Fountain of Death(15)

“God, yes,” Stella said. “I’ve never been more tense in my life. I wasn’t this tense when Tim died. What did you think of that man?”

“What man?”

“Gregor Demarkian. The detective. The consultant.”

The vanity table was built into the wall, with a mirror above it. Just to the right of mirror was the medicine cabinet. Magda opened this up and looked inside. Aspirin. Tylenol. Advil. Contac. She pushed all these aside and took down a little handful of prescription bottles.

“I don’t think I like his attitude,” Stella was saying. “And I looked him up at the library, you know, after we heard that Tony Bandero was going to call him in. I don’t think he’s the—right person for this kind of thing.”

Penicillin. Erythromycin. Amoxidyl. Magda put the bottles down and reached for another handful. “Why is that?” she asked evenly.

Stella was swinging her legs on the carpet. The movement made little swooshing sounds.

“He does—complicated murders,” Stella said. “Cases where there are all kinds of ramifications and mysteries. And I don’t care what Tony Bandero thinks. I don’t believe Tim was involved in some—plot.”

Motrin. Vitamin D. Iron supplements. Magda reached for a third handful.

“It’s hard to imagine Tim involved in a plot,” she agreed.

Stella blew a raspberry. “It’s impossible to imagine Tim involved in a plot. He wasn’t that kind of person. And he was only, what, twenty-two? You know as well as I do that he couldn’t have been taking serious drugs on a regular basis. He wouldn’t have been able to do his work here if he had been.”

“I think the implication was that he might have been selling drugs. People who sell drugs don’t necessarily take them, do they?”

“Tim couldn’t have been selling drugs. He didn’t know enough arithmetic.”

“Well, there has to be some reason he ended up full of arsenic and stark naked on our lawn. I can’t see it as a likely suicide.”

“Tim wouldn’t have committed suicide, either,” Stella said. “That’s as silly as thinking of him as part of a plot. All he wanted out of life was a transfer to one of our places in California. I keep feeling terribly guilty that we never gave it to him.”

“Don’t.”

“Maybe I’d feel better if we’d known more about him,” Stella said. “I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now. Do you realize how odd it is, how little we all know about each other? I don’t mean you and me. I mean most of us. I work with Faith every day. I don’t even know if she lives in an apartment or a house.”

“So ask.”

“I don’t ask, that’s the point. None of us asks. Now Tim is dead and we don’t know anything about him, and we aren’t going to find out soon because nobody is going to tell us anything. Sometimes I wish this had made a bigger splash in the newspapers. Maybe some reporter somewhere would have found something out.”

“This has been a big case,” Magda said. “It has made a splash in the newspapers. They’ve had Tim’s picture all over everything. What more do you want?”

“I don’t know,” Stella said. “Real information, maybe. Not just, well he went to high school here and his parents have left the area and he used to work as a parking lot attendant. Real information. Magda? About that thing with the railing this morning. Do you think it was an accident?”

This handful of prescription bottles was much more interesting than the previous ones. Valium. Lithium. Prozac. Percodan. Magda put these down on the glass top of the vanity and turned the last bottle over in her hands. Demerol. She remembered Demerol. Simon had been given it after his gallbladder operation last summer. It had knocked him right out.

“Magda?” Stella said one more time.

Magda shook a couple of white pills into her hands. “75 milligrams each. Take no more than one every six hours.”

“I don’t see what else it could have been,” Magda said. “I can’t see Traci pushing the thing over on purpose.”

“Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe someone cut the balcony railing apart, very carefully, and just left it there for someone to come along and get hurt by it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why, Magda, but people do that kind of thing. And you know, Magda, I think that Gregor Demarkian person had the same kind of idea. He kept walking around looking at all the junk on the foyer floor and saying it was interesting.”

“That could mean anything, saying it was interesting.”