Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (38 page)

“Miss Dubroff?” Dessa asked, sticking her head through the doorway. The office was empty. It was also incredibly tiny. Dessa was going to choke to death if she had to sit in there. She backed out into the hall.

“It’s Ms. Carter, isn’t it?” a voice behind her said. “I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve been running late all day.”

Dessa Carter turned around, prepared to find One Of Those Women, the kind of woman she called in her mind a Career Woman Barbie. Perfect hair. Perfect clothes. Perfect makeup. Perfect body. All of that accompanied by the unshakable conviction that any woman on earth could be a Career Woman Barbie, too, if she only really worked at it.

The woman at the other end of the hall was not a Career Woman Barbie. Her hair was in pretty good shape. Her makeup was flawless. Her clothes were nothing spectacular. It was her body that disqualified her. Claudia Dubroff, Dessa Carter realized, was a good fifty pounds heavier than Dessa had ever managed to get herself.

She was also shorter.

Dessa Carter turned to look at the other woman full face. Claudia Dubroff stopped in her tracks and stared. Dessa felt herself start to smile. Then she felt herself start to laugh. Claudia Dubroff started to laugh, too.

“Oh, dear,” Dessa Carter said.

“Oh, I know,” Claudia Dubroff said. “Were you worried about what I’d think of you?”

“Petrified,” Dessa Carter said.

“I was worried about what you’d think of me, too. You wouldn’t believe the kind of reactions I get.”

“I bet you get lectured once a week on how you shouldn’t try to solve other people’s problems until you’ve solved the ones you’ve got yourself,” Dessa said.

“Oh, yes,” Claudia Dubroff said. “I also get offered diets. By strangers on the street. People just walk up and hand me some diet book they’ve been reading.”

“People just walk up and tell me I’ve got to do something about myself,” Dessa said. “Or else they won’t talk to me at all. Saleswomen in stores are the worst.”

“I always have a problem with waitresses in restaurants. They act like I’m not there. It’s as if anybody who’s as fat as this shouldn’t actually allow herself to eat anything.”

“As if you should go on rations of bread and water until you got thin,” Dessa agreed.

“As if there must be something
really
wrong with you if you aren’t ashamed of yourself,” Claudia Dubroff said. “That’s the worst of it. They’re always expecting you to be ashamed of yourself. I belong to a fat liberation support group, by the way. Do you think you’d be interested?”

“I don’t know,” Dessa said. “I’ve just started going to the Fountain of Youth Work-Out. I like it there.”

“Isn’t it terribly expensive?”

“I’m trying to figure out a way for my insurance to pay for it.”

“Oh, that shouldn’t be any problem,” Claudia Dubroff said. “That’s just the kind of thing insurance companies like to pay for.”

“Don’t you find it incredibly claustrophobic in this office?” Dessa Carter said.

The two women turned and looked into Claudia Dubroff’s tiny office. To Dessa, it looked even smaller now than it had when she had first seen it. It looked more crowded, too. It was a very neat office. The books were in their proper places on the shelves. The file cabinet drawers were neatly closed. Except for a single file lying in the middle of it, the desk was clear of papers. The furniture looked too small. How did Claudia Dubroff sit on these chairs without half-falling off?

“Well,” Claudia Dubroff said, “I suppose we could go down to the lounge. It’s supposed to be for staff only, but at this time of the evening there won’t be anyone there to notice. And the chairs are bigger there.”

“All right,” Dessa said.

Claudia hurried into the office and picked up the file in the middle of the desk. Then she hurried out again, file in hand.

“I’ve researched all these alternatives for long-term nursing home care for your father,” she said. “I don’t know if you’re going to like any of them, but you might as well know what’s available. Isn’t Fountain- of Youth the place where they’ve had all those poisoning murders?”

“Only two,” Dessa told her. “Or maybe three, if you count Traci Cardinale. Except that she isn’t dead.”

“Oh, I know,” Claudia said. “She’s right here. Upstairs in Ward six. Do you know her?”

“Yes,” Dessa replied. “Yes, I do.”

“You ought to go up and see her, then. She’s been more or less conscious all day from what I hear, though I wouldn’t think she’d be doing much talking yet. I hear she’s very depressed. You ought to go and try to cheer her up.”

“Maybe I will,” Dessa Carter said.

Claudia Dubroff opened a door with no name sign on it at all and stepped through it.

“Here we are,” she announced. “The staff lounge. It’s even got a coffee machine that makes hot chocolate.”

I
F IT HADN’T BEEN
for the request from Gregor Demarkian to stick around for the meeting tomorrow morning at ten, Frannie Jay would have already been gone. She wanted to be gone even before the meeting. She hadn’t murdered Tim Bradbury. She hadn’t even known Tim Bradbury. It was bad enough to have to deal with the police when you had actually done something wrong. Then she thought that she had an obligation—to Fountain of Youth, because they had hired her in spite of knowing everything there was to know about her background; to Magda Hale—and she knew she had to stay. All this publicity about the murders couldn’t be doing Magda’s business any good, especially right before the nationwide tour. Frannie would stay long enough to give Gregor Demarkian the help he needed tomorrow. Maybe that would be enough.

It was ten o’clock at night now, and Frannie had her clothes lined up in piles across her bed. There weren’t a lot of them. Seven complete leotard-and-tights work-out combinations. Seven pairs of white athletic socks. Two pairs of white work-out shoes. Then there were only a few things: turtlenecks, jeans, button-down blouses in pastel colors, one dress, one pair of loafers, one pair of heels. Frannie found it hard to look at these things, harder, even, than she found it to look at the one thing she had left of Marilee: a small pink cap, knitted out of stretchy yarn, that they had given her in the hospital.

Frannie picked up the cap and put it in the duffel bag. She had taken it everywhere with her since Marilee died. She had even taken it with her to jail. Was there ever going to be a time when this didn’t matter to her anymore?

There was only one thing Frannie was sure of: It was time to leave New Haven. She should never have come back here in the first place. She shouldn’t stay now that she knew it was wrong. Tomorrow was not only the day of Mr. Gregor Demarkian’s important meeting. It was also the last day of the special seminar week. Once she finished her classes, they wouldn’t be counting on her for anything. They would have time to find someone else to lead step aerobics on a regular basis.

Frannie took two pairs of underwear out of the stack: one for tomorrow morning and one for tomorrow afternoon after her classes. She put the rest of her underwear in the duffel bag. She took out a shirt and a clean pair of jeans. She put those aside, too. She could get away with the sweater she was wearing as long as she didn’t spill anything on it. She put the rest of her things in the duffel bag and pulled the string at the top of it closed, tight. The string was a fashion statement. The real closure on the duffel bag was a short, heavy-duty zipper: Frannie pulled that closed and fastened it to the body of the bag with the tiny padlock that had come with it.

Maybe I’ll go to Montana, Frannie thought. Or Vermont. Or Oklahoma. Somewhere I’ve never been before.

There was a knock on the door. “Frannie?” Nick Bannerman said.

Frannie froze. She hadn’t seen Nick Bannerman for hours. She hadn’t even run across him in the halls. It was as if he had been hiding from her.

“Frannie?”

Frannie went to the door and stood right in front of it. It was such a big, heavy door. It had a good bolt lock on it. If she locked herself in, Nick would never be able to break the door down.

Nick would never want to.

“Frannie,” Nick said again. “For God’s sake. Open up, will you please?”

The door isn’t locked, Frannie thought irrationally. He can come right in. Why doesn’t he come right in? She reached forward and pulled the door open abruptly, making a breeze.

Nick was standing in the hall in his dark outdoor jacket. He looked like an African-American version of Lou Reed in that television commercial from a couple of years ago.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

Frannie stepped back away from the door. Nick came in. Frannie shut the door again.

“Well,” Nick said. His eyes were on the duffel bag.

“I was packing,” Frannie said. “I thought that, after tomorrow, you know, I’d move on.”

“I thought you had family here.”

“I do. I don’t talk to them much.”

“Do you have any idea where you want to move on to?”

Montana, Frannie thought. Vermont. Oklahoma. She went over and sat down on the bed.

“I’m surprised you came,” she said. “I thought you’d taken off for somewhere.”

“I’m not the one who wants to take off. I was out walking around. I was thinking.”

“About what I told you?”

“Yeah. About what I told you.”

“I don’t think there’s much to think about,” Frannie said.

“Yeah. Well. One of the things I was thinking about was what the issue was. I mean, what is it exactly you were trying to tell me?”

“I was trying to tell you what happened,” Frannie said.

There were a chair and a desk next to the window Frannie had looked out of that first night. Nick took the chair and straddled it, backward.

“So you told me. But what was it all supposed to mean, Frannie? What did you want me to get out of it?”

Frannie was confused. “I wanted you to know what kind of person I am.”

“If that were the point, you left a few things out. Like everything that’s happened since.”

“Nothing has happened since.”

“A lot has happened since. You’ve gotten off drugs. You’ve been to jail. You’ve gotten a job. Entire universes have been born and died since.”

“Nothing important has happened since.”

Nick closed his eyes and put his head down on his arms. “Nothing important from your point of view, maybe. Did you every think of going into therapy?”

“I had therapy coming out of my ears when I was in jail. They were real big on it.”

Nick opened his eyes. “Do you know why I came here?”

“No.”

“I thought that since both of us were supposed to be at that meeting tomorrow morning, and since neither of us is leading any classes tomorrow, you might, you just might, want to go out for a drink.”

“I don’t—”

“Drink,” Nick interrupted. “I should have guessed. You can have a cup of tea. I can have a drink. I’m beginning to think I need one.”

“Do you really think Gregor Demarkian is going to unmask the killer tomorrow morning?” Frannie asked. “Do you think it’s going to be just like Hercule Poirot where the killer leaps up out of the crowd and tells the whole story?”

“I doubt it. That son-of-a-bitch is going to be there, you know. Detective Bandero. He’s probably going to give a little lecture on why it is that African-Americans are more likely to commit murder than white people are. Then he’s going to arrest me on the spot.”

“Oh,” Frannie said.

Nick reached across the space between them and touched her lightly on the knee. “Frannie? Do you want to go out?”

“Yes,” Frannie said softly. “I think I do.”

“Good. Go get your coat and we’ll get out of here.”

“All right.”

“It will be just like the last time, you know. Three guys will ask you why you’re wasting your time on the homeboy. Never mind the fact that I wouldn’t know a homeboy from a hero sandwich?”

“I didn’t mind that. They were just stupid.”

Nick got off of his chair.

“We’ll talk about the other stuff later,” he said, “when I’ve got a glass of Scotch in front of me. Maybe once we both calm down, we can figure out where to go from here.”

Frannie hadn’t known there was anywhere to go from here, except out, or further on, or gone.

She got her coat.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN DIDN’T REALLY
believe in confrontation scenes. He liked them—in the books Bennis gave him to read, the confrontation scenes always seemed to be the least confusing part—but his thinking ran along the lines Philip Brye’s did: it was a wonder one of these fictional “detectives” hadn’t been shot. Especially Nero Wolfe. Gregor’s personal favorite among fictional detectives was Nero Wolfe, who sat in his favorite chair all day and ate perfect food and solved impossibly complicated crimes without ever leaving his house. If Gregor had been able to choose a method of detection for himself, that would have been it. The problem with it was the problem with all the other methods of detection in all the other books Bennis gave him. Eventually, it required the Great Detective to meet the murderer face to face and make an accusation. Philip Brye was right. In real life, the Great Detective would have been shot, time and again, and stabbed, too, and pushed out of high windows. Murderers in real life didn’t kill people just because they “knew too much”—or, at least, amateur murderers didn’t. Murdering somebody was messy and dangerous. Still, having someone jump up in front of your face and declare that he had the evidence to convict you of murder was something else. Your first impulse could easily be to take care of the problem in the next split second. Your next impulse might be to laugh. Gregor had had that happen to him a couple of times. Everybody watched the cop and court shows on television these days. Everybody knew it had become almost impossible to convict anybody of anything in the United States of America.

The Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio didn’t look like a place where anybody would get murdered, or arrested, or even confronted with a violent crime. Sitting in the pale sunlight of this cold mid-morning, it looked like the setting for an English children’s book, all fancy grillwork and gingerbread details. Gregor got out of Connie Hazelwood’s taxi and looked it over. Connie intended to park out of sight somewhere and come in for what she called “the festivities.” Gregor wanted to tell her that there was nothing festive about playing a nasty trick on someone, even someone you didn’t like. When you played one on someone you did like, it could leave a bad taste in your mouth for weeks.