Howard took the magnifying glass and stared at it. “My God,” he said. “It’s just like Sherlock Holmes. I don’t think I’ve used one of these since I was a Boy Scout.”
“I got it for my birthday one year,” Gregor said. “From a friend who was thinking of Sherlock Holmes himself. Look at the area right around the nipple.”
Howard Androcoelho looked. Then he sat back, puzzled. “That’s—what is that? A tattoo?”
“A pinpoint tattoo, yes. The kind men give themselves and each other in prisons. Notice anything else about it?”
“It says MOM.”
“Anything else?”
“If you can see something else here, you have better eyes than I do, Mr. Demarkian. And I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Was Chester Morton in prison? Is that why he disappeared for twelve years and nobody knew where he was? How does that have anything to do with whether he hanged himself off the billboard or not?”
Gregor sighed. “Well,” he said, “it depends on what this looks like on the actual body. But assuming it looks the same, then it’s fair to say that that tattoo was put on that body after death.”
“What?”
“The red of the ink is far too bright,” Gregor said. “In a living body, ink fades. It gets sucked deeper into the skin. It gets acted on by all kinds of bodily chemicals. New skin grows and old skin sloughs off, and it’s a process that makes the ink look duller. But that ink is bright red. It’s like it was put on with red nail polish.”
“Was it?” Howard said. “Put on with nail polish, I mean?”
“I don’t think so. We can check that when we see the body. But there’s something else. There’s the hair.”
“Hair,” Howard said.
“The hair on the chest,” Gregor said. “There’s a reason why that’s the only tattoo on the chest. Chester Morton had enough chest hair to be a werewolf. He’s literally carpeted with it. But somebody shaved that one small space, and shaved it clean.”
“Are you sure? I mean, couldn’t it just be a bit of a bald spot?”
“No,” Gregor said, “I don’t think so. But again, I’d have to see the body. And then there are the holes for the nipple rings.”
“So?”
“So, they’re very wide. Which means Chester Morton was used to wearing a ring in that nipple. He wasn’t used to leaving it out. So we have to ask where exactly that nipple ring has gone.”
“I don’t see how you can tell all that from a single photograph,” Howard said.
“I don’t, either,” Gregor said. “But that’s why I want you to take me to see the body. Let’s make sure I’m not just overinterpreting some anomaly in a picture.”
2
Feldman’s Funeral Home was on East Main Street, and like the rest of Mattatuck, it was bigger and more impressive than he’d been led to expect. East Main Street itself was bigger and more impressive than he’d been led to expect. It not only had stoplights, it had a divider down the middle, running up to the town green. The green began at an enormous granite war monument dedicated to THE CITIZENS OF MATTATUCK WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE WAR FOR THE union . The monument was four-sided, though. Gregor expected he’d find the name of Mattatuck men lost in other wars on the other sides of it. The green was relatively substantial, too, with benches along the edges of it for people who were waiting for a bus. Gregor saw one of the buses come and stop and pick up a lone black woman with three overloaded tote bags.
Howard Androcoelho parked in a space clearly marked NO PARKING, which Gregor put down to police privilege. He got out and hurried around the car to Gregor’s side of it, then stood back as Gregor got out on his own. Gregor hated having car doors opened for him.
“Parking’s getting to be a problem,” Howard said. “I’ve got to admit it. If there’s one sign Mattatuck is getting to be bigger than we want it to be, it’s the parking. It’s hard to believe, do you know what I mean? Most places in this part of the country are falling apart. And here we are. Having a problem with parking.”
Gregor looked up at the THE FELDMAN FUNERAL HOME, as the sign read. He was almost sorry Bennis wasn’t here to see it. It was the kind of house she would have loved. It was two story, and Victorian, but on top of that it had enormous porches on both floors, and at the front right corner, where the corner of the intersection was, it had stacked built-on gazebos, too. It was the kind of house girls liked to play fairy princess in, when they were in grade school.