Fountain of Death(6)

The Fountain of Youth Work-Out didn’t look like it would suit Jane Fonda any more than the roof had. Coming around to the front, Gregor saw that the deliberate Victorian reconstruction had been even more carefully executed here. The heavy brass knob and knocker on the front door were either antiques or were custom-made to mimic antiques. The curving trim around the windows had been cut to follow the curving scrollwork of the wrought-iron window guards. The two big concrete planters on either side of the front door had been molded with friezes of fruit around their bases, like the plaster fruit that adorned so many Victorian ceilings. A lot of money had gone into this, or a lot of debt. Did the women who came to Fountain of Youth for diet and exercise advice want to live in a Victorian fantasy? Weren’t diet and exercise and the healthy foods movement much more modern than that? Wouldn’t it have been a better use of funds to put the money into better equipment or bigger exercise rooms or a new advertising campaign? Of course, it was possible that money was no object. There was that. That would put a different complexion on things entirely.

Tony Bandero had marched up to the front door and rung the bell. “They’ve got one of those buzzer systems here, the same as everyplace else,” he said. “Nobody lets anybody in the front door without seeing who they are first.”

The buzzer system was well disguised. Gregor couldn’t find the camera, which had to be hidden somewhere over his head. There was a long angry hum and the door popped open with a mechanical clack. Tony pushed it the rest of the way in.

“This is Traci.” Tony motioned to the young girl behind the small desk. “Traci Cardinale. She’s the receptionist here. This is Gregor Demarkian.”

“Oh, yes,” Traci Cardinale said. “The detective who was coming about Tim. Isn’t it awful about Tim? I was working that night, too, right here until eleven o’clock. But I didn’t see anything except the usual.” She sounded sad.

“What’s the usual?” Gregor asked her.

Traci shrugged. “Members coming in and out. Members losing half their stuff—we put up all these signs about how they ought to be careful and not leave their purses lying around on benches and things, but they do it anyway. I mean, they think that just because this place is expensive, nobody who comes here is going to steal. It’s stupid. Oh, yes. The fat lady was here, too.”

“The fat lady?” Gregor asked.

Traci Cardinale nodded. “I know I shouldn’t call her the fat lady. It would hurt her feelings. But she is a fat lady, you know, really, really fat, not just overweight. Anyway, she came in around nine thirty that night to sign up for the course this week. She’s upstairs right now with the beginners’ class. She’s really a very nice lady.”

“She was on her way home from working the second shift at the Braxton Corporation,” Tony said. “She lives in Derby with her father. He’s got Alzheimer’s.”

“She really is a very nice lady,” Traci said again. “She paid her deposit in cash and then she came in about a week later with the rest of the money in cash, too. I’d almost forgotten about her in all the fuss about Tim, but there she was. I’m glad she came to the course this week. A lot of them just put their money down and then never show up. You’d be amazed. We get five, six thousand dollars like that every time we run a course. People pay for it and then just disappear. They don’t even ask for refunds. But Dessa Carter came. She really needs to do something about herself.”

There was a long, thin window with frosted stained-glass panels in the wall to Traci Cardinale’s right. Gregor went to it and tried to look out. He caught a glimpse of the drive and the wrought-iron fence that separated this property from the one just a little way down the hill. The glimpse wasn’t much, and Gregor thought it would have been even less in the dark. Traci Cardinale was staring at him as if she thought he, too, needed to do something about himself. Gregor went back to her desk and tried to pretend she wasn’t staring.

“You can’t see very much from here,” he told her. “You were here all that night?”

“Until eleven o’clock,” Traci said. “Only, I was answering both doors.”

She gestured toward the stained-glass window. Gregor saw that there was indeed another door back there, smaller and down a couple of steps to the side.

“That’s the members’ private entrance. People have keys to it. Not everybody, of course. People who sign up for the Golden Circle memberships. They pay about three times as much as everybody else does and they can come and go as they want, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Not that they do much of it, though. Nobody wants to be driving around in the dark on their own with all these car-jackings going on. Especially not Golden Circle members. They just come in at the regular times like everybody else.”