Fountain of Death(3)

Gregor Demarkian recognized Tony Bandero because Tony Bandero looked like a cop, a good old-fashioned cop, a cop circa 1954. Bandero was tall and broad and potbellied, with a bald spot on the back of his head and a badly fitting brown wool suit. He had thick hairy hands and frayed shirt cuffs and a Timex watch that looked like it had taken some battering. Gregor was tall and broad, too—at six foot four, considerably taller than Tony Bandero—but a different physical type. Tony Bandero was heavyset. Gregor Demarkian was massive.

People were rushing into the gate, trying to get to a train whose arrival had been announced while Gregor was still waiting to get off his. There was a banner over the ticket counters in the station that said “HAPPY NEW YEAR” in glitter-stuck letters on a white background. Gregor had seen the same banner in a Hallmark store. He tucked his briefcase up under his arm to avoid hitting shorter people in the side with it. The shorter people were all in a massive hurry and not paying any attention to where they were going. Tony Bandero was surrounded by shorter people, all women, who seemed to be waiting for passengers from Gregor’s train. The women all wore those short cloth coats with the rough surfaces that came in such odd colors, like powder blue and copper-washed metallic green. Gregor made his way over to the little group and stuck out his hand.

“Tony Bandero?” he said. “I’m—”

Tony Bandero was carrying a copy of The New Haven Register. He shoved it under his left arm and stuck his right hand out to catch Gregor’s own.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Mr. Demarkian. I recognized you from your pictures.”

“Gregor,” Gregor said.

“The bishop said I should call you Mr. Demarkian,” Tony Bandero said. “Not that I take the bishop’s word as gospel in everything, you understand, but he called you for me. I figure I owe him a little courtesy.”

“Actually,” Gregor said, “your bishop called John Cardinal O’Bannion in Colchester. It was Cardinal O’Bannion who called me.”

“Whatever. The church is the church. She’s been taking a hell of a beating lately—deservedly, in some cases, if you ask me; who the hell can figure all those child abuse cases—but she still comes through when you need her. The bishop said I was to tell you there wasn’t anything religious about this case.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “Health clubs. Diet gurus.”

“It’s more like exercise gurus.” Tony Bandero shook his head. “The bishop said you might shy away from it if you thought it was a religious murder. He said you might have had enough of religious murders for a while. Three, he said you were involved in. You couldn’t get me to touch a religious murder with a ten-foot pole. They don’t think like us, you know, bishops don’t. They get trained out at the Vatican and they don’t think like Americans.”

All the Roman Catholic bishops Gregor had ever known, and especially John Cardinal O’Bannion, had thought like hyper-Americans. O’Bannion practically snored “The Star Spangled Banner” in his sleep. There was a whole raft of beggars at the front doors to the station, standing in a row that reminded Gregor crazily of a debutante receiving line.

“I take it New Haven’s having the same problems every place else is,” Gregor said.

Tony Bandero examined the row of beggars and frowned. Then he turned away from them and hurried through the doors onto the sidewalk outside. His coat was a dirty trench that looked too light for the cold of the day. It flapped in the breeze as he walked.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “We got the same problems as every place else. We got beggars. We got drugs. We got street gangs. Twice a month we pick up some high school kid who’s just offed his best friend because they had an argument over the coolest color for a pair of sneakers. Does this kind of thing make any more sense to you than it does to me?”

“No,” Gregor said.

They had reached a battered Ford Fairlane, its color the same brown as Tony Bandero’s suit.

“The thing is,” he said, “I used to like being a cop. It was dangerous, but it was fun. There were the good guys. There were the bad guys. The good guys chased the bad guys. Sometimes the good guys won. You know what I mean?”

“Sure.”

Tony unlocked the passenger-side door of the Fairlane and motioned Gregor in. “Now I pick up these kids, thirteen, fourteen years old, sometimes twelve, they’ve just offed somebody, they’ve just raped some old lady and bashed her head in with a lead pipe, they’re dealing six thousand dollars a week, and they want to pay me off, they just don’t give a shit. Then I go up to the house, and what do I get? They’ve got this mother, she hasn’t been straight since she was thirteen herself, she’s turning tricks out of the back bedroom, she’s got an eleven-year-old daughter turning tricks out of the hall closet, she’s got a boyfriend who’s pimping the both of them. Then we take the kid in and send him through medical, and it turns out his arm has been broken six times and the doctors know the breaks didn’t happen the day before yesterday. Does this make any sense to you?”