“And it’s not like any doctor couldn’t do that?”
“No, any doctor couldn’t. I’m not insulting your people here, Mr. Androcoelho, I’m just hoping to get a little expert advice. There are things going on here that don’t make any sense to me, starting with that tattoo. It was a small tattoo. Too small to be readily visible—well, not visible. It was visible. But you know what I mean. It wasn’t the kind of thing that slaps you right in the face.”
“The state police,” Howard said. “If they come in here and do anything, they’re going to charge us an arm and a leg. They really are. There’s going to be hell to pay.”
“There shouldn’t be, if it helps you catch a murderer,” Gregor said. “There shouldn’t be even if it helps you establish that this was a suicide and somebody tampered with the body after death.”
“You don’t know Mattatuck,” Howard Androcoelho said.
Then he turned down a long paved road called Watertown Avenue, a road that was oddly half-country and half-strip development. There were half-a-dozen fast-food restaurants, the low-slung crumbling brick of the Department of Social Services, three pawnshops, and intermittent overgrown vacant lots, all of them full of automobile parts. The Department of Social Services had a crowd of people in front of it, all of them looking deflated.
“The trailer park is up here,” Howard said. “Charlene should be there waiting for us.”
“She’ll get there before we do?”
“Yeah,” Howard said, “it’s irony or something. Chester moved out to the trailer park, and it’s far enough from their place out at Sherwood Forest, but it’s right across the back from and maybe fifty feet down the road from the business. I mean, let’s face it. If you had a trash business, where would you put it?”
Gregor had no idea what that question meant, but he didn’t bother to ask. There was a faded, unreadable sign by the side of a dirt track driveway, and that was the beginning of the trailer park.
SEVEN
1
Charlene Morton was neither a fool nor a mental defective, and she didn’t have time to waste. The office was only across the lot at the back of this place. All she had to do was wade through the mud, if that’s what she wanted. It wasn’t what she wanted. She’d done enough wading through the mud since this whole thing began. She’d put up with that little tramp from the trailer park—except, of course, the little tramp wasn’t from the trailer park. The whole thing was just impossible. With a name like that, that girl should have been best friends with a biker gang, and there she was.
Charlene took her own car. It was against her better judgment, and against any judgment she’d ever had, even the bad kind. That’s what you needed to do, to make your day complete, drive a nice shiny new Ford Fusion into that mess of tin and garbage. Charlene could see it now, the faces hidden behind plastic blinds, looking out, making plans. She’d have the car stolen out from under her if she didn’t have people coming to meet her, and that was a fact.
Of course, the people coming to meet her were Howard Androcoelho and that friend of his. That was going to be a joke. Charlene had watched a couple of television programs now that had Gregor Demarkian in them, and Mark had found her something on the Internet about a case in Philadelphia from a month or two ago. The man looked like—well, Charlene didn’t know what he looked like. “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” the Web site had called him. Charlene remembered something about Hercule Poirot. He was a fussy little man with a mustache. They had movies about him on A&E.
She parked the car in front of Chester’s old trailer and sat for a moment looking at it. The sky was clouding up. It was going to rain. She remembered the first time she ever saw this trailer, when Chester had come home happy as a clam to tell them all he was moving out. He expected her to let him go and wait around for an invitation. She wasn’t like that. She’d gotten right into the car and come right over here, and then she’d sat just like she was sitting now, appalled.
There were other people in the trailer park, of course. It had inhabitants. Charlene didn’t understand how anybody on earth could want to live in a place like this, but there were people who did. She thought about getting out and looking around on her own. She did that sometimes. More often, she sent Mark or Kenny to do it for her. She just wanted to be sure none of these people were getting into the trailer and stealing Chester’s things.
Another car came up, Howard Androcoelho’s unmarked special-expensive commissioner of police car, as if Mattatuck was the kind of town that needed a commissioner of anything. Charlene got her purse and got out. Sometimes when she came here, there were people sitting out on their steps, women mostly, smoking cigarettes and not doing much of anything. This was something Charlene really couldn’t understand. There wasn’t a moment in her life when she wasn’t doing something.