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

“That’s Dessa Carter.” Traci Cardinale pointed to a very fat woman in the last row of dancers.

Traci had not been exaggerating. Dessa Carter was enormous. She was not, however, silly. She was wearing a plain black leotard and plain black tights and black running shoes that looked less expensive than the ones worn by the women around her. Her body hung in folds and globes and shivered violently in the air every time she moved. She still had a great deal of plain old-fashioned human dignity. There were more normal-size women around her who did not hold up to scrutiny so well. Dessa Carter, Gregor thought, looked like a woman he might like to know.

“This is an aerobic dance class,” Traci explained. “Most of our members spend most of their time on aerobic dance, but we offer other things. Weight training and weight machines. Step aerobics. Yoga and stretch. Interval work.”

Machines screeched. Music blared. Feet crashed into hardwood.

“Is it all this loud?” Gregor asked.

“Yoga is pretty quiet.” Traci motioned them to follow her back into the hall. When they were all outside, she closed the doors to the studio viewing area again. In terms of noise, it didn’t help much.

“We have everything we can soundproofed and protected,” she said, “but it seems like there’s no way to soundproof a door without spending the kind of money the Pentagon does, so the only soundproof doors we’ve got are the ones on the film room upstairs and the ones on the studio where we make the videotapes. Those have to be soundproof. You get used to the noise after a while, though. You’ll see.”

Gregor didn’t think he would. Now that they were farther down the hall, he could hear other pounding and other music. He wondered how many studios Fountain of Youth ran. It was a big house, but there were more than studios in it. How many classes could Fountain of Youth fill at any one time? How many women were there in New Haven who were willing to put themselves through that kind of physical trauma at—Gregor checked his watch—twenty-five minutes to nine on a Monday morning?

Traci reached the door at the end of the hall and knocked. When nobody answered, she knocked again.

“Sometimes Simon puts his earphones on so he can’t hear any of it,” she explained. She turned the knob on the door and opened up. She stuck her head in and looked around. “He’s not here,” she said, in some confusion. “He’s supposed to be here. He knew you were coming.”

“Maybe we should go back downstairs and wait,” Gregor suggested.

Traci shook her head and pushed the door open wider. “There’s no need for you to do that. There are chairs for visitors to sit in. You should go in and take a seat and give me a minute while I go look for him. He’s probably just gone down the hall to the bathroom.”

Gregor looked over at Tony Bandero, to see if this setup was making him uncomfortable, too. Toward the end of Gregor’s time with the Bureau, there had been new procedural guidelines issued for dealing with suspects and property belonging to suspects. One of those guidelines had stressed the necessity for any agent or group of agents entering a suspect’s room or place of work or residence to have an invitation, a warrant, or a witness. It was too easy for defendants to claim illegal search in other circumstances. Surely, Gregor thought, Simon Roveter must be a suspect in this case. The dead man had worked for him. The dead man’s body had been found on his own back lawn. Tony Bandero didn’t seem to care. He had gone into Simon Roveter’s office and begun to walk slowly around it, looking at the framed hunting prints that hung in clusters on the paneled walls. It was, Gregor had to admit, quite an office. Tall arched windows set in the wall opposite the door overlooked a scene of bare tree branches and cloud-occluded sky. A desk with its back to this wall was six feet long and made of deeply polished oak. That, Gregor was convinced, was a replica. The desk had pigeon holes and odd-shaped little specialty drawers rising from the front of it. It had lots and lots of embossed fluted ornamentation. Like everything else self-consciously Victorian about this house, it must have cost a mint and a half and then some.

“Good,” Traci Cardinale said when she saw that Tony Bandero was satisfied. “I’ll be right back. Don’t worry about a thing.”

She went trotting off back down the hall, the thin heels of her high-heeled pumps catching in the carpet pile. Gregor turned his attention back to Tony Bandero.

“Well,” he said. “This is an interesting place. Have you been in here before?”

“Yep,” Tony Bandero said.

“And?” Gregor prodded.

Tony shrugged. “And I think these people throw around a lot of money,” he said, “which is what you think, too. I also wonder where it all comes from, which you wonder, too. I also want to know if this business is really doing this well and if these people are in a lot of debt and if the late Tim Bradbury had anything to do with it. The questions are obvious. I’ve asked all the questions. It’s the answers I don’t have.”

“You haven’t been able to get hold of the financial records?”

Tony made a face. “This isn’t the FBI. We can’t just call up the IRS and demand to see a lot of tax returns. We have to have a whole lot of probable cause.”

“You’d have to have a whole lot of probable cause even if you were the FBI. You’ve got a dead body.”

“I’ve got a dead body, the one thing we know for sure about it was that it wasn’t murdered on the premises. This is not the kind of thing that looks good when you ask the judge for access to private files.”

“True,” Gregor said, “but you could milk the rumors. You could talk to the people who do business with them. Suppliers, those kinds of people. Isn’t there a local newspaper?
The New Haven Register
? You could talk to the financial reporter there.”

“We tried. Maybe you could talk to her. Maybe she’d be more comfortable with a man in a suit than she was with a cop.”

Gregor went over to look at one of the clusters of hunting prints. They were pen-and-ink reproductions, not originals. This Simon Roveter, whoever he is, hadn’t let himself go that far. Still. These reproductions were good reproductions. They hadn’t come cheap.

“I think one of the things we’re going to have to do pretty soon,” Gregor said, “before I start going off half-cocked myself and speculating about things I can’t begin to understand, is to—what’s that?”

That was the sound of something creaking, creaking and creaking, like a rusty hinge being pulled violently back and forth. Tony Bandero had heard it at the same time Gregor did. He had turned away from the scrollwork he had been examining at the front of the desk. He was frozen in the middle of Simon Roveter’s office, his head up, listening.

“What the hell—” Tony began.

The creaking changed to a sound more like wood splintering. Then there was an enormous creak, the creak to end all creaks, a screaming whine like a vampire whose heart had just been staked. Then there was a crash, and a woman started screaming.

“Traci Cardinale,” Tony said, just before he started moving.

Gregor started moving, too. He went out the door of Simon Roveter’s office and into the hall. He went down the hall to the doors that led to the balcony. The doors were standing open. So were the doors that led to the viewing section of the exercise studio where Traci had shown them the beginners’ class. Women were spilling out of that door and milling around in confusion.

“Somebody’s screaming,” one of the women kept saying—not Dessa Carter or the woman who had been leading the class. “Somebody’s screaming. Why should somebody be screaming?”

Gregor pushed past her and then past Dessa Carter. He went through the doors to the balcony without looking where he was going. He nearly plowed into Tony Bandero’s back. Tony was standing stock-still in the very middle of the balcony, his hands on his hips and his head thrown back.

“What the hell is going on around here?” he was demanding.

Gregor got around the side of him and saw what it was that was happening, as far as it was possible to see. A long low stretch of balcony railing was missing, gone from the center of the curved stretch that overlooked the foyer. When Gregor went forward a few steps, he could see what was left of it lying on the foyer floor below. A lot of the wood seemed to have been reduced to shards and splinters. There were raw nails sticking up out of the debris. Traci Cardinale stood with her back to the balcony wall. Her face was leached of color and the knuckles on both her hands were white. If she had been standing next to that balcony rail when it collapsed, Gregor thought, she would have been dead. At the very least, she would have been seriously hurt.

Traci Cardinale’s skirt was torn. She was screaming.

“I’m going to call into the office and get a car out here,” Tony Bandero announced to the assembled company.

Gregor thought that was a very good idea, although maybe not for the reasons Tony Bandero thought it was. Gregor walked to the raw open edge of the balcony rail and back to the doors that led into the second floor and back to the balcony rail again. It was a mess down there in the foyer. There were pieces of wood scattered across Traci Cardinale’s receptionist’s desk. There were more nails than Gregor had realized would be necessary for a balcony of this kind.

In the background, Traci Cardinale was still screaming. Tony had ceased hearing her because he was busy. Gregor had ceased hearing her because he was thinking. She was going on and on and on, letting out a thin high wail that was as even and unsubstantial as water from a lawn sprinkler.

Gregor went back to the gap on the balcony and looked down. No one was hurt. No one was killed. No one was even messed up, as far as Gregor could see.

It just didn’t make any sense.

G
REGOR WAS STILL STANDING
at the open place in the balcony rail, thinking that nothing at all was making sense, when the police finally showed up—but by that time Gregor wasn’t alone, and Tony Bandero had lost the fight to keep order in the foyer. The police arrived with sirens wailing, as if there were an armed robbery in progress. Their noise mingled with all the other noise and became unintelligible.

“Get away from the wood,” Tony Bandero was bellowing. “Get away from the wood.”

There were now dozens of women in leotards in the foyer and on the balcony. They had come streaming out of doors and stairways all over the house, curious and tense, still worked up from whatever exercise they had been doing when the fuss started. The women who had come from the third and fourth floors had their hair plastered to their heads with sweat. Some of them were wearing clothing with Fountain of Youth advertising on it. Gregor saw one woman in a pale green leotard with the words “A
NEW YOU FOR THE NEW YEAR”
plastered across her chest in black. The letters made it impossible to tell with any accuracy whether she was thick or thin, in good shape or bad.

“Traci nearly got killed,” women kept saying.

Traci was standing where she had been standing all along, with her back to the wall. She wasn’t screaming anymore.

“Get away from the wood,” Tony Bandero kept saying. “Get away from the wood and stay away from it.”

Down in the foyer, the front door opened and two uniformed policemen stepped in. They were both young and jumpy. When they saw the crowds of women who awaited them, they both blanched. Gregor shook his head in exasperation and started down the stairs. That was all they were going to need now, two rookies put out of commission by sexual confusion. There were too many people around here who had been put out of commission by other kinds of confusion already.

Gregor gave Traci Cardinale one last look—she seemed on the verge of tears, but she wasn’t crying—and then went all the way down into the foyer. He pushed his way through a crowd of older women in dark tights and brightly colored headbands and went up to Tony Bandero.

“Is everybody here you expect to be here? Simon Roveter? Magda Hale?”

“I don’t know,” Tony told Gregor, Beginning to redden, “I haven’t had a chance to look. This is nuts.”

“We need you ladies to step away from the wood,” one of the young uniformed patrolmen was saying to five very young women in stretch bicycle shorts. “We need you to keep away from the wood.” The women weren’t listening to the patrolman any more than they had been listening to Tony Bandero.

Gregor stepped up to the wood himself and looked it over. There wasn’t much more of to see close up than there had been from the balcony. The nails looked longer and newer. The splinters of wood looked bigger and more treacherous. Gregor rubbed his face.

“The important thing here,” Tony Bandero said, coming up behind him, “is to find out whether this was deliberate or an accident.”

“No,” Gregor told him, still rubbing his face.

“No?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “it couldn’t have been an accident. That’s obvious. So the real question is not whether this was deliberate, but what kind of deliberate it was.”

“I don’t think I get your point here,” Tony Bandero said.

Gregor walked away from Tony. There was wood everywhere in the foyer, so he couldn’t walk all the way around it all. The nails gleamed. The shards flashed wickedly sharp points. The splinters looked like loose needles ready to prick and stab. Gregor wanted to kick something. It didn’t make any sense.

“The important thing here,” Gregor told Tony Bandero with an edge of anger in his voice, “is that nobody got killed, nobody got hurt, nobody got even scratched. And it just doesn’t begin to add up.”

W
HEN GRETA BELLAMY FIRST
heard that Gregor Demarkian was in the building, she was standing on the second-floor balcony just a few steps from the doors to the second floor proper in a cluster of other women, wondering what was going on. Ten minutes later, she was still wondering what was going on, but she had seen Gregor Demarkian in the flesh. He was less impressive than he had been in
People
magazine. That might have been because he was looking confused instead of wise. In
People
, he always looked a little like one of those ancient seers, a man with all the answers. It might also have been because he didn’t have Bennis Hannaford with him, or didn’t seem to. Greta was confused. She had thought, from what she had read, that Gregor Demarkian and Bennis Hannaford were always together, like Siamese twins. She looked around and around the foyer and through all the clusters of strange women that littered the stairway and the halls, but she didn’t see anyone who looked like the dark-haired woman in
People
magazine. It made Greta feel a little let down. She had been tense and miserable all day, thinking about Chick and Marsha in Atlantic City, thinking about how ugly she must look in her leotard and how stupid she must seem trying to do aerobic dance steps when she had no sense of rhythm. She felt thick and awkward, the way she had when she first started going out with Chick. When Chick had asked her out for the first time, it had felt like a miracle.