Flowering Judas(57)

“I’m always working late,” Ferris Cole said. “Not that that’s anything you have to worry about. Anyway, I saw the note and I decided to call right away. It isn’t often we get a call from Mattatuck.”

Gregor picked at a fried clam. “The chief of police, police commissioner, I don’t know what I’m supposed to call him. He told me they don’t have much in the way of violent death down here.”

“Oh,” Ferris Cole said, “they have it. They just pretend that they don’t. It’s Howard Androcoelho you’ve been talking to, I guess.”

“That’s the one,” Gregor said.

“Well, it’s not like it’s just Howard,” Ferris Cole said. “They’re all like that down there. And it’s not just police work, either. Couple of years in a row, they still hadn’t passed a school budget. Teachers were working without getting paid. They won’t vote the taxes for anything. They keep trying to pretend that it’s thirty years ago. They’ve got fifty thousand people in that town these days. They need to face reality. I’m surprised they hired you. From what I hear, you’re not particularly cheap.”

“Not particularly.”

“And you got them to call us in? You must be a miracle worker. Either that, or Charlene Morton has put the fear of God in them.”

“Ah,” Gregor said. “I was wondering if you knew what case I was calling about.”

“There’s only one case you could be calling about,” Ferris Cole said. “It’s been in all the papers anyway, and on television. Mrs. Morton even got in touch with us, although there was nothing we could do. It was a municipal matter. Of course, she also got in touch with the FBI. Maybe she did put the fear of God into Howard and Marianne. I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“Marianne?”

“Marianne Glew,” Ferris Cole said. “She’s the mayor down there. If you haven’t met her yet, you will. She’s at least as big a piece of work as Howard is. Maybe more.”

Gregor thought about it. He was pretty sure he’d heard the name from Howard Androcoelho at least once.

Gregor played with another fried clam. “What I want,” he said, “is to get a proper autopsy done, something that will give me some clue as to whether this was a murder or a suicide. I do know enough about dead bodies to know that the man was in fact hanged, while he was still alive. I also know that he wasn’t hanged from the top of that billboard where he was found. What I’d like to know is if he hanged himself someplace else and then was moved to the billboard, or if he was hanged by somebody else somewhere else and then moved to the billboard. And in either case, I find it completely bizarre that he was moved to the billboard.”

Ferris Cole sounded interested. “How do you know he was moved to the billboard? How do you know he didn’t just—”

Gregor explained about the tattoo.

“So,” Ferris Cole said, “somebody took the dead body, shaved a little hair off the right breast area near the nipple, and tattooed—”

“Don’t forget the nipple ring,” Gregor said. “I’m pretty sure there was a nipple ring in the ring holes and the ring was taken out.”

“To facilitate the tattooing.”

“Right. The holes were enlarged. They looked like they’d had something heavy in them recently.”

“But why would anybody go to all that trouble?” Ferris Cole asked. “I mean, why bother? I mean, I can see the hanging part, if you wanted to make it look like suicide, but the rest of it makes no sense. Is there supposed to be a code here? Is somebody sending a message? What?”

“All of this would be better answered if I could just get the body properly autopsied,” Gregor said, “which is why I called you. Do you think you could send somebody down tomorrow to do this, or to take the body back to where you need it to be? The longer we wait, the more we’re likely to lose.”

“Oh, I agree with you,” Ferris Cole said. “Sure, I can arrange to have the body picked up in the morning. We can bring it back here and I can look at it myself. Seems odd, after all these years. We’ve been living with this case up here for a decade.”

“Well, finding out how he died won’t even begin to answer the questions,” Gregor said, “but it bugs the hell out of me that, in this day and age, we don’t have a rudimentary forensics finding—oh, never mind. It’s just me. I’ve been riding around with Howard Androcoelho all day, and the town used the stimulus money to do things like install a hands-off cell phone system in his car. It’s enough to make me lose my mind.”