by Jane Haddam
Gregor was thinking about it some more. “Can we go over and see the place?” he asked. “Would we have to get a warrant? Would Mrs. Morton let us in?”
“Charlene would let us in with bells on,” Howard said, “but maybe she’ll be busy. Then we can get her to just give us the key. When do you want to go?”
“What about right now?”
“You mean drive over there right this minute?”
“Something like that. We should stop and call Mrs. Morton, if she’s the one we need permission from, and the key—”
“Give me a second,” Howard said.
He punched something on his dashboard, and Gregor suddenly realized that the car was set up to make it possible to dial, talk, and drive all at the same time when Howard Androcoehlo said, “Charlene Morton,” very loudly, and the car was suddenly filled with touch-tone beeps.
“Neat, isn’t it,” Howard said.
“More of that stimulus money?”
“Absolutely,” Howard said. “I loved that stimulus money, I really did. It had to go to law enforcement, we used it for law enforcement, but it’s not like we needed more cops on the street or more clerks in the office. We even got ourselves a SWAT team, and I don’t know what we’re ever going to use it for. For terrorists, it’s supposed to be. Any terrorist who finds himself in Mattatuck is lost.”
What had been the vague background buzz of a ringing phone suddenly became a voice, a harsh and low voice. “Morton Rubbish Removal,” the voice said.
“Hello, Kay,” Howard said, “this is Howard Androcoelho. Is Charlene around somewhere I can talk to her?”
Gregor took another look at the road. It had moderate traffic. Howard seemed to be able to concentrate on it. Gregor told himself it would be all right—he needed to use Tony for these things; he didn’t like the way Howard Androcoelho drove—and took his own cell phone out. He punched Bennis’s speed dial number in and waited. He got the answering machine.
“Hey,” he said. Then he wondered why he’d said it. He never said things like “hey.” “Bennis, listen. I suppose you’re out doing something with tiles or wallpaper. I’ve got a problem. Do you think you could find out for me if the New York State Police have some kind of service to provide autopsy help for small towns without their own full-time medical examiners? I don’t know what to call this, but I remember Connecticut does it. It’s just—we could use some serious forensics up here and I’m not going to get that kind of thing from the town of Mattatuck. Call me back and tell me what you find. And give me an update on old George.”
Gregor slid his phone closed. He saw that Howard Andocoelho was staring at him.
“You want to bring the state police in on this?” he said, incredulous.
“Not really,” Gregor said. “There are some states, Connecticut is one of them, where the state police provide help with things like forensics for towns too small to have their own permanent, full-time systems. I was hoping we could get a qualified pathologist to look at that body and explain a few things to me.”
“And it’s not like any doctor couldn’t do that?”
“No, any doctor couldn’t. I’m not insulting your people here, Mr. Androcoelho, I’m just hoping to get a little expert advice. There are things going on here that don’t make any sense to me, starting with that tattoo. It was a small tattoo. Too small to be readily visible—well, not visible. It was visible. But you know what I mean. It wasn’t the kind of thing that slaps you right in the face.”
“The state police,” Howard said. “If they come in here and do anything, they’re going to charge us an arm and a leg. They really are. There’s going to be hell to pay.”
“There shouldn’t be, if it helps you catch a murderer,” Gregor said. “There shouldn’t be even if it helps you establish that this was a suicide and somebody tampered with the body after death.”
“You don’t know Mattatuck,” Howard Androcoelho said.
Then he turned down a long paved road called Watertown Avenue, a road that was oddly half-country and half-strip development. There were half-a-dozen fast-food restaurants, the low-slung crumbling brick of the Department of Social Services, three pawnshops, and intermittent overgrown vacant lots, all of them full of automobile parts. The Department of Social Services had a crowd of people in front of it, all of them looking deflated.
“The trailer park is up here,” Howard said. “Charlene should be there waiting for us.”
“She’ll get there before we do?”
“Yeah,” Howard said, “it’s irony or something. Chester moved out to the trailer park, and it’s far enough from their place out at Sherwood Forest, but it’s right across the back from and maybe fifty feet down the road from the business. I mean, let’s face it. If you had a trash business, where would you put it?”
Gregor had no idea what that question meant, but he didn’t bother to ask. There was a faded, unreadable sign by the side of a dirt track driveway, and that was the beginning of the trailer park.
SEVEN
1
Charlene Morton was neither a fool nor a mental defective, and she didn’t have time to waste. The office was only across the lot at the back of this place. All she had to do was wade through the mud, if that’s what she wanted. It wasn’t what she wanted. She’d done enough wading through the mud since this whole thing began. She’d put up with that little tramp from the trailer park—except, of course, the little tramp wasn’t from the trailer park. The whole thing was just impossible. With a name like that, that girl should have been best friends with a biker gang, and there she was.
Charlene took her own car. It was against her better judgment, and against any judgment she’d ever had, even the bad kind. That’s what you needed to do, to make your day complete, drive a nice shiny new Ford Fusion into that mess of tin and garbage. Charlene could see it now, the faces hidden behind plastic blinds, looking out, making plans. She’d have the car stolen out from under her if she didn’t have people coming to meet her, and that was a fact.
Of course, the people coming to meet her were Howard Androcoelho and that friend of his. That was going to be a joke. Charlene had watched a couple of television programs now that had Gregor Demarkian in them, and Mark had found her something on the Internet about a case in Philadelphia from a month or two ago. The man looked like—well, Charlene didn’t know what he looked like. “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” the Web site had called him. Charlene remembered something about Hercule Poirot. He was a fussy little man with a mustache. They had movies about him on A&E.
She parked the car in front of Chester’s old trailer and sat for a moment looking at it. The sky was clouding up. It was going to rain. She remembered the first time she ever saw this trailer, when Chester had come home happy as a clam to tell them all he was moving out. He expected her to let him go and wait around for an invitation. She wasn’t like that. She’d gotten right into the car and come right over here, and then she’d sat just like she was sitting now, appalled.
There were other people in the trailer park, of course. It had inhabitants. Charlene didn’t understand how anybody on earth could want to live in a place like this, but there were people who did. She thought about getting out and looking around on her own. She did that sometimes. More often, she sent Mark or Kenny to do it for her. She just wanted to be sure none of these people were getting into the trailer and stealing Chester’s things.
Another car came up, Howard Androcoelho’s unmarked special-expensive commissioner of police car, as if Mattatuck was the kind of town that needed a commissioner of anything. Charlene got her purse and got out. Sometimes when she came here, there were people sitting out on their steps, women mostly, smoking cigarettes and not doing much of anything. This was something Charlene really couldn’t understand. There wasn’t a moment in her life when she wasn’t doing something.
Howard got out of his own car. The man Charlene assumed was Gregor Demarkian got out after him. Charlene held her purse on her arm and
over her stomach, like a shield.
“Howard,” she said.
“Charlene,” Howard said. He turned to his side and sort of gestured in that vague direction. “This is Gregor Demarkian, Charlene. I told you all about him. Mr. Demarkian, this is Charlene Morton, Chester’s mother.”
“How do you do?” Gregor Demarkian held out his hand.
Charlene had no intention of taking it. She took her pocketbook off her arm instead and reached inside it for the keys. She’d had a special key ring made for those keys only a few weeks after Chester was gone. It had his picture in it in a plastic bubble.
She stuck the keys into the trailer’s door and opened it. She didn’t know why she bothered with the key. The whole damn thing was made of tin. Anybody who wanted to could get in with a can opener.
She stood back and let Gregor Demarkian go through first, but she went in before Howard. The last thing she was going to do was get formal and polite with Howard Androcoelho. When she got up the steps she saw that Gregor Demakrian was drawing his finger across a thick layer of dust on top of the half-high divider that separated the so-called “entry” from the living room. She cleared her throat.
“I’ve kept the place on, just in case he came home,” she said. “I’m not a lunatic. I haven’t been cleaning it.”
“That’s a good thing,” Gregor Demarkian said. “It tells me the first thing I needed to know. Your son didn’t come back here when he came back.”
Charlene considered saying absolutely nothing. She didn’t like giving Howard anymore ammunition than she had to. She decided that it would not be a good idea, in this circumstance.
“He couldn’t have come back here without seeing me first,” she said. “After he disappeared, I had the locks changed. Lock, I suppose it is. I had it changed, anyway, just in case that woman had a copy. He’d have had to come to me for the key.”
“All right,” Gregor said.
“I suppose you think I’m a suffocating mother,” Charlene said. “I know the kind of thing Howard says about me. He’s been saying it since we were all in school together. But I had good reason, in this case. Chester was gone, and no one would listen to me.”
“There was no reason to listen to you,” Howard said. “You were going on and on about how Chester was dead and Darvelle had murdered him. Well, Chester wasn’t dead.”
“He’s dead now,” Charlene said.
“That’s not the same thing, is it?” Howard asked her.
Gregor Demarkian cleared his throat. “Did you see him when he came back?” he asked.
“No,” Charlene said. “He didn’t come to the house. I guess he didn’t come here, either. Maybe he went to see Darvelle.”
“She doesn’t still live in the same place,” Howard said. “How would he know where to go to find her?”
“Maybe they’ve been in touch all this time,” Charlene said. “Maybe this was one of her bright ideas. She’s got a lot of bright ideas.”
“What about you?” Gregor Demarkian said. “Were you in contact with him at all during the twelve years he was gone.”
“Of course I wasn’t,” Charlene said. “What do you take me for?”
“Do you have any idea where he might have been for twelve years?”
Charlene decided she was really beginning to hate this Gregor Demarkian. She hated the look on his face. It was the same look he had in all those television programs. It was supposed to be “thoughtful.”
“Howard here thinks he’s going to be able to blame all this on me,” Charlene said. “He’s got you out here to back up his fool idea that he can call this a suicide and get away with it. Chester couldn’t stand being on the run anymore and he couldn’t stand the idea of coming back to me, so he killed himself. Well, he didn’t kill himself. And I’m not going to let any of you say he did.”
Gregor Demarkian was walking up and down the length of the trailer, looking at things. There wasn’t much to see. The place was neat enough—Charlene had seen to that—but that thick layer of dust covered everything, half an inch thick at least and completely undisturbed. Charlene found herself wondering if the boys had really come in here and checked things out when she had asked them to. It didn’t look like it.
Gregor Demarkian stopped in the middle of the living room, looked at the ceiling, looked at the windows, and shook his head. “This is where he was, twelve years ago, the last time anybody saw him?”
“Yes,” Howard said. “Yes, Mr. Demarkian, that’s it. Some people who lived in the park saw him walking around that last night, and then that was it.”
“There are clothes back there in a closet. Did you go through those at the time? Was anything missing?”
“I went through everything in this trailer piece by piece,” Charlene said. “I did it no more than four days after Chester disappeared. Not that anybody was listening to me about Chester disappearing. Oh, no. They all thought he’d run out just to get away from me. But I went through everything, and there was nothing missing.”
“Except the backpack,” Howard said. “Don’t forget about the backpack.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Howard. Yes, the backpack was gone, but nobody goes missing with nothing but a backpack full of schoolbooks.”
“Chester did,” Howard said. “You can’t say he didn’t, Charlene. He did.”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “The last time anybody saw Chester was here, in this trailer park, when?”
“The night he went missing,” Howard Androcoelho looked confused.
“I mean what time of day?” Gregor Demarkian asked.
“It was late,” Charlene said. “Around ten o’clock. Which makes sense, because he’d been to class. The class started around seven or eight, I don’t know. It only lasted about an hour and twenty minutes, but he and Darvelle liked to go eat at those fast-food places. She likes fast food, Darvelle does.”
“Chester and Darvelle were in the same class?”
“Yes,” Charlene said. “They were taking all their classes together. They were in love. Wasn’t that sweet?”
“Oh, Charlene,” Howard said. “Just can it.”
“And of course,” Charlene said, “Darvelle was supposed to be pregnant. And don’t start in on me, Howard. She came to my house, no more than a week before Chester disappeared, and she was as big as a house. You can ask Stew, or Mark, or Suzanne. They were all there. She came into my living room and she was as big as a house. And if she wasn’t when you went to talk to her, it’s because she went somewhere and got rid of it.”
“Charlene,” Howard said. “I’ve told you a dozen times—”
Charlene wheeled around on Gregor Demarkian. It was hard to do in this small a space, but she managed it. “He’s going to say it was proved positive that she was never pregnant,” she said. “He’s going to say dozens of people saw her all that same month and they didn’t think she looked pregnant at all. Well, she was pregnant. I saw her. My whole family saw her. And if Chester did run away and hide for twelve years, I know why he did it.”
“Why?” Gregor Demarkian asked.
“Because she went somewhere and aborted that child,” Charlene said triumphantly. “She went somewhere they weren’t particular about the trimester and had that child killed. That’s how the skull got cracked, Mr. Demarkian. That was the skull you found in the backpack. That’s how they do a partial birth abortion. They crack the skull and they haul the body out with forceps. Darvelle Haymes had that done and then she handed over that body to my son, and do you know why she did it? She did it because she knew she was never going to get hold of my money, even if she did marry Chester.”
2
Howard Androcoelho wasn’t really comfortable in his body, but he could usually tell himself there was nothing he could do about it. Men who were big the way he was big always ran to fat in middle age. Just look at all those football players. There were also other football players, but he chose not to think about that. The problem was, with Gregor Demarkian in the car, he cou
ld think about nothing else. Gregor Demarkian was tall. It was obvious that he had once been very muscular. You couldn’t say that he was fat.
“Flabby, maybe,” Howard said, out loud, getting the car to start.
“What?”
Howard looked across the car to the other seat. Gregor Demarkian was on the phone—text messaging. He had been on the phone and text messaging ever since they had left Chester Morton’s trailer and sat down to watch Charlene sail off into the distance in her shiny new Fusion. Charlene always had a new car. She got one every two or three years.
“It’s a miracle somebody didn’t throw a rock at that windshield,” Howard said.
“What?” Gregor Demarkian said again.
“The windshield,” Howard said. “It’s a miracle somebody didn’t throw a rock at it. You don’t want to bring a new car like that to a place like this. You don’t want to bring it even if they don’t know you here. And everybody here knows Charlene.”
“And doesn’t like her, I take it.”
“Nobody likes Charlene,” Howard said. “I don’t think her own husband likes her. I really mean it. Well, you see how she was.”
“She seems to want to control the lives of her children more than is really feasible.”
“She does control the lives of her children,” Howard said. “God, you should have seen her, you really should have, when Chester went missing. Of course, now I look like an idiot, not taking her seriously at the time. Or maybe I don’t. I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, for my reputation, I mean, that I didn’t take her seriously and he wasn’t actually dead. Except that now he is. If you see what I mean.”
“You came out and looked at the trailer,” Gregor said. “You found that blood. I presume you got it tested.”