by Jane Haddam
“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” the young man said. “I’m glad I’ve got the chance to meet you. Is what I heard really true? Are you really going to bring in one of those state medical examiners to look at Chester Morton’s body?”
Gregor sucked in air. “That got around fast,” he said.
“It’s a small town,” the man behind the desk said. He was much too young to have known Chester Morton before his disappearance. “And people talk.”
Tony Bolero was pulling the car up under the big porte cochere. Gregor mumbled something noncommittal and went out into the warm September air. It was still raining, but the roof of the porte cochere kept that off his head, and the young man at the checkout desk kept him distracted.
“I don’t care how small a town is,” Gregor said, when he got into the car. “News doesn’t travel that fast unless somebody is spreading gossip. Howard Androcoelho must have gone back to the station and announced it all over a bullhorn. And it’s not all that small a town in the first place.”
“All right,” Tony Bolero said.
Gregor didn’t impose on him any further. The Howard Johnson was on the edge of town. They turned into the lights and Gregor watched the buildings go by, first stretched out along thin strips of green, then coming closer together. When the buildings began to come close together, Gregor saw at least three pawnshops, and four convenience stores, and two bars. More than size distinguished a small town from a larger one. These were the kinds of places that asked for trouble.
They made a turn and then another turn, and they were suddenly on the green, with the tall Civil War monument looking like a miniature pyramid displaced from the Middle East. It didn’t look that way in good light. Tony went down one side of the green, turned left at the end of it, then came down the other. The Feldman Funeral Home was just beyond it.
“Here we are,” Tony said, parking at the curb. “Do you need me to come inside?”
“No,” Gregor said. “I may need to talk to you, later. Is that part of this arrangement? Can I sit you down someplace and run ideas by you?”
“You can,” Tony said, “but I don’t know what good it would do. I’ve never investigated anything in my life.”
Gregor gave a noncomittal grunt. Then he got out of the car and walked up to the funeral home’s front door. There was something going on in the front room. It was all lit up, and Gregor could see people moving around. He rang the doorbell and waited. At least he wasn’t going to get the Feldmans out of bed.
The man who came to the door was Jason Feldman himself, and he looked surprised.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Did we have an appointment? Was Howard supposed to call? Howard really is completely irresponsible in some ways. I don’t know why he gets to head up the police department. I really would like to accommodate you, but as you can see, we have a wake going on and—”
“I just need to go downstairs and take a look at the body for a minute,” Gregor said.
“Now? Right now? Why do you have to do that right now?”
“I won’t be long,” Gregor was in the foyer now. It wasn’t that hard to get past Jason Feldman. “I don’t need to disturb anything you’re doing. I just want to check something out.”
“But it’s the middle of the night!”
“I couldn’t settle down to sleep,” Gregor said, moving slowly but inexorably toward the basement door he remembered from earlier. “It really is just one small thing. So if you—”
Jason Feldman rushed to get to the basement door before Gregor did, but he didn’t block the way. It was as if what mattered to him was that no guest in the funeral home should ever open his own doors. Jason Feldman flung the basement door open, turned on the light, and stepped back.
“Really,” he said. “Really. This is not the way I expect things to be done here. We’re not a morgue. We’ve got a business to run.”
Gregor went down the steps. Jason Feldman closed the basement door behind them and followed.
“Really,” he said. “Really. We can’t have things like this here. Bereaved families are very fragile. They’re in a very delicate position. We can’t have their mourning interrupted by police nonsense and all kinds of other things—”
Gregor had reached the room with the cold lockers built into the wall. He turned on the light there and looked at the lockers one by one. They looked exactly as he remembered them from earlier. The room looked exactly as he remembered it from earlier, too, although it was a messy room. A lot can happen in a messy room without anyone noticing.
Gregor went to the locker where Chester Morton’s body was kept and opened it. Then he pulled out the slab.
“Really,” Jason Feldman was saying. “I mean, really, you can’t—”
Jason Feldman stopped dead. Gregor had to force himself not to laugh.
The slab was empty.
PART II
In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
ONE
1
It was like watching a movie, the wrong kind of movie, a Keystone Kops exercise that Gregor was sure was staged for his benefit. He let it unfold without interference. At this time of night, there was very little else he could do. He needed to get someplace and sit down to think. He needed to wake Bennis or Tibor out of a sound sleep and rail at them. He needed something. What he got was Howard Androcoelho puffing up and down the stairs giving every indication that he was about to have a heart attack while the new mobile crime unit did things with brushes and vials that Gregor wasn’t sure they knew how to use.
It was nearly eleven o’clock when they were all finished, and nothing had been discovered or decided that Gregor could tell. He had done his once-over of the area while they were waiting for the police to show up, so he knew all that was available to know. Jason Feldman kept pacing around the room and up and down the cellar stairs, moaning over and over again that it was all impossible, the funeral home was going to get sued, you couldn’t have the police crawling all over the place during a wake. The family wouldn’t stand for it.
Out in the car again, with Tony Bolero at the wheel, Gregor considered his options.
“We going back to the motel?” Tony asked.
Gregor shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I take it you don’t know this area any better than I do. You wouldn’t know where there might be an all-night diner somewhere, or a McDonald’s that stayed open twenty-four-seven, or something like that. Except, not in Mattatuck. I want to be at least two towns over.”
Tony Bolero cleared his throat. “Give me a minute,” he said. Strange clicking noises came from the front seat. Tony grunted. Then he said, “There’s a place called Five Brothers Fast Food. It’s about twenty miles from here. They’re supposed to be open all night. Will that do?”
“How did you know that?”
“I looked it up on the GPS.”
Gregor wasn’t sure what a GPS was—he’d thought it was a way to find routes to where you were going, but to do that you would almost surely need to know where you were going already. This would be something else digital he hadn’t heard about.
He filed the information away and said, “Yes, all right. That will be fine. When we get there, would you mind very much coming in with me and listening to me talk?”
“This is the bouncing-ideas-off-me-thing you were mentioning before?”
“Exactly.”
“I wouldn’t mind at all. It sounds kind of exciting. I’ve never had much to do with crime, you know, except watching it on TV. You know what I’ve learned from the TV? If your wife takes out an insurance policy on your life, run like hell.”
Gregor thought this made a great deal of sense. He sat back and watched the scenery go by, such as there was of it, and such as there was that he could see in the dark. The lights of Mattatuck lasted a little while, first as the town itself, then as the long stretches of strip malls and one-story buildings, then as houses that got
farther and farther apart the longer they drove. A few miles after the last of these, Tony Bolero got onto a highway. After that, there was nothing to see by the big arched safety lights over their heads, and other cars, all of which seemed to be on the other side of the meridian and going in the opposite direction.
The exits were far apart and, for Gregor, hard to see. Tony Bolero got off at the third of them, swung around the curve to a stoplight, and turned right. A few seconds later, he was pulling into the parking lot of Five Brothers Fast Food—but it wasn’t a fast-food place, it was an old-fashioned diner, the kind that had been made out of an aluminum-sided dining car. The aluminum was polished to a high shine. The windows were lit up as if it were noon.
“This is wonderful,” Gregor said.
Tony got out and opened the passenger door. “It looks pretty empty,” he said. “I mean, there’s waitresses, but there doesn’t look like much of anybody else. That what you wanted?”
“It’s just what I wanted.”
The two of them went up a steep set of steps to the glass door and went in. There was one guy sitting at the counter on a stool with a revolving seat. There were waitresses. There was nobody else. Gregor and Tony went to a booth way in the back and sat down, Gregor in the seat that allowed him to see anybody coming in the front door. The menus were sitting in the clutch spring of a metal carrier for sugar, salt, and pepper. There was one of those little wall jukeboxes screwed into the wall. Gregor checked the music and found Patsy Cline, Conrad Twitty, and Frank Sinatra, but nothing from after 1963.
“If this were a Twilight Zone episode, we’d do ourselves a favor by running like hell,” Gregor said.
The waitress came by with her pad. Gregor ordered coffee. Tony Bolero ordered coffee and a hamburger club sandwich.
“Sorry,” he said. “I never got around to eating earlier.”
“That’s all right.”
“I figured what you wanted was someplace out of the way where it didn’t matter if you were overheard,” Tony said. “I figured twenty miles ought to do it for you.”
“I don’t know how much it matters if I’m overheard,” Gregor said, “because I’m fairly well convinced that anything I might have to say is already common knowledge among half of Mattatuck, or at least among those people in Mattatuck that I don’t want to know. So there’s that. But yes, at least trying to be discreet was what I had in mind.”
“I take it from what I heard that there’s a body missing,” Tony said.
Gregor sighed. The waitress had come back with the cups and the coffeepot. She set up the cups, poured coffee in them, and left little plastic packets of cream. Gregor tried his coffee and decided that it was not quite as good as the Ararat’s, but that that was to be expected.
“It’s not that the body is missing,” he said, “it’s that I knew it was going to be missing. I knew who was going to have had to make it missing, and I just can’t see the point. I mean, yes, I do see the point in some ways. Howard Androcoelho doesn’t want that body autopsied. Not by a real medical examiner, at any rate.”
“Howard Andro—”
“Androcoelho,” Gregor said. “The guy who got me up here. The man I went to see this morning. The chief of police, except he calls himself the police commissioner, which is so ridiculous I can barely stand it. Anyway, I was sitting there at dinner tonight, thinking that now that I had a way to get the body autopsied, it was going to disappear. And it’s Howard Androcoelho who has to be responsible for it, one way or the other, because not anybody could just wander down to The Feldman Funeral Home basement and take a body out of there. I wonder where they put it.”
“I saw the police searching the grounds,” Tony said. “They’d have found it if it were there.”
“Oh, I’m sure it left the premises in somebody’s trunk,” Gregor said. “It would be easy enough to get the thing out of there and into a car, because there’s that cellar door that opens right onto the service entrance lot. Just pull your car up there, go down the basement stairs, get the body out, and bring it back up.”
“But couldn’t anybody have done that?” Tony said.
“I suppose they might have,” Gregor said. “But I’d still be willing to bet anything that it was either Howard Androcoelho himself or Howard and an accomplice. He’s the only one I know of with a direct concern about the body—anybody else would have been willing to let the thing go once we’d figured out that Chester Morton didn’t die on that billboard. After that, if the issue was just the murder of Chester Morton, nothing mattered. Getting rid of the body is not going to change the finding or even put it in doubt. We’ve got the pictures from the first autopsy that show clearly that that little tattoo was applied after death. It’s not the murder-finding somebody wants to avoid, it’s the autopsy, specifically. Which leaves a lot of questions and not a lot of answers.”
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either,” Gregor said. “What could possibly be in that body, or on it, that didn’t come out in the first autopsy that might come out if a second and more professional autopsy was done? I was concerned about whether or not Chester Morton had been sedated so that somebody could hang him up and make him look like a suicide—but then we come back to the same thing I was talking about before. That’s a murder-finding, and we’d have that even if there was no second autopsy to confirm it. Assuming it even happened. Even an amateur autopsy isn’t going to miss a load of drugs stuffed into his stomach or his ass. It makes no sense.”
The waitress came with Tony’s sandwich. The sandwich came with a huge pile of french fries. Tony picked up the bottle of ketchup and opened it.
“So what do we do now?” Tony asked. “If you’re right and it’s the police who are hiding the body, it doesn’t make much sense to ask the police to go find it.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “I wish I knew why Chester Morton disappeared. I wish I knew why he came back. And then there’s the skeleton of the baby. There’s something. If Chester Morton was female, a second autopsy might have caught signs of a former pregnancy the first autopsy missed. But Chester Morton isn’t female.”
“Is detecting things always this hard?” Tony Bolero said. “It looks a lot easier on Law and Order.”
Gregor looked at Tony’s immense, exploding sandwich. “I’m not going to ask why Howard Androcoelho brought me in,” he said. “That was to cover his ass with the Morton family. The question now is whether he’s going to try to get me out. And it still comes down to why he’d want to stop a second autopsy, and that is still a question I have no answer to.”
“Maybe you should go out on your own,” Tony Bolero said. “That’s the way Bruce Willis does it in the movies.”
Gregor didn’t want to know what Bruce Willis did in the movies. He did want one of those sandwiches, but after the fried clams a few hours ago, it would probably kill him.
2
Gregor reached old George Tekemanian, finally, in the morning. The crisp, bouncy voice of the nurse said, “Put him through to the room,” and he heard old George complaining about the food.
“I don’t understand why they think it’s better for sick people not to eat,” he said. “I tried to get Martin and Angela to bring me something from the Ararat, but they’re not listening to me. Nobody is listening to me. What do they expect, if they’re just careful enough, I’ll live another hundred years?”
“I think the food is made to nutritionists’ standards,” Gregor said. “The right amount of protein, the right amount of carbohydrates, the right amount of salt.”
“Well, Gregor, if this is what is healthy for me, I’ll be unhealthy. I never liked those hamburger places, but after three days of this, I’m ready for a Big Mac.”
Gregor put down the phone and thought that old George sounded better than he had expected him to. He sounded almost better than he had on that day at the Ararat. Gregor wondered when that had happened. He was beginning to feel like one of
those comedians who annoyed him so much. He wanted to complain that nobody ever told him anything.
He phoned Ferris Cole’s office to warn him against coming down to look at a body nobody could find for the moment. Then he called Bennis and explained to her, as well as he could, what was going on.
“I don’t like these situations,” he said. “I don’t like it when I’m called in not to do a job, but to cover somebody’s ass, and especially not when the person who wants to cover his ass doesn’t want me to do the job. I told you back in Philadelphia that I shouldn’t have touched this one.”
“But if they’re covering up a murder,” Bennis said, “isn’t it a good thing that you’re there? If it’s the police who committed it, especially…”
“I’ve got no evidence that a murder occurred,” Gregor said. “At best, I’ve got a dead body that was moved sometime between the time the man died and the time he was found. And I’ve got a lot of garbage. A huge amount of garbage. Somebody shaved a bit of hair off the man’s chest and tattooed MOM on it in capital red letters—”
“I don’t get that part. Wouldn’t that take a long time?”
“No, not necessarily. Half an hour. Forty-five minutes. Tops. And that’s assuming that whoever it was that did it didn’t have professional tools. It really was a tiny thing. But it’s garbage, Bennis. It’s not a real clue—”
“Oh, you mean it’s a red herring.”
“Yes, all right, maybe,” Gregor said. “But I prefer to think of this kind of thing as garbage. It’s meaningless. It’s a distraction. I’d be willing to bet you anything you want, that whoever tattooed that word on Chester Morton’s chest wasn’t his mother, wasn’t his siblings, didn’t really have any point at all except to get us thinking about it. Assuming we ever noticed it to think about in the first place.”
“But wouldn’t he want you to notice it?” Bennis asked. “I mean, what would be the point if you didn’t notice it?”
“Backup, maybe,” Gregor said. “In case the original plan didn’t work.”