Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (41 page)

“Are you two talking about suicide?” Donna Moradanyan came into the room with a bowl of cold stuffed grape leaves in her hands. She saw her small son with his hand covered with onion dip and grabbed for the stack of napkins to wipe him off. “Honestly, Tommy,” she said. “What will Russ say if he sees you like this?”

“He’ll say I have a really excellent appetite,” Tommy said positively.

Donna threw the wad of napkins into the nearest waste-paper basket and gave Tommy a stuffed grape leaf.

“The really awful thing is that he’s probably right,” she said. “Every time he does something incredibly messy, Russ acts like he’s giving evidence of genius or something. Do you think that’s good parenting?”

“Yes,” Gregor said.

“I don’t know how to define the word parenting” Bennis said.

“It’s just boy stuff,” Tommy Moradanyan said wisely.

Donna shot her son a look that said she ought to argue about this—give a lecture on sexism, maybe, or repeat one of those talks on how Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness that Lida Arkmanian liked to throw around—but then she turned her attention to the news again. The picture of Virginia Hanley was just fading behind the anchorwoman’s left shoulder. It was being replaced by the picture of two very young girls on an ice skating rink, posing elegantly but uncertainly like Nancy Kerrigan in the diet soda commercial.

“I wish I understood why people do the things they do,” Donna said. “I mean, what good did it do this woman to do what she did? Her husband isn’t going to love her for it. He probably won’t even feel guilty that she did it, because he’ll just say that she was crazy. And she didn’t even make a big splash in the papers, because with all this stuff about Fountain of Youth, she’s just a side issue.”

“She would have been more than a side issue if the circumstances had been different,” Gregor said. “The problem was that this house she blew herself away in was the next county and a completely different jurisdiction. Nobody connected her to Fountain of Youth in the beginning. Which is a good thing, if you ask me, because if anybody had connected her to Fountain of Youth, we would have been forced to treat her death as only a probable suicide, and then God only knows what would have happened. We’d have been hung up for another two weeks, in all likelihood. I wouldn’t be home now. I would be sitting in a motel on the New Haven-Orange border, listening to the staff get ready for the sleepover New Year’s Eve party.”

“I approve of sleepover New Year’s Eve parties,” Bennis said. “They keep a lot of drunk people off the roads.”

“It works just as well if you can walk home,” Donna Moradanyan said. She was still staring at the television set, where the two very young girls had been replaced by an ice hockey game. Big men in thick protective pads were skating back and forth to no purpose. Nobody made a goal.

“It’s as if people have lost any sense that there’s more than one option in the world,” Donna said suddenly, “or maybe I mean two. Put up with it or blow it away. That’s all anybody thinks about. Even in the movies.”

“Tony Bandero wasn’t blowing people away,” Bennis pointed out.

Donna waved this into oblivion. “It amounts to the same thing. It’s like that Menendez brothers business. Think about it. They could have done a million things about the child abuse. They could have filed suit against their parents. They could have written a book and gone on the talk show circuit. They could have just disappeared. The world was full of options, but what they did was blow their parents away and tons and tons of people thought that made perfect sense. But it didn’t make perfect sense.”

“You’re not making perfect sense,” Bennis said. “Why are you worrying about the Menendez brothers?”

“I’m not. I’m just—” Donna shrugged helplessly. “I think I like this case least of all the ones Gregor has been involved in. I like it even less than the first one.”

“I don’t,” Bennis said.

“Buy maybe it’s just stimulus overload. If you know what I mean. The Menendez brothers. Virginia Hanley. Bosnia. Tony Bandero. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger in
Terminator II
. It’s just the same thing over and over again. I’m really sick of it.”

“Tony Bandero and Bosnia in the same breath,” Bennis said. “That’s a stretch, Donna.”

“Gregor knows what I mean,” Donna said.

Tommy had his hand in the onion dip again. Donna took it out again, and cleaned it up again, and held onto it this time.

“Russ has been talking about signing up with the DA’s office when he passes his bar exam,” Donna said. “An assistant DA got killed last week by some guy he was prosecuting on a drug charge.”

“Ah,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Donna tugged on Tommy’s hand and went stomping back across the living room, through the dining room, into the kitchen. Her blond hair bounced in the breeze she made. Tommy had to pump his legs hard just to keep up.

“She’s been in a lousy mood all week,” Bennis said after she had gone. “I’ve made a couple of stabs at getting Russ to switch his interest to wills and estates, but I don’t think it’s working.”

T
HE ODD THING, GREGOR
thought later, when the VCR had been hooked up and Donna and Bennis were watching the videotape of a 1950s horror movie called
Them
, was that in getting caught for the murders of Tim and Alissa Bradbury, Detective Tony Bandero had finally gotten what he had always really wanted: national recognition. Ever since the arrest, the newspapers had been full of it. It had been all over the network news, too. Gregor supposed that over the next month, the magazines would get onto it. The local stringer for
People
magazine had already called Gregor’s apartment twice, and left three messages on Bennis Hannaford’s answering machine. The
Sally Jessy Raphael
people had tried to reach him through the Bureau, which had sensibly refused to accommodate them.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
was having a field day, running headlines like BATTING A THOUSAND and DEMARKIAN UPSTAGES CONN POLICE. At least the references to “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot” had been kept to the minimum. The
Inquirer
was the publication that had started all that, but in the present circumstances the newspaper was much more concerned to note that the police in its own precincts were far more competent than the police in New Haven, never mind the fact that New Haven had Yale and Philadelphia had only the University of Pennsylvania, which everybody outside the state considered second-rate Ivy League.

Or something.

Gregor sat at Tibor’s dining room table, surrounded by paperback copies of Judith Krantz novels and plates of
loukoumia
and thick butter cookies in the shape of stars. Tibor and Russ Donahue sat with him, ignoring the women and Tommy Moradanyan and the giant ants that were marching across the television screen. Tibor was a small, thin man with a receding hairline and a lined and pock-marked face. He looked a good ten years older than Gregor Demarkian but was in fact a couple of years younger. Russ Donahue was a tall man with sandy hair and the face of a Hollywood choirboy. He had been with the Philadelphia police department for the last seven years.

“What tipped me off,” Gregor was telling them, “was the business with the balcony, and the way Traci Cardinale talked. The balcony thing was especially important, because there was only one person who could have made that railing fall over, and that was Traci Cardinale herself.”

“I still don’t see why somebody couldn’t have sneaked out on the balcony and done it while nobody was looking, Krekor,” Father Tibor said. “It is the first thing I would have thought of if I had been there.”

“It was the first thing you were supposed to think of,” Gregor said, “but if it had happened that way, somebody would at least have been hurt. That wood fell all over Traci Cardinale’s desk, which she was supposedly sitting at, and she didn’t get so much as a splinter.”

“I take it the balcony had been rigged to fall beforehand,” Russ Donahue said.

“Tony came over and did it himself one night when Traci Cardinale was working late,” Gregor told him. “The line he fed Traci was that he was in big trouble on this case, he was getting a lot of pressure because Magda Hale was so prominent in New Haven, and now he had been forced to call me in because his superiors didn’t think he was doing enough to see the case to a conclusion—”

“Was that true?” Tibor asked.

“No,” Gregor said. “It was Tony’s own personal idea to get in touch with me. But Traci didn’t know that. Tony convinced her I was the big bad enemy, out to show him up and maybe ruin his career. So she let him come in in the middle of the night, when she was the only one there and the rest of the house was blocked off by security doors, and they did a little judicious sawing and puttering so that the railing looked all right, but was actually very easy to destroy. And then, when the time came, Traci destroyed it. And Tony created a media circus around it, and I was supposed to be thrown off the scent.”

“Which you weren’t,” Russ Donahue said.

“What I was was nearly half convinced that Traci Cardinale must have murdered Tim Bradbury,” Gregor said, “except that it was obvious that the railing had to have been sawed, and I couldn’t see Traci doing it. And the more I looked over those bits of wood, the more I was sure Traci couldn’t have done it, not unless she had done it months before. Her hands were perfectly smooth. There were no signs of abrasions or calluses on them. She hadn’t been sawing anything.”

“But Krekor,” Tibor said, “how did you know that the person Traci Cardinale had been helping was Tony Bandero? Why not Simon Roveter? Why not Magda Hale.”

“I didn’t know it,” Gregor said. “I just knew that Traci Cardinale knew Tony Bandero better than she was admitting to, and I found that—curious.”

“Yes,” Tibor persisted, “but how did you know that?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “Traci called everyone at Fountain of Youth, including Magda Hale and Simon Roveter and all the students, by their first names. But she called all the outside people, even rank patrolmen with no status at all, by their last names. Mr. O’Neill. Mrs. Donnegan. Except for Tony Bandero. Tony Bandero, Traci always called Tony.”

“That’s pretty weak,” Russ Donahue said. “I wouldn’t want to write something like that up in a report.”

“Neither would I, but fortunately I don’t have to file reports.” Gregor sighed. “As it turned out, I was right. I do feel a little guilty about not doing something about it earlier, though. Traci could have wound up dead.”

“She really knew not at all that Tony Bandero was involved in the murder?” Tibor asked.

“She definitely knew nothing at all,” Gregor said. “What tipped her off was the death of Stella Mortimer. Stella found that phone number, and she called it, but what she also did was to show it to Traci one afternoon, and Traci recognized it. And the next thing Traci knew, Stella was dead and there didn’t seem to be any other reason for it.”

“Is she going to testify to all this in court?” Russ asked. “This month’s star witness?”

“She says she will,” Gregor said. “I’m afraid I gave her a bit of a lecture before I left about how if you suspect someone of poisoning two people you probably shouldn’t accept cups of coffee from him while you’re asking him if he really did it. She seemed to think the lecture was a bit more than she ought to have to take.”

“It probably was,” Father Tibor said sadly. “You probably delivered it to her while she was in the hospital. In these things you do not have a wonderful sense of timing, Krekor.”

“I don’t have any sense of timing at all,” Gregor said. “I don’t see why I should have. My job isn’t social work. In fact, technically I don’t have a job at all.”

“You should really get your private detective’s license,” Russ Donahue said. “Not getting it at this point is just an attitude on your part. What would it hurt?”

“It would be too much trouble,” Gregor said.

Over on the television set, the army was bringing flame throwers and tanks into the sewers of Los Angeles to rid them of giant ants. Gregor got up and went over to see what Bennis and Donna and Tommy Moradanyan were doing. Only Tommy had his eyes glued to the television set. Donna was asleep. Bennis was looking idly through that day’s issue of the
Inquirer
, checking out Gregor’s publicity. There was a fair amount of publicity to check out. Besides the main story on the front page, there was a two-page inside spread with fuzzy pictures from all of Gregor’s old cases and a boxed sidebar titled, “Why Cops Go Bad—A Psychologist Reports.” It had definitely been a slow news week.

“Someday,” Gregor said, “I’m going to wrap up one of these cases on the same day that peace arrives in Northern Ireland or Communist China invades South Korea, and nobody is going to notice.”

“Sure they’ll notice,” Bennis said, without looking up. “You’re a lot more fun than Northern Ireland or South Korea.”

“If you want Donna Moradanyan to see in the New Year, you’d better wake her up. It’s about six minutes to midnight.”

Bennis checked her watch and straightened on the couch. Then she shook Donna by the foot and said:

“Donna. Come on. Wake up.”

Donna didn’t move.

“Maybe we ought to skip waking her up for the New Year,” Bennis said. “I mean, what difference does it make, anyway? The New Year is going to come in regardless.”

“That’s my line of argument,” Gregor said. “I’m the one who’s always saying that celebrating the New Year makes me feel ridiculous.”

Bennis shook Donna Moradanyan’s foot again. Donna turned over on her side, facing the back of the couch. Bennis gave up and stretched out on the couch herself, angling her legs so that she didn’t squeeze Tommy Moradanyan out.

“Forget it,” she said. “Tell Tibor and Russ I’m going to turn on the celebrations any second.”

L
ATER, WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT,
when Tommy Moradanyan had fallen asleep on the couch next to his mother and it had become obvious that they were not going to wake up until they were good and ready, Gregor Demarkian and Bennis Hannaford walked back across Cavanaugh Street together. Russ was staying to wait for Donna and Tommy. Tibor was in one of his hyperactive moods where all he really wanted to do was play hand after hand of solitaire and talk endlessly about what his life had been like before he left the Soviet Union—when there had been a Soviet Union, which, to Gregor, had begun to seem like an eternity ago. Cavanaugh Street was unusually deserted. It was never a very lively place late at night. It was too much of a family neighborhood for that. Even so, there were usually more lights on than this, no matter how late it got. The problem was that the two people most likely to leave their lights burning all night were both away for the holiday. Old George Tekemanian was visiting his grandson Martin and his three great-grandchildren out on the Main Line. Lida Arkmanian was out in California spending the holiday with “a friend.” Gregor looked up at the big line of tall windows that marched from one side to the other across the front of the third floor of Lida’s townhouse, all dark now. Gregor had grown up with Lida Arkmanian on this very street, when it had been not much better than a slum. It was only recently that the area had been gentrified and turned into what
Philadelphia
magazine had called “the best urban renewal story in America.” Gregor looked at the townhouses and the duplexes and the shiny storefronts selling everything from Armenian foodstuffs to expensive glass sculptures that looked like teardrops having nervous breakdowns. The neighborhood was decorated to within an inch of its life. The entire facade of the four-story brownstone where Bennis and Gregor both had floor-through apartments was wrapped up like a Christmas package in blue foil paper, complete with a big blue satin ribbon on the roof. That was Donna Moradanyan’s hobby, wrapping up the brownstone where Gregor and Bennis lived. Donna Moradanyan lived there, too, on the fourth floor. She had not, Gregor noted, taken down her Christmas decorations to replace them with decorations for New Year’s. It only went to prove his theory that New Year’s Eve was not a real holiday. For real holidays, Donna Moradanyan decorated.