Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  “Not on a house that hasn’t had a drug connection, we don’t,” Roger Dornan said. “And we wouldn’t keep that kind of soft information on a place in Derby or Oxford anyway. You could ask the local police forces there, if you really wanted to know.”

  “What is it you want to know?” Philip Brye asked Gregor. “I thought this thing you were looking for was singular.”

  “It is,” Gregor said. “It is. I was just curious, that’s all. It might be interesting to see what the record is like. Domestic disputes. Disturbing the peace. Child abuse reports—although there might not be any of those, that far back. I don’t know how the law operated in Connecticut when Tim Bradbury was a child.”

  “It operated the way the law operated everywhere in those days,” Philip Brye said. “Meaning it didn’t. You can have all this information for the asking if this plan of yours works, you know, Gregor. Once the police actually arrest somebody, you can get anything you want.”

  “Maybe I will,” Gregor said softly.

  Roger Dornan looked down at his book of maps and scowled. “I just want to get one thing straight. What you two want me to do here—what my friend Phil wants me to do here, which is why I’ve been listening to this request at all—is to ask for a warrant to search the house at forty-seven Stephenson in connection with an ongoing investigation. And then I’m supposed to take the two of you with me.”

  “Right,” Philip Brye said. “To be specific, you’re supposed to take him with you,” he jerked his head in the direction of Gregor Demarkian, “because he’s the one who knows what we’re interested in.”

  “You won’t be lying, you know,” Gregor said. “This is a search in connection with an ongoing investigation.”

  “If you talk to old Judge Varley, you won’t have to say much of anything at all,” Philip Brye said. “That’s what I was hoping you’d do, Roger, because it’s the only way I can think of to get around telling Tony Bandero.”

  “I know.” Roger Dornan was still scowling. “You two are absolutely sure this is absolutely necessary?”

  “Positive,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “There’s no other way to get this done.”

  “I’ve been through this problem in my head a dozen times, Roger,” Philip Brye said. “I can’t think of one.”

  “Let’s try this,” Roger Dornan said. “You’re both sure that there’s no other way to successfully complete the investigation you’re working on without getting this done, this way.”

  “No,” Gregor Demarkian said. “But there’s no way to be absolutely sure that we can get this murderer arrested and tried unless we go about this this way. We can go about this in the ordinary manner, Mr. Dornan. We can inform Tony Bandero of what we want to do and let him turn it into a media circus. But if we do that, I don’t think we will see an arrest, and I’m sure we won’t see a conviction.”

  Roger Dornan rubbed his face with his hands. “Shit,” he said. “All right, Mr. Demarkian. I’ll take your word for it. You’ll have to give me a couple of hours to make a few phone calls and fill in the paperwork. You both ought to be very grateful that I don’t like Tony Bandero any more than you do.”

  “We are,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “It’s not like you’ve never done this before,” Philip Brye said. “I really didn’t invent this idea out of a fervid imagination. I heard about that case of Carol Dillerby’s—”

  Roger Dornan shot Philip Brye an absolutely poisonous look. “I’m not saying I haven’t done it before,” he barked. “I’m not saying I’m the only one who’s ever done it, either. I’d just like to make sure it was worth it in case I get caught.”

  3

  NOBODY GOT CAUGHT. NOT then, anyway. The process seemed to take forever, but it was a process, and by four o’clock that afternoon, Gregor and Philip Brye and Roger Dornan were standing by the side of the road in front of the little collection of shacks that lined the Housatonic River on the Derby side. Connie Hazelwood was still in her taxi. A pair of police officers in the uniforms of the Derby Police Department had parked their cruiser half onto the slick cold grass. The cruiser was tilted slightly downward, like a car that had not quite gone off the side of a cliff.

  Four o’clock in the afternoon in December is dark. The lights in the house on the hill behind them were lit. The shacks in front of them were showing light, too, although in some places that was only the light of a flickering television screen. There was a flickering light on in the house of the retarded woman who lived next door to number 47. It seemed to be a candle or a kerosene lamp. The two uniformed patrolmen were making a circuit of Alissa’s Bradbury’s shack. When they came back to the roadside, they climbed the hill again and joined Gregor Demarkian and Philip Brye and Roger Dornan.

  “The place is completely boarded up,” one of them said. “The only way in is to break in.”

  “You’ve got permission to break in if you have to,” Roger Dornan said.

  “Let’s make sure we’ve all got flashlights,” Gregor said. “I don’t think there’s any electricity on in that house.”

  They all had flashlights except Philip Brye, who said it never would have occurred to him. Connie Hazelwood gave him the one she kept in her glove compartment. It was small and inadequate, but it would keep him from tripping over himself in the dark.

  “The only door’s over on this side,” one of the patrolmen said, leading the group to the river side of the house. Gregor had stood on the steps to it while he talked to the woman with Down’s syndrome next door. Now one of the patrolmen climbed the steps and tugged at the board nailed across the screen.

  “Watch out,” the other patrolman said. “Those steps are rotted right through.”

  The first patrolman got out a claw hammer he had hanging from his utility belt and tried that on one of the nails holding up the board. It didn’t work and he cursed softly and put the hammer back and took up the crowbar instead. The crowbar bit into the soft wood and came up with splinters and a soft substance like wood putty. The patrolman put the crowbar back in his belt and used his hands instead. He got a grip on the middle of the board and pulled. The board came away like paper.

  “Bad plywood and rotten on top of it,” he said, clearing away the remaining wood with his hands. He pulled at the screen door and it came open without complaint. He pushed at the door inside that and it came open, too. “No locks,” he said, stepping into the shack.

  Gregor followed the patrolman inside and looked around. Coming in the door, you walked right into a tiny room meant to be a combination living room-dining room-kitchen. The kitchen consisted of a single wall of cabinets and small appliances. The dining room consisted of a small round table and two chairs. The living room consisted of a couch and an ancient television set. Even in the bad light given off by the flashlights, Gregor could see that there were thick layers of dust over everything. Some of the dust would have been disturbed, of course, but they could come back for that. They could pull the boards off the windows and do it in the daylight later.

  “Find the bathroom,” Gregor said.

  One of the patrolmen made a comment about how a place like this ought to have an outhouse. Gregor ignored him and went through the only other door beside the outside one that he could see. He found himself in a small square space with two other doors opening onto it. Gregor shone his flashlight into the closest of these doorways and found the bedroom. He shone his flashlight into the other and found the bathroom. It wasn’t much of a bathroom. Half the floor appeared to be rotted out.

  “It’s cold as hell in here and it still smells bad,” Philip Brye said.

  Gregor shone his flashlight in the direction of the toilet, and then into the toilet and then onto the walls next to the toilet.

  “There,” he said finally. “In that corner.”

  “What’s in that corner?”

  “Vomit,” Gregor said. “Considerably dried, of course. There should be more on his clothes.”

  “On what clothes?�
�� Roger Dornan sounded confused.

  “Tim Bradbury’s,” Gregor said. He backed out of the bathroom. “They’ll be in here, I expect,” he said, meaning in the bedroom. “Left in a heap, probably, unless our murderer was smart enough to get rid of them right away. I don’t see that there would have been any need to bother, though. It wasn’t like there was any danger of anyone coming out here any time soon.”

  “I would think there would be,” Philip Brye said. “If I were a cop, I’d come here practically right away. After all, it was his mother’s house.”

  Gregor played his flashlight from one corner of the room to another. The room was small, but it was crammed with stuff. There were discarded clothes everywhere. Gregor turned his attention to the floor. The floors in the living room and the hall were carpeted. The floor in the bathroom was covered with linoleum. This floor wasn’t covered at all. It was made of wood, but not wood planks. It was composed of cheap sheets of plywood. The whole house was made of plywood, Gregor thought. If somebody put up a shack just like it today, it would be made of pressboard.

  The plywood floor was dirty and warped, but otherwise untouched,

  “Do you think the two of you could move the bed?” Gregor asked the patrolman nearest him. “I want to see what’s underneath it.”

  “Probably rat droppings,” the patrolman said, but he got to work.

  The bed wasn’t hard to move, in spite of all the clothes and bottles piled on top of it. When it was out of the way, Gregor got down on his knees and shone the flashlight on what had been uncovered. The plywood was dirty and warped here, too.

  “We’re going to have to go through all the clothes in this room until we find Tim Bradbury’s,” he said absently, looking at the seams between the boards. “We aren’t going to absolutely need them, but they wouldn’t be bad to have. Wait a minute. There it is.”

  “There what is?” Philip Brye asked.

  “The difference,” Gregor said. He stood up and pointed his flashlight at the floor. “Right there,” he said. “If these two officers would be kind enough to pull up the floor starting right there—”

  By now the two Derby patrolmen were no longer interested in asking questions. They got right down on their knees and went at the relevant place on the floor with hammers and crowbars. This wood didn’t splinter as easily as the wood that had covered the door had. It was newer. One of the patrolmen got up a corner of the board and tugged at it. It bent in his hand, but it didn’t break.

  “It’s the river,” he said apologetically. “Everything this close to the water gets wet.”

  “I’ve got it,” the other patrolman said.

  The board was made of very good plywood indeed. It came off in a piece, barely splintered where the nails had been driven into it. Gregor was willing to bet that the nails were of a better quality than the ones used in the rest of the shack, too.

  “What the hell is that?” the patrolman asked, peering into the hole left by the discarded plywood board. Then he blanched. “Oh, Christ,” he said.

  Gregor Demarkian bent closer. What “that” was was a now fleshless skeleton, curled into the fetal position and still wearing a locket necklace—turned green with age—around its neck.

  What “that” was was all that remained of the body of Alissa Bradbury.

  A single bullet was lodged in the bone in the center of its chest.

  FOUR

  1

  THE ENVELOPE FROM JIMMY Fleck did not contain a prescription for Demerol. It contained copies of her x-rays, with little notes written on them in green felt-tipped pen. “Hairline fracture,” several of the notes read. Others were more complicated, containing words Magda only vaguely knew’ the meanings of, the names of bones, the designations of injuries. If I had injured a muscle, I would have understood it better, Magda told herself when the package came. Then she put the package away in the long center drawer of the antique desk in her bedroom.

  “You haven’t just injured yourself once,” Jimmy Fleck explained to her that morning. “You’ve injured yourself over and over again and you’ve never done anything about it. Your legs are about to disintegrate. This must have been going on for months, for God’s sake. Didn’t you ever notice you were hurt?”

  Well, yes, Magda thought now, looking at herself in the mirror as she dressed for her last class of the day. She had noticed that she was hurt, if by “hurt” Jimmy Fleck meant to say “in pain.” She had noticed the pain quite frequently. She had simply assumed that it was, well—

  (getting old)

  something unthinkable, something she didn’t want to deal with. It seemed impossible to her, after all the work she had put into this, that she would end up just like everybody else. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to work. You were supposed to work hard. You were supposed to give it everything you had. You were supposed to get what you’d worked for. There was no room in Magda Hale’s life for inevitability.

  The pills were lined up on the vanity counter around the sink, thirteen of them, too many to take all at once. Magda had gotten them the easy but expensive way. When Jimmy Fleck had refused to give her a prescription for more than ten (“people get addicted to this stuff, Magda”) she had simply gone down to the Green and said in a rather idle voice that she wished she had some. The whole transaction had taken less than five minutes. She had gotten real pills, too, not substitutes or placebos. She had brought one of her own pills along for comparison. Of course, she wouldn’t be able to go on getting them this way. She would be in too much danger of being caught. She would have to find a doctor who didn’t mind handing them out.

  Magda picked up two of the pills, put them in her mouth, and swallowed them straight, without water. She swooped the rest of the pills into her cupped left hand and put them into the bottle the prescription Jimmy had written for her had come in. She felt a little dizzy. These were not the first pills she had taken this morning. She was taking too many of them, and not just because when she didn’t take them she was in pain. She liked the feeling they gave her, the flying floating feeling, and the way she was never worried

  (getting old old old old old)

  about anything. It was even better than falling in love, because it didn’t make you pick at yourself all the time, wondering if the other person was going to love you back.

  “You’re going to have to give up the high-impact aerobics,” Jimmy Fleck had told her. “That’s the only solution to this. You’re going to have to give them up for at least six months and maybe forever. If you don’t, you’re going to cripple yourself.”

  Someone had come in through the bedroom door: Simon. Magda put the pills away in the medicine cabinet and checked herself out one more time in the mirror. She had her hair pinned up in the way most likely to come down in a tangle of wisps and sweat halfway through the dance. The customers liked to see their Fearless Leader really getting knocked out by her own workout. It made them feel that they were getting what they paid for.

  Magda adjusted the top of her leotard and the legholes, too, so that they didn’t bind. Then she got up and went into the bedroom.

  Simon was standing at the window with the curtains drawn back, looking at the backyard.

  “I talked to that Gregor Demarkian person a while ago,” he said.

  “Did he want something in particular?” The pills were beginning to work. Magda felt positively lightheaded. She sat down on the side of the bed and began to put on her workout shoes.

  “He wants to have a meeting here tomorrow morning at ten o’clock,” Simon said. “A big meeting with a whole bunch of people in it, including some of the students in the beginners’ class.”

  “The students? But the students couldn’t have been involved in Tim’s murder. They didn’t even know him.”

  “You can’t be sure of that, Magda. Tim was local. The students are local. Maybe they all knew him.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Maybe it’s not Tim he’s thinking about now. Maybe it’s Stella. They wer
e all in the house when Stella died.”

  “I keep forgetting that Stella is dead,” Magda said. “Maybe it’s because I didn’t watch it all on the news the way I did with Tim. I think I must have been depressed. I slept through he whole thing.”

  “You haven’t even lived through the whole thing yet, Magda. Maybe Mr. Demarkian will have some answers tomorrow morning. I’m a little nervous about the effect of all this on the tour.”

  “You said before it wouldn’t have an effect,” Magda said. “You said there would be a mention or two about a tragic mugging and that would be it.”

  “That was before Stella died.”

  Magda undid the knot on her work-out shoe. It was a Gordian mess. She had no idea how it had gotten that way. Her fingers felt like elastic. She started to tie up again.

  “I think we should just go on tour and get it over with,” she said. “The police haven’t told us not to leave town, have they?”

  “No, Magda. I don’t think they do that in real life.”

  “Then we should go, and get on with it, and get it over with, and come back. Then I think I’m going to take a nice long vacation, a month or six weeks. It’ll all blow over, you’ll see. It’ll just disappear into thin air.”

  “What if they don’t catch anyone? What if that Detective Bandero decides to make a public issue out of it?”

  “He’s already making a public issue out of it. He’ll stop when he realizes it isn’t going anywhere. He won’t want to be embarrassed. And besides—”

  “What?”

  The left shoe was tied. Magda went to work on the right, more slowly this time. Was she imagining it? She thought she was getting shooting pains in her hands.

  “Well,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it. And you know, it seems to me that people who get murdered—not people who get mugged, but people who get murdered on purpose—have usually done something to cause it.”

  “Are you trying to say Stella was asking for it?”

  The right shoe was laced. No mistakes. She did have a shooting pain in her hands. She sat up.