by Jane Haddam
“I’m saying that we really didn’t know anything much about Tim Bradbury,” she said firmly, “not anything important. He could have been up to anything. That’s probably why Tony Bandero called this Gregor Demarkian in. I’ve been reading up on Mr. Gregor Demarkian over the last few days.”
Simon was giving her a very odd look. “That’s funny,” he said.
“What is?”
“This attitude of yours. Ever since Tim died, really. And I always thought you liked Tim.”
“I liked him as well as any of the other people we employ here. Cici Mahoney. Juliet Nash.”
“What about Traci Cardinale, Magda? Do you think she did something to cause it, too? What about Stella?”
“I don’t know about Stella. I don’t know about Traci, either, I haven’t been paying much attention. I’ve had work to do, Simon.”
“Yes, I know.”
Magda got up and flexed her knees. They hurt, but the pain was very far away. “Are you going to let Mr. Demarkian use the house?”
“Of course. He’s asked us to be in attendance. I think we both should be. If only so we don’t show up on the news later as a couple of uncooperative shits.”
“All right.”
“You don’t seem to be very interested in having this solved, Magda. Two of the people who worked for us are dead. A third very nearly died. I’d think you’d be very anxious to make sure that whoever is doing this is safely put out of the way. If only to make sure that whoever it is doesn’t decide to do you in next.”
Magda flexed her arms, and then her fingers, and then her toes.
“I’m not going to be next,” she said with perfect conviction, “and neither are you.”
“Famous last words,” Simon said.
“Oh, no,” Magda told him. “Inside knowledge.”
2
USUALLY, WHEN THE POLICE came, after her father had had one of his outbursts, Dessa Carter refused to let them do anything at all about calling an ambulance or putting him in the hospital. It seemed obvious to her that the old man didn’t need an ambulance and didn’t belong in a hospital. Or at least not in an ordinary kind of hospital. Aside from the Alzheimer’s, the old man was as healthy as a horse. He was healthier than she was. He was stronger than she was, too, which was the terrifying thing.
This time, when the police had insisted on calling Yale-New Haven Hospital, Dessa Carter had given in. She hadn’t even made much of a protest. The idea of spending the night in that house, with the old man crazy on the inside and the gangs and addicts rocketing through the streets on the outside, was suddenly horrifying to her. Why it would be that now, when it had never been before, she didn’t know. The gangs had been there for years. Her father had been crazy for years. What was different?
“It’s not like this is anything new,” she told Greta Bellamy as she got ready to leave Fountain of Youth that night. “It’s not like I haven’t been through it before. It’s just that I don’t seem to be able to see my way to living with it anymore.”
“It’s probably self-esteem,” Greta said solemnly, and then broke into giggles. “Oh, Lord. I don’t know how I kept a straight face in that lecture. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to change the subject.”
“Maybe you didn’t change the subject,” Dessa said. “Maybe it is all about self-esteem. I keep thinking about trying to sell the house, to have the money to put him in a nursing home, and then I think it wouldn’t be enough and what would I do with myself anyway?”
“You’d come and live with me,” Greta said. “We talked about that.”
Dessa dropped her work-out shoes on top of her pile of dirty exercise clothes and pulled the string closure of her gym bag shut. It was a terrible gym bag, cheap and shoddy, and she was suddenly ashamed of it.
“Well,” she said, “I’ve got to go talk to the social worker, and after I do that I’ll probably realize that there isn’t anything to do but wait for him to die. Sometimes I wish I was a different person from the one I am. One of those people who could just dump him in the hospital emergency ward and disappear.”
“No, you don’t want to be that,” Greta said.
“I don’t want to be who this social worker is going to think I am, Greta. The fat lady. Fat ladies have nothing else to do with their lives than take care of their senile parents until they’re old enough to be senile themselves. Thin people have goals and aspirations that have to be respected.”
“Do people really do that to you?”
“All the time.”
“Go talk to the social worker,” Greta said. “Then come over and spend the night with me. We’ll sit down and think the whole thing through and try to work it out.”
“I don’t think there’s anything to work out.”
“Then come and we’ll talk about the big important meeting tomorrow. Gregor Demarkian unmasks the killer. I’m sure that’s what he’s going to do. Won’t it be exciting?”
Dessa parked her car in the parking garage right under a security lamp and got out. She always parked under security lamps, just in case, in spite of the fact that nobody had ever bothered her. There was one good thing about being this fat. You didn’t worry about getting raped, even if you ought to.
Dessa let herself into the core well and then into the elevator. As far as she could tell, the garage was absolutely deserted. She pressed the button for the first floor and tapped her foot while the elevator was getting ready to move. She thought about going over to Greta’s after all this was over and not seeing the house in Derby at all. Greta’s place sounded nice—not big, but nice, and away from the worst things. No gangs. No addicts. No crazy old men smashing up the furniture. Was it such a terrible thing, under the circumstances, that she wanted so desperately for her father to die?
The elevator stopped on the first floor and opened. Dessa got out. Nobody in the lobby looked like a doctor or a nurse. Nobody was wearing a uniform. Dessa thought something wonderful had gone out of the world when nurses stopped wearing their graduation caps.
Dessa went up to the visitors’ desk and gave her name. “I have an appointment with Claudia Dubroff,” she told the woman.
The woman turned away from her computer and pointed down the hall. “Down there. Follow the signs. Up one flight. All the social workers’ offices are together.”
“All right,” Dessa said, and thought: “all” the social workers’ offices? How many social workers does a place like this need?
There were not only signs on the walls but colored lines on the floor. To get to Social Work, all she had to do was follow the blue line. Dessa went past a row of offices with only names in them and letters following the names. Except for “M.D.,” she didn’t know what any of the letters meant. She went past little clusters of Christmas and Hannukah decorations, too, and in once place a display that seemed to have something to do with the Hindu festival of Dewali. Then she went around a corner, up a short flight of stairs, and around another corner. There was a pair of swinging metal fire doors with a round safety window in each one. She lumbered through the doors and came out on a hall with a big black-and-white sign on the wall of it: SOCIAL WORK.
I should have gone up and seen my father first, Dessa told herself, but she couldn’t make herself feel guilty about it. She didn’t want to see her father. Not now. Not for a couple of days. She would have him back soon enough. She went down the hall, reading the names on the signs outside the doors. Thomas Fitzpatrick. Annemarie Gonzalez. Tammy Wu. When she got to the one that said Claudia Dubroff, the door was open.
“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 Wo
man 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.”
3
IF 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.
&nb
sp; 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?”