Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  Marianne was waiting for him to get settled. He got settled. It bought him a little time.

  “Well?” she said finally.

  Howard gave her a long look and then shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to tell what’s going on.”

  “Well, something must be going on,” Marianne said. “This sort of thing doesn’t happen naturally. Or maybe I mean habitually. For God’s sake, Howard. Somebody’s treating that body like a prize piece in ‘Hide-the-Treasure.’ There’s got to be a reason for it.”

  “I was thinking maybe the only reason for it might be Gregor Demarkian,” Howard said. “Maybe he attracts this sort of thing. People who want to see themselves on American Justice or City Confidential or one of those shows, so they do crazy stuff to make the case seem more interesting.”

  “You can’t tell me you think it’s not interesting,” Marianne said. “You can’t tell me you still think Chester Morton committed suicide.”

  “I still think that’s what makes the most sense,” Howard said. “And Demarkian doesn’t think that’s completely crazy, either. He said that one of the possible explanations would be that Chester Morton committed suicide someplace where he’d get somebody’s attention, and then that somebody decided to get out from under. The psychology of it works, too. It wouldn’t be crazy to think that people would be so traumatized by finding the body there that they wouldn’t think to look into it any farther.”

  “You don’t think it would be crazy to think that?”

  “No, it wouldn’t be,” Howard insisted. “I mean, Marianne, for God’s sake, it’s just what we all did. We didn’t ask Gregor Demarkian in here because we thought there was more to this case than Chester acting like the punk ass he was. We called him in because Charlene wouldn’t shut up. And all we expected him to do was come on to the scene, declare the thing an obvious suicide, and get us out from under.”

  “But we’re not out from under.”

  “No, Marianne. I know that.”

  “And there are things,” Marianne said. “There’s that stupid tattoo, for one thing. And then the body going missing from Feldman’s and turning up in that goddamned trailer. Didn’t your people search the trailer last night?”

  “We sent somebody out to look, yeah,” Howard said. “There wasn’t anything there. And somebody would have seen something, anyway. You know what that place is like. It’s more alive in the middle of the night than it is in the morning. Nobody could just waltz up there and drag a body into a trailer without being seen. Somebody would have noticed something.”

  “But nobody did notice anything.”

  “Not that they’re telling us,” Howard said. “But you know how that is. We’ll keep asking. There may be at least one person in that place that doesn’t hate cops on general principles. Or maybe it was one of them that did it. Maybe it was somebody from the trailer park that moved the body.”

  “And you don’t think he’d be noticed, dragging the body into that trailer?”

  “He’d be noticed, but nobody would tell us about it,” Howard said. “They don’t like to talk to us. You know that.”

  “I know that they don’t think twice about running their mouths about their neighbors if they think it’s going to cause trouble,” Marianne said. “And you know that, too. They clam up about themselves, but they’re more than happy to get the guy next door landed in jail. If they’d seen one of their own dragging a body into that trailer, you’d have heard about it.”

  “I didn’t hear about it.”

  “I know.”

  “And the body was definitely in the trailer,” Howard said. “I just saw it, sitting up in an armchair stark naked and going a little to seed after all this time. Gregor Demarkian thinks I put it there.”

  “What?”

  “Gregor Demarkian thinks I put it there,” Howard repeated. “He won’t come out and say it in so many words, but that’s what he thinks. He thinks I’m trying to avoid having the state do an autopsy.”

  “Well,” Marianne said.

  “Yeah, well,” Howard said. “But Christ Almighty, Marianne, if that’s what I wanted I could get it done without dragging the body all over hell and gone. Whoever’s doing that has got to be some kind of idiot. Maybe he’s an alien and he has a teleportation device. At least that would explain how somebody got that body into that trailer without anybody noticing anything. I think I’m going to have a migraine.”

  “Well,” Marianne said again.

  Howard looked away from her. There were two windows in the far wall. They looked out on West Main Street.

  “Well,” Marianne said again.

  “Don’t tell me,” Howard said. “It was a bad idea to bring Gregor Demarkian into this case. I’ve already come to that conclusion. But damn it, Marianne. There’s absolutely no reason why things should be turning out like this.”

  FIVE

  1

  Gregor Demarkian did not spend all night standing watch by the body of Chester Morton—although he thought about it, and he probably would have done it, if he hadn’t been able to hear Bennis’s voice in his head telling him what an idiot he was. Instead, he went back to his hotel room, set up his laptop, and started running the only kind of searches he knew how to run that might be some help in finding a missing person.

  It was Tony Bolero he sent to keep watch over the body of Chester Morton, and he was shocked nearly speechless when he got no interference from Howard Androcoelho.

  “They must be embarrassed,” he told Tony. “If I was in Howard Androcoelho’s shoes, I’d have screamed bloody murder if anybody had suggested anything like that. Never mind. Go. Sit. I’ll get a cab over there in the morning, and then I’m meeting Ferris Cole. I can’t imagine that a new autopsy is going to give us any more information than we already have, but by now I want it done just because somebody doesn’t.”

  Tony had made noncommittal grunting noises and gone off, and Gregor had sat down to his computer again. Then he had taken out his cell phone and called Bennis. Sometimes, these days, he felt as if he’d entered an old-fashioned science fiction movie.

  “There’s no change,” Bennis said, when he was finally able to make her sit down and talk. “Unless you count a request as change.”

  “What request?”

  “Well, we finally got his dates straightened out,” Bennis said. “He is about to be a hundred, but not the day after tomorrow, the way we originally thought. It’s a week from tomorrow. He wanted to know if you’d be finished with the case by a week from tomorrow.”

  “If I’m not, I’ll finish it myself by shooting half the people I’ve met here,” Gregor said. “He wants me to be there on his birthday?”

  “He wants a cake. Lida and Angela are arguing about who gets to bake it. I figure that’s preliminary to whoever wins arguing with Hannah and Sheila about who gets to bake it. But you get the picture.”

  “He wants a birthday party.”

  “A hundredth birthday party, yes.”

  “Even if he’s still in the hospital?”

  “The impression I got was especially if he’s still in the hospital. But that’s been it. He wants a birthday party. But he actually seems fairly well, Gregor, considering. I mean, he’s very old, and he’s very frail, but he’s—himself. If you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean, yes. All right. I’ll make a point of being back for his birthday, if not earlier. Whether I’ve finished the case or not.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “That’s not like you,” Bennis said. “You like to finish things.”

  “I’m getting old,” Gregor said. “I’m running out of patience. And besides. There’s nothing to say that I can’t come down there for the birthday and then come back up, if I have to. I like Tony Bolero. He does what I tell him to. He’s a good listener. And you’re paying for him.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m going to go back to playing with this computer. I’ll talk t
o you later.”

  Gregor put the phone down next to the laptop and thought that this was one of the very odd things about his second marriage. In his first, he and Elizabeth never said good-bye to each other without saying, “I love you.” He and Bennis never said, “I love you,” or barely ever. And yet, Gregor was as sure that Bennis loved him as he had been that Elizabeth had. And he was sure that he loved Bennis as much as he had Elizabeth. Maybe that was age, too, along with the lack of patience. He’d only been half kidding when he’d told Bennis he was getting old.

  He applied himself to the laptop. First, he did a Google search for anything and everything having to do with Chester Ray Morton. This time he got a “sponsored link” with a picture from some magazine somewhere. Apparently, the case was beginning to attract some media attention. Gregor wondered if they’d made the “Oddball” segment on Keith Olbermann’s show yet. He checked out the magazine and found absolutely nothing he didn’t know already.

  He tried again, this time searching for “Chester Morton WY,” as if Chester were a town in the mountains. He got a small flurry of hits, most of them the same hits he’d had before, but targetted to the parts of them that mentioned that Chester had always loved Wyoming. He tried the Wyoming Citizen’s Crime Watch, and got nothing. He tried the New York Citizen’s Crime Watch and got a long lead story about a woman who had robbed a bank wearing a burka. Except that nobody was sure it really was a woman. The burka covered too much.

  Gregor got up and moved away from his laptop. He went to stand at the windows that looked out onto the parking lot. He pulled the curtains back and stared at the darkening evening, the lights going on in the town of Mattatuck, the cars in their parking spaces. At the edge of the parking lot, there were grass and trees and what looked like a dirt access road—except that it might not have been dirt. It might just have been dusty from lack of use.

  If you eliminate the impossible, Sherlock Holmes used to say, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Gregor had no idea if he was quoting that correctly. But he got the general idea, and the general idea was right. The problem was that everything in this case was improbable, and nothing was really impossible. What felt impossible were the really massive improbabilities—that body wandering all over creation like it was still ambulatory; the complete lack of anything like professional police work in a town that was large enough to qualify as a small city; the entire story of Chester Morton, which was half like a fairy tale and half like the kind of pulp novel that had been popular in the Forties.

  One day, twelve years ago, Chester Morton had decided to leave. One day, a couple of weeks ago, Chester Morton had decided to come back and had brought with him a baby’s skeleton in a yellow backpack. There was no rhyme or reason to it. None. Maybe, twelve years ago, he’d left town because he’d killed the baby. Maybe that was the baby Darvelle had said he’d wanted to buy. But, what baby? There was nothing in any of the material Howard Androcoelho had sent him to indicate that there was a baby that had gone missing at the same time Chester Morton had. There was nothing to indicate that a woman had gone missing around the same time, either.

  Gregor walked back across the room to the door, then back again to the window. He leaned his forehead against the glass. He counted to ten. Nothing shook itself loose.

  He opened his eyes again, and looked out.

  And that was when he saw it.

  Out on the access road, half hidden by the trees and the grass and the puddled darkness beyond the security lights, a car had come to a stop. The light from the headlights hung in the air for a while and then went out. The interior light went on and stayed on for longer than it had any right to. Then that light went out and another light went on in the interior, as if somebody were using a flashlight.

  It didn’t look right at all, and it didn’t feel right.

  And Gregor Demarkian didn’t trust anything that happened in Mattatuck to be about anything but the Chester Morton case.

  2

  Gregor Demarkian didn’t think for a moment about what he was doing until he got past the parking lot and into the grass. Then it occurred to him that he was behaving like an idiot. It had been years since he’d done any kind of field work, and even that had required him to spend time sitting in a car, not thrashing through the underbrush. He wasn’t dressed for this. The slick soles of his wing-tip shoes kept threatening to slide out from underneath him. The landscape around him was too dark. The security lights in the parking lot were aimed inward, toward the hotel. The access road in front of him had no lights at all.

  Whoever was in the car still had the flashlight going, though, and Gregor thought that was interesting. Batteries didn’t have all that long to run before they conked out on you, and whoever was using these was behaving as if that didn’t matter. Gregor tried to see what the person in the car was doing. The impression he got was that the person was … reading a book. But that made no sense.

  After the tall grass, there was a stretch of marshy stuff and brush, and then some small trees. Gregor made himself move slowly. He didn’t want to be heard, but mostly he didn’t want to fall. The closer he got, the more obvious it was that the person in the car was a woman, and that the woman was at least middle-aged, if not edging toward elderly. It wasn’t anybody he recognized. It certainly wasn’t Charlene Morton. Whatever could she be doing here sitting alone on an access road with her engine off in the middle of the night?

  Suddenly, the woman’s head went up. She looked around, from one of the car’s windows to the next. Gregor stood very still, he wasn’t sure why. He must not have stood still enough. The woman put a stiff plastic card into the book she was reading and then put the book down on the dashboard. Then she leaned over and got something out of the glove compartment.

  What happened next happened so fast that Gregor was never able to remember it properly, never mind explain it to anybody else. One moment, he was standing still next to a weak tree, thinking he was entirely invisible. The next, the door of the car popped open, the woman inside jumped out, and there was the clear backfire of a bullet going off in the air. Less than a second later, the bullet hit the ground near his feet, and he jumped.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “Who are you?” the woman said. “Come out of there. Come out where I can see you.”

  Gregor thought that if he really had been a mugger, or a crazed homicidal maniac combing the bushes for his next serial kill, this woman would never have made it off this access road alive. She was holding the gun as if it were a Popsicle stick.

  “Come out of there,” she said again. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  Gregor swore under his breath, for real this time. “For God’s sake, stop shooting that thing,” he said, moving closer to her through what was still very tall grass. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Who are you?” the woman demanded again.

  By now, Gregor was out on the access road proper. The woman had to be able to see that he was nearly as old as she was, and probably in far less good physical shape. She was squinting at him through the darkness.

  “My name is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said, “and—”

  “Oh,” the woman said, letting the gun drop to her side. “Oh, my God. You are Gregor Demarkian. I’m so sorry. I could have hurt you. I didn’t mean to. It’s just that I have to be so careful, I mean out here, you know, you can never tell who’s going to come along, that’s why I got this thing, but I’ve never actually used it before, so—”

  “I could tell you’d never actually used it before.”

  “Oh, well. Actually. I did use it once. I took it to a firing range. You know. To see how it was. I fired it there.”

  “Did you hit anything?”

  “I think I hit the floor. I hurt my wrist.”

  “Of course you did,” Gregor said. He got closer to the car and looked inside. Even without any lights at all, it was obvious that the car was loaded down with stuff. Clothes were piled
high in the backseat. Books were everywhere. “My God,” Gregor said. “You’re living in this car.”

  The woman was quiet for a long time. “Only temporarily,” she said finally. “Only until the cold weather hits. I’ve got almost enough money to rent a place for the entire winter. I only need a couple of more weeks.”

  “A couple of more weeks,” Gregor said. “You’ve got a job?”

  “Of course I’ve got a job,” the woman said. “I’ve got two of them. If I’ve got any luck, I’ll have three for the fall term. I teach English.”

  “At a high school?”

  “At Mattatuck–Harvey Community College,” the woman said. “Also at Pelham University. That’s a private place, down the road. It doesn’t pay nearly so well.”

  “You’re a college teacher and you can’t afford to rent an apartment?”

  “I’m an adjunct,” the woman said. “That means I’m only part time. Except with teaching it isn’t like part time is most places. They don’t divide your hours by the hours for full time and give you that percentage of a full-time salaray. I get paid forty-one hundred dollars to teach each course at Mattatuck–Harvey, and nineteen hundred to teach each course at Pelham—”

  “That’s what? A week? A month?”

  “That’s the course,” the woman said. “The entire course.”

  “This Pelham University place pays you less than two thousand dollars to teach an entire course?” Gregor said. “Over, what is that, three months?”

  “Fourteen weeks,” the woman said. “Three classes a week of an hour each, plus office hours every week, plus whatever it takes to do prep and correcting. At Mattatuck–Harvey, it’s sixteen weeks. It used to be all right, though, because I used to be able to teach three courses at Mattatuck–Harvey every term, and with the two at Pelham I’d just about make it. But there’s a union at Mattatuck–Harvey, and they got a rule passed that nobody can teach more than two classes a term in the entire community college system, so I can’t even drive out to Binghamton and teach there. So I’m making some accommodations.”