Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor did not think he was actually awake. He tried sitting up a little straighter. Just on the other side of his windows, rain was coming down in sheets.

  “Gregor?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You were going to tell me if you got the information about the guy.”

  “If you mean the guy from the New York State Police, yes I did,” Gregor said. “And I kept the text messages so that I wouldn’t lose them. Thank you for all that. The people up here are driving me crazy.”

  “It must be a very small town.”

  “It’s not as small as it thinks it is,” Gregor said. “It doesn’t matter. I just want somebody to look at this thing that I can trust to see whatever’s there. What about you? What about George? What are you doing in a Chinese restaurant on City Avenue?”

  Bennis sighed. “I was eating dinner,” she said. “We went to see George, and then Donna took Tibor somewhere he had to go. Some meeting. So I decided to sit somewhere and have dinner and call you. That’s when I looked through my bag and found I didn’t have the phone. Which is just as well, I guess. They don’t like phones in hospitals. It interferes with the equipment.”

  “What about George?”

  “Resting comfortably and as well as can be expected.”

  “Which doesn’t tell me anything.”

  Bennis sighed again. “Okay,” she said. “Try not to overreact. Liver cancer.”

  Gregor swung his feet off the side of the bed and stood all the way up. He had no idea why. He was not going to help himself, or George, pacing back and forth across a motel room in Mattatuck, New York.

  “I’m coming home,” he said.

  “I told you not to overreact,” Bennis said. “I knew you were going to overreact. There’s no point in your coming back here right now. George is in no danger of dying anytime soon—well, you know, anytime in the next week or two, anyway. He’s practically a hundred, so—”

  “Why would I want to stay up here?” Gregor demanded. “I mean, what would be the point? I’m not all that interested in this case, the people are driving me crazy, I’m spending all my time worrying about what’s going on down there—”

  “And if you came down here right now, you’d only get in everybody’s way, and you know it. Finish the case and get it over with. Then come back here.”

  “For the end.”

  “Gregor.”

  “Do you know any other way to put it?” Gregor asked. “Is there some other prognosis I don’t know about?’

  “No,” Bennis said, “but for God’s sake—”

  “He’s nearly a hundred years old,” Gregor said. “He will be a hundred next week sometime. They’re not going to operate on him. He probably wouldn’t survive it. They’re not going to put him on the transplant list. He wouldn’t last long enough to get a new liver. If he did, he wouldn’t survive the surgery, and if he did survive the surgery, he wouldn’t survive it for long. So what we’re talking about here is—”

  “Look,” Bennis said. “Stay where you are. Call him, if you really need to talk to him. He’d probably like the diversion. But stop acting like an idiot. I don’t like this anymore than you do, but the man is very old, Gregor. Something like this was almost inevitable, one way or the other, eventually.”

  Gregor stopped pacing when he got to the windows. The rain really was coming down, down, and down. He’d hate to be out in it.

  “I know,” he said finally. “I do know. I’m not a complete idiot.”

  “Well, yes you are, a lot of the time,” Bennis said, “but I love you for it. Look, I’m going to go find a cab and get back to Cavanaugh Street. George was asleep when I left, so you might want to wait until morning. But it’s not a bad idea. Call him every once in a while. Talk to him. You’ll feel better, and he’ll like it.”

  “How is Martin holding up?” Gregor asked. “He was frantic, the last time I saw him.”

  “He’s still frantic,” Bennis said, “but Angela’s keeping her head straight. They’ll be all right. And there are grandchildren, did you know that? And great-grandchildren. They’ve been piling in from as far away as Colorado. For some reason, I thought the family was small.”

  “There was one son,” Gregor said. “Anton. He died in the service. Vietnam, I think. He left, I think, three.”

  “Well, one of the other two must have had sextuplets. The kids are everywhere. It’s really amazing. It makes me think I’m right, though, about not wanting to die in a hospital.”

  “People go to hospitals when they’re sick,” Gregor said. “Are you trying to tell me you want to be hit by a bus?”

  “No, I’m saying that if I get to the end of my life and there isn’t much anybody can do for me but lessen the pain, then I’d rather have them do it in my own bedroom. It would save on the amount of time nurses would have to run around telling everybody not to disturb the other patients.”

  “I think I’d rather get hit by a bus,” Gregor said.

  “I’m going to go back to Cavanaugh Street,” Bennis said. “I’m tired and I’m depressed and I miss you, but that does not mean I want you to come right back home. There’s no place to sit in the living room, anyway. I’ve got curtain samples on the couch.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re worrying about curtain samples when you say we’ve got to redo all the window treatments, whatever those are.”

  “It’s the windows themselves we’re redoing. A lot of them have to be recaulked. I’m going to go, Gregor.”

  “Call me when you get back to the apartment,” Gregor said. “I don’t like City Avenue in the dark.”

  Bennis hung up. Actually, she did the cell phone equivalent of hanging up, which was something like disappearing into thin air. Gregor missed real hanging up, where there was a click or a bang and you really knew where you were.

  He walked back to the bed and put the phone down on the night table. There was a regular landline phone there. He wondered if anybody ever used it.

  Then he walked over to his suitcase and started looking through the things Bennis had packed for him so that he’d have something clean to put on after he took a shower.

  2

  Gregor Demarkian called the hospital as soon as he got out of the shower, only to be told that Mr. Tekemanian was sleeping. The nurse at the desk said this as if he should have known, as if there was something about—What? Seven o’clock?—that made it obvious that people in hospitals would be asleep, that anybody with any sense would be asleep. He got less information out of the nurse than he had gotten out of Bennis. He thought about calling Martin, but that seemed excessive. Martin and Angela probably had enough to do with all this already.

  He wasn’t really very good at walking around doing nothing. He was less good at doing what had to be done next when there was something else he wanted and couldn’t have. He got dressed. He put on a tie. He sat down at the room’s little desk and picked up the things on it one after the other, as if they could tell him what he ought to be doing. Finally, he had a thought that required some kind of action.

  He was hungry.

  There was a restaurant downstairs. Of course there was. When Gregor was growing up, Howard Johnson meant restaurants to him, not “motor inns.” He left his room and went down the hall to the elevator. He went down the elevator to the lobby and then across the lobby to the restaurant. There was a hostess waiting at the door, which appeared to be necessary. The restaurant was nearly full.

  The waitress showed him to a booth in a back corner, so far away from everything else that it was almost like being put in Siberia. Gregor didn’t mind it. He had things to think about and he didn’t really want to listen to people talk about their dogs or their relationships or the terrible things their mothers-in-law had done to them. The waitress brought a menu, and Gregor thought it would be a good time to indulge in something fried. Tibor wasn’t here to rat him out to Bennis. Bennis wasn’t here to give him the impression that, now that he was married, he had no right to
try to commit suicide by saturated fat.

  He had just about started on his enormous pile of fried clams when his telephone went off, the 1812 Overture again, not a number he was supposed to recognize. He got the phone out and looked at the caller ID. It wasn’t an area code he knew, which meant it wasn’t likely to be Bennis or anybody else on Cavanaugh Street.

  He put his fork down across his plate and said, “Yes?”

  “Is this Gregor Demarkian?” a man said.

  “This is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.

  “Good. This is Ferris Cole. I’m with the New York State Police. I’m a medical examiner—”

  “Oh,” Gregor said. “I was going to call you in the morning. Isn’t it late? Are you working late?”

  “I’m always working late,” Ferris Cole said. “Not that that’s anything you have to worry about. Anyway, I saw the note and I decided to call right away. It isn’t often we get a call from Mattatuck.”

  Gregor picked at a fried clam. “The chief of police, police commissioner, I don’t know what I’m supposed to call him. He told me they don’t have much in the way of violent death down here.”

  “Oh,” Ferris Cole said, “they have it. They just pretend that they don’t. It’s Howard Androcoelho you’ve been talking to, I guess.”

  “That’s the one,” Gregor said.

  “Well, it’s not like it’s just Howard,” Ferris Cole said. “They’re all like that down there. And it’s not just police work, either. Couple of years in a row, they still hadn’t passed a school budget. Teachers were working without getting paid. They won’t vote the taxes for anything. They keep trying to pretend that it’s thirty years ago. They’ve got fifty thousand people in that town these days. They need to face reality. I’m surprised they hired you. From what I hear, you’re not particularly cheap.”

  “Not particularly.”

  “And you got them to call us in? You must be a miracle worker. Either that, or Charlene Morton has put the fear of God in them.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said. “I was wondering if you knew what case I was calling about.”

  “There’s only one case you could be calling about,” Ferris Cole said. “It’s been in all the papers anyway, and on television. Mrs. Morton even got in touch with us, although there was nothing we could do. It was a municipal matter. Of course, she also got in touch with the FBI. Maybe she did put the fear of God into Howard and Marianne. I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “Marianne?”

  “Marianne Glew,” Ferris Cole said. “She’s the mayor down there. If you haven’t met her yet, you will. She’s at least as big a piece of work as Howard is. Maybe more.”

  Gregor thought about it. He was pretty sure he’d heard the name from Howard Androcoelho at least once.

  Gregor played with another fried clam. “What I want,” he said, “is to get a proper autopsy done, something that will give me some clue as to whether this was a murder or a suicide. I do know enough about dead bodies to know that the man was in fact hanged, while he was still alive. I also know that he wasn’t hanged from the top of that billboard where he was found. What I’d like to know is if he hanged himself someplace else and then was moved to the billboard, or if he was hanged by somebody else somewhere else and then moved to the billboard. And in either case, I find it completely bizarre that he was moved to the billboard.”

  Ferris Cole sounded interested. “How do you know he was moved to the billboard? How do you know he didn’t just—”

  Gregor explained about the tattoo.

  “So,” Ferris Cole said, “somebody took the dead body, shaved a little hair off the right breast area near the nipple, and tattooed—”

  “Don’t forget the nipple ring,” Gregor said. “I’m pretty sure there was a nipple ring in the ring holes and the ring was taken out.”

  “To facilitate the tattooing.”

  “Right. The holes were enlarged. They looked like they’d had something heavy in them recently.”

  “But why would anybody go to all that trouble?” Ferris Cole asked. “I mean, why bother? I mean, I can see the hanging part, if you wanted to make it look like suicide, but the rest of it makes no sense. Is there supposed to be a code here? Is somebody sending a message? What?”

  “All of this would be better answered if I could just get the body properly autopsied,” Gregor said, “which is why I called you. Do you think you could send somebody down tomorrow to do this, or to take the body back to where you need it to be? The longer we wait, the more we’re likely to lose.”

  “Oh, I agree with you,” Ferris Cole said. “Sure, I can arrange to have the body picked up in the morning. We can bring it back here and I can look at it myself. Seems odd, after all these years. We’ve been living with this case up here for a decade.”

  “Well, finding out how he died won’t even begin to answer the questions,” Gregor said, “but it bugs the hell out of me that, in this day and age, we don’t have a rudimentary forensics finding—oh, never mind. It’s just me. I’ve been riding around with Howard Androcoelho all day, and the town used the stimulus money to do things like install a hands-off cell phone system in his car. It’s enough to make me lose my mind.”

  “We’ll pick the body up in the morning,” Ferris Cole said again. “And don’t let Howard worry you. Or Marianne, either. That town won’t vote money for anything. A couple of months ago, somebody figured out that the police radios didn’t work in at least half the territory, and they couldn’t get the town council to vote the money to get better ones. So then they held a referendum, and they couldn’t get the people of the town to vote the money to get better ones. Police radios. Do you believe it?”

  “The whole town thinks it doesn’t have any crime when it actually does?”

  “It’s mostly the Mattatuck–Harvey Taxpayers Association. Older people, most of them on Social Security, who don’t want taxes raised for any reason. They’re not the majority of the town, but they are the majority of the people who will actually go out and vote in local elections. And it’s like I said. They only think they don’t have crime. I’m willing to bet that Howard gets four or five cases a year that are at least iffy, and then there are the domestics, of which Mattatuck always has a few. You’ve got to wonder about some people.”

  Gregor agreed that you had to wonder about some people. Then he said good-bye to Ferris Cole and went back to his mound of fried clams.

  Somehow, it wasn’t nearly as much fun eating them as it was when he had Bennis around to complain.

  3

  Back in the room, Gregor lay down on the bed—well, one of the beds, the one closest to the door—and considered his options. He called the hospital again, even though he knew it was useless. He got a different nurse from the one he’d had before, but with the same attitude. He thought about calling Bennis. That was something he wanted to do before he went to sleep, but right now it just felt wrong. He rarely discussed case problems with her. She understood them when he did, but her attitude to justice tended to be as direct as anything in a Die Hard movie. If she knew who the bad guys were, she wanted to blow them away.

  Actually, Gregor couldn’t imagine Bennis blowing anyone away. Giving them the kind of tongue lashing that reduced them to ribbons—yes, that he could see. Using a weapon was not really her style.

  He got off the bed and went to the desk. He had left his little airplane bag there, the one Bennis packed what she called his “miscellaneous essentials” in. He rifled through it until he came up with his little L.L. Bean folding alarm clock. It was bright yellow, because Bennis thought something bright yellow would be hard for him to lose. He opened it. It was nine-twenty.

  I’m losing all sense of time, he thought, and it was true. The day had started too early. He’d been moving through it too fast. He thought he’d gone down to dinner at seven, but maybe it had been earlier. He hadn’t really checked. He put the alarm clock on the beside table next to where he expected to sleep and went back to pacing. Then h
e went to the window and looked out on the parking lot. The lights of Mattatuck were spread out before him, and there were many more lights than you’d expect to see in a “small town.” Gregor wondered if the teachers were getting paid this year. Then he wondered if the police had working radios. Then he decided that he couldn’t do this much longer without going insane, and headed out into the hall and down one room to get Tony Bolero.

  Tony Bolero had not undressed to go to bed. If he had, Gregor might have changed his mind about what he wanted to do. Tony Bolero was still in his full driver’s uniform, except for the hat. Gregor took that as an omen.

  “Could you drive me somewhere?” Gregor asked. “I don’t know what the arrangement is. If it’s too late—”

  “I can drive you anywhere you want,” Tony Bolero said. “Where do you want to go?”

  Gregor thought that in a murder mystery, Tony Bolero would definitely turn out to be the murderer. Since he was from Philadelphia, that was not likely to be the case here.

  “I want to go to a place called Feldman’s Funeral Home. Or The Feldman Funeral Home. I’m not sure how they phrase it. I was there earlier today, but not with you. It was when I was driving around with Howard Androcoelho.”

  “It’s The Feldman Funeral Home,” Tony Bolero said. “I know where it is. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll bring the car around to the lobby.”

  Gregor did not ask how Tony Bolero knew where The Feldman Funeral Home was. It felt like one of those better-kept secrets. Maybe Bennis had hired this guy on purpose, because he seemed to her to be the kind of person who would fit in a murder investigation. Meaning, Gregor thought, that he seemed like the kind of person who could be a second lead on The Sopranos.

  Gregor went back to his room, made sure he had things like his wallet and his phone, and went down to the lobby. There was a young man behind the desk this time instead of a young woman.