Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  “It’s coming. I sent one of the detectives to get it. Did you really get on the phone and call a judge? Did you really do that?”

  “Of course I did,” Gregor said. “I had to do it, because you won’t.”

  “If I think there’s a decent chance that I’m going to find evidence of a murder investigation, I’ll get a search warrant,” Howard said, “I’ll get a search warrant. Are you honestly standing there telling me that one of the Mortons—Charlene, I’d guess, from the way you’ve been going on—killed Chester Morton and then blew away two completely pathetic people with a gun for—what, exactly?”

  “Chester Morton killed Chester Morton,” Gregor said. “I already told you that.”

  “Yes, I know you did,” Howard said. “But that doesn’t make any sense, either. If Chester Morton committed suicide, then Althy Michaelman and what’s his name—”

  “Mike Katowski. You ought to read your own reports.”

  “I don’t give a damn what the man’s name was,” Howard said, “if Chester Morton committed suicide, then what did either of those people have to do with anything? What did they have to do with Charlene Morton? Do you really think somebody like Charlene Morton would have had anything to do with people like that?”

  “Sure,” Gregor said.

  The front door to the Morton house had opened, and Charlene Morton had come out, followed by the stooped tall man Gregor assumed was her husband. The stooped tall man seemed to be shrinking with every puff of wind. Charlene Morton seemed to be growing taller. She came down the walk to the driveway. She stepped off the driveway onto the grass and walked to where Howard and Gregor were standing.

  “Well,” Howard said. “Charlene, we’re sorry to bother you, but Mr. Demarkian here—”

  “Mr. Demarkian here thinks you ought to be arrested for the murders of Althy Michaelman and Mike Katowksi,” Gregor said.

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Am I?” Gregor took off across the lawn. The greenhouse was almost all the way at the back. That was why it was hard to see from the road. Once you had seen it, though, you’d never miss it again. It was the size of the greenhouses nurseries used. It was a greenhouse for serious business.

  “You can’t go in there,” Charlene Morton said, catching up to him. Gregor pulled open the greenhouse door and she put her hand on his wrist. “You can’t go in there without a search warrant.”

  “We’ll get a warrant,” Gregor said. “But thank you for reminding me.” He turned back to Howard Androcoelho, who was just puffing up, out of breath and looking angry. “You’re going to have to call your detective. You’re going to need a warrant specifically for the greenhouse.”

  “Why?” Howard said. “What are you doing here? What do you think you’re going to find in a greenhouse?”

  “Evidence of human remains,” Gregor said, pointing through the open door to the large, flowering tree that seemed to be growing out of the middle of the floor. “Under that.”

  “Under that,” Howard said. “You think you’re going to find a body under that.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “The body is gone. The body is that infant’s skeleton we have. It was buried in there for twelve years.”

  “You really can’t be serious,” Charlene said.

  “I’m very serious,” Gregor said. “The first thing you have to know is that Chester Morton was never missing. Mrs. Morton here knew where he was from the beginning, because she sent him there. She gave him the money to leave. She told him where to go. She kept in touch with him all this time. Then she pretended to be looking for him.”

  “Do you think those billboards are signs of pretense?” Charlene asked.

  “Yes,” Gregor said, “I do. They were local billboards, which were fine because Chester was no longer in the locality. There are no other billboards anywhere else that I know. And in spite of all the talk you did about calling in the FBI, you didn’t actually do it. You made demands. You made a big fuss. You went on local television. You never did the kinds of things people actually do in your situation. You only pretended to.”

  “It doesn’t look like pretending when you see me on television,” Charlene said. “It didn’t look like pretending to that little whore who turned Chester’s head around and made him a traitor to himself and his family.”

  “The only person who made Chester a traitor to himself and his family was Chester,” Gregor said. “Maybe with your help. But Chester was acting out long before Darvelle Haymes came along. You tell everybody Chester wanted to move out of the house and you wanted to stop him, but that’s not true, either. Your son Kenny remembers the fights that went on in the weeks before Chester left your house, and I’d be willing to bet I could find other people who remember, too. Lots of fights. Lots of yelling. All about money.”

  “We never begrudged our children money,” Stew Morton said. Nobody had seen him come up. Gregor was startled. “We gave them all they wanted. We gave them jobs and let them earn even more.”

  “You couldn’t possibly give Chester as much as he wanted, because Chester gambled,” Gregor said. “He also took drugs and drank and did a lot of things you didn’t want him to do. And when you tried to cut him off, he just stole. So the situation got worse and worse, and you threw him out.”

  “Charlene would never have thrown him out,” Stew said. “She would never throw any of our children out. She’s not that kind of mother.”

  “You did throw him out,” Gregor said. “That’s what happened. And he rented that trailer, and then the two of you started a fight that lasted for months over the way he was living and the way he was behaving. You weren’t going to back down unless he cleaned up his act, and Chester was willing to do anything but clean up his act. That’s when Chester started looking for a way to get what he wanted without having to give up the liquor or the gambling Especially the gambling, I think. That’s when he came up with the idea that he should get married and give you grandchildren.”

  “I didn’t want grandchildren from that little tramp,” Charlene said.

  “Oh, come on now,” Gregor said. “You had nothing against Darvelle Haymes. Under other circumstances, you’d have liked her. She’s hard working. She’s conscientious. She’s frugal. She’s all the things you probably would have wanted in a daughter-in-law, if you’d thought she was capable of turning Chester around. But she wasn’t capable, because Chester wasn’t really in love with her. She was just convenient. Unfortunatly, she wasn’t convenient enough. She refused to get pregnant.

  “And that’s where the real trouble started. Chester was obsessed with his plan to give you a grandchild and get you to come around that way, and when Darvelle wouldn’t help he found another way to get a baby. He was living right next door to a woman who had sold every one of her children but one. Sold them as infants. Sold them to get money for liquor and drugs and just fooling around. She was pregnant. She made Chester an offer. Chester took it. He needed some money. My guess is between five and ten thousand dollars. He needed it, and he knew where to get it. He could get it from you.”

  “If I’d really thrown him out of the house,” Charlene said, “do you think I’d have given him even five thousand dollars, never mind ten, to buy a baby to pretend was my grandchild?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I think he stole it. He still had access to your house. He still had access to your business. It wouldn’t have been all that hard. Of course, doing it right, so that he got away with it, would have been harder, but I doubt if he even tried. He got hold of the money. He got the baby. Then he was going to bring the baby to you and say it was your grandchild, when you figured out he had taken the cash.

  “So, instead of going home, here, to talk to you about it all, he suddenly found you on his own doorstep, loaded for bear. You were furious. You weren’t going to put up with it. You knew the baby wasn’t his and you weren’t going to have any part of it. But the baby was there, and it was crying. And you picked it up by the feet and smashed it agai
nst the trailer wall, and then it was dead.”

  “You can’t possibly know that,” Charlene said, “never mind prove it.”

  “I don’t have to prove everything, Mrs. Morton, I really don’t. A lot of these things are details and they’re not going to matter in court. But I’d stake my life that you killed that infant, and that you then convinced Chester that nobody would believe you’d killed it. They’d all think he had. You convinced him that he had to go away and stay away. And he didn’t mind that, at first, at any rate. You were going back to supporting him. He could go on living the way he was living. Why not?”

  “Why would I bother?” Charlene asked. “Nobody cared about that baby. Nobody even realized it was gone. If we’d really done what you think we’d done, nothing would have happened to us because of it.”

  “You couldn’t be sure of that,” Gregor said. “Especially not at the time. You had no reason to think that nobody would miss the baby. And over all these years, that missing baby, the possible pregnancy, the baby-connected-to-Chester hasn’t ever completely gone away. It’s been here, always, waiting for somebody to pay attention to it. People were wrong about whose baby it was. The general idea was that it was Darvelle Haymes who had had a child—for those people who accepted that she was pregnant at the time Chester disappeared and was lying when she said she wasn’t—and you encouraged that, just like you encouraged stories about Chester’s love for the outdoors and lifelong ambition to live in Wyoming or Montana or one of those places, safely in the wrong direction from where he really was and safely in the wrong kind of venue. He went to Atlantic City. You enabled the hell out of all of his problems.”

  “So first I threw him out of the house because of his problems,” Charlene said, “and then I enabled him?”

  “Enabling was better than going to jail for child murder, or seeing Chester go to jail for child murder, or even just having to weather the scandal. You fed the local media one set of nonsense and you fed Chester another, saying that you were keeping him safe. And, I think, you told him that he had to stay away as long as he did because Darvelle Haymes was going to turn him in as soon as she found out he was alive.”

  “You think Darvelle Haymes was there when Chester and I murdered an infant,” Charlene said.

  “No. I think Darvelle Haymes knew all about buying the baby, and that’s a crime in itself,” Gregor said. “Anyway, eventually things began to come apart. Chester was getting worse and worse and he wanted to come home. The bogus ‘search’ for him was getting hard to keep bogus. First a television program got interested in the case, a national television program. Then the FBI stepped in and agreed to look things over. Eventually, somebody was going to recognize him. And you didn’t want him to come home. He wasn’t better. He might even be worse. As soon as he got back to Mattatuck, you’d have all the same problems with drugs and liquor and hysterical behavior and, yes, stealing from the business. So you were juggling a lot of balls, and you didn’t know what you were going to do.

  “And in the meantime, Chester just got in his truck and came back. He was strung out. He was depressed. He had money problems from the gambling. And he was convinced that he wasn’t going to be able to come home because Darvelle Haymes was a bitch who wanted to destroy him. So he came back. He didn’t tell you about it. He just came.

  “He wanted to do something dramatic to ruin Darvelle’s life, so he went looking for the body of the baby. He started by digging up the ground around his old trailer and in the vicinity. I think you’d told him that that was what you’d done to the body. But it wasn’t there, and Haydee Michaelman ended up thinking it was Mike Katowski trying to find the money she’d saved up.

  “But Chester started thinking, and when he realized the body wasn’t where he thought it was, he started wondering where it could be. And that’s when he remembered this. A great big greenhouse, and a tree called a flowering Judas. You’re the one who goes around telling everybody that they’re traitors to the family. Judases. You buried the baby in the greenhouse and left it there until Chester figured out where it was and dug it up. Then he took it with him, went to Darvelle Haymes’s house and hung himself from the bathroom door frame. He left her a note making it seem as if they’d killed the baby together, or as if she’d been responsible for it—she burned the note, so we’ll never be sure. But he tried to incriminate her, and because of that she and a friend moved the body to the billboard.

  “And from there,” Gregor said, “there isn’t that much to say, is there? Everything else was just a lot of smoke and mirrors until you killed Althy Michaelman and Mike Katowski.”

  “And I did that, why?”

  “Because Althy Michaelman made the first of what you knew was going to be a series of blackmail demands, threatening to go to the police about the baby, her baby, the one she sold to Chester. That, and the fact that you were at the trailer the night Chester supposedly disappeared, and the fact that Chester was at the trailer the night before he actually died. Althy wasn’t good at putting two and two together, but she was good at remembering the things she knew might make her some money. So she did. And first, my guess is that you gave her some cash, but you didn’t give her everything she wanted. She had cash, and that had to come from you. But you agreed to meet the two of them to hand over the real payment, and you got them down by the truck, and you shot them. They were drunk as skunks by then. They couldn’t have put up much of a fight.”

  “I’ve never had a gun in my life,” Charlene said. “And you can’t say I have.”

  “No, I can’t,” Gregor agreed. “But Chester had lots. They found an entire cache of them at his house in New Jersey this morning. The gun was in the glove compartment. You found it when you found the truck, parked where Darvelle and her friend had left it, in your own back lot. It was always that truck that was going to get you in trouble.”

  “The truck?” Howard said. “What is it about the truck?”

  “It was the one thing she couldn’t control,” Gregor said. “Chester loved that truck. He wouldn’t leave without that truck. So she managed to find a way to get it to him. She pretended to be sick of looking at it. She told people she’d sold it to some kid off the street. Nobody challenged her and she got away with it, but if you think about it, you’ve got to wonder why. This is a woman who rented her son’s trailer for twelve solid years, supposedly because she wanted to have it waiting for her son if he was ever found—and she gets rid of his truck in no time flat? Why? Chester Morton didn’t give a damn one way or the other about his trailer. He loved his truck.”

  “You’re still not going to be able to prove any of this,” Charlene said. “Not in a million years. And nobody would believe it.”

  Gregor looked back through the greenhouse door at the flowering Judas tree. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “You’d be amazed at what we can do if we know what we’re looking for.”

  EPILOGUE

  Evil is real, like concrete.

  —Philip K. Dick

  1

  On the day of old George Tekemanian’s one hundredth birthday party, Gregor Demarkian sat down to write Howard Androcoelho an e-mail.

  This was not as easy as it should have been. The promise that if Gregor would only go away for a while Bennis and Donna would deal with the arrangements for renovating the new townhouse had not been fulfilled. The apartment was still full of stacks of carpet samples, stacks of tile samples, dunes of bathroom fixture samples, swaths of curtain materials, stacks of countertop samples. Gregor thought he would never want to hear the word “sample” again, and that it was going to take him years to relax in the new house. He’d never be able to turn on a faucet without remembering all this.

  He couldn’t use the computer in the bedroom. That would wake Bennis, and it was only four o’clock in the morning. He couldn’t use the computer in the living room. There were samples on it, he wasn’t sure of what. He couldn’t open his own laptop on the kitchen table, because there was no kitchen table left. It was
buried under … stuff.

  Finally, he went downstairs to what he and Bennis still referred to as “Bennis’s old apartment,” although the two apartments had been knocked together years ago. He brought his laptop, and told himself that this was a sign he should have caught. They’d knocked the apartments together, but they’d never lived as if they had both spaces to do what they wanted with. They had been destined to buy a house.

  Down in Bennis’s apartment, the sample situation was a little better, but not by much. He removed a few of the stacks from the coffee table in the living room, but Bennis’s taste in coffee tables was too bizarre to make writing e-mails comfortable. The table was in the shape of a gigantic book. It made Gregor feel as if he were Alice in Wonderland, after she’d eaten the whatever it was that made her very small.

  He went out into the kitchen and looked at the stacks on the table there, but there were very few of them. He took these off—they seemed to be more carpet; he had no idea why they needed to have so many samples of so many different kinds of carpet—and set the laptop up there. He knew enough about himself to plug the thing in. He never finished whatever he wanted to do in half an hour or less. He didn’t understand why the people who made laptops couldn’t find a battery that would go for a day or more. Then he brought up his e-mail program, clicked on the link for a blank e-mail form, and typed Howard Androcoelho’s e-mail address into the little box. These programs had been made to be used by idiots. Gregor appreciated it.

  Dear Howard (he started),

  I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking about this. Part of my reason for writing is to be sure that you understand what happened in the disappearance of Chester Morton and the deaths of Althy Michaelman and Mike Katowski, and that’s easy to do.

  All you have to remember is that Charlene Morton is one of those women who needs to build a fortress around herself, and one who needs to make sure that her life and that of her family is seen in public as being beyond reproach. And to make that happen, she needed her children to be her children forever, or maybe even longer than forever. She needed them to do what they were told. She needed them to be what she wanted them to be.