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Fountain of Death(8)

By:Jane Haddam


“That’s Dessa Carter.” Traci Cardinale pointed to a very fat woman in the last row of dancers.

Traci had not been exaggerating. Dessa Carter was enormous. She was not, however, silly. She was wearing a plain black leotard and plain black tights and black running shoes that looked less expensive than the ones worn by the women around her. Her body hung in folds and globes and shivered violently in the air every time she moved. She still had a great deal of plain old-fashioned human dignity. There were more normal-size women around her who did not hold up to scrutiny so well. Dessa Carter, Gregor thought, looked like a woman he might like to know.

“This is an aerobic dance class,” Traci explained. “Most of our members spend most of their time on aerobic dance, but we offer other things. Weight training and weight machines. Step aerobics. Yoga and stretch. Interval work.”

Machines screeched. Music blared. Feet crashed into hardwood.

“Is it all this loud?” Gregor asked.

“Yoga is pretty quiet.” Traci motioned them to follow her back into the hall. When they were all outside, she closed the doors to the studio viewing area again. In terms of noise, it didn’t help much.

“We have everything we can soundproofed and protected,” she said, “but it seems like there’s no way to soundproof a door without spending the kind of money the Pentagon does, so the only soundproof doors we’ve got are the ones on the film room upstairs and the ones on the studio where we make the videotapes. Those have to be soundproof. You get used to the noise after a while, though. You’ll see.”

Gregor didn’t think he would. Now that they were farther down the hall, he could hear other pounding and other music. He wondered how many studios Fountain of Youth ran. It was a big house, but there were more than studios in it. How many classes could Fountain of Youth fill at any one time? How many women were there in New Haven who were willing to put themselves through that kind of physical trauma at—Gregor checked his watch—twenty-five minutes to nine on a Monday morning?

Traci reached the door at the end of the hall and knocked. When nobody answered, she knocked again.

“Sometimes Simon puts his earphones on so he can’t hear any of it,” she explained. She turned the knob on the door and opened up. She stuck her head in and looked around. “He’s not here,” she said, in some confusion. “He’s supposed to be here. He knew you were coming.”

“Maybe we should go back downstairs and wait,” Gregor suggested.

Traci shook her head and pushed the door open wider. “There’s no need for you to do that. There are chairs for visitors to sit in. You should go in and take a seat and give me a minute while I go look for him. He’s probably just gone down the hall to the bathroom.”

Gregor looked over at Tony Bandero, to see if this setup was making him uncomfortable, too. Toward the end of Gregor’s time with the Bureau, there had been new procedural guidelines issued for dealing with suspects and property belonging to suspects. One of those guidelines had stressed the necessity for any agent or group of agents entering a suspect’s room or place of work or residence to have an invitation, a warrant, or a witness. It was too easy for defendants to claim illegal search in other circumstances. Surely, Gregor thought, Simon Roveter must be a suspect in this case. The dead man had worked for him. The dead man’s body had been found on his own back lawn. Tony Bandero didn’t seem to care. He had gone into Simon Roveter’s office and begun to walk slowly around it, looking at the framed hunting prints that hung in clusters on the paneled walls. It was, Gregor had to admit, quite an office. Tall arched windows set in the wall opposite the door overlooked a scene of bare tree branches and cloud-occluded sky. A desk with its back to this wall was six feet long and made of deeply polished oak. That, Gregor was convinced, was a replica. The desk had pigeon holes and odd-shaped little specialty drawers rising from the front of it. It had lots and lots of embossed fluted ornamentation. Like everything else self-consciously Victorian about this house, it must have cost a mint and a half and then some.

“Good,” Traci Cardinale said when she saw that Tony Bandero was satisfied. “I’ll be right back. Don’t worry about a thing.”

She went trotting off back down the hall, the thin heels of her high-heeled pumps catching in the carpet pile. Gregor turned his attention back to Tony Bandero.

“Well,” he said. “This is an interesting place. Have you been in here before?”

“Yep,” Tony Bandero said.

“And?” Gregor prodded.

Tony shrugged. “And I think these people throw around a lot of money,” he said, “which is what you think, too. I also wonder where it all comes from, which you wonder, too. I also want to know if this business is really doing this well and if these people are in a lot of debt and if the late Tim Bradbury had anything to do with it. The questions are obvious. I’ve asked all the questions. It’s the answers I don’t have.”