Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (31 page)

“Why should I mind? I’m not paying for it.”

Right, Gregor thought. He picked up the receiver of the instrument she pushed across the desk to him, and called Philip Brye.

T
HE NEIGHBORHOOD SURROUNDING THE
New Haven morgue and the New Haven medical examiner’s office was much more threatening in the dark than it had been in the daylight—so much more threatening, Connie Hazelwood tried to talk Gregor out of going there and taking her with him. It was only six thirty-two, but it might as well have been midnight. The streets were no longer deserted and the double- and triple-decker houses no longer looked respectable. In Gregor’s younger days, people who were breaking the law used to try to stay out of the way of the police. Now there were prostitutes working not fifteen feet from a building patrolmen went in and out of all night, and junkies shooting up on porches just across the street from the place where their bodies would eventually end up. Maybe the junkies were all smoking these days. Gregor hadn’t kept up with the fashions in street drugs. Except for a few self-appointed holy knights of the drug war, Gregor didn’t know a cop of any variety, federal, state, or local, who wanted to have anything to do with drugs. Drugs were a black hole that ate time and energy. It was depressing as hell to be confronted daily with the job of protecting the lives of people who were determined to end up dead. Gregor told Connie Hazelwood to go cruise a safer neighborhood for an hour and got out onto the curb. Right here, right next to the morgue building itself, the sidewalk was empty. On the other side of the street, very young girls in very short skirts and very high heels were parading back and forth, trying to keep warm. All of them were under eighteen, and all of them had their hair dyed one shade or another of violently yellow blond.

Gregor went into the relative warmth of the morgue foyer, gave his name to the guard at the desk, and let himself be checked out and buzzed through. This time, though, when he got back to the clerk’s desk, Philip Brye was ready and waiting for him. The clerk was a short, roundish young woman with dark hair and plump hands. She wrote his name in her book and otherwise ignored him. Philip Brye was holding two gigantic Danish pastries. He handed the cheese one over to Gregor.

“It is cheese, isn’t it?” he asked. “You can have the strawberry one if you want instead.”

Gregor couldn’t imagine eating a strawberry Danish. He took the cheese one and began to follow Philip Brye back to his office.

“I take it you put some kind of rush on the lab reports for Stella Mortimer,” he said. “Either that, or you’ve been doing them personally.”

“I can’t do lab reports.” Philip Brye kicked open his office door and gestured Gregor inside. “I get the vapors every time I see a test tube. I did the autopsy myself.”

“And?”

“And what did you expect? Death consistent with poisoning by arsenic, which, by the way, is what the lab people found when they analyzed the contents of her stomach. That and traces of what was probably an English muffin, with butter. Also coffee. Stella Mortimer wasn’t much of a health food nut.”

The lab reports were lying in the middle of Philip Brye’s desk, enclosed in a file clearly marked
AUTOP: SM
in red felt-tipped pen. Gregor picked them up and took them over to a chair where he could sit down and examine them. He took a large bite of Danish and flipped the file open.

“She didn’t have to be,” he said in answer to Philip Brye’s comment about the health food. “She wasn’t hired to be a role model, like the instructors. She was hired to take the pictures. Are all these numbers down this side supposed to mean something to me?”

“Not really. They’re for administration. Take the next page.”

Gregor turned to the next page. This was the stomach analysis, and he understood all of it. He couldn’t count the number of stomach analyses he read while he was heading up the Behavioral Sciences Department. Eventually, he had gotten an agent trainee to read them for him. They always made him a little ill. Gregor ran through the technical language that added up to an English muffin with butter and a cup of coffee—gluten simplex, sucrose, dextrose, paraphalymides—and looked up.

“She took a lot of sugar in her coffee.”

“She did this time, yes.”

“Do you think somebody made the coffee for her? The sugar would do something to hide the taste of arsenic.” Gregor sighed. “You know, I’ve investigated maybe half a dozen arsenic poisonings in my life, and you know what always bothers me?”

“No,” Philip Brye said. “What?”

“Arsenic tastes awful,” Gregor told him. “Arsenic tastes really, really awful. I know. I’ve tasted it. In the interests of research, if you get me. And yet people eat the stuff all the time. They eat massive quantities of it. That’s why they die.”

“Be reasonable, Gregor. Stella Mortimer didn’t eat massive quantities of arsenic. She ate, or more probably drank, just enough to kill her. And the taste was disguised in the food she ate with it.”

“Arsenic isn’t cyanide,” Gregor pointed out. “You need more than a drop or two.”

“True. But arsenic is a hell of a lot easier to come by and it does the job. You wouldn’t believe how much of the stuff we have sitting around here in the evidence room. You’re not supposed to be able to buy straight arsenic without signing for it, but people do. They most certainly do. Then they go out and poison other people’s dogs with it.”

“Is that what most of the arsenic you collect has been used for?”

“Oh, yeah. Dogs and cats. People are incredibly nasty about other people’s pets. Dogs are as fussy as humans are about the tastes of the foods they eat. At least some dogs are. If you can disguise the taste for dogs, why couldn’t you disguise the taste for people?”

“Maybe it’s the politeness factor. Maybe if somebody gives you something to eat, or makes it for you, maybe you feel obligated to eat it even if it tastes awful.”

“Remind me never to do that again,” Philip Brye muttered.

Gregor flipped through to the next page in the file. This file was much thicker than the file at Fountain of Youth, but Gregor didn’t think it was much more revealing. Height. Weight. Eye color. Hair color. He couldn’t find anything unusual. At the tune she died, Stella Mortimer hadn’t been on any of the common recreational drugs. She hadn’t been on the pill. She had gone through menopause. She had had her gallbladder removed. Gregor could have said the same things about a Park Avenue Chihuahua. He flipped another page in the file and came to the detailed physical descriptions of internal body parts. He flipped the file closed and handed it back to Philip Brye.

“She hadn’t been dead very long when we found her,” he said. “None of the vomit was dry.”

“None of the smell had cleared off, either,” Philip Brye said. “Now that’s something else about arsenic. It takes time. With cyanide, you hand the poison over, and seconds later, your victim is belly-up. And there you are, right on the scene. With arsenic, you have time to arrange an alibi. Or at least a getaway.”

“Did anybody get away from Fountain of Youth yesterday?” Gregor asked.

“You’d know more about that than me,” Philip Brye replied. “Tony Bandero is supposed to be trying to find out where she was when she ate last, but he doesn’t seem to be making much progress with it. The general assumption, from what I heard, was that people who work at Fountain of Youth eat at Fountain of Youth, because the nearest restaurant is a hefty walk away. I didn’t see anything like English muffins or butter in that kitchen, though.”

“I didn’t either,” Gregor said, “but she could have brought all that with her. Did she have a refrigerator in her office, or anything like that?”

“I don’t know. We could ask. The uniforms will be talking to you, even if Tony Bandero isn’t. In fact, from what I hear, the uniforms are real interested in you.”

“Tony is real interested in me too,” Gregor said, “it’s just the wrong kind of interest. I keep wondering what it is he isn’t telling me. In spite of all the hotdogging, my guess is that he’s a better than competent cop. He’s got to know more about what’s going on here than he’s letting on.”

“So that he can pull it out of his hat at the last minute and look like a genius? Yeah, that would be about Tony’s speed. What is it you think he might know?”

Gregor had been considering this question for some time now. If he was looking to make a media splash and stage a public coup, a clear win over the most overhyped murder investigator of the second half of the twentieth century (which was what Gregor considered himself to be;
way
overhyped), what information would he hold back? What information was it that this case could not be solved without?

“I think,” Gregor told Philip Brye, “that there may be more information than he’s been letting on about where Tim Bradbury’s body was before it showed up on the lawn at Fountain of Youth. That naked body is the single most troublesome factor in this entire case. It’s the one thing that makes this case odd.”

“I can get you the original lab reports,” Philip Brye offered. “I can probably get you the investigating officers’ reports, too. It may not be legal, but Tony could hardly complain after all the time he’s spent talking to the television reporters about how he’s made you a full-fledged part of his team and how he’s given you complete access to all the relevant information.”

“Could you get me transcriptions of the interviews, too? I want to know if anybody else heard this bird or car or whatever it was—have you heard about that?”

“Koo roo. Clang. Whoosh.”

“That, yes. I’ve got three people who say it was a bird, and one who swears it was a car. Maybe if I can find more people who heard it, they would describe it to me as other things.”

“I suppose a car is more likely. I can’t think of any night-singing winter birds in this part of Connecticut. The car could have belonged to the killer, I suppose.”

“If it was a car. I’d say it almost certainly did. Virginia Hanley told me that the sound she heard was the result of an exhaust system problem that is relatively common. Do you know anything about that?”

“All I know about cars is that you put gas in them and they go,” Philip Brye said. “I’ve never had one make a
koo roo
sound at me.”

“If it were a car and the problem is common, the
koo roo
sound doesn’t matter” Gregor said. “It wouldn’t prove anything. We couldn’t use it. If the problem is uncommon—”

“Is Virginia Hanley the middle-aged one who looks like she’s heading the ball committee for the American Cancer Society benefit?”

“That’s the one, yes.”

“She doesn’t look like someone who would know all that much about cars to me. I mean, if it’s a problem with cars and she’s heard about it, then I’d think the problem would have to be fairly common because—” The phone started ringing. “Just a minute.”

Gregor relaxed and let Philip Brye pick up. He could see what Philip was getting at about Virginia Hanley, although you never could tell. People knew the oddest things. Philip Brye had picked up a pencil and started writing a note on his memo pad.

“Ward six,” he was saying. “All right. All right. The emergency room first. I’ll tell him.”

Philip Brye hung up.

“Start of a bad night?” Gregor asked him sympathetically.

“I don’t know.” Brye looked pensive. “That was one of my ambulance men. He was passing on what he thought was some interesting information. He’s at the emergency room over at Yale-New Haven.”

“What’s happened?”

“What happened is that one of the regular ambulances brought in an apparent attempted suicide about twenty minutes ago, a young woman in her twenties, vomiting all over the place, they went right to the stomach pump. There wouldn’t be anything strange about that, except that this young woman had identification in her purse saying that she worked at the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio.”

Gregor sat up very straight in his chair. “Did you get a name?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Philip Brye said. “Traci Cardinale.”

“The problem with days of auld lang syne is that they always make you look like a jerk.”

—
TIMES SQUARE REVELER,

LIVE ON WCBS, CHANNEL 2,

NEW YORK

A
S SOON AS GREGOR
and Philip Brye entered the hospital, Gregor could smell the smoke. One corner of the waiting room was taken over by six large young men in sleeveless vests and toxic orange hats. The backs of the vests were stenciled in white paint: “
BLOOD BROTHERS
.” Most of the young men had tattoos on their arms, coiling snakes being a favorite. Most of them were smoking cigarettes. Philip Brye passed them without notice. Gregor thought only that it was the better option, given the several that might have presented themselves, for the staff to ignore the cigarettes. Somewhere in this building, one of the Blood Brothers was probably bleeding and might be dead. The last thing the Yale-New Haven, or any other hospital, needed was a gang war in its emergency room waiting room.

Up at the nurse’s window, there was a stand-up cardboard sign that said: “KEEP THE NEW YEAR HAPPY. APPOINT A DESIGNATED DRIVER.” Two cops were standing next to it, looking tired. The nurse behind the window was wearing a white tunic top with a name pin over the pocket identifying her as S. Caloverdi, LPN. Also behind the window was a plump young woman with short-cropped hair in civilian dress, operating a computer. The emergency room waiting room was not too crammed, which was a kind of miracle for this time of year. Aside from the Blood Brothers there was what looked like a mother and her three young children. None of the four was visibly hurt. There was an old man with a cane. There was a young couple looking sullen. It was still early yet, too early for major gang fights or that perennial problem of American emergency medicine, drug overdoses. Why was it that so many addicts overdosed at night? Too many things happened at night, as if the division was not between rich and poor or young and old or black and white, but between daylight and darkness.