Flowering Judas (15 page)

“Excuse me,” the man said, leaning a little on the counter that divided Kyle's part of the room from the general public. “I have an appointment with Howard Androcoelho. I'm—”

“Mr. Demarkian! Mr. Demarkian!” Howard came barreling out of his office at the back, moving faster than Kyle had ever seen him before. “Mr. Demarkian! I'm glad you're here. If you could come back here for a moment—”

“He doesn't look all that impressive,” Kyle said.

“No, he doesn't,” Sue said. “Just you watch, all this crap will be wrong, and then we'll have a real mess on our hands. I'm surprised Charlene isn't with us as we speak.”

Kyle sat back down a little. Gregor Demarkian was disappearing into Howard Androcoelho's office. People had started to talk again. The room was getting loud.

He thought of picking up the phone and calling Darvelle, and decided against it. He just wished that she'd calm down. He wished that everybody would calm down.

He bent over the paperwork he was supposed to be doing and tried to think about fishing. Fishing always took his mind off everything.

 

SIX

1

Gregor Demarkian had seen dozens of small-town police departments in his life. He had seen them smaller than this, which was, after all, only the main of something like three stations. This was, in many ways, a good-sized community. The local community college was here. There was a solid little section of town with gridded streets and stoplights instead of stop signs. There were sidewalks.

Still, there was some kind of tipping point somewhere, that distinguished a small town from a small city, and it wasn't just population. There was a change in attitude, or maybe experience. It was a tipping point Mattatuck hadn't crossed.

Gregor passed through the big open room full of people working at desks on computers, ubiquitous now not only in police departments but in every other kind of organization. He went into Howard Androcoelho's office, which was nothing like the office of somebody called a “police commissioner” anywhere else. Gregor wondered who had thought up the title, and why. What Howard Androcoelho actually seemed to be was the local chief of police.

The office was small, but it did have windows. The windows looked out onto a small grassy area defined by a spiked wrought-iron fence. Howard Androcoelho's desk was regulation size and covered with papers. His computer was on a little wheeled “workstation” that Gregor was willing to bet was nearly impossible for such a large man to do anything at. There was a visitor's chair—a plain wooden one, without cushions.

Gregor sat down in the visitor's chair and looked around. Howard Androcoelho was bustling. He shut the door and then checked to make sure the air conditioning was working. The air conditioning was an ordinary window unit. The building they were in had to be a hundred years old.

Howard Androcoelho hurried around to sit at the desk. Then he beamed, or tried to.

“Well,” he said. “You really came. I wasn't sure, you know, with all that trouble the day I came to Philadelphia.”

“I did say I would come.”

“Yes, yes. I know you did. It was just—well, I hope that friend of yours came out all right. That was a terrible thing. Terrible. You don't expect that sort of thing to happen right in front of you.”

“He's doing as well as can be expected,” Gregor said. “Can I ask you something? Why are you called the police commissioner? Why aren't you just the chief of police?”

This time Howard Androcoelho did beam. “Oh, I am,” he said. “There's not really much call for a police commissioner yet. Not here. But we're growing. We're growing so fast, we can hardly handle it. And Marianne and I thought—”

“Marianne?”

“Marianne Glew,” Howard said. “She's the mayor these days. Funny how these things work out. She was my partner once. She was my partner on this, you know, when Chester Morton first went missing. We were both detectives then, and we thought—well, we thought being detectives was the most amazing thing we could be. That was only a few years after this town started hiring detectives. You really would be amazed at how fast this town has been growing.”

“And police commissioner?”

“Well, we thought we'd get to police commissioner eventually,” Howard said. “We've got almost fifty thousand people within the city limits these days, and that's almost ten thousand more than we had twelve years ago.”

Gregor considered this. “You've got almost fifty thousand people, and you don't have a regular morgue?”

“We're getting people, Mr. Demarkian, not crime. This is only the second time we've felt any need for a morgue since I joined the force as a patrolman. Not a lot happens here.”

“Drug overdoses?” Gregor suggested. “Domestic violence murders?”

“Oh,” Howard said. “Yeah. We get some of that. But you don't need one of those fancy medical examiners for that sort of thing. And not much else has happened here. I told you when I came to see you, the last time there was a real murder in this town, it was 1948.”

Gregor thought about it. He did remember Howard saying something like this, but at the time he had imagined that Mattatuck, New York, would be like Snow Hill, Pennsylvania—a little nothing of a place entirely out in the sticks, with more dirt roads than paved ones. From what he had seen of Mattatuck so far, however, it was a largish “small” town that was well on its way to becoming a small city. The crime statistics couldn't be what Howard Androcoelho said they were. Either he was deliberately downplaying the reality here, or he was spending most of his time looking the other way when bad things happen.

“We do have that mobile crime lab,” he said suddenly. “I told you that, didn't I? We got it with the stimulus money.”

“Yes,” Gregor said.

He was still thinking. He looked at the walls of Howard's office. What wasn't obscured by old-fashioned filing cabinets was blank and painted that odd sick green that covered the insides of so many public buildings from the Thirties.

“You're still using filing cabinets? You're not putting your records on the computer?”

“Oh, we're putting all the new records on the computer,” Howard said. “We've been doing that for fifteen years or so now, more or less. It's the old records we don't have on the computer.”

“You don't have a storage space?”

“Sure we do. In the basement of this building, as a matter of fact. But you know how it is. You stack the stuff up here and there and forget all about it. I suppose I ought to clean out this office once in a while.”

“What about the case we're talking about, Chester Morton? Is that on the computer, or in analog files?”

“Oh, most of that's in the computer,” Howard said. “But we've also got files. You know, Mr. Demarkian, no matter how good these computers are supposed to be, in the end, you always end up with files. You have to. We've got all of Charlene's letters, for instance, and we've got them in files. She didn't send them on the computer. I don't even know if she had one back then.”

Gregor looked around a little more. Howard Androcoelho cleared his throat.

“Well,” Howard said. “You were saying, Mr. Demarkian, on the phone, that Chester Morton couldn't have committed suicide.”

Gregor turned his attention back to Howard. “No,” he said. “That's not what I said. I said that I could prove that Chester Morton didn't commit suicide by hanging himself off that billboard. That doesn't mean he didn't commit suicide somewhere else.”

“Well—did he? Did he commit suicide somewhere else?”

“Even if he did,” Gregor said, “it doesn't get you out of your problem. If he committed suicide someplace else, somebody still had to get the body and hang it off that billboard. And that person has to be guilty of half a dozen things, including tampering with a crime scene.”

“Oh, well,” Howard said. “Yes. But—”

“Here,” Gregor said. He put the briefcase he had brought with him onto Howard's desk, opened it, and took the photograph that mattered right off the top. There was barely any room on Howard's desk to put a briefcase or even a cup of coffee, but the papers there didn't look particularly worked on. They just looked messy.

Gregor handed the photograph across to Howard Androcoelho. “There,” he said. “What do you see?”

Howard Androcoelho frowned. “A bare torso,” he said. “Holes that look like they're for a nipple ring. Some discoloration.”

Gregor reached back into the briefcase and came up with his little magnifying glass. “Try this,” he said. “Right over the nipple near the holes.”

Howard took the magnifying glass and stared at it. “My God,” he said. “It's just like Sherlock Holmes. I don't think I've used one of these since I was a Boy Scout.”

“I got it for my birthday one year,” Gregor said. “From a friend who was thinking of Sherlock Holmes himself. Look at the area right around the nipple.”

Howard Androcoelho looked. Then he sat back, puzzled. “That's—what is that? A tattoo?”

“A pinpoint tattoo, yes. The kind men give themselves and each other in prisons. Notice anything else about it?”

“It says
MOM
.”

“Anything else?”

“If you can see something else here, you have better eyes than I do, Mr. Demarkian. And I don't understand what you're getting at. Was Chester Morton in prison? Is that why he disappeared for twelve years and nobody knew where he was? How does that have anything to do with whether he hanged himself off the billboard or not?”

Gregor sighed. “Well,” he said, “it depends on what this looks like on the actual body. But assuming it looks the same, then it's fair to say that that tattoo was put on that body after death.”

“What?”

“The red of the ink is far too bright,” Gregor said. “In a living body, ink fades. It gets sucked deeper into the skin. It gets acted on by all kinds of bodily chemicals. New skin grows and old skin sloughs off, and it's a process that makes the ink look duller. But that ink is bright red. It's like it was put on with red nail polish.”

“Was it?” Howard said. “Put on with nail polish, I mean?”

“I don't think so. We can check that when we see the body. But there's something else. There's the hair.”

“Hair,” Howard said.

“The hair on the chest,” Gregor said. “There's a reason why that's the only tattoo on the chest. Chester Morton had enough chest hair to be a werewolf. He's literally carpeted with it. But somebody shaved that one small space, and shaved it clean.”

“Are you sure? I mean, couldn't it just be a bit of a bald spot?”

“No,” Gregor said, “I don't think so. But again, I'd have to see the body. And then there are the holes for the nipple rings.”

“So?”

“So, they're very wide. Which means Chester Morton was used to wearing a ring in that nipple. He wasn't used to leaving it out. So we have to ask where exactly that nipple ring has gone.”

“I don't see how you can tell all that from a single photograph,” Howard said.

“I don't, either,” Gregor said. “But that's why I want you to take me to see the body. Let's make sure I'm not just overinterpreting some anomaly in a picture.”

2

Feldman's Funeral Home was on East Main Street, and like the rest of Mattatuck, it was bigger and more impressive than he'd been led to expect. East Main Street itself was bigger and more impressive than he'd been led to expect. It not only had stoplights, it had a divider down the middle, running up to the town green. The green began at an enormous granite war monument dedicated to
THE CITIZENS OF MATTATUCK WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE WAR FOR THE UNION
. The monument was four-sided, though. Gregor expected he'd find the name of Mattatuck men lost in other wars on the other sides of it. The green was relatively substantial, too, with benches along the edges of it for people who were waiting for a bus. Gregor saw one of the buses come and stop and pick up a lone black woman with three overloaded tote bags.

Howard Androcoelho parked in a space clearly marked
NO PARKING
, which Gregor put down to police privilege. He got out and hurried around the car to Gregor's side of it, then stood back as Gregor got out on his own. Gregor hated having car doors opened for him.

“Parking's getting to be a problem,” Howard said. “I've got to admit it. If there's one sign Mattatuck is getting to be bigger than we want it to be, it's the parking. It's hard to believe, do you know what I mean? Most places in this part of the country are falling apart. And here we are. Having a problem with parking.”

Gregor looked up at the
THE FELDMAN FUNERAL HOME
, as the sign read. He was almost sorry Bennis wasn't here to see it. It was the kind of house she would have loved. It was two story, and Victorian, but on top of that it had enormous porches on both floors, and at the front right corner, where the corner of the intersection was, it had stacked built-on gazebos, too. It was the kind of house girls liked to play fairy princess in, when they were in grade school.

“It's something else, isn't it?” Howard said, flapping his arms at it. “They don't build houses like this anymore, do they? That one was built here in the nineteenth century sometime, before World War I, anyhow. Guy who built it had a big metalworking factory on the outskirts of town. That's long gone, of course. Nobody has metalwork factories in places like this anymore. Too expensive. Cheaper to build them down in Mexico where you can pay people a dollar a day. It's something else, let me tell you.”

Gregor grunted something deliberately incomprehensible and followed Howard up the steps to the porch and the big double front doors. The door was opened moments later by a small, older man in a fussy suit, the kind of suit Gregor thought must be given away at every funeral director certification ceremony in the world. The man's hair was very thin and slicked back over his skull like the villain's in a silent movie. He was very nervous.