“I want you back here right away. I want a united family. I want to make sure those idiots understand what they’re dealing with.”
“A united family about what? What the hell is going on?”
“He was here this morning,” his mother said. “Gregor Demarkian. And Howard Androcoelho, of course, but Howard doesn’t count. He never counted. I don’t care what kind of fancy title he’s giving himself these days.”
“Okay. Mr. Demarkian and Mr. Androcoelho were over there this morning. About what? Do they know more about what happened to Chester?”
“They were here to tell me I’m a suspect in that murder case. The two people out by the dam. Don’t tell me you’ve been in class and at lunch so long you don’t know two people were killed out by the dam.”
“Everybody knows two people were killed out by the dam,” Kenny said. “What does that have to do with you?”
“They were in a black pickup truck,” his mother said. “They’ve decided it must be Chester’s pickup truck. I haven’t had it for twelve years. I sold it ages ago. It doesn’t matter. It’s the way that Demarkian’s mind works. He’s decided it’s Chester’s truck and I killed those two people, and he isn’t going to be satisfied until he puts me right in jail.”
“I don’t believe that,” Kenny said. “I really don’t. He wouldn’t have the kind of reputation he has if he behaved like that.”
“What do you know about reputations?” his mother said. “What do you know about anything? You’re a traitor, just like Chester was, and you know it. You try to hide it better, but I know what you are. I’ve always known what you are. If you stood on the ground next to the tree, you’d turn the flowers red.”
“What?”
“Judas,” she said. “Except you’re worse than Judas. You and Chester both. At least Judas got his money from Christ’s enemies. You want to get it from Christ.”
“Did you just compare yourself to Christ?” Kenny said. “I can’t believe that. What’s wrong with you?”
“Judas,” his mother said again.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can get there,” Kenny said.
Then he hung up the phone, quickly. He had not lied. He would get back as soon as he could get there. The trick was in defining “as soon as he could get.”
He flicked through the phone menu and found the REJECT list. He pushed a few more buttons and put his mother’s number on it. Then he added the landline number at home, the numbers of his brother and his sister, and all three of the lines at the business. Then he put the phone back in his pocket.
When he got back to the table, Haydee was carefully dipping the world’s longest French fry into ketcup.
Kenny slid into the booth and said, “Do you know what a flowering Judas it?”
“A flowering Judas? Do you mean Judas like in the Bible?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Kenny said. “A flowering Judas is a plant. A tree, kind of. It doesn’t grow up here except in a greenhouse. Anyway, it’s got sort of red-purple flowers. The legend is that it used to have white flowers. Then Judas took the thirty pieces of silver and then he felt guilty, and he threw the silver on the ground and hanged himself. From this tree. And when he did that, hanged himself from the tree, I mean, the flowers turned from white to red. It’s a legend. We got a little piece of paper with the legend on it when we got the tree.”
“You’ve got one of these trees?” Haydee asked.
“My mother does,” Kenny said. “In the greenhouse.”
THREE
1
Going back across town to central station next to Tony Bolero in his own car, Gregor Demarkian tried to count the cases he’d been on that had left him in a situation like this. There had been a lot of them, lately. That wasn’t a good sign. There were too many of these small and medium-sized towns out there that only thought about law enforcement when there was an emergency—or maybe not too many. Maybe that was a very good sign, both because there were so many places that had so few emergencies and because so many towns used their common sense about individual drug use. Or something.
Gregor’s head hurt, and he thought it was going to get worse as the day went on. It wasn’t the lack of crime in American small towns that he minded. He never minded a lack of crime. It was the attitude that by pretending that nothing ever changed, you could prevent crime from happening, or make it disappear when it did. It was the making it disappear that was the problem, because there could always be more behind it if that was what you were trying to do. The question here was just how much was behind this.