Flowering Judas(133)

“Accused you of what?” Stew said. “Charlene, honest to God, you need to go lie down for awhile. You look white as a sheet.”

“I’m not going to lie down. They’ll be here any minute.”

“They? Do you mean the police?”

“Howard, and that Mr. Demarkian person. I knew that was going to be trouble. I knew it. What could Howard possibly have been thinking? Bringing in somebody like that, somebody who’s been on television—maybe Howard thought he’d end up on television, too. God. Does Howard think? Does he?”

“Charlene.”

Charlene stretched out her legs. They felt stiff. Her ankles hurt. “Howard Androcoelho, of all people,” she said. “He couldn’t even get Marianne to marry him, and it’s not like she’s going to get any other offers. You spend your whole life building up. Building up a family. Building up a business. Building up a life. You work and you work and you work and in a moment it’s gone.”

“Nothing’s gone,” Stew said. “Except Chester. Chester is gone. He was more troubled than we realized. He ran away. He got himself in some kind of trouble. He was depressed. It’s a sad thing, but it doesn’t mean that everything is gone.”

Charlene smiled. Out past the tall, thin windows that flanked the double doors, there was no sound on the street at all.

3

Howard Androcoelho was moving very slowly. He was moving so slowly that it felt as if the air around him had turned into molasses. Nothing made sense, except it might—and if it did, that was worse.

Marianne was still in the building, waiting in his office. He came up to her and closed the door. Of course, the door didn’t have a lock. Anybody could walk in at anytime. He still felt better with the door closed.

“Well?” Marianne said.

Howard leaned against the door, as if that could keep somebody out. “He says he knows who killed Althy and Mike,” he said.

“Is that all he knows?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Crap,” Marianne said.

Howard didn’t usually have trouble being short of breath. He was a fat man, but he thought he was also a fit man. Maybe that was not true. He was having trouble breathing now. “We’ve got a call in to Charlene,” he said. “Well, to all the Mortons, I guess. He wants to go over there.”

“And?”

“And I’m going over there,” Howard said. “Of course I’m going over there. He wants to bring a patrolman. Or a couple. Or something. I don’t know. Do you remember me telling you about that thing, about the ground around the trailer being all dug up about the time we found Chester Morton dead?”

“I think so.”

“I included a picture of it, some pictures of it, in the material I sent him when I asked him to come up here,” Howard said. “I was just trying to cover all the bases. It was that trailer and it was the timing so I threw the pictures in there. He was just looking at him and that’s when he said he’d made a mistake, but we’d better go see Charlene and the Mortons first. I don’t like this. I don’t like the way this works.”

“Nobody likes this,” Marianne said. “I kept trying to tell you. Every department that works with him has reason to regret it, even when they get what they want and then have him back again. He sees things. He sees things that nobody else does because he isn’t used to them, so they stand out for him where they wouldn’t for us. Do you get it?”

“I think we’re going to end up having to have a regular medical examiner,” Howard said. “And a morgue.”

“That was going to come eventually.”

“Yeah, I know. But I thought maybe it could come after we’d both retired.”

“Where is he and what is he doing?”

“He’s upstairs looking through his file,” Howard said. “It’s incredible how much time he spends doing that. He looks through the file and looks through the file and looks through the file. Then he moves pictures around. It makes me want to scream.”

“Get back to him,” Marianne said. “I’d better get back to the office. You can’t have the mayor away from her desk for half the day, not even in a little town like this. We’ll think of something. Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.”

“You don’t have to think about it,” Howard said. “It was my fault, wasn’t it? It was all my fault. If I’d suggested it instead of just losing my mind, you wouldn’t have gone along with it. You’d have knocked some sense into me.”

“If you’d been able to think ahead to it, you wouldn’t have done it,” Marianne said, “and I helped you in the end, so I do have to think of something. But for God’s sake, Howard, don’t do that thing where you just shoot your mouth off and—”