Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  Althy took a deep, sucking draw on the cigarette, as if it were a joint. She wished she had a joint. She wished she had something.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work right now? You’re always at work in the middle of the day. Fucking idiot.”

  “I worked a bit and then they sent me home,” Haydee said. “I’ve got class now. Then I’m going to work again tonight. They took me on the dinner shift to waitress over at Pat and Carol’s.”

  “Shit,” Althy said.

  “It’s a good waitressing place,” Haydee said. “I talked to one of the girls who already works there. You get a lot of people for dinner and they’re good with tips. The woman who’s place I’m taking worked there for forty years and raised a whole family on what she got, and raised them right, too. They all of them went to college. Now she’s retired and they’re taking care of her.”

  “Pat Nickerby went to high school with me,” Althy said. “He grew up right here in this trailer park. He’s a little shit.”

  “Well, it just goes to prove it.”

  “To prove what, for fuck’s sake?”

  “To prove that you don’t have to stay in a place like this, just because you were born in it,” Haydee said. “If you work hard, and you do right, and you don’t stop, you can end up in a ranch house in Sherwood Forest.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Althy said.

  “You shouldn’t cuss all the time,” Haydee said. “People who don’t live in places like this don’t cuss all the time. Did you know I didn’t know that? I didn’t know it until I went to college. When you cuss all the time, you sound like an absolute idiot.”

  “You sound like a prissy little fuck,” Althy said. “That’s what you are. Won’t even support your family. Just as happy to let your mother starve if it means you can keep a fucking dime for yourself. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Do you hear me? You’d let me fucking starve.”

  Haydee zipped her backpack closed and threw it over her shoulder. “You’re not starving. You’re just short the money for another drink. You know it, and I know it, and the only thing new about today is that Mike isn’t around. Maybe he got arrested. He’s not even a good thief.”

  “Oh, well,” Althy said. “Look the fuck at you.”

  Haydee turned away and left the living room, went out to the little vestibule, and down the stairs to the door. Althy wouldn’t usually let herself go wandering around when there was a fucking police convention going on outside, but she couldn’t help herself. Sometimes Haydee made her fucking head want to explode.

  “Fucking A,” Althy said, going out of the door herself.

  It really was a police convention out here. There had to be six police cars, plus the mobile crime unit, plus Charlene “Fucking” Morton, and that crime consultant person, plus a wagon from Feldman’s. The sirens were off, but the police cars all had their top lights pulsing in that way that made Althy feel dizzy. Maybe she ought to fall down right here and have a fit and see what happened with it. You could get some money that way if people thought they’d given you a seizure. She looked around. It probably wouldn’t work, not right here, right now. There were too many professional people around. There might even be a doctor. When you pulled the thing with the seizure, you wanted to be one on one with some idiot who was scared of his own shadow and didn’t want anybody to know he was in that particular parking lot at that time of night.

  Haydee was talking to the crime consultant, leaning over close to him and nodding while he wrote something down. Wasn’t that just fucking precious? It sure the fuck was. Haydee the saint and Haydee the model citizen.

  Haydee turned around and pointed at her. Althy nearly spit.

  “Listen,” Haydee said, coming up to her with the crime consultant in tow. “Ma, this is Gregor Demarkian. He’s helping with the Chester Morton investigation—”

  “I know who the fuck he is,” Althy said. “I’ve seen him before.”

  “Fine.” Haydee closed her eyes. “I was just telling him I wasn’t home all day. I only got home about an hour ago. He needs to talk to somebody who was home all day.”

  “I wasn’t the fuck home,” Althy said. “I was the fuck asleep.”

  “And it’s not just today,” Gregor Demarkian said. “It could have been last night.”

  “I wasn’t the fuck here last night,” Althy said. “What do you take me for? I was out till two at least and then when I came the fuck home I just passed out. I’m not some fucking plaster saint.”

  “I was telling Mr. Demarkian that I heard a lot of vehicles before I went to sleep, but there are always a lot of vehicles around here.”

  “All the fucking time,” Althy said. “Somebody must have brought a fucking truck.”

  Gregor Demarkian leaned in, interested. “A truck? You saw a truck?”

  “No, I didn’t see a fucking truck,” Althy said. “What do you take me for? I tripped on the rut, that’s all. We came home and I came down this path and there was a fucking rut the size of a whale right here in front of my door, and I tripped on it. I fell flat on my face. Hurt like fucking hell.”

  “It was an old rut?” Gregor Demarkian asked. “It was dry?”

  “No, it wasn’t the fuck dry,” Althy said, her voice at maximum volume, as if she were talking to somebody who couldn’t speak English. “There’s mud everywhere. What the fuck is wrong with your fucking eyes? It was just a big rut, is all. Deep and wide. And I fell the fuck into it. Fuck, if there’d been a truck the size of that rut around, I’d have seen it. I’m right in the fucking middle of the park. I’d have seen it even if it were black as shit and had its lights off.”

  “Yes,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Yes, I see.”

  “I don’t see why you have to shout,” Haydee said.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Althy said.

  Then she turned to look at the whole mess of them out there milling around doing nothing useful, and headed back to the trailer.

  There was more than one way to make sure you had enough money to have a good time, and Althy Michaelman knew all of them.

  2

  Kyle Holborn was on the desk when the call came in, and for the next half hour all he did was make little notes in the margins of the call sheet to make sure there was a record of who was going out there and why. Well, maybe not why. There was no why to this thing besides panic, and just as it was with all panic, it made a lot of noise. What Kyle couldn’t get his head past was just how much he resented it. He resented being at this desk. He resented the incredible fuss this was causing. He resented Mr. Gregor “Great Detective” Demarkian, who had waltzed in here and acted like none of them knew what they were doing.

  It was the kind of gossip that got around town very fast. He didn’t expect to be the first to tell anybody about it. He really didn’t expect to be the first to tell Darvelle, who spent her day with women who lived for the moment when they could impart shocking information to somebody. He called Darvelle anyway. So many of the other people in the station were either on their way over to the scene or huddled into tight little groups to discuss it, he thought he was probably safe no matter what he said.

  Darvelle’s cell phone rang so many times, Kyle thought he was going to get that message that told him to stop trying. Then Darvelle picked up, and she sounded angry.

  “Darvelle Haymes,” she said, as if she hadn’t seen his name on the caller ID.

  Kyle took a deep breath and let the air out very slowly. He imagined himself as a plastic blow-up clown, deflating.

  “It’s me,” he said. “You had to know it was me.”

  “Oh,” Darvelle said. “Oh. I’m sorry. I wasn’t looking. Things are a little tense here.”

  “Are you out with a buyer? I didn’t mean to get you in the middle of something.”

  “I’m back at the shop. But there are buyers here, and I don’t know who else, and the whole place is going crazy. If you called to tell me they found Chester Morton’s body sitting up in a chair, stark naked, in his old trailer, I already
know. Mice at the town dump already know.”

  “I wish people would stop getting so worked up about the stark naked,” Kyle said. “I mean, of course he was stark naked. He was in a cold locker at Feldman’s. You don’t put clothes on a body in a cold locker. At least, you don’t until you want to put him in a casket. And what did they expect? That whoever took the thing was going to dress it up before he put it somewhere?”

  There was a long pause on the line. Kyle knew that Darvelle was thinking it through. Then she said, very cautiously, “All right. I can see how that would work.”

  “I’d think the real problem would be the time,” Kyle said. “I mean, the body disappeared from Feldman’s last night, we know the approximate time, sort of, you see what I mean? And now the body is in the trailer. So the question is, did the body go directly to the trailer, or did it get there later. You know, did someone hang on to it for a while.”

  Darvelle did some more considering. “And that’s one of those things they can figure out?”

  “Maybe,” Kyle said. “It depends on where the body was when it wasn’t in the trailer.”

  “Why?”

  Kyle shrugged. He knew she couldn’t see his shrug, but, he didn’t care. “Bodies leave things behind. You never get them away completely clean. They leave fibers, and blood, and DNA, and stuff. Except I don’t think there would be any blood in this case. But they leave things. Forensics.”

  “I thought you said that was all a lot of bunk,” Darvelle said. “CSI and all that stuff. I thought you said it was all a lot of crap.”

  “It is a lot of crap,” Kyle said. “I mean, they make up half the stuff they do on CSI. But forensics isn’t a lot of crap. There really are forensics. So, you know, if somebody had the body someplace for a while before they put it in the trailer, there’d be stuff left behind. And that stuff lasts. It can last a really long time.”

  “What’s a really long time?”

  “Months,” Kyle said. “Years, sometimes. Fibers. That kind of thing.”

  “Crap,” Darvelle said again.

  Kyle looked up and around the station. There was still nobody near the front desk. They were all huddled in the back, telling each other stories. There was nobody coming through the front door. He might as well have been alone.

  “If I was the person who moved the body,” he said, “the best thing I could do would be just get rid of whatever I moved it in. Sell the car or the truck or whatever. Junk it if I had to. But that’s not as easy as you’d think. Everybody keeps records these days. So the next best thing would be to clean out the space with something strong. Lye, maybe.”

  “Wouldn’t the police be able to detect the lye?” Darvelle said. “I mean, for God’s sake, Kyle. Detecting blood with some chemical that lights up purple in the right kind of light sounds like science fiction, but detecting lye is a job I could give to a cat.”

  “They’d be able to detect the lye,” Kyle said, “but they wouldn’t be able to detect anything else.”

  The pause this time was even longer. Kyle looked down at his fingernails. His fingernails looked awful. There was dirt under them, and the edges were ragged.

  “You’re out of your mind,” Darvelle said finally. “You really are. I don’t know what it is you think you’re thinking.”

  “I’m thinking that I’m sick of Gregor Demarkian,” Kyle said. “I’m sick of everybody running around acting as if he’s God. Sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t cause this stuff he runs into. Maybe he moved the body himself. Maybe this is some big plot to turn this into a sensational case that will make all the magazines and get him on television again. Maybe there are a lot of reasons for people to want to move that body that have nothing to do with whether they murdered Chester ‘Goddamned’ Morton.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Darvelle said again. “I’m going to get off the phone now. I’m going to go get some work done.”

  “That Albanian guy who owns the construction company was in here this morning,” Kyle said. “He was asking about the baby.”

  This time, Darvelle was angry. “I told you what I was going to do about that, and I did it. I talked to Gregor Demarkian this morning. And no body of any baby has anything to do with me, and you know it. You are not going to get me worked up over this again.”

  “I’m not trying to get you worked up over anything.”

  “Yes, you are, Kyle, yes you are. And I’ve had enough. And if you don’t leave it the hell alone, I’ll ambush Demarkian at breakfast again tomorrow and give him chapter and verse of my suspicions about everything. Because if you think I don’t know what’s going on, you’re even stupider than I think you are.”

  The phone went dead silent. Kyle looked at the receiver in his hand and then replaced it in the cradle. It had started to feel a little odd to him, using landlines. He pushed the heavy black phone away from him. The women were still in the back, yammering. Almost every one of the patrol cars was over at the trailer park, creating more upset and confusion in the middle of a genuine crisis. If you wanted to rob a bank in Mattatuck, this was definitely the time to do it.

  He got off his seat and wandered back toward the hall with the restrooms, not because he needed to use one, but because he was just tired of sitting there doing nothing. He caught Sue Folger’s eye as he went, and she nodded to him. Then she went to take his place at the front desk. Kyle thought he could ask her anything he needed to know about what was going on and she would tell him, with additions.

  In the men’s room, Kyle walked into a stall and bolted the door. He put the lid of the toilet down and sat, stretching his legs out in front of him. There was no other man left in the station as far as he knew. He still felt as if he needed protection from something or somebody.

  He put his head back and closed his eyes. He had well and truly hated Chester Morton, back in the days when he had known the man. He had hated Chester Morton because Chester had been Darvelle’s main squeeze, and he was in love with Darvelle himself. He had hated Chester Morton because Chester was loud and obnoxious and a regular pain in the ass whenever they had classes together. But mostly, he had hated Chester Morton because Chester always seemed to be standing between him and wherever it was he wanted to go. It was as if he and Chester had lived parallel lives, always going in the same direction, but Chester always got there first.

  Of course, that wasn’t the direction Kyle was going in any more, but he didn’t know if that mattered.

  3

  Howard Androcoelho was willing to admit that he’d done the wrong thing in bringing Gregor Demarkian into this case. He was willing to bet that there were small town heads of police from one end of America to the other who had felt the same. The problem was that it was impossible to bring in any outside investigator and be sure of getting what you wanted. In this case, Howard had only wanted someone to come in and tell him that of course Chester Morton had committed suicide. There was no other way Chester Morton could have gotten up on that billboard. Nobody could have dragged him up there to throw him over the billboard either as a squirming murder victim or a dead weight. The whole idea was ridiculous. Now it was bad enough that it turned out somebody had thrown him up there, and as a dead weight. It was worse that things were happening that seemed to be totally insane, as if people were deliberately doing things to make the situation more complicated. That was the real problem with bringing in a “Great Detective.” A Great Detective was a focal point for cameras and the press. Where cameras and the press congregated, nutcases went to work to make themselves famous.

  Howard reminded himself that he did not know for sure that anybody was out there trying to make himself famous. Then he pulled his car into his marked space behind city hall and cut the engine. He was not ready to go back to central station yet. He was not ready to deal with police work. He was really not ready to talk to Gregor Demarkian. Demarkian was beginning to sound as if he were out of patience, and Howard thought that was more than a little outrageous.

  He go
t out of the car and stood for a while, catching his breath. He was so heavy now he had trouble breathing except when he was sitting down. It was hot, too, ridiculously hot for any time in September. Little pinpoint rivulets of sweat kept starting under his chin and making their way down his neck. Beyond the City Hall parking lot, the town of Mattatuck was mostly loud. Too many people were leaning on their horns. Too many people were revving their engines.

  Howard went around to the front of the building and in the front door. He could get in the back—he was an authorized person—but he didn’t feel like ringing the bell and waiting for somebody to come and get him. He didn’t feel like making this visit. He went across the foyer to the elevator, got in, and pressed the button for the second floor. City Hall was a pretty building, built back in the Thirties when everybody seemed to be trying to do something about Public Works. They cared about what they built in those days. They wanted to make the government majestic.

  On the second floor, Howard got out of the elevator and walked down the long corridor to the mayor’s office. He let himself into the anteroom and said hello to the receptionist there. She was not somebody he knew. Marianne seemed to go through receptionists the way Howard went through Philly cheese steak sandwiches. He gave the girl his name and waited until she’d announced him. He thanked her when she told him he could go in.

  He was, he thought, keeping his manners glued on, which was a good thing. There had to be something wrong with letting the people at large know that their police commissioner was panicking.

  Howard opened the door to Marianne’s office and found her sitting behind her desk, dressed in one of those perky pastel suits she thought was “professional” for a woman in an important political position. Howard was a little surprised that she was still mayor of Mattatuck. He’d expected her to run for the state legislature, and then maybe run for Congress, or for lieutenant governor, or something like that. The Marianne who had been his partner all those years ago had always had ambition.

  He closed the door, got the spare chair from against the wall, and sat down. Marianne kept the spare chair just for him. It had no arms, so there were no issues about whether or not he’d fit.