Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  There was noise down the hall. It could be a burglar, but Althy didn’t think so. She went back out into the hall and down it toward the “living room,” which was full of dirty clothes, too. Dirty clothes traveled. They were everywhere.

  Mike was sitting on the recliner. The recliner was broken. It showed raw wood at the joints. Mike had his head back and his eyes closed.

  “Did you find the money?” Althy said.

  “Of course I didn’t find the goddamned money,” Mike said. “Why would I find the fucking money? She’s a bitch, that girl is. I’m going to beat the fucking crap out of her when she gets home.”

  Althy sat down on the metal folding chair. She couldn’t remember where the chair had come from. It was just there in the trailer one morning, and it still was.

  “Listen,” she said. “You don’t want to touch Haydee. She’s not like other people.”

  “Beat the fucking crap out of her,” Mike said.

  “She’ll call the police,” Althy said, feeling anxious now. “She did last time. She’ll get you locked up.”

  “You ought to learn to control the fucking bitch,” Mike said. “She’s your daughter.”

  “We don’t want the police around here,” Althy said. “Not again. It’s one thing we find the money and we take it. We have a right to take it. She’s living here. She’s supposed to be contributing to the household. I read that in the papers. But you can’t touch her. She’ll call nine-one-one.”

  Mike was so still on the recliner, he looked dead. “I looked everywhere,” he said after a while. “I took a knife to her fucking mattress. I couldn’t find it. How much do you think she has?”

  “Eight or nine hundred dollars,” Althy said.

  “What’s the bitch want a car for anyway? Where does she think she’s going? To work? Right. Some work. Quik-Go, for Christ’s sake. And that school. What the fuck does she think she’s doing going to school?”

  Althy looked at her hands. “Did you dig up the ground? You know, out there? Haydee thinks you did. She thinks you were looking for the money.”

  “Of course I didn’t dig anything the fuck up,” Mike said. “Jesus. If she’d dug that thing down in the ground that way, somebody would have seen her. It would have been gone in a day. And she likes to look at it. I know she does. She hoards the fucking stuff. Like a miser. She hoards the fucking stuff.”

  “Somebody dug it all up,” Althy said. She was pushing words past the haze in her brain. They were having a hard time coming out. “Somebody’s going to come out from the company and have a fit. She thinks you dug it all up looking for the money.”

  “I didn’t dig it all up.”

  “Don’t you wonder who did dig it up? Don’t you wonder? Under the circumstances.”

  “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean? ‘Under the’ fucking ‘circumstances’?”

  Althy looked down at her hands again. It was hard to keep the times straight, sometimes. That had all happened so long ago. Haydee was only six. That was all. Haydee was sitting right here in this living room while Chester Ray Morton paced up and down and that girlfriend of his … that girlfriend of his …

  It was hard to remember. There was nothing left of it but the trailer next door, and it was empty.

  And haunted.

  Maybe Haydee had put the money over there.

  Althy closed her eyes and put her head in her hands and waited for the headache spasm to pass. Then she opened up again and looked around the room.

  If Haydee was hiding the money in Chester Ray Morton’s empty trailer it was safe enough from Althy Michaelman.

  She wouldn’t go back into that place on a bet.

  8

  Kyle Holborn could have told Darvelle Haymes where he was going, and why he was going there, and what the dispatcher said the man on the phone said he’d thought he’d found out there at the building site—but it would have taken too long to explain, and much longer to handle. Kyle didn’t know if he was handling it now. He wished he’d been the one to drive. It was always Jack who drove when they went out together. Kyle didn’t know why.

  Jack parked the cruiser as close as he could to where everybody was standing. That wasn’t very close. Kyle could see them all through the darkening evening, a little clutch of men around some construction equipment, swaying back and forth, their hands in their pockets. One of them looked up and saw the patrol car. He broke away from the crowd and headed toward them.

  “Crap,” Jack said. He popped the driver’s side door and got out.

  Kyle got out, too. It was thick and muggy, still heavy summer even though it was this late in the year. He looked to the left and to the right. Everything was torn up. He didn’t recognize the place.

  “You remember what it was like before?” he asked Jack.

  “Before what?”

  “Before they started this building.”

  “Sure I remember what it was like before.”

  “Do you remember them digging it up the first time?”

  “They dug it up before?”

  “When Chester Ray Morton went missing. There was a rumor. Somebody said they saw him out here, or saw some guy out here, and we came and dug it up. We dug the whole thing.”

  “Wasn’t that twelve years ago? You were on the force twelve years ago?”

  “No,” Kyle said. “I was at the college. But I remember it. I thought everybody remembered it.”

  “I’m from Kiratonic,” Jack said. “I wasn’t living here then.”

  The man walking toward them was beginning to look like something besides a blob in haze. Kyle recognized him. It was old Tim Kika, except that his name wasn’t really Tim. It was something complicated that sounded foreign. He just called himself Tim.

  Shpetim Kika stopped in front of them. He looked bad. Kyle couldn’t put a more precise word on it. He just looked bad.

  “Well,” Jack said.

  “We left it alone,” Shpetim said. “After we opened it, I mean. I mean, it was there, what were we supposed to do, it came out of the dirt. So we opened it.”

  “You opened it?” Kyle asked.

  “One of the guys opened it,” Shpetim said. “I was there. They pulled it out of the ground, and then they were worried about it. I mean, it’s a yellow backpack. We should have thought not to touch it. But we opened it. And there it was.”

  “Have any of you touched it?” Kyle asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Shpetim said. “Nderi, my son, came out here to look at it first. Before I did. Only, we didn’t, you know, any of us, put our hands on it. We opened it, with a stick, because we wondered. You guys looked at this place already. You dug it all up. I remember.”

  “I remember, too,” Kyle said. “I was just thinking about it. But I don’t think we actually dug it all up. I think we just searched the place.”

  “Even so,” Shpetim said. “Somebody dug a hole in the ground, you’d have noticed it. Wouldn’t you? We thought you would.”

  “Maybe we better go take a look at it,” Jack said.

  Kyle looked at the sky over his head. There wasn’t much to see. Everywhere it was getting dark. The air was thick and hard to breathe. He did remember police going over this whole field, inch by inch of it. And that was—what? Weeks later?

  “It wasn’t like it was wooded,” Kyle said.

  “What?” Jack said.

  “I know what you mean,” Shpetim said. He sounded relieved. “It wasn’t wooded. It wasn’t like there were trees that would make something hard to find. The police were here. They went all over it. If there was something dug in the ground just then, you’d have seen it. So we didn’t think, you know, that this could be related to that. Except here we are.”

  “Here we are,” Kyle said.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re all talking about,” Jack said.

  Kyle sighed. “He’s talking about Chester Ray Morton. You know, the guy who went missing, the guy on all the billboards all over town? He had a yellow backpack
the night he went missing. Bright yellow, L.L. Bean backpack.”

  “It’s bright,” Shpetim said. “It’s been in the dirt. If it’s even his. And not, you know, other kinds of trouble.”

  “They didn’t search anything for weeks after he went missing,” Kyle said, “because the police didn’t think he was dead. They just thought he’d decided to disappear. But his mother kept pushing, and his mother kept pushing, and then somebody said they’d seen somebody in around here, and we went over the entire area. I remember it. I remember the day of the search. A bunch of us drove our cars up over there and got out and sat on them and watched. But they didn’t find anything.”

  “Is this the guy whose mother is supposed to be crazy?” Jack said.

  “If it was my son, I’d keep pushing,” Shpetim said.

  Then he looked back at the little crowd of men, and Kyle and Jack looked back with him.

  “Well?” Shpetim said.

  Jack was tired of waiting. He started across the building site, all torn up now, the grass mostly gone. Kyle and Tim looked at each other. Shpetim shrugged.

  “I’ve seen it already,” he said. “I’m not in a hurry to see it again.”

  Kyle headed across the site himself. He wished it wasn’t so close to dark. He wished the site didn’t feel so much like a graveyard. He wished he’d told Darvelle something, or that he’d told somebody something. He should not be out here. He should not have anything to do with anything to do with anything about this case.

  He got to the little group of men. Jack was standing there in the circle of them, looking down.

  “Damn,” he said, as Kyle walked up.

  “If we thought there was anything important inside it, we would have left it alone. Still, no one actually put their hands on it,” one of the men said. “It was just that we didn’t know what to do. It was all zipped up when we found it. It wasn’t like we could see anything.”

  “It wasn’t like that guy’s body could have fit in it,” another man said.

  “It made sense to open it,” a third man said, and Kyle knew this one. It was Nderi Kika. It was funny the way things worked. Nderi had been born in Albania, but he was now so American nobody would think he hadn’t been here forever.

  The crowd of men stepped away a little, and Jack pointed at the ground.

  “Look at that,” he said.

  At first, all Kyle saw was the yellow of the backpack. He took his flashlight out. He turned it on and aimed it down. It wasn’t really dark. The flashlight helped but it almost didn’t. Kyle ran the light up and down the now-open pack, up and down the bones half crushed and lying there, some of them bent, not quite the way they ought to be.

  The tiny human skull was cracked in half.

  9

  The last person to see the body hanging from the billboard on Mattatuck Avenue was Chief of Police Howard Androcoelho, and he was paying more attention to it than he thought he could ever pay to anything.

  By then it was almost full dark, and the lights across the top of the billboard were glowing. Traffic on Mattatuck Avenue had turned into a communal parking experience. Traffic in and out of the front entrance of Mattatuck–Harvey Community College had come to a halt. There were a good half-dozen patrol cars, a good thirty uniformed police officers, four plainclothes detectives, two EMT vans, the coroner’s van, and seven mobile news trucks clustered around the bottom of the billboard. There were newspeople doing stand-up reports in the middle of the street.

  Howard Androcoelho was sitting in his car, looking up at the body hanging there, twisting a little as three men did what they could to bring it down. They couldn’t just cut the rope. It could fall. There was always a chance that the man was still alive. There was always that chance even if there wasn’t one.

  Howard’s cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and opened up.

  “Well?” the voice on the other end of the line said. The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Marianne Glew, the mayor of Mattatuck.

  “We won’t know for sure until we bring him down.”

  “Don’t do this to me, Howard.”

  “I’m not doing anything to you. We won’t know until we bring the body down and they can do the tests. DNA. Fingerprints. Dental records.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Whoever is up there is definitely dead.”

  “You don’t need to do tests for that one?”

  “They’ll do tests for it,” Howard said. “I don’t need tests to know. You ever seen the face of somebody’s been hanged? Their tongue sticks out—”

  “All right, yes, Howard. I was with you on the Keith Marbury case, for God’s sake. It might have been a million years ago, but it’s the kind of thing you remember.”

  “Yeah, well,” Howard said.

  There was that odd dead silence on the cell that happened whenever nobody was talking, or when somebody had hung up. Except that you couldn’t really hang up a cell phone, not in the way you used to hang up the real phone. Howard thought of all those old Forties movies his wife liked to watched so much, the black-and-white ones where Fred MacMurray was a villain and the cops were all overweight. If he was in one of those movies right now, he’d be carrying a hip flask full of whiskey.

  Which would not be a bad idea.

  Marianne coughed. “Howard?”

  “I’m still here,” Howard said.

  “It was all a million years ago,” Marianne said. “But you’ve got to remember it. You’ve got to remember him. He’s hanging off the billboard with the goddamned picture on it. Are you really telling me you can’t tell if it’s him or not?”

  Howard considered his left hand. It looked the way it always looked. Then he looked out at the scene going on above him. Somebody had hold of the rope. They were pulling the body upward.

  “I can’t tell for sure,” he said finally. “But I can guess.”

  “And you guess it’s him?”

  “I guess it’s him.”

  “Then what does that mean, Howard? Is that good news? Has he been dead for twelve years? What do you think is going on here?”

  “If he’d been dead for twelve years, he’d be a skeleton by now,” Howard said. “Unless he was embalmed, of course. Somebody could have embalmed him and kept the body in a refrigerator all this time. He’d be pretty solid then.”

  “For God’s sake, Howard, I mean it. I’m going to murder you.”

  “Marianne, for God’s sake. What am I supposed to say? I mean it. What am I the hell supposed to say? He’s up there. I’m pretty sure it’s Chester Ray Morton. I don’t know how long he’s been up there. I know it hasn’t been twelve years. I don’t think it could have been all of twenty-four hours. There were day classes at the college today. Somebody would have seen him. After that, I haven’t got a clue, and I’m not going to have a clue until the tech people get done with what they do. I’m not a clairvoyant. I don’t know what happened here.”

  This time, the cell line was not silent. There was a click, click, clicking sound. Howard knew what that was. That was Marianne tapping the top of her pen on her desk. She used to do that when they were both detectives and she was his partner. It had always driven him crazy.

  “Listen,” Marianne said. “We’re not going to be able to do it. We’re not going to be able to say it was suicide.”

  “We don’t know that it was suicide.”

  “His body hanging off the billboard? What would it be except suicide?”

  “He could have been killed first,” Howard said. “Somebody could have shot him, or strangled him, or stabbed him, and then bundled up the body and hung it off the billboard.”

  “And you think that’s what happened? How could anybody have done that? That billboard is right out in front of everybody and everything. Somebody would have seen.”

  “Well, you’d think somebody would have seen if he hanged himself from it,” Howard said, “but they didn’t see that, either. There are people running all over here. As far as I k
now, they haven’t found anybody who saw anything yet, except the security guard who called it in.”

  “I’ll bet a dozen people saw it,” Marianne said. “They just didn’t bother to phone it in.”

  “People see things without seeing them,” Howard said. “They see a vague thing and they’re not sure what it is and their minds are on something else. You know how it goes.”

  “We’re still not going to be able to say it’s suicide,” Marianne said. “I don’t care if the guy left a video message saying he was going to off himself, we’re not going to be able to go with that. We’ve going to have to investigate it as a murder whether it makes sense to do it or not. And you know that.”

  “I do know that,” Howard said.

  “That woman will be around any minute, if she isn’t already. She’ll be on CNN and MSNBC and Fox and all the local stations and she’ll be screaming bloody murder.”

  “Yes,” Howard said.

  “She’ll do that even though we were right,” Marianne said. “He wasn’t dead. We said that at the time. He wasn’t dead. He’d gone off somewhere. And we were right. But it won’t matter. Because he’s dead now. Do you see?”

  “Yes, yes, I see,” Howard said. “You don’t have to yell in my ear. I know what the ramifications of this are. I’ve always known what the ramifications of this would be. I knew as soon as they told me about the call. Give it up, Marianne.”

  “This could be big trouble,” Marianne said.

  “I know.”

  “This could be lethal trouble. For both of us.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “I think we need some help,” Marianne said.

  Howard leaned forward a little. The body was going up and up. There was a man on the ladder with a hook holding it from one side and what looked like two other men on another ladder pulling carefully upward. One of the men at the top had hold of the rope and was trying to saw through it. The weird lighting made everything look wrong.

  Howard could still remember the day that he and Marianne had searched the trailer for the first time—the dust on all the surfaces, the bed made up with hospital corners, that small thin line of caking blood that had snaked across the top of the kitchen counter. They’d never been able to connect that blood to anybody.