Flowering Judas(139)

“So first I threw him out of the house because of his problems,” Charlene said, “and then I enabled him?”

“Enabling was better than going to jail for child murder, or seeing Chester go to jail for child murder, or even just having to weather the scandal. You fed the local media one set of nonsense and you fed Chester another, saying that you were keeping him safe. And, I think, you told him that he had to stay away as long as he did because Darvelle Haymes was going to turn him in as soon as she found out he was alive.”

“You think Darvelle Haymes was there when Chester and I murdered an infant,” Charlene said.

“No. I think Darvelle Haymes knew all about buying the baby, and that’s a crime in itself,” Gregor said. “Anyway, eventually things began to come apart. Chester was getting worse and worse and he wanted to come home. The bogus ‘search’ for him was getting hard to keep bogus. First a television program got interested in the case, a national television program. Then the FBI stepped in and agreed to look things over. Eventually, somebody was going to recognize him. And you didn’t want him to come home. He wasn’t better. He might even be worse. As soon as he got back to Mattatuck, you’d have all the same problems with drugs and liquor and hysterical behavior and, yes, stealing from the business. So you were juggling a lot of balls, and you didn’t know what you were going to do.

“And in the meantime, Chester just got in his truck and came back. He was strung out. He was depressed. He had money problems from the gambling. And he was convinced that he wasn’t going to be able to come home because Darvelle Haymes was a bitch who wanted to destroy him. So he came back. He didn’t tell you about it. He just came.

“He wanted to do something dramatic to ruin Darvelle’s life, so he went looking for the body of the baby. He started by digging up the ground around his old trailer and in the vicinity. I think you’d told him that that was what you’d done to the body. But it wasn’t there, and Haydee Michaelman ended up thinking it was Mike Katowski trying to find the money she’d saved up.

“But Chester started thinking, and when he realized the body wasn’t where he thought it was, he started wondering where it could be. And that’s when he remembered this. A great big greenhouse, and a tree called a flowering Judas. You’re the one who goes around telling everybody that they’re traitors to the family. Judases. You buried the baby in the greenhouse and left it there until Chester figured out where it was and dug it up. Then he took it with him, went to Darvelle Haymes’s house and hung himself from the bathroom door frame. He left her a note making it seem as if they’d killed the baby together, or as if she’d been responsible for it—she burned the note, so we’ll never be sure. But he tried to incriminate her, and because of that she and a friend moved the body to the billboard.

“And from there,” Gregor said, “there isn’t that much to say, is there? Everything else was just a lot of smoke and mirrors until you killed Althy Michaelman and Mike Katowski.”

“And I did that, why?”

“Because Althy Michaelman made the first of what you knew was going to be a series of blackmail demands, threatening to go to the police about the baby, her baby, the one she sold to Chester. That, and the fact that you were at the trailer the night Chester supposedly disappeared, and the fact that Chester was at the trailer the night before he actually died. Althy wasn’t good at putting two and two together, but she was good at remembering the things she knew might make her some money. So she did. And first, my guess is that you gave her some cash, but you didn’t give her everything she wanted. She had cash, and that had to come from you. But you agreed to meet the two of them to hand over the real payment, and you got them down by the truck, and you shot them. They were drunk as skunks by then. They couldn’t have put up much of a fight.”

“I’ve never had a gun in my life,” Charlene said. “And you can’t say I have.”

“No, I can’t,” Gregor agreed. “But Chester had lots. They found an entire cache of them at his house in New Jersey this morning. The gun was in the glove compartment. You found it when you found the truck, parked where Darvelle and her friend had left it, in your own back lot. It was always that truck that was going to get you in trouble.”

“The truck?” Howard said. “What is it about the truck?”

“It was the one thing she couldn’t control,” Gregor said. “Chester loved that truck. He wouldn’t leave without that truck. So she managed to find a way to get it to him. She pretended to be sick of looking at it. She told people she’d sold it to some kid off the street. Nobody challenged her and she got away with it, but if you think about it, you’ve got to wonder why. This is a woman who rented her son’s trailer for twelve solid years, supposedly because she wanted to have it waiting for her son if he was ever found—and she gets rid of his truck in no time flat? Why? Chester Morton didn’t give a damn one way or the other about his trailer. He loved his truck.”