Flowering Judas(42)

“Wait,” Kyle said. “I think this is it.”

All around the big room, people were sitting up, heads were turning to the door. It was too quiet. Then the door swung open and a man came in, tall without being as tall as Howard Androcoelho, slightly heavyset without being at all like Howard Androcoelho. Kyle was disappointed. He’d expected to recognize the man from the pictures he’d seen, and the pictures on television especially, but he could have passed this man on the street and not given him a second thought.

“Excuse me,” the man said, leaning a little on the counter that divided Kyle’s part of the room from the general public. “I have an appointment with Howard Androcoelho. I’m—”

“Mr. Demarkian! Mr. Demarkian!” Howard came barreling out of his office at the back, moving faster than Kyle had ever seen him before. “Mr. Demarkian! I’m glad you’re here. If you could come back here for a moment—”

“He doesn’t look all that impressive,” Kyle said.

“No, he doesn’t,” Sue said. “Just you watch, all this crap will be wrong, and then we’ll have a real mess on our hands. I’m surprised Charlene isn’t with us as we speak.”

Kyle sat back down a little. Gregor Demarkian was disappearing into Howard Androcoelho’s office. People had started to talk again. The room was getting loud.

He thought of picking up the phone and calling Darvelle, and decided against it. He just wished that she’d calm down. He wished that everybody would calm down.

He bent over the paperwork he was supposed to be doing and tried to think about fishing. Fishing always took his mind off everything.





SIX

1

Gregor Demarkian had seen dozens of small-town police departments in his life. He had seen them smaller than this, which was, after all, only the main of something like three stations. This was, in many ways, a good-sized community. The local community college was here. There was a solid little section of town with gridded streets and stoplights instead of stop signs. There were sidewalks.

Still, there was some kind of tipping point somewhere, that distinguished a small town from a small city, and it wasn’t just population. There was a change in attitude, or maybe experience. It was a tipping point Mattatuck hadn’t crossed.

Gregor passed through the big open room full of people working at desks on computers, ubiquitous now not only in police departments but in every other kind of organization. He went into Howard Androcoelho’s office, which was nothing like the office of somebody called a “police commissioner” anywhere else. Gregor wondered who had thought up the title, and why. What Howard Androcoelho actually seemed to be was the local chief of police.

The office was small, but it did have windows. The windows looked out onto a small grassy area defined by a spiked wrought-iron fence. Howard Androcoelho’s desk was regulation size and covered with papers. His computer was on a little wheeled “workstation” that Gregor was willing to bet was nearly impossible for such a large man to do anything at. There was a visitor’s chair—a plain wooden one, without cushions.

Gregor sat down in the visitor’s chair and looked around. Howard Androcoelho was bustling. He shut the door and then checked to make sure the air conditioning was working. The air conditioning was an ordinary window unit. The building they were in had to be a hundred years old.

Howard Androcoelho hurried around to sit at the desk. Then he beamed, or tried to.

“Well,” he said. “You really came. I wasn’t sure, you know, with all that trouble the day I came to Philadelphia.”

“I did say I would come.”

“Yes, yes. I know you did. It was just—well, I hope that friend of yours came out all right. That was a terrible thing. Terrible. You don’t expect that sort of thing to happen right in front of you.”

“He’s doing as well as can be expected,” Gregor said. “Can I ask you something? Why are you called the police commissioner? Why aren’t you just the chief of police?”

This time Howard Androcoelho did beam. “Oh, I am,” he said. “There’s not really much call for a police commissioner yet. Not here. But we’re growing. We’re growing so fast, we can hardly handle it. And Marianne and I thought—”

“Marianne?”

“Marianne Glew,” Howard said. “She’s the mayor these days. Funny how these things work out. She was my partner once. She was my partner on this, you know, when Chester Morton first went missing. We were both detectives then, and we thought—well, we thought being detectives was the most amazing thing we could be. That was only a few years after this town started hiring detectives. You really would be amazed at how fast this town has been growing.”