Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  Darvelle pulled into the driveway of the last house they were scheduled to see. It was a Tudor split-level, and it was blessedly empty. It was also directly across the street from the Morton’s house. Darvelle had debated with herself long and hard about showing it today at all.

  She cut the engine and put her car keys in her purse. “Well,” she said. “Here we are. This is absolutely the best section of Mattatuck. And this is a beautiful house. It was custom built. It has all hardwood floors. It’s got a brand new kitchen and brand new baths, everything updated within the last year. It’s the best buy on the market, if you ask me.”

  Mrs. Lord beamed. “And now,” she said. “Now with all of this. He comes back, but he comes back only so that somebody can murder him. And steal his body. It must be terrible for you, dear. It must break your heart.”

  “Actually,” Darvelle said again, “at the moment, the word is that it’s more likely that he committed suicide than that he was murdered.”

  “Is it?” Mrs. Lord said. “But they don’t bring that Mr. Demarkian in to investigate suicides, I don’t think. I hear he’s very expensive, and very picky about the jobs he takes. It has to be something really mysterious and complicated before he gets interested. Oh, I’ve heard a lot about him. And of course, I’ve seen him on television. It’s really exciting to have him here, I must say. Have you met him? I’ll admit I’ve sometimes wanted to just find a way to run across him in the street, you know, just so I could say hello.”

  “I think,” Darvelle said slowly, “that it was because of Mrs. Morton that they brought Gregor Demarkian in. The police think Chester committed suicide, but Mrs. Morton doesn’t, and they wanted an independent evaluation. Just so nobody could say they hadn’t done everything they could.”

  “Well, then,” Mrs. Lord said, “there’s the matter of the disappearing body. Bodies don’t disappear on their own. I tell you, when I heard that on the morning news, I nearly passed right out. I nearly did. Can you imagine something like that in Mattatuck? Really. And I was thinking. It had to be at least two people involved, don’t you think? I mean, a single person couldn’t carry a dead weight like that out of the basement of Feldman’s without being seen by somebody. I’m surprised the two of them weren’t seen by somebody. Feldman’s is a busy place. Oh, no, dear. I’m sure there’s nothing like suicide involved in this thing. I’m sure it was murder, and the police know it. You just have to ask yourself who you know who’s likely to do a thing like that.”

  Darvelle didn’t have to ask herself who was likely to do a thing like that. She could think of a dozen people she’d be perfectly willing to murder herself, starting with Mrs. Lord. She sat behind the wheel and counted to ten in her head. She wished the muscles in her arms and back didn’t feel as if they had all the plasticity of petrified wood. Then she popped the driver’s side door and got out onto the driveway.

  “It’s an excellent value in a house,” she said firmly. “And they aren’t building split-levels anymore, so this is a very rare chance to get something in a style I know you like. And unlike most split-levels, this is especially large, over three thousand square feet, so you’ll have more than enough room for anything you want to do. And it’s designed for entertaining, with an L-shaped living-dining room space that allows a free flow of traffic for really large groups of people. Think of your annual Christmas party, the one you were telling me about—”

  Mrs. Lord stepped out of the car and looked around, but Darvelle didn’t see her. She was looking at the end of the driveway. That was Charlene Morton standing there. Yes, of course, Charlene lived across the street, but Darvelle hadn’t expected her to actually show up. Or even to know that Darvelle was there.

  On the other hand, she should have expected it. Charlene always knew where she was and what she was doing. It had been that way for twelve years. Charlene had known the house Darvelle was buying before she bought it. Charlene had known every car Darvelle bought before she bought it. Darvelle sometimes thought Charlene lived inside her head.

  Mrs. Lord looked at the end of the driveway and brightened up. “Oh, that’s Mrs. Morton, isn’t it? Does she live around here? I mean, I knew she lived in Mattatuck, of course, that’s been on the news, but I never realized she was right in the neighborhood. Oh, the poor thing! Look how distraught she is!”

  Distraught my ass, Darvelle thought. She slammed the car door shut and turned her back on Charlene, as if Charlene weren’t really there, as if she was one of those hallucinations from the Beautiful Mind movie.

  “The foyer,” she said firmly, “is really entirely unlike anything else I’ve shown you so far. It’s one of those custom touches I was talking about. It’s got a cathedral effect, and skylights. You feel like you’re walking into a palace instead of a split-level.”

  “I’m not going to let you get away with it,” Charlene said.

  Charlene wasn’t shouting, but it sounded like a shout. Maybe the street was unusually quite. It was a very quiet day. There was no traffic. Of course, there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic on a residential street in Sherwood Forest. She started up the cobblestone walk to the front door.

  “Look at this walk,” she told Mrs. Lord, just as if Mrs. Lord was following her. “I really like the cobblestone effect, don’t you? A lot of care and planning was put into this house.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Lord said, “aren’t you going to—”

  “I’m not going to let you get away with it,” Charlene said again. “Do you think you can just walk off and pretend you don’t hear me? You hear me. I don’t know what you did with my son’s body, but I’m going to find out. I’m going to find out how you murdered him, too. Don’t think you’re going to get away with it.”

  Darvelle could feel the strength of whatever it was that maintained her self control snapping inside her, like ropes tying down a beast whose wildness was beyond their capacity. Her brain felt as if it were pulsing inside her skull, hard enough to crack the bone. She wheeled around and looked Charlene in the face. Then she marched to the end of the drive and forced Charlene into the street.

  “For God’s sake!” she said. She was screeching. She could hear herself. “For God’s sake, Charlene, I didn’t murder him. Nobody murdered him. He ran away from here to get away from you and he stayed away for twelve years. And when he came back, when he got home, well, then what, Charlene? Then he killed himself rather than get stuck with you again. And I don’t blame him. I don’t blame him. If you were my mother, I’d have murdered myself at birth.”

  THREE

  1

  The most important thing to understand, in situations like this, was why it was that the people who had hired you didn’t want you to do the job they had supposedly hired you to do. Gregor Demarkian knew, from experience, that there was more than one possible answer to this. There was even more than one possible answer when the local police called in the FBI. If anything, being a consultant had reduced the amount of friction between himself and local law enforcement agencies. A local law enforcement agency could be pressured by public opinion or the state government to ask in Feds it wanted no part of, but it didn’t usually ask in a consultant unless it had come to its own decision to do it. Of course, it didn’t always come to its own decision willingly.

  One of the reasons a local police department might ask in a consultant when it didn’t want to was that it might otherwise be required to ask in the FBI, which it really didn’t want to.

  Gregor considered all of this sitting in the backseat of his hired car, feeling like something of an idiot being driven around like a debutante in the wilds of western New York state. He looked at the back of Tony Bolero’s head and wondered if the man shaved it. He thought about calling Bennis, or Tibor, or even the hospital. Then he got out his notebook and looked at the notes he had made about the billboard.

  They’d gone a meandering half a mile when he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Could you pull over?” he asked Tony Bolero.

  Tony Bo
lero looked curious, but he pulled over. “Is there something you need to see, Mr. Demarkian? I’ve got to admit, I didn’t notice a thing, but if there’s something you think is important, you just tell me where you want me to stop.”

  “Stop as soon as it’s safe,” Gregor said. “Stop anywhere at all.”

  Tony Bolero pulled the car over to the soft shoulder of the road and cut the engine. Gregor got out and came around to the front. Then he got into the front passenger seat and slammed the door. Then he grabbed the seat belt.

  “That feels better.”

  Tony Bolero frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to—”

  “Look,” Gregor said. “My wife grew up on the Philadelphia Main Line in a house that could be turned into a boarding school if her brother ever felt like it. I grew up in a tenement slum area that’s gotten a little better over the years.”

  “Oh, Cavanaugh Street is more than a little better, Mr. Demarkian. I’d say it’s one of the nicest streets actually in the city. As nice as anything on the Main Line, if you ask me.”

  “Yes, well. It wasn’t when I was growing up. The thing is, I feel like an idiot sitting back there like that, as if I’m some sort of—I don’t know what. And then there’s talking to you. I do have to talk to you. I have to talk to somebody, and right now I can’t talk to Howard Androcoelho. And I don’t want to be shouting things from the backseat and having to explain them three times before you understand them.”

  Tony Bolero considered this. “All right,” he said. “Mrs. Demarkian did say I should give you any assistance you needed.”

  “That’ll do it,” Gregor said. “And we don’t have to tell her anything about me sitting up front if it would make you feel better. Right now, I think I want to go to the police department. I’m not sure. So, in the meantime, do you think you could drive me around the long way, give me about half an hour to think?”

  “You mean take the scenic route? Sure.”

  “Good,” Gregor said.

  Tony pulled the car back onto the road, and Gregor began flipping through page after page of his notebook, the same kind of spiral stenographer’s notebook he’d been using since his first days as a Federal agent. He didn’t even know if there were stenographers anymore. Certainly, fewer people had secretaries. Everybody had cubicles now, with their own computers in them.

  Computers.

  He had a computer with him. He had one that could connect to the Internet, if he found something called a “Wi-Fi” connection.

  He put the notebook down on his lap.

  “Something wrong, Mr. Demarkian?”

  Gregor looked up. “You have to keep all the questions separate, that’s the problem,” he said. “The natural inclination is to see them all as connected. That’s the way the human brain is built to run. That’s why there are so many conspiracy theorists. But you have to keep the questions separate, or you could end up making an idiot out of yourself.”

  “What questions, Mr. Demarkian?”

  “Didn’t I do this for you before? I might have been doing it for Howard Androcoelho. It doesn’t matter. The more I go over it, the better off I am. Well, first, there’s why Chester Morton left. Because we know now, of course, that he did leave. He wasn’t murdered twelve years ago. And I have two pieces of information I didn’t have yesterday. The first is that there were fights between Chester Morton and his family, and especially his mother, which led to his moving out of the family home and into the trailer park.”

  “Fights about what?”

  “We don’t know that,” Gregor said. “I’ll ask Charlene Morton, but I’m not sure I’ll get anything like an accurate answer. But there were fights, not just Chester’s need for independence, that led him to move out. In fact, I wonder if there was anything going on about independence at all, because the other thing I know that I didn’t before is that Chester wanted to reconcile with his family, at least enough to get some financial support.” Gregor tapped his fingers against his knees. “You know, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What doesn’t?” Tony Bolero asked. “I mean, it makes sense to me, you know. Kids used to picking up pretty good change from not much work, doesn’t have to kiss the butt of a boss, doesn’t like being out on his own where things are different.”

  “Oh, I agree,” Gregor said. “But the story, from everybody—from Howard Androcoelho, from Darvelle Haymes, even from Kenny and Charlene Morton—has been that Chester had a mind of his own, he was independent, he was going to move out if he wanted to, and he was going to date the girl he wanted to and he didn’t give a damn about the family. But is that really the case? Does he sound like somebody who would do that?”

  “Well, he did it, didn’t he?” Tony Bolero said.

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “There were fights, and he moved out of the house. He wasn’t forced out. That is, they didn’t tell him he had to leave. Everybody agrees on that. And yet—And what is it with Darvelle Haymes? Supposedly he was so in love with Darvelle Haymes, he was willing to do anything not to give her up. Even go through with that ridiculous plan of buying a baby so that he could have his cake and eat it, too. But maybe that’s wrong. Myabe he didn’t give a damn about Darvelle Haymes at all, except that she was the kind of person he thought he could talk into the things he wanted to talk a girl into.”

  “You’ve gone to the moon, Mr. Demarkian.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Gregor said. “The impression I got from Howard Androcoelho was that Chester Morton moved out of his family’s house because he wanted to date Darvelle Haymes without getting a lot of hassle about it. But that isn’t true. He started dating Darvelle after he moved out. The arguments at home were about something else. What if he started dating Darvelle because he thought she was the kind of girl he could get to go along with, say, getting royally pregnant out of wedlock and then keeping the baby?”

  “You mean he was looking to knock somebody up.”

  “I mean I think he was looking for somebody to have his baby because he thought the baby would bring his mother around on—on whatever it actually was that the problem was. Which brings me right back to the problem I had when I started talking to you. If Chester Morton’s primary motivation in the months between the time he left his family’s house and the time he disappeared was to make some kind of peace with his family and get taken back into the fold—presumably on his own terms, there was something he wanted a concession for, I don’t know what—but anyway, if that was his primary motivation, why did he leave at all? Well, okay, that was always the question. Why did he leave at all. And if he cared so much about being in his family’s good graces, or good enough graces, maybe I should say, then why disappear?”

  “If I keep going the way I’m going, I’m going to be at the police station in a minute or two. Do you want me to circle around some more? Or are you ready to go in?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Find me one of those places—you know, where they let me plug the computer in and get on the Internet.”

  2

  Tony Bolero’s GPS found a coffee shop one town over with unlimited Wi-Fi access. Gregor didn’t know if he’d gone out of his way to pick something away from Mattatuck proper, or if this was just the closest place that had what they needed. Gregor didn’t think it was the closest place. He was pretty sure there was a Barnes & Noble in Mattatuck, and pretty sure that Barnes & Nobles had coffee shops that let you plug into the Internet.

  “They don’t let you plug in,” Tony said, as he helped Gregor set up at a table along the back wall. “So, you know, your battery runs out and that’s it. Of course, we could have just stayed at the hotel, but I figured you had to have some reason. So we came here.”

  “Here” was nice enough. Gregor hadn’t asked to go back to the hotel because he hadn’t thought of it. You got up, you got dressed, you got out of the house—there seemed like there was something essentially wrong with going back again, as if you weren’t really working. He loo
ked at the big menu over the counter where coffee was being ordered and being served.

  “I don’t suppose they have actual coffee in this place,” he said. “You know, no caramel, no whipped cream, no chocolate sprinkles. Why do people drink this stuff, anyway? It isn’t coffee. It’s a milk shake. Milk shakes. Whatever.”

  “You just sit and I’ll find you something,” Tony Bolero said. “You care if it’s fair trade or not?”

  “There’s a politics of coffee?”

  Tony shook his head and went off over to the counter where he was third in line. The two people ahead of him were both women in their forties with their hair pulled back off their faces and Coach bags.

  Gregor opened up and turned the laptop on. He was much more comfortable with the computer now than he used to be, and the more he got used to doing searches, the better he liked using the thing. He opened Internet Explorer and got online. Then he went to Google and typed in “Chester Morton.” The first link that came up was “Justice for Chester,” the Morton family’s official Web site on Chester and what might have happened to him.

  Gregor looked at the big picture of Chester that was the first thing under the site’s title. It was the same picture that appeared on the billboard near Mattatuck–Harvey Community College. He scrolled down a little and found a page of more pictures: Chester with Charlene Morton and a little crowd of other people that Gregor thought must be the Morton family; Chester on a lifeguard’s chair at a beach somewhere; Chester with a jacket and tie at somebody’s wedding. Gregor moved around from page to page. There were no other pictures. The first picture, the one from the billboard, kept appearing over and over again.

  Gregor found a link that said, “About Chester,” and tried that. It turned out to lead to a page with long paragraphs of type, all presented on a slightly beige background with pictures of leaves scattered across it, red and orange leaves, the kind that fell in the fall. Gregor had no idea why somebody would choose to use a background like this for a page like this. He wondered who had designed the site. He wondered when it had been designed.