“And found the body of Tim Bradbury?” Gregor asked.
“That’s right. The naked body of Tim Bradbury, I may add, if that wasn’t in the report I sent you—”
“It was.”
“Anyway, it’s lying in there under the bushes, sort of pushed back in there, and I have the word from forensics that it was naked when it was pushed. It wasn’t shoved back in there and stripped.”
“Why would anybody do that?”
Tony Bandero shrugged. “Why would anybody do anything? He was poisoned, by the way. With arsenic. But not here.”
“Did you ever find out where?”
“Nope. No signs of vomiting down here. None in his room. None in any other part of the house. None in the garage.”
“Are you sure he did vomit? I know it’s usual with arsenic, but usual doesn’t mean universal—”
“He vomited,” Tony Bandero said. “I got that from forensics, too. Apparently, when you vomit you bring up a lot of acid and it strips the lining of your throat and does things to your tooth enamel. That’s why bulimics have such bad teeth.”
Gregor walked over to the bushes and poked at them. “The vomit could have been cleaned up,” he pointed out. “Did anyone on the investigating team notice a strong smell of disinfectant anywhere in the house, or cleaning fluid, or lime—”
“Why lime?”
“It’s a good cover for vomit in terms of the scent. It’s a good cover for a lot of things. Lime and water is what people use when they want to get rid of the smell of cats in old houses.”
Tony shrugged. “I asked about disinfectants,” he said, “and everybody told me they smelled no such thing, but I don’t really know if they would have noticed when they weren’t notified in advance that they were supposed to notice. You can ask them yourself later. I’ve set up a time for you to meet the whole team. As for the lime—even I didn’t know about the lime.”
Gregor stepped back and looked up at the house. “Which window did she look down from?”
“That one.” Tony pointed to the third to the left from the line of the back door.
“Why?” Gregor asked.
“She said she heard a noise,” Tony told him. “That much I know is in the report, but the noise was weird. It said koo koo or something like that, like a bird noise, except she said she could tell it wasn’t a bird. So she opened her window and leaned out to see if she could spot what it was.”
Gregor nodded. The windows back here didn’t have wrought-iron grills or little balconies. “This was at midnight?” he asked Tony.
“That’s right.”
“But Tim Bradbury didn’t die at midnight.”
“That’s right, too. Autopsy says no later than eleven o’clock. There needed to be at least an hour for the abrading to take place in the throat to the extent it had. You know how that is. That’s an estimate.”
“I know. Bradbury was absolutely dead when she found him?”
“He was dead by the time the ambulance got here. I don’t think he was twitching or anything by the time she found him. She would have said.”
“Did anybody else see him?”
“Sure.” Tony jerked his head toward the house. “Half the people in there saw him. She screamed.”
“Right away?”
“She says.”
“And when they came out, they all saw what they thought was a dead body.”
“Actually,” Tony said, “you can ask them yourself, too. I meant it when I said I wanted to bring you into this investigation as close to officially as possible. I’ve got you clearance to talk to anybody you want. Of course, they don’t have to talk back, unless they work for us. Lawyers are lawyers.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
And that was true, of course, lawyers were lawyers—but Gregor didn’t think they were going to have any trouble with lawyers this early in a case like this. In his experience, the stranger the cases were, the less intelligent the people involved in them were about keeping their mouths shut when they were talking to the police. This case was shaping up to be very strange indeed.
Suddenly, there was a high-pitched pulsing whine in the air. Tony Bandero reached into his inside jacket pocket and came out with a beeper. He shut the sound off and put the beeper back in his pocket.
“Don’t you have to call in or something now that you’ve heard that?” Gregor asked him.
“Nah,” Tony Bandero said. “I’ll get around to it later.”
TWO
1
GREGOR HAD NEVER BEEN in a health club of any kind—not in a spa or an exercise studio or a hotel weight room. Most of the men he knew didn’t exercise. Most of the women he knew didn’t bother with health clubs when they did exercise. Donna Moradanyan, his upstairs neighbor back on Cavanaugh Street, had a few tapes she jumped around to from time to time. Gregor thought one of them had been put out by Jane Fonda. He remembered a background that had been made to look like a roof in a not-very-well-off part of a city. Television aerials, low-rising utility chimneys, security netting and arc lights: none of it went with Ms. Fonda herself, who was dressed from neck to ankle in black stretch lace. Some of the high school boys he knew worked out with weights to build themselves up for sports. Gregor didn’t know if it did much good. The Armenian-American community hadn’t produced a plethora of sports stars, except for Ara Parseghian, who coached instead of doing the grunt work. Coaching seemed to Gregor the best part of any sport. You got to sit down for most of the games, eat what you wanted when you wanted, and be boss of the whole enterprise. Gregor thought being head of the Olympic committee or commissioner of baseball would be even better.