Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  Shpetim nodded. There was an English word he had truly learned to hate. It was “subcontractors.”

  “I thought that would cheer you up,” Nderi said. “I thought you were all worried we were getting behind.”

  “I wasn’t worried about getting behind,” Shpetim said. “Construction projects are always behind. I was worried about impossible.”

  “Well, there’s nothing impossible about this. I’ve been feeling really good about it. First really huge project we’ve had, and we’re going to do a spectacular job. And that’s sure to mean more big projects. So, you know, if everything works out all right—”

  “I want to go out for awhile.”

  “What?”

  “I just—I want to go out. I want to take a drive. I’ll be gone about an hour, I think. Could you look after things here?”

  “I look after things here all the time,” Nderi said. “I did it for three days last spring when you had the flu. But you don’t just go places. Where do you want to go?”

  Shpetim took his keys off his belt and handed them over. “I’ll be about an hour. Maybe two. I’ll be right back.”

  “You’re making absolutely no sense,” Nderi said.

  Out on the road, Shpetim thought that he wasn’t making sense. He was bumping along in the downtown traffic in Mattatuck, and he had no idea what he was going to do when he got where he was going. He passed The Feldman Funeral Home and noticed the crime tape up along the sidewalk. That was where the body of Chester Morton had disappeared from just last night. Maybe the problem was that they weren’t paying attention to anything. Shpetim was not entirely clear in his mind who “they” were. “They” were definitely the police, but “they” were also the television news reporters, and the people at the newspaper, and that kind of thing.

  He got to the central station of the Mattatuck Police Department and pulled around the back to park. He sat for a moment behind the wheel of the truck and tried to think of what he wanted to say. He didn’t know. He didn’t even know who he wanted to talk to.

  He got out of the truck and went around the front to enter the building by the door there. The door at the back was labeled OFFICIAL PERSONNEL ONLY, which was just another way of saying, “Keep Out.” This was a beautiful building, too, near new and very well kept. The town of Mattatuck might not know what it was doing in a lot of ways, but it did know what it was doing with buildings.

  There was a counter just inside the door, and past the counter were dozens of people in uniform doing things at computers. Shpetim walked up to the counter and waited. A middle-aged woman in a police uniform came up to greet him, holding a clipboard in her hand.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Communism or capitalism, Shpetim thought, public officials were rude.

  “I’d like to talk to somebody,” he said.

  It sounded lame even as it was coming out of his mouth. He looked around the big area full of people in uniforms. All of a sudden, he was frantic. He was here, and he had no idea why he was here. Then he saw a young man he recognized, and felt better immediately.

  “I want to talk to him,” he said, pointing. “That one over there.”

  The middle-aged woman turned around. “Which one?”

  “That one. The one with the—the young man. He’s got a folder that he’s carrying.”

  “They’ve all got folders that they’re carrying,” the middle-aged woman said. “Do you mean that one over near the cooler? Officer Holborn?”

  Shpetim tried desperately to remember the names of the officers who had come to the building site when they’d called about the baby in the backpack, but he couldn’t. He was still willing to bet that the young man with the folder was one of them.

  “All right,” he said. “Yes. Officer Holborn.”

  The middle-aged woman gave him a look. Then she turned around and shouted, “Hey, Kyle. Somebody here to see you.”

  Shpetim waited patiently while Kyle Holborn came up to the counter. He didn’t look glad to have been called. There was something else about public officials—communist or capitalist, they didn’t like being called on to do any work.

  “Yes?” Kyle Holborn said, stopping at the counter.

  The middle-aged woman seemed to have disappeared. Shpetim straightened up a little.

  “I am Shpetim Kika,” he said. “I remember you. It is my company that is building the new tech building for the community college. You came to the building site with another policeman on the night we found a yellow backpack with a skeleton in it.”

  “Oh,” Kyle said. “Yes, yes I did. But I’m not on that case anymore.”

  Shpetim had no idea how to interpret this. “I have come to find out what is happening about the baby in the backpack,” he said. “You came to the building site and took away the backpack and the skeleton, and then there was a mention in the news the next day, and after that there was nothing. Nothing. A baby is dead, and it seems to me nobody is doing nothing.”

  “I’m sure people are doing something,” Kyle said. “We don’t tell the newspeople everything. But I’m not on that case anymore.”

  “I want to know what is being done about the baby in the backpack,” Shpetim said again. “Do you know what a horrible thing it was, to find it like that? Maybe you’re a policeman, you see things like that every day, it doesn’t bother you. I don’t see things like that every day. There were the tiny bones. There was the tiny head, cracked in half like you do with eggs. And all of it lying there on top of schoolbooks. I can still see those school books. Current Issues, that was one of them. And The Everyday Writer. I know The Everyday Writer. My son, Nderi, had that book when he was in the community college.”

  “Right,” Kyle Holborn said. “I remember. I mean, I don’t remember the titles of the books, but that’s in the report, and—”

  “I want to know what is being done about the baby in the backpack,” Shpetim said. “Something should be done. You people should be taking it seriously.”

  “But I’m not on that case anymore,” Kyle said. “I really can’t help you.”

  Shpetim Kika leaned against the counter, and folded his arms in front of his chest, and frowned.

  “I’m willing to stay here all day,” he said. “But I want to know what’s being done.”

  2

  The screaming had started early, almost at midnight, when the first calls had started to come in saying that Chester’s body had gone missing from The Feldman Funeral Home. Except that the screaming wasn’t really screaming, Kenny thought. If it had been, he’d have had less of a problem with it. His mother didn’t get right in there and make loud noises so that the neighbors could hear. She sat in a chair with her arms folded over her chest and talked in a voice that sounded like it was coming from something made of metal. It sounded—Kenny didn’t know how it sounded. He only knew he was going to have to get out of there, sooner rather than later. He was not an idiot about Chester. He knew Chester had not been a saint. He also knew why Chester had had to get out of this house. It was as if the walls were closing in, sometimes. It was as if the walls had already closed in and were starting to crush him.

  His mother was in the living room when he left, sitting in the overstuffed armchair next to the hearth.

  “It was Howard Androcoelho who did this,” she said, as Kenny opened the front door. “He’s afraid of a real autopsy. He’s afraid of what it will show.”

  Kenny had no idea if this was true or not. He didn’t know Howard Androcoelho, except as the object of his mother’s enduring and very terrible wrath. He thought his mother could be one of those Viking women in the movies, the kind who could wield a broadsword with precision.

  Kenny did have an idea of where he wanted to go, but he wasn’t sure how he was going to get there. One of the difficult things about falling in love with a girl before you really knew her was that you didn’t have all her habits and routines down to where you wanted them. You didn’t know where she was supposed to be when.

&n
bsp; He drove over to the trailer park and sat for a while at the entrance. Then he remembered what Haydee had said about the drug dealers parking in that place and moved the truck inside. He got out and asked a woman sitting on a stoop if she knew where Haydee Michaelman lived. The woman pointed to the trailer right next to Chester’s trailer and Kenny felt like an idiot. He had known that. He really had. He had talked to Haydee about it.

  Kenny knocked on the door of Haydee’s mother’s trailer. A woman came to the door with half her clothes on and a cigarette in her mouth and asked him what the fuck he wanted. He asked her where Haydee was.

  “How the fuck am I supposed to know where Haydee is?” the woman said. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  Kenny went back to sit in the truck and think. If that was really Haydee’s mother, he thought he loved Haydee even more than he thought. He’d never heard a single person use the “F” word that many times in that few sentences. Even in junior high school, when half the boys he knew seemed to be working on using it as often as it could be used, nobody had done it like that.

  The next obvious place to look for Haydee was the Quik-Go. He knew which one she worked at, and he knew she worked as often as she could. He didn’t want to go there, though, because he didn’t want to get her into trouble at work. He had a good idea that if he ended up getting Haydee fired, she’d dump him faster than garbage.

  He pulled the truck back out onto Watertown Avenue and started driving through town. It took him a while to realize that he knew where he was going. He was heading out to school. This made a certain amount of sense. Haydee was taking a full academic load as well as working full time, so she’d be just as likely to be at school as at work. Kenny just wished he’d gotten her schedule.

  He was pulling up to the main entrance and thinking about how to look for her—maybe start at the cafeteria first, keep a lookout for that friend of hers—when he realized there was something going on around the sign. There was a car parked there, and two men. One of the men was leaning up against the car. The other, the taller one, was walking back and forth from the front of the sign to the grassy area behind it, looking up.

  Kenny pulled the truck around, through the entrance. Then, when he got to the roundabout at the top, he pulled through the circle so that he was going back the other way. The school roads were busy this time of day. He had to watch out for a Volkswagen and two more trucks when he made his way around. Then he got a violent honking from a little Chevy Cavalier when he pulled off into the grass where the billboard was. As soon as he did, the man who had been leaning against the car stood all the way up, and the man who had been walking around the sign walked toward him.

  Kenny cut the engine and got out. The man who had been leaning up against the car came up to him.

  “Can we help you?” the man said.

  Kenny suddenly felt really stupid. His family didn’t own this billboard, and they certainly didn’t own the land underneath it.

  The taller man came closer, and Kenny suddenly realized who he as. “Oh,” he said. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry, I thought it was, I don’t know, reporters, or people just screwing around, or something—”

  “Who are you?” the shorter man said. Kenny thought he sounded faintly belligerent, but he didn’t know why.

  “I’m Kenny Morton,” Kenny said. “Chester Morton was my brother. I mean, I’m sorry I bothered you. I didn’t mean to get in the way of anything. I just thought—”

  Kenny didn’t know what he thought. He decided it would be a good idea to shut up.

  Gregor Demarkian’s suit looked dusty and worse. There was brown dirt on the knees. There was a little tear in the jacket. He put his hand out and Kenny took it, although Kenny never felt entirely comfortable when he had to shake somebody’s hand.

  ”I met your mother,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I’m probably going to go see if she’ll talk to me again this afternoon.”

  “She’s loaded for bear,” Kenny said. “She thinks Howard Androcoelho stole Chester’s body because he was afraid of a new autopsy that would show he was really murdered.”

  “Well,” Gregor Demarkian said. “That’s not necessarily a crazy way to think. I’d say that thought could have occurred to anybody.”

  Kenny looked away. Traffic on the road and at the entrance had begun to slow down. People were staring at them.

  “Listen,” Kenny said, turning back to Gregor Demarkian. “I know, you know, that the body is gone and that that’s weird. But you don’t get it. It’s not that my mother thinks that guy stole the body so nobody could prove a murder happened now, it’s like she thinks the body could prove that a murder happened then. Am I making any sense here? It’s like she’s lost the time frame. The body turns up now and it’s like she’s been vindicated for twelve years of thinking that Chester was dead all along. But Chester couldn’t have been dead all along. Do you see?”

  “I do see,” Gregor Demarkian said. “How old were you when your brother disappeared?”

  “I was ten,” Kenny said. “And before you ask, I do remember it. I remember it perfectly. And I remember Chester, too. My mom talks like he was some saint who would never do anything like just take off on his own or do something criminal or something, but that wasn’t true. He was—well. He was weird.”

  “Weird?”

  Kenny shrugged. “He gave me my first marijuana joint.” He flushed. “Not that I smoke anymore, you know, I mean—”

  “It’s all right,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I’m a police consultant, not the police.”

  “Right,” Kenny said. “Anyway, you know what I mean. He had an earring. A great big one that he wore in his right ear. And he had a tattoo. And he did other drugs besides marijuana. And—”

  “Yes?”

  Kenny shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was only ten. But I think there was something going on with my parents, and not just Darvelle. I remember when Chester moved out, it was before he met Darvelle, I’m almost sure of it. Anyway, there were screaming fights, fights like you wouldn’t believe. Fights with my parents and fights with my brother Mark. The first thing I noticed when Chester left was how quiet it got.”

  “Do you remember what the fights were about?”

  “Money,” Kenny said. “And responsibility. Well, at my house, my mother is always talking about responsibility. But this wasn’t like those. This was real crazy stuff. And then Chester left, you know, and got the trailer. And then he went missing. Wherever he went.”

  “Do you know where he might have gone?” Demarkian asked.

  Kenny brightened up. “Not exactly,” he said, “but I just remembered. I know where he always said he’d go if he could ever get good and away from here.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Caspar, Wyoming. He had pictures of it, posters of it, up in his room. And he took the posters to the trailer when he moved there. He had them up on a wall there, and more on the refrigerator. Maybe they’re still there, if you look.”

  3

  Darvelle Haymes thought she’d done the right thing by talking to Gregor Demarkian, but it was the kind of “done the right thing” that made her nervous and upset, and it didn’t help that every single one of her buyers this morning had wanted to talk about nothing else.

  “I don’t want you to think it’s in any way your fault,” Mrs. Castleton had said, over the phone, while she was canceling her appointment for the afternoon. “Of course, you had nothing to do with it. It’s just that you have to be so careful these days, when you’re looking for a place to raise your children. It isn’t like it used to be. We didn’t have all these sexual predators hanging around when I was growing up.”

  Darvelle had wanted to scream at that point. Sexual predators? Who was talking about sexual predators? Chester Morton had never been anything like a sexual predator. He hadn’t even liked sex all that much. Or did this woman mean that she thought that sexual predators went around stealing bodies from funeral homes?

  At
least Mrs. Castleton didn’t know that Darvelle was in some way “involved” in the situation. A lot of the others did know. Darvelle was sure that some of them had chosen her because of it. That was something she had Charlene Morton to thank for. Darvelle would never have done that interview with Disappeared if she’d realized they were going to make her sound like Lizzie Borden reincarnated.

  Of course, when all this started, she hadn’t even known who Lizzie Borden was. She learned that from one of her buyers who liked to gossip.

  The buyer who liked to gossip was not Mrs. Lord, but Mrs. Lord was the buyer for the late morning, and Darvelle was stuck with her.

  “It must be so painful for you,” Mrs. Lord kept saying, as they drove from one house to the other across the length of Sherwood Forest. “I mean, he was a young man you knew, wasn’t he, and you had a relationship with him? And you were only eighteen. That might have been your very first love.”

  “I don’t think it was that serious,” Darvelle said. “And it was a long time ago.”

  “Of course it was, dear. But time doesn’t really mean much when you’re in the grip of strong emotion. And then to have him disappear like that, and everybody thinking he was dead.”

  “Actually,” Darvelle said. “I never did think he was dead.”

  “And then to have it on all those television shows,” Mrs. Lord said. “I feel sorry for you. I really do. It must have been horrible, to have that brought back to you over and over and over again, when you probably just wanted to forget about it. And those billboards. Mrs. Morton must be such a dedicated mother. But I know how she feels. I’d do the same if something ever happened to one of my little children.”

  Mrs. Lord’s little children were twenty-four and twenty-six, with wives and children of their own. They lived on the West Coast. When Mrs. Lord wasn’t obsessing about Chester Morton, she was telling Darvelle all about the wonderful things her grandchildren did and where they were all going to go to college when they got big enough.