Flowering Judas (46 page)

“I really wish the world was like
CSI,
” Ferris Cole said, “but it isn't. Of course, it's to our advantage if criminals think it is. The death penalty may not be a deterrent, but fear of exposure through test tubes certainly is. Although I wish it were more of one. I'm so sick of exploding meth labs, I could give up this work to run a Dairy Queen.”

“So we wouldn't be able to find anything at all?”

“I wouldn't say that,” Ferris Cole said. “I haven't had a look at the skeleton, but you keep telling me it has a crack in the skull. Cracks leave fragments, or they frequently do. Of course, it depends on just how young an infant this was. If it was just a day or two, the skull would have been fairly soft. That wouldn't get you what you wanted. If it was a couple of weeks old, though, you might get fragments. And the fragments would have been left in the soil when the skeleton was taken out. It's a long shot. The police would have to shift through the soil with a flour sifter. But at least it's possible.”

“I'm with what you said,” Gregor said. “I wish the world were like
CSI,
too.”

“You've got to understand, it's not that there would be no evidence at all of a body having decomposed there,” Ferris Cole said. “There would always be something left behind. It's just that it would be incredibly hard to detect, and even if you did detect it, it isn't likely that it would tell you anything more than that
something
had been there. Then it would depend first on the judge, to let the prosecution enter evidence that was that vague, and then on the jury. The jury watches
CSI,
too. When you can't nail it the way they do on television, juries are likely to decide that that amounts to reasonable doubt.”

“Marvelous,” Gregor said. “Half the time they ignore evidence because it's not like the science fiction stuff they see on TV, and half the time they convict without evidence because they're sure that nobody could be arrested if they hadn't done
something
wrong. Tell me again why this is the best possible judicial system.”

“It is, though,” Ferris Cole said. “Let me get this stuff going and see what I can find. You should try to come up with an alternative approach, that's all. Something that doesn't rely on the skeleton.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “But it annoys me. The aesthetic is wrong. This whole thing, from the beginning, was about the baby. Well, no, not from the absolute beginning. But—oh, never mind. I'll explain it all later. I'm in a car.”

“You're not driving, I hope. Not while you're talking on a cell phone.”

Gregor let that go by. He never drove—or almost never—but everybody wanted to tell him not to do it on his cell phone.

Rhonda Alvarez was nearly out of breath. “I'm here,” she said, when she picked up. “I was just thinking of you. I'm here, we're all here, we've been here for half an hour.”

“Where?”

“Chester Morton's house,” she said. “It's a house, too, not an apartment. Out in the country in this little town. He was renting it and he still is, technically. He didn't give up the lease or anything. Anyway, I yelled and screamed and acted hysterical and insisted this was priority and rush and all the rest of it, and the locals got a warrant in no time flat and we came right out here. We've been here for half an hour. God, the place is a mess.”

“A mess?'

“Forget vacuuming. The man never picked up his garbage. You wouldn't believe it. Fast-food wrappers and boxes everywhere, and some fast food still in them, going to mold. Old magazines. Those magazines, if you know what I mean. He loved beaver shots. Everything's trashed. The bathroom stinks.”

“Could somebody have been trying to search the place?”

“It doesn't look like that, no,” Rhonda said. “It's not that kind of mess. And anybody who had been trying to search the place would have found what the police found, because it wasn't like it was hidden.”

“And what was that?”

“Guns and ammo,” Rhoda said. “Two rifles under the bed—just under it. Not in cases or bags or anything, just shoved there. Several, I made at least four, handguns. A double-barrelled shotgun. Three tasers.”

“For God's sake,” Gregor said. “What was the idiot doing? Had he joined the mob? Did he owe money to the mob?”

“He owed money to everybody, from what we've been able to tell,” Rhonda said, “but I don't think that's what this is. There's a lot of ammunition in boxes, but I'm willing to bet, even after just a first look, that most of these things haven't been fired in years. And some of them are brand new. They've never been fired.”

“I don't suppose he bought any of them legally and registered them,” Gregor said.

“We haven't checked yet, but my guess would be no. He doesn't seem the type, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know what you mean.”

“I would say, though, that you had a good call that the gun you've got up there would be a gun he brought with him and not anything somebody up there had. My guess is that he was packing most of the time. It probably made him feel important.”

“Probably,” Gregor said.

“And we also found drugs,” Rhonda said. “Not a lot. Not a little, either. It's not impossible that he was dealing a little on the side, some marijuana, maybe some cocaine, but it wouldn't have been anything dramatic. He was definitely using. And his refrigerator was full of beer. And there was an entire bookshelf of the hard stuff, Patrón, Johnnie Walker. Most of those were better than half empty.”

“Was there any money?”

“Nope. Were you expecting us to find any?”

“Not really,” Gregor said.

“I don't know if any of this helps,” Rhonda said, “but this guy was in no way the kind of person who loves the outdoors and wants to go hiking all the time. If he was doing even half the stuff there's evidence of him doing around here, he wouldn't be able to hike for half a mile without falling over dead. And, for what it's worth, I don't think the house being out in the country means he was fond of the wilderness, either. I think it just means—”

“That he wanted to be far away from people who could pry into what he was doing?”

“Like that,” Rhonda said. “You can't think this guy killed your two, right? Because this guy was dead first.”

“I know who killed my two,” Gregor said, “I'm just trying to find a way for the prosecution to make their case.”

“Well, good luck with that. I'm going to go now. They're going to take out a wall in the bathroom.”

Gregor didn't ask what they wanted to take out a wall in the bathroom for. He sympathized with the landlord who was going to have to clean up at least some of it when all this was over.

Tony Bolero was making his way through the tree-lined streets of a neighborhood that practically screamed “best place to live in town.” The houses were all large, if vaguely old-fashioned: ranches; split-levels; “contemporaries” that must have been built in the Sixties.

Tony pulled into a driveway that already had too many cars in it, but not enough for Gregor. There was no patrol car here. There was no Howard Androcoelho.

Tony pointed ahead to the long, low ranch. “This is it,” he said.

Gregor was looking at something else. The yard was wide and deep. What he was looking at was almost invisible from the driveway. He got out of the car and went to the side of the garage. Then he just stood there and stared.

“My God,” he said.

“What is it?” Tony Bolero materialized at his elbow.

Gregor pointed across the back lawn. “It's a greenhouse,” he said.

It wasn't just a greenhouse.

It was a big one.

2

The other cars drove up almost immediately—Howard's, and then the two patrol cars. Nobody's siren was blaring. Nobody's lights were pumping. It was all very quiet, as if what was about to go on here was a pool party or a barbecue, the kind of thing people who lived in the kind of place Sherwood Forest was did on any given weekend.

Except that it wasn't a weekend.

“Did you bring a search warrant?” Gregor asked.

“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.”