Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  She had told George or Graham or both of them—she couldn’t remember—that she had to teach, but she didn’t really, not until this evening. After lunch, she went back up to the room and sat on the bed and tried to think. Then she tried to read. Then she tried to watch television. She was too restless. The stories about Althy Michaelman and her man friend—“Slaughter at the Stephenson Dam!” was how Channel 8 put it—came and went. Penny couldn’t seem to make them make sense.

  She had a book of crossword puzzles. She tried that, but that didn’t work, either. That was when it occurred to her that she could get something done. She could do laundry, if nothing else. The laundromat would be open. She could sit there and wait for her clothes to finish going around and around in the dryer.

  She got to the laundromat just in time for the noon rush. The washers and dryers all seemed to be in use, except for the two in the back, which were not open to the public. Penny looked around. There was a sign on the wall. The laundromat staff would do your laundry for you, at the price of one dollar a pound, with a minimum of ten pounds. Penny looked at the bag of laundry in her hands. It was really a black plastic garbage bag. That sign had been up there as long as she could remember. She had read it every time she had come into the place. She had read it, but she hadn’t taken it in. She complained that her students didn’t understand how to read, that they read things and just didn’t take them in, and here she was.

  She went to the back and looked in at the door where the administrator stayed during the day. Maybe the word shouldn’t have been “administrator.” Maybe it should have been something like “attendant.” There was something she’d never thought of before.

  The attendant was a small girl with hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had bright red pimples along the edge of her jaw. She was chewing gum. Penny cleared her throat.

  “Could I ask you what the policy is for getting laundry done?” she asked. “I mean, would I have to bring it in in the morning, or—”

  The girl looked down at Penny’s half-full garbage bag. “Two hours,” she said.

  “What?” Penny said.

  “Two hours,” the girl said. “Leave it here and come back in two hours. I can’t be any faster than that.”

  “Oh,” Penny said. “Yes.” She fingered the plastic of the bag. Could she really do this? It felt extravagant in a bad way, paying somebody else to do your laundry. On the other hand, she hated doing laundry. She hated even more sitting in the laundromat waiting for the laundry to be done. The girl was just standing there, chewing gum. Penny had to do something.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll be back in two hours.”

  The girl handed her a plain slip of paper and a ballpoint pen. “Put your name and number on this,” she said. “That’s just in case I have to call you. I’ve never had to call anybody all the time I’ve been here, but that’s what I’m supposed to do. Get you to write your name and number.”

  Penny wrote down her name and number. She passed the little slip of paper back to the girl. Then she just wanted to be out of there. She left the laundromat and went back across the parking lot to her car. She didn’t like this parking lot, and she didn’t like this shopping center. Too many of the stores were out of business.

  Penny turned the car’s engine on. She turned the air conditioning on. She turned the radio on. She needed to get up and get out of there, but she had no idea where to go. Usually, when she felt like this, she went in to school. Today, she didn’t want to be there.

  She had just about decided that she was going crazy in some novel and definitely peculiar way when the radio station she was listening to went to the news, and she was faced with Althy Michaelman yet again.

  “Sources that cannot be named inside the Mattatuck Police Department,” the announcer said, “tell us that police are proceeding on the assumption that the two deaths discovered this morning are linked to the disappearance and death of Chester Morton, a local man who…”

  Penny sat up straight in the driver’s seat. That didn’t make sense, did it? How could those two deaths be related to Chester Morton? How could anything be related to Chester Morton?

  Penny looked out the windshield into the parking lot. It was empty. It really was. Two crazed yabbos from the trailer park or the welfare office weren’t going to come running in to mug her if she got out of the car.

  She got out of the car, went around to the trunk, and opened it. She was still carrying most of her stuff. She hadn’t thought to unpack it just because she finally had a room she could count on.

  She rummaged through the files of papers she kept in the back of the trunk space—really, all her “stuff” was paperwork from teaching; she owned practically nothing she wouldn’t be able to throw out if she ever decided to give it all up to join the roller derby.

  She asked herself what had made her think of the roller derby, and then she found it, the file she kept on Haydee Michaelman. Penny kept files on all her students. It was the only way she could keep track of whether or not they were making progress.

  She found the first of the papers Haydee had written, the personal narrative, and looked through it. It was all about her mother getting pregnant at sixteen. Penny looked some more and found the copy of the journal entry where Haydee had written about being taken into foster care. She had been six at the time. Penny read through it. Then she took the two papers, closed the trunk, and got back into the driver’s seat of the car.

  She put the papers out across the dashboard. She leaned forward and read the journal entry.

  For me, the really hard thing about the way I grew up isn’t the stuff that happened so much. It’s that I never seem to feel the way people expect me to feel. When the social workers came and took me away, it was traumatic. I cried for days. But it’s not what I really remember. It’s not what scared me the most. That was a couple of days earlier, when the social workers took my baby brother away. They took him first, and then they came back for me. And I knew they were going to come back. I knew when they took him that I was going to be next, and for that whole week I hid in my closet at night because I was afraid I was going to wake up and be snatched.

  Penny rubbed the side of her nose with her finger. Althy Michaelman was sixteen when she had her first child, but she must have been thirty-four when she had Haydee, and forty or close to it when she had this baby brother. And there was something else, too, in some of the other journal entries, something about older brothers Haydee didn’t know because she’d never met them.

  And there was the skeleton of a baby that nobody talked about.

  And there were two people dead by the dam.

  Penny got out her cell phone, found Gregor Demarkian’s number in her address book, and dialed.

  FIVE

  1

  Gregor Demarkian took the call from Penny London while he was sitting in Howard Androcoelho’s office. After he had heard her out, he asked her to repeat everything so that he could write it down. Then he asked her if she could bring the copies of the essays, or make copies and bring those, or something. He was thinking that it might be possible to send Tony Bolero to wherever she was to get what he needed, but it turned out not to be necessary.

  “I’m not far from you at all,” she said. “I’m at this awful shopping center with all these empty stores—”

  “Out near the trailer park? I know where that is.”

  “Yes, well, I’m there. And I’ve got my car. And because of you, I’ve got my own room at the Howard Johnson and two absolutely furious sons, who are apparently getting on a plane tonight. How did you do that?”

  “I waited until you were asleep and then I went in and took your phone. I put it back when I was through with it.”

  “I know that,” Penny London said. “I didn’t miss it. How did you know they were my sons?”

  “They were California area codes,” Gregor said, “and the only ones on the phone. You told me you had grown sons. You told me they lived in California. It wasn’t
that hard.”

  “Yes, well. It appears they’re coming out here to take charge of my life.”

  “From what I’ve seen, somebody has to.”

  “Ahem. I do have a doctorate. I mean, I managed to get through graduate school. I’m not a complete idiot.”

  “Any sixty-year-old woman who sleeps in her car when she’s got family she gets along with who want to take care of her is a complete idiot. How long before you get here?”

  “Fifteen minutes. You’re a very unusual man, Mr. Demarkian.”

  “My wife says the same thing, but she’s usually got a different inflection in her voice.”

  Penny London hung up.

  Gregor put his phone down on Howard Androcoelho’s desk. “Who do we talk to to get a rundown of the history of Althy Michaelman with—what’s it called here? Child Protective Services?”

  Howard Androcoelho was sitting behind his desk, looking deflated and more than a little worried. Now he looked startled. “Here it is Children and Family Services, OCFS. But they won’t talk to us. They can’t. Everything they do is supposed to be confidential.”

  “They’ll talk to us if what’s involved is the murder of a child,” Gregor said. “We’ve got the skeleton of an infant with its skull cracked. That’s the murder of a child.”

  “But what does that have to do with Althy Michaelman? What does any of this have to do with Chester Morton? I don’t understand what’s going on in here.”

  “Well, I’ll clear up the Chester Morton thing in about an hour,” Gregor said. “I just want to put a few things together first. But as for Althy Michaelman—Chester Morton said he was going to buy a baby. I think we’ve got everybody agreed on that, right?”

  “Yes, right, absolutely.”

  “Good,” Gregor said. “Well, Haydee Michaelman, Althy Michaelman’s daughter, takes a composition class from a woman named Penelope London.”

  “I remember Dr. London,” Howard said. “She taught the class Chester Morton was taking back twelve years ago, too. She was teaching farther back than that—”

  “Yes, I know,” Gregor said. “And she’s the one who witnessed the fight between Kyle Holborn and Chester Morton the last night anybody will admit to seeing Chester Morton alive and around here. I’m going to get back to that in a bit. But as to Althy Michaelman—Haydee wrote a series of essays and journal entries for Penny London’s class, and in them she wrote about how her mother had her first child at sixteen. She also wrote about being taken into foster care when she was six. It was a terrifying experience for her because her baby brother had been taken away only a little time before, and she had other brothers who had been taken away and never allowed to come home again.”

  “Yeah,” Howard said. “Okay. That sounds about right. Althy dropped out of high school our junior year because she was pregnant.”

  “It’s all those kids being taken into foster care I’m thinking about,” Gregor said.

  “With a woman like Althy? Why? She was a raging alcoholic. She couldn’t stay in work. She did a fair amount of low-level drugs. She’s the kind of person OCFS spends a lot of time involving themselves with.”

  “I agree. But I don’t think that’s what happened this time. I think Althy Michaelman sold those babies. Every single one of them.”

  “She didn’t sell Haydee,” Howard said. “If Althy was selling babies, why would she keep just that one?”

  “My guess is that she was in jail,” Gregor said. “That’s something else I wanted you to look up. Did Althy Michaelman have a record, did she spend any significant time in jail. By which I mean more than eighteen months.”

  “Why more than eighteen months?”

  “Because,” Gregor said, “if you’re going to sell babies, you’ve got to sell babies. That’s the point. It’s difficult to find a white infant to adopt. If the respective adopting parents have anything at all about them that the social service agencies don’t like, there’s no chance. And that tends to mean that older couples and same-sex couples get the choice of an older child or nothing at all.”

  “Well,” Howard went, “okay. I’ve heard about that kind of thing. But if she was doing that, shouldn’t she have had a lot more money? Didn’t I see a Dateline report on that where these fancy-ass lawyers were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get hold of infants?”

  “They wouldn’t be interested in getting hold of one from somebody like Althy Michaelman,” Gregor said. “People of the kind you’re talking about are very careful about this kind of thing. They’re not going to want an infant who’s been exposed to alcohol and tobacco in the womb, and Althy smoked, drank, and did everything else unhealthy for a developing fetus. Althy would have been dealing with people with far less money. I still think she could probably have charged around, say, ten thousand dollars.”

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Howard said. “You think Chester Morton bought an infant for ten thousand dollars. Where do you think he was going to get ten thousand dollars?”

  “He got it from the same place he got the rest of his money,” Gregor said. “He stole it from his mother. Well, you know, from the family firm. But I’ve met Charlene Morton. She’d have considered it stealing from her, personally.”

  “This is nuts.”

  “I agree. A lot of this is completely nuts,” Gregor said. “But let’s stick with Althy Michaelman now. I want to know if OCFS ever removed any other children from Althy’s home and put them in foster care—any of them. I especially want to know if they removed an infant around the same time they removed Haydee around twelve years ago. You should be able to get them to tell you that. That’s not confidential information, and we do have the skeleton to account for.”

  “All right,” Howard said. “I get that. We can probably do that.”

  “Then I want to find out if Althy Michaelman was in prison for about eighteen months or a little longer around eighteen years ago. I think that’s about right. Haydee wrote that she was six when she was taken into foster care and she remembers just when because it was just after the police came and searched the trailer park because Chester Morton was missing. Six then, twelve years later, eighteen now. If she gave birth just before or just after going to prison, the baby would have been put into foster care until she was released—unless there was family? Did she have family to take the child?”

  “It’s the Michaelmans we’re talking about here,” Howard Androcoelho said. “They’re all like that, except maybe this young one. Althy walked out on her mother when she was pregnant the first time and never looked back. God only knows who her father was. But Mr. Demarkian, I don’t get it. If Althy had had all these children taken away by Child Protective Services, why would they have given Haydee back when Althy got out of prison, if she ever was in prison?”

  “I don’t think Althy did have a lot of business with Children and Family Services,” Gregor said. “Remember? I think she just said she did, to cover the fact that she was selling the infants.”

  “Then why didn’t she sell Haydee?”

  “Because,” Gregor said, “Haydee would have been too old. If Althy went in to prison about the time she gave birth or very soon afterward, and if she stayed there a year and a half or more, she wouldn’t have had time to sell the infant before she was incarcerated and the child would have been past the point where people would pay for it when she got out. So there was Haydee. And Althy was stuck with her.”

  “Honest to God,” Howard said.

  “Go find out the stuff I want,” Gregor said. “I want to commandeer your office for about an hour. I promise to use my own cell phone and not touch any of your papers. Find out if OCFS has any record of removing children other than Haydee from Althy Michaelman’s care. Find out if Althy Michaelman was in prison eighteen years ago. Get the stuff Penny London is bringing in in the next half hour or so and give it to me. Then get Darvelle Haymes and Kyle Holborn into a room for me. I’m going to yell at them.”

  “Kyle Holborn? Officer Holborn?”<
br />
  “That’s what I said.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Howard said.

  Gregor Demarkian knew exactly what he was doing, and he felt good doing it. In fact, he felt good for the first time since he’d arrived in Mattatuck, New York.

  2

  When Howard Androcoelho was finally out of sight and out of mind, Gregor had the urge to get going and get on with it: call Rhonda Alvarez at the FBI; call Ferris Cole and hear about the bodies. Instead, he reached for his phone and tried first Bennis, then Donna, then Fr. Tibor Kasparian, listening to that strange distant ringing all phones gave you in imitation of what was supposed to be happening on the other end. Of course, it wasn’t what was happening on the other end. Bennis and Donna and Tibor all had ring tones they’d bought, little snatches of music, all kinds of things. Tibor’s general ring tone was the theme from Looney Tunes. Gregor found himself wondering why phones could do all the things they did but not give you the ring tone the person you were calling would be hearing. It was a silly thought, useful for nothing. It was the kind of thing Gregor thought of when he was tired.

  When Bennis did not pick up, and Donna after her, Gregor got worried. He had a leaden, sickened feeling that he had failed to check in when he ought to have. He imagined their phones on silent and the ringing going on and on and on, but mute, while old George passed away in a hospital bed while the one person he wanted to hear from was nowhere to be found.