Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (27 page)

“You sure you don’t want me to stick around?” Connie Hazelwood asked. “Just in case you need to make a quick getaway?”

Gregor could easily imagine himself wanting to make a quick getaway, especially if Tony showed up. He noted that there were no cars parked under the porte cochere. There were several in the parking lot out back, but there ought to be. It was ten o’clock in the morning and classes were in full swing.

“Go have lunch or do your homework,” Gregor told her. “Come back to get me at two.”

“It’s too early for lunch,” Connie Hazelwood said, “and I’m too old to have homework.”

“Go,” Gregor said.

Connie Hazelwood sighed heavily and revved the engine. Gregor went up the walk to the front door and rang the bell. Deep in the foyer, Traci Cardinale must have checked him out in the security camera. The intercom next to the door crackled on. Traci said, “Hello, Mr. Demarkian” in what sounded like a garbled and slightly nasal way. The door clicked open. Gregor went inside and closed it again.

“Goodness,” Traci Cardinale said. “I didn’t expect to see you here this morning, Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t think we were going to have anybody here from the police until later this afternoon.

Gregor was not exactly “from the police,” in spite of Tony Bandero’s invitation, but he wasn’t going to point that out to Traci Cardinale.

“Is that the official word?” he asked her. “Later this afternoon?”

“That’s what that policeman told me. That detective who was here at the end last night. The one in the uniform. Mr. McKay.”

“He wasn’t a detective. He was a patrolman.”

“Oh. I thought all policemen were detectives. Anyway, I wasn’t expecting you. Is there something I can do to help?”

The balcony railing had still not been repaired. Gregor wondered how long it would take.

“I wanted to talk to three of your students, if they’re here,” he said. He fished around in his coat pockets for the note he had written to himself. He had to stop writing notes to himself and putting them in his pockets. He lost half of them. He always ended up reminding himself of Columbo. He really
hated
Columbo. It was bad enough that so many cops were stupid. It was worse that there was one who was supposed to want to look stupid. It was nonsense that looking stupid would get you more information than looking smart. He had to start getting more sleep. He was going off on tangents again.

He found the note he had written to himself. “Dessa Carter,” he read off. “Christie Mulligan. Virginia Hanley. Are they here today?”

“Oh,” Traci said. “Well. None of them has canceled. They’re all in the beginners’ class.”

Gregor had thought they might be all in the same class. The best way for three people to witness more or less the same thing was to be in more or less the same place at more or less the same time.

“Why don’t you tell me where the beginners’ class is meeting,” Gregor said, “and I’ll just go up there and wait until they’ve finished with whatever it is they’re doing.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Traci said quickly. “Not everybody in a class likes to be observed. And the instructor may object to it, too. Are you—I mean, are these women suspects or something? Do you think one of them killed Stella?”

“No. It’s just something I overheard during the questioning yesterday afternoon that I would like to clarify.”

“Oh.” Traci Cardinale looked uncomfortable. “Well. The thing is, Mr. Demarkian, I mean, I’m not really authorized to make a decision like this and, well, everybody is in class right now—”

“I’m not in class right now,” Magda Hale said.

Gregor and Traci looked up. Magda Hale was leaning over the balcony a little to the side of the plywood barrier. She looked tired and—Gregor was sure of this—a little high.

“That’s Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it? Do you want to take an exercise class?”

“He wants to talk to some of the women,” Traci said. “Miss Carter and Miss Mulligan and Ms. Hanley. I’ve told him I didn’t really think he ought to do that—”

“Why not?” Magda Hale interrupted.

“Oh,” Traci said. “Well, I don’t know. It didn’t seem right. And I didn’t even know if they were all here today.”

Magda Hale brushed this off. “They’re all here today. They’re in the beginners’ class, aren’t they? That’s step aerobics this morning. It’s not the students I’d worry about if I were you, Traci. It’s Frannie Jay. For someone who spends her life jumping up and down in front of dozens of stranger in a leotard, she’s awfully touchy about her privacy. Are the beginners’ still in the second-floor studio today?”

“Yes,” Traci said. “Yes, they are.”

“Then come on up, Mr. Demarkian. You can witness your first step aerobics class.”

Gregor shoved himself out of his coat, handed it to Traci Cardinale, and climbed the stairs to the second-floor balcony.

“W
HAT YOU HAVE TO
remember about an operation like this,” Magda Hale said as she led him down the second-floor hall to the studio he had been in on his first day at Fountain of Youth, “is that no matter what else you’re offering women, you
have
to offer them a method of losing weight. That’s the bottom line. You can talk all you want to about staying young and staying fit and staying healthy. The staying young part might even be a draw for some of the older women. Most of your clients, though, are going to want one thing and one thing only, and that is to get thinner fast. It doesn’t matter how much they weigh, either. Twenty pounds overweight or twenty pounds underweight, they all want to get thinner fast.”

They stopped at the door to the studio and Magda Hale opened up and poked her head inside. Music rolled out.

“That’s ‘Shake Your Body,’ and it’s just started,” she said. “This version takes about twelve minutes. Come in and sit down, Mr. Demarkian.”

Gregor let Magda Hale lead him to one of the theater chairs on the platform overlooking the studio floor. On the studio floor itself, the same rows of women he had observed the first time were now moving back and forth in front of little black plastic platforms, led by a young woman with long blond hair who was facing the mirror at the front of the room. Gregor assumed the mirror must be for the benefit of the instructor. He couldn’t see that it was doing the students any good. If he was a woman who thought she needed to lose weight, he would have hated looking at himself in it.

“To the right. To the middle. To the left. To the middle. And
step
,” the blond instructor said.

The women stepped. Gregor wondered how they managed to stay in sync like that. He recognized Dessa Carter in the back row, because she was unmistakable. The fat one.

“This is called step aerobics,” Magda said, leaning against the low rail that separated the viewing area from the studio proper. “It’s this year’s miracle discovery. There’s always a miracle discovery. A couple of years ago, it was the ultra-low-fat diet. We were all supposed to keep our fat intake down to ten or fifteen percent of our total calories. Then we could eat as much as we wanted without ever gaining weight.”

“I take it it didn’t work,” Gregor said.

“Oh, it worked just fine,” Magda told him. “The problem is, nobody could stand to stay on the diet for long. No butter. No cheese. No oils except in very minimal amounts. No yogurt. No milk except skim. No ham or dark meats, ever. No chicken skin.”

“What was left?”

“Rice and beans. Potatoes eaten plain. Raw green vegetables and steamed vegetables. Oh, and pure sugar sweets. Cakes and cookies have too much fat in them, but if you wanted to you could sit down with a jar of orange marmalade and eat it with a spoon. People did.”

“And they still lost weight?”

“Sure. Ultra low fat was basically just another calorie restriction diet, another variation on a theme. There isn’t anyone on earth who can eat enough rice and beans in combination to exceed, say, two thousand calories a day. Even if you’re adding marmalade to that, you won’t go much above twenty-five hundred. Since most women with serious weight-loss needs are doing at least thirty-five hundred, you get—”

“Weight loss,” Gregor said.

“Exactly. Then there’s the Puritan factor. The women who go on a diet like that who don’t really need to lose weight tend to be obsessives. They won’t eat the marmalade even though the diet says they can. They won’t eat until they’re full, either. They’ll sit there with a little plate of rice and beans all calculated to USDA portion sizes, when everybody knows that USDA portion sizes aren’t big enough to satisfy a hamster. So you see, one way or another, everybody lost weight while it lasted, but it didn’t last. Life isn’t much fun if you can never have butter on your mashed potatoes.”

Gregor cocked his head toward the women on the studio floor. “This isn’t a diet.”

“No, it isn’t,” Magda agreed. “For the last ten years or so, we’ve been very big on exercise. There’s nothing really wrong with that, of course. We could all use more exercise, except maybe for exercise instructors, who could probably use less. But the theory is, of course, that exercise can help you keep weight off and probably even help you take it off. And, if you’re in reasonably good shape when you start, you can dress up for it.”

The women in this class didn’t seem to be dressed up for exercise. Most of them were wearing plain black leotards and plain black tights. The instructor, however, was wearing a silver and silver-blue lame striped leotard, silver-blue tights, and a silver-blue Greek fisherman’s cap. Gregor could see what Magda Hale meant.

“I suppose I didn’t expect you to be so cynical about it,” he said finally. “From your advertisements and the other material I’ve seen around here, I thought you’d be a true believer.”

“Oh, but I am.” Magda Hale shook her head. “I believe in diet and exercise, especially for keeping yourself young and healthy. But most of the women who come to these courses don’t give a damn if they’re healthy. They only care if they’re thin. And that, you see, is the dirty little secret of the whole diet industry.”

“What is?”

“That some people can’t be thin. Not on a long-term basis. No matter what they do. I’m not saying they have to be as fat as Miss Carter.” Magda and Gregor looked across the room at Dessa Carter. “Most women aren’t that heavy and won’t get to be that heavy no matter what they do. I’m saying that there are a lot of perfectly normal women who are twenty pounds heavier than the charts say they should be—the old charts, that is—and nothing they ever do is going to change that.”

“Are there new charts?”

“Oh, yes,” Magda said. “And we don’t have any of them out here. In fact, I don’t know a single diet or exercise business that does have the new charts anywhere where the clients can see them. According to the new charts, it’s just fine for a forty-year-old woman who’s five four to weigh as much as a hundred and fifty pounds. According to the old charts, the outside limit is about one hundred thirty, and the recommended weight is more like one twenty or one fifteen. That means that eighty-five percent of American women over forty are too heavy. That means that they’re also unhealthy, and getting unhealthier every year. Never mind minor little facts like the one that says American women are living longer every year.”

“You do sound cynical.”

Magda shrugged. “You don’t tell potential clients about the new charts. You don’t tell them they’re wrong to want to lose weight, even if they’re anorexic as hell and ready for a hospital. You don’t tell them they’ve simply got a body type that doesn’t fit the present fashions and is never going to. You always hold out hope of salvation through fasting and discipline. And if you don’t do that, if you try to be honest about what you can do for people, you go out of business.”

“I take it you’re not in any danger of going out of business.”

“No, I’m not,” Magda Hale said, “but at least I haven’t gone as far as some people go. I’d probably have been ready to expand a long time ago if I had.”

“How far do people go?”

“Well,” Magda Hale said, “a couple of the diet companies used to dress their salespeople up in white coats and not quite say they were doctors and not quite say they weren’t, if you see what I mean. So that people thought they’d had a medical consultation or a session with a nutritionist. Congress held an investigation and had a fit. Did you hear about it?”

“No.”

Magda Hale smiled. “Of course you didn’t. Practically nobody did. The regular press didn’t cover it. The women’s magazines didn’t cover it either, because they get huge amounts of advertising money from the diet centers and the fitness clubs. And most people just didn’t want to know. Tell the average American woman these days that she’s never going to lose the extra twenty pounds, and she’s going to think you just sentenced her to death. Hell, most of the people we get here would rather be sentenced to death. They’d rather hear that they had cancer than that they were always going to be what they call fat.”

“Step
up
,” the blond woman at the front of the group insisted. “Step up. Step up. Step
right
. Step middle. Step
left
. Step
up
.”

Magda Hale checked her watch. “One more sequence and then the cooldown. You wouldn’t believe how hard we work to make this sound all New Age and professional, nothing at all like those futile exercise programs your mother went on when you were a kid. God, I don’t understand people sometimes. Especially women.”

“Step up. Step
up
. Step right. Step middle. Step left. Step middle. And
breathe
,” the blond woman said.

D
ESSA CARTER WAS THE
fat one. Christie Mulligan was the extremely thin one. Virginia Hanley was the fortyish woman who looked like she ought to be presiding over the latest meeting of the local Junior League. When the class had finished their step routine to “Shake Your Body,” Magda Hale called a time-out and separated these three from the rest and called them over to talk to Gregor. Christie Mulligan’s friends didn’t like it. The one called Tara even threatened to call a lawyer, on the assumption that Christie was about to be questioned by a hostile government force who might suspect her of a crime and, therefore, needed the protection of official representation. When Christie herself turned this suggestion down, Tara moved as close as she could to the platform, so that she could listen to everything that was said. Gregor didn’t care if the entire class listened to everything that was said. He was, in fact, a little put off by the way Magda Hale had arranged things. It was all too organized. He didn’t want to come off as the school principal, ferreting out miscreants in the girls’ rooms.