Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (21 page)

“Well,” Traci said, “I could say that we’d know by the way things had been moved around and the way the exercise equipment had been left, because you absolutely wouldn’t believe the mess people leave things in around here, Keyholders or not. Maybe especially Keyholders. Anyway, we’ve got video cameras.” She pointed toward the front door.

Gregor turned around and saw it, just. It had been very artfully disguised by what looked like just another cluster of plaster fruit. He turned to the entrance to the corridor Traci had indicated was the one with the special work-out room on it and saw that there was another camera there, also disguised by fruit.

“Is the system comprehensive?” he asked her. “No blind spots?”

“I’m sure there could be some blind spots, Mr. Demarkian, but I can’t see that somebody could get in and go clomping all over the place around here without getting caught by the cameras at some point. Do you?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“I like the security system at this place,” Traci said. “I’m the one who has to work alone in this foyer most nights, and I feel really safe. And Tony said it was a good system, too. He checked it out for me.”

A buzzer went off on the phone on the little desk and Traci Cardinale picked up the receiver and listened. When she put the phone down again, she said, “That was the nutritional lecture getting out. Simon gives it. They all go in there together, no matter what class they’re in. Simon will go down to the kitchen now and have a cup of coffee. He’ll be on his own for at least half an hour. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind talking to you. This thing with Tim has been on Simon’s mind a lot.” Traci got up and beckoned him along. “This way. You don’t even have to go up any stairs to get there. There aren’t any balcony railings to fall down. Isn’t that a relief?”

T
HE KITCHEN, GREGOR THOUGHT
as soon as he saw it, was a much better place to talk to a man about a murder than that office upstairs had been. It was an unpretentious space with a picnic table and windows looking out on the yard where the body had been found. There were no self-consciously tasteful prints or pretentious pieces of furniture to skew the atmosphere. Unfortunately, Simon Roveter looked capable of skewing the atmosphere all on his own. Gregor didn’t think he had ever seen a man who looked more like an actor trying to play himself. Graham Greene, that’s who Simon Roveter reminded Gregor of—not the writer but the writer’s characters. He was even wearing a tan linen suit. It should have looked out of place at this time of the year in this part of the country. But it suited Simon Roveter so well, it didn’t. He was an arresting presence, thinning hair, slack jawline, and all. So arresting, it took Gregor a moment to realize that Roveter was not alone. Standing at the far end of the picnic table, positioned a little sideways so that she could see both the kitchen door and out into the yard at the same time, was a woman in well-preserved middle-age: Magda Hale. She wore a bright green spangled leotard and bright green tights with bright green fairy boots to match. She needed to gain at least thirty pounds, just to look normal.

Simon Roveter looked confused when Traci ushered Gregor in, but as soon as he got an introduction, he brightened.

“Excellent,” he said. “Excellent. You don’t know how glad I am that you came back to talk to us. After all that mess yesterday—”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much confusion,” Magda Hale said. “I still don’t think it was really necessary to have the police here with their sirens and everything, and I don’t know who notified the reporters. It was a circus.”

“They made us sound like the Fountain of Death on the news,” Simon Roveter said. “This is a bad time for bad publicity, in case you didn’t know. We’re going national in a week. We’ve got a forty-city tour lined up. We’re opening studios in sixteen new cities across the Midwest and South. We’re starting a line of exercise wear. From a business point of view, Tim’s death was bad enough. But this—”

“It’s not that we look at Tim’s death mainly from a business point of view,” Magda Hale put in quickly. “We were all very fond of Tim. And, of course, we saw a lot of him.”

“He was living in the house,” Simon Roveter explained. “Temporarily.”

“We often have members of our staff living in the house,” Magda Hale put in. “Especially high-level members we really need to keep. We can’t always pay a lot in absolute cash terms, but this is a lovely place to live. In a good neighborhood. It’s a great incentive.”

“Tim wasn’t here on that basis, though,” Simon Roveter said. “He was just temporarily between apartments.”

“He had to get out of his last one because they tore the building down,” Magda Hale said. “I think it might have been condemned.”

If the staff had to live in buildings that were about to be condemned, Fountain of Youth must need an incentive like rooms in the house to keep good people. Gregor wondered how much this pair kept for themselves. He didn’t have the expertise to judge the relative costs of exercise clothes, but those would surely be considered a business expense in this case. The tan linen suit was off the rack, but not cheap.

Gregor walked over to the picnic table and looked out the window into the backyard. “I’ve just been talking to Miss Cardinale about your security systems. The cameras. The Golden Circle Keyholders. If you’d ever asked me about it, I would have told you it wasn’t a very good idea.”

Simon Roveter nodded. “The Golden Circle Keyholders, you mean. I agree with you. I’m afraid we just got stuck with it. It started with our studio out in California, which is just a regular studio without a house attached to it, and then one of our members from out there moved out here.” He shrugged.

“People are really very, very picky,” Magda Hale said. “I tried to explain that to the detective; that Mr. Bandero, but I just couldn’t seem to get across. I don’t think he’s a man who listens very well, do you?”

“He’s a policeman,” Simon Roveter said. “He has a job to do. He isn’t supposed to listen to us complain about our clients.”

“I’m not complaining about our clients.” Magda spoke sharply. “I’m just explaining something. I don’t feel we’ve been served very well by the police in this matter.”

She’s older than she looks, Gregor thought. She’s at least as old as I am. He stood awkwardly at the table, wondering what he was supposed to do next. That was the trouble with not having been brought fully into the police case. He didn’t know what these people had been asked. He didn’t know what blind alleys Tony Bandero had already stumbled into. He wished these two people didn’t make him so uncomfortable.

Gregor moved away from the table and walked around the room. It was a nice but perfectly ordinary kitchen. Refrigerator. Cook top. Oven. Microwave. Sink. He stopped at a door at the back of the room.

“Where does this go?” he said. “To the backyard?”

“No, no,” Simon Roveter told him. “The door to the backyard is down the hall you came through to get here. That’s the door to the pantry.”

“It’s a wonderful walk-in pantry,” Magda Hale said. “You should take a look at it. This house has been gutted and renovated at least six times before we did it, but nobody’s ever renovated the pantry. I don’t know why they don’t design them into houses these days. I’m sure the women of America could use them.”

Gregor opened the pantry door and stuck his head inside. It was too dark to see, but he could smell a sharp sourness that he imagined must be rotting vegetables. It was strong enough to make him queasy.

“There’s a light switch right there on the wall next to the door to your right,” Magda Hale said. “You’ll never see anything in the dark.”

Gregor reached around and found the switch. The smell was really awful, thick and wet and sharp. A triple row of track lights embedded in the ceiling sprang on. The room was full of muted pinks and greens directed at bins of vegetables and shelves of other vegetables in cans. Nothing was directed at the body on the floor, but the body was there, crumpled into a heap, and there was no doubt at all that it was dead.

“Oh, my God,” Magda Hale said, coming up beside Gregor. “It’s Stella Mortimer.”

Gregor must have stepped back when he saw what was in there on the floor. He didn’t remember doing it, but he was now out of the way of the door, giving everyone in the kitchen a clear look at what he had found.

He had forgotten that Traci Cardinale was still in the room. Now she rushed up to the door, took one look at the corpse lying on the floor, and started screaming again.

Dear Jesus Christ, Gregor thought. Doesn’t this woman ever do anything else?

“Nobody really wants to turn over a new leaf and start a whole new life. They’d only make just as much of a mess of it as they’ve made of the one they have.”

—
ALTERNATIVE PSYCHOTHERAPIST
,

Psychology Today

T
ONY BANDERO WAS IN
the house. He had been in the house for hours. The enormity of this—that Tony had gotten him all the way out from Philadelphia and then cut him out of the loop; that Tony had made him look like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe in the newspapers and then done everything possible to ensure that he could not perform even as well as he normally did—did not strike Gregor at first. There was too much to do. Gregor had never been in on a scene of the crime when he was an agent with the Bureau. The Bureau didn’t work that way. Even when Gregor was chasing serial killers, all he ever really did was to sit at a computer, or at the head of a table full of people who knew more about computers than he did, and talk about things that had happened miles away in Seattle and Salt Lake. Every once in a while, he had gone out to the places where crimes had happened months, or even years, before. He had stood at the edge of a ditch where a soft-spoken young man who worked for the phone company and collected Mickey Mouse cartoons on videotape had buried sixteen five-year-old boys. He had walked around the edges of dense thicket of brush where a drifter with a record as long as the
Oxford Unabridged Dictionary
had murdered the college sorority girl he had kidnapped three states away. The scenes were always sanitized and past’ usefulness, spiritual journeys instead of professional ones. Gregor hadn’t seen an actual murder scene, with the body on the floor and the tech men trying to measure the distances between ruts in the carpet, until he was retired and living on Cavanaugh Street. That was his first extracurricular murder and the case that had introduced him to Bennis Hannaford. That was also the case that had started
The Philadelphia Inquirer
calling him “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” By now, everybody had picked up on “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” a circumstance that made Gregor a little crazy. He wasn’t anything like Hercule Poirot. He wasn’t small. He wasn’t short. He wasn’t fussy. He didn’t go around telling everybody what a wonderful brain he had, because he often wasn’t sure that his brain was that wonderful. He couldn’t think of a fictional detective he was anything like. They were all much too sure of themselves. He knew which fictional detective he would like to be. Nero Wolfe got to sit in a chair and eat all day. He was never present at the scenes of crimes where middle-aged women seemed to have strangled on their own vomit.

Stella Mortimer hadn’t strangled on her own vomit. Gregor knew enough about how people died from arsenic poisoning to know that. She would have been sick, yes. She would have had cramps. She would have been violently and painfully ill for at least half an hour. She wouldn’t have fallen flat over until the very end, and then it would have been too late for her to strangle on anything. She would have been dead. This was different from cyanide, where the victim died right away, and from taxine, where the effect was so slow that strangling would have been eminently possible. Stella Mortimer hadn’t died from either cyanide or taxine. She wasn’t blue along her jawline. Her face hadn’t turned that odd color, like ecru dough. He couldn’t really know for sure until the lab tests had been done, and the medical examiner had made his pronouncements: but under the circumstances, he thought he had a right to make a guess. Tim Bradbury had died of arsenic poisoning. It was going to turn out that Stella Mortimer had died of it, too.

Tony Bandero came in while Gregor was on the kitchen phone, trying to arrange for the right New Haven cops to arrive at this scene—looking, in fact, for Tony himself. The door to the pantry was closed tight. So was a door to the pantry that came in on the other side, from some kind of servants’ staircase. Gregor had gone around the long way and shut it. Of course, the scene wasn’t secure. Gregor didn’t know enough about these people to have any sense of who he might be able to trust. It was better than nothing. He had even been careful to use a handkerchief when closing the pantry’s back door, just in case there were useful fingerprints on the doorknob.

By the time Tony Bandero came in, Gregor was talking to Philip Brye, asking for instructions.

“I’ll make the call myself,” the medical examiner was saying. “It’s not that complicated if you know what you’re doing.”

Obviously, Gregor wanted to say, I don’t know what I’m doing. Why should I?

Then Tony Bandero was there, swaying in the kitchen doorway, his thick flabby bulk rippling the surface of his brown wool suit. His suit, if anything, was more wrinkled and creased than it had been the day before. It was like he was pretending to be Colombo and making a bad job of it. Gregor gave Philip Brye the news of Tony’s arrival and hung up. Then he turned to Tony and demanded, “Just where did you come from?”

It was Magda Hale, not Tony Bandero, who answered. She sounded puzzled. “He’s been here since quarter to nine this morning,” she said, “interviewing people. We were all so disappointed that you couldn’t come, too.”

“Couldn’t?” Gregor asked.

Tony Bandero pushed his way across the room to where Gregor was standing and then beyond him. Traci Cardinale was still screaming, but he didn’t even look at her.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded.