Flowering Judas (6 page)

“I can't tell for sure,” he said finally. “But I can guess.”

“And you guess it's him?”

“I guess it's him.”

“Then what does that mean, Howard? Is that good news? Has he been dead for twelve years? What do you think is going on here?”

“If he'd been dead for twelve years, he'd be a skeleton by now,” Howard said. “Unless he was embalmed, of course. Somebody could have embalmed him and kept the body in a refrigerator all this time. He'd be pretty solid then.”

“For God's sake, Howard, I mean it. I'm going to murder you.”

“Marianne, for God's sake. What am I supposed to say?
I
mean it. What am I the hell supposed to say? He's up there. I'm pretty sure it's Chester Ray Morton. I don't know how long he's been up there. I know it hasn't been twelve years. I don't think it could have been all of twenty-four hours. There were day classes at the college today. Somebody would have seen him. After that, I haven't got a clue, and I'm not going to have a clue until the tech people get done with what they do. I'm not a clairvoyant. I don't know what happened here.”

This time, the cell line was not silent. There was a
click, click, clicking
sound. Howard knew what that was. That was Marianne tapping the top of her pen on her desk. She used to do that when they were both detectives and she was his partner. It had always driven him crazy.

“Listen,” Marianne said. “We're not going to be able to do it. We're not going to be able to say it was suicide.”

“We don't know that it was suicide.”

“His body hanging off the billboard? What would it be except suicide?”

“He could have been killed first,” Howard said. “Somebody could have shot him, or strangled him, or stabbed him, and then bundled up the body and hung it off the billboard.”

“And you think that's what happened? How could anybody have done that? That billboard is right out in front of everybody and everything. Somebody would have seen.”

“Well, you'd think somebody would have seen if he hanged himself from it,” Howard said, “but they didn't see that, either. There are people running all over here. As far as I know, they haven't found anybody who saw anything yet, except the security guard who called it in.”

“I'll bet a dozen people saw it,” Marianne said. “They just didn't bother to phone it in.”

“People see things without seeing them,” Howard said. “They see a vague thing and they're not sure what it is and their minds are on something else. You know how it goes.”

“We're still not going to be able to say it's suicide,” Marianne said. “I don't care if the guy left a video message saying he was going to off himself, we're not going to be able to go with that. We've going to have to investigate it as a murder whether it makes sense to do it or not. And you know that.”

“I do know that,” Howard said.

“That woman will be around any minute, if she isn't already. She'll be on CNN and MSNBC and Fox and all the local stations and she'll be screaming bloody murder.”

“Yes,” Howard said.

“She'll do that even though we were right,” Marianne said. “He wasn't dead. We said that at the time. He wasn't dead. He'd gone off somewhere. And we were right. But it won't matter. Because he's dead now. Do you see?”

“Yes, yes, I see,” Howard said. “You don't have to yell in my ear. I know what the ramifications of this are. I've always known what the ramifications of this would be. I knew as soon as they told me about the call. Give it up, Marianne.”

“This could be big trouble,” Marianne said.

“I know.”

“This could be lethal trouble. For both of us.”

“I know that, too.”

“I think we need some help,” Marianne said.

Howard leaned forward a little. The body was going up and up. There was a man on the ladder with a hook holding it from one side and what looked like two other men on another ladder pulling carefully upward. One of the men at the top had hold of the rope and was trying to saw through it. The weird lighting made everything look wrong.

Howard could still remember the day that he and Marianne had searched the trailer for the first time—the dust on all the surfaces, the bed made up with hospital corners, that small thin line of caking blood that had snaked across the top of the kitchen counter. They'd never been able to connect that blood to anybody.

“Damn,” Howard said.

“What is it?” Marianne said.

The men trying to take the body down had dropped it.

It seemed to hover in the air for a second all on its own.

Then it just fell, a dead weight, into the grass and bushes below.

 

PART I

Damnation is simple.

—Vladimir Nabokov

 

ONE

1

If anybody had asked Gregor Demarkian if it mattered to him to feel he had someplace settled to live, he would probably have said no. Why should it matter to him? Being homeless would not be good, but he'd never been the kind of person to care about the messiness of his kitchen or the view from his balcony. At the moment, he didn't even have a balcony, and he didn't want one. He wasn't sure what he did want. Not being liable to trip over stacked carpet samples in the hallway might be one thing. Not to find bathroom tile samples in the bathtub might be another. The bathroom tile “samples” were actually bathroom tiles, big ones, in all kinds of colors. There had to be hundreds of different colors, sizes, shapes, and materials for bathroom tiles. It was insane.

It was six o'clock on the first Monday in September. Labor Day. Gregor had managed to wrestle the bathroom tiles out of the bathtub so that he could take his shower, and now he was standing at the big window in his living room that overlooked Cavanaugh Street. Upstairs, Grace Feinmann was practicing, the faint sound of the harpsichord rippling up and down scales. Out on the street, nothing much was happening. It was a holiday. Donna Moradanyan Donahue had put up a big mural of Thirties-era workmen with big muscles outside Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, sort of in honor of somebody named Glenn Beck.

“No, she isn't honoring Glenn Beck,” Bennis had tried to explain, a week ago, when Donna was first out there putting things up and getting her son Tommy to hammer nails. “It's kind of a joke. Glenn Beck is the sort of person who sees Communists in his soup, or, you know—”

But Gregor didn't know. He hadn't known then, and he didn't know now. Glenn Beck was somebody on television. He had tried to catch Glenn Beck on television. He'd never managed it.

He walked away from the window and headed toward the kitchen. Ever since Bennis had discovered coffee bags, he'd been able to make his own coffee in the morning. This was a good thing, since it turned out that Bennis needed to do all kinds of things in the morning, and getting the coffee wasn't one of them.

He went through the swinging doors and found himself confronted by the kitchen table, which had cabinet façade samples stacked up on one side of it and handle samples stacked up on the other. Gregor was beginning to think you could put an entire house together from samples alone if you didn't care if things matched. He picked up one of the façade samples and looked at it. Then he picked up another. He was sure there were lots of differences between them. He just didn't understand why anybody would care. He really didn't understand why Bennis would care.

He filled the kettle and put it on to boil. He took a clean mug out of the cabinet and put a Folgers Coffee bag in it. He put the mug on the table between façades and handles. Then he took it off and put it back on the counter.

The Post-it Note with the information for today's meeting was stuck to the front of the refrigerator. It said:
H. ANDROCOELHO, EIGHT
. That was it. He had always been rather cavalier about the business part of what he did. He had a good pension from the Bureau and a solid wall of savings behind it. He didn't need to worry about the details as much as he might have. Still. It had gotten to the point where his professional life was like a poem by William Carlos Williams.

The kettle went off. He took it off the heat and poured water over the coffee bag. Bennis left her tea bags to steep for twenty minutes or more. If Gregor did that with a coffee bag, he'd have tachycardia in a minute and a half.

He looked at the handle samples again. Some of them were actually handles. Some of them were knobs. Some of them seemed to move. Some of them obviously didn't. How did anyone choose among all these things? Why would anyone want to put herself through this? Why not just let the contractor pick what he thought was practical and go with that?

Gregor came to again. He felt as if he were going in and out of fugue states. He took the coffee bag out of the coffee with a spoon. He threw the coffee bag into the garbage pail next to the sink. He wondered if, somewhere, Bennis had hundreds of samples of sinks that she'd gathered to look at before deciding which one would go into the kitchen of the new house.

Gregor took a sip of coffee. It didn't help. He took another sip of coffee. It still didn't help. He thought of H. Androcoelho, who was coming all the way out here from someplace in New York, on a holiday, to talk to him about something—and Gregor couldn't remember it.

Gregor took the coffee cup and went back through the living room and down the hall again, to the bathroom and the bedroom. Bennis was just coming out of the bath, wrapped in an enormous bathrobe, her wet hair falling down over her shoulders. The bathrobe was Gregor's bathrobe. Bennis had a dozen bathrobes of her own, including ones from special stores where everything cost as much as a small car, but she didn't wear them.

“Hey,” she said, pushing the door to the bedroom open. “Are you okay? I left a note about your appointment on the refrigerator.”

“I saw it. The kitchen table is full of—stuff.”

“I know it's a pain, Gregor, but it's only for a little while. We should be into the new house by Thanksgiving. Or maybe Christmas. Anyway, it will be worth it when it's done. You'll see.”

“I don't think I can go without sitting at my kitchen table for four months.”

“I don't see why. It's not like we ever eat here. I mean, really eat. We go to the Ararat. You're going there now. There's something we can do in the new house. Or I can do. I can cook.”

“Do you cook?”

“Well enough when I was living on my own,” Bennis said. “I could get Donna to teach me. It's going to be a really spectacular kitchen.”

“I'm going to go downstairs and see if old George wants to pick up Tibor with me,” Gregor said. “I wish you'd made more notes about that appointment. Don't you think it's odd, this guy coming out on a holiday?”

Bennis was putting clothes out on the bed. All the underwear matched. Bennis's underwear always matched. That was something odd to know about her.

“He's the chief of police in wherever this is,” Bennis said. “Maybe this was the only time he could get away. And it's not really all that far from here. It's just New York. Maybe two hours or so north? Can't be much more than that. I forgot the name of the town. It's an Indian name.”

“All right. I'd still feel better if you or I remembered exactly what it was he wanted to talk to me about.”

Bennis had the hairbrush in her hand. She put it down on the bed. “It's a cold case—a missing persons cold case, except just a little while ago the guy turned up dead. And there were complications, but I don't remember those, because there are always complications. If there weren't complications, they wouldn't come to you.”

“All right.”

“Don't get all
sigh-y
on me, Gregor. I'm renovating an antique house and I've got a book due at the end of the month. Which is going to be late. And besides, I don't know. It's one of those things. It's been on television.”

“The case?”

“Yes. Really, you've got to remember this. I told you. It was on one of those shows.
Disappeared,
that kind of thing. Or maybe it was only going to be on one. I'm sorry. The thing sounded garbled as hell to me when I took the call, and he said he'd come today, so I figured he'd tell you about it. He will tell you about it.”

“He will,” Gregor agreed. “I really am going to go down and see about old George. Are you coming out for breakfast?”

“Yes, and no,” Bennis said. “I'm meeting Donna. I keep telling her I don't like wallpaper, I really much prefer paint, but she has some samples for me to see. She's going to bring them and then if I hate them she'll bring them back. I'll probably hate them.”

“We don't have room in this apartment for wallpaper samples,” Gregor said.

“Go see about old George. I don't like the way he's been looking lately. He looks like kindergarten paste.”

“What?”

“Go,” Bennis said.

Gregor went.

2

Outside on the landing, Grace's playing was clear, not exercises now, but a recognizable piece. Gregor thought she had to have her door open up there. She did that sometimes when she was sure everybody in the building was awake. Gregor didn't mind. Bennis didn't mind. Old George was too far away to be bothered by it if he didn't want to be.

Gregor thought about going upstairs for a minute and asking her what she was playing. Then he decided that would be rude. Grace was always rehearsing for something, and besides, she might think he was actually bothered by her playing and being polite about it. It never ceased to amaze him how complicated people were, in their relationships with each other. Here they were, empowered by speech, and they were always looking for clues and hints and signs and omens. Maybe that was why so many people loved things like
The Da Vinci Code.