Fountain of Death(95)
“I want to know how you got into that house and dug up a body without it at least appearing on the police band,” Tony Bandero demanded angrily. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Forty-seven Stephenson is in Derby,” Philip Brye said. “It was on the Derby police band.”
“Let’s go back to Tim Bradbury,” Gregor said. “Sometime recently, I would guess at November of this year, Tim decided he had to do something about what he knew. He contacted his father and demanded a meeting. He got a meeting, in the house at forty-seven Stephenson. During that meeting he was fed something, possibly very sweet coffee, possibly something else, that was full of arsenic. He would have died between thirty and sixty minutes later. Yesterday afternoon, we found vomit in the bathroom and vomit-stained clothes in the bedroom. Once he was dead, our murderer stripped the body, made sure it was clear of external vomit, and put it in the trunk of his car. Then he brought it here, and deposited it in the yard. At that point, the most important thing was that there be nothing on or near the body to connect it to forty-seven Stephenson Road. Stripping the body actually helped with that in more ways than the obvious one. Aside from removing most forensic connections with forty-seven Stephenson and the arsenic that poisoned Tim, it also sensationalized the case in a way that brought the spotlight firmly to Fountain of Youth. It looked like whatever had happened to Tim Bradbury, even if it hadn’t happened to him here, had to be connected to here.”
“Of course it was connected to here,” Magda Hale said sharply. “There has been a murder and an attempted murder since Tim died, and both have been visited on our people.”
“Wait,” Frannie Jay said. “Tim Bradbury died the night I came to Fountain of Youth. He picked me up just about nine o’clock. I think we got up here around nine fifteen. Would there have been time, after that, for Tim to have gotten all the way out to Derby and been killed and gotten all the way back again, stark naked?”
“Sure,” Philip Brye said. “If traffic was light and the meeting was set in advance. It isn’t all that far out to the Stephenson Road.”
“Let’s stipulate at this point that there was enough arsenic in what Tim Bradbury ate or drank that night to kill him quickly,” Gregor said.
Magda Hale was gesticulating angrily. “It has to be connected to here,” she insisted again. “How else can you explain what happened to Stella? And Traci Cardinale?”
“Traci Cardinale is the easy part,” Gregor said. “The attempt to murder her was entirely practical. Traci was, you see, the person who staged the incident with the collapsing balcony rail. She staged it quite deliberately, at the request of the murderer, although she didn’t know he was the murderer. It wasn’t until Stella Mortimer died that she put two and two together. At the time of the balcony rail incident, she thought she was doing a favor for the man she loved, for a man who loved her. She thought she was directing my attention away from him by setting up a situation he could not possibly have caused and making it look like it must have some connection to Tim Bradbury’s death.”
Simon Roveter was rubbing his hands together, over and over again. There was a sheen of sweat across his forehead. “That still doesn’t tell us what happened to Stella. Are you trying to tell us that she knew something about Tim Bradbury’s mother? Why would she?”
“She didn’t,” Gregor said. “What Stella Mortimer knew was something about Tim Bradbury’s father.” Gregor reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “After Tim Bradbury died, Stella Mortimer was concerned about the fact that she had known so very little about him. She expressed this concern to several people, but she also did something about it. She went to the records here. She got Tim Bradbury’s employment application.”
“Our employment application couldn’t have helped Stella find out about Tim’s father,” Magda Hale said crisply. “There’s practically nothing on it.”
“I know. This is a copy of that application, and it certainly is short. It does, however, have one interesting feature. In the section on next of kin, Tim put down the name and address of Alissa Bradbury, and he also put down her phone number: two-oh-three, two-nine-seven, seven-one-six-two.”
“Two-nine-seven?” Greta Bellamy asked. “But that’s not a Derby exchange. That’s a New Haven exchange.”
“Do you mean Tim put down his father’s phone number?” Frannie asked.
Nick Bannerman stirred. “Do you mean Stella Mortimer just called this number and got the murderer on the other end of the line?”