Flowering Judas (38 page)

“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?” Kenny 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!”

Somewhere down the block, there were wind chimes. Gregor could hear them as the wind blew. It was too hot for this time of year. Gregor was tired.

“Well?” Marianne Glew said.

“Mr. Demarkian wants to look at some of the evidence we've collected,” Howard Androcoelho said. “He wants to look at the backpack. I don't know if he wants to see the skeleton of the baby, but I've told him we don't have it. Not here in the station, at any rate. It's over there at Feldman's, and they're not very happy about it. It's not like a regular body. Nobody's going to come forward to claim it. They don't know what they're going to do with it. And I don't, either.”

They both looked at him. Gregor took an enormous, deep, cleansing breath and counted to ten in his head.

“I don't need to see the skeleton,” he said. “Not right away. I want to look at the backpack and the contents of the backpack.”

“Well,” Howard said, “then you come this way. I mean, right through here and down the hall. The other way from the main office. You just come through here.”

Howard was moving them into the building as he talked. Gregor and Marianne Glew followed him. The halls were just as dingy and uninspiring as Gregor remembered them. He had never understood why police departments always wanted to paint their hallways vomit-pea-soup green and very-vomit-yellow beige.

But they all did, half and half, every time.

Howard Androcoelho got them down to the end of a long corridor. There was a door there. He opened it and stepped back to let them pass.

“This is our evidence room,” he said. “It isn't very big, but we don't usually have much use for it. We don't usually have much evidence, I mean. There's not that much crime in Mattatuck.”

“No,” Marianne Glew said positively. “There isn't. It's one of the great virtues of a small town. Not much crime, and too much gossip.”

There was a big wooden table in the middle of the room with chairs all around it. The chairs were the metal and wood kind found in a lot of high school cafeterias. Gregor looked around.

“You don't keep somebody on duty here?” he asked.

“On duty?” Howard said. “What would somebody do here on duty?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “he, or maybe she, might watch over the place and make sure nobody comes in and tampers with evidence.”

“Oh, we know about tampering with evidence,” Howard said. “We keep the room locked. It was locked right now. I mean, before we came in. I had to use my key to open it.”

“How many keys are there?” Gregor said.

“Just three,” Howard said. “I've got one. The town prosecutor's office has one. And there's one upstairs in the main office.”

“Where upstairs?”

“In the drawer at the front desk, I think.”

“So, in a drawer, out where anybody could pick it up,” Gregor said.