Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  “Sorry I took so long,” the young woman said to Greta when she was done. “That’s what it is mostly these days. Old people. Nobody else seems to want to use the library any more. What can I help you with?”

  “I want to find a copy of The New Haven Register. I’m not sure which copy exactly, but it would have been somewhere in February 1988.”

  “Eighty-eight.” That would be on microfilm, then.”

  “Microfilm?”

  “We put all our newspapers on microfilm at the end of the year. We have to, or we couldn’t keep them. We don’t have the space.”

  “Do you microfilm the pictures, or only the words? It’s a picture I’m looking for, you see.”

  “We microfilm everything. Pictures. Words. Cartoons. Dust motes. You name it.”

  “But will I be able to really see the picture? Or will it be really small or fuzzy or something?”

  “You’ll be able to see the picture better than you could have in the paper if you want to. You can adjust the viewer. Come on with me and I’ll get you set up.”

  “All right.”

  The young woman led Greta across the blue carpet of the reference section to three little carrels that had been installed in front of a blank wall. Then she disappeared and came back in a moment with a box the size of a card catalog file drawer.

  “Here we are,” she said, putting the box down in the carrel next to the machine. “This is all of 1988. First you find February.” She found February. “Then you do this.”

  She leaned over Greta’s shoulder and showed her how to work the viewer. Do this to make the picture bigger. Do that to make it smaller. Do this other thing to move the microfilm around. It was really very easy, Greta thought in relief, more like a typewriter than a computer. She thought she would be all right using it.

  “Thank you very much,” she told the young woman.

  “No problem at all,” the young woman said. “It’s nice to see somebody in here who isn’t geriatric. Holler if you need help.”

  Greta looked through the viewer at the banner headline on the front page of the February 1, 1988 issue. When she looked up again, the young woman was back at her desk. Greta got her handbag onto her lap and felt carefully in the outside pocket for the piece of paper she had left there. It was a torn-away section of yesterday’s New Haven Register with the standard picture of Tim Bradbury on it, captioned TIMOTHY JOHN BRADBURY: MURDER VICTIM.

  It’s probably nothing, Greta told herself, as she smoothed the picture out on the desk surface. It probably has nothing to do with anything. Still, she would feel a lot better when she knew for sure.

  Besides, why shouldn’t she check it out? It wasn’t like she had anybody to go home to, or anything to do. There was nobody to care if she was out until midnight. And she would feel so much safer being sure.

  Greta bent her head over the viewer, flicked past the front page, and went searching for the “Lifestyles” section.

  THREE

  1

  THE MOST SENSIBLE THING to do would have been to rent a car. That was what most people would have done if they found themselves in a town they didn’t know with a lot of traveling to do and inadequate public transportation. But Gregor couldn’t take that option. Although he had a driver’s license, he was a legendarily bad driver. He hadn’t even tried to drive for over ten years, except once on a vacation in Cape Cod with Bennis and Tibor, when Tibor needed to go to the hospital with a cut foot. The results had not been gratifying. Bennis said afterward that she hadn’t known it was possible to strip gears like that on an automatic transmission. The cop who stopped them on the little road in Orleans where they got lost for the last time said he thought that all of them must be drunk. Why else would they be weaving back and forth across the lanes that way? It was a good thing Tibor’s cut turned out not to be serious. It was a good hour and a half by the time the cop stopped them. By then, they didn’t even know where they were.

  Gregor got up the morning after the death of Stella Mortimer and called Bulldog Cabs. Philip Brye had promised to messenger over copies of the forensics reports as soon as they came in. That meant that Gregor could do an end run around Tony Bandero’s obstructiveness when he wanted to. He very much wanted to. Tony had been all over the television set again last night, giving interviews, making broad hints, suggesting the threatening and the sinister for the benefit of the viewing audience. If Madonna ever became a detective, she would be the kind of detective Tony Bandero was.

  Gregor asked for Connie Hazelwood specifically, and it was Connie Hazelwood who showed up in the lobby, wearing another blue-and-white Bulldog sweater and sporting a big enameled button that read: “YOU DRINK—WE DRIVE-EVERYBODY HAS A HAPPY NEW YEAR.” Gregor decided not to buy a copy of The New Haven Register with Tony’s picture on the cover. He bought a copy of The New York Times instead, and then realized he’d stuck himself with one more series of stories of one more round of Middle Eastern peace talks. Maybe if they talk peace long enough, they’ll get around to doing some of it. Gregor threw the Times in the nearest wastebasket and told Connie Hazelwood where he wanted to go.

  Connie Hazelwood considered the proposition seriously. “Do you have any idea what kind of place this is you want to go to?”

  “Shabby,” Gregor said, remembering the photograph of Tim Bradbury’s mother’s house. “Poor. Very rundown.”

  “It’s a rural slum,” Connie Hazelwood said bluntly. “And don’t think it’s not dangerous just because it’s got a lot of trees and grass around the buildings. Alcohol. Drugs. Rifles.”

  “I thought the problem in urban slums was handguns.”

  Connie Hazelwood shrugged. “Handguns are nice when you only want to aim and shoot short distances, but you need a rifle to really drive off the revenuers. If you know what I mean. They had one of those stills out there blow up last summer; it burned for four days.”

  “The person I’m going to see is an old woman. From the way she’s been described to me, she couldn’t hit the side of a moving van from two feet away with an elephant gun.”

  “She may not be the one you have to worry about. There are people out there who have been known to shoot at passing cars when they got tanked enough. You’re going to show up over there in that coat, and six guys are going to decide you’re from the government.”

  “What’s wrong with my coat?”

  “It costs six hundred dollars and it looks it.”

  Actually, Gregor thought, it cost seven hundred fifty. He wasn’t an extravagant man, but he liked good coats.

  “I really do have to go out there,” he told Connie Hazelwood. “I can’t see any substitute for talking to this woman and she isn’t going to come to me.”

  “You should just have warned me in advance,” Connie Hazelwood said. “I could have brought us both body armor.”

  Body armor only keeps you from getting shot in the body, Gregor wanted to say. You could still get shot in the leg. You could still get shot in the head. Even the old-fashioned head-to-toe tin-can armor of the Middle Ages hadn’t worked. Plenty of knights had died in battle.

  “Come on,” Gregor said. “The sooner we do it, the sooner we have it over with.”

  Out on the sidewalk in front of the porte cochere, someone had put up two tall sandwich signs announcing the motel’s New Year’s Eve party, complete with a list of the musical acts slated to appear. Connie looked over the names and said,

  “Oh. Old people’s stuff: ’60s music.”

  Okay, Gregor thought. Connie was talking about Bennis Hannaford’s generation, not his, and Bennis was twenty years younger than he was. Gregor wondered if Connie had ever heard of Guy Lombardo or Lester Lanin or Peter Duchin or even Benny Goodman. There was a reference to Benny Goodman on a Joni Mitchell album Bennis had, but maybe Connie hadn’t even heard of Joni Mitchell. Maybe this was what was wrong with the world. Maybe we needed to go back to the days of folk songs and ritual traditions, when all the generations shared the same music. It would be jus
t fine, Gregor decided, as long as he got to pick the music.

  Gregor climbed into the back of Connie’s cab and crossed his legs. Connie got into the front and went through the collection of cassette tapes she kept under the seat.

  “Let’s do some Meat Loaf,” she said. “It sort of fits this expedition.”

  2

  MEAT LOAF DIDN’T FIT any expedition Gregor had ever heard of, except maybe a gang war sequence in a Mad Max movie, but by the time they got to the Housatonic River, Connie had changed her mind about the music anyway. By then, she was playing very hokey-sounding hayseed stuff. “Elvira” was the name of one of the songs. “Wallflower” was another. Gregor did not think this was fair. First there was New Haven, which was definitely a city. Then there was a tangle of access roads and semiurban strips lined with gas stations and car dealerships and fast-food restaurants. Then there was a short stretch of four-lane bliss with a grass median and thickly wooded patches next to each of the outside lanes. Then there was Derby. There were a lot of words that could be used to describe Derby, Connecticut, but “rural” was not one of them. The place seemed to have survived, intact and untouched, from the Great Depression. Rickety two- and three-story frame houses were crammed onto postage-stamp lots in thick profusion up and down the steep hills. Schools and churches were massive edifices in faded red brick. Banks were imposing and heavy, temples of commerce, with their hours stenciled onto their first-floor windows in metallic gold paint. There were some signs of the times. Stopped at a red light on Main Street, Gregor found himself just across the street from a tattoo parlor and the Adult World bookstore. The bookstore promised “videos, videos, and more videos,” but didn’t have any of the video covers on display. It wouldn’t have had anyplace to put a display if it had wanted to. The only window on the Adult World bookstore’s storefront was in the door. On the other side of the street, there was a bar with a blinking neon martini glass in its window. The martini glass was blue and pink and had an electric green olive inside.

  “Depressing place,” Gregor told Connie Hazelwood.

  “Oh, yeah,” Connie said. “My mom said it used to be a national joke. Because of Yale, you know.”

  “No.”

  “Well, look at it this way. New Haven wasn’t always a pit, but Derby was. My mom says that it used to be the rich people who lived in New Haven, mostly, and the middle class, and what you had in Derby was the Polish immigrants who worked in the factories and those kinds of people. It was always a low-rent sort of place.”

  “It still looks like a low-rent sort of place.”

  “Yeah, it is. Only there used to be this thing called Derby Day, where the kids from Yale would come over and cause a lot of trouble and trash the place. And everybody laughed about it, you know, except the people who lived in Derby.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Yeah, well, there are still some rich people who live in New Haven. On Edge Hill Road and Prospect Street and places like that. There still aren’t any rich people who live in Derby.” My mother says that the surest way you have to drop off the face of the earth as far as all your New Haven friends are concerned is to move to Derby. It’s like living in Levittown or Beverly Hills. It brands you.”

  They were out of the center of Derby and into a dilapidated maze of concrete abutments, closed factories and sagging overhead wires. The closed factories all had most of their windows broken. Then Connie took the car around a sharp bend in the road and the factories fell away. To the right of them there was a steep hill going up to nowhere, dotted here and there by 1930s-style shingle-sided bungalows. To the left of them there was another steep hill, going down to the river. Gregor stopped straining to see through the grime on his window and rolled it down. He saw a long line of little shacks marching along the water toward a high dam. The dam looked like one of those big 1930s public works projects that were supposed to solve the unemployment problem. Right now, no water was spilling through it. The riverbed on this side of it was nearly dry.

  “What’s the number of this place you’re looking for?” Connie asked.

  “Forty-seven.”

  Connie slowed down and peered through the windshield. There was no other traffic on the road. There were no signs of people anywhere.

  “Fifty-two,” she muttered under her breath. She pulled up a few more feet and stopped. “Forty-seven.”

  The shack was even smaller and shabbier than it had looked like it was going to be in the picture. The boards that had been used to cover the windows were warped and split by the weather. The screened-in porch was sagging so badly, a bad patch of wind would have sent it into collapse. The shacks on either side of this one were not in such bad shape. The one to the left had a new set of steps leading up to its front door. The one to the right had clean windows with blue-and-white curtains in them. Gregor got out of the car and walked to the edge of the dropping slope.

  “Well?” Connie Hazelwood asked, getting out to stand beside him.

  “I was thinking that it isn’t entirely hopeless here,” Gregor said. “Look at the steps. Look at the curtains.”

  “I didn’t say the people who lived here weren’t human, Mr. Demarkian. I said that a lot of them were nuts.”

  Closer to the dam, one or two of the shacks had packed dirt driveways. Up here, there was nothing but dirt and mud and grass.

  “There isn’t a path I could use to get down there?”

  “Not that I know of,” Connie Hazelwood said. “But don’t trust me. I’ve never been down there.”

  Gregor looked down at his shiny black wing-tip shoes and sighed. A modern fictional detective in a modern detective novel would not have had this problem. He would have been dressed in jeans and Timberland boots to show his independence from Establishment authority and his friendliness toward the earth. Gregor was from a generation of men who wore their ties from the moment they got up in the morning to the moment they went to bed, even on Saturdays.

  Gregor picked a place where the grass seemed thicker and the mud seemed thinner than it did anywhere else—an optical illusion, he was sure—and let himself slide a little as he went down the bank. He stumbled against a pile of rotting twigs and uprooted rocks. When he reached a place where he could safely stand without being pitched forward by the incline and gravity, he turned around. Connie Hazelwood was still standing on the road, leaning against the car, her hands in her pockets.

  “I’m going to skip it if it’s all right with you,” she called down to him.

  It was all right with Gregor Demarkian. He walked from one corner of the shack to the other along the length of the roadside. Then he began to circle the building. Here and there, he could see flecks of green paint. Otherwise, the walls were bare and as warped as the boards over the windows. Some of the boards had fallen off the windows that faced the river. Torn and rusted screen showed through, along with broken glass. The only door was the door to the screen porch. It stood at the top of a short flight of decaying steps, only nominally boarded up. There was a single board hammered across the top half of it, loose and easy to pry off.

  Gregor didn’t try to pry the board off. He stood to the side of the steps—if he’d stood on them, they would have crumbled into splinters—and knocked instead. Nobody came to answer it.

  “I don’t think anybody lives in that place,” Connie Hazelwood called down to him.

  Gregor waved to acknowledge that he’d heard what she said and went on walking around the shack. He looked through the cracks in the boards that covered the windows. He went back to the door and tried the handle, only to find that it was locked. Of course, it wasn’t too securely locked. Whoever had built this place hadn’t been able to afford to put in a really strong lock. Gregor could have broken in in a minute. He wasn’t ready to do that yet.

  He was still standing near the door, trying to get a look in through the small window next to it, when the door to the shack next door opened and a woman came out. She was an enormous woman, three or four hundred pou
nds at least, wearing a flower-print polyester tent dress that came down to the middle of her calves. She had white ankle socks on her feet and thick brown men’s boots she had left unlaced, she would have looked slatternly, except that she had taken a great deal of trouble with her hair. It was long and straight, freshly washed and freshly combed, held back in a blue plastic flower barrette.

  The woman stood at the top of her brand new steps, staring at him in suspicion. The flesh of her neck hung down in folds. The flesh of her upper arms wiggled and swung every time she moved. Gregor finally realized what it was about her face that had drawn his attention. Under all the fat, this woman exhibited all the signs of Down’s syndrome.

  The woman crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Whatchoo doin’?” she demanded.

  Gregor stepped a little ways away from the door. “I’m looking for the woman who lives here,” he said. “For—” he checked the piece of paper he had shoved into his coat pocket. “For Alissa Bradbury.”

  The woman didn’t believe him. “Ali don’t live there no more. She’s gone.”

  “You mean she moved away?”

  “I mean she’s gone. Gone. She’s not there no more.”

  “I understand that. Do you know if she went to another house to live in?”

  “She didn’t say good-bye to nobody around here,” the woman said.

  “Do you know when she left? Was it yesterday or last week or last month or—”

  “A long time. Years. I know about years. Every Christmas is a new year.”

  Gregor remembered the kerosene lamp shining through the boards on the screen porch in the picture Philip Brye had shown him. He thought of this way of telling time: every Christmas is a new year. Somewhere, sometime, somebody had considered this woman worth enough to teach that to.