Flowering Judas(45)

“It’s something else, isn’t it?” Howard said, flapping his arms at it. “They don’t build houses like this anymore, do they? That one was built here in the nineteenth century sometime, before World War I, anyhow. Guy who built it had a big metalworking factory on the outskirts of town. That’s long gone, of course. Nobody has metalwork factories in places like this anymore. Too expensive. Cheaper to build them down in Mexico where you can pay people a dollar a day. It’s something else, let me tell you.”

Gregor grunted something deliberately incomprehensible and followed Howard up the steps to the porch and the big double front doors. The door was opened moments later by a small, older man in a fussy suit, the kind of suit Gregor thought must be given away at every funeral director certification ceremony in the world. The man’s hair was very thin and slicked back over his skull like the villain’s in a silent movie. He was very nervous.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, standing back and letting Howard and Gregor come inside. “I told you on the telephone. This isn’t a very good time. We’ve got the Mollerton viewing starting up any minute now. I don’t know what they’re going to think about a police car parked right out front.”

“You should build yourself a parking lot out back,” Howard said.

The fussy little man rolled his eyes. “You know there’s no room to build a parking lot out back. There’s no room to build a parking lot anywhere. He still thinks we’re back in 1950. Or even 1930. Or before that. I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Gregor said. “It’s just—”

“Oh, I know what ‘it’s just,’” the fussy little man said. “I understand completely. I’m just about beside myself, though. This has been the biggest problem. And of course Charlene has been here. Several times. Last time I had to call Stew to come and get her out. She was howling like a dog, she really was. And of course, we had a wake. We almost always have a wake.”

The fussy little man had been moving while he’d been talking, and he’d brought them to a door in a back hall.

“Charlene is the mother,” Gregor said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Charlene is definitely the mother,” the fussy little man said. “And of course, we’ve done all the Morton funerals. I expect we’ll go on doing all of them, in spite of the things she said. But she’s not completely sane on this subject. She is really not.”

The fussy little man opened the door and turned on a light with a switch at the bottom of the stairs. He started down the steps himself. They followed.

What was at the bottom of the steps was an enormous finished basement, fitted out to serve as an embalmer’s studio. Along one wall there were three metal doors that Gregor recognized immediately as belonging to what the police in Philadelphia would probably call meat lockers—cold storage boxes for bodies.

The fussy little man went to the one on the far right and opened the door. Then he put both hands on the end rail and pulled the slab out.

“This has been a problem, let me tell you,” he said. “I’ve got him as close to freezing as I can get him, and he’ll keep, but I’ve only got the three. You can see that. And I’ve got business coming in all the time. It’s been hard to handle.”

Gregor went to the slab and looked down on the body. He was not a medical examiner, but he knew that purple tinge to the face, and the bugging of the eyes and tongue. The man had been alive when he’d been hanged, or hanged himself.

“He looks much better now than when he came in,” the fussy little man said. “Then—well, you’re supposed to be an expert on crime, aren’t you, Mr. Demarkian? It’s Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it? We’ve all heard about you down here by now. The effects of a hanging recede over time. And of course we can make them recede a lot faster. But Howard said I wasn’t supposed to do that. So I just put him in here and let nature run its course.”

“That was probably a good idea,” Gregor said. The body had been left naked except for a pair of briefs. The briefs were not soiled, which meant they must have been put on after death.

“Did you put the briefs on him yourself?” Gregor asked.

“Oh,” the fussy little man said. “Yes, yes I did. It just seemed wrong, somehow, leaving him in there with nothing—I mean with everything. Wasn’t I supposed to do that?”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” Gregor said. “Did somebody keep the clothes he was wearing when he was found?”