Fountain of Death(16)

“I know.” Stella sounded out of patience. “I wish you’d take all this seriously, Magda. You’ve got a tour coming up. We’re expanding. These kinds of things could end up causing us some seriously bad publicity.”

What would really cause them some seriously bad publicity, Magda thought, was if she fell over in the middle of a dance routine in a mall in Elyria, Ohio. She looked at the white dosage strip on the bottle again. “75 milligrams each, Take no more than one every six hours.” The words no more than had been underlined in blue ballpoint pen.

“I think you’re making too much out of all this stuff,” she said firmly. “Tim’s death is tragic, but it has nothing to do with us. And that thing with the balcony rail is dramatic, but it’s an accident. Things like this happen in old houses like this all the time.”

“That balcony railing wasn’t old, Magda. It was put in with the door moldings the year the major renovations were done. That was what—five years ago?”

“Six.”

“Whatever. It still wasn’t long enough ago to call that wood ‘old.’ ”

Magda took two of the pills out of her palm and put them down on the glass vanity top. She ached. She was sure she would hurt like hell if she stood up. In less than half an hour, she had to go downstairs and lead another aerobic dance, complete with high kicks.

“If I were you, I’d let the police worry about all this,” she told Stella decisively.

Then she picked the two pills up off the glass and swallowed them both.

Without water.





FOUR


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS NOT staying in his idea of a New Haven hotel. His idea of a New Haven hotel was the Taft, as it had existed in old movies about Broadway show lives and out-of-town openings. That was what New Haven had been famous for, besides being the home of Yale University, if it had ever been famous for anything. Producers took their new plays there to open them before they braved the critical climate in New York. Bad reviews could sink a play before it ever got to the city. Anne Baxter and George Sanders having it out in All About Eve. Judy Garland doubled up and tense before she had to go on with a big production number. Fred Astaire practicing tap routines in the hotel lobby. They didn’t make those movies anymore. When Hollywood made movies about Hollywood now, they were all about bad sex and worse drugs and really sinister business deals. Gregor didn’t like them. He didn’t even like the fact that movies were no longer in black and white. The problem with color was that it made it too easy for directors to use what looked like real blood.

Gregor’s New Haven hotel was not the Taft. It wasn’t even in New Haven, if by that he meant within the urban landscape. It might have been within the New Haven city limits. Whatever its address, it stood on a large sloping patch of lawn that looked out over similar buildings in similar patches of lawn. From the concrete balcony outside his sliding glass doors, Gregor could see a Ramada Inn, a Holiday Inn, a Howard Johnson hotel, and a Quality Court. He was sure their rooms all had the same twin double beds his had, the same long closets, the same comfortingly antiseptic bathrooms. He had stayed in thousands of motels like this when he had been on kidnap detail in his first years at the Bureau. These days, they had better restaurants and sometimes even room service. The prints on the walls tended toward impressionism rather than Norman Rockwell. The towels came in pastels as well as hospital white. Gregor didn’t mind the motel. He minded the location. Stuck out here without a car, with no idea at all of what direction to go in to get back to the action, he felt cut off and out of touch. The feeling was emblematic. Gregor knew what he had thought he’d done by accepting Tony Bandero’s invitation to come out here and “look at” this case. Now that he was here, he was no longer sure what Bandero had invited him out here to do. It certainly wasn’t to investigate in any way Gregor understood the term. Yesterday had been—

—what?

Gregor was lying on the double bed closest to the sliding glass doors, dressed in his pajamas and bathrobe, staring at the ceiling. It was very early morning, not even eight o’clock. The motel clock on the bedside table was glowing red. Through the double set of curtains, Gregor could see the faint patches of brightness that meant the day was not going to turn out to be completely miserable, at least as far as the weather went. Whether it was going to be completely miserable as far as Tony Bandero went was undetermined. Yesterday had been—

—frustrating, Gregor decided. Infuriating. Ridiculous. Something like that.

Gregor rolled over onto his side and sat up with his legs hanging over the edge of the bed, facing the other bed and the door to the hall. The other bed was covered with paper—computer printouts, typed reports, and lined notebook sheets Gregor had jotted points down on. There were even some books Gregor had brought up from Philadelphia, thinking he might need them, including his best physicians’ drug reference and Poisons and Toxicity, the world’s most authoritative volume on the ways in which people can kill each other with ingestible substances and chemicals of all kinds. Poisons and Toxicity was the size of an unabridged dictionary and weighed fifty-two pounds. Gregor sighed heavily in its direction and reached for the phone.