Gregor took a long sip of coffee. “This was your case? When there got to be a case? You were the detective who investigated it?”
“That’s right,” Howard said. “I was a detective then. My partner was Marianne Glew. Anyway, there wasn’t much of a case for weeks. Because there isn’t a case in cases like this, do you know what I mean?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“Chester and Darvelle go over to the Mortons’ house for whatever reason it was, take your pick. They leave. Chester drops Darvelle back at her place and goes home—that wasn’t the house then, it was a place over on the East side of town. He drops her home, he wanders around being normal for a while. Then he just disappears into thin air. Except, you know what missing persons are. Charlene tried to call him the next day and didn’t get an answer, and that’s when she started hounding the department about his being murdered and Darvelle murdering him. But there wasn’t any body. There wasn’t any anything, at that point.”
“So you made her wait—what? Three days? Two weeks? What’s the standard?”
“Two weeks,” Howard said. “When nobody had seen or heard from him in two weeks, we got a search warrant to look through his trailer. I thought we’d find the place emptied out and that would be the end of it. But we didn’t. There were all of Chester’s clothes and things, everything but his yellow backpack. Everything else was there. We talked to the teacher of the one course he was still taking. That’s Charlene’s other thing. She makes them all go to school. Anyway, the teacher, this Penny London woman, hadn’t heard from him. We asked Darvelle and she let us in to search her place without a fuss. Nothing there, either, except for a spare toothbrush and set of shaving things.”
“And that was it? It was that clean?”
“Not quite,” Howard said. “There was a little counter in the kitchen, and on the counter was a little snaking line of dried blood. And you don’t have to ask. We had it tested. It wasn’t Chester’s blood, and it wasn’t Darvelle’s. And a couple of years ago, with Charlene going nuts the way she was, we had it sent to DNA analysis. It’s not only not Chester’s, it’s not anybody in any way blood related to the Morton family or to Darvelle. But it’s human blood.”
“And what about Vegas? If they were going to elope, there might have been something—reservations, plane tickets—”
“We checked. There were no reservations and no plane tickets. Chester was gone. Just like that. Nobody knew where. But nobody thought he’d been murdered, either, no matter what Charlene said. We had no reason to think he was murdered.”
“Not even all the clothes and things left in the trailer?”
“No,” Howard said. “You must know how missing persons cases go. Stuff like that happens all the time. And we were right, weren’t we? Chester hadn’t been murdered. He was alive and out there somewhere. He just didn’t want to be found. Until now, I guess. I don’t know what happened to make him come back. He just did.”
“Did you check on the girl’s pregnancy?”
“No. Let’s face it. She didn’t have to give us confidential medical records if she didn’t want to, and there isn’t a court in the state of New York that would have given an order to have her tested. Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant. Maybe we’ll never know. I will say I never saw her sticking out so that it was obvious, and I used to see her around quite a lot. But that may be perception. I wasn’t looking for it. Charlene was.”
Gregor reached out to pick up the stack of photographs Howard Androcoelho had laid out on the table. He wanted to see them all, not just the two Howard had shown him to start. The photograph on top of the stack was of what looked like a very messy, incredibly tiny living room, its two pieces of furniture both oddly orange colored. Gregor wondered if the people who rented the trailers brought their own furniture, or if furniture was part of what they paid for.
“Gregor?” old George Tekemanian said, very softly, into Gregor’s ear.
Gregor looked up. Old George was standing right next to the table, swaying a little on his feet, the way he sometimes did these days when he stood up too long. It took Gregor another minute to realize that old George was no longer completely dead white. He was tinged with just a little blue.
“Gregor, I apologize,” old George said. “But I’m afraid I can’t help it.”
Then the old man collapsed to the floor, unconscious.
3
It was the same hospital Tibor was in when he got mugged—or was it Bennis? Gregor found it hard to remember the exact sequence of anything as they pushed through the corridors, trying to follow the gurney to wherever it was it was going in the bowels of the hospital. An ambulance had taken old George, thankfully not dead, still not conscious. Bennis, Gregor, and Tibor had taken a cab, and Bennis had spent the entire drive getting in touch with Martin and Angela. She got Angela first. Angela had one of those jobs the wives of successful men often had, where she worked part time and took care of the children part time, even though the children were now old enough to take care of themselves. Martin had the kind of job where putting in ninety hours a week was considered slacking off. It was in banking, or law, or something. Gregor couldn’t remember that, either.