I knew, was that I had this talk with this woman who’s now a staff assistant here in the department. Five years ago, she was a guidance counselor at the high school in Derby. That was Tim Bradbury’s senior year.”

Gregor scratched the side of his face. “I take it this has a punch line,” he said. “She had some startling revelation that Tony Bandero wouldn’t listen to.”

“Bandero won’t listen to anybody, but this isn’t a startling revelation, no. But it is indicative. This woman was a guidance counselor, right, so she had access to Tim Bradbury’s files. Father, unknown. Mother’s occupation, housewife.”

“I’m surprised she remembers all this. Even with the murder, it sounds like she can recall a lot of detail. Too much detail, maybe.”

Philip Brye smiled wanly. “She’s not an inaccurate witness, Mr. Demarkian. And she’s not the sort of person who’s prone to making things up. No, she remembers what she remembers because it was an issue at the time. Tim was an issue at the time. Tim’s mother was an issue at the time. How strange she was.”

“She came to teachers’ conferences and that kind of thing?”

“Not on a regular basis, no, I don’t think so. Mrs. Conyer—that’s the ex-guidance counselor—says she came in once and looked just the way you’d expect her to. Acted just the way you’d expect her to, too. Very overweight. Very slovenly. Dressed in a big polyester tent and shoes run over at the heels. Not too recently bathed. White trash.”

“Another good reason for Tim Bradbury to want to move out as soon as he could,” Gregor pointed out. “Especially since, from everything you’ve told me about him, he wasn’t the same type.”

“Mrs. Conyer said the mother came as quite a shock to the teachers. Tim was always neat, polite, clean, very well behaved. He wasn’t a world beater. He didn’t make it into the top third of his class and sail out with a scholarship to an important college. He was just a stable, industrious kid. I know it’s not fashionable to say so these days, but in my experience family counts for a lot. I get the children of mothers like the one Mrs. Conyer described in here all the time. Anyway, I get their bodies in here. Dope. Liquor. Knife fights. Not jobs teaching weight training for Fountain of Youth.”

“Are you absolutely sure he was never on drugs?”

“No. I can be absolutely sure that I never saw him on drugs, and I saw him a fair amount. I can be absolutely sure he wasn’t on drugs on the night he died.”

“What about dealing drugs? Dealers don’t often use. Not if they’re smart.”

“True,” Philip Brye said, “and, of course, there would be know way to be positive that he wasn’t dealing, because there isn’t any way to prove a negative. But my take on this was that he just didn’t have enough money. I don’t know about checking accounts and savings accounts and that kind of thing. I don’t think anyone has checked yet—”

Gregor snorted.

“However,” Philip Brye said, “Tim didn’t live like a drug dealer. He didn’t even live like a part-time dealer. That job he had was no piece of cake. It required a great deal of physical effort. Why bother to do that if you’ve got five, six hundred dollars a week, minimum, coming in on the side?”

“He could have been trying to launder the money,” Gregor suggested.

“He could have laundered the money by waiting tables or tending her or working in the library. Part time. Instead of that, he had a full time, job at Fountain of Youth. There’s also the evidence of what he didn’t have. No seventy-five dollar designer jeans. No hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar Timberland boots. Just good old Levi’s and Stride Rites.”

“Let me try one more thing,” Gregor said. “Let me try the possibility that he was just one very smart young man. Smart enough to know how to hide. Smart enough to know he had to bank his money because dealing drugs gets old fast and drug dealers don’t stay alive if they try to stay too long in the business.”

“No,” Philip Brye said. “If Tim was the kind of smart that that kind of behavior would have made him, then he was the greatest actor since Laurence Olivier. He might have played a game like that and gotten away with it if he were the sort of kid nobody notices, but he wasn’t. He was the sort of kid people like me tend to mentally adopt. Here’s a good kid, we say. From a modest background. Really determined to make his way up. Let’s give the kid a hand, we say. Let’s at least take an interest in how he’s doing. I think that’s what happened at Fountain of Youth, don’t you? They have some of their staff living in the house, but they don’t have all of it. I think Tim got asked because he was—affecting.”

“Possibly,” Gregor said.

Actually, the secret ingredient in the lives of most successful psychopaths was precisely the fact that they were—affecting. Charming. Bashful. Boyish. Eager. Vulnerable. All on the surface, but all perfectly plausible. People want to believe in the struggling young man determined to make good. There were even some struggling young men out there worth believing in.

Most of the struggling young men Gregor had known, however—especially the boyish, affecting, vulnerable kind—had been struggling mostly to hide their rage. On the evidence of what was in this file folder, Tim Bradbury had had a lot to be legitimately enraged about. It bothered Gregor that nobody had ever picked up any such emotion in him.

Gregor leafed through a few more pages of the folder. Most of its bulk was made up of repetitions. Three pictures of the house. Four pictures of what looked like Tim Bradbury as a ten-year-old boy. Two copies of Tim Bradbury’s page from the high school yearbook. Most of it would turn out not to mean anything.

Even so, Gregor thought, this was more than he had had when he got up this morning—a lot more. It was enough for him to move on with. It was a start.

Gregor hadn’t realized it before this, but he had been desperately looking for a start ever since that piece of balcony rail had gone crashing to Fountain of Youth’s polished hardwood foyer floor.