Flowering Judas (45 page)

She crossed her legs at the ankles. She folded her hands in her lap. She stared straight ahead. When she heard a car in the driveway, she didn't even flinch. It wasn't their car. It was Stew.

Stew came in through the side door, through the kitchen, the way he always did. He called out “Charlene?” as soon as he was in the house.

Charlene unfolded her hands and looked at the palms of them. “I'm in here,” she said.

Stew stumbled through the kitchen and then out into the hall. Stew always stumbled. There was something about his body that did not work right. It never had, even when they had all been in high school.

Charlene looked up when he came through the archway from the dining room. She folded her hands again. She didn't smile.

“You could have told me you were leaving,” Stew said. “I'd have come with you. I never said I wouldn't come with you.”

“I asked you before,” Charlene said. “I asked you and Mark and Suzanne and Kenny. Kenny hung up on me. Did you know that? I think he was with that girl. That girl he met at the college. Another one from the trailer park. What happened to our children, that all they want to know is people from the trailer park?”

“That isn't true,” Stew said. “Suzanne is married to a very nice boy. You practically picked him out yourself. And Mark—”

“What about Mark?” Charlene said. “It will probably turn out that I'm responsible for that. Mark without a girlfriend. Mark without a girlfriend for years. Maybe he's gay. Maybe I made him that way. It's what everybody will say, in the long run.”

“I don't think Mark is gay,” Stew said, “and I'm pretty sure you couldn't make him that way if he wasn't. You're not thinking.”

“I'm thinking fine,” Charlene said. “They'll be here any minute, and then we'll have to listen to the whole thing, all the bilge, everything. It would have been different if he had died. Then, I mean. It would have been different if they'd have found him dead when he went missing. It wouldn't have been like this, then.”

“And that's what you wanted? You wanted him to be dead?”

“He came here, you know, before he went over to that girl's house. He left me a note. Maybe if I'd have been here, it would have been different.”

Stew sat down on the love seat. Charlene tried to remember what it had been like sleeping with him, but she couldn't. She could remember a time in her life when sleeping with somebody was the biggest decision any girl could make, and girls talked about it in the bathrooms at school, talked and talked about it, as if talking about it would make it disappear. She hadn't talked about having sex with Stew, because she hadn't had sex with Stew. Not until they night they were married.

“Charlene,” Stew said.

“I was thinking about high school,” Charlene said. “You and me and Howard and Marianne and Althy Michaelman. Girls getting pregnant. Girls getting kicked out. Boys telling lies. I suppose I thought it was normal. Boys always tell lies.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I burned the note,” Charlene said. “I did it as soon as I heard he'd been found hanging from that billboard. I knew he'd committed suicide. I knew it as soon as I heard he was dead. She must have strung him up there herself, just to laugh at me.”

“Herself?” Stew said. “Do you mean Darvelle? Darvelle couldn't have gotten Chester's body up on that billboard. She's a tiny thing.”

Charlene shrugged. “Then she got that boyfriend of hers to do it for her. It doesn't matter. Why would it? I did everything but cut out my own heart to make things right for him, and in the end I might as well not have bothered. He accused me of it. Did you know that? He accused me of it.”

“Accused you of what?” Stew said. “Charlene, honest to God, you need to go lie down for awhile. You look white as a sheet.”

“I'm not going to lie down. They'll be here any minute.”

“They? Do you mean the police?”

“Howard, and that Mr. Demarkian person. I knew that was going to be trouble. I knew it. What could Howard possibly have been thinking? Bringing in somebody like that, somebody who's been on television—maybe Howard thought he'd end up on television, too. God. Does Howard think? Does he?”

“Charlene.”

Charlene stretched out her legs. They felt stiff. Her ankles hurt. “Howard Androcoelho, of all people,” she said. “He couldn't even get Marianne to marry him, and it's not like she's going to get any other offers. You spend your whole life building up. Building up a family. Building up a business. Building up a life. You work and you work and you work and in a moment it's gone.”

“Nothing's gone,” Stew said. “Except Chester. Chester is gone. He was more troubled than we realized. He ran away. He got himself in some kind of trouble. He was depressed. It's a sad thing, but it doesn't mean that everything is gone.”

Charlene smiled. Out past the tall, thin windows that flanked the double doors, there was no sound on the street at all.

3

Howard Androcoelho was moving very slowly. He was moving so slowly that it felt as if the air around him had turned into molasses. Nothing made sense, except it might—and if it did, that was worse.

Marianne was still in the building, waiting in his office. He came up to her and closed the door. Of course, the door didn't have a lock. Anybody could walk in at anytime. He still felt better with the door closed.

“Well?” Marianne said.

Howard leaned against the door, as if that could keep somebody out. “He says he knows who killed Althy and Mike,” he said.

“Is that all he knows?”

“I don't think so.”

“Crap,” Marianne said.

Howard didn't usually have trouble being short of breath. He was a fat man, but he thought he was also a fit man. Maybe that was not true. He was having trouble breathing now. “We've got a call in to Charlene,” he said. “Well, to all the Mortons, I guess. He wants to go over there.”

“And?”

“And I'm going over there,” Howard said. “Of course I'm going over there. He wants to bring a patrolman. Or a couple. Or something. I don't know. Do you remember me telling you about that thing, about the ground around the trailer being all dug up about the time we found Chester Morton dead?”

“I think so.”

“I included a picture of it, some pictures of it, in the material I sent him when I asked him to come up here,” Howard said. “I was just trying to cover all the bases. It was that trailer and it was the timing so I threw the pictures in there. He was just looking at him and that's when he said he'd made a mistake, but we'd better go see Charlene and the Mortons first. I don't like this. I don't like the way this works.”

“Nobody likes this,” Marianne said. “I kept trying to tell you. Every department that works with him has reason to regret it, even when they get what they want and then have him back again. He sees things. He sees things that nobody else does because he isn't used to them, so they stand out for him where they wouldn't for us. Do you get it?”

“I think we're going to end up having to have a regular medical examiner,” Howard said. “And a morgue.”

“That was going to come eventually.”

“Yeah, I know. But I thought maybe it could come after we'd both retired.”

“Where is he and what is he doing?”

“He's upstairs looking through his file,” Howard said. “It's incredible how much time he spends doing that. He looks through the file and looks through the file and looks through the file. Then he moves pictures around. It makes me want to scream.”

“Get back to him,” Marianne said. “I'd better get back to the office. You can't have the mayor away from her desk for half the day, not even in a little town like this. We'll think of something. Don't worry. We'll think of something.”

“You don't have to think about it,” Howard said. “It was my fault, wasn't it? It was all my fault. If I'd suggested it instead of just losing my mind, you wouldn't have gone along with it. You'd have knocked some sense into me.”

“If you'd been able to think ahead to it, you wouldn't have done it,” Marianne said, “and I helped you in the end, so I do have to think of something. But for God's sake, Howard, don't do that thing where you just shoot your mouth off and—”

“I won't do that,” Howard said.

“Good.” Marianne got her purse off the floor and walked across the room to where Howard was still leaning against the door. He moved away to let her pass. “I'll call you tonight,” she said.

Howard watched her walk out into the main part of the station. He'd known her all his life. They'd met in kindergarten, when they were both five. Maybe they should have done something about it sometime along the way.

Marianne left and Gregor Demarkian returned, almost simultaneously. He was carrying photographs in one hand and a briefcase in the other. Howard wasn't sure what was going to happen next.

“Mr. Androcoelho,” Demarkian said. “Come look at this for a minute.”

Howard moved aside so that Gregor Demarkian could go through the office door without interference. “I made the call to the Mortons,” he said. “Charlene says she'll meet us at the house. I don't suppose there's anything wrong with that. I don't blame her for not wanting to gum up the business with a murder investigation.”

Gregor Demarkian went over to the desk and dumped the photographs on it. They were the same photographs of the ground being dug up around Chester Morton's trailer he had been looking at before.

“Nobody ever mentioned this,” he said. “But it's interesting, don't you think?”

“I guess,” Howard said.

“I was wrong about New Jersey,” Gregor said. “I knew this all had to be about the baby, but I thought Chester must have taken the dead body of the infant when he left here. He took it. He stashed the body somewhere it would not give itself away, in a plastic bag in other plastic bags, in the ground, somewhere so that it wouldn't smell. And then when he wanted to come back here, he dug it up and took it with him. I was so sure of that, I got a Bureau agent to go talk the police in Atlantic City into getting a warrant for Chester Morton's place of residence to check for traces of it.”

“Chester Morton was in Atlantic City?” Howard said.

“Yes, he was,” Gregor said. “But the body of the baby wasn't. The body of the baby was here. All these years.”

“And we never noticed it?” Howard said. “What was it, out in the woods, or what?”

Gregor Demarkian shook his head. “It would have made sense, wouldn't it, to have taken it out into the woods somewhere? But then, maybe not. Kids stumble over stuff in the woods. Hunters do, too. So if you absolutely did not want it found, if you did not want anybody to connect you to the death of an infant, maybe it would make more sense to keep it where you could keep an eye on it. Like in the ground around the trailer.”

“So that's where it was? Buried under the trailer? Chester went and buried the body of an infant under his trailer? I think you're crazy.”

“I'd think I was crazy, too, if that was the kind of thing I was going with,” Gregor said. “In the first place, Chester didn't bury the body. In the second, the body wasn't buried around the trailer. It couldn't have been. People in that trailer park will hide from the police. They'll close their blinds and play dead while Kyle Holborn runs around doing whatever he wants to do with a full-grown adult corpse, because he's got a uniform and a patrol car and they don't want anything to do with the law. But if one of their own was burying something in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day for that matter, they'd have been all over it.”

“He wasn't one of their own,” Howard said reflexively.

“He lived in the park,” Gregor Demarkian said. “That was as close to being one of their own as he needed to get. Let me shove some of this back in my briefcase and then let's go. I need to talk to Charlene Morton.”

“But where did he bury the body?” Howard said. “You've still got the corpse of an infant wandering around. Where did he put it?”

“He didn't put it anywhere,” Gregor said. “He didn't bury it and he didn't know where it was buried. Although I think he might have thought he did.”

“He thought it was in the ground around the trailer.”

“That's right.”

“But maybe it was,” Howard said. “I mean, maybe he found it when he went looking for it. Look at those pictures. The ground is dug up everywhere. Maybe—”

“If he'd known where the body was buried,” Gregor said, “if he'd buried it himself, he'd have had a better idea of where to dig. Those are pictures of a blind search. Everything is uprooted everywhere. And not just around his own trailer, but around the one next door. If he'd found the body, he'd have stopped digging. But he never stopped digging. Not until he had the whole area completely unearthed. So he didn't find it there.”

“It wasn't a body anyway,” Howard said. “It was a skeleton.”

“Let's go over and talk to the Mortons,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I need to get back to Philadelphia for a birthday party.”

 

SEVEN

1

Gregor Demarkian did not go out to Charlene Morton's house in Howard Androcoelho's car. He'd had enough of Howard Androcoelho on any level. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in a small space while the man asked him questions while trying not to actually ask him and pumped him for information he didn't actually need.

Instead, Gregor sat next to Tony Bolero and punched numbers into his cell phone one after the other—to Bennis, because he wanted to hear her voice; to Ferris Cole, to find out what could be found if you searched a place where a body had decomposed; to Rhonda Alvarez, to explain why the police probably weren't going to find what he'd hoped they'd find in wherever Chester Morton had been living in New Jersey.