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Fountain of Death(25)

By:Jane Haddam


“Me, either. What I find significant, though, is that Tim had apparently left that house emotionally long before he left it physically. I guess that’s a polite way of saying he lied about his background. Consistently. To everyone.”

“What did he say?”

“He said his parents had left the area,” Philip Brye said. “Emphasis on parents, plural.”

“I take it he didn’t have parents, plural,” Gregor said.

“I got hold of his birth certificate. On the line for ‘father’ all it says is ‘unknown.’ ”

“That doesn’t mean that the father was necessarily actually unknown. The mother must have known who he was. She may have been in contact with him for years. Was the family on welfare?”

“No. No welfare. No social security. No social workers.”

“The mother had a job, then,” Gregor said.

“Not as far as I could find out,” Philip Brye said. “You’re the detective and I’m the amateur. I’ve probably missed something obvious that you’ll pick right up. It will turn out she was slinging hash in a diner someplace, and there’s no mystery about it at all. But the thing is, what really got me going looking into this beyond the fact that Tim was somebody I knew, was that I had this talk with this woman who’s now a staff assistant here in the department. Five years ago, she was a guidance counselor at the high school in Derby. That was Tim Bradbury’s senior year.”

Gregor scratched the side of his face. “I take it this has a punch line,” he said. “She had some startling revelation that Tony Bandero wouldn’t listen to.”

“Bandero won’t listen to anybody, but this isn’t a startling revelation, no. But it is indicative. This woman was a guidance counselor, right, so she had access to Tim Bradbury’s files. Father, unknown. Mother’s occupation, housewife.”

“I’m surprised she remembers all this. Even with the murder, it sounds like she can recall a lot of detail. Too much detail, maybe.”

Philip Brye smiled wanly. “She’s not an inaccurate witness, Mr. Demarkian. And she’s not the sort of person who’s prone to making things up. No, she remembers what she remembers because it was an issue at the time. Tim was an issue at the time. Tim’s mother was an issue at the time. How strange she was.”

“She came to teachers’ conferences and that kind of thing?”

“Not on a regular basis, no, I don’t think so. Mrs. Conyer—that’s the ex-guidance counselor—says she came in once and looked just the way you’d expect her to. Acted just the way you’d expect her to, too. Very overweight. Very slovenly. Dressed in a big polyester tent and shoes run over at the heels. Not too recently bathed. White trash.”

“Another good reason for Tim Bradbury to want to move out as soon as he could,” Gregor pointed out. “Especially since, from everything you’ve told me about him, he wasn’t the same type.”

“Mrs. Conyer said the mother came as quite a shock to the teachers. Tim was always neat, polite, clean, very well behaved. He wasn’t a world beater. He didn’t make it into the top third of his class and sail out with a scholarship to an important college. He was just a stable, industrious kid. I know it’s not fashionable to say so these days, but in my experience family counts for a lot. I get the children of mothers like the one Mrs. Conyer described in here all the time. Anyway, I get their bodies in here. Dope. Liquor. Knife fights. Not jobs teaching weight training for Fountain of Youth.”

“Are you absolutely sure he was never on drugs?”

“No. I can be absolutely sure that I never saw him on drugs, and I saw him a fair amount. I can be absolutely sure he wasn’t on drugs on the night he died.”

“What about dealing drugs? Dealers don’t often use. Not if they’re smart.”

“True,” Philip Brye said, “and, of course, there would be know way to be positive that he wasn’t dealing, because there isn’t any way to prove a negative. But my take on this was that he just didn’t have enough money. I don’t know about checking accounts and savings accounts and that kind of thing. I don’t think anyone has checked yet—”

Gregor snorted.

“However,” Philip Brye said, “Tim didn’t live like a drug dealer. He didn’t even live like a part-time dealer. That job he had was no piece of cake. It required a great deal of physical effort. Why bother to do that if you’ve got five, six hundred dollars a week, minimum, coming in on the side?”

“He could have been trying to launder the money,” Gregor suggested.