by Jane Haddam
On the other hand, Gregor did not know that he was the one person old George wanted to hear from. In fact, it was unlikely. Old George had family. But still.
Gregor didn’t leave voice mail messages for Bennis or Donna. He didn’t have to. Their phones would tell them they had missed a call from Gregor Demarkian. He thought he would leave a voice mail for Tibor if Tibor didn’t pick up, but then, when the ringing had just begun to feel endless, it cut off, and Tibor said, “Krekor? This is you?”
Gregor took a deep breath and expelled it very slowly. He hadn’t been aware that he’d been this tense until this moment.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Tibor. This is me. I just wanted to check up on, you know, things. I feel like I haven’t been checking in anywhere near enough.”
“You have been checking in constantly, Krekor. Bennis complains about it. You did not want to call Bennis this time?”
“I did call her,” Gregor said. “She didn’t pick up. I called Donna, too. She didn’t pick up, either.”
“They have left the baby with Lida and taken Tommy to the movies,” Tibor said. “Then they’re going to take him to Chili’s to eat. Maybe they’re still in the movies.”
“Maybe they are,” Gregor said, feeling better.
“The movie is called Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” Tibor said. “I went with Grace and her friend who plays the violin the other night. It is a really terrible movie, but I liked it. The way I liked Jacqueline Susann. I felt sorry for the friend who plays the violin.”
“Why?”
“Because he is in love with Grace,” Tibor said, “and Grace is only pretending she is not in love with the doctor who is an intern at that hospital downtown. You can see the problem there.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “I can definitely see the problem there. What about our problem? What about old George?”
“It is the same as the last time you called me,” Tibor said. “He drifts in and out, sort of, but he doesn’t seem to be getting any worse. He just doesn’t seem to be getting any better. He talks to people. He really isn’t very confused except when they give him the pain pills—”
“Pain pills? He’s in pain? Has he always been in pain?”
“Krekor, please,” Tibor said. “They’ve been giving him pain pills from the first day. You know about this. We have talked about it.”
“It’s not a good idea, giving a man that age pills that depress his body functions. That’s what pain pills do, after all. They—”
“They’re not loading him up,” Tibor said. “They’re giving him the lowest possible dose, in an attempt to keep him comfortable. And it seems to be working. He is comfortable. He is not fading. He is just there. I think maybe he is waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For his birthday,” Tibor said. “I have seen it in other old people, Krekor, it is not uncommon. They know they are dying and they are ready for it. They are not in that place some people are where they hate the idea and will do anything to fight it. But there is something they are waiting for. Something they want to do first. I think old George wants to wait until his birthday. I think he wants to be officially one hundred years old. And then. Well.”
“You think old George is dying,” Gregor said. His mouth felt very dry.
“Of course I think old George is dying,” Tibor said. “And so do you. And so do Martin and Angela. And so do the doctors. And so does old George, if it comes to that.”
“That’s horrible.”
“No,” Tibor said. “What you are dealing with there, that’s horrible. Murder. Torture. Rape. The things we do to cause each other pain. Those things are horrible. So are the diseases that make people die before they’re ready. Cancer. But this is not horrible. This is a natural end of a human life on this earth.”
“I’m not convinced that there’s any other life but the one on this earth.”
“I know, Krekor, but for me it is simpler. I am convinced. But either way, this is not horrible. This is the end of a long good life. You should go now and deal with the things that are horrible. Your murders were breaking news on CNN not twenty minutes ago.”
“Right,” Gregor said. “Of course they were. How do they do these things so fast?”
“They have local partners,” Tibor said promptly. “You hear them talk about it all the time. Go do some work, Gregor. You should come back for the birthday party if you can get here.”
“There’s going to be a birthday party? For old George?”
“With a cake and those popper things that pop and then throw out streamers,” Tibor said. “Angela and Bennis and Donna and Lida and all the rest of them have been planning. And I think that the day after that will be the end.”
“Maybe he won’t want to go until he sees me,” Gregor said. “Maybe that way I could just stay away and he’d live forever.”
“Krekor.”
Gregor closed the phone and sat back, thinking. Okay, that last thing had been bad. It had been worse than bad. It had been stupid.
He picked up the phone again and found Rhonda Alvarez’s number in his address book. She picked up on the first ring, sounding a little out of breath.
“I just got the first news in from Atlantic City,” she said. “I would have called you, I really would have. I just wanted to go through it.”
“Go through it after you give me an overview,” Gregor said. “I may have to get some things done here before I get the full report. Did you find the truck?”
“Absolutely. That was easy. Black Ford pickup, approximately twelve years old, registered to a Charles Mason, and an address. Could he really have taken a name so much like his own as Charles Mason?”
“Don’t they usually?”
“Not since those true crime shows have been all over TV,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “They learn all kinds of things from those shows. Although it’s hard to tell. There’s that To Catch a Predator thing, been on forever, but the guys keep falling for it, over and over again. Maybe it’s a good thing so many criminals are stupid.”
“I’m sure it is,” Gregor said. “Did you run a check on Charles Mason?”
“Absolutely,” Rhonda Alvarez said again. “And I got a nice preliminary haul. Worked the casinos for several years and kept getting fired. My guess would be petty theft that they couldn’t quite prove, if you know what I mean. Ended up without a job, but I don’t see any record that he’d been homeless or anything like that—”
“No,” Gregor said, “he wouldn’t have been.”
“Looks like he had a gambling problem,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “A lot of this is squishy. He definitely had a drinking problem, but it never amounted to much. A few arrests for public intoxication, one for possession of an amount of marijuana too small to get a cat high, little things like that, lots and lots of them. Only one serious arrest, for assault. He got into a fight with this guy who does tattoos. The guy called the cops. There was a plea bargain. He got probation. He was still working then, so that was probably why. There really doesn’t seem to be much here.”
“I didn’t expect there to be,” Gregor said. “But what I think we do have now is probable cause for a warrant to search his place. It’s his truck that was sitting up here with two bodies in it. Do you think that, given that circumstance, you could convince the local cops to get that warrant and search that house?”
“I don’t think it would be any problem at all,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “Is there something you want them to be looking for?”
Gregor thought about it for a minute. “Try for a bright yellow L.L. Bean backpack. After all these years, it might not be so bright yellow anymore. Look in the basement, in the crawlspace if that’s what it is—he has to have kept the body of that infant all this time. Either that or he’s been murdering babies systematically for twelve years, and I’m nearly a hundred percent certain that isn’t true. He’s got to have hidden it somewhere. And he has to have had it with him when he came up here, so it either had to be in the house he was
living in at the time or he had to have hidden it somewhere else. I think if it was somewhere else, we’re probably screwed.”
“But you have the skeleton of the baby,” Rhonda said. “You have it with you up there.”
“Just the skeleton,” Gregor said. “There was no flesh on the bones. It has to have rotted off somewhere, or been removed somewhere.”
“Oh, God,” Rhonda said.
“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well. And he may have lived somewhere else before, and the evidence we’re looking for might be there instead.”
“I can find out the places he lived.”
“I know. I don’t know if you could get all those warrants,” Gregor said. “And they might not matter anyway. I don’t know how long it takes flesh to rot off a skeleton, and I don’t know if the rotting leaves any evidence behind. But at least have the locals get a warrant and search the place he was living in right before he came back here. Maybe they’ll find something.”
3
It was almost half an hour before Howard Androcoelho came in to say that Kyle Holborn and Darvelle Haymes were sitting downstairs in the “conference room,” which was what Howard called any room with a big table and chairs in it. Gregor filed this away on his mental list of grievances over the preciousness of Mattatuck and followed Howard to the meeting place.
“You’d better stay,” he said, just as they were going through the door.
“Of course I’ll stay,” Howard said, looking startled.
Gregor reminded himself that he would be able to get back to Howard later, and went in to find Darvelle and Kyle sitting so close to each other, one of them might as well be in the other’s lap. Gregor pulled out a chair directly across from them and leaned over the table.
“We didn’t kill anybody,” Darvelle burst out.
Kyle Holborn grabbed her arm.
Gregor counted to five in his head. Then he counted to ten in his head. Then he reminded himself that there was no way to avoid stupid people in police work.
“I know you didn’t kill anyone,” he said, “but what you did do is beyond stupidity, and it’s caused untold trouble for me and everybody in this police department and it might have been the catalyst that got two people murdered. Now, I’m going to tell you what happened. You’re going to tell me if I’m right—and, believe me, I am right—and then you’re going to fill in the details. Got it?”
“You can’t force us to say anything,” Kyle said. “We have the right to have a lawyer present. We have the right to remain silent.”
“By all means, let’s get a lawyer in here,” Gregor said. “Right now, you’re just going to be in the ordinary kind of trouble, but I don’t see why I couldn’t convince Howard here to prosecute you for the stunts you’ve pulled. At the moment, I think I can promise that that will be off the table. There’s just the four of us here. This is the least pressing part of this case and I want it over with. So, take your pick.”
“We didn’t kill anyone,” Darvelle said again, starting to cry.
Kyle Holborn looked away.
Gregor Demarkian waited long enough to make sure Kyle Holborn wasn’t going to ask for a lawyer again, and then he started.
“First,” he said, “Chester Morton decided to come back home. I don’t think the two of you had anything to do with that. And why he decided it doesn’t matter for our purposes here, so I’ll let that slide. But he decided to come back home, and my guess is that he went straight for Ms. Haymes’s house. Am I right so far?”
Darvelle nodded.
“Next question,” Gregor said. “Did he ring the doorbell, or did you just come home to find him?”
“I just found him,” Darvelle said. “And the rest of the stuff. He was—he was hanging, just hanging there, he looked awful. He was just hanging from the lintel, you know, the top of the door to the bathroom, so he was the first thing I saw when I went down the hall. And then there was the other stuff—the stuff.”
“The baby’s skeleton,” Gregor said.
“That and a note,” Darvelle said. “The note was about how he couldn’t live with himself anymore, and all this total crap. It said that we bought the baby together and that I’d killed it and that that was why he’d run away—but it isn’t true. It isn’t true. I never saw the baby. Not ever.”
“No, I don’t think you did,” Gregor said. “He was going to get the baby the last night you two ever saw him, the night of the last English class you all had together at Mattatuck–Harvey Community College.”
Darvelle nodded.
“And that’s what the fight in the parking lot was about,” Gregor said. “It wasn’t just that Chester was harassing you, it was that he wanted you to come take delivery of this baby, which he’d already bought, and you,” Gregor nodded toward Kyle, “didn’t want to see Darvelle in that kind of trouble.”
Kyle stirred for the first time. “You have no idea,” he said. “God, but Chester was an asshole. Really. And I could just see it. Darvelle’s life ruined. Everything a mess, and why? Because the guy was a lunatic?”
“Was he a lunatic?” Gregor asked. “Do you think Chester Morton was crazy?”
“I wouldn’t know how to tell,” Kyle said, “not the way a psychologist would. But he was sure as hell the ordinary kind of crazy, if you know what I mean. He did incredibly risky, dangerous crap all the time, and he sucked people into it.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Let’s get back to the present. You came home, you found him dead and hanging in a doorway, and then you called Mr. Holborn here. And Mr. Holborn came over.”
“Right away,” Darvelle said. “He wasn’t working, thank God.”
“My guess this was about two days before Chester Morton’s body was found hanging from the billboard. Which means you must have stashed it somewhere cold.”
“We put it in my freezer in the basement,” Darvelle said. “I’ve got one of those big long ones. I buy things in bulk and freeze them. It’s cheaper. Except there wasn’t much of anything in there, which was good, because after the body was in there I had to—I had to throw everything out. I had to. I couldn’t.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “So you put the body in the freezer, and then you tried to figure out a way to point suspicion of any kind away from yourselves.”
“People would have thought she’d killed him,” Kyle said. “Or they’d have thought we both had. We weren’t being entirely stupid.”
“You were, indeed, being entirely stupid,” Gregor said. “But let’s see how this goes. Chester Morton either didn’t have the yellow backpack with him or he had it but it was unusable for some reason—”
“He didn’t have it,” Darvelle said. “He didn’t have anything. We searched the truck later, and there wasn’t anything.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “So one of you went out and bought a bright yellow backpack somewhere.”
“Kmart,” Kyle said.
“—and put the skeleton of the baby in it. Also the books. Where did you get the books?”
“They were mine,” Kyle said, “I still had them from the class. They weren’t even out of their shrink-wrap yet. They were brand new.”
“Did you two think to wear gloves when you were handling them?” Gregor asked.
“We wore latex gloves the whole time, when we were handling everything,” Kyle said. “I don’t think you could have found a thing to trace us to the—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Gregor said. “Of course we could have found stuff to trace to you two. You can’t pull as much nonsense as you did without leaving something behind. Experts would leave something behind and neither of you are experts. You bought the backpack. You put the skeleton and the books in it. You did what with the note?”
“I flushed it down the toilet,” Darvelle said.
“Then you had the truck. Was it parked in your driveway?”
Darvelle shook her head. “If it had been in the driveway, I’d have known he was around before I came into the house. We ha
d to go looking for it. I mean, we knew he had to drive something and we didn’t want it near the house. But it was the same truck. At least it looked the same. It was parked around the corner. And the keys were in Chester’s pocket, so we—”
“I drove it over to the place, you know, the business,” Kyle said. “Morton Rubbish Removal. Whatever it’s called. I drove it over there and left it in the employee parking lot way in the back near the brick wall.”
“I followed him in my car and after he’d parked he just got in and we left,” Darvelle said. “It wasn’t hard. There aren’t any security cameras or anything.”
“And all this time, the body was in Ms. Haymes’s freezer,” Gregor said.
They both nodded.
“So,” Gregor said. “You went back to Ms. Haymes’s house, and you tried to figure out a way to dispose of the body, and a way to dispose of the backpack. But first you shaved off a small amount of hair near his nipple and spider-tattooed MOM onto it. Why?”
“That was me,” Kyle said. “I thought, all along I thought, we were safest the more bizarre it all was. If it was really strange, people would pay attention to the strange instead of just looking for the obvious, if you see what I mean. And then there was Charlene, you know. I can’t stand Charlene. Nobody can. So I thought—well, let’s get everybody thinking about Charlene. But it was just a little thing. The whole process took less than fifteen minutes, some ink and a straight pin. It wasn’t like he was going to call out in pain.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “So, first you gave him a tattoo and then—then you must have gotten rid of the backpack. You put the backpack at the construction site, to make sure it would be found. I’ve got the security tapes from the site. I take it I’m going to find one extra, out-of-schedule police run.”
Kyle shook his head. “I just picked up the car and went with it,” he said. “Nobody asked any questions. Nobody ever does.”
“Did you take Chester Morton’s body to the billboard in a police car?”
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “Really early in the morning, right after I dropped off the backpack. God, it was surreal. I thought somebody would see the damn thing right away, but it hung up there for hours and hours and hours. I thought I was going to go insane.”