Flowering Judas (48 page)

And he had to be stealing from the business, and not just from Charlene personally, because he must have needed large sums of money on a fairly regular basis. That was, in fact, a reason why Charlene might throw him out. The business is the basis for everything in her life. If the business goes bankrupt, if the business is in trouble, then everything Charlene cares about goes completely to hell.

So Charlene threw him out, and Chester got crazier and crazier in his attempts to get back in, and then there was the baby. Chester found a way to steal money from the business even though he was shut out of the house. He bought the baby from Althy Michaelman, and then, just as he was about to produce it as Charlene's new grandchild, Charlene showed up at his door.

I'll be convinced, to the end of my life, that it was Charlene and not Chester who murdered that infant. I think she did it in a blind rage. Buying a baby is a crime. It's a serious crime with a long prison sentence attached. I think she just exploded, picked it up and hit it against the wall. And then the baby was dead, and things went as I outlined them back in Mattatuck.

Charlene and Chester faked the disappearance. Chester got the money he wanted for drugs and gambling, a lot more of it than he could have gotten if he'd stayed here. Charlene was desperate for him to lie low and keep his mouth shut.

I don't think Chester ever realized that this was, from the beginning, a temporary thing. Eventually, when she felt safe, Charlene was going to want him to come home and get his act together. The interest of the television people just moved the date forward a little.

But Chester couldn't face it. He didn't want to go to rehab. He didn't want to be back home where Charlene would be monitoring his every move and making sure he couldn't play cards or get high. The very thought of it made him desperate. He wanted to come home and be safe and go on living the way he had been living.

Charlene convinced him that he couldn't do that because Darvelle would expose him if he tried, that Darvelle was still furious at him for what he had done to her and frothing at the mouth for revenge.

Charlene thought that would make Chester toe the line. Instead, it made him want to kill himself, and he did.

But he wanted to use his death to get back at Darvelle, so he wanted to leave her with the baby's body. I don't know if he realized that it would only be a skeleton after all these years. He went to the place his mother had told him she had buried it and dug until there was no more room to dig. When he didn't find the body, he probably had a good idea where it was. He went to the greenhouse and dug it up.

Then he went to Darvelle's—everybody was always saying he wouldn't know where that was; she'd bought a house and moved on since he'd been in town; but it wouldn't have been hard for him to find out. His mother was going over there to put up flyers on Darvelle's street every other day or so.

Chester went out there, wrote his note accusing Darvelle and Kyle Holborn of murdering the baby, and then hung himself off Darvelle's bathroom door frame.

And after that, I think you're pretty clear. This would all have been over a lot sooner, and Althy Michaelman and Mike Katowski would still be alive, if Darvelle Haymes and Kyle Holborn hadn't panicked and started acting like idiots.

As for Althy and Mike Katowski—well. You'll never convict Charlene of murdering the baby, but you should be able to get her on those two, if you're careful about the forensic evidence.

That means calling in the state medical examiner. It means no more amateur autopsies. It means no more playing cop with the fibers and the drops of blood.

Mattatuck has gotten too large for you to go on playing the games you do about how you're a small town with no need of a professional law enforcement operation. It is important that Charlene Morton go to jail. I think I've guaranteed that by calling in the state professionals myself while I was there.

But there will be other Charlene Mortons, and you're going to need professional investigations to catch and convict them. It's time for Mattatuck to get its own full-time coroner and forensics department.

I'm sure that if you and Mayor Glew go to the next town council meeting and lay this out, you'll have no problem at all getting a referendum to approve it. I'm expecting to hear all about it in the next few months. Ferris Cole has promised to keep me posted.

And you aren't going to fight it anymore, and neither is Marianne Glew. Because if you do, I'll get in touch with the people I know at
American Justice
and
City Confidential
and a few more of those shows, and I'll point them in the direction of a supposed murder-suicide that occurred in Mattatuck when you and Marianne Glew were partners.

I say “supposed” because you know, as well as I do, that there was no suicide. A man named Dade Warren killed his wife and children, yes, but you two got to him before he had a chance to kill himself. And my guess is that you just lost it. You lost it, you shot the place up, you killed the guy, and then you and Marianne Glew started to worry that this wasn't going to go over well, that it couldn't really be justified by the circumstances. And you both decided to call it suicide and say you'd seen it.

And since Mattatuck didn't have professional forensics, you got away with it. And you've been getting away with it ever since.

Well, it's been a long time. The truth of it probably couldn't be absolutely proved. But I know something about the media. Absolutely proved or not, that truth can ruin your life.

And if you don't do something about the state of law enforcement in Mattatuck in the next six months, I will do it.

Keep it in mind when you think of me.

Gregor Demarkian.

2

Bennis came down when he was still sitting at her old kitchen table. The e-mail had been sent. He was just feeling tired.

“Are you all right?” she asked him. “Are you coming to the Ararat?”

“Yes, I suppose I am,” Gregor said.

He closed the laptop and stared at the black plastic top of it. “I'm a little tired.”

“You've been up for forever,” Bennis said. “Are you depressed? Is that it?”

“Tibor thinks that we're going to blow the birthday candles out on that cake and old George is going to just keel over dead,” Gregor said. “Maybe not that dramatically, you know, but something like that. That he's been holding on just to get to this birthday party, and when he's gotten to it, he'll be gone.”

“Is that really such a bad thing?”

“I think so, yes,” Gregor said. “I'm from a generation that thinks of death as the enemy. And death is the enemy. I've heard all that stuff about quality of life and all the rest of it, but in the end, death is the enemy. And we should have thought of something to do about it by now.”

“I think that old George lived on his own in his own apartment until he was nearly a hundred years old,” Bennis said. “I think he went to the Ararat, and had friends and family, and did all the things people do, and he was happy. I think that's a very good life.”

“That's what Tibor said.”

“Tibor makes a lot of sense most of the time.”

“I was thinking, on the day we took George to the hospital, that he'd lived long enough to see almost everybody he'd grown up with die, and almost everybody he'd been close to for most of his life, too. That we were his second set of friends and family, if that makes any sense.”

“It does,” Bennis said, “but you're not making much. Go put on some serious clothes and come to the Ararat. We're going to set up a big party right after breakfast and go to the hospital. Hannah made a cake. Lida decorated it. It's got the Statue of Liberty on it, and if you light that it throws sparks. The hospital is going to kill us.”

“If there's an oxygen tank within a hundred miles, we're going to kill it,” Gregor said.

“There's no oxygen tank that I know of. Come on. Get up, get out, get moving. What were you doing down here anyway?”

“Sending an e-mail.” Gregor got up. “You can't do anything at all upstairs these days. Isn't there ever going to be a point where you make decisions about these things and we can have our furniture back?”

“I'm getting there,” Bennis said.

She left the kitchen. Gregor heard her moving through the living room, then starting up the stairs to their usual space.

“Come on,” she called, as she went up.

Gregor unplugged the laptop, wrapped the cord into a coil and put the computer itself under his arm.

He was tired and he was depressed and he had this irrational need to not let anyone stage this birthday party, as if not having it would keep old George alive forever. But he'd been having that same idea the other day, and he'd told Tibor about it, and Tibor had not been helpful.

Gregor went into Bennis's living room himself and looked out the big plate glass window on Cavanaugh Street.

It would not be the same place without old George Tekemanian in it.

 

THE GREGOR DEMARKIAN BOOKS
BY JANE HADDAM

Not a Creature Was Stirring

Precious Blood

Act of Darkness

Quoth the Raven

A Great Day for the Deadly

Feast of Murder

A Stillness in Bethlehem

Murder Superior

Dead Old Dead

Festival of Deaths

Bleeding Hearts

Fountain of Death

And One to Die On

Baptism in Blood

Deadly Beloved

Skeleton Key

True Believers

Somebody Else's Music

Conspiracy Theory

The Headmaster's Wife

Hardscrabble Road

Glass Houses

Cheating at Solitaire

Living Witness

Wanting Sheila Dead

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

FLOWERING JUDAS
. Copyright © 2011 by Orania Papazoglou. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haddam, Jane, 1951–

    Flowering Judas : a Gregor Demarkian novel / Jane Haddam.—1st ed.

     p.   cm.

    ISBN 978-0-312-64433-8

 1.  Demarkian, Gregor (Fictitious character)—Fiction.   2.  Private investigators—Fiction.   3.  Armenian Americans—Fiction.   4.  Missing persons—Fiction.   5.  Cold cases—Fiction.   I.  Title.

    PS3566.A613F58 2011

    813'.54—dc22

2011009102

First Edition: August 2011

eISBN 978-1-4299-7193-5

First Minotaur Books eBook Edition: August 2011