Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (22 page)

It was Magda Hale who answered, again. “It’s Stella Mortimer. She’s in the pantry.”

“Dead,” Gregor added.

Tony looked from Gregor to Magda Hale to Simon Roveter to Traci Cardinale, whose screaming had become background noise, unheard and unimportant. Then he went to the pantry door and opened it up.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” Gregor said.

Tony closed the pantry door. “I’ll call myself,” he said. “Even if she just got sick and died—”

“She was poisoned,” Gregor said firmly.

“You can’t possibly know that,” Tony shot back.

“I know it as well as I know anything,” Gregor told him. “I’m the one who’s good at poison, do you remember? That was supposedly one of the reasons you wanted me to come out here.”

“You can’t tell if somebody’s been poisoned unless you see them die.” Tony was stubborn. “And even then, you’re making a guess.”

“She was poisoned. I’ll bet my life on it. She was poisoned with arsenic. I’ll bet my left leg on it. You should call your cops in, Tony. We need the tech men.”

“I didn’t say we weren’t going to call the tech men,” Tony said. “Under the circumstances, I’d call the tech men if a butterfly farted around here. I’m only saying—”

“Oh, stop arguing,” Magda Hale said desperately. “Please stop arguing. I don’t think I can stand it anymore.”

Traci Cardinale had stopped screaming. Gregor didn’t know when. She had backed up until she was flat against the wall next to the windows looking out on the backyard, sat down on the floor, and rolled into a ball. Magda Hale was crying.

“All right,” Tony said. “I’m going to make a call.”

Gregor got away from the phone. “Go right ahead.”

Tony picked up, turned his back to the rest of them, and started dialing.

“Good God,” Simon Roveter said.

Gregor sat down on the bench at the picnic table. “Who was she?” he asked Magda and Simon. It would have been useless to ask Traci Cardinale anything. “A guest? A member? One of the staff?”

“Stella was our videotape director,” Simon Roveter said. “We make exercise tapes here that you can buy to bring home with you. So you can work out even if you can’t get into the club.”

“She’s been with us absolutely forever,” Magda Hale said. “Since about the fifth year we were in operation, and we’ve been open for nearly twenty. Of course, it wasn’t videotapes back then. It was commercials for the local stations. Stella made them for us.”

“She had a background in film?” Gregor asked.

“She made a couple of highly acclaimed documentaries when she was younger,” Simon Roveter replied. “One on what she called the Bubba drug culture. Rednecks with long hair who smoke dope. That was back in ’68 or ’70. One on welfare mothers. That was a couple of years later.”

“You can’t make any money on documentaries,” Magda explained. “Unless you’re doing really sensationalistic ones on murder trials or executions or something. I think by the time she came to us, she was tired of scrambling around for cash.”

“Did she live here, in the house?”

Magda Hale shook her head. “Oh, no. Stella wouldn’t have liked that. She was a very reclusive person. She had an apartment out near the Co-Op someplace.”

“Alone? With a husband? With a lover?”

“Alone,” Magda said definitely. “I know she was never married. She always said she didn’t approve of it. And I know she wasn’t living with a lover, because I don’t think—” Magda stopped.

“What is it?” Gregor asked her.

Magda waved her hands helplessly in the air. “It’s just odd,” she said. “I was just going to say that I didn’t think Stella believed in lovers any more than she believed in husbands, and then I realized that I didn’t really know that. I’ve known the woman for fifteen years, and I didn’t really know that. I’m not even sure, if Stella ever had a lover, I’m not even sure what sex the lover would be.”

“Oh, God,” Simon Roveter groaned.

Magda turned to him. “But Simon, it’s true. It’s really true. I never asked and she never said, never once in all those years. And it’s even odder, because yesterday we were talking about that, about how we all work here but we don’t really know very much about each other, about what goes on on the outside. Stella said our relationship with each other was different, but now I’m not so sure it was.”

“What got you started talking about that kind of thing?” Simon looked bewildered.

Magda made another of her helpless gestures. “It was Tim, of course. Stella was all upset because we knew so little about him. I think she thought there was something disrespectful in that, disrespectful to the dead, or maybe just that it was a wrong way to be about somebody you knew who had died. She kept saying that she wished the papers would be better about it, so that we could find out what his life had been like.”

“We know what his life was like,” Simon said. “He lived right here in the house.”

“She meant what his life was like outside.”

“There wasn’t anything to know about Tim Bradbury’s life outside. He was a local kid who wanted to go to California.”

Magda Hale sighed. “You always make it sound so easy and uncomplicated, Simon, but it isn’t. People have histories. Even people like Tim. Stella only wanted… to feel like she’d been more of a friend, I think.”

“She wasn’t a friend. She barely knew him. None of us knew him. He taught weight-training sessions.” Simon sounded impatient. “—The kind of knowing you’re talking about is the kind that only happens between confidants. Or lovers.”

“Oh, Simon. You don’t have to be a confidant, or a lover, to know if somebody’s parents are alive or if they tried out for their high school basketball team or if they dated women or men. Casual acquaintances know that much about each other sometimes.”

“My casual acquaintances don’t.”

“Simon is a very private man,” Magda said to Gregor. “If he were a Catholic, he would only go to confession to a priest who had been struck dumb.”

Tony Bandero thumped the phone receiver down. “It’s all set up,” he announced. “The tech men are on their way. Some uniforms are on their way. An ambulance is on its way. Does that satisfy everybody?”

“It’s a start,” Gregor said.

Tony Bandero’s face reddened. “At this point the procedures are routine,” he said. I’m sorry I don’t share your sense of emergency, Demarkian, but there’s no emergency here. We don’t have a bunch of terrorists holding hostages on the roof. We’ve got a dead body that isn’t going to be going any place soon.”

Traci Cardinale hadn’t moved in minutes. Now she did, slowly at first, then faster and faster, unfolding herself and standing straight up at the same time. She was shaking and her face was streaked with tears, but she didn’t looked anguished as much as she looked angry. In fact, she looked furious.

“You,” she spat out in the direction of Tony Bandero. “I can’t believe you. How can you be so callous? How can you be such a—such a son of a bitch?”

It might have been interesting to find out what Tony Bandero had to say to all that, but nobody got the chance. Because Traci Cardinale walked up to him, reared back her right arm, and slapped him resoundingly across the face. Then she whirled on her heel and marched out of the kitchen.

T
ONY BANDERO MUST HAVE
called the press at the same time he called the tech men. The press arrived first, in the form of a WTNH mobile news van that pulled up the drive and parked right in front of the front door. Then the reporter for
The New Haven Register
arrived and parked his ancient Volkswagen Beetle behind the mobile news van, blocking any chance it had of being able to turn around and get out on the street again. Then the van for the CBS affiliate showed up and parked behind the Volkswagen Beetle. Nobody went to the back, where there was a sizable parking lot filled with the cars of people who would not be allowed to be in a hurry. When the tech men arrived, they had to go back there. The ambulance had to park on the street.

“It’s one of Phil Brye’s ambulances,” Bandero told Gregor. “Don’t worry about that. I’m not having the body sent to Yale New Haven.”

Gregor hadn’t been worried about it. What he was worried about was getting the tech men and the other official people into the house without letting in a lot of reporters and letting out half the attendees at the Fountain of Youth’s New Year’s special exercise week. The attendees were getting particularly frantic. The seeds of the panic mentality had been planted. Ever since the murder of Stella Mortimer had become generally known—which had taken no time at all, really; Gregor could never believe how fast these things spread—rumors had been jumping from one class to the next. There was a serial killer loose in the house. There was poison in the food. The house was being used as a center for drug gangs. It didn’t matter how preposterous the theories were. They all sounded real enough to a crowd of women who had been exercised into exhaustion and half starved to death all day. Gregor watched the ripples of fear and worry spread through the classes like fault lines. Give any one of them a push in the wrong direction, and the plates would start moving, whatever weak bulwark of calmness and control was left would come tumbling down.

The head of the mobile crime unit was not a tech man, but a tech woman. Gregor let her in through the back door, both because it was the door closest to where the van had parked and because the reporters were waiting around the front. The women in the classes were around at the front, too, spread out across the foyer and up the stairs to the second-floor balcony, just as they had been after the railing fell the morning before. Philip Brye himself pulled in behind the mobile crime unit van. He drove a Volvo so battered it looked like it ought to have been awarded battle medals. When he got out of the car, he was wearing a large enameled pin on his coat that said: “D
ON’T DRINK AND DRIVE, BE ALIVE TO SEE IN THE NEW YEAR.”
Gregor stood at the back door, holding it open as the doctor ran the last few steps. Tony Bandero stood behind him in the first-floor hallway, snorting.

“Phil,” Tony Bandero said, as the medical examiner stepped inside. “I’m surprised. Didn’t think you made house calls anymore.”

Philip Brye unbuttoned his coat. “I’m taking an interest in this case,” he replied. Then he held his hand out to Gregor. “Hello, Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

“Again,” Tony Bandero said.

“Mr. Demarkian came to see me at the morgue this morning. You did tell me I was supposed to answer any questions he put to me, Tony. You told everyone in the department.”

“I didn’t know Demarkian had been out this morning, that’s all. I thought he was sleeping in this morning.”

“I never told you I was sleeping in,” Gregor said.

Two ambulance men appeared around the back of the house, carrying a collapsed stretcher between them. Gregor opened the back door for them, too.

“The thing is,” Tony Bandero said, “stuff around here seems to be getting out of control. We’re not coordinated, that’s the problem. We’ve got to let each other know what we’re doing or we’re going to be stepping on each other’s toes.”

“I take it that the scene of the crime is this way.” Philip Brye pointed in the direction the tech woman had gone in.

Actually, Gregor thought, the scene of the crime could have been anywhere on this floor. Men and women in white coats seemed to be everywhere he looked, taking fingerprints, photographing floorboards, measuring the distances between nails in the walls. Gregor knew that all the things they did were important. Cases had failed because of inadequate or incompetent tech work. He just didn’t understand exactly what it was the tech people did.

He went back into the kitchen. Magda Hale and Simon Roveter had been ordered out. They had probably gone to sit in the foyer with their work-out students. Tech people were attacking the kitchen, too, and the pantry door was open. As Gregor watched, Philip Brye backed out of there, shaking his head. The stench was worse than awful now. It had soured and spread.

“Well?” Gregor asked Philip Brye.

“Poisoned,” Philip Brye said. “That’s virtually certain. Arsenic would be a good guess.”

“That’s what I told Tony Bandero.”

“And?”

“He told me I couldn’t possibly know that until the lab reports came in.”

“Well, that’s true enough. That doesn’t mean you have to act like you never saw a dead body before. And there’s one relief here, at least. It’s not like Tim. We don’t have to wonder where this woman died or how her body got here. And she is, thank God, fully clothed.”

“I wonder what she took the arsenic in,” Gregor said. “And when. And where.”

“Assuming it was a good strong dose, she took it half an hour ago or so, that’s when. As to where, I wouldn’t know. As to in what—well, the lab reports will probably tell us. We’ll do a stomach content analysis.”

“What had Tim Bradbury taken the arsenic in?”

“Hot chocolate. Very sweet hot chocolate.”

Gregor considered this. “Do you know what’s always bothered me about poisoners?” he asked. “Poison is not like a gun, or a knife. You can’t aim it at somebody and let it go from there. A poisoner has two choices. Either he can put the poison in something in his victim’s possession. Or he can feed the poison to his victim himself. Those are the only two things he can do. “But they both have drawbacks,” Gregor continued. “If the poisoner puts the poison in something his victim already owns, then the first thing that happens is that he loses control of the time schedule. Some are on regular medication or take vitamin capsules at a scheduled time every day, but most people don’t. And some people who do do one or the other take pills instead of capsules, and it’s damned hard to put poison in a pill.” He sighed. “Then you have the innocent bystander factor. Unless the poisoner is dealing with prescription medication, there’s always the chance that somebody else will end up dead instead of the intended victim. The victim’s girlfriend decides to take one of his time-release cold capsules and gets the wrong one. The victim’s mother decides she needs a little herb tea this morning and opens the wrong box. It gets messy. I think that’s why, in all the years I’ve been working, I’ve only known of one case where the poisoner operated that way.”