“They’re in evidence bags down at the station,” Howard said.
Gregor bent over the chest. It was there, and it looked exactly as it had looked in the photograph. The letters were not large, but they were large enough so that they would not be missed, especially with the hair cut away the way it was. And they were bright red. Gregor put his finger down and ran it over the surface of the word MOM. Then he stood back and shook his head.
“It’s a tattoo,” he said.
“Oh, Chester had tattoos,” the fussy little man said. “He was that kind. Terrible to say it, really, but there it is. The Mortons are probably the most prominent family in this town. They’ve built that business into a powerhouse. They’ve got a vacation house in Florida. They’re good, hardworking people. But Chester was always Chester. He didn’t like home. He didn’t like the business. He was always trying to—I don’t know what you’d call it. But he had a lot of tattoos. You can see for yourself. And then he had that girl. And that place out at the trailer park.”
“He didn’t have any other tattoos on his chest,” Gregor said.
“It was probably too much trouble to keep up with the hair,” Howard Androcoelho said. “God, he’s got a lot of hair.”
“And this hair,” Gregor pointed to the MOM in red, “was shaved off after he was dead, and the tattoo was put there after death.”
“Really?” the fussy little man said. “How could somebody do that? Doesn’t it take hours and hours to put on a tattoo?”
“Depends on the tattoo,” Gregor said. “This is just those three letters, they’re not large, they’re not fancy, they’re all in the same color ink. They’re the kind of thing prisoners put on each other, or even themselves. Something like that might take forty-five minutes. It would probably take less, even assuming whoever did it didn’t have access to professional tools.”
“But why would anybody put a tattoo on the body after the guy had died?” Howard said. “What would be the point of that?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“Well, whoever did it, didn’t know Chester,” the fussy little man said. “Chester would never have had that tattooed on him, anywhere. Chester hated that woman, he really did. The whole bunch of them hate her. And it’s not hard to see why.”
3
The fussy little man was named Jason Feldman, and as he stood on the sidewalk outside The Feldman Funeral Home watching Howard Androcoelho get himself back inside his car, he fussed even more.
“We’re really not prepared for this kind of thing,” he said to Gregor Demarkian, rubbing his hands together as if he were standing in front of a fire. It was nearly 80 degrees out, and it was already half past one.
“It used to be all right, you know, in my father’s time,” he said. “In those days, what did you get that you had to worry about? Hunting accidents? There are a lot fewer of those than you’d think. And they don’t amount to much, if you know what I mean. No, what you’d get mostly was the wife beating, and that was terrible, but it wasn’t as if they were our clientele anyway. The kind of people who come here either don’t beat their wives, or they’re very careful not to kill them when they do it.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“Well,” Jason Feldman said, “there are the suicides, of course. We have surprising few of those, too. And mostly it’s teenagers. That’s the terrible thing. Are you going to be here long?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I suppose it will be as long as it takes.”
“This town needs to wake up and see the changes,” Jason Feldman said. “We’re not a tiny little burg anymore. Things are going to happen.” He stopped and looked thoughtful. “Not that things didn’t happen before,” he said. “I mean—”
It was hot, and Howard Androcoelho was in a rush. Gregor said good-bye and got into the car. Howard had the air conditioner blasting.
“Having an interesting talk?” he said. “Jason could tell you a lot of things. His father could tell you more, but his father’s been dead now two or three years. There was a time, this was the only funeral home in the area. You’d have to go clean off to Binghamton to find another one. The Feldmans got all the business.”
“Apparently, there was business they didn’t want.”
“Oh,” Howard said, easing the car out into what was definitely downtown traffic. “Yeah, well. We’ve got an element. Any rural town has got an element. That’s the trailer park I was telling you about. The one where Chester Morton had a trailer after he moved out of his mother’s house. God, did that cause an explosion. She didn’t want him moving out of that house. She doesn’t want any of them moving out of that house.”