Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (32 page)

Philip Brye stuck his head through the nurse’s window and said, “Susan? I got a call about a Traci Cardinale?”

The LPN looked up. She was younger than Gregor had thought she was when he first saw her. Her skin was very pale and pasty looking. A line of angry red pimples ran along her jaw. Her nose was too big and too crooked to be attractive. Still, there wasn’t a single crow’s foot line at the sides of her eyes. Gregor guessed that she wasn’t more than twenty-five. If that.

As soon as Susan Caloverdi recognized Philip Brye, she got even paler. “Oh, Dr. Brye,” she said. “Traci Cardinale? Do you mean she’s—”

“Not as far as I know,” Philip Brye said quickly.

Susan was relieved. “Oh, good. We really worked hard over that one. We didn’t know what was going on. But the last I heard, she was stable.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Philip Brye said.

The two officers standing by the sign shifted on their feet. “Dr. Brye?” the taller of them asked.

“That’s right,” Philip Brye said.

“I’m Officer Tom Mordeck. This is Officer Ray Haraldsen. Dr. Lindner asked us to meet you here.”

“Pete Lindner is the man I called just before we left the office,” Philip Brye told Gregor.

Philip Brye had called several people just before he and Gregor left the office, including a take-out Chinese restaurant. Gregor put his hand out to Officer Tom Mordeck and said, “How do you do. My name is Gregor Demarkian.”

“Oh, hell,” Officer Haraldsen said. “So that’s what all this is about.”

“We’re not sure,” Philip Brye said.

“It’s interesting seeing you in person,” Mordeck said, speaking to Gregor. “You look a lot bigger in person than you do on television.”

“On television, he was standing behind Tony Bandero,” Haraldsen pointed out.

“On television, everybody stands behind Tony Bandero,” Philip Brye said.

“We’re the ones brought the Cardinale woman in here,” Mordeck said. “Next door neighbor heard her vomiting and called us. Don’t ask me why she didn’t call an ambulance.”

“She told us why she didn’t call an ambulance,” Haraldsen said. “She wanted to be sure somebody had the authority to break down the door.”

“We called the ambulance and then we waited,” Mordeck said, “and then we came right in behind them.”

“I think they got there faster because it was us who called,” Haraldsen added.

“Anyway, we’ve been hanging around here ever since.” Tom Mordeck looked a little guilty. “Don’t ask me why. The whole thing just felt wrong, if you know what I mean. She wasn’t having the right kind of fits. I mean—”

“Jesus,” Haraldsen said.

“There’s a way they have fits when they’ve taken too many tranquilizers and there’s a way they have fits when they’ve taken too much dope, and this wasn’t either of them,” Mordeck said stubbornly. “I mean, for Christ’s sake. I’ve picked up enough of these guys. I know what I’m looking at when I see it.”

“Why don’t we just go see Pete Lindner,” Philip Brye suggested. “Have either of you two notified anybody official about this?”

The two officers looked confused. “Who’s to notify?” Haraldsen asked. “Do you mean, have we filed a report?”

Philip Brye shot his eyebrows up his forehead, looking at Gregor. “I hate to do this to you, but under the circumstances, I think it might be a good idea if they called Tony.”

“I know,” Gregor said sadly.

Tom Mordeck seemed stunned. “You want us to call in Bandero? He’ll turn the place into a circus. He’ll bring five television reporters with him. He’ll make everybody nuts.”

“It’s his case,” Philip Brye said.

“The only case that ever matters to Bandero is the case he’s got on himself,” Mordeck said. “Why don’t you two guys just wrap this one up and save his appearance for the press conference?”

Gregor Demarkian could see the elegance of this course of action. It was the course he would have taken himself if he could have thought of any way to justify it. There was no way to justify it. Jurisdiction mattered, even when it was held by a publicity-seeking jerk who only wanted in so that he could get his name in the papers.

Gregor Demarkian had known a lot of publicity-seeking jerks in his career, the most notable of them being J. Edgar Hoover himself. Before Tony Bandero, however, he had never known one who took such unhampered glee in the whole process; Even good old J. Edgar had at least pretended to be “a very private person.” Tony might be that rarity of rarities, a budding celebrity who would come out and say what everybody knew about him anyway: that he loved the hell out of publicity and wanted to live as public a life as possible.

Tom Mordeck and Ray Haraldsen were leading the way down a gleaming polished hallway into the bowels of the emergency room, their guns bumping against their hips as they went.

D
R. PETER LINDNER WAS
not the doctor who had actually taken care of Traci Cardinale, and pumped her stomach, and assigned a nurse to monitor her vital signs. Dr. Lindner was the head of emergency medicine for the entire Yale-New Haven complex, which made him much too important to do any of that. He sat in a large office with charts hanging from hooks on the walls and books piled every which way on the built-in shelves, but his own desk was scrupulously clean. He was, Gregor thought, like one of those executives from the largest corporations, who proved how well they delegated responsibility by showing how little paperwork they had on their desks to do. Dr. Peter Lindner himself did not look like the head of a large corporation. In spite of the Nordic sound of his name, he was small and dark and more Italian looking than Tony Bandero. The tops of his hands were covered with dark black hairs. His eyebrows met together over the bridge of his nose. His body was short-legged and long-trunked, the standard Mediterranean peasant’s. Gregor wondered where the “Lindner” had come from.

“It was Rama Kadhi who took care of her,” Lindner told Gregor and Philip Brye when he had gotten them both settled. He was passing out cups of coffee. Gregor didn’t know what it was, but all the police and emergency room people he ever met had near-obsessions with making sure their guests had coffee. “Kadhi’s a very good man in emergency, very competent and very calm, but I think he’s a little confused. He’s only been over from India for about two years, and then it took a while to transfer his accreditations. In fact, accreditations are the only reason I have him now. He has to complete the equivalent of an internship and residency to satisfy the board. After that, I suppose he’ll move out to the suburbs and start charging by the hour.”

“Are you having the contents of her stomach analyzed?” Philip Brye asked.

“We always do.”

“We’d like you to check for a few things you don’t usually check for,” Gregor said. “Starting with arsenic.”

Pete Lindner’s mouth quirked into a smile. “I already did. As soon as Phil here told me that you were coming, Mr. Demarkian. I do read the papers.”

“You wouldn’t have had to bother,” Philip Brye said. “The way the press has been on this case, the only way you could have missed any of it was to have been blind, deaf, and dumb.”

“True,” Pete Lindner said. “If I’d realized at the start that all this was connected with that, I would have handled the case myself. Fortunately, as I said, Kadhi is a very good man. Did the officers tell you how she was found?”

“They said something about a neighbor calling,” Gregor said. “A neighbor heard her vomiting and called the police.”

“She wasn’t just vomiting, she was pounding,” Pete Lindner said. “After I talked to Phil here, I went down and talked to the ambulance men. They said she was lying in her bathtub, absolutely dry and fully clothed, vomiting all over the floor and hitting the heel of her hand against the bathroom wall. That’s the wall that connects with the bathroom wall in her neighbor’s apartment. The heel of her hand was bruised black.”

“She was still vomiting when the ambulance men got there?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, yes,” Pete Lindner said. “She slipped into unconsciousness just a few minutes after they arrived. You can talk to them a little later, if you want. I’ve got them filling out forms to waste time. She didn’t say anything to anybody. She wasn’t capable.”

“Do you know if she said anything to the police officers?” Gregor asked. “Weren’t they there first?”

“They were definitely there first,” Pete Lindner said, “and, again, you can ask them yourself. But I don’t think she did. Once I knew that Phil was bringing you in here, Mr. Demarkian, I called in everyone I could find who was even remotely connected with this thing and told them we had a probable attempted murder on our hands. We did all try to work out what we knew so we’d be able to present it to you when you got here. Not that I told anybody it was you who was coming. The way news spreads around a hospital, information like that would have been damned near lethal.”

Gregor agreed. He got out of his chair and walked around Pete Lindner’s office. Through the barred E-glass windows, he could see the first signs of a light snow in the lights from the line of streetlamps that marched down the sidewalk outside. This was another terrible neighborhood. The sidewalks were deserted. The paint on the streetlamps was blistered and peeling. Only the streets themselves were in good repair. Probably because they didn’t want the ambulances getting flat tires in potholes.

“She left work early,” Gregor said, stopping near Pete Lindner’s empty desk. “I needed something over there today that she usually would have been the one to get me, and Magda Hale told me that. Traci left work at four o’clock to go to a dentist’s appointment.”

“That can be checked out,” Philip Brye said.

“We can check her teeth to see if anything’s been done to them,” Lindner said. “Of course, the dentist’s appointment may just have been for x-rays.”

“I don’t think we have to go so far as to check her teeth,” Gregor said. “Is she still unconscious?”

“Yes,” Pete Lindner said. “She’ll probably be unconscious for most of the rest of tonight. She’d had a very bad time.”

“But you do expect her to survive?”

“Oh, yes. Unless something very unusual happens, she should survive quite nicely.”

“And she’ll be whole?” Gregor persisted. “She won’t have brain damage or affected speech or anything like that?”

“There’s no reason why she should have. This isn’t lye we’re talking about here, or even strychnine. Being poisoned with arsenic shouldn’t have any long-term consequences much different from being poisoned with sleeping pills.”

“People are in comas for years after taking overdoses of sleeping pills,” Gregor said.

“I know, Mr. Demarkian. But Traci Cardinale isn’t in a coma now, and there’s no reason to think she’s going to be in one. Would you like to go down and see her? I was having her kept on the ward until the two of you arrived.”

“It would probably be a good idea to keep her on the ward until Tony Bandero arrives.” Gregor sighed.

Pete Lindner laughed. “Oh,
Tony
,” he said. “He’ll bring an entourage.”

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN WOULD HAVE
been hard-pressed to explain why he wanted to see Traci Cardinale in her hospital bed. She was wan. She was sick. She was asleep. The little information this provided him with was of no use to him whatsoever. The hospital wasn’t interesting, either. It was more or less standard, as hospitals went—maybe a little more high-tech than average, because this was a teaching and research hospital connected with Yale, instead of just a health care facility. There were too many machines with too many gauges. There was too much white and operating room green. Right outside Traci’s room, there was another of those New Year’s Eve signs, this time written in letters that were supposed to look like dripping blood. “NEW YEAR’S DEAD,” the blood letters said. Gregor thought he would spend this New Year’s Eve locked safely in his own bedroom with a television set and a cup of hot chocolate.

The nurse sitting beside Traci’s bed stood up when Gregor and Philip Brye entered the room. Then there was a movement in the shadows and a small man appeared, dark and diffident and very serious. Dr. Rama Kadhi, Gregor realized. The doctor wore a stethoscope around his neck that had been polished so well it shone. He bowed his head first to Philip Brye and then to Gregor. Then he stepped over to the bed and pointed at the young woman lying in it. Traci Cardinale had an IV drip in her arm.

“Dr. Lindner has told us that this woman may be the victim of a homicide attempt,” Rama Kadhi said very formally. “This is what you are thinking?”

Rama Kadhi was looking at Philip Brye, but Gregor Demarkian answered. “This woman is connected to a case in which two homicides have already occurred,” he said. “We feel we have to be cautious.”

“Ah,” Rama Kadhi said. “I feel I have to be cautious, too. We did start work on her in time to save her. She will be all right.”

“Good,” Philip Brye said.

“In the meantime, there are difficulties,” Rama Kadhi continued. “We are having a difficult time keeping her calm and quiet. It is necessary now that she stay calm and quiet. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Traci seemed calm and quiet enough to Gregor Demarkian. She seemed inert.

“In a different kind of case, we would give her sleeping pills now to help her rest,” Rama Kadhi was going on, “but in this case it is not possible. She is unconscious. It is not indicated to give sleeping pills to a woman who is unconscious.”

“If she’s unconscious, why does she need help to relax?” Gregor asked. “Isn’t that relaxed enough?”

The nurse next to Traci Cardinale’s bed stirred. “She’s having dreams,” she said. “She’s having terrible dreams. She keeps calling out in her sleep.”

Dr. Khadi shot the nurse a disapproving look. “It is not possible to have dreams while unconscious. This I was taught in India. She is quite restless, however. She does cry out.”

“Wood,” Traci Cardinale said, quite distinctly, as if to prove the nurse’s and doctor’s point.

The upright people stared steadily at the bed, but Traci Cardinale didn’t cry out again. She didn’t move. Her face looked as if it had been sculpted from wax.

“Well,” Pete Lindner said. “I told you she wasn’t in a coma.”