Flowering Judas(43)

“And police commissioner?”

“Well, we thought we’d get to police commissioner eventually,” Howard said. “We’ve got almost fifty thousand people within the city limits these days, and that’s almost ten thousand more than we had twelve years ago.”

Gregor considered this. “You’ve got almost fifty thousand people, and you don’t have a regular morgue?”

“We’re getting people, Mr. Demarkian, not crime. This is only the second time we’ve felt any need for a morgue since I joined the force as a patrolman. Not a lot happens here.”

“Drug overdoses?” Gregor suggested. “Domestic violence murders?”

“Oh,” Howard said. “Yeah. We get some of that. But you don’t need one of those fancy medical examiners for that sort of thing. And not much else has happened here. I told you when I came to see you, the last time there was a real murder in this town, it was 1948.”

Gregor thought about it. He did remember Howard saying something like this, but at the time he had imagined that Mattatuck, New York, would be like Snow Hill, Pennsylvania—a little nothing of a place entirely out in the sticks, with more dirt roads than paved ones. From what he had seen of Mattatuck so far, however, it was a largish “small” town that was well on its way to becoming a small city. The crime statistics couldn’t be what Howard Androcoelho said they were. Either he was deliberately downplaying the reality here, or he was spending most of his time looking the other way when bad things happen.

“We do have that mobile crime lab,” he said suddenly. “I told you that, didn’t I? We got it with the stimulus money.”

“Yes,” Gregor said.

He was still thinking. He looked at the walls of Howard’s office. What wasn’t obscured by old-fashioned filing cabinets was blank and painted that odd sick green that covered the insides of so many public buildings from the Thirties.

“You’re still using filing cabinets? You’re not putting your records on the computer?”

“Oh, we’re putting all the new records on the computer,” Howard said. “We’ve been doing that for fifteen years or so now, more or less. It’s the old records we don’t have on the computer.”

“You don’t have a storage space?”

“Sure we do. In the basement of this building, as a matter of fact. But you know how it is. You stack the stuff up here and there and forget all about it. I suppose I ought to clean out this office once in a while.”

“What about the case we’re talking about, Chester Morton? Is that on the computer, or in analog files?”

“Oh, most of that’s in the computer,” Howard said. “But we’ve also got files. You know, Mr. Demarkian, no matter how good these computers are supposed to be, in the end, you always end up with files. You have to. We’ve got all of Charlene’s letters, for instance, and we’ve got them in files. She didn’t send them on the computer. I don’t even know if she had one back then.”

Gregor looked around a little more. Howard Androcoelho cleared his throat.

“Well,” Howard said. “You were saying, Mr. Demarkian, on the phone, that Chester Morton couldn’t have committed suicide.”

Gregor turned his attention back to Howard. “No,” he said. “That’s not what I said. I said that I could prove that Chester Morton didn’t commit suicide by hanging himself off that billboard. That doesn’t mean he didn’t commit suicide somewhere else.”

“Well—did he? Did he commit suicide somewhere else?”

“Even if he did,” Gregor said, “it doesn’t get you out of your problem. If he committed suicide someplace else, somebody still had to get the body and hang it off that billboard. And that person has to be guilty of half a dozen things, including tampering with a crime scene.”

“Oh, well,” Howard said. “Yes. But—”

“Here,” Gregor said. He put the briefcase he had brought with him onto Howard’s desk, opened it, and took the photograph that mattered right off the top. There was barely any room on Howard’s desk to put a briefcase or even a cup of coffee, but the papers there didn’t look particularly worked on. They just looked messy.

Gregor handed the photograph across to Howard Androcoelho. “There,” he said. “What do you see?”

Howard Androcoelho frowned. “A bare torso,” he said. “Holes that look like they’re for a nipple ring. Some discoloration.”

Gregor reached back into the briefcase and came up with his little magnifying glass. “Try this,” he said. “Right over the nipple near the holes.”