Flowering Judas(59)

Gregor went back to his room, made sure he had things like his wallet and his phone, and went down to the lobby. There was a young man behind the desk this time instead of a young woman.

“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” the young man said. “I’m glad I’ve got the chance to meet you. Is what I heard really true? Are you really going to bring in one of those state medical examiners to look at Chester Morton’s body?”

Gregor sucked in air. “That got around fast,” he said.

“It’s a small town,” the man behind the desk said. He was much too young to have known Chester Morton before his disappearance. “And people talk.”

Tony Bolero was pulling the car up under the big porte cochere. Gregor mumbled something noncommittal and went out into the warm September air. It was still raining, but the roof of the porte cochere kept that off his head, and the young man at the checkout desk kept him distracted.

“I don’t care how small a town is,” Gregor said, when he got into the car. “News doesn’t travel that fast unless somebody is spreading gossip. Howard Androcoelho must have gone back to the station and announced it all over a bullhorn. And it’s not all that small a town in the first place.”

“All right,” Tony Bolero said.

Gregor didn’t impose on him any further. The Howard Johnson was on the edge of town. They turned into the lights and Gregor watched the buildings go by, first stretched out along thin strips of green, then coming closer together. When the buildings began to come close together, Gregor saw at least three pawnshops, and four convenience stores, and two bars. More than size distinguished a small town from a larger one. These were the kinds of places that asked for trouble.

They made a turn and then another turn, and they were suddenly on the green, with the tall Civil War monument looking like a miniature pyramid displaced from the Middle East. It didn’t look that way in good light. Tony went down one side of the green, turned left at the end of it, then came down the other. The Feldman Funeral Home was just beyond it.

“Here we are,” Tony said, parking at the curb. “Do you need me to come inside?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I may need to talk to you, later. Is that part of this arrangement? Can I sit you down someplace and run ideas by you?”

“You can,” Tony said, “but I don’t know what good it would do. I’ve never investigated anything in my life.”

Gregor gave a noncomittal grunt. Then he got out of the car and walked up to the funeral home’s front door. There was something going on in the front room. It was all lit up, and Gregor could see people moving around. He rang the doorbell and waited. At least he wasn’t going to get the Feldmans out of bed.

The man who came to the door was Jason Feldman himself, and he looked surprised.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Did we have an appointment? Was Howard supposed to call? Howard really is completely irresponsible in some ways. I don’t know why he gets to head up the police department. I really would like to accommodate you, but as you can see, we have a wake going on and—”

“I just need to go downstairs and take a look at the body for a minute,” Gregor said.

“Now? Right now? Why do you have to do that right now?”

“I won’t be long,” Gregor was in the foyer now. It wasn’t that hard to get past Jason Feldman. “I don’t need to disturb anything you’re doing. I just want to check something out.”

“But it’s the middle of the night!”

“I couldn’t settle down to sleep,” Gregor said, moving slowly but inexorably toward the basement door he remembered from earlier. “It really is just one small thing. So if you—”

Jason Feldman rushed to get to the basement door before Gregor did, but he didn’t block the way. It was as if what mattered to him was that no guest in the funeral home should ever open his own doors. Jason Feldman flung the basement door open, turned on the light, and stepped back.

“Really,” he said. “Really. This is not the way I expect things to be done here. We’re not a morgue. We’ve got a business to run.”

Gregor went down the steps. Jason Feldman closed the basement door behind them and followed.

“Really,” he said. “Really. We can’t have things like this here. Bereaved families are very fragile. They’re in a very delicate position. We can’t have their mourning interrupted by police nonsense and all kinds of other things—”

Gregor had reached the room with the cold lockers built into the wall. He turned on the light there and looked at the lockers one by one. They looked exactly as he remembered them from earlier. The room looked exactly as he remembered it from earlier, too, although it was a messy room. A lot can happen in a messy room without anyone noticing.