Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (23 page)

“In your experience, most murderers like to watch their victims die,” Philip Brye said.

Gregor was startled, but not completely surprised. “You know,” he said, “I think that’s true. Not only of the poisoners I’ve known in my career, but of all the other murderers, no matter what kind of murderer they were. I knew someone once who poisoned a man with lye and stood right there and watched him drink it.”

“Ouch. How did he get conned into drinking it?”

“That’s the problem the direct poisoner has,” Gregor said. “He makes coffee for himself and his victim. He puts the poison in his victim’s coffee. Now what he’s got to do is get his victim to drink it. Which means, in the first place, that the victim can’t suspect that the murderer would go so far as to kill him.”

“Most people wouldn’t suspect that,” Philip Brye pointed out.

“True,” Gregor said, “but most people who end up murdered in complicated and deliberate ways such as this do know that their murderers hate them, or have a reason to fear them, or want something out of them. They’re not entirely without a clue. And what if we’re not talking about the first victim?”

“Do you think victims always suspect?”

“Well,” Gregor, said. “Let’s look at what we have here. First, Tim Bradbury is poisoned and his nude body is dumped in the yard. Then, yesterday, a piece of the balcony railing falls down and causes havoc, on the premises and in the media. These are both high-profile events.”

“True.”

“So,” Gregor went on, “what we have here is, we have a house in a crisis atmosphere, part of something that probably looks to the people who are living here to be creepy and maybe nearly supernatural. You can see the mood people are in.”

“Now.”

“Now it’s worse, yes, but it was bad when I was here yesterday. Especially after that railing fell.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at.” Phil Brye was coughing again.

“What I’m getting at is, either this woman died because she ate or drank something arsenic had been placed in or she was fed arsenic by someone who did not make her think that she might be at risk. If she ate or drank something poison had been placed in, we have a very serious situation here, because that would mean we have a poisoner who just doesn’t care.”

“But that isn’t what you think,” Philip Brye said.

“No,” Gregor admitted, “it isn’t. I think she took something from somebody, something she was deliberately handed. I wish I knew more of what she was like, if she was a suspicious person or a pragmatic one, if she was optimistic or pessimistic. I wish I knew whether the chances were good or poor that she would have felt it necessary, in the present circumstances, to look out for herself.”

“My guess is that the chances are nil,” Tony Bandero put in.

Gregor and Philip Brye turned to him in surprise. He must have been standing there for quite some time, Gregor realized, and he must have been very interested in hearing what Gregor had to say. When Tony Bandero wasn’t interested, he interrupted. Now he was rocking back and forth on his feet with his hands stuck into the pockets of his pants, his red face getting redder with every moment.

“The chances are nil,” he repeated, even more positively this time. “In my experience, nobody ever expects to get murdered except the professionals. The professionals are always watching out for it. But everybody else—” Tony gave a massive shrug. “Some woman starts nagging at her husband, putting him down, screaming and yelling at him, one day he takes out a forty-five and shoots her dead, and you can see it in her face, she was
surprised
.”

In Gregor’s experience, this was not the usual scenario when husbands killed wives. He let it go.

“It’s really useless to speculate about this anyway,” he said. “We don’t know anything about her yet. Dr. Brye hasn’t even gotten confirmation that this was an arsenic poisoning.”

“I haven’t even asked for one.”

“Maybe it’ll turn out to be a stroke or something,” Tony said. “If it doesn’t, I think we’ve got to go with the idea that what we’ve got here is a nut. That’s what you’re really the expert in, Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it? Nuts?”

Gregor was expert enough on the subject of what Tony Bandero called “nuts” to know that these two deaths didn’t have the shape or feel of the start of a serial murder case. He let this go, too.

“Why don’t we just let your technical people do their work,” he told Tony Bandero. “We can talk this all out later, when we finally have something to say.”

T
HERE WERE POLICE IN
the house again, and Frannie Jay was in a state of paralysis. Again. That was what she couldn’t help thinking about, sitting on the stairs in the foyer, listening to the sounds of them at the back of the first floor. This was happening to her
again
. How many times was it going to happen to her before she just lost it, before she went so rigid at the terror of it that she couldn’t move anymore? She thought of herself answering questions at the table after Tim Bradbury died:
When did you meet him? How long had you known him? What were you doing looking out the window that made it possible for you to see his foot?
There were all those gleaming copper molds hanging from the beams in the kitchen. There were all those stainless-steel bowls sitting on the kitchen counters. She thought of herself sitting on the back steps of the house in California, the steps that led to the beach:
Where were you? What were you doing? What happened next?
The policeman in California had been young and grim and very angry. He had made it clear to her from the beginning that he thought it was all her fault. Frannie remembered only the little silk flower he had worn through one of the buttonholes on his blue shirt, a poppy in honor of Veteran’s Day. The smell coming in from the ocean was high and rank. The air was wet and cold. Out here it was always cold. Frannie had been freezing since the moment she stepped off her bus. How long was it going to take them to think of the obvious? Before she came, everything was fine. Since she came, two people had been murdered. She might even have murdered them.

It was late now, after five. The work-out students had had their names and addresses taken by the police and had been sent home. Half a dozen of them or so would not be back, but most of them would. Frannie knew how it worked. Most people didn’t really believe it could happen to them. Most people were not smart enough to be afraid. They were excited. They imagined telling the story to friends and acquaintances, when it was over.
Do you remember those murders at the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio? Well, I was taking a class there at the time…

The foyer was empty, except for the occasional policeman or lab technician passing through to one of the vehicles outside. Most of the press vans had been forced out of the driveway into the road. There were still reporters and cameramen out there, but they were on foot. WTNH had a delay-remote setup out on Prospect Street. When the local news came on this evening, the pretty black woman who had already stopped her three times (
Can you tell us what the feelings of the staff are at this moment?
) would be standing in front of the house, holding a microphone to her lips and pretending that she wasn’t being chilled to pneumonia by the wind. Frannie wondered where the rest of the staff had gone. Magda and Simon were holed up in their bedroom. That was to be expected. Nick Bannerman and Traci Cardinale and Cici Mahoney and Susan Dietz and all those people seemed just to have disappeared. Maybe they had gone out for pizza without asking her to come along. Maybe it would be here like it was in California, after it was all over. Maybe she would functionally cease to exist.

A young patrolman carrying a white paper bag came through from the back, glanced without interest at Frannie sitting at the bottom of the stairs, and went out the front door. He was walking very fast and looking very distracted. Frannie stood up and flexed her knees. She couldn’t really tell if she was stiff from fear or from too much exercise. If everyone else had gone out without her, there was nothing she could do about it. If she confronted them with it, they would only deny it. They would say that they hadn’t been able to find her or that they hadn’t thought she would be interested. In California, after her picture had been in the paper, there were people who hadn’t been able to find her when she was sitting next to them on the bus.

Frannie went up the steps and onto the landing. From there she could see through the fan window over the front door and out onto the lawn that sloped to Prospect Street. That police detective, Tony Bandero, was standing in the middle of a crowd of people, apparently giving an interview. He always seemed to be giving interviews. Frannie went through the doors onto the second floor proper. She passed the exercise studio where the beginners’ class worked out and went to the door to the back staircase. Somebody, probably Simon, had gotten ambitious between yesterday and today. The walls on this floor were now decorated with life-size cardboard cutout posters of Magda Hale, the new ones where she was standing on a double-decker pyramid of words that read; “THE BEST NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION YOU’LL EVER MAKE.”

Frannie climbed up past the third floor, where Magda and Simon were, to the landing that led to her own bedroom. The hallway was dark. The window at the other end of it was heavily curtained and the curtains were closed. Frannie shook her head. What difference did it make if the curtains were closed? It was evening and January. The hallway would be dark even if the curtains were wide open and the sashes were all the way up. She found a light switch and used it. Little globe lights made to look like nineteenth-century gas lamps sprang on in two long lines on either side of the hall. They didn’t do much good, but at least they showed the path to Frannie’s bedroom door. After this, I’ll have to lock it when I leave it, she thought. It wasn’t locked now. She went down to it, opened up, and turned on her overhead light.

“Frannie?” somebody said from behind her.

Frannie jumped nearly a half foot in the air—and then instantly felt guilty about it. She realized that she was trembling in every part of her body, and had been for quite some time. She forced herself to turn slowly in the direction of the voice and to keep her face perfectly blank. Nick Bannerman was coming down the hall to her from the direction of the main staircase.

“Oh,” Frannie said.

“I frightened you.” Nick was already out of his exercise clothes. He was wearing black jeans and a black turtleneck and a big oversize black cotton sweater. With his dark skin, set in a shadowed room or on an unlit street corner, he would just have disappeared.

“You didn’t frighten me,” Frannie told him. “I’m jumpy.”

“Everybody’s jumpy.” Nick stopped at the door. “I just got finished talking to the world’s greatest detective and I’m absolutely wrung out. I thought if you hadn’t eaten yet, you might want to come out with me for some food.”

“I haven’t eaten yet.” Frannie thought of the way she had talked to this man just hours ago at the beginning of the day and blushed a little. She had been having one of her moods. She had been behaving as strangely as hell. She looked into her room and was glad to see she had made the bed this morning. “By the world’s greatest detective, did you mean Gregor Demarkian?”

“No, I didn’t mean Demarkian. I meant our own personal cop, Tony frigging Bandero. Excuse me. He talked to me for forty-five minutes and then he marched straight out onto the front lawn and told a crowd of reporters that he had a serious suspect in the case, but he couldn’t name him before he had more evidence. Meaning
me
. Which is, quite frankly, bullshit. I’m just the one Tony Bandero
wants
to be guilty.”

“Why?” Frannie was totally bewildered.

“Well,” Nick said drily, “I am the only African-American male in the group. And we all know how violent African-American males can be.”

“Oh. Does he say it like that? Does he say African-American like that, I mean.”

“He just says it. I don’t think the switch in nomenclature is working out too well. Jesse made a mistake with this one.”

“Jesse?”

“Jackson.”

“Oh,” Frannie said again. This was hopeless. She had heard of Jesse Jackson, sort of, but she couldn’t really pin him down. Some kind of Afri—black politician, she thought. Or maybe Negro? What was the right thing to say these days? Frannie didn’t know any black people really well. The ones she knew casually—the head teller at her bank in California; the preschool teacher who had the house next to hers on the beach—she wasn’t in a position to talk about race with. Or “nomenclature.” Frannie’s mother didn’t know any black people either, but she talked about them enough. “Those people” was how she put it. Frannie
knew
that was the wrong thing to say.

She looked back over her shoulder into her room. “Well,” she said. “I’d love to get something to eat. I just need to get changed.”

“Wear black and wrap your hair up in a hat,” Nick told her. “We’ll sneak out the back way.”

“Is that necessary, sneaking out the back way?”

“It is if you don’t want to end up on Channel eight.”

Frannie desperately didn’t want to end up on Channel 8. “Well,” she said. “I—um—I have to take a quick shower and then, well, I can’t ask you in while I’m getting dressed because—um—”

“Oh, no. I understand.”

“Well, I’ll only be a few minutes. If you could just, uh—”

“I’ll wait down on the second-floor balcony,” Nick said quickly. “I’ve got some reading I have to do anyway.”

“I’ll be about twenty minutes.”

“Good.”

“Good,” Frannie repeated. Then she blushed again.

Good heavens, she thought. How many years have I been dating? How many times have I said yes to an offer to go out? Doesn’t it ever get any easier?

The answer, as far as Frannie could tell, was no.

W
HEN VIRGINIA HANLEY WALKED
into the New Temple Bar, the television in the back was turned to
WTNH Action News
and Detective Tony Bandero was talking about the important suspect he had and how close he was to closing the case. Virginia took this with a grain of salt. It was all dope and
them
, that’s what it was. “Them” was Virginia’s currently favored term for Hispanics from South America. That was where all the dope came from, South America, but Virginia didn’t really blame the South Americans. The South Americans were just trying to get rich. It was the North Americans Virginia had absolutely no respect for. There was no way to tell what the North Americans were getting out of their part in the drug trade, except poorer by the minute and dead too soon. Or maybe not soon enough. Virginia hadn’t really thought this through. It was not on her agenda. She was just tired of listening to the sound of Detective Tony Bandero’s voice, and she didn’t believe him when he said he knew what he was doing. Virginia didn’t believe any man when he said he knew what he was doing.