by Jane Haddam
“No,” Gregor agreed, looking around again. “That isn’t.”
3
Nderi Kika dropped Gregor at The Feldman Funeral Home on East Main Street, instead of around the back in the parking lot. Gregor went in the front door, into a foyer that was, today, entirely empty, as if Jason Feldman had deliberately refused to schedule any more memorial services as long as Chester Morton’s body was in his basement. Jason Feldman was both absolutely furious and just exasperated, alternately. He kept turning on and off like a defective light bulb.
“There are dozens of people in my basement,” he told Gregor when he was ushering him to the stairs. “Dozens. And not the kind of people we want here. You people just don’t seem to understand. A funeral home is in a very delicate position. The families who come to us are bereaved. They’ve lost the people they love. They don’t want to be confronted with policemen, and they most certainly don’t want to be confronted with coroners. Not even if you call them medical examiners. Coroners. Autopsy. The departed cut up like meat in a butcher shop. It isn’t acceptable.”
Gregor wanted to say that Jason Feldman had volunteered his services as Mattatuck’s morgue, but then it occurred to him that it might not be true. Feldman could have been dragooned into this business by a city council with the ability to influence a zoning board. All city councils had influence with their zoning boards.
Gregor allowed himself to be shown downstairs, but he was relieved that Jason Feldman disappeared immediately afterward.
“Mr. Demarkian,” Tony Bolero said. He looked exhausted. “It’s still here. Safe and sound.”
“And I’m Ferris Cole,” a tall, thin, aggressively bald man said, coming out of the shadows to hold out his hand. “I’m a little early, I know, but I thought that, under the circumstances, it might be a good idea.”
“Thank you,” Gregor said. “It was a good idea. I take it there were no disturbances at all last night?”
“Not a thing,” Tony Bolero said. “I’d say it was as quiet as the grave, but you’d probably hit me.”
“What about Howard Androcoelho?” Gregor said. “Isn’t he supposed to be here.”
“He called,” Tony said. “He’s running late. He’ll be here about half past nine. He didn’t sound like he was running late. He didn’t sound like he was rushed, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Gregor said.
Ferris Cole laughed. “Howard never sounds rushed. And I mean not ever. It doesn’t matter what kind of an emergency there is. But you have to wonder how long they’re going to be able to go on with this. It’s not 1950 any more. It’s not even 1980. Some nasty things happen in Mattatuck these days.”
“They got a slum,” Tony Bolero put in helpfully. “Jason Feldman told me.”
Ferris Cole brushed this off. “Every town has a slum,” he said. “Even the smallest one. There’s always someplace where the houses are small, or they’re trailers, and the people who live there don’t bother to pick up their own garbage, and they’re always out of work, and there are too many mind-altering substances. Alcohol, mostly, around here.”
“There was a meth lab a couple of years ago,” Tony said. “It blew up.”
“Yes, well,” Ferris Cole said. “That’s what happens when people who couldn’t pass high school chemistry try to do high school chemistry. I’ve given the body a quick look over, if you’re interested. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get you what you want.”
The body was still in the cold locker. Gregor went to it and pulled it out. Chester Morton looked very much as he had looked when Gregor first saw him, much as he had looked in the big stack of photographs Howard Androcoelho had sent him, except that now he seemed a little worse for wear. There wasn’t anything definite Gregor could put a finger on, but there it was. The body looked older—older as a body.
Gregor stepped back. “Well,” he said.
“We’ll take him off your hands and give him a good thorough autopsy,” Ferris Cole said, “but if you ask me, we’re going to end up finding that suicide is just as likely as murder, and maybe more likely. And yes, I know, he didn’t hang himself off that billboard. But my guess is that he was dead when somebody else hung him. A toxicology screen might be interesting. If he was drugged before he was hanged, that might prove murder for you. It’s going to be touch and go, though.”
“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “What about the tattoo?”
“You mean the MOM thing? I think after death is a good guess, and definitely not much before. That’s a hairy chest and the area of the tattoo is absolutely clean. Someone either shaved him and tattooed him after he died, or he got that within a few hours of dying. Weird thing to find there, don’t you think? It’s like one of those ones the guys do to themselves and each other in prison. You know, no proper equipment. Ink and safety pins or sewing needles or whatever they can get their hands on.”
“If somebody did tattoo him after he died, maybe the somebody wasn’t a professional,” Gregor said. “Or even if he was, maybe he wasn’t within reach of his equipment.”
“True enough,” Ferris Cole said. “Do you really think you have a murder here? I don’t know. Usually I’m crazy about getting Howard to ask for help. You have no idea what kind of trouble he’s caused for himself over the years, what kind of trouble they’ve both caused for themselves—”
“Both?”
“Howard and Marianne Glew. The mayor. Haven’t you met the mayor, yet? She almost certainly had to okay your coming here. Nobody spends money in Mattatuck without Marianne having her say about it. Which is largely why nobody spends money in Mattatuck. I can complain about Howard, but it’s Marianne who’s running the show. It always was. Even back when they were partners.”
“Partners?”
“Howard Androcoelho and Marianne Glew,” Ferris Cole said. “Didn’t you know that? They both used to be on the police force. Well, Howard still is, I suppose. But they were partners, detectives and partners. They were the ones who originally investigated—”
“Chester Morton’s disappearance,” Gregor said. “I did know it was Howard Androcoelho who did that investigation.”
“Well, but it was Marianne who really did the investigation,” Ferris Cole said. “She’s light years smarter than he is. Which doesn’t take much, I’ll admit, but she is. They caught a couple of big cases in their time, and it was always Marianne who made it work. If it hadn’t been for Marianne on the Warren case, Howard would have botched the thing from start to finish.”
“The Warren case?”
“Biggest thing to happen in Mattatuck before Chester Morton went missing and Charlene Morton went ballistic. Still the biggest thing to happen in Mattatuck, if you ask me. Local pharmacist by the name of Dade Warren. He had a wife and three kids. He drugged them all with Thorazine, then shot them all, and propped them up against the couch in the living room. Then he wrote the suicide note to end all suicide notes and shot himself in the head. It was an absolute, utter, and bloody mess. You really have no idea.”
“It sounds like it,” Gregor said.
“Anyway,” Ferris Cole said, “it was almost something of a police scandal. Howard was the first one into the house, and he got spooked. He ended up discharging his firearm all over the place when there were nothing but dead bodies in the room. Marianne had to haul his ass out of that one. She had to haul his ass out of a lot of things over the years.”
“Interesting,” Gregor said.
Ferris Cole seemed to shake himself out of a reverie. “Well,” he said, “let me get my people in here and we’ll take this guy out and give him a going over. Like I said, I don’t know if it’s going to do you any good, but at least you’ll have tried. Howard and Marianne are just going to have to accept the fact that Mattutuck needs a thoroughly professional morgue these days. They can’t go on pretending it’s thirty years ago forever.”
Ferris Cole ran up the basement steps, meaning to call for help in moving the body.
He was stopped halfway up by a frantic Jason Feldman rushing down. Of course, Jason Feldman was always frantic, but this time he was really beside himself.
“Mr. Demarkian, Mr. Demarkian,” he kept saying sounding as if he’d empty his lungs of breath minutes ago. “Mr. Demarkian, it’s Howard Androcoelho on the phone and he says you have to come. You have to come right away because there are two bodies, two of them, and there’s blood everywhere—”
PART III
Hypocrisy and dissimulation are what keeps social systems strong; it is intellectual honesty that destroys them.
—Theodore Dalrymple
ONE
1
The location of the emergency was not possible to find on Tony Bolero’s GPS. “At the fork near the dam” was not something the GPS understood, and even “the dam” proved difficult to find.
“There have to be six dams within a twenty-five-mile radius of this place,” Tony said. “There are two in the Mattatuck town limits. Can that be right? I thought dams were big things and you had one for an entire region. Unless, you know, we’re talking about beaver dams.”
Gregor wouldn’t have put it past Mattatuck to have special designations for its beaver dams, but he didn’t say so. He allowed a patrol car to lead the way. The officer in the patrol car obviously wanted Gregor to come along with him, but Gregor wasn’t having any of that. Even dead tired, Tony Bolero meant independence, and Gregor needed as much independence as he could get. It was even one of those times when he wished he could drive himself.
On their way out of town, Gregor put in another call to Rhonda Alvarez at the FBI, but still got nothing but her voice mail. This annoyed him only slightly. She was, after all, a working agent with a caseload. He’d had those himself once. Still, there were things he wanted to know. They were things he thought he did know, but he wanted to be sure.
The route to the dam turned out to be familiar. It went past the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the McDonald’s, the Burger King, and the nearly empty shopping center. It went past the trailer park and the low brick building with the Department of Social Services in it. Gregor found himself wondering about that name. Social Services. Everybody used it. Everybody knew what it meant. It was still very odd. What was “social” about welfare?
On the other side of the little cluster of depressed-looking buildings—even the fast-food places looked depressed, Gregor had no idea why—there was semi-open country, and what looked like a river. Gregor was sure it had been there before. He just hadn’t paid much attention to it. Side roads went off to their right, but not, obviously, to their left, where the river was. They passed a big roadhouse place with a deep parking lot fronting the street and bright yellow awnings all across its single-story storefront façade. There was a sign close to the road, hand lettered in bright red marker against a white background. It read: BIKERS WELCOME.
“Has that always been there?” Gregor asked.
“It was there the last time we came through here,” Tony said. “You don’t pay attention much, do you?”
Gregor wanted to say he didn’t pay much attention in the dark, or couldn’t see in it, or something, but he let it go. This was not the time to start worrying about getting old. The dam was not too far ahead of them. In the sunlight and good weather, it was easy enough to see. The police cars were lined up along a little road that went off to the right just past it.
Gregor leaned forward. There were a lot of police cars. There was an EMT vehicle. There was a fire engine. Why was there a fire engine?
Tony Bolero slowed down and began to glide into the choked side road. He was stopped almost immediately by a uniformed patrol officer.
“Oh,” the officer said, looking into the front seat. “It’s Mr. Demarkian. Come right in and try to park out of the way so that we’ve got a clear shot at getting some of these vehicles out. Commissioner Androcoelho wants to see you right away.”
Tony pulled off to the side and parked. Gregor got out of the front passenger seat and looked around. The center of activity was across the road and in the direction of the water, just on the other side of the dam from town. Gregor saw a lot of uniforms milling around, and the top of what looked like a big black pickup truck.
He left Tony with the car and walked across the road, looking around as he went. A hundred feet or so further down the road there was a derelict building, its paint almost entirely sheered off by wind and weather, its windows broken. He wondered what had been there once, and why it wasn’t there anymore.
Gregor got to the other side of the road. The big black pickup truck was in a deep ditch, sitting sideways precariously on the grass. There were so many uniformed officers around it, it was impossible to see what was going on.
Gregor went down the embankment. Howard Androcoelho was there, pacing back and forth on the other side of the vehicle, near the water. He was talking on a cell phone.
Gregor caught his eye. Howard Androcoelho said something else and then snapped the cell phone closed.
“Mr. Demarkian, Mr. Demarkian. I’m glad you got here.”
“What happened?”
Howard Androcoelho waved toward the pickup truck. “Both dead,” he said, “and really dead. Shot through three or four times apiece.”
Gregor looked back at the truck. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see that there were people in it, people sitting at odd angles, one slumped against a side door, the other collapsed forward onto the dashboard.
He left Howard Androcoelho and moved toward the truck. The closer he got, the more obvious it was that the two people inside it were dead. Officers moved out of the way for him. Gregor got right up next to the windshield and looked inside.
“It’s awful,” Howard Androcoelho said, right at his elbow, causing Gregor to nearly jump out of his skin. “It’s awful. Nothing like this ever happens in Mattatuck. It’s not a Mattatuck kind of thing.”
Gregor thought about the story about the pharmacist who had killed his wife and children and then himself. Then he looked back through the windshield again. There was a man and a woman. He was sure he’d never seen the man before. The woman looked vaguely familiar.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“Althy Michaelman and the current boyfriend,” Howard said. “Mike something. We’ll look it up. Althy always has boyfriends. She always did. We went to high school together. Her mother had ambitions, before she got pregnant. That’s why Althy was Althy. Althea.”
Gregor stared at her a little longer. She didn’t look like an Althea. She didn’t look like a woman who always “had boyfriends.” “She looks familiar,” he said. “Have I met her?”
“I think so, once or twice,” Howard said. “She has the trailer next to the Morton trailer out at the trailer park. She was there the first day we went out to look it over.”
“Was she,” Gregor said. “What about the man? Did he live there, too?”
“Oh, yeah,” Howard said. “He has, now, two or three years. He wasn’t going anywhere unless Althy threw him out. I don’t think he’s kept a job six weeks running in the last ten years. He likes his beer. He shoplifts a little. He used to have some scam going about disability, but Social Services got wise to him.”
“And they didn’t have him arrested?”
“You have to prove something to have somebody arrested,” Howard said. “Then you’ve got to go through all the rigamarole with paperwork and hearings. Easier just to declare him fit to work. That just takes a doctor. They got a doctor. Didn’t hurt that nobody but Althy could stand him.”
“Huh,” Gregor said.
He backed up a little and went around to the front of the truck. There was a blank space where the license plate was supposed to go. He went around to the back and found the same thing. Then he came back to Howard Androcoelho.
“No plates,” he said. “Did the truck belong to them? To Althy Michaelman and whatever his name was?”
“A nice truck like that?” Howard said. “Hell, no. Althy and Mike wo
uld never put away enough money to buy a truck like that. Or any truck at all. I don’t think Althy’s ever had a car of her own since I’ve known her. Nah, they’d get a little money in hand and they’d go drink with it. Beer, usually, because it was cheap. They had more money on them than that last night, though. The hospital guys say they smell like serious liquor, Scotch or whiskey or something like that. That probably means they found Haydee’s stash.”
“Who’s Haydee?”
“Althy’s daughter. The only one who lived, that is. Althy got pregnant a lot, but she got stillbirths a lot. Well, that was years ago. It’s what happens when you drink like a fish when you’re pregnant. But Haydee is something else. Goes to school. Works her butt off at two jobs. Saves her money. Problem is, Mike is pretty good at figuring out where she’s stashing it. He got away with over twelve hundred dollars about a year and a half ago. Haydee came in to the police station to accuse him of stealing it, but the problem is, if it’s not in a bank account or anything, there’s no way to prove you ever had it. And by the time Haydee found out the money was gone, the two of them had pissed it all away. Literally. So there was nothing we could do.”
“Do you think that’s what happened here? That the two of them took this Haydee’s money and she murdered them for it?”
“Nah,” Howard said. “Haydee isn’t going to murder anybody. Though I don’t think I’d blame her if she tried. Is that what you think happened, that Haydee did it? I was going for they ran into one of those bikers down the road and they were flashing cash, and, you know.”
“And the biker had a big black pickup truck?”
“Lots of bikers have other vehicles,” Howard Androcoelho said.
“It’s an expensive truck,” Gregor said, “and nearly new. You think the biker just shot them in it and left them there? He took the plates and wrote off the vehicle?”
“I don’t know,” Howard Androcoelho said.
“Well, I do,” Gregor said. “Run the serial number through the national databases. You’ll come up with a Jersey registration. I’d like to know the name listed on it. What about the gun? Did you find that?”
