Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (37 page)

Gregor Demarkian bent closer. What “that” was was a now fleshless skeleton, curled into the fetal position and still wearing a locket necklace—turned green with age—around its neck.

What “that” was was all that remained of the body of Alissa Bradbury.

A single bullet was lodged in the bone in the center of its chest.

T
HE ENVELOPE FROM JIMMY
Fleck did not contain a prescription for Demerol. It contained copies of her x-rays, with little notes written on them in green felt-tipped pen. “Hairline fracture,” several of the notes read. Others were more complicated, containing words Magda only vaguely knew’ the meanings of, the names of bones, the designations of injuries. If I had injured a muscle, I would have understood it better, Magda told herself when the package came. Then she put the package away in the long center drawer of the antique desk in her bedroom.

“You haven’t just injured yourself once,” Jimmy Fleck explained to her that morning. “You’ve injured yourself over and over again and you’ve never done anything about it. Your legs are about to disintegrate. This must have been going on for months, for God’s sake. Didn’t you ever notice you were hurt?”

Well, yes, Magda thought now, looking at herself in the mirror as she dressed for her last class of the day. She had noticed that she was hurt, if by “hurt” Jimmy Fleck meant to say “in pain.” She had noticed the pain quite frequently. She had simply assumed that it was, well—

(
getting old
)

something unthinkable, something she didn’t want to deal with. It seemed impossible to her, after all the work she had put into this, that she would end up just like everybody else. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to work. You were supposed to work hard. You were supposed to give it everything you had. You were supposed to get what you’d worked for. There was no room in Magda Hale’s life for inevitability.

The pills were lined up on the vanity counter around the sink, thirteen of them, too many to take all at once. Magda had gotten them the easy but expensive way. When Jimmy Fleck had refused to give her a prescription for more than ten (“people get addicted to this stuff, Magda”) she had simply gone down to the Green and said in a rather idle voice that she wished she had some. The whole transaction had taken less than five minutes. She had gotten real pills, too, not substitutes or placebos. She had brought one of her own pills along for comparison. Of course, she wouldn’t be able to go on getting them this way. She would be in too much danger of being caught. She would have to find a doctor who didn’t mind handing them out.

Magda picked up two of the pills, put them in her mouth, and swallowed them straight, without water. She swooped the rest of the pills into her cupped left hand and put them into the bottle the prescription Jimmy had written for her had come in. She felt a little dizzy. These were not the first pills she had taken this morning. She was taking too many of them, and not just because when she didn’t take them she was in pain. She liked the feeling they gave her, the flying floating feeling, and the way she was never worried

(
getting old old old old old
)

about anything. It was even better than falling in love, because it didn’t make you pick at yourself all the time, wondering if the other person was going to love you back.

“You’re going to have to give up the high-impact aerobics,” Jimmy Fleck had told her. “That’s the only solution to this. You’re going to have to give them up for at least six months and maybe forever. If you don’t, you’re going to cripple yourself.”

Someone had come in through the bedroom door: Simon. Magda put the pills away in the medicine cabinet and checked herself out one more time in the mirror. She had her hair pinned up in the way most likely to come down in a tangle of wisps and sweat halfway through the dance. The customers liked to see their Fearless Leader really getting knocked out by her own workout. It made them feel that they were getting what they paid for.

Magda adjusted the top of her leotard and the legholes, too, so that they didn’t bind. Then she got up and went into the bedroom.

Simon was standing at the window with the curtains drawn back, looking at the backyard.

“I talked to that Gregor Demarkian person a while ago,” he said.

“Did he want something in particular?” The pills were beginning to work. Magda felt positively lightheaded. She sat down on the side of the bed and began to put on her workout shoes.

“He wants to have a meeting here tomorrow morning at ten o’clock,” Simon said. “A big meeting with a whole bunch of people in it, including some of the students in the beginners’ class.”

“The students? But the students couldn’t have been involved in Tim’s murder. They didn’t even know him.”

“You can’t be sure of that, Magda. Tim was local. The students are local. Maybe they all knew him.”

“I suppose.”

“Maybe it’s not Tim he’s thinking about now. Maybe it’s Stella. They were all in the house when Stella died.”

“I keep forgetting that Stella is dead,” Magda said. “Maybe it’s because I didn’t watch it all on the news the way I did with Tim. I think I must have been depressed. I slept through he whole thing.”

“You haven’t even lived through the whole thing yet, Magda. Maybe Mr. Demarkian will have some answers tomorrow morning. I’m a little nervous about the effect of all this on the tour.”

“You said before it wouldn’t have an effect,” Magda said. “You said there would be a mention or two about a tragic mugging and that would be it.”

“That was before Stella died.”

Magda undid the knot on her work-out shoe. It was a Gordian mess. She had no idea how it had gotten that way. Her fingers felt like elastic. She started to tie up again.

“I think we should just go on tour and get it over with,” she said. “The police haven’t told us not to leave town, have they?”

“No, Magda. I don’t think they do that in real life.”

“Then we should go, and get on with it, and get it over with, and come back. Then I think I’m going to take a nice long vacation, a month or six weeks. It’ll all blow over, you’ll see. It’ll just disappear into thin air.”

“What if they don’t catch anyone? What if that Detective Bandero decides to make a public issue out of it?”

“He’s already making a public issue out of it. He’ll stop when he realizes it isn’t going anywhere. He won’t want to be embarrassed. And besides—”

“What?”

The left shoe was tied. Magda went to work on the right, more slowly this time. Was she imagining it? She thought she was getting shooting pains in her hands.

“Well,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it. And you know, it seems to me that people who get murdered—not people who get mugged, but people who get murdered on purpose—have usually done something to cause it.”

“Are you trying to say Stella was asking for it?”

The right shoe was laced. No mistakes. She did have a shooting pain in her hands. She sat up.

“I’m saying that we really didn’t know anything much about Tim Bradbury,” she said firmly, “not anything important. He could have been up to anything. That’s probably why Tony Bandero called this Gregor Demarkian in. I’ve been reading up on Mr. Gregor Demarkian over the last few days.”

Simon was giving her a very odd look. “That’s funny,” he said.

“What is?”

“This attitude of yours. Ever since Tim died, really. And I always thought you liked Tim.”

“I liked him as well as any of the other people we employ here. Cici Mahoney. Juliet Nash.”

“What about Traci Cardinale, Magda? Do you think she did something to cause it, too? What about Stella?”

“I don’t know about Stella. I don’t know about Traci, either, I haven’t been paying much attention. I’ve had work to do, Simon.”

“Yes, I know.”

Magda got up and flexed her knees. They hurt, but the pain was very far away. “Are you going to let Mr. Demarkian use the house?”

“Of course. He’s asked us to be in attendance. I think we both should be. If only so we don’t show up on the news later as a couple of uncooperative shits.”

“All right.”

“You don’t seem to be very interested in having this solved, Magda. Two of the people who worked for us are dead. A third very nearly died. I’d think you’d be very anxious to make sure that whoever is doing this is safely put out of the way. If only to make sure that whoever it is doesn’t decide to do
you
in next.”

Magda flexed her arms, and then her fingers, and then her toes.

“I’m not going to be next,” she said with perfect conviction, “and neither are you.”

“Famous last words,” Simon said.

“Oh, no,” Magda told him. “Inside knowledge.”

U
SUALLY, WHEN THE POLICE
came, after her father had had one of his outbursts, Dessa Carter refused to let them do anything at all about calling an ambulance or putting him in the hospital. It seemed obvious to her that the old man didn’t need an ambulance and didn’t belong in a hospital. Or at least not in an ordinary kind of hospital. Aside from the Alzheimer’s, the old man was as healthy as a horse. He was healthier than she was. He was stronger than she was, too, which was the terrifying thing.

This time, when the police had insisted on calling Yale-New Haven Hospital, Dessa Carter had given in. She hadn’t even made much of a protest. The idea of spending the night in that house, with the old man crazy on the inside and the gangs and addicts rocketing through the streets on the outside, was suddenly horrifying to her. Why it would be that now, when it had never been before, she didn’t know. The gangs had been there for years. Her father had been crazy for years. What was different?

“It’s not like this is anything new,” she told Greta Bellamy as she got ready to leave Fountain of Youth that night. “It’s not like I haven’t been through it before. It’s just that I don’t seem to be able to see my way to living with it anymore.”

“It’s probably self-esteem,” Greta said solemnly, and then broke into giggles. “Oh, Lord. I don’t know how I kept a straight face in that lecture. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to change the subject.”

“Maybe you didn’t change the subject,” Dessa said. “Maybe it is all about self-esteem. I keep thinking about trying to sell the house, to have the money to put him in a nursing home, and then I think it wouldn’t be enough and what would I do with myself anyway?”

“You’d come and live with me,” Greta said. “We talked about that.”

Dessa dropped her work-out shoes on top of her pile of dirty exercise clothes and pulled the string closure of her gym bag shut. It was a terrible gym bag, cheap and shoddy, and she was suddenly ashamed of it.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve got to go talk to the social worker, and after I do that I’ll probably realize that there isn’t anything to do but wait for him to die. Sometimes I wish I was a different person from the one I am. One of those people who could just dump him in the hospital emergency ward and disappear.”

“No, you don’t want to be that,” Greta said.

“I don’t want to be who this social worker is going to think I am, Greta. The fat lady. Fat ladies have nothing else to do with their lives than take care of their senile parents until they’re old enough to be senile themselves. Thin people have goals and aspirations that have to be respected.”

“Do people really do that to you?”

“All the time.”

“Go talk to the social worker,” Greta said. “Then come over and spend the night with me. We’ll sit down and think the whole thing through and try to work it out.”

“I don’t think there’s anything to work out.”

“Then come and we’ll talk about the big important meeting tomorrow. Gregor Demarkian unmasks the killer. I’m sure that’s what he’s going to do. Won’t it be exciting?”

Dessa parked her car in the parking garage right under a security lamp and got out. She always parked under security lamps, just in case, in spite of the fact that nobody had ever bothered her. There was one good thing about being this fat. You didn’t worry about getting raped, even if you ought to.

Dessa let herself into the core well and then into the elevator. As far as she could tell, the garage was absolutely deserted. She pressed the button for the first floor and tapped her foot while the elevator was getting ready to move. She thought about going over to Greta’s after all this was over and not seeing the house in Derby at all. Greta’s place sounded nice—not big, but nice, and away from the worst things. No gangs. No addicts. No crazy old men smashing up the furniture. Was it such a terrible thing, under the circumstances, that she wanted so desperately for her father to die?

The elevator stopped on the first floor and opened. Dessa got out. Nobody in the lobby looked like a doctor or a nurse. Nobody was wearing a uniform. Dessa thought something wonderful had gone out of the world when nurses stopped wearing their graduation caps.

Dessa went up to the visitors’ desk and gave her name. “I have an appointment with Claudia Dubroff,” she told the woman.

The woman turned away from her computer and pointed down the hall. “Down there. Follow the signs. Up one flight. All the social workers’ offices are together.”

“All right,” Dessa said, and thought: “all” the social workers’ offices? How many social workers does a place like this need?

There were not only signs on the walls but colored lines on the floor. To get to Social Work, all she had to do was follow the blue line. Dessa went past a row of offices with only names in them and letters following the names. Except for “M.D.,” she didn’t know what any of the letters meant. She went past little clusters of Christmas and Hannukah decorations, too, and in once place a display that seemed to have something to do with the Hindu festival of Dewali. Then she went around a corner, up a short flight of stairs, and around another corner. There was a pair of swinging metal fire doors with a round safety window in each one. She lumbered through the doors and came out on a hall with a big black-and-white sign on the wall of it: SOCIAL WORK.

I should have gone up and seen my father first, Dessa told herself, but she couldn’t make herself feel guilty about it. She didn’t want to see her father. Not now. Not for a couple of days. She would have him back soon enough. She went down the hall, reading the names on the signs outside the doors. Thomas Fitzpatrick. Annemarie Gonzalez. Tammy Wu. When she got to the one that said Claudia Dubroff, the door was open.