Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  “Do you have any money on you at all?”

  “I have money on me and I have money in the bank,” Penny said. “You don’t understand. This isn’t what you think it is.”

  “I know what it is,” George said. “We’ll talk about what it’s going to be when we get there. Go check in. I’m ready to kill you.”

  The phone went dead again. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the news feed had come around.

  The two dead bodies discovered at Stephenson Dam this morning have been identified as belonging to Althea Marie Michaelman, 52, and Michael Robert Katowski, 48.

  She had a girl in her class named Michaelman. Haydee Michaelman. Maybe this was her mother?

  Penny shook her head. If anything, at that age, it would be Haydee’s grandmother. Haydee had written about her mother, and her mother had gotten pregnant and had to drop out of school at sixteen.

  3

  Kenny Morton had been half-waiting for the call all morning—half-waiting and half-worrying about Haydee. The worrying would not leave him. Haydee was something beyond distraught. She cried for hours after they were done with the police. Then she’d let him drive her out to The Elms on Straits Turnpike, ordered a hamburger, and cried there. The Elms sounded fancy, but it wasn’t. It was an ordinary old-fashioned offers-everything-American-kind-of restaurant with large portions and the kind of thing your mother made at home. You could get meatloaf there, and Brussels sprouts.

  “It’s kinda funny to think of it,” Kenny said, by way of making neutral conversation. “Restaurants all used to be like this. You know, not Italian or Chinese or Mexican, just American. Ordinary stuff.”

  “I guess,” Haydee said.

  Haydee’s hamburger was the size of a small bowling ball. The fries were piled up like a pick-em-up sticks mountain. Kenny was willing to bet that nobody at The Elms had thought of replacing the good beef fat deep-fry for something more nutritional.

  “I’m sorry about this,” Haydee said. “I really am sorry about this.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” Kenny said. “Your mother died. You’re upset. You’re supposed to be upset.”

  “But that’s the thing,” Haydee said. “I’m not upset that way. I mean, I am, a little, but not mostly. I think a lot of it is guilt.”

  “Guilt? About what? She was shot. They were. You didn’t go out and shoot them.”

  “No, no, of course I didn’t. But I’m—I don’t know. I never liked Mike at all. He could have disappeared any time and I wouldn’t have cared. I’d have been glad. I’m glad now. I’m never going to have to see his stupid face again and that’s good.”

  “That’s nothing to feel guilty about,” Kenny said. “That’s understandable.”

  “I know it is. But I don’t feel much differently about her. My mother. She was my mother. And I never liked her. I haven’t liked her in years. Most of the kids I knew who went into foster care when I did, you know, on and off over the years, most of them hated foster care, they hated the social workers, they ran away, they did anything they could to get back to their families. But I knew what she was. Even when I was six that first time. I could see it. I knew what she was and I knew it was her fault.”

  “What?”

  “I knew it was her fault,” Haydee insisted. “I knew that it wasn’t bad luck or men who were irresponsible or any of the rest of it. I mean, she did have all that, that was true, but I knew she didn’t have to just sit down and let it drown her. I knew. I hated the social workers, too, but it was mostly because they had sort of the same attitude. Not that stuff just happened to people and there was nothing they could do. Not that exactly. More like, if you were the kind of person that stuff happened to you, then you were kind of sick, and you had to have treatment. Therapy. I didn’t mind foster care, but I hated therapy. I think I lied my way through every therapy session they made me sit through.”

  “If somebody had made me sit through a therapy session, I’d probably kick them,” Kenny said.

  Haydee smiled a little and actually drank some Coke. “It’s just guilt,” she said. “All I wanted was to get the hell out of there and never see her again. Never see any of them again. Any of those people. I wanted to get out and go live with people who get their asses in gear and get things done in their lives. And now here I am.”

  Kenny’s cell phone went off. He got it out of his pocket and saw his mother’s picture in the screen. He knew it was his mother before he looked, though. He had given her a ring tone. He didn’t know what the music was, but it sounded like explosions going off between the notes.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m going to go out to the parking lot for a minute.”

  “It’s important?” Haydee said. “I can go to the ladies room if you need privacy.”

  “I’ll go to the parking lot,” Kenny said. “Sit still and eat lunch.”

  He wanted to say she hadn’t really eaten any lunch yet. He slid out of the booth and picked up. He said, “Hello,” as he was walking to the restaurant’s front door. When his mother spoke, she was loud. Kenny thought she could be heard all the way into the kitchen.

  “Where are you?” she asked him. “What the hell are you doing? Do you know what’s going on around here?”

  Kenny was out in the parking lot. It was a big parking lot in the front of the restaurant. He could look right down on the street. The street was empty. This was not the middle of town.

  “I’m having lunch,” he said finally.

  “You’re having lunch,” his mother said. “Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that just fine! I’m being persecuted, and you’re having lunch.”

  “You’re being persecuted about what?” Kenny said. “Who’s persecuting you?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t know, would you? You wouldn’t have any idea. You’re having lunch.”

  “For God’s sake, Ma. I went to class. I—ran some errands. Then I stopped to have lunch. Can you tell me what’s wrong with any of that? School was your idea, not mine. I’m just doing what you told me to do.”

  “I want you back here right away. I want a united family. I want to make sure those idiots understand what they’re dealing with.”

  “A united family about what? What the hell is going on?”

  “He was here this morning,” his mother said. “Gregor Demarkian. And Howard Androcoelho, of course, but Howard doesn’t count. He never counted. I don’t care what kind of fancy title he’s giving himself these days.”

  “Okay. Mr. Demarkian and Mr. Androcoelho were over there this morning. About what? Do they know more about what happened to Chester?”

  “They were here to tell me I’m a suspect in that murder case. The two people out by the dam. Don’t tell me you’ve been in class and at lunch so long you don’t know two people were killed out by the dam.”

  “Everybody knows two people were killed out by the dam,” Kenny said. “What does that have to do with you?”

  “They were in a black pickup truck,” his mother said. “They’ve decided it must be Chester’s pickup truck. I haven’t had it for twelve years. I sold it ages ago. It doesn’t matter. It’s the way that Demarkian’s mind works. He’s decided it’s Chester’s truck and I killed those two people, and he isn’t going to be satisfied until he puts me right in jail.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Kenny said. “I really don’t. He wouldn’t have the kind of reputation he has if he behaved like that.”

  “What do you know about reputations?” his mother said. “What do you know about anything? You’re a traitor, just like Chester was, and you know it. You try to hide it better, but I know what you are. I’ve always known what you are. If you stood on the ground next to the tree, you’d turn the flowers red.”

  “What?”

  “Judas,” she said. “Except you’re worse than Judas. You and Chester both. At least Judas got his money from Christ’s enemies. You want to get it from Christ.”

  “Did you just compare yourself to Christ?” K
enny said. “I can’t believe that. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Judas,” his mother said again.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can get there,” Kenny said.

  Then he hung up the phone, quickly. He had not lied. He would get back as soon as he could get there. The trick was in defining “as soon as he could get.”

  He flicked through the phone menu and found the REJECT list. He pushed a few more buttons and put his mother’s number on it. Then he added the landline number at home, the numbers of his brother and his sister, and all three of the lines at the business. Then he put the phone back in his pocket.

  When he got back to the table, Haydee was carefully dipping the world’s longest French fry into ketcup.

  Kenny slid into the booth and said, “Do you know what a flowering Judas it?”

  “A flowering Judas? Do you mean Judas like in the Bible?”

  “Yeah, sort of,” Kenny said. “A flowering Judas is a plant. A tree, kind of. It doesn’t grow up here except in a greenhouse. Anyway, it’s got sort of red-purple flowers. The legend is that it used to have white flowers. Then Judas took the thirty pieces of silver and then he felt guilty, and he threw the silver on the ground and hanged himself. From this tree. And when he did that, hanged himself from the tree, I mean, the flowers turned from white to red. It’s a legend. We got a little piece of paper with the legend on it when we got the tree.”

  “You’ve got one of these trees?” Haydee asked.

  “My mother does,” Kenny said. “In the greenhouse.”

  THREE

  1

  Going back across town to central station next to Tony Bolero in his own car, Gregor Demarkian tried to count the cases he’d been on that had left him in a situation like this. There had been a lot of them, lately. That wasn’t a good sign. There were too many of these small and medium-sized towns out there that only thought about law enforcement when there was an emergency—or maybe not too many. Maybe that was a very good sign, both because there were so many places that had so few emergencies and because so many towns used their common sense about individual drug use. Or something.

  Gregor’s head hurt, and he thought it was going to get worse as the day went on. It wasn’t the lack of crime in American small towns that he minded. He never minded a lack of crime. It was the attitude that by pretending that nothing ever changed, you could prevent crime from happening, or make it disappear when it did. It was the making it disappear that was the problem, because there could always be more behind it if that was what you were trying to do. The question here was just how much was behind this.

  He got Ferris Cole on the phone as soon as he was on the road. Ferris Cole was also on the road, but Gregor didn’t care. He explained the two bodies by the dam. Ferris Cole had heard of the dam.

  “I’ve got them sitting out there waiting for you,” Gregor said. “I’ve told them all to stay put, and they’ll do it. I’ve done enough yelling so that Howard Androcoelho isn’t going to get in my way for a while. Do you think you could see your way to getting out there and picking them up, or sending somebody out there to pick them up?”

  “Of course I can,” Ferris Cole said. “That’s what we do. We wish the locals would call us in right at the start more often. But I don’t understand. This is a different case?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “All right. It doesn’t sound the same as the other one. Shootings, this time.”

  “What other one?”

  “The murder of Chester Morton,” Ferris Cole said.

  “That’s not the other one.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a long story, and I don’t have time to go into it now. There is another murder connected to these murders, and that murder is part of the Chester Morton case, but the murder in question is not the murder of Chester Morton. Unless I’m very badly mistaken about the people in this thing, and I don’t think I am.”

  “But why would you think this had anything to do with the Chester Morton case at all? Did these people know Chester Morton.”

  “One of them did. One of them lived in the tailer that directly abutted Chester Morton’s trailer in that trailer park.”

  “All right,” Ferris Cole said. “That’s interesting.”

  “In more ways than I can begin to tell you,” Gregor said. “But even if that hadn’t been the case, I’d have suspected that the two events were connected. There’s the matter of the truck.”

  “The truck?”

  “Chester Morton’s black Ford pickup truck. From all the accounts of people who knew him at the time, Chester Morton was in love with his truck. Like some bad parody of a country song. Really in love with his truck.”

  “And?”

  “And he left it behind when he disappeared.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ferris Cole said.

  “It was one of the prime pieces of evidence for Chester Morton being dead or worse, instead of just some guy who took off,” Gregor said. “He left his truck. He loved the truck. He never would have left the truck behind. Therefore, if the truck was left behind, he must have been killed and the police were being idiots for not following up on it. And it wasn’t a bad argument. Even if he hadn’t loved the truck, he would have needed transportation to get wherever it was he wanted to go.”

  “That makes sense,” Ferris Cole said.

  “Most of these guys, the ones who take off, take off in their own cars if they have them. Every once in a while, you’d get a guy with a particular kind of problem. He knows the car is about to be repossessed anyway, say, or there’s some reason why he’s really worried about being followed. But most of them take their cars and trade them in for another used one later.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “It does make sense,” Gregor said, “but in this case, it doesn’t, because in this case, Chester Morton really was missing. So here’s this guy who’s taking off, and he’s out here in the middle of nowhere, at least relatively. He leaves the truck and does what? Walks? Hitchhikes? We’d have heard something if he’d been hitchhiking. Somebody would have come forward years ago. Okay, that’s only about ninety percent sure. But it is ninety percent sure.”

  “All right,” Ferris Cole said, “so he left the truck. I still don’t see how that means his disappearance connects to two bodies by a dam—”

  “They’re in a black Ford pickup truck.”

  “The same one?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “So you’re saying that somebody had the truck—his family, what? Somebody had the truck and then … I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I’m not sure of what I’m saying, either,” Gregor said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s the same truck. And it’s one of those things. If anybody had been paying attention twelve years ago, they should have paid attention to the truck.”

  “Did his family keep it? Did the police impound it as evidence? What?”

  “His mother had it in her garage and then she sold it,” Gregor said. “At least, that’s what she says. She sold it to some kid, she can’t remember his name, it was a long time ago. But there’s a black pickup truck sitting down there by the water with two bodies in it, and it’s around the right vintage and, though the plates were removed, it was registered in New Jersey.”

  “All right,” Ferris Cole said. “You’ve finally lost me.”

  “I’ll tell you some other time when I’m not racing against time to stop a pack of idiots from mucking up the evidence enough to shoot their own case in the foot. Just get those bodies for me, if you can, and give them a thorough going over that won’t get blown to pieces in court. And thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Ferris Cole said. “This is very interesting. My life doesn’t usually run like an episode of Law and Order.”

  Gregor wanted to say that everybody’s life ran like an episode of Law & Order these days, because there were so many episodes of Law & Order that they must have covered the known universe
of contemporary American situations by now. He hung up the phone instead and called Rhonda Alvarez. He had her cell phone number now. She picked up immediately.

  “I’m glad you called,” she said. “I ran those numbers you gave me.”

  “And?”

  “Absolutely right, Atlantic City. We’ve got an address. Are you going to want somebody to go over there?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You’re going to have to get local cooperation for that,” Rhonda said. “I mean, officially, we’re not actually in this at the moment, if you know what I mean. There are problems with jurisdiction. But we get along with the cops around here. I could talk to them beforehand.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Gregor said. “Can you do me one more favor? Can you text message from that phone?”

  “Sure.”

  “Send me a text with the names and numbers of the people we have to contact,” he said. It’ll be easier that way. I can just put the phone down on a desk somewhere and let them have at it. I’m in a moving car at the moment. Writing things down would be difficult.”

  “All right, I can do that.”

  “Thank you,” Gregor said. “I’ll talk to you later. We seem to be coming up on our destination. Or something.”

  “Right,” Rhonda Alvarez said.

  The phone went dead in Gregor’s ear. He closed it up and put it in his pocket. They were curving around to the parking lot now. Howard Androcoelho was waiting for him by the back door, shifting nervously from foot to foot. There was a middle-aged woman with him, looking angry.

  2

  The middle-aged woman turned out to be Marianne Glew. Marianne Glew turned out to be one of those women who smile too much, too often, and with too little reason. Gregor gave her as much of a smile as he could manage, and let himself drift through her opening monologue.

  “Mr. Demarkian!” she said. “I should have met you before now. I should have had Howard bring you to my office as soon as you got here. I didn’t think. There’s been so much going on. And not just in the police department. I don’t have to tell you, I’m sure. A town like this is a gigantic time suck. It really is. There’s no end to the kind of things we have to do just to keep going. And of course, the public is the public. It wants lots of services and low taxes at the same time, and if it doesn’t get them it never stops complaining. It’s quite a balancing act. We were so glad you were able to come in and help us out. Of course, I always knew nobody had murdered Chester Morton—not then, at any rate—but you know what people are like. Charlene wouldn’t give up. Maybe I wouldn’t, either, if I were somebody’s mother. At any rate, you’re here. That’s the thing. And we’re very glad to have you!”