Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  “Maybe she was,” Gregor agreed. “Whores don’t have to be good looking to get business, but they do have to be decent looking to make serious money. Alissa may have been decent looking when Tim was first born. I haven’t seen a picture of her from that time and I wouldn’t know. What you have to take into account, however, is that by the time Alissa begins to be seen by other people in her role as Tim’s mother, she is already everything I have described her to be. Not only enormous but slovenly, ill-groomed, unkempt, and alcoholic. But she still wasn’t on welfare or food stamps or Medicaid. And her bills were getting paid. I wasn’t able to check on her electricity or her heat. I didn’t have time. Up until about three years ago, the taxes were paid every six months at the Derby tax collector’s office, on time and in cash and in person.”

  “What happened three years ago?” Nick Bannerman asked.

  “The taxes started to be paid by check,” Gregor said, “and mailed in. But they were still paid and they were still paid on time.”

  “Maybe she was the one who was dealing drugs,” Magda Hale said.

  “If she was, she was very, very good at it,” Gregor said. “Nobody in any drug squad anywhere in this part of Connecticut has ever connected that house to drugs. I was able to check. I’ll tell you something else I was able to check on. At ten o’clock last night, I got court permission—actually, a man named Roger Dornan got court permission—to do a global search of the bank records in this state for any sign of a bank account under Alissa Bradbury’s social security number. If we had found such a bank account, we would have had to get court permission to pull the records of it, but it didn’t matter. There was no such bank account. Not in the state of Connecticut. My guess is that there isn’t any such bank account in any state, anywhere.”

  “Roger Dornan,” Tony Bandero said incredulously. “Roger Dornan went behind my back?”

  “Nobody went behind your back,” Philip Brye said in exasperation. “You’re the one who went on television and said that everybody in every department connected with the New Haven police should give Mr. Demarkian whatever helped he asked for.”

  “I know I said that,” Tony Bandero said sharply, “but I expected to be kept informed, for Christ’s sake. Of course I expected to be kept informed.”

  “Wait a minute,” Nick Bannerman said. “If there isn’t any bank account, where are the real estate tax checks coming from?”

  “Ah,” Gregor said, “very good question. And the answer is that right now, we can’t be absolutely sure, because the town of Derby does not photocopy the tax checks it receives. My assumption, however, is that the tax checks are coming from the same place the cash was coming from, from the man who was Tim Bradbury’s father, and who kept Alissa Bradbury just well enough to ensure that she would not file a paternity suit against him or otherwise annoy him in public, all the time Tim was growing up.”

  Simon Roveter shifted in his seat, uneasy. “If that’s really true,” he said slowly, “then why the sudden switch from cash to checks? Wouldn’t that be a very stupid thing to do? Even if Derby doesn’t photocopy its tax checks, the checks can be traced, can’t they? Especially if the police know exactly what it is they’re looking for and who they want to investigate?”

  “Checks can be traced,” Gregor said, “but about three years ago, something happened that left our murderer with no choice. Alissa Bradbury died. To be precise, she was murdered. There’s no way for us to know now, unless the murderer tells us himself, why that happened. It might have been that our man was tired of keeping Alissa Bradbury. He had a woman of his own by then. He was probably tired of being tethered to the past and not sure that he could walk out on her even after all those years without being exposed. There might have been some kind of violent argument. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Tim Bradbury either saw this murder happen or found out about it soon afterward.”

  “But why would he cover it up?” Dessa Carter asked. “This is his mother you’re talking about.”

  “It’s his mother, yes, but he wasn’t close to her, and remember it was his father who killed her. I think that in spite of that ‘unknown’ designation on his birth certificate, Tim Bradbury knew who his father was—after the murder, if not before. I think his loyalties were divided and his reactions were confused. At any rate, Alissa’s body was stashed under the floorboards in the bedroom in the house at forty-seven Stephenson Road, the utilities were shut off and the house was boarded up. And that’s where everything sat, for three long years, until Tim was no longer able to rationalize what he knew about the death of his mother.”

  “I want to know how you got into that house and dug up a body without it at least appearing on the police band,” Tony Bandero demanded angrily. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “Forty-seven Stephenson is in Derby,” Philip Brye said. “It was on the Derby police band.”

  “Let’s go back to Tim Bradbury,” Gregor said. “Sometime recently, I would guess at November of this year, Tim decided he had to do something about what he knew. He contacted his father and demanded a meeting. He got a meeting, in the house at forty-seven Stephenson. During that meeting he was fed something, possibly very sweet coffee, possibly something else, that was full of arsenic. He would have died between thirty and sixty minutes later. Yesterday afternoon, we found vomit in the bathroom and vomit-stained clothes in the bedroom. Once he was dead, our murderer stripped the body, made sure it was clear of external vomit, and put it in the trunk of his car. Then he brought it here, and deposited it in the yard. At that point, the most important thing was that there be nothing on or near the body to connect it to forty-seven Stephenson Road. Stripping the body actually helped with that in more ways than the obvious one. Aside from removing most forensic connections with forty-seven Stephenson and the arsenic that poisoned Tim, it also sensationalized the case in a way that brought the spotlight firmly to Fountain of Youth. It looked like whatever had happened to Tim Bradbury, even if it hadn’t happened to him here, had to be connected to here.”

  “Of course it was connected to here,” Magda Hale said sharply. “There has been a murder and an attempted murder since Tim died, and both have been visited on our people.”

  “Wait,” Frannie Jay said. “Tim Bradbury died the night I came to Fountain of Youth. He picked me up just about nine o’clock. I think we got up here around nine fifteen. Would there have been time, after that, for Tim to have gotten all the way out to Derby and been killed and gotten all the way back again, stark naked?”

  “Sure,” Philip Brye said. “If traffic was light and the meeting was set in advance. It isn’t all that far out to the Stephenson Road.”

  “Let’s stipulate at this point that there was enough arsenic in what Tim Bradbury ate or drank that night to kill him quickly,” Gregor said.

  Magda Hale was gesticulating angrily. “It has to be connected to here,” she insisted again. “How else can you explain what happened to Stella? And Traci Cardinale?”

  “Traci Cardinale is the easy part,” Gregor said. “The attempt to murder her was entirely practical. Traci was, you see, the person who staged the incident with the collapsing balcony rail. She staged it quite deliberately, at the request of the murderer, although she didn’t know he was the murderer. It wasn’t until Stella Mortimer died that she put two and two together. At the time of the balcony rail incident, she thought she was doing a favor for the man she loved, for a man who loved her. She thought she was directing my attention away from him by setting up a situation he could not possibly have caused and making it look like it must have some connection to Tim Bradbury’s death.”

  Simon Roveter was rubbing his hands together, over and over again. There was a sheen of sweat across his forehead. “That still doesn’t tell us what happened to Stella. Are you trying to tell us that she knew something about Tim Bradbury’s mother? Why would she?”

  “She didn’t,” Gregor said. “What Stella Mortimer knew was something about Tim Bradbury’s f
ather.” Gregor reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “After Tim Bradbury died, Stella Mortimer was concerned about the fact that she had known so very little about him. She expressed this concern to several people, but she also did something about it. She went to the records here. She got Tim Bradbury’s employment application.”

  “Our employment application couldn’t have helped Stella find out about Tim’s father,” Magda Hale said crisply. “There’s practically nothing on it.”

  “I know. This is a copy of that application, and it certainly is short. It does, however, have one interesting feature. In the section on next of kin, Tim put down the name and address of Alissa Bradbury, and he also put down her phone number: two-oh-three, two-nine-seven, seven-one-six-two.”

  “Two-nine-seven?” Greta Bellamy asked. “But that’s not a Derby exchange. That’s a New Haven exchange.”

  “Do you mean Tim put down his father’s phone number?” Frannie asked.

  Nick Bannerman stirred. “Do you mean Stella Mortimer just called this number and got the murderer on the other end of the line?”

  “Something like that. Yes. And that, you see, was unacceptable.” Gregor turned to look at the officers standing near the door. “Would one of you two, please—?”

  “Sure,” the one to the right of the doors said, coming forward to take the copy of the employment application out of Gregor’s hand. He went to the ersatz antique phone and started dialing.

  “None of it had anything to do with Fountain of Youth, you see,” Gregor continued, “not really. This was just a convenient place to shunt suspicion, and every development made it even more convenient. That was luck, but luck counts. Luck always counts.”

  “Okay,” the officer at the phone said. “She’s ringing.”

  At just that moment, Tony Bandero’s beeper began to go off.

  It took a while for the obvious to sink in. The beeper’s tone was high and strident. It bounced around the room like a rogue germ, leaving everyone blank. Then Nick Bannerman stood straight up and said, “Jesus Christ.”

  Gregor Demarkian turned to Tony Bandero, who seemed to be frozen in place.

  “Traci Cardinale is awake,” he said gently. “She seems to think she has a lot to say.”

  “Does she?” Tony Bandero said.

  The cop on the phone had put the receiver on the table, stunned. The phone was still making the beeper beep. The shrill high note seemed destined to go on forever.

  “You should get that car of yours fixed,” Gregor told Tony Bandero. “It makes a very distinctive sound. I heard it when you picked me up at the train station. Frannie Jay heard it on the night Tim Bradbury died. At least four people now in this room heard it the day Stella Mortimer died. And, of course, I heard it last night, at the hospital. If I had been able to connect the sound to the descriptions I had been given of it, I would have been on to you before I was.”

  “I’m not going to get the car fixed now,” Tony Bandero said. “I’m not going to have time.”

  Epilogue

  “Here we come awassailing, among the leaves so green”

  —“THE WASSAIL SONG,”

  traditional

  1

  THE STORY OF VIRGINIA Hanky’s suicide made the six o’clock news on the CBS affiliate in Philadelphia on New Year’s Eve, serving as a sterling example of what Gregor had always thought of as the “bizarre footnote” school of journalism.

  “In a bizarre footnote to the tragic events at the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio in New Haven,” the reporter started.

  Gregor ducked under the gigantic crepe paper sculpture of Janus that hung from the ceiling just past the archway between the living room and the dining room in Father Tibor Kasparian’s apartment and wondered what the news was doing on. Tibor didn’t watch the news on a regular basis. He gave himself enough trouble reading the newspapers, which he defined as anything being sold at a newsstand and printed on newsprint. Tibor’s apartment was full of copies of the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News stuck into copies of Plato’s Republic in the original Greek. Right now, Tibor’s apartment was also full of crepe paper, because Donna Moradanyan and her friend Russell Donahue had just gotten finished decorating it. Aside from the two-faced Janus hanging from the ceiling, there was a crepe paper sculpture of a grinning New Year’s baby on the dining room table, a glitter-and-papier-mâché display of shooting stars on the living room wall over the fireplace, and a trick Fountain of Youth made of mirrors and water on the pantry cabinet in the kitchen. There were also balloons, but they were not Donna Moradanyan’s fault. It had been Bennis Hannaford’s idea to fill one hundred and one of them with helium and let them float unanchored through the copies of Heidegger and St. Thomas Aquinas and Mickey Spillane.

  “It isn’t a bizarre footnote to anything,” Gregor said to the television set. “That woman hardly noticed anything at all was going on at Fountain of Youth.”

  Bennis Hannaford came out of the kitchen with a big bowl of onion dip in one hand and a bigger bowl of potato chips in the other. She was followed closely by little Tommy Moradanyan, who had onion dip all over his face and right hand.

  “What are you talking about?” Bennis asked, putting the bowls down on the coffee table. Then she saw the television set and made a face at it. “That’s not supposed to be on until Russ gets the new VCR hooked up. Why are you watching the news?”

  “I wasn’t watching the news,” Gregor said. “I was ambushed by the news. It was blasting away when I got here.”

  But Bennis ignored him. Her eyes were on the television screen. “Goodness, she’s an unpleasant-looking woman. Was she a suspect?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I think somebody ought to have suspected her of something, Gregor. She looks like she deserves it.”

  Tommy Moradanyan had his right hand in the bowl of onion dip up to his wrist. As Gregor watched, Tommy pulled it out and started licking on the large white mound that emerged as if it were a lollipop.

  “Excellent,” he said to Gregor through a mouthful of white. “Really very superior.”

  Tommy Moradanyan was three.

  Bennis was looking at the television set, her thick cloud of wiry black hair escaping in wisps from the barrette she was using to hold it to the top of her head.

  “If I were going to commit suicide, I wouldn’t use a gun,” she said. “I’d do something dramatic like jump off the top of the World Trade Center with a streamer sign attached to my back blaming the whole thing on my dysfunctional childhood.”

  “I’d use a gun,” Gregor said. “Jumping off tall buildings gives you too much time to change your mind on the way down.”

  “You couldn’t jump off the top of the World Trade Center anyway,” Bennis said. “I checked it out once for a time travel story I was doing. They’ve got that observation deck protected up one end and down the other. And you can’t even get on the roof.”

  “Are you two talking about suicide?” Donna Moradanyan came into the room with a bowl of cold stuffed grape leaves in her hands. She saw her small son with his hand covered with onion dip and grabbed for the stack of napkins to wipe him off. “Honestly, Tommy,” she said. “What will Russ say if he sees you like this?”

  “He’ll say I have a really excellent appetite,” Tommy said positively.

  Donna threw the wad of napkins into the nearest waste-paper basket and gave Tommy a stuffed grape leaf.

  “The really awful thing is that he’s probably right,” she said. “Every time he does something incredibly messy, Russ acts like he’s giving evidence of genius or something. Do you think that’s good parenting?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “I don’t know how to define the word parenting” Bennis said.

  “It’s just boy stuff,” Tommy Moradanyan said wisely.

  Donna shot her son a look that said she ought to argue about this—give a lecture on sexism, maybe, or repeat one of those talks on
how Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness that Lida Arkmanian liked to throw around—but then she turned her attention to the news again. The picture of Virginia Hanley was just fading behind the anchorwoman’s left shoulder. It was being replaced by the picture of two very young girls on an ice skating rink, posing elegantly but uncertainly like Nancy Kerrigan in the diet soda commercial.

  “I wish I understood why people do the things they do,” Donna said. “I mean, what good did it do this woman to do what she did? Her husband isn’t going to love her for it. He probably won’t even feel guilty that she did it, because he’ll just say that she was crazy. And she didn’t even make a big splash in the papers, because with all this stuff about Fountain of Youth, she’s just a side issue.”

  “She would have been more than a side issue if the circumstances had been different,” Gregor said. “The problem was that this house she blew herself away in was the next county and a completely different jurisdiction. Nobody connected her to Fountain of Youth in the beginning. Which is a good thing, if you ask me, because if anybody had connected her to Fountain of Youth, we would have been forced to treat her death as only a probable suicide, and then God only knows what would have happened. We’d have been hung up for another two weeks, in all likelihood. I wouldn’t be home now. I would be sitting in a motel on the New Haven-Orange border, listening to the staff get ready for the sleepover New Year’s Eve party.”

  “I approve of sleepover New Year’s Eve parties,” Bennis said. “They keep a lot of drunk people off the roads.”

  “It works just as well if you can walk home,” Donna Moradanyan said. She was still staring at the television set, where the two very young girls had been replaced by an ice hockey game. Big men in thick protective pads were skating back and forth to no purpose. Nobody made a goal.

  “It’s as if people have lost any sense that there’s more than one option in the world,” Donna said suddenly, “or maybe I mean two. Put up with it or blow it away. That’s all anybody thinks about. Even in the movies.”