Flowering Judas (11 page)

“You don't know anything,” Lora said. “You're jumping at shadows. This is our Nderi. That must be the girl. She's a very beautiful girl.”

Shpetim Kika already knew that Anya Haseri was a beautiful girl. He just didn't think it was the point.

3

For almost the last week now, Darvelle Haymes's clients had not been clients. They had been people who wanted to get a look at—even to talk to—the woman who might have killed Chester Morton. Darvelle knew all about those particular kinds of people. She'd met a lot of them after Chester first disappeared. She'd met them everywhere. Once, she'd come home—that was to the old place, the bad place—and found one of them in her living room, crawling around on the carpet with a magnifying glass, like a goddamned Sherlock Holmes.

So far, this time, there hadn't been much in the way of that kind of thing. There had been the “clients” who weren't clients, but it had all been very civilized and oblique. She'd go out to show a few houses to somebody who said she was looking for a four bedroom ranch or something new with copper plumbing. Then the questions would start. They were never direct questions. The “clients” never came out and said they knew she was the one everybody had talked about when Chester went missing, or that that crazy Charlene Morton had been talking about on television and in newspapers ever since. They didn't say anything, just “My my,” and “Oh, dear,” and “Don't you wonder if it's getting so it's not safe to live here anymore.”

Darvelle had gone out on the night they found the body. She'd driven all the way over to Mattatuck–Harvey Community college and parked her car on the grassy side of the road. She wasn't up near the billboard. By the time she'd got there, half the town had come up. There was no space up near the billboard. Still, she'd been close enough. She'd been able to see the body swaying back and forth in the wind and the guys climbing up to bring it down. Nothing about it had looked familiar to her. She didn't know why she had thought it would.

Now she turned off her engine and looked up into the rearview mirror to make sure Kyle was pulling in behind her. He had his red pickup truck and not the police cruiser, which was as it should be. He wasn't on duty, and even if he was, she would have insisted. She didn't want police cruisers parked at her place, not the way things were. She didn't want police cruisers anywhere near her place.

She got out of the car and looked around. There were no flyers taped to the telephone poles. The last of those had gone up the day Chester was finally found. There was no crazy old woman sitting on her doorstep. Darvelle kept expecting her to show up there. Threatening. Or something.

Kyle got out of his truck and looked around. “It looks quiet enough,” he said.

“It is,” Darvelle said. “Of course, we're not inside yet. Maybe she's in the kitchen waiting for me to come home. Maybe somebody else is. You have no idea what it was like twelve years ago.”

“I was there.”

Darvelle considered this. This was only half true. She had seen Kyle on the night Chester was supposed to have gone missing, but she hadn't seen him again for months after that. He hadn't even wanted to talk to her.

She went up to the front door, and opened it, and looked around. She flicked on the overhead lights and waved Kyle in. It had started to get dark earlier again. She didn't like it when it got dark earlier.

Kyle came in and sat down on the couch and said, “Well?”

Darvelle headed toward the kitchen. “Don't be like that,” she said. “You don't know what that woman is like. I wouldn't put it past her to have this place bugged.”

“She had to get a warrant to get this place bugged,” Kyle said, raising his voice so that it carried to her. “And no judge is going to issue a warrant to a civilian, and nobody in the department has asked for a bug. I'd have heard about it if they had.”

Darvelle got a couple of beers out of the refrigerator. She got a glass for herself.

“People install illegal bugs,” she said. “You hear about it all the time.”

“It doesn't matter. Whatever those get, they're not admissible as evidence.”

“They wouldn't have to be admissible as evidence for you to lose your job,” Darvelle said. “You're not supposed to be talking to me about this, and you know it.”

She went back into the living room and handed a can of beer to Kyle. He popped the top and drank it.

“You know,” he said, “it's not like they don't know that we're together. They know that we're together. That's why they took me off the baby thing—”

“But you were on the baby thing,” Darvelle said. “You went out there.”

“I went out there, we didn't know what it was. Not really.”

“They tell you it's the skeleton of a baby in a bright yellow backpack and you don't know what it is, not really?”

“Yeah, I didn't know what it was. You told me you'd never had a baby. You'd never had an abortion. You'd never been pregnant.”

“And it's true,” Darvelle said. “I've never been any of those things.”

“I had no reason to think you'd have anything to do with the skeleton of a baby. Anyway, I wasn't, you know, much of anything when all that happened. I was still living with my parents in Kiratonic.”

“We were going out.”

“And everybody knew about it,” Kyle said. “That idiot woman told everybody on earth that you'd killed her son because—hell, I don't know why. Because you wanted to be with me? What sense did that make? We were all about eighteen. If you wanted to dump him and be with me, you didn't have to kill him. You just had to do it.”

“I did do it.”

“I know.”

Darvelle poured beer into her glass. She didn't really like beer. She used to like it, but that was before she'd gotten her life together and grown up. These days, she only kept the stuff in the refrigerator for Kyle.

“So,” she said. “What's going on?”

Kyle shrugged. “They've hired this guy. Gregor Demarkian.”

“I know that. I looked him up on the Internet.”

“Then you know as much as I do. They hired him to consult, whatever that means. That's what he is, a consultant. He's due up here tomorrow or the day after.”

“And then what?”

“I don't know then what,” Kyle said, sounding irritated. “He'll consult, I guess. I don't know how he works. The clerks have been spending all their time making copies of all the files and sending him things. Every once in a while, we get a request for something from forensics. That's a joke. What does he think this is,
CSI: Miami
? Forensics, for God's sake.”

“I thought you got a lot of new stuff for forensics. From the stimulus package, or whatever that was.”

“We did. But we didn't get the guys to run it. You've got to have really good guys. They cost a lot of money. We didn't get money for that. We going to make something or go out to eat?” Kyle said. “I'm starving.”

Darvelle didn't want to go out to eat. There would be people in restaurants. The people might not be as polite as the clients.

“I'll make something,” she said, getting up. “I could use the distraction, anyway. Are you going to be able to spend the night?”

“I even brought a clean uniform.”

Darvelle headed back toward the kitchen. She'd make pasta and garlic bread. It would be simple and it wouldn't take a lot of time. She would not think about that whole week after Chester was reported missing, after everybody had begun taking it all seriously. She would very definitely not think of the very night, and herself standing in the door of Chester's trailer while the rain poured down outside and she knew Kyle was waiting for her at the side of the road.

 

FOUR

1

Gregor Demarkian did not know what disoriented him more: the fact that he had a hired car and a driver named Tony Bolero, or the fact that the first thing he saw when he walked into the lobby of the Howard Johnson in Mattatuck, New York, was his own face on the front page of the local newspaper.

The car and the driver made him feel odd in the way that Bennis's ideas often made him feel odd. The woman had been born and raised rich, and it seemed that that made a more permanent impression than the ten years she'd spent poor and disinherited. She was rich again—richer than her brothers who had not been disinherited—given the fantasy novels and all that, and she spent money in a way that Gregor, who had been brought up poor in a tenement, never could.

He had no idea what the car and driver cost, just as he had no idea what the renovations on the townhouse were going to cost. There were things he thought it better not to ask about. It did occur to him that, if he had asked about the cost of the car and the driver, he might have been able to stage a fight and avoid this trip. It interested him that he had not thought of it until he was already here and past complaining.

His face on the front cover of the newspaper was less disturbing to think about. The newspaper was the Mattatuck
Republican American,
and the other person on the front page was Sarah Palin. Gregor bought a copy on his way through the lobby and looked it over as he waited at the reception desk. Tony Bolero followed behind with the bags, both Gregor's and his own. That was another thing about the expense of the car and the driver. The car and the driver had come up from Philadelphia. The driver had to be fed and housed for however long this was going to take.

The headline said:
ANDROCOELHO CALLS IN EXPERT FROM
PHILADELPHIA
. It was a very bad headline. There ought to be some school newspaper editors could go to to learn to write headlines. Maybe there was, and Gregor didn't know about it.

Bennis had been very clear about her motives when she'd hired the car and the driver.

“George is stable,” she'd said. “You heard the doctor say that himself. He's not going to die tonight, or tomorrow night. He's not going anywhere for awhile. You're not going to do anything for anybody hanging around here making the doctors nervous.”

“He's old,” Gregor said. “I wouldn't want to be away if he, if he—”

“Died? Gregor, for God's sake, you can usually get the word ‘died' out of your mouth without flinching. George has got Martin here. He's got Angela. He's got the children. They don't need you hovering around, either. And no matter what you think, your presence in George's hospital is not going to be what will keep him alive, if he gets through this. You do not have magic powers.”

“I know I don't have magic powers,” he'd said—but then, of course, he'd only been half serious. It wasn't that he thought he had magic powers for good. It wasn't that he thought he could keep old George alive. It was that he thought he had magic powers against—not evil, exactly. Maybe “against ill.” There was a part of his brain that was convinced that if he went away, the very fact of his going away would cause all kinds of …

It was an idiotic way to think, and Gregor Demarkian knew it. He looked down his face on the front page of the newspaper again. His face was above the fold. Sarah Palin's face was beneath it. That said something, but he wasn't sure what.

“I'm going to leave these here and go out and get the big suitcase,” Tony Bolero said, waving at the pile he'd made of the luggage.

Gregor said, “Okay.” Then he went over to the briefcase and picked it up. It was the briefcase Bennis had bought him for his birthday, or Christmas, or sometime, a few years ago. It was made by Coach in beautiful black leather, and he hadn't asked what it cost, either.

He put the briefcase on the reception desk and looked up to find a young woman there, looking very neat and professional and young. She was smiling in that way people did when they were required to smile all the time, for business purposes.

“Can I help you?” she asked him.

Gregor suddenly wished Tony would come back, or that he'd brought Bennis along with him. “Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I think I have a reservation. In fact, I think I have two.”

The young woman did not stop smiling. “Two,” she said, tapping away at a computer. “Let me look that up.” She tapped and tapped. Gregor looked at the caption under his picture. It read:

GREGOR DEMARKIAN, NATIONALLY RENOWNED CRIME CONSULTANT, WILL AID MATTATUCK POLICE IN MORTON HANGING MYSTERY

Everything was capitalized, as if it were a headline instead of a caption. Gregor's head was beginning to hurt.

“Here it is,” she said. “It's two rooms, connecting, but you don't want the connecting door unlocked? Is that right?”

“That's right.”

“That's no problem, then. We have everything set up for you. If you'll just sign here,” she passed along a registry book, “and let me have your credit card.”

Gregor handed over his credit card just as Tony came back in with the big suitcase. It was the one Bennis had packed for him herself.

“You never know what to bring,” she'd told him. “You pack six pairs of underwear and five pairs of socks and think you have everything you need. And don't forget, the driver does errands. He can run out to the laundry if you need him to.”

The young woman came back with his credit card and a large manila envelope. In fact, it was a huge manila envelope, and one of the padded ones, as if somebody had shipped him something from Alaska. Instead, Gregor noticed, it hadn't even been put in the mail. There wasn't a postage stamp or postal marking on it.

The young woman handed the two things over. Her smile was in place. It never moved.

“You're that man,” she said. Then she saw Gregor had the paper and pointed at it. “That man. I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude. Everybody's been talking about it for a week, though—the fact that they were going to bring you in. It's really exciting to have you here at Howard Johnson.”