Fountain of Death(22)

Gregor walked up to the desk. “My name is Gregor Demarkian. I’m here to see Dr. Philip Brye.”

Maybe the guard didn’t read the newspapers. Or watch local television. He showed no flicker of recognition at all at the sound of Gregor’s name.

“Phil Brye,” he said, tapping numbers into his phone. Somebody must have picked up on the other end. The guard said, “Gregory Demark for Phil Brye,” listened for a minute, and then said, “Okay.”

Gregor thought about becoming Gregory Demark. It had its points.

“You can go on through,” the guard told him. “Office is right there on this floor, all the way to the back, just keep walking till you run into a secretary. Secretary is a guy. We have guy secretaries in the department these days.”

“Okay,” Gregor said.

“We have girl patrolmen, too,” the guard said. “I’m retiring at the end of the summer. Maybe they’ll replace me with a girl guard.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said, edging toward the inner door.

“It’s more than I can do to keep up with it,” the guard said.

Gregor got through the door into the hallway. Like the front room, the walls were lined with cork bulletin boards. The posters here, though, were far more explicit than the ones at the front. HAPPY NEW YEAR, one of them announced in bold black letters—right under the picture of a dead man spilling out of a wrecked car with his leg severed. It was a real dead man and a real wrecked car and a real severed leg, too. Gregor checked. It made his stomach turn. Where would they have gotten a picture like that? And what the hell did they think they were doing, using it on a poster? What was a poster like that supposed to accomplish?

DONT DRINK AND DRIVE, the next poster said.

Gregor walked past it without looking at its picture. Whatever the picture was of required the exhibition of a lot of very red blood. Gregor caught that much out of the corner of his eye.

The secretary turned out to be a clerk in a police officer’s uniform. He was young and very efficient looking and obviously bored. Gregor wondered what he’d done to get stuck with duty like this. There was another bulletin board on the wall here. The poster on it said AULD LANG SYNE. It showed a young black man bleeding to death on a sidewalk with a knife in his back.

“Somehow,” Gregor said, “you people around here don’t have the same New Year’s spirit as the rest of the country.”

“That’s because we pick up the pieces of the New Year’s Eve spirit all through the hours of New Year’s Day,” the clerk said. “You know how many deaths we had in this town last New Year’s Eve? Fifty-seven!”

Gregor was startled. “Murders?”

“Nah,” the clerk said. “Car accidents mostly. People are perfectly sane three hundred sixty-five days a year, gets to New Year’s Eve and they down a couple of big bottles of champagne and go for a drive. We get other accidents, too. Glass.”

“Glass?”

“Yeah. You wouldn’t believe how many people go through windows. Second-story windows. Fifth-story windows. Plate-glass windows in stores they’re trying to rob only they’re too damned smashed to do it right. People get cut up and they bleed to death. Alcohol is worse than crack. It gets more people into more trouble. Believe me.”

“I will.”

“Doc Brye went down to the theater for a minute. Not to do an autopsy, you understand, just to check in on somebody. Come on down the hall, and I’ll let you into his office.”

The clerk got up and motioned Gregor down another hallway, limping a little as he went. Gregor followed him, staying a little behind. The limp explained a few things. The clerk was either temporarily or permanently disabled. That was why he was a clerk, in spite of being both competent and young.

The clerk stopped at the door of the corner office at the back, opened up and looked inside.

“Still not back yet,” he said. “Why don’t you go in and sit down, and I’ll get you a cup of coffee. Phil’s always got coffee hanging out somewhere. Also food. You want something like a cheese Danish? Or a chocolate doughnut?”

A chocolate doughnut? First thing in the morning? “A cheese Danish will be fine,” Gregor said.

“Back in a minute.”

The clerk went out, and Gregor took the opportunity to look over Philip Brye’s office. It was a huge, square room with a disintegrating acoustic ceiling and a vinyl floor that looked like someone had gone at it with a fish scaler. Instead of a desk, it had a long wood work table shoved into one corner, entirely covered with papers and books and files. There were cork bulletin boards in here, too, but they didn’t have posters on them. They had lists. DUTY ROSTER NEW YEAR’S EVE, one said, and another, CALL LIST NEW YEAR’S EVE. All the available display space was taken up with lists of people who could be counted on to come in on New Year’s Eve.