Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (33 page)

“Of course she is not in a coma.” Rama Kadhi said, surprised. “If she were in a coma, we would have put her in the Intensive Care Unit. Right away. The police do not come first here.”

Gregor moved closer to the bed.

“Wood,” Traci Cardinale said again.

Her lips barely moved. Gregor didn’t understand why this was enough “restlessness” to worry about. She wasn’t about to pull the IV drip out of her arm with this.

“Is
wood
all she ever says?” Gregor asked the doctor and the nurse.

“
Wood
is all I’ve ever heard her say,” the nurse said. “I’ve been assuming she means wood as in trees. Maybe she’s saying
would
with a
you el
. As in she would or wouldn’t do something.”

Rama Kadhi looked disapproving again. “This is very foolish,” he said stiffly. “Why would she said
would
with a
you el
? This would not make sense.”

“I don’t think the woman has to make sense while she’s unconscious,” Philip Brye said.

Gregor looked around the room. There was no locked cupboard or personal closet. This was the emergency ward. There was no sign of what he was looking for.

“What happened to her things?” Gregor asked. “What was she wearing when she came in here?”

“She was wearing a little suit,” the nurse said. “I’ve sent it upstairs already, to Ward six. There wasn’t any place to keep it down here. I don’t know if she’s ever going to be able to use it again, though. It’s covered with vomit and it’s ripped in places, too. We had to rip it just to get it off her.”

“This was a navy blue suit with a sort of boxy jacket that came down long over her hips?” Gregor asked.

“That’s right,” the nurse said. “It was a beautiful suit. Expensive.”

“Was that what she was wearing when you saw her at work?” Philip Brye asked.

Gregor nodded. “What about shoes?” he asked the nurse. “And stockings. Was she wearing those?”

“She was not wearing shoes,” Rama Kadhi said. “I thought they had been lost in the ambulance.”

“She wasn’t wearing stockings, either,” the nurse said. “Stockings are always the worst to get off in cases like this. We take scissors and just rip them up. It’s the only efficient way. But we didn’t have to.”

“Wood,” Traci Cardinale said again. This time she did move, side to side, making the IV drip jiggle in its frame. The nurse bent forward quickly to steady it.

Rama Kadhi sighed. “This woman is no longer unconscious in the medical sense. She is only in a very heavy sleep. This is the problem.”

“In the long run, it’s not a problem,” Philip Brye said. “In the long run it means she’s going to recover. What about it, Gregor? Is there anything else you need here? We should let these people get on with what they’re doing.”

Gregor was thinking. There wasn’t anything else he needed here. He’d picked up more than he’d expected to.

“I’d like to go see that suit she was found in,” he said. “You might consider sending it for laboratory analysis.”

“Good idea.” Philip Brye nodded vigorously. “I know where Ward six is. I can take you up.”

“Point me in the direction of a bathroom first,” Gregor said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Philip Brye took him out into the hall, handed him a key, and pointed him toward where he wanted to go.

“I have hospital privileges here,” he explained, “and those are to the staff toilets. You don’t want to use the ones available to the general public.”

Gregor would have asked why not, but he didn’t have the heart.

I
T WAS NEARLY THREE
minutes later, when Gregor had just shut the water faucet off and started to put his coat back on, that he first heard the
koo roo
. He didn’t realize, right away, that that was what it was. He was simply aware of a sound that was distantly and vaguely familiar, and that for some reason filled him with sharp anxiety. Then he heard it again, and the sequence became brilliantly and undeniably clear.

Koo roo
,
clank
,
whoosh
, it went.
Koo roo, clank, whoosh, clank, whoosh, clank, koo roo
.

I know what that is, Gregor thought suddenly. I’ve heard something make that noise.

The staff toilet suddenly felt very claustrophobic. He went to the window above the sink and tried to force it down. It wouldn’t go. He put his ear to the glass to see if he could hear better, but he wasn’t even completely sure the sound he was hearing was coming from outside.

Koo roo
,
clank
,
whoosh
, it went.
Koo roo, clank, whoosh, clank, whoosh, koo roo, koo roo
.

It was definitely coming from the outside.

Gregor had his coat half on. He shrugged himself the rest of the way into it, unlocked the staff toilet door, and charged into the hallway. Philip Brye was waiting for him there, looking idly at the notices on a bulletin board while he did. Gregor grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around.

“What’s on the other side of that wall?” he demanded, pointing into the staff toilet.

“A street,” Philip Brye said, bewildered. “Gregor, what—”

“Come on.”

Gregor grabbed Philip Brye by the arm and pulled him a few steps before taking off on his own. All he could think of was that he had to get to that street fast, wherever it was. He still wasn’t sure what it was that made that noise, but for some reason he was convinced that if he didn’t hurry, it would disappear. He flew up the corridor, moving faster than he could remember himself doing since they had mustered him out of the army. He passed the Blood Brothers talking to a nurse and the woman and her children in an open examining room. He slammed through the swinging double doors into the waiting room—

—and got stopped, dead in his tracks, by Tony Bandero.

To say, as the uniformed officers had, that Tony Bandero was bringing a “circus” with him would have been putting it mildly. Tony Bandero had brought what looked like every piece of camera equipment in the Western world with him. The camera equipment and the people who operated it were blocking the doors to the emergency room. A nurse was running frantically around the lot of them, telling them in a shrill voice they had to get out of the way. Tony Bandero was holding court, like Muhammed Ali giving a press conference after a successful fight.

“The Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio,” he was saying, “is becoming a Fountain of Death for the people who work there.”

Gregor started to wince, but he felt his own arm grabbed and he was dragged, stumbling, to Tony Bandero’s side. Tony threw an arm around his shoulders—a good trick, since Gregor was half a foot taller than he was—and grinned for the cameras.

“And here’s Mr. Gregor Demarkian, our expert consultant on this case, to give you a few of the details.”

At any other time, Gregor would have bitten Tony Bandero’s hand for pulling something like that on him. Now, he almost didn’t care. For it had suddenly come to him.

He knew where he had heard that sound before. He knew what had made it. He knew who had killed Tim Bradbury and Stella Mortimer and tried to kill Traci Cardinale. He even knew why somebody thought Tim and Stella and Traci had to die.

Now all he had to do was prove it.

G
RETA BELLAMY HAD TO
wait until after ten o’clock to find Gregor Demarkian, and by then she was frantic. It didn’t help that Christie Mulligan and her two friends hadn’t shown up for class. More and more people were dropping out, disappearing, not even saying good-bye. It made Greta feel immeasurably sad. This had been, in spite of the murder, one of the best weeks she could remember in her life. Everybody here was exactly the way she had expected them to be, and it was true what they said in all those lectures about self-esteem. If you really went to work on yourself, you could change the way you looked in the mirror. Lately, Greta had been looking a lot taller, and stronger, and smarter to herself than she had before. Once or twice, she had even looked like somebody who might have a master’s degree. It was an interesting thought. It wiped whatever nostalgic feeling she had left for Chick right out of her brain. Greta didn’t think she was ever going to see the inside of a roadhouse again. What she wanted now was a full-time membership to the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio, so that she could come up here every other night or so on her way home from work. Chick could marry Marsha Caventello if he wanted to. Kathy could adopt Marsha as her best friend. There were at least three women in this class Greta liked better than Kathy. One of them, Dessa Carter was even trying to stay on at Fountain of Youth after the end of the week, just like Greta herself.

Greta and Dessa and a tall, pale woman named Cindi were sitting together during the break, working out the ways in which Dessa could find the money for a Fountain of Youth membership, when Greta saw Gregor Demarkian come in with a man she didn’t know.

“What you’ve got to do,” Cindi was saying, “is go to a doctor and get him to say that you have to have the membership for health reasons. It’s got to be a prescription, like medicine.”

“They’re going to take a health club membership for a medicine?” Dessa asked.

“Or a treatment, yes,” Cindi said. “For your weight. There’s not a health insurance claims adjuster alive who knows the difference between correlation and causality, they all operate on voodoo, so what you do is—”

Greta and Dessa and Cindi were sitting on the second-floor balcony overlooking the foyer. Gregor Demarkian came in with his coat already open and his face red with cold. Greta stood up and leaned over the balcony railing. She wished they would get it fixed. It was the one wrong note in the Fountain of Youth symphony. It was even worse than the murder, because it was out in front, calling attention to itself all the time. Greta took her terry cloth sweatband off her forehead and bit her lip. Maybe it was just as well that Bennis Hannaford wasn’t with Demarkian. What would a woman like Bennis Hannaford think of someone like Greta, in a leotard?

“Mr. Demarkian?” Greta called.

Dessa and Cindi were bent over together, going through the ways in which Dessa might convince her
company
to pay for Fountain of Youth. Greta had never before known how many different ways there were to get something like this paid for.

Gregor Demarkian stopped in the middle of the foyer and looked up. The man he was with stopped with him. Greta Bellamy blushed.

“Oh,” she said. “Mr. Demarkian. Um. Could I come down and talk to you a minute?”

“Of course.”

Greta’s blush seemed to be getting worse, if that was possible. Dessa and Cindi were looking up at her curiously. So were Gregor Demarkian and his friend. Greta rubbed her palms on the sides of her leotard and took a deep breath.

“Just a minute,” she said.

Dessa and Cindi seemed to lose interest. Greta ran down the curving balcony stair and arrived panting at the bottom, feeling foolish.

“Oh,” she said. “Excuse me. It probably isn’t even important.”

I’d do better if the man didn’t seem so damned amused, Grace told herself—but it wasn’t Gregor Demarkian who seemed amused. It was his friend. Gregor Demarkian looked polite.

Greta rubbed the palms of her hands on the sides of her leotard again. “Well,” she said. “The thing is. It’s about that boy. The one who used to work here and he died?”

“Yes?” Gregor Demarkian said.

This was not the way Greta had imagined this working out. She bit her lip and twisted her right leg behind her left. She wished she could stop fidgeting. It was better than just as well that Bennis Hannaford wasn’t here. Bennis Hannaford would think she was some kind of silly little hick.

“Well,” Greta said again. “The thing is, I knew him. Sort of. I mean, it probably isn’t anything, of course, you know, but I thought I ought to tell you because he is dead and that woman is dead too and I thought—I thought—”

“You thought you’d better tell me, just in case,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“I didn’t really know him know him,” Greta blurted out. “He was too young. And the time I’m talking about, it was in February of 1988. He must have been in high school.”

“He must have been in high school when what?” This was Gregor Demarkian’s friend, whom Greta had already decided she didn’t like. Greta tried to pretend he wasn’t there.

“I got the picture from
The New Haven Register
,” she said. “I went to the library and had it copied off the microfilm. We were in a singing group together, you see. The New Haven County All-Country Choir. We were all in church groups.”

“What church group was Tim Bradbury in?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

“Baptist,” Greta said. “I wouldn’t have remembered on my own, but it was in the caption. To the picture I looked up. I made a copy of the caption, too. Anyway, I remembered because his mother used to come to all our performances, and it was really sad. She was this huge woman who wore tent dresses all the time and cut her own hair, you know the kind of woman I mean. And Tim was so embarrassed.”

“Nineteen eighty-eight, Gregor Demarkian said. “That’s interesting.”

“I don’t think he was just being snobbish,” Greta said. “I mean, it wasn’t just the way she looked. She was drunk nearly all the time. And then she’d come to these things and fall asleep in her chair, and everybody could hear her snore.”

“Nineteen eighty-eight, Gregor Demarkian said again. “You said you had a copy of this picture: Where is it?”

“In my purse. In my locker.”

“Where’s your locker?”

Greta pointed down the corridor at the side. “It’s not very far. I could go get it for you right now if you wanted me to.”

“Do you have time?”

“Oh, yes,” Greta said.

Greta didn’t know if she had time. The breaks were ten minutes long. She had no idea when the class had been dismissed for this one. She had no idea how long they had all been sitting around on the balcony. She ran down the corridor to the locker room. It was a very elegant locker room, not like the one off the gym in high school. The lockers had combination locks, but they were built in.