Flowering Judas(51)
“And doesn’t like her, I take it.”
“Nobody likes Charlene,” Howard said. “I don’t think her own husband likes her. I really mean it. Well, you see how she was.”
“She seems to want to control the lives of her children more than is really feasible.”
“She does control the lives of her children,” Howard said. “God, you should have seen her, you really should have, when Chester went missing. Of course, now I look like an idiot, not taking her seriously at the time. Or maybe I don’t. I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, for my reputation, I mean, that I didn’t take her seriously and he wasn’t actually dead. Except that now he is. If you see what I mean.”
“You came out and looked at the trailer,” Gregor said. “You found that blood. I presume you got it tested.”
“Oh, yeah, well, we did,” Howard said. “The way you could get things tested at the time. It wasn’t Chester’s blood. It wasn’t his type, anyway.”
“Do you still have samples of it around somewhere?”
“I think so,” Howard said. “You know what it is. We don’t have room to store things like they do in the cities. But this has been an open case. Charlene has kept it an open case. So all the evidence is still on file somewhere.”
Gregor’s phone made that odd tinkling noise that announced a text message coming in. Howard sat still and watched while Gregor opened the message, read what was there, and then texted back again. He did not text-type as fast as Howard had seen the kids do it, but he wasn’t a complete klutz, either. Gregor closed the phone.
“That’s it,” he said. “The New York State Police do have a service you can use if you don’t have a proper medical examiner’s office. I’ll talk to them later on this afternoon and we’ll arrange for them to pick up Chester Morton’s body and do a more thorough autopsy. Then, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to haul out all of that old evidence and let me go through it. In the end, we’ve got four questions that need to be answered before we can be sure that we know what really happened here. First, why did Chester Morton disappear? Second, why did Chester Morton come back? Third, where did Chester Morton die? And fourth, was Chester Morton murdered, or did he commit suicide? If you answer those four questions, you’ll at least know what happened here. Whether you can make a case for it in court is another thing. That will have to be up to you.”
Howard got the car started and pulled it slowly around in the dirt ruts until they were facing the exit and on their way out. A woman came out on the steps of the trailer that directly abutted the one they were just in, and Howard saluted her halfheartedly. Then he got the car out onto Watertown Avenue and turned back toward the central station.
“I’ve never understood the people who live in that place,” he said. “I mean, it’s one thing if you don’t have a choice, if you’re disabled or something like that. Then you have to take what you can get. I don’t understand people who could do something to get themselves out of there and don’t.”
“Can many of them do something to get themselves out of there?” Gregor asked.
“Some of them at least could have, once,” Howard said. “See that woman I waved to back there? Althy Michaelman. Althea Michaelman. Her mother was like that, all these fancy names. She had a sister named Jael, from the Bible. The sister’s long gone. Althy was in my class in high school.”
“Intelligent?”
“I don’t know what you mean by intelligent,” Howard said. “She was bright enough until she got to be about sixteen. Then it was guys here and guys there. She never graduated. She got pregnant and got on welfare and moved out there. And she’s been out there ever since, half drowned in beer. She’s got four kids and none of them are worth a damn that I can see, except maybe the youngest one. The youngest one goes to the community college and she’s got a job.”
They were almost back, but the clouds had had enough. They were black and close to the ground, and now they opened up and started pouring rain over everything. It was big-dropped, soaking rain, the kind Howard liked least.
“Do you know everybody in town?” Gregor asked him. “Everyplace we go, you seem to have gone to high school with half the people in the room.”
“It’s a small town,” Howard said, easing his car around to the back to park it. Gregor Demarkian’s driver’s car was there, with the driver still inside it. The driver was reading a book. “It was an even smaller town then,” Howard went on. “There were only about a hundred and twenty people in my graduating class. It’s odd to think of what happened to everybody. Charlene married to Stew Morton. Althy in the trailer park. Not that Charlene would have been surprised about that. She always thought Althy was a tramp, even in high school. But that might have had something to do with the fact that Althy was pretty, and Charlene was definitely not. Funny to think Althy was pretty once, isn’t it?”