Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (18 page)

F
OR NICK BANNERMAN, THE
idea of leaving Fountain of Youth for an hour in the afternoon to have lunch or go to the Co-op was appalling. Ever since the incident at the SuperHour Grocery, Nick had developed an odd kind of situation-specific agoraphobia. He had been at Yale for four years. There were still restaurants he knew and where he was known, stores whose owners he knew by sight and others whose owners he knew by name. There was also the strip out on Dixwell Avenue: the chain stores and the franchises, the malls whose managements had New York legal help and knew too much about liability and law suits to pull anything like what he’d been subjected to at the SuperHour. Not that that would necessarily do him any good. There was a black judge in Pennsylvania suing Bloomingdale’s right now, because they’d had him arrested on suspicion of credit card fraud. Somebody in their security department had apparently decided that fraud was the only possible reason a black man could have a credit card. There were other things like that floating around in the air, too, in New York and Baltimore and Miami and San Francisco and Washington. Once Nick started thinking about it, he was shocked at how many incidents he could come up with. Incidents. It felt like the wrong word. An incident was the time you drank too much at dinner with your girlfriend’s mother and threw up on your shoes, or the time you stopped paying attention in the K mart parking lot and dented your fender on a lamp pole. It wasn’t this… creeping slime, that hid in the shadows and got you when you weren’t looking. That was what frightened him. It was out there waiting for him. It would get him if he didn’t watch out. He felt exactly the way he had when he was six years old and had first had to sleep in his bedroom in the new house in Larchmont, the one where the closet door would never entirely close.

The problem with me, Nick told himself, as he came out of his third dance of the morning—the intermediates, meaning he’d actually had to work up a little sweat—is that I’ve led a much too sheltered life. He wended his way through the women dressed in leotards in the corridor and headed for the stairway. He had grown up in Larchmont, not in Harlem. His father had been the first black man ever promoted into a vice presidency at IBM. He knew as little about the ghetto as any sorority president cheerleader at the University of Kansas. The only time he had ever seen a gun, except on a cop, was when he’d been mugged. Until the SuperHour, of course. The SuperHour had changed everything. Except that it probably hadn’t changed anything at all. He’d been followed by store detectives, ignored by sales clerks, dismissed by bank tellers. He’d had teachers, even at prep school and Yale, who had behaved as if his vocabulary were restricted to words of one syllable. There had been a thousand and one little things and a hundred and one not so little ones, but nothing, ever, anywhere, anything like what had happened at the SuperHour.

If you went down the service stairs far enough, you got to a swinging wood door that led to the service hallway and what was still, after a hundred years and six renovations, the pantry. Nick pushed his way in there and looked around at the shelves. It was twelve o’clock and he was starving. He was also in no mood to sit down in the dining room again with all those women. Doing that yesterday it had given him a headache. It was incredible what some women could be like, when they wanted to be. There was the middle-aged one who had squeezed his thigh while they were waiting on line at the salad bar. There was the young one who had cornered him for an earnest conversation about the Problems of the Underclass and then been furious with him when she realized that he didn’t actually know anybody in the underclass. She’d had her hand on his knee until she had gotten angry with him. Then, before getting up and stalking away, she had dug the tips of her very long nails right into the vulnerable place under his kneecap.

There was a can of tuna fish on the shelf and a bag of onions in the top bin of a stack of plastic bins. The bins underneath the onions all seemed to be full of beans. Nick took a can of tuna and an onion and a loaf of four-grain bread and looked around for some mayonnaise. He found six different kinds of vegetable oil and sixteen different kinds of vinegar. The vinegar surprised him so much, he had to count the bottles twice. Then he decided that Fountain of Youth must be out of mayonnaise, because the only glass jars of anything like it he could find were filled with tofu paste. Nick took the tuna fish and the bread and the onion out of the pantry and into the kitchen. The kitchen was one of those big empty places, built to be used by several people at one time, where all the appliances were too far apart.

Nick put his food down on the long wood picnic table that sat next to a row of windows overlooking the back lawn and went to the refrigerator. There was a second kitchen, a little smaller but much more efficient, where the group meals were prepared for the women who were taking the classes upstairs. That kitchen would be full of frantic people at this time of day. This kitchen was a haven. Nick didn’t define to himself exactly a haven from what. He looked through the jars on the refrigerator shelves. More tofu paste. Eight different kinds of mustard. All-natural organic ketchup. The door to the hall swung open.

If Nick had been living at the house, he would have recognized her immediately. Since he was only there for the working day and she was not sociable, it took him a minute. His first reaction was simple surprise. She was so pretty, he almost dropped the jar he was holding. Tall. Thin. Blond. Perfect. The epitome of everything in the world of women that Nick Bannerman knew he should not want. He felt the stiffening in his pants and sidled hastily toward the refrigerator door, to make sure he was covered. God only knew, exercise clothes wouldn’t cover him much. He looked at the jar he was holding and wondered why he had picked it up. It contained something called anise pickles.

“Ah,” he said. “Hi. Well. Um. It’s Frannie, isn’t it?”

The blond woman had stopped dead as soon as she had seen him. She looked pale and frozen. When Nick spoke, she jumped a little. When he finished, she walked toward the middle of the room, slowly and deliberately, as if she were making herself do it.

“That’s right. Frannie Jay. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

“You didn’t bother me,” Nick told her. “I was looking for some mayonnaise.”

“I won’t bother you much longer,” Frannie Jay said. “I just want to get a bottle of mineral water. As soon as I get a bottle of mineral water, I’ll get right out of here.”

Anise pickles. Nick put them back on the shelf, next to a jar of 100 percent all-natural carob sauce. It said it like that, in big jokey letters, as if it were a can of SpaghettiOs. The healthy foods movement meets American mass marketing. The palms of Nick’s hands were wet with sweat. He wiped them off, as discreetly as he could, on the back of his T-shirt.

“You don’t have to get out of here,” he said. “Stick around and I’ll make you some lunch. That’s why I was looking for the mayonnaise. Tuna fish.”

“I don’t eat lunch,” Frannie Jay said.

Frannie Jay didn’t look like she ate much of anything at all. She wasn’t anorexic, exactly. She had good muscle tone and rounded, strong calves. Still you could see every bone in her rib cage. Nick felt his erection wilt and then stiffen again.

He closed the refrigerator door. “If you don’t want to spend the hour upstairs, you could stay here and keep me company,” he suggested. “I could use a little company. I spend all my time either bouncing around or commuting.”

Frannie looked toward the wall of windows next to the picnic table and blinked. “I don’t really like this room. Those windows. I don’t really like to look out there when I don’t have to.”

“That’s right,” Nick said. “You’re the one who—ah—”

“Found the body.”

“Exactly.”

“I didn’t really find the body. I only found the foot. It was sticking out of the bushes.”

Maybe this was some kind of posttraumatic stress disorder. Nick had played a Vietnam veteran with posttraumatic stress disorder once. Frannie had moved farther into the kitchen and was staring out the window.

“Did you meet that man who was here yesterday?” she asked suddenly. “That Gregor Demarkian person, the detective?”

“Briefly.” Nick was confused.

“It said in the paper that he was good at secrets. All the cases he’s ever solved were full of secrets.”

Nick had read this article. What it had actually said was that Gregor Demarkian was good at uncovering
guilty
secrets.

“I don’t think the police brought him in here because he was good at secrets,” Nick told her. “I think they were taking a lot of heat about not solving the case and not really doing anything to get themselves anywhere and Demarkian was a good bone to throw at public opinion. He’s got a reputation.”

Frannie walked all the way over to the picnic table, leaned against it, and looked out the windows.

“He drove me in from the bus stop, you know. Tim did. The night he was killed.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

“He was a very nice boy. Man. Whatever. He seemed very young.”

“Everybody says that about him, yeah. That he was sort of innocent.”

“I think he had a secret,” Frannie said. “That’s why people get killed, isn’t it? Grown-up people, anyway. Children get killed just for being children.”

What was this about? It was like being in a room with a hypnotized person. No. It was worse. Nick wanted to go to the table to get his food, but all of a sudden he didn’t want to get that close to Frannie Jay. His erection was a distant memory.

“I don’t think you ought to worry too much about Tim Bradbury,” he told Frannie. He isn’t your responsibility. You didn’t even know him.”

“That’s true.”

“The police are supposed to worry about him. And Demarkian.”

Frannie Jay swayed a little, and blinked.

“Oh,” she said, in a much more normal voice. “I have to get out of here. I just came down for some—”

“Mineral water,” Nick finished. He whirled around and opened the refrigerator door again. There were dozens of fat-bellied green bottles of Perrier on the bottom shelf. He took out two.

“Here you are,” he said. “Perrier. Specialty of the house.”

Frannie Jay looked at him as if he had gone crazy. Then she came back across the kitchen and took the bottles of Perrier out of his hands.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” he told her.

The bottles had the kind of caps you had to pry open with a can opener. Maybe Frannie kept an opener in her room for just that purpose.

“Well,” she said. “I guess I’d better go. It was nice talking to you.”

“It was nice talking to you, too.”

“I have three more step classes this afternoon. I’m going to be a wet noodle by the time I’m done.”

“I’ve got three more classes, too. I don’t worry about watching my calories while I’m working at this place.”

Frannie gave the last bit a smile as lame as the comment itself, said “Bye,” and went out the kitchen door. Nick Bannerman leaned back against the refrigerator doors and closed his eyes.

Now that Frannie Jay wasn’t acting crazy anymore, his erection was back. It was big and hard and solid, and any minute now he was certain it was going to hurt.

D
ESSA CARTER KNEW SOMETHING
was wrong as soon as Mrs. O’Reilly picked up the phone in Derby. She could hear the sound of heavy thudding against wood and Mrs. O’Reilly’s labored breathing. In spite of her heaviness, Mrs. O’Reilly was almost never short of breath. She was a rock of a woman, as she put it herself. Rocks did not have physical limitations. As soon as she heard the thudding, Dessa Carter stiffened. She had actually been feeling pretty good before that. It was step aerobics day on the smorgasbord. Dessa was surprised to find that she liked step aerobics. She was tired and achy and hot. She felt heavier than she really was. Yet she still felt better than she had a couple of days ago. There was something to this exercise stuff. It made her mentally light.

The thudding was rhythmic and strong, unyielding and brutal.

“I’ve got him locked in the bathroom,” Mrs. O’Reilly was saying. “It was the best I could do. He broke the coffee table.”

The pay phone was just off the foyer, in a little utility hall with a locker room in it and a cloakroom with a revolving coatrack but no attendant. At least, Dessa thought, I’ll be private here. None of the women from her class was anywhere near this hall at all. The foyer was empty, too. If Dessa leaned back a little, she could see the place where the balcony railing had fallen apart. Someone had boarded it up with a piece of plywood.

“He doesn’t sound like he’s calming down,” Dessa said.

“Oh, he’s calming down,” Mrs. O’Reilly told her. “It was a lot worse half an hour ago. I didn’t have him locked up then. And he’s stronger than you think.”

“I know how strong he is.”

“You’re going to have to find a nursing home for him. You can’t keep on with him the way he is. I can’t keep on with him.”

Dessa pressed her forehead against the shiny metal front of the phone. She had never been so hungry in her life. Never. She craved a grocery bag full of Mars bars, sticky sweet, sugar rush. She wanted to go down to Taco Bell and eat three ten-packs of tacos. She wanted to make herself a huge pot of mashed potatoes and smother them in butter. She wanted all the food on earth, right now, this minute, and then she wanted to lie on the floor of her own bedroom and feel the pain in her stomach until it got so bad she passed out.

“You can’t leave now,” she said, in a hoarse voice she barely recognized. “Not today.”

“I’m not going to leave today.”

Dessa relaxed a little. “I can’t find him a nursing home this week,” she said, forcing herself to sound reasonable. “It might take months.”

“You can’t hold onto people when they’ve changed,” Mrs. O’Reilly insisted. “He isn’t the father you knew when you were a girl. He’s an addled old hulk with a disease. He needs twenty-four-hour-a-day nurses. You’re not doing him any good keeping him here.”

“I know.”

“He’s going to hurt somebody someday. Me or you.”