Flowering Judas (20 page)

“There's only one case you could be calling about,” Ferris Cole said. “It's been in all the papers anyway, and on television. Mrs. Morton even got in touch with us, although there was nothing we could do. It was a municipal matter. Of course, she also got in touch with the FBI. Maybe she did put the fear of God into Howard and Marianne. I wouldn't put it past her.”

“Marianne?”

“Marianne Glew,” Ferris Cole said. “She's the mayor down there. If you haven't met her yet, you will. She's at least as big a piece of work as Howard is. Maybe more.”

Gregor thought about it. He was pretty sure he'd heard the name from Howard Androcoelho at least once.

Gregor played with another fried clam. “What I want,” he said, “is to get a proper autopsy done, something that will give me some clue as to whether this was a murder or a suicide. I do know enough about dead bodies to know that the man was in fact hanged, while he was still alive. I also know that he wasn't hanged from the top of that billboard where he was found. What I'd like to know is if he hanged himself someplace else and then was moved to the billboard, or if he was hanged by somebody else somewhere else and then moved to the billboard. And in either case, I find it completely bizarre that he was moved to the billboard.”

Ferris Cole sounded interested. “How do you know he was moved to the billboard? How do you know he didn't just—”

Gregor explained about the tattoo.

“So,” Ferris Cole said, “somebody took the dead body, shaved a little hair off the right breast area near the nipple, and tattooed—”

“Don't forget the nipple ring,” Gregor said. “I'm pretty sure there was a nipple ring in the ring holes and the ring was taken out.”

“To facilitate the tattooing.”

“Right. The holes were enlarged. They looked like they'd had something heavy in them recently.”

“But why would anybody go to all that trouble?” Ferris Cole asked. “I mean, why bother? I mean, I can see the hanging part, if you wanted to make it look like suicide, but the rest of it makes no sense. Is there supposed to be a code here? Is somebody sending a message? What?”

“All of this would be better answered if I could just get the body properly autopsied,” Gregor said, “which is why I called you. Do you think you could send somebody down tomorrow to do this, or to take the body back to where you need it to be? The longer we wait, the more we're likely to lose.”

“Oh, I agree with you,” Ferris Cole said. “Sure, I can arrange to have the body picked up in the morning. We can bring it back here and I can look at it myself. Seems odd, after all these years. We've been living with this case up here for a decade.”

“Well, finding out how he died won't even begin to answer the questions,” Gregor said, “but it bugs the hell out of me that, in this day and age, we don't have a rudimentary forensics finding—oh, never mind. It's just me. I've been riding around with Howard Androcoelho all day, and the town used the stimulus money to do things like install a hands-off cell phone system in his car. It's enough to make me lose my mind.”

“We'll pick the body up in the morning,” Ferris Cole said again. “And don't let Howard worry you. Or Marianne, either. That town won't vote money for anything. A couple of months ago, somebody figured out that the police radios didn't work in at least half the territory, and they couldn't get the town council to vote the money to get better ones. So then they held a referendum, and they couldn't get the people of the town to vote the money to get better ones. Police radios. Do you believe it?”

“The whole town thinks it doesn't have any crime when it actually does?”

“It's mostly the Mattatuck–Harvey Taxpayers Association. Older people, most of them on Social Security, who don't want taxes raised for any reason. They're not the majority of the town, but they are the majority of the people who will actually go out and vote in local elections. And it's like I said. They only think they don't have crime. I'm willing to bet that Howard gets four or five cases a year that are at least iffy, and then there are the domestics, of which Mattatuck always has a few. You've got to wonder about some people.”

Gregor agreed that you had to wonder about some people. Then he said good-bye to Ferris Cole and went back to his mound of fried clams.

Somehow, it wasn't nearly as much fun eating them as it was when he had Bennis around to complain.

3

Back in the room, Gregor lay down on the bed—well, one of the beds, the one closest to the door—and considered his options. He called the hospital again, even though he knew it was useless. He got a different nurse from the one he'd had before, but with the same attitude. He thought about calling Bennis. That was something he wanted to do before he went to sleep, but right now it just felt wrong. He rarely discussed case problems with her. She understood them when he did, but her attitude to justice tended to be as direct as anything in a
Die Hard
movie. If she knew who the bad guys were, she wanted to blow them away.

Actually, Gregor couldn't imagine Bennis blowing anyone away. Giving them the kind of tongue lashing that reduced them to ribbons—yes, that he could see. Using a weapon was not really her style.

He got off the bed and went to the desk. He had left his little airplane bag there, the one Bennis packed what she called his “miscellaneous essentials” in. He rifled through it until he came up with his little L.L. Bean folding alarm clock. It was bright yellow, because Bennis thought something bright yellow would be hard for him to lose. He opened it. It was nine-twenty.

I'm losing all sense of time,
he thought, and it was true. The day had started too early. He'd been moving through it too fast. He thought he'd gone down to dinner at seven, but maybe it had been earlier. He hadn't really checked. He put the alarm clock on the beside table next to where he expected to sleep and went back to pacing. Then he went to the window and looked out on the parking lot. The lights of Mattatuck were spread out before him, and there were many more lights than you'd expect to see in a “small town.” Gregor wondered if the teachers were getting paid this year. Then he wondered if the police had working radios. Then he decided that he couldn't do this much longer without going insane, and headed out into the hall and down one room to get Tony Bolero.

Tony Bolero had not undressed to go to bed. If he had, Gregor might have changed his mind about what he wanted to do. Tony Bolero was still in his full driver's uniform, except for the hat. Gregor took that as an omen.

“Could you drive me somewhere?” Gregor asked. “I don't know what the arrangement is. If it's too late—”

“I can drive you anywhere you want,” Tony Bolero said. “Where do you want to go?”

Gregor thought that in a murder mystery, Tony Bolero would definitely turn out to be the murderer. Since he was from Philadelphia, that was not likely to be the case here.

“I want to go to a place called Feldman's Funeral Home. Or The Feldman Funeral Home. I'm not sure how they phrase it. I was there earlier today, but not with you. It was when I was driving around with Howard Androcoelho.”

“It's The Feldman Funeral Home,” Tony Bolero said. “I know where it is. Give me a couple of minutes and I'll bring the car around to the lobby.”

Gregor did not ask how Tony Bolero knew where The Feldman Funeral Home was. It felt like one of those better-kept secrets. Maybe Bennis had hired this guy on purpose, because he seemed to her to be the kind of person who would fit in a murder investigation. Meaning, Gregor thought, that he seemed like the kind of person who could be a second lead on
The Sopranos.

Gregor went back to his room, made sure he had things like his wallet and his phone, and went down to the lobby. There was a young man behind the desk this time instead of a young woman.

“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” the young man said. “I'm glad I've got the chance to meet you. Is what I heard really true? Are you really going to bring in one of those state medical examiners to look at Chester Morton's body?”

Gregor sucked in air. “That got around fast,” he said.

“It's a small town,” the man behind the desk said. He was much too young to have known Chester Morton before his disappearance. “And people talk.”

Tony Bolero was pulling the car up under the big porte cochere. Gregor mumbled something noncommittal and went out into the warm September air. It was still raining, but the roof of the porte cochere kept that off his head, and the young man at the checkout desk kept him distracted.

“I don't care how small a town is,” Gregor said, when he got into the car. “News doesn't travel that fast unless somebody is spreading gossip. Howard Androcoelho must have gone back to the station and announced it all over a bullhorn. And it's not all that small a town in the first place.”

“All right,” Tony Bolero said.

Gregor didn't impose on him any further. The Howard Johnson was on the edge of town. They turned into the lights and Gregor watched the buildings go by, first stretched out along thin strips of green, then coming closer together. When the buildings began to come close together, Gregor saw at least three pawnshops, and four convenience stores, and two bars. More than size distinguished a small town from a larger one. These were the kinds of places that asked for trouble.

They made a turn and then another turn, and they were suddenly on the green, with the tall Civil War monument looking like a miniature pyramid displaced from the Middle East. It didn't look that way in good light. Tony went down one side of the green, turned left at the end of it, then came down the other. The Feldman Funeral Home was just beyond it.

“Here we are,” Tony said, parking at the curb. “Do you need me to come inside?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I may need to talk to you, later. Is that part of this arrangement? Can I sit you down someplace and run ideas by you?”

“You can,” Tony said, “but I don't know what good it would do. I've never investigated anything in my life.”

Gregor gave a noncomittal grunt. Then he got out of the car and walked up to the funeral home's front door. There was something going on in the front room. It was all lit up, and Gregor could see people moving around. He rang the doorbell and waited. At least he wasn't going to get the Feldmans out of bed.

The man who came to the door was Jason Feldman himself, and he looked surprised.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Did we have an appointment? Was Howard supposed to call? Howard really is completely irresponsible in some ways. I don't know why he gets to head up the police department. I really would like to accommodate you, but as you can see, we have a wake going on and—”

“I just need to go downstairs and take a look at the body for a minute,” Gregor said.

“Now? Right now? Why do you have to do that right now?”

“I won't be long,” Gregor was in the foyer now. It wasn't that hard to get past Jason Feldman. “I don't need to disturb anything you're doing. I just want to check something out.”

“But it's the middle of the night!”

“I couldn't settle down to sleep,” Gregor said, moving slowly but inexorably toward the basement door he remembered from earlier. “It really is just one small thing. So if you—”

Jason Feldman rushed to get to the basement door before Gregor did, but he didn't block the way. It was as if what mattered to him was that no guest in the funeral home should ever open his own doors. Jason Feldman flung the basement door open, turned on the light, and stepped back.

“Really,” he said. “Really. This is not the way I expect things to be done here. We're not a morgue. We've got a business to run.”

Gregor went down the steps. Jason Feldman closed the basement door behind them and followed.

“Really,” he said. “Really. We can't have things like this here. Bereaved families are very fragile. They're in a very delicate position. We can't have their mourning interrupted by police nonsense and all kinds of other things—”

Gregor had reached the room with the cold lockers built into the wall. He turned on the light there and looked at the lockers one by one. They looked exactly as he remembered them from earlier. The room looked exactly as he remembered it from earlier, too, although it was a messy room. A lot can happen in a messy room without anyone noticing.

Gregor went to the locker where Chester Morton's body was kept and opened it. Then he pulled out the slab.

“Really,” Jason Feldman was saying. “I mean, really, you can't—”

Jason Feldman stopped dead. Gregor had to force himself not to laugh.

The slab was empty.

 

PART II

In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

 

ONE

1

It was like watching a movie, the wrong kind of movie, a Keystone Kops exercise that Gregor was sure was staged for his benefit. He let it unfold without interference. At this time of night, there was very little else he could do. He needed to get someplace and sit down to think. He needed to wake Bennis or Tibor out of a sound sleep and rail at them. He needed something. What he got was Howard Androcoelho puffing up and down the stairs giving every indication that he was about to have a heart attack while the new mobile crime unit did things with brushes and vials that Gregor wasn't sure they knew how to use.

It was nearly eleven o'clock when they were all finished, and nothing had been discovered or decided that Gregor could tell. He had done his once-over of the area while they were waiting for the police to show up, so he knew all that was available to know. Jason Feldman kept pacing around the room and up and down the cellar stairs, moaning over and over again that it was all impossible, the funeral home was going to get sued, you couldn't have the police crawling all over the place during a wake. The family wouldn't stand for it.