Flowering Judas(101)

“Oh, yeah,” Howard said. “He has, now, two or three years. He wasn’t going anywhere unless Althy threw him out. I don’t think he’s kept a job six weeks running in the last ten years. He likes his beer. He shoplifts a little. He used to have some scam going about disability, but Social Services got wise to him.”

“And they didn’t have him arrested?”

“You have to prove something to have somebody arrested,” Howard said. “Then you’ve got to go through all the rigamarole with paperwork and hearings. Easier just to declare him fit to work. That just takes a doctor. They got a doctor. Didn’t hurt that nobody but Althy could stand him.”

“Huh,” Gregor said.

He backed up a little and went around to the front of the truck. There was a blank space where the license plate was supposed to go. He went around to the back and found the same thing. Then he came back to Howard Androcoelho.

“No plates,” he said. “Did the truck belong to them? To Althy Michaelman and whatever his name was?”

“A nice truck like that?” Howard said. “Hell, no. Althy and Mike would never put away enough money to buy a truck like that. Or any truck at all. I don’t think Althy’s ever had a car of her own since I’ve known her. Nah, they’d get a little money in hand and they’d go drink with it. Beer, usually, because it was cheap. They had more money on them than that last night, though. The hospital guys say they smell like serious liquor, Scotch or whiskey or something like that. That probably means they found Haydee’s stash.”

“Who’s Haydee?”

“Althy’s daughter. The only one who lived, that is. Althy got pregnant a lot, but she got stillbirths a lot. Well, that was years ago. It’s what happens when you drink like a fish when you’re pregnant. But Haydee is something else. Goes to school. Works her butt off at two jobs. Saves her money. Problem is, Mike is pretty good at figuring out where she’s stashing it. He got away with over twelve hundred dollars about a year and a half ago. Haydee came in to the police station to accuse him of stealing it, but the problem is, if it’s not in a bank account or anything, there’s no way to prove you ever had it. And by the time Haydee found out the money was gone, the two of them had pissed it all away. Literally. So there was nothing we could do.”

“Do you think that’s what happened here? That the two of them took this Haydee’s money and she murdered them for it?”

“Nah,” Howard said. “Haydee isn’t going to murder anybody. Though I don’t think I’d blame her if she tried. Is that what you think happened, that Haydee did it? I was going for they ran into one of those bikers down the road and they were flashing cash, and, you know.”

“And the biker had a big black pickup truck?”

“Lots of bikers have other vehicles,” Howard Androcoelho said.

“It’s an expensive truck,” Gregor said, “and nearly new. You think the biker just shot them in it and left them there? He took the plates and wrote off the vehicle?”

“I don’t know,” Howard Androcoelho said.

“Well, I do,” Gregor said. “Run the serial number through the national databases. You’ll come up with a Jersey registration. I’d like to know the name listed on it. What about the gun? Did you find that?”

“There was a gun on the ground next to the truck when we got here,” Howard said. “Is that going to be registered in New Jersey, too?”

“No,” Gregor said. “It isn’t going to be registered at all. Can you get me in touch with this Haydee person?”

“Sure. We have to get in touch with her anyway.”

“Good. I have to make a phone call. I’ll talk to you in twenty minutes.”

Gregor left Howard Androcoelho standing where he was and marched back across the road to Tony Bolero and the car.

2

Gregor Demarkian got himself back into the front seat of Tony Bolero’s car and told himself that it did no good for him to lose his temper. What was worse, he knew why he wanted to lose it. He hadn’t expected this. Every part of the analysis he had made up until now said that this was not the kind of thing that was likely to happen. That meant that exactly one part of his analysis had been wrong, and it was the one part he should not have made a mistake about.

He got out his cell phone and dialed Rhonda Alvarez’s number at the FBI, once again. He was beginning to wonder if her phone was programmed to go directly to voice mail. He reminded himself not to sound annoyed, or impatient. He wasn’t an agent anymore. The Bureau had only taken an interest in this case in the last week or two, or something like that—at the moment, Gregor couldn’t remember how that particular sequence of events had gone. He looked up and across the scene at the top of the pickup truck. The big black pickup truck. Althy Michaelman had mentioned a big black pickup truck only yesterday. He had heard her.