by Jane Haddam
“We do have that mobile crime lab,” he said suddenly. “I told you that, didn’t I? We got it with the stimulus money.”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
He was still thinking. He looked at the walls of Howard’s office. What wasn’t obscured by old-fashioned filing cabinets was blank and painted that odd sick green that covered the insides of so many public buildings from the Thirties.
“You’re still using filing cabinets? You’re not putting your records on the computer?”
“Oh, we’re putting all the new records on the computer,” Howard said. “We’ve been doing that for fifteen years or so now, more or less. It’s the old records we don’t have on the computer.”
“You don’t have a storage space?”
“Sure we do. In the basement of this building, as a matter of fact. But you know how it is. You stack the stuff up here and there and forget all about it. I suppose I ought to clean out this office once in a while.”
“What about the case we’re talking about, Chester Morton? Is that on the computer, or in analog files?”
“Oh, most of that’s in the computer,” Howard said. “But we’ve also got files. You know, Mr. Demarkian, no matter how good these computers are supposed to be, in the end, you always end up with files. You have to. We’ve got all of Charlene’s letters, for instance, and we’ve got them in files. She didn’t send them on the computer. I don’t even know if she had one back then.”
Gregor looked around a little more. Howard Androcoelho cleared his throat.
“Well,” Howard said. “You were saying, Mr. Demarkian, on the phone, that Chester Morton couldn’t have committed suicide.”
Gregor turned his attention back to Howard. “No,” he said. “That’s not what I said. I said that I could prove that Chester Morton didn’t commit suicide by hanging himself off that billboard. That doesn’t mean he didn’t commit suicide somewhere else.”
“Well—did he? Did he commit suicide somewhere else?”
“Even if he did,” Gregor said, “it doesn’t get you out of your problem. If he committed suicide someplace else, somebody still had to get the body and hang it off that billboard. And that person has to be guilty of half a dozen things, including tampering with a crime scene.”
“Oh, well,” Howard said. “Yes. But—”
“Here,” Gregor said. He put the briefcase he had brought with him onto Howard’s desk, opened it, and took the photograph that mattered right off the top. There was barely any room on Howard’s desk to put a briefcase or even a cup of coffee, but the papers there didn’t look particularly worked on. They just looked messy.
Gregor handed the photograph across to Howard Androcoelho. “There,” he said. “What do you see?”
Howard Androcoelho frowned. “A bare torso,” he said. “Holes that look like they’re for a nipple ring. Some discoloration.”
Gregor reached back into the briefcase and came up with his little magnifying glass. “Try this,” he said. “Right over the nipple near the holes.”
Howard took the magnifying glass and stared at it. “My God,” he said. “It’s just like Sherlock Holmes. I don’t think I’ve used one of these since I was a Boy Scout.”
“I got it for my birthday one year,” Gregor said. “From a friend who was thinking of Sherlock Holmes himself. Look at the area right around the nipple.”
Howard Androcoelho looked. Then he sat back, puzzled. “That’s—what is that? A tattoo?”
“A pinpoint tattoo, yes. The kind men give themselves and each other in prisons. Notice anything else about it?”
“It says MOM.”
“Anything else?”
“If you can see something else here, you have better eyes than I do, Mr. Demarkian. And I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Was Chester Morton in prison? Is that why he disappeared for twelve years and nobody knew where he was? How does that have anything to do with whether he hanged himself off the billboard or not?”
Gregor sighed. “Well,” he said, “it depends on what this looks like on the actual body. But assuming it looks the same, then it’s fair to say that that tattoo was put on that body after death.”
“What?”
“The red of the ink is far too bright,” Gregor said. “In a living body, ink fades. It gets sucked deeper into the skin. It gets acted on by all kinds of bodily chemicals. New skin grows and old skin sloughs off, and it’s a process that makes the ink look duller. But that ink is bright red. It’s like it was put on with red nail polish.”
“Was it?” Howard said. “Put on with nail polish, I mean?”
“I don’t think so. We can check that when we see the body. But there’s something else. There’s the hair.”
“Hair,” Howard said.
“The hair on the chest,” Gregor said. “There’s a reason why that’s the only tattoo on the chest. Chester Morton had enough chest hair to be a werewolf. He’s literally carpeted with it. But somebody shaved that one small space, and shaved it clean.”
“Are you sure? I mean, couldn’t it just be a bit of a bald spot?”
“No,” Gregor said, “I don’t think so. But again, I’d have to see the body. And then there are the holes for the nipple rings.”
“So?”
“So, they’re very wide. Which means Chester Morton was used to wearing a ring in that nipple. He wasn’t used to leaving it out. So we have to ask where exactly that nipple ring has gone.”
“I don’t see how you can tell all that from a single photograph,” Howard said.
“I don’t, either,” Gregor said. “But that’s why I want you to take me to see the body. Let’s make sure I’m not just overinterpreting some anomaly in a picture.”
2
Feldman’s Funeral Home was on East Main Street, and like the rest of Mattatuck, it was bigger and more impressive than he’d been led to expect. East Main Street itself was bigger and more impressive than he’d been led to expect. It not only had stoplights, it had a divider down the middle, running up to the town green. The green began at an enormous granite war monument dedicated to THE CITIZENS OF MATTATUCK WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE WAR FOR THE UNION. The monument was four-sided, though. Gregor expected he’d find the name of Mattatuck men lost in other wars on the other sides of it. The green was relatively substantial, too, with benches along the edges of it for people who were waiting for a bus. Gregor saw one of the buses come and stop and pick up a lone black woman with three overloaded tote bags.
Howard Androcoelho parked in a space clearly marked NO PARKING, which Gregor put down to police privilege. He got out and hurried around the car to Gregor’s side of it, then stood back as Gregor got out on his own. Gregor hated having car doors opened for him.
“Parking’s getting to be a problem,” Howard said. “I’ve got to admit it. If there’s one sign Mattatuck is getting to be bigger than we want it to be, it’s the parking. It’s hard to believe, do you know what I mean? Most places in this part of the country are falling apart. And here we are. Having a problem with parking.”
Gregor looked up at the THE FELDMAN FUNERAL HOME, as the sign read. He was almost sorry Bennis wasn’t here to see it. It was the kind of house she would have loved. It was two story, and Victorian, but on top of that it had enormous porches on both floors, and at the front right corner, where the corner of the intersection was, it had stacked built-on gazebos, too. It was the kind of house girls liked to play fairy princess in, when they were in grade school.
“It’s something else, isn’t it?” Howard said, flapping his arms at it. “They don’t build houses like this anymore, do they? That one was built here in the nineteenth century sometime, before World War I, anyhow. Guy who built it had a big metalworking factory on the outskirts of town. That’s long gone, of course. Nobody has metalwork factories in places like this anymore. Too expensive. Cheaper to build them down in Mexico where you can pay people a dollar a day. It’s something else, let me tell you.”
Gregor grunte
d something deliberately incomprehensible and followed Howard up the steps to the porch and the big double front doors. The door was opened moments later by a small, older man in a fussy suit, the kind of suit Gregor thought must be given away at every funeral director certification ceremony in the world. The man’s hair was very thin and slicked back over his skull like the villain’s in a silent movie. He was very nervous.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, standing back and letting Howard and Gregor come inside. “I told you on the telephone. This isn’t a very good time. We’ve got the Mollerton viewing starting up any minute now. I don’t know what they’re going to think about a police car parked right out front.”
“You should build yourself a parking lot out back,” Howard said.
The fussy little man rolled his eyes. “You know there’s no room to build a parking lot out back. There’s no room to build a parking lot anywhere. He still thinks we’re back in 1950. Or even 1930. Or before that. I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Gregor said. “It’s just—”
“Oh, I know what ‘it’s just,’” the fussy little man said. “I understand completely. I’m just about beside myself, though. This has been the biggest problem. And of course Charlene has been here. Several times. Last time I had to call Stew to come and get her out. She was howling like a dog, she really was. And of course, we had a wake. We almost always have a wake.”
The fussy little man had been moving while he’d been talking, and he’d brought them to a door in a back hall.
“Charlene is the mother,” Gregor said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Charlene is definitely the mother,” the fussy little man said. “And of course, we’ve done all the Morton funerals. I expect we’ll go on doing all of them, in spite of the things she said. But she’s not completely sane on this subject. She is really not.”
The fussy little man opened the door and turned on a light with a switch at the bottom of the stairs. He started down the steps himself. They followed.
What was at the bottom of the steps was an enormous finished basement, fitted out to serve as an embalmer’s studio. Along one wall there were three metal doors that Gregor recognized immediately as belonging to what the police in Philadelphia would probably call meat lockers—cold storage boxes for bodies.
The fussy little man went to the one on the far right and opened the door. Then he put both hands on the end rail and pulled the slab out.
“This has been a problem, let me tell you,” he said. “I’ve got him as close to freezing as I can get him, and he’ll keep, but I’ve only got the three. You can see that. And I’ve got business coming in all the time. It’s been hard to handle.”
Gregor went to the slab and looked down on the body. He was not a medical examiner, but he knew that purple tinge to the face, and the bugging of the eyes and tongue. The man had been alive when he’d been hanged, or hanged himself.
“He looks much better now than when he came in,” the fussy little man said. “Then—well, you’re supposed to be an expert on crime, aren’t you, Mr. Demarkian? It’s Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it? We’ve all heard about you down here by now. The effects of a hanging recede over time. And of course we can make them recede a lot faster. But Howard said I wasn’t supposed to do that. So I just put him in here and let nature run its course.”
“That was probably a good idea,” Gregor said. The body had been left naked except for a pair of briefs. The briefs were not soiled, which meant they must have been put on after death.
“Did you put the briefs on him yourself?” Gregor asked.
“Oh,” the fussy little man said. “Yes, yes I did. It just seemed wrong, somehow, leaving him in there with nothing—I mean with everything. Wasn’t I supposed to do that?”
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” Gregor said. “Did somebody keep the clothes he was wearing when he was found?”
“They’re in evidence bags down at the station,” Howard said.
Gregor bent over the chest. It was there, and it looked exactly as it had looked in the photograph. The letters were not large, but they were large enough so that they would not be missed, especially with the hair cut away the way it was. And they were bright red. Gregor put his finger down and ran it over the surface of the word MOM. Then he stood back and shook his head.
“It’s a tattoo,” he said.
“Oh, Chester had tattoos,” the fussy little man said. “He was that kind. Terrible to say it, really, but there it is. The Mortons are probably the most prominent family in this town. They’ve built that business into a powerhouse. They’ve got a vacation house in Florida. They’re good, hardworking people. But Chester was always Chester. He didn’t like home. He didn’t like the business. He was always trying to—I don’t know what you’d call it. But he had a lot of tattoos. You can see for yourself. And then he had that girl. And that place out at the trailer park.”
“He didn’t have any other tattoos on his chest,” Gregor said.
“It was probably too much trouble to keep up with the hair,” Howard Androcoelho said. “God, he’s got a lot of hair.”
“And this hair,” Gregor pointed to the MOM in red, “was shaved off after he was dead, and the tattoo was put there after death.”
“Really?” the fussy little man said. “How could somebody do that? Doesn’t it take hours and hours to put on a tattoo?”
“Depends on the tattoo,” Gregor said. “This is just those three letters, they’re not large, they’re not fancy, they’re all in the same color ink. They’re the kind of thing prisoners put on each other, or even themselves. Something like that might take forty-five minutes. It would probably take less, even assuming whoever did it didn’t have access to professional tools.”
“But why would anybody put a tattoo on the body after the guy had died?” Howard said. “What would be the point of that?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“Well, whoever did it, didn’t know Chester,” the fussy little man said. “Chester would never have had that tattooed on him, anywhere. Chester hated that woman, he really did. The whole bunch of them hate her. And it’s not hard to see why.”
3
The fussy little man was named Jason Feldman, and as he stood on the sidewalk outside The Feldman Funeral Home watching Howard Androcoelho get himself back inside his car, he fussed even more.
“We’re really not prepared for this kind of thing,” he said to Gregor Demarkian, rubbing his hands together as if he were standing in front of a fire. It was nearly 80 degrees out, and it was already half past one.
“It used to be all right, you know, in my father’s time,” he said. “In those days, what did you get that you had to worry about? Hunting accidents? There are a lot fewer of those than you’d think. And they don’t amount to much, if you know what I mean. No, what you’d get mostly was the wife beating, and that was terrible, but it wasn’t as if they were our clientele anyway. The kind of people who come here either don’t beat their wives, or they’re very careful not to kill them when they do it.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“Well,” Jason Feldman said, “there are the suicides, of course. We have surprising few of those, too. And mostly it’s teenagers. That’s the terrible thing. Are you going to be here long?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I suppose it will be as long as it takes.”
“This town needs to wake up and see the changes,” Jason Feldman said. “We’re not a tiny little burg anymore. Things are going to happen.” He stopped and looked thoughtful. “Not that things didn’t happen before,” he said. “I mean—”
It was hot, and Howard Androcoelho was in a rush. Gregor said good-bye and got into the car. Howard had the air conditioner blasting.
“Having an interesting talk?” he said. “Jason could tell you a lot of things. His father could tell you more, but his father’s been dead now two or three years. There was a time, this was the only funeral home
in the area. You’d have to go clean off to Binghamton to find another one. The Feldmans got all the business.”
“Apparently, there was business they didn’t want.”
“Oh,” Howard said, easing the car out into what was definitely downtown traffic. “Yeah, well. We’ve got an element. Any rural town has got an element. That’s the trailer park I was telling you about. The one where Chester Morton had a trailer after he moved out of his mother’s house. God, did that cause an explosion. She didn’t want him moving out of that house. She doesn’t want any of them moving out of that house.”
“Not even when they’ve married?”
“Well, Suzanne’s married. That’s the eldest, I think. The girl. She’s married, and she and her husband have a house in the next block, and the husband works in the business. I guess there are advantages to that kind of thing if you can stand putting up with it. Guaranteed job. Don’t have to worry about unemployment. Don’t have to worry about the down payment, either. As long as you’re willing to stay tied to the umbilical cord, the money will be sitting there waiting. It would drive me nuts, let me tell you about that.”
Gregor thought about it. “The trailer—didn’t you say something about the trailer in the notes you gave me? Isn’t the trailer empty, or something?”
“It’s empty,” Howard said. “It’s been empty ever since Chester disappeared. Charlene pays the rent on it. Keep the home fires burning. Leave a light in the window. Whatever. Just in case he ever came home, she says.”
“Do you know if he went to the trailer on the day he died?”
“Nope,” Howard said, “and in case you’re going to ask, yes, we did go over there. There was no sign of anybody having been around.”
“Would he have been able to get in?”
“You mean, did he have a key he didn’t have to ask Charlene for?” Howard shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s got a key, though. I half think she goes over there and just sits in the place, communing with spirits. Or what she thought was spirits. She was that convinced somebody had killed him. But then, I can’t really see Charlene spending any time in that trailer park. It’s not the kind of thing she’d put up with.”