by Jane Haddam
“Father Tibor is standing up for the younger generation again,” old George said.
“Tcha,” Tibor said. “What would you think if you were an eighteen-year-old American girl, and you had some priest with an accent telling you you were going to go to hell because you didn’t let your parents pick your husband? Never mind that the parents aren’t interested in picking the husband. It’s a mess.”
“I’m going to have an American omelet,” old George said. “The one with ham and cheese in it.”
“A Western omelet,” Tibor said.
“Say what you want,” old George said. “I didn’t try to pick a wife for Stepan, and he did fine on his own. And I called him Steve as soon as he wanted me to.”
“All my teachers in school used to call me Gregory,” Gregor said. “It used to drive me crazy. It happened in the Bureau, too. Is Linda actually around here anywhere?”
Gregor turned around and looked across the restaurant. It was slowly beginning to fill up. Almost nobody on the street cooked anymore, unless they were having a party or family was coming. Lida Arkmanian was sitting with Hannah Krekorian and Sheila Kashinian. Lida and Sheila had on their chinchilla coats—end of summer, muggy hot weather be damned.
The doors to the back opened then, and Linda Melajian came in, carrying the coffeepot in one hand. She breezed by at least four tables that wanted her attention and came over to them, flipping the coffee cups upright with her free hand.
“George will have a Western omelet, and Bennis is eating with Donna, so Gregor will have scrambled eggs with bacon and sausages and hash browns, plus buttered toast and nine-one-one on speed dial,” she said. “How am I doing?”
“Perfectly,” Gregor said. “But Bennis is going to be here, even if it’s at another table, so maybe I ought to tone it down a little.”
“Do what you want,” Linda said. “But Bennis is picking Donna up at Donna’s, and you know what that’s going to be like. They won’t be here for an hour. I’m supposed to tell you that hardwood floors are better in the master bedroom than a carpet is, and you can always buy an Oriental rug.”
“Bennis told you to talk to me about hardwood floors in the master bedroom?” Gregor said.
“No,” Linda said, “Lida did. She was talking to Bennis about it yesterday, I think. Really, Gregor, I don’t see the point. Do you? I mean, there isn’t really a master bedroom in that place, not like there would be in a modern house, with a bathroom and walk-in closets—”
“There will be by the time Bennis gets through with it,” old George said.
“You know what I mean,” Linda said. “Let me go get you your food and find out what everybody else wants. There was some guy in here at opening, he was standing right outside the door when I came to unlock it. Anyway, he’s looking for Gregor.”
“Is he here now?” Gregor asked.
“Nope,” Linda said. “He said he’d be back later. I’ve got no idea where he went. There isn’t anything open around here at a quarter to six in the morning, and it’s not like he could go home. I saw his car. It had New York plates.”
“That will be your appointment,” old George said. “Bennis said he was from New York.”
“He’s also not supposed to be here until eight,” Gregor said.
“Whatever,” Linda said. “He’s probably around somewhere, wandering into bad neighborhoods and getting mugged. Not that he’s the kind of person you’d think would get mugged. He’s absolutely enormous. Taller than Gregor even. And he’s fat. I don’t know. Maybe they’d mug a fat guy. They don’t usually like tall, though.”
“‘They’ is muggers?” Gregor asked.
“Exactly,” Linda said. “But there’s the fat, and then there’s the—I don’t know. Aura. He was the most nervous person I’ve ever seen. He practically jumped out of his skin when I came up behind him. And he had a briefcase. One of the old-fashioned floppy kinds with straps that you buckle like a belt.”
“This is supposed to make him more likely to be mugged?” Father Tibor said. “You’re not making any sense.”
“I didn’t say I was making any sense,” Linda said. “I was just telling you what I saw. Anyway, I put a RESERVED sign on one of the bigger tables against the wall. Anybody with a briefcase as big as that is going to have to have some room to spread out. I’ll go get everybody’s food. Have the sausages, Gregor. Bennis won’t be here anytime soon. Maybe I’ll accidentally hit Sheila Kashinian on the head with the coffeepot when I get there. Honestly, if that woman wants to know the calories of anything else ever again, I’m going to slit her throat.”
“She’s waving at you,” Gregor pointed out.
“She waves at me every twenty seconds,” Linda said. Then she straightened up a little. “There he is. The guy from this morning. He’s just coming through the door.”
Gregor, Tibor, and old George all looked up at once. There was indeed a strange man coming through the door. He was strange in the sense of not belonging to Cavanaugh Street, and strange in the sense of being very odd looking.
Linda had been right about the size. The man was very, very fat, but the first thing you noticed was the height. Gregor was almost six foot four himself. This man had to be closer to six eight. He was holding the briefcase up to his chest, keeping his arms clapped across it as if he were carrying nitroglycerin. He looked around the restaurant and then around again. Gregor thought his head was moving too quickly to actually see anything.
Then the man caught sight of Gregor, and the air came out of him as if somebody had punctured his tire.
He practically ran to the window booth and held out his hand.
“Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “I’m Howard Androcoelho.”
TWO
1
For some reason, Howard Androcoelho reminded Gregor Demarkian of Shrek—Shrek the character, and Shrek the movie. He did not look like the sort of man who should run. It wasn’t just his size. He didn’t look healthy. His face was pasty and the wrong kind of white, not like skin but like paper. The veins in his neck stood out on his neck even under all the fat. His hands were faintly trembling. Gregor took it all in and decided that the man was not on any kind of drug he knew the symptoms of. For one thing, the kind of drug that made your hands tremble also made you thinner.
Gregor took Howard Androcoelho’s hand and shook it. Then he looked at the briefcase. Howard Androcoelho looked at the briefcase, too.
“Oh,” he said. “Yes. I brought everything with me. Well, not everything. Copies of nearly everything, though. I got the permission of the mayor. I’m sorry to interrupt you. I’ve been driving for hours. I just thought, it was a restaurant, I thought I’d stop and get something to eat, you know, before our meeting. I didn’t realize you’d be here, too.”
“It’s all right,” Gregor said. “I think Linda reserved us a table so that we could spread out—”
“It’s right here,” Linda Melajian said, moving in quickly. “I just knew he was your appointment, Gregor. I mean, why else would anybody be in here at this time of the morning if he wasn’t from the neighborhood? I’ve got a nice big table. You can empty that briefcase all over it, if you want.”
“Oh,” Howard Androcoelho said. “Well. Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m sorry. I really didn’t meant to interrupt anything. It’s just that I don’t know Philadelphia, not really, and I was afraid I’d get lost, so I started out early. And then, it’s like I said. I drove for hours and hours and hours. I should have stopped at McDonald’s.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Linda said, shooing Howard toward the appointed table. “We can do a lot better than McDonald’s. Sit down and I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”
Howard Androcoelho sat down. Gregor wasn’t entirely sure how they had managed to get across the restaurant to the big table, but they had. Howard sat down in a chair and looked around.
“You don’t have to bother about me now,” he said, looking back at the window booth. “We’re not on till eight o’clock an
d that’s an hour and a half from now. You go have your breakfast and I’ll have mine, and then—”
Gregor sat down at the other chair at the big table. “That’s all right,” he said. “You’re here, I’m here, we might as well get on with it. Are you sure you don’t need some rest? You look—”
“Terrible?”
“Like you’re about to have a stroke,” Gregor said.
“I know,” Howard said. “Maybe I am about to have a stroke. I haven’t slept for—I don’t know. It’s Monday? Of course it’s Monday. It’s Labor Day. I haven’t slept since last Monday, because last Tuesday evening—” He paused. He put the briefcase on the table and opened it. It was complicated. Straps had to be unbuckled. The leather of the flap was old and bent and wouldn’t straighten out.
Gregor considered offering to help, but thought better of it. He thought he’d only confuse Howard Androcoelho more. Linda Melajian brought over his cup of coffee and a menu. She put them down on the table.
Howard Androcoelho found what he was looking for, double checked to make sure, and then put it down on the table. It was a photograph, printed out on glossy paper, but—Gregor was sure—originally taken on somebody’s phone. For a moment, Gregor thought it was in black and white. Then he looked closer, and it was a scene at night.
It was a very odd scene. In the background was what appeared to be a part of a billboard. In front of it, a body was hanging, the neck bent and obviously broken, the head obscured by what looked like a burlap sack.
“Well,” Gregor said.
“That’s how we found him,” Howard Androcoelho said. “Just like that. As if he’d been executed.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Had he been?”
Howard Androcoelho shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. The medical examiner wants to call it a suicide and get it over with. I don’t think there’s any physical evidence that anything else happened. Except for the hood on his head, or the hood-ish thing. It was just a feed bag. But suicides don’t usually do that, do they? Put something over their heads like that.”
“Not usually,” Gregor said. “If the medical examiner thinks it’s suicide, what makes you think it’s not?”
“I don’t think it’s not,” Howard Androcoelho said. “It’s just that—the circumstances are kind of odd. We tried to work it out after we cut him down, you know. As far as we can tell, he’d been hanging there for hours, hanging off this billboard all lit up by the nightlamps, you know, the way billboards are. And nobody noticed.”
“Was it in an out of the way place?”
“It was right on the corner of the entrance to Mattatuck–Harvey Community College,” Howard Androcoelho said. “The place is huge, and it was evening. Students and teachers were going in and out all the time. The ones going out wouldn’t have noticed anything necessarily, but the ones going in had to pass right by the thing. There are evening classes, starting at seven, all fall term. People were going in and out. Nobody saw him.”
“Maybe he wasn’t there,” Gregor said. “Maybe he got there, I don’t know, when did you find him—”
“We cut him down, it was a little after nine.”
“So maybe he got there a little before nine.”
“Not according to the forensics,” Howard said. “Not that we’ve got the kind of forensics you people have down here. We don’t. But we got a bunch of money from the Homeland Security people after 9/11, so we’ve got a mobile crime lab, and a lot better equipment than we used to have. Anyway, our guy says he’d been up there a minimum of two hours. Which means that people were passing back and forth in front of him for—well, forever.”
Gregor looked at the picture again. The lights around the body seemed to turn it into a display, something you were supposed to look at, something calling attention to itself.
“I wonder if he expected it,” Gregor said.
“Expected what?”
“Not to be found for at least two hours,” Gregor said. “Not everybody who tries to commit suicide is trying to commit suicide. Some of them are just trying to get attention. Maybe he hanged himself there because he expected people to notice him right away, and then, when they didn’t, he died.”
“If he hanged himself there, that won’t be the only reason he did it,” Howard said. “And if somebody else hanged him there, that won’t be the only reason they did it, either. Let me show you something else.”
Howard reached back into the briefcase, shuffled more papers around, took more papers out and put them on the table, and shuffled other papers around. Gregor didn’t think he’d ever seen a police officer this disorganized about his evidence. It was a wonder that this man had ever solved any case at all.
Howard finally found what he was looking for and pulled it out. It was another photograph, also of the body and the billboard behind it, but taken from farther out, so that the billboard as clear. It was an oversized photograph, too, so that the billboard was very clear.
CHESTER RAY MORTON ran across it in outsized capital letters. Gregor looked above those and saw the words HAVE YOU SEEN
Below that, there was a phone number, also in outsized letters, and then, underneath that:
AWARD FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO DISCOVERY OF HIS WHEREABOUTS
Gregor sat back. “That’s interesting,” he said.
“It’s more than interesting,” Howard Androcoelho said. “That billboard? The guy they’re looking for there? That’s the guy that we found hanging.”
2
When Linda Melajian came back to take Howard Androcoelho’s order, he had it ready. Gregor listened in fascination as the man ordered a double stack of pancakes with butter, syrup, sausages, and hash browns, as if he were the star of a television commercial for IHOP. Linda did not bring Gregor’s own order—which really wasn’t much better—although everybody else at the window booth had been served. Maybe she was trying to do the professional thing and make sure Gregor and Howard ate together. Gregor had had a talk with Linda once about the professional side of waiting tables. There was a lot more to it than he would have suspected.
Gregor waited until Linda had refilled his coffee cup and bustled off toward the kitchen. Then he waved at the mess on the table and said, “Well?”
Howard Androcoelho sighed. “I was one of the detectives in charge,” he said. “When this whole thing first started. When Chester went missing.”
“He was somebody you knew? Somebody you’d call by his first name?”
“Well,” Howard said. “It’s not like Mattatuck is a small town anymore. We probably have fifty thousand people. But the Mortons are sort of, I don’t know—what would the newspapers call it?—locally prominent. Like that.”
“Locally prominent as what?”
“They run the largest trash collection company in the country,” Howard said. “And don’t laugh. They were the first, and they’ve got most of the business in town, and most of the business in all the towns around us. They’re good, and they’re cheap. You’ve got to have trash collection in Mattatuck. We’re too big now not to insist on it, so we’ve got a city ordinance. But most of the towns around us let you do what you want. A lot of people just pile their garbage in the back of their truck and then haul it on out to the dump. Morton’s is good enough and cheap enough so that a fair number of them pay to have them haul it instead.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “I assume they therefore have money.”
“Hard to tell,” Howard said, “but, yes, I’d guess so, too. Best guesses in and around town are that they’re worth about ten million dollars, between the business itself and investments. They’ve got a bunch of kids, and the kids are going into the business. Even the daughter is doing bookkeeping. Hell, okay. They insist that the kids go into the business.”
“And the kids don’t want to?”
Howard considered this. “It’s hard to say. You’d have to know Charlene. That’s the mother. The woman is a lunatic. It’s like she had these chil
dren, they came with umbilical cords attached, and she’s never going to cut them. If you know what I mean.”
“Sort of,” Gregor said. It sounded like half the Armenian immigrant women he’d known in his childhood.
“So,” Howard said, “Chester didn’t want to. Go into the business, I mean. And there’s probably another one of those coming up, because the youngest one? Kenny? He’s got two Internet businesses going, he’s got his own business cards. I don’t know how she’s keeping him at home. He’s got to be making more than she’s willing to pay him already. Whatever. Chester didn’t want to go into the business, and he didn’t want to live at home.”
“So did he do something about it?”
“He did,” Howard said. “He wasn’t any Kenny, that’s for sure. He didn’t have that kind of drive. But he did get an outside job, at some convenience store, I think, and he got himself a trailer at the most white trash trailer park in Mattatuck and he moved out. Oh, there was a girl. Did I tell you there was a girl?”
“A girl the mother didn’t like, I take it,” Gregor said.
“Exactly,” Howard said. “Darvelle Haymes. I didn’t make that up. That was really her name. There’s a go-getter, if you’re looking for one. And I think maybe that was the problem. Charlene thought Darvelle was only after Chester for the money.”
“And was she?”
“Hard to tell,” Howard said again. “I’m not good at motive, Mr. Demarkian, I never was. Darvelle got her associate’s degree and then she got her real estate license and now she’s something of a big deal. She does a lot of business. She’s got her own house, and it’s not a trailer. So, I don’t know. Maybe she was. Maybe that was her first idea for making something of herself. Maybe it wasn’t and she already knew she was going to do all right on her own. I can’t tell you. Just that she and Chester were a thing, and when Charlene tried to put her foot down and break it off, Chester quit the family business and moved out. And that was that for about six months.”