Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (28 page)

Dessa Carter and Virginia Hanley sat on chairs. Christie Mulligan sat on the floor, her legs folded under her in a quasilotus position. All three women looked solemn, as if they were invited guests at a funeral. Virginia Hanley looked bored, too.

Now there’s somebody who wouldn’t surprise me if she turned out to be a serial killer, Gregor thought. Aside from looking bored and solemn, Virginia Hanley also looked smug. Serial killers were always smug.

Gregor leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. “What I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, “was something each of you said to the detectives doing the questioning yesterday afternoon. You may remember that I sat in on some of those interviews.”

“You sat in on mine,” Virginia Hanley said. “I didn’t like it. I almost registered a protest.”

Of course you did, Gregor thought. He said, “Yes. Well. What I want to do now is get more specific about just a single point. Each of you were talking about the period of time just around lunch, and you said you were on your way to the dining room—”

“We were late,” Christie Mulligan said crisply. “At least, I was. Tara and Michelle and I were in the bathroom so long, we missed the line.”

“I was late, too,” Dessa Carter said, looking tired. “I had to call home.”

Gregor looked at Virginia Hanley and Virginia shrugged. “I was probably late, too,” she said. “I stopped to look at the brochures about the new line of exercise clothes.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “Fine. Did the three of you see each other when you were going upstairs?”

“We saw Dessa,” Christie Mulligan said. “She was on the landing ahead of us.”

“I heard them coming up behind me,” Dessa said.

“I didn’t see anybody,” Virginia said.

“All right,” Gregor told them, “now. From what I remember, Miss Carter, when you were asked if you heard or saw anything out of the ordinary, you said that the only thing you could fix on was a bird—”

“Oh,” Christie Mulligan said. “Did you hear that, too? Wasn’t that odd?”

“I didn’t hear a bird,” Virginia Hanley said.

Dessa Carter shifted her bulk around in her chair. She was almost fat enough to need two chairs. Gregor thought she would be much more comfortable in something without arms.

“It went
koo roo
,” Dessa said. “Like that. And then there was this odd metallic sound—”

“A
clank
,” Christie Mulligan put in.

“Right. A
clank
. And then this other sound that went
whoosh
. Like air being let out of a chamber.”

“That stuff didn’t sound like a bird,” Christie Mulligan said, “and that was what was so odd,, because every time you got the bird noises, you got the
clank
and the
whoosh
. As if they were connected somehow.”

“That’s right,” Dessa Carter said.

“Excuse me,” someone else said.

They all looked up—Dessa Carter, Virginia Hanley, Christie Mulligan, Magda Hale, and Gregor—to find the tall blond step aerobics instructor leaning across the rail to them. She looked pale.

“Excuse me,” the instructor said again. “My name is Frannie Jay?” She made the statement a question. We talked yesterday. I don’t know if you remember?”

“I remember. Did you hear this bird or whatever it was yesterday afternoon, too?”

“Not yesterday, no. It was the night Tim Bradbury died, the night I came here. I was the one who found Tim Bradbury’s body.”

“I remember that, too,” Gregor told her. What he didn’t remember was anything about a
koo roo
or a
clank
or a
whoosh
in any of the reports Tony Bandero had given him. Tony was either keeping information from him again, or engaging in sloppy police work. Unless Frannie Jay hadn’t mentioned the sound at the time.

Gregor asked. “Did you tell the police about this the night Tim Bradbury died?”

“Oh, yes,” Frannie Jay replied. “Such an odd noise.
Koo roo, clank, whoosh
. Over and over again. Just like that. I thought it was some kind of bird, too.”

“Except for the
clank whoosh
part,” Christie Mulligan interjected.

“After a while, I just got spooked,” Frannie Jay said. “I—it just sounded so odd. So eerie. In the dark like that. So I went over to my window to look out and see if I could spot it, and I saw—I saw—well, the leg. Tim Bradbury’s leg. Instead.”

“Oh,” Christie Mulligan said. “Maybe it’s a sound a corpse makes, and when we were going upstairs we were hearing that Stella Mortimer woman. Hearing her dead body, I mean.”

“I don’t know when you went upstairs,” Virginia Hanley said decisively, “but I went upstairs nearly an hour before they found the body. Maybe more.”

“Maybe she’d been dead for an hour by the time they found the body,” Christie Mulligan suggested.

“I don’t think dead bodies say
koo roo
,” Dessa Carter objected. “I don’t think they say anything.”

“What time was it when you came upstairs?” Gregor asked them, trying to keep to the point.

“Just about twelve o’clock exactly,” Dessa Carter told him. “I saw the clock on Traci Cardinale’s desk before I started up.”

“I was going to say I didn’t know,” Christie Mulligan said, frowning, “but we were just behind Dessa, so it must have been around the same time. Somehow, wearing a watch doesn’t seem to go with wearing exercise clothes,” she explained.

“Wearing a watch goes with wearing my exercise clothes,” Virginia Hanley said. She held her right arm in the air, displaying an intricately worked gold band. It was the kind of watch that went with full formal evening dress, not thirty minutes of step aerobics.

Gregor turned his attention to Virginia Hanley. “You reported hearing a noise yourself. I remember hearing you do it. Was it this same noise?”

“It went
koo roo
,” Virginia Hanley said. “It went
clank
and
whoosh
, too, but it wasn’t a bird, for God’s sake. It wasn’t a corpse talking, either. That was just ridiculous.”

“Everything anybody says around here that she doesn’t agree with is just ridiculous,” Christie Mulligan told Gregor. “You should hear her on the subject of the vegetarian menu. And she doesn’t even have to eat it.”

“You should hear her on the subject of my weight,” Dessa Carter contributed. “If I wasn’t used to that kind of thing, I would have decked her by now.”

“You should deck her the next time you feel she deserves it,” Christie Mulligan said. “It will be very good for your self-esteem.”

“I don’t think I have a problem with my self-esteem,” Dessa Carter told her icily.

Gregor didn’t want to get caught in the trap of discussing everybody’s self-esteem. “Mrs. Hanley,” he said. “Please. You were where when you heard this noise?”

“Halfway up the stairs between the first and second floors, on the half-landing.”

“And this noise was coming from the first floor, from the direction of the kitchen or the pantry?”

Virginia Hanley looked surprised. “Of course not. How could it possibly have been coming from there?”

“That’s where I thought it was coming from,” Christie Mulligan said.

“That’s where I thought it was coming from, too,” Dessa Carter said. “You know, Virginia, it’s just possible, just remotely possible, that every once in a while, you might be wrong.”

“Well, I’m not wrong about this,” Virginia Hanley said. “I can’t see how it would have gotten into the kitchen, never mind the pantry. And I can’t see that no one would have noticed.”

“That no one would have noticed what?” Gregor asked, slightly bewildered.

“Why, the car, of course,” Virginia Hanley said. “That’s what it was. A car with an exhaust system problem. I forget what it’s called, but it’s very common. It happened to me just last year. And really, after all the trouble it cost me, I’d know that sound anywhere.”

T
HE WORST THING, MAGDA
Hale decided as she eased her bright red Toyota Corolla more or less into a parking space in the empty back corner of the lot at the Fleck Medical Group in Orange, wasn’t her reaction times, but caring about her reaction times. She could make the stops at red lights and respond to other drivers wanting to change lanes, but the whole procedure seemed infinitely silly, useless, utterly unimportant. She longed to put her head down on the steering wheel and go to sleep. She longed to think about floating. She longed to go back to her bedroom and take another one of these pills, because the ones she had taken at ten o’clock this morning were beginning to wear off.

It was now three thirty in the afternoon, and every part of Magda Hale’s body ached. She had spent the entire morning with her advanced aerobics class. To be here now, she had to hand that same class over to Cici Mahoney for the afternoon. She didn’t like to do it. Cici had begun to notice how many corners she was cutting, how much time she was spending slacking off. All the young instructors had. If Magda wasn’t careful, Simon would start to notice, too. Magda didn’t know what she would do then. Fountain of Youth was Simon’s entire life. It belonged to him more than it did to Magda, no matter what the legal papers said, because it had been his idea at the beginning and his idea to incorporate and his idea to expand. Fountain of Youth was certainly Simon’s entire life with Magda. Magda didn’t think they had talked about anything else for years. What would they say to each other if Magda couldn’t be part of the business anymore? What would the clients say if they found out Magda was getting old?

Getting old.

I’m not getting old, Magda told herself now, pulling the keys from the ignition and climbing out onto the asphalt. There was a wind blowing in swiftly from the east. It was very cold. All of Magda’s joints ached. She hadn’t wanted to take more pills when she was coming down here. How would she be able to tell the doctor where it hurt? She was just so afraid of the pain. If Jimmy Fleck wouldn’t give her more Demerol, she wasn’t sure what she would do. High-impact aerobics was the most important part of her day. Leaping and bouncing, stomping and twirling: there were people who said they got high from that alone; the more vigorous the workout, the better it sold. She couldn’t go out on the road and do only the geriatric stuff, or the yoga, or the lectures on how to stay young forever. Nobody would listen to her.

I’m not getting old, Magda told herself again, and then, because the Demerol hadn’t completely worn off, she hurried across the parking lot to the medical center’s front doors, forcing her legs to move swiftly in the chill. She had two more Demerol in her purse, just in case she needed them. There were six more in the little brown plastic prescription bottle back home. Already, her legs were beginning to send out warning signs of sharp shooting pains waiting under the dull ache.

Jimmy Fleck’s office was on the first floor: a good thing, because Magda wasn’t sure she wanted to climb stairs. Magda gave her name to the receptionist. The receptionist was new in the last six months and not somebody who knew her. Jimmy Fleck always had new receptionists. He couldn’t seem to keep women working for him. Magda wondered why that was.

The waiting room was empty. There was a small artificial Christmas tree on a table in one corner, covered with tinsel and glowing with tiny white lights. There was a pile of magazines on the coffee table that could not have belonged to anyone intimately connected to Jimmy Fleck’s life:
Woman’s Day Christmas Crochet Patterns
and
Family Circle’s 1001 Things to Make for the Holidays
. Magda started to sit down, and Jimmy Fleck himself appeared in the doorway to the offices, looking concerned.

“Magda?”

Magda forced herself to stand up straighten Jimmy Fleck was at least fifteen years younger than she was. He didn’t look forty. Magda always felt slightly anxious around him, as if he were judging her, as if the judgments of young men were somehow what really mattered. In all likelihood, Fleck only judged the swiftness with which her bills were paid.

Magda held out her hand to shake and winced. Her hip was acting up again.

Jimmy cocked his head. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is that the leg you were telling me about?”

“Leg, hip, back, everything,” Magda said, catching her breath. “I think I must have strained something. And I have the introductory seminar this week. And a tour that starts next week.”

“You’ve been working?”

“Of course I’ve been working. I have to work. Working with me personally is what people pay for when they come to these seminars.”

“Have you been taking some kind of painkiller?”

The dull ache was definitely giving way now to sharp shooting pains. The pains were starting in her hips and snaking up her back.

“I found some Demerol in the medicine cabinet. I’ve been taking those when I needed them.”

“Do you need them often?”

“I need them when I work. The last few days, when I work, I’m in pain.”

Jimmy Fleck stepped back, contemplated her from one end to the other, and shook his head. He was a tall man with a slight stoop and too much thick black hair. He wore wire-rimmed glasses like the prep school boys at Yale.

“All right,” he said. “Come on back with me.”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to take some x-rays. We’re going to take quite a lot of x-rays.”

“I thought you would.”

“Then I’m going to pull at you a little, to see what I can find. Have you taken any of that Demerol recently?”

“Not since ten o’clock.”

“Good.”

He led her thought the rabbit-warren maze of cubicles that all doctor’s offices seemed to be these days. The more Magda walked, the harder she found it to go on moving. The walls of the cubicles were covered with posters exhorting her to quit smoking, lose weight, do a monthly breast exam, count her cholesterol. The x-ray room was at the very back, in one of the only two rooms in the warren with real walls instead of just partitions. The other one was Jimmy Fleck’s own office. Why was it, when doctors made so much money they wouldn’t spend it on decent renovations?

“Marie?” Jimmy Fleck called out.

Marie was Jimmy Fleck’s nurse, the one woman he had been able to keep in his employ. Magda thought she must have been with the practice forever. She was an older woman who believed in older things. Marie still wore a white dress and white stockings and white shoes and the fancy winged white cap she had been given at her hospital nursing school. Now she appeared out of nowhere, impassive but ready.