Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  “What was the original plan?”

  “To make everybody think that Chester Morton had committed suicide by hanging himself from the top of that billboard,” Gregor said. “And I think that the second half of that sentence is just as important as the first.”

  “What second half?”

  “From that billboard,” Gregor said. “Whoever put the body there didn’t just want people to think that Chester Morton had committed suicide, but that he’d committed suicide by hanging himself there. Since we know Chester Morton was hanged, either by his own hand or otherwise, then the point must be to make sure we don’t find out that he was hanged somewhere else. Which brings up all kinds of issues.”

  “Like what?” Bennis asked. “Maybe somebody just didn’t want the publicity.”

  “There’s that,” Gregor agreed. “But then there are other things. The most obvious one is murder. Maybe somebody drugged the man and then hanged him, then moved the body to be hanged again on the billboard. But even if Chester Morton really did commit suicide, the place he chose to commit it might have been … inconvenient for somebody. Who was doing something else unconnected with Chester Morton that he doesn’t want looked into?”

  “I think you’re tying yourself in knots for no good reason,” Bennis said. “If Chester Morton committed suicide, wouldn’t he be connected to any place he did it in? People who commit suicide don’t just pick random places to do it in, do they? They pick some place with significance to them. I mean, I suppose there must be people with mental illnesses, you know, that kind of thing, who pick places you’d never be able to figure out why. But people who aren’t like that pick places they think have meaning.”

  “True,” Gregor said.

  “And most of them leave notes,” Bennis said.

  “Half true,” Gregor said.

  “You really can be enormously annoying sometimes,” Bennis said. “I’m just saying that wherever Chester Morton died, it had to be someplace that had something to do with him. Either he was murdered, so you have to ask where he’d go and who he’d go to and why, and all those things would matter to him. Or he committed suicide, and then—”

  “Yes, I got that part. I’m just trying to figure out how I’m going to go about doing this when the police are going to be more hindrance than help. Are you sorting through tiles or something today?”

  “I’m going to look at sinks. It will all be over by the time you get back. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not a hundred percent convinced that I’m not going to be back today,” Gregor told her. “Don’t forget. One way situations like this work out is that the local police change their minds and send me home. It’s not the kind of thing I’d fight at the moment.”

  “Go do something sensible and let me go do something sensible, too,” Bennis said. “Tommy Donahue says, ‘Hi’. Try not to eat yourself to death when I’m not there to watch you.”

  Gregor thought about the fried clams, but didn’t report them. There was time to get into that particular argument—never.

  A few minutes later, he was in his clothes and down the hall, knocking on Tony Bolero’s door. Tony came out looking as if he’d never gone to sleep late. His hair was still wet from a shower.

  “Are you in any shape to go running around?” Gregor asked. “Could we maybe get some breakfast to take out and take a little ride? There’s something I want to see before I make up my mind what to do next.”

  “Sure,” Tony said.

  Gregor’s cell phone went off. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the caller ID. It was a local number, which meant it was either Howard Androcoelho on yet another line—how many lines could any one person have access to?—or somebody connected to the case somehow trying to get in touch with him. Gregor thought of Charlene Morton and shuddered. He rejected the call and put the phone back in his pocket.

  “I’ll talk to people when I’ve seen what I want to see,” he said. “I want to go out to that place and get a look at that billboard. It’s supposed to be at the entrance to Mattatuck–Harvey Community College. Do you think you can find where that is?”

  “Sure,” Tony said again. “Give me five minutes.”

  “I’ll go down and order some food. Or coffee, or something.”

  Tony made a noncommittal noise and retreated into his room to get ready.

  Gregor went down the hall to the elevators, and then to the lobby. The lobby was deserted except for one young woman sitting on a couch in the middle of everything, holding a large tote-bag-sized purse on her lap and looking around as if she were lost. Gregor noted the off-the-rack business suit and the shoes that matched, asked for messages at the desk, got the answer that there weren’t any, and headed for the dining room.

  He was almost at the hostess’s station when the young woman with the purse suddenly scooted up beside him, breathless, and said:

  “Gregor Demarkian? I’m Darvelle Haymes. I have to talk to you.”

  3

  The first thing Gregor thought was that this was not what he had expected of somebody named Darvelle Haymes, and then he felt a little exasperated with himself. Forget the social sin of indulging in stereotypes. It was unprofessional of somebody who called himself a detective to jump to conclusions the way he had. The woman couldn’t help her name. The picture he’d had in his mind might have been more appropriate to her mother than it would ever be to her.

  Or it might have been wrong about both of them. There was that.

  Tony was just coming in to the lobby from the elevators. Gregor caught his eye and shook his head slightly. Tony looked at Darvelle Haymes and nodded.

  “I was just going to have a cup of coffee,” Gregor said. “Why don’t you join me?”

  Darvelle Haymes looked into the dining room and then back at the reception desk, and sighed. “I suppose I might as well,” she said. “It’s not like everybody in town hasn’t seen me here already.”

  “Everybody in town?”

  Darvelle jerked her head back toward the reception desk. “The girl on this morning is Molly Dankowski. Her sister Mary Beth goes to school with the head of my agency. The guy is Eddie Berman. He lives across the street from me and his mother is the worst gossip in town. They’ll have me grilled under a heat lamp and carted off in handcuffs before the day is out.”

  The hostess came by with a little stack of menus and gestured them toward a table near the windows. Gregor followed her, and Darvelle followed him.

  “Is it always like that around here?” he asked, when they two of them had been seated. “Does everybody talk about everybody else all the time?”

  “Sort of,” Darvelle said. “Oh, I know it’s not the way it was when I was growing up. It’s not that small anymore. There are probably plenty of people you never even hear about. But people are going to hear about me. For the last twelve years, half of them have been thinking that I killed Chester Morton and hid his body somewhere. Now they think I killed Chester Morton and hung his body off that billboard last week. I just killed my baby twelve years ago.”

  “Did you have a baby twelve years ago?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Darvelle said. “I’ve never been pregnant. I hear there are tests for that kind of thing, and if you want me to, I’ll take one, I don’t care how embarrassing it is. I’m sick of this. I really am. I’m sick of it even though I know for certain it’s my own fault that the rumors are there. Or, you know, mine or Chester’s.”

  The waitress came by. Gregor asked for coffee, and so did Darvelle Haymes, but they didn’t need to. The waitress had a pot at the ready, just like Linda at the Ararat.

  “I’ll leave you two to make up your minds,” she said.

  Gregor waited until she was well and truly gone. “So,” he said. “Why is it your fault, or yours and Chester’s, that people think you were pregnant twelve years ago.”

  Darvelle looked into her cup of coffee. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “You have to understand, Chester isn’t the kind of guy I usually d
ated. He wasn’t then. He isn’t now. I’ve been working almost all my life. I’ve had to work. And even back then, I sort of had my whole life mapped out, what I’d work at, how much money I’d save, when I’d be able to buy my own house—I did buy my own house, by the way, and I’m in no danger of foreclosure. I work hard. I don’t spend money on silly crap. I make a plan and I stick to it.”

  “That’s very admirable.”

  “Yes, well, thank you, I guess. But the thing is, back around twelve-and-a-half years ago, I met Chester. I was going to Mattatuck–Harvey Community College to get my associate’s degree. At the time, I thought my best bet would be going into some kind of human resources work with a corporation somewhere. That’s before I found out that human resources is the great corporate sinkhole, where they put people they’ll never let within a mile of top management. But I didn’t know that then and I was getting this degree, and so was Chester, and we met.”

  “In a class?”

  “In the cafeteria. We had a class, but we were just sitting in the same room. We didn’t get to talking until we met up in the cafeteria. Anyway, it’s like I said. He wasn’t what I was used to. His family had money. Still does. It might not be a lot of money compared to people in Philadelphia and New York, but around here it’s what passed for rich. And Chester had moved out of his family’s house and into the trailer because they were just driving him crazy. They’d drive anybody crazy. I don’t know if you’ve met Charlene yet, but she’s a loon.”

  “I’ve met Mrs. Morton once,” Gregor said. “It wasn’t for very long.”

  “Well, trust me, she’s a loon. And one of those women who want to hang on to their children until death, if you know what I mean. So Chester had moved out. But even though he’d moved out physically, he hadn’t really moved out mentally. He wasn’t used to taking care of himself. He didn’t really like it. He didn’t like the trailer park or the people there. He didn’t like the trailer. He didn’t like not having the cash to throw around the way he was used to. I think, if he hadn’t met me, he might have moved back home sooner rather than later. But he did meet me, and Charlene hated me.”

  “Did she have reason to?” Gregor asked.

  Darvelle shrugged. “She thought I was low class. I was low class. Nobody in my family had ever had anything, and nobody was ever going to have anything unless it was me. But she didn’t like me, and she did one of her stupid Charlene things and tried to say that Chester had to give me up if he wanted—I don’t know what, exactly. If he wanted to come home If he didn’t want his family to disown him. Except that I can’t see Charlene disowning any of her children. She’s more the stainless-steel umbilical cord type.”

  “That’s an image,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah, well,” Darvelle said again. “Anyway, Chester thought he was madly in love with me, but he didn’t want to be separated from his family. That would be understandable, you know, if he loved them, but he didn’t seem to. He seemed to just be worried that he’d never get back with the money. So he came up with this idea that we should get married.”

  “And he thought that would help him out with his mother? When his mother didn’t like you?”

  “He thought his mother would never give up a grandchild,” Darvelle said. “So his idea was that we should say I was pregnant and that we had to get married, and then even if Charlene didn’t like me, she’d put up with me, because she’d want to be near her grandchild. The problem was that I wasn’t pregnant and I wasn’t going to get pregnant. That was one of the big rules of my life. I didn’t just practice safe sex, I damn near married it. That’s what happened to most of the girls I went to high school with, do you know what I mean? Knocked up and knocked out. I had no intention of having it happen to me.”

  “But you told Charlene Morton you were pregnant? What did you think was going to happen when the months went by and you didn’t have a baby?”

  “Chester said we’d be married by then and we could just say I’d had a miscarriage,” Darvelle said. “Oh, I know. It’s completely ridiculous. But I was eighteen and I was being stupid, and I went along with it. Chester gave his family the whole story, and then we were invited over for dinner. I kept joking that Charlene was going to poison my soup, but I don’t know if I really was joking. Anyway, we went over there. And I—um, I—well. I wore a little costuming, if you know what I mean.”

  “Something under your dress to make you look pregnant?”

  “Exactly. And I went over there, and it didn’t work out the way Chester had expected. Charlene was not warming up to the idea of a grandchild. Or at least she wasn’t warming up to the idea of me and a pregnancy wasn’t going to change that. So we had this really uncomfortable dinner and then we left and that would have been the end of it. Except Chester had a better idea.”

  “What idea was that?”

  “Chester thought that the pregnancy wasn’t going to be enough, but an actual child would be. So at first he tried to convince me to get pregnant for real. And, like I said, I wasn’t having any. Especially not in that situation. I mean, God, can’t you see it? First he talks me into getting pregnant, then I get pregnant, then Charlene wears me down, then he dumps me, then there I am, in exactly the same position my mother was in when she was my age.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Not the best scenario.”

  “No, it wasn’t. And when he finally accepted the fact that I wouldn’t do it, he came up with something else. He said he knew where we could buy a baby.”

  “What?”

  “I know. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But that’s what he said. He said he knew where we could buy a baby, and that it wouldn’t be cheap, but it wouldn’t be as expensive as I’d think. And I just blew up. I mean, being pregnant would have been a disaster, but he was talking about jail time—I mean, it’s not legal to sell babies, right? I thought he was out of his mind. So we had this huge enormous fight. And that was the last time I really talked to him.”

  “This was what,” Gregor said, “right after the dinner? The next day?”

  “Maybe two or three days later.”

  “And was that the last time you saw him?”

  “Oh, no,” Darvelle said. “We didn’t go out or meet up or anything after that, but we were taking a class together again. English Composition. The one they make everybody take. So I saw him in class toward the end of the week. That was the last time I saw him before he disappeared.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No, not really. He came up and tried to talk to me before class, but I didn’t want to and finally he went away. I don’t know what happened to him after that. I know Charlene is always saying that he disappeared on whatever date it was, but we don’t really know that, none of us. That was the last time I saw him. I think Charlene talked with him on the phone the next night. And that was it.”

  “Was it, really?”

  “As far as I’m concerned it was,” Darvelle said. “I don’t care what people say, it was an ordinary college thing except for that stupid charade about the pregnancy, and I didn’t go anywhere with that after we had that dinner. If Chester decided to disappear for twelve years after that, I’ll bet anything it had nothing to do with me.”

  TWO

  1

  Shpetim Kika sometimes spent all evening worrying about the skeleton of the baby in the backpack—not worrying about it, exactly, but brooding about the way it seemed to have disappeared from public view. Maybe it was because he had seen it face-to-face, so to speak—but that made no sense. It really didn’t. In Shpetim’s mind, everybody should be concerned about the skeleton of a baby in a backpack. It should be on everyone’s mind, all the time, instead of a side issue that might as well not have happened. Shpetim got up every morning and checked the television news on all three of the local stations. Never once did he hear a single word about the baby. That news had come and gone in a day after Chester Morton’s body was found hanging from that billboard.

  “Listen,” he told
Lora sometimes, at night. “It’s a terrible thing. You should have seen it. No, all right, nobody should have seen it. But somebody should be caring about it. A baby is dead. That’s not a small thing. A baby is dead and nobody knows who it was, or why it died. There should be an outcry.”

  Public outcries were one of the things on Shpetim’s long list of confusing facts about America. He loved America. He really did. He was overjoyed to have had a chance to come here, and he’d done very well since he’d set up shop, too. He would not have been able to build a business like this back in Albania. He would not have a son who had been to college and was about to be married to a girl whose wedding would be something out of a fairy tale. He did truly love America. He just thought Americans were crazy a lot of the time. The news would give you day after day and week after week about some politician who wasn’t even in office anymore, or running for anything, making a sex tape with his mistress—and not say a single thing about the skeleton of a baby in a backpack.

  Right now, Shpetim was sitting in the little construction shed, watching men walking along girders on the second floor of the new tech building. It was going to be a beautiful building when it was done. That was something else he liked about America. They talked and talked, back home, when the Soviets were still in power, about how they were doing everything for the people, and how in America the people were left to fend for themselves. Well, it was in America that there would be this beautiful new tech building and anybody who wanted to study in it could just come in and sign up, no approval necessary except for a high school diploma. And if you didn’t have the money, there was financial aid.

  Nderi was walking back across the site to the shed. Shpetim straightened up a little. He knew it was silly, but he wanted Nderi to be proud of him. He didn’t want to be the kind of ignorant immigrant parent whose children couldn’t wait to leave home.

  Nderi made a pretense of knocking at the side of the shed door and poked his head inside. “We’re going to get the shell on the south end of the second floor done today,” he said. “We’re going a lot faster than I expected. I think we can be sure we’ll have the whole thing enclosed before the really bad weather hits. Then we’ll have to deal with the electricians.”