Fountain of Death(66)

“I take it you thought there was a different explanation,” Gregor said.

Faith Keller nodded. “Oh, yes. I don’t know what you know about this area, but Stephenson Road—”

“I’ve been to Stephenson Road,” Gregor said quickly.

“Well, then. You see what I mean. I think Tim just lied, Mr. Demarkian. I think he told the truth on the application because he thought he had to, but when he was talking to other people he just lied. Not out of malice. Out of embarrassment. Stephenson Road is an embarrassing place to be from.”

“I can see it would be.”

“Stella couldn’t see it. She was all worked up about it. I told her to go talk to Magda about it, but she said she’d tried and she just couldn’t get Magda interested. If I know Stella, she probably went about it backward—indirectly, you know, so that Magda had no idea what she was worried about or how worried she really was. Stella could get like that.”

There was a red cardboard pencil holder on the desk near the tallest stack of papers. Gregor got a Bic medium point out of it and picked up a piece of blank notepaper from the floor. Then he wrote down all of the information on Alissa Bradbury and stuck the piece of paper in his wallet.

“What about Stella Mortimer’s personnel file?” he asked. “Can I see that?”

Faith Keller took back the file on Tim Bradbury and shoved it into the second drawer from the top of the cabinet without paying attention to just where she was putting it. If this was the way she handled files when she went to work in the records room, Fountain of Youth was going to be in even more of a paper mess than it was already. Faith opened the third drawer from the top of the cabinet, rummaged through it, and came up with another file. This one was thicker than Tim Bradbury’s, but not by much.

“Here you go,” she said.

Gregor opened the file. Workmen’s compensation insurance registration. Social security number. Federal and state income tax withholding information. Salary schedule. Health insurance information for Fountain of Youth corporate plan. Gregor turned to the employment application. It was so old, the paper was brittle and yellowing. The only interesting thing on it was the fact that the next-of-kin information had been left blank. Even fifteen years ago, when Stella Mortimer had only just heard of Fountain of Youth, she had been an isolated woman.

Gregor handed the file back. “I think I understand what Miss Mortimer was so upset about. You people really don’t seem to have any contact with each other.”

“Some of us like it that way.”

There was a time when Gregor had thought he might like it that way. He had changed his mind. It was a crazy way to live.

“That’s all I’m going to need this for,” he told Faith Keller. “Do you mind if I use the phone?”

“Why should I mind? I’m not paying for it.”

Right, Gregor thought. He picked up the receiver of the instrument she pushed across the desk to him, and called Philip Brye.





2


THE NEIGHBORHOOD SURROUNDING THE New Haven morgue and the New Haven medical examiner’s office was much more threatening in the dark than it had been in the daylight—so much more threatening, Connie Hazelwood tried to talk Gregor out of going there and taking her with him. It was only six thirty-two, but it might as well have been midnight. The streets were no longer deserted and the double- and triple-decker houses no longer looked respectable. In Gregor’s younger days, people who were breaking the law used to try to stay out of the way of the police. Now there were prostitutes working not fifteen feet from a building patrolmen went in and out of all night, and junkies shooting up on porches just across the street from the place where their bodies would eventually end up. Maybe the junkies were all smoking these days. Gregor hadn’t kept up with the fashions in street drugs. Except for a few self-appointed holy knights of the drug war, Gregor didn’t know a cop of any variety, federal, state, or local, who wanted to have anything to do with drugs. Drugs were a black hole that ate time and energy. It was depressing as hell to be confronted daily with the job of protecting the lives of people who were determined to end up dead. Gregor told Connie Hazelwood to go cruise a safer neighborhood for an hour and got out onto the curb. Right here, right next to the morgue building itself, the sidewalk was empty. On the other side of the street, very young girls in very short skirts and very high heels were parading back and forth, trying to keep warm. All of them were under eighteen, and all of them had their hair dyed one shade or another of violently yellow blond.

Gregor went into the relative warmth of the morgue foyer, gave his name to the guard at the desk, and let himself be checked out and buzzed through. This time, though, when he got back to the clerk’s desk, Philip Brye was ready and waiting for him. The clerk was a short, roundish young woman with dark hair and plump hands. She wrote his name in her book and otherwise ignored him. Philip Brye was holding two gigantic Danish pastries. He handed the cheese one over to Gregor.