Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  “And do what?” Haydee said. “Don’t be ridiculous. And Chester Morton didn’t die there anyway. He didn’t die twelve years ago at all. But, you know, it’s like I said. It’s a little strange.”

  “What is?”

  “The way my mother is with that trailer,” Haydee said. “I was thinking about it the other day, because Kenny said something to me about it. That Demarkian person is going around talking to everybody who had anything at all to do with Chester Morton when he disappeared. Kenny was saying we should expect he’d want to talk to us, because, you know, we lived right next door. But I was thinking about it. It was more than that. He used to come over to our trailer, and my mother used to go over to his. I remember it.”

  “How can you remember it? You must have been two.”

  “I was six,” Haydee said. “And I do remember it. But then, you know, when the cops came looking for Chester Morton there was that one who called DCS and then I went into foster care for a while. I remember that, too.”

  “I remember all the times I’ve been in foster care,” Desiree said. “That was a load of frigging crud. I can’t believe they think that helps people.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever. There it is. I’d better go back to my place and have a shower. I’ve got two classes and work. Sometimes I think I’m going to get so tired, I’m going to fall over.”

  “What if Mike is back there waiting for you? Maybe you could take your shower here. If you were quiet, you know what I mean.”

  “I need clean clothes,” Haydee said, yawning. “Besides, I don’t think it’s going to matter. I saw them go out after I came over here. They actually looked pretty happy. Mike was singing.”

  “That must have been interesting.”

  “It was. Anyway, they must have gotten some money from someplace, because they went out. Maybe Mike robbed a liquor store. That would be hysterical. But my money’s in the credit union, and Mike can’t get at it, and that’s all I really care.”

  2

  Darvelle Haymes knew women who liked to say, “I told you so,” and sometimes she was one of them, but this was not one of those times. “I told you so” was only fun if you were saying it about somebody else. You told Sheila she’d get fat if she kept eating those doughnuts and she got fat? I told you so! You told your mother-in-law that she’d end in a car wreck if she kept running the stop sign at that intersection? I told you so! You told your boyfriend that the coming of this Gregor Demarkian was going to be a disaster for the both of you? I told you—wait. No, it wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t even funny.

  Darvelle propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at Kyle sleeping on the other side of the bed. He was dead to the world, and she had no idea how. If she had rotating shifts like that morning one week, afternoons the next week, evenings the week after that, she’d be losing her mind. She’d need pills just to sleep at all. Kyle had sex, then he rolled over and crashed, and he never moved until the alarm went off.

  Darvelle got the alarm clock from the bedside table and turned the alarm off before it could ring. She wasn’t going to get back to sleep no matter what she did, and she had a full day ahead of her.

  Or she didn’t. She went into the bathroom, shut the door behind her, and turned on the shower. Last night, two of her clients had called to cancel their appointments for today. She still had three more that she knew of, but the trend was unsettling. Maybe there got to be a point where murders were not interesting but only frightening, or where knowing a potential murderer—what?

  She stepped under the showerhead and closed her eyes. Did anybody really think she might have murdered Chester Morton? And then what? Hauled his body all over Mattatuck? That great big body, that lardass body, that—but that was ridiculous. She didn’t have the upper body strength to throw Chester Morton’s corpse over that billboard, and anybody who looked at her had to know that. And what was she supposed to have done at the trailer park? Driven her car in there, dragged Chester’s body out of the trunk or the backseat, dragged it some more into the trailer—her head hurt just thinking about it. She was pretty sure people were suspecting her nonetheless.

  She got her hair washed and stepped out. The bathroom was steamed up. The effect was uncomfortable. It was getting on into September, but it was not that hot.

  She went back into the bedroom for some underwear and a robe, and found that Kyle was up, up and moving around somewhere in the house. She put on the underwear and the robe and wandered out into the kitchen.

  “Hey,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m making us breakfast. You got up.”

  “I thought you didn’t have to. I thought you didn’t work until afternoon or something today.”

  “I go in at three. I’m awake.”

  Darvelle sat down at the kitchen table. “Well?” she said.

  Kyle was making an omelet. It had mushrooms and cheese in it. Darvelle could see the scraps on the cutting board next to the sink.

  “Well?” she said again.

  “If you want to start saying, ‘I told you so,’ I suppose you’ve got the right,” Kyle said. “This is getting to be a bigger mess by the minute.”

  “We didn’t kill anybody,” Darvelle said. “I don’t care what kind of a mess this is, it can’t be that kind of a mess.”

  “But it can,” Kyle said. “You’ve got no idea. It doesn’t matter if we didn’t kill anybody. It only matters if they think we did.”

  “And do they think we did?”

  “I don’t think so. I think if they did, they’d have gotten me out of the station by now. Hell, I don’t even know if they suspect us, one way or the other.”

  “Do they suspect me?”

  “Well, you’re on Howard’s hot list,” Kyle said. “I don’t know about Gregor Demarkian. He’s calling in the state, if I haven’t told you that already. There’s a rumor around that he’s been in contact with the FBI.”

  “Charlene talked to the FBI,” Darvelle said. “It didn’t seem to make much difference.”

  “Charlene was just the pain in the ass mother of a missing person with a background that sounded halfway to organized crime,” Kyle said. “Gregor Demarkian used to work there. They’re going to take him seriously.”

  “Yes, I know,” Darvelle said, “but I still come back to the same thing. We didn’t kill anybody. We didn’t. We had no reason to kill anybody. Why would they think of us at all.”

  Kyle picked up the frying pan and slammed it down again, hard, against the top of the stove.

  “Because people kill other people for a lot less reason than you’d think,” he said, finally angry. “Because you just don’t get it. A prosecutor doesn’t even have to prove motive at a trial. Motive is irrelevant. People kill other people over a pair of shoes, or because she dissed her husband one too many times, or because it’s Tuesday. It doesn’t matter if we had no reason, even if we had no reason. And as things stand, I can think of a really good one.”

  Darvelle put her face in her hands. “The baby.”

  “Bingo.”

  “But it wasn’t my baby,” Darvelle said. “I had nothing to do with it. He told me we were going to buy a baby and I told him to pack up and get lost. I didn’t want any part of it. I didn’t help him buy it. And you had nothing to do with it at all. For God’s sake, Kyle, what else were we supposed to do? What else would anybody have done in that situation?”

  “Call the cops, that would be one thing.”

  “But we couldn’t have done that, and you know it. You know what Chester was like. It would have been a matter of he said, we said, and we’d have gotten screwed, because you know what he’d have said. He’d have said that we were in on it. And even if we’d gotten it straightened out eventually, there’d have been a nice long meantime when they’d all have run around believing him, because he was a Morton and we were just trailer trash.”

  “You were just trailer trash,” Kyle said. “I grew up in a split-level in Kiratonic.”

&nbs
p; “Thanks a lot.”

  Kyle was finished with the omelet. He got a knife out of the drawer next to the stove and cut it in half in the pan. Then he got the spatula and put one half of the thing on a plate. The house was suddenly much too quiet.

  “There’s the other thing, of course,” Kyle said. “There’s the fight in the parking lot.”

  “It wasn’t much of a fight. Chester made a remark and you decked him. He must have been flying higher than Venus that night.”

  “I knocked him over. He fell on his back.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe he had the baby in the backpack then,” Kyle said. “Maybe that’s what killed it. Maybe I knocked him over, and he fell on it, and that cracked its skull.”

  Darvelle got up off the chair she’d been sitting in and marched back toward the bedroom.

  “If that baby was in that backpack that last night in Miss London’s class, it was dead already. If it hadn’t been, it would have made a noise. It would have made a lot of noise.”

  Darvelle was sure this was true, but she didn’t want to talk to Kyle anymore anyway. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  3

  If there was one thing Shpetim Kika was sure of, it was that somebody had to take this seriously, and nobody was. The problem had kept him up all night. Part of it was that he didn’t know what to do next. Most of it was a slow burning fury at all the members of the Mattatuck Police Department. Shpetim Kika was a law-abiding man. Since coming to America, he had never once entertained the idea that the local police were incompetents, or fools, or corrupt to the core. That was the kind of problem you had back in Albania, before the Communists left, because all the Communists could do was to produce incompetents and fools and thieves. This was America. In America, the policeman was your friend.

  Shpetim got up at five o’clock in the morning—sort of. What he really did was decide there was no point lying there staring at the ceiling any longer, especially not when Lora was sound asleep beside him, and snoring. He got up and went to his kitchen. He made the first of several pots of coffee. He sat at the kitchen table and tried to think it out.

  The most promising possibility—the one he wanted to be true—was that the young police officer he had talked to had been the wrong police officer to talk to. Maybe there was somebody assigned to the case he was supposed to direct his questions to, and instead he had spoken to a desk clerk who didn’t know anything about what was going on. The probability of this possibility was a weak one, Shpetim had to admit. The police officer he had talked to yesterday had been one of the same two who had come out to the construction site in a patrol car the night the skeleton of the baby had been found. Surely he had to know something about the case. Maybe it was the partner Shpetim should have talked to. Shpetim hadn’t seen the partner anywhere in the station when he went in.

  Could it really be this hard to find the right person to talk to when you had information about a crime? On television, it looked easy. You walked into the police station and told the first person you met that you had information on the homicidal clown case. You were whisked away to an interrogation room and everything you said was taken down on a yellow legal pad.

  The next possibility—and the one Shpetim thought was most likely—was that the police wanted to be competent and helpful, but that they were under too much pressure to “do something” about the whole Chester Morton mess. Shpetim Kika had met Charlene Morton on a couple of occasions. He wouldn’t be surprised to find that she’d intimidated the entire police department. He wouldn’t be surprised to find that she had intimidated the entire United States Congress. That’s what you needed when you had a problem with officialdom—not a lawyer, not the media, but one of these women who was used to getting her own way and deaf to any arguments to the contrary. They were always mothers, too, those women. It was as if the pain of childbirth altered something in their brains. Shpetim had known a few of those women in his life. He had an uncomfortable feeling that his Lora might be one of them.

  The last possibility was, of course, that the police were corrupt, that they had been bribed, that there was a secret baby-killing conspiracy going on that was being run out of the basement of central station. This seemed silly, to say the least. Shpetim couldn’t imagine Howard Androcoelho running a conspiracy of any kind. Babies had to come from somewhere. Shpetim was pretty sure that if babies were going missing all the time, no conspiracy would be wide enough to keep it out of the local media. He watched too much television, that was the problem. He always thought of things as they would work out on one of the various versions of Law & Order.

  The other question was what to do about all this. He had already gone to the police. He wouldn’t know how to go to the media. There was only one thing left for him to do, and he wasn’t sure how to go about that, either.

  He went to Nderi’s bedroom, turned on the overhead light, and waited. Nderi couldn’t sleep in light. He had to have darkness, or he came right awake. This could be very useful.

  Nderi turned over in bed. “What?” he said.

  “Come to the kitchen,” Shpetim said. “There’s something we have to do.”

  “If this has something to do with the wedding, I’m going to knock you over the head.”

  Shpetim went back to the kitchen and sat down. There were big pads of paper in one of the drawers near the refrigerator. He got up and got one, then got a pen from the collection in the pencil cup next to the microwave. He sat down again and tried to think. It was important to go about this rationally. You had to know what you wanted to say, but you also had to know what order you wanted to say it in. Things didn’t make sense when they were out of order. When things didn’t make sense, people didn’t take you seriously.

  By the time Nderi came into the kitchen, Shpetim had two full pages of legal pad filled up with writing. He had all his points numbered. He had a couple of them starred. Nderi looked down at the pad with all the writing on it when he came into the kitchen. Then he went to the coffeepot on the counter and poured himself some.

  “Well,” he said, “what is it that couldn’t wait until six-thirty?”

  “I need you to come with me to the Howard Johnson,” Shpetim said. “I need you to go with me to see this Gregor Demarkian.”

  “At ten minutes after six.”

  “Right away. Before he gets up and goes about his business for the day. If we wait for that, we won’t know where to find him.”

  “If you don’t wait until he’s up, he’ll probably throw you out on your ear. And what about the project? If we’re both chasing Gregor Demarkian, who’ll run the crews this morning?”

  Shpetim shrugged this away. “Andor can take over for a hour. He won’t kill anybody. But a baby is dead. A baby has to be dead because there was that skeleton. You don’t agree.”

  “Of course I agree.”

  “And something has to have happened to the baby, because the skull was cracked,” Shpetim said. “I saw it as clearly as you did. Cracked right down the side. And yes, I know, you told me. That could have happened after the baby died. But the baby died. And somebody put its body somewhere for the skin to fall off the bones, and then he put the bones in that backpack. And somebody has to do something about that.”

  “I know they do,” Nderi said patiently, “but that person doesn’t necessarily have to be you. If I thought you really knew anything, it would be different, but we told the police all we knew and it wasn’t much. The thing just showed up at the site.”

  “We didn’t tell them everything we knew,” Shpetim said “We didn’t tell them the things we thought were obvious. When something is obvious, you expect everybody to see it, just the way you do. But they don’t see it. Or I can’t see any evidence that they’ve seen it.”

  “Seen what?”

  “Two things,” Shpetim said. “First is the timing. The backpack has to have been put there just the night before, and no earlier, because if it had been there even an extra day, we would have found it ea
rlier.”

  “I don’t think that’s something they don’t know and we do,” Nderi said. “We came right out and told them that. Twice. That isn’t something new.”

  “Yes, yes,” Shpetim said. “But then there’s the new. I really mean new. The backpack was new and so was everything else in it.”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  Shpetim tapped his fingers on the table. “All along, everything we’ve heard, Chester Morton always carried a bright yellow backpack. The backpack was the only thing that disappeared when he did. The baby’s skeleton is found in the bright yellow backpack, there was a baby or a pregnancy or something in the Chester Morton case, the backpack must be Chester Morton’s and so it turns out there really was a baby. But, Nderi, that can’t be true.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Shpetim said, “the backpack was new. Brand new. That wasn’t something Chester Morton had had for twelve years. It wasn’t something he had had for twelve days. There were smudges on it because it had been in the dirt all day, but anyplace you could see the canvas was bright, bright yellow. Brand new. And that wasn’t the only thing that was brand new.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “The books,” Shpetim said. “There were the books. The ones you had, too, when you went to Mattatuck–Harvey. Current Issues and Enduring Questions. The Everyday Writer. They were there, in the backpack. And they were new.”

  “Can you really tell if a book is new just by looking at it?”

  “There were no creases in the cover. There were no stains. Nothing was bent back or—or even rifled. It looked like they’d never been opened.”

  “You can’t really know that.”

  “Yes, I can,” Shpetim said. “I really can. And if I’m wrong, it will only take a moment or two to prove it. They only have to go look at the backpack again. But nobody is looking at the backpack. Nobody is paying any attention to it. It isn’t the baby they’re investigating. It’s the death of Chester Morton. So I think we should tell someone, and the someone I think we should tell is Gregor Demarkian.”