Flowering Judas(60)

Gregor went to the locker where Chester Morton’s body was kept and opened it. Then he pulled out the slab.

“Really,” Jason Feldman was saying. “I mean, really, you can’t—”

Jason Feldman stopped dead. Gregor had to force himself not to laugh.

The slab was empty.





PART II

In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.

—Jean-Paul Sartre





ONE

1

It was like watching a movie, the wrong kind of movie, a Keystone Kops exercise that Gregor was sure was staged for his benefit. He let it unfold without interference. At this time of night, there was very little else he could do. He needed to get someplace and sit down to think. He needed to wake Bennis or Tibor out of a sound sleep and rail at them. He needed something. What he got was Howard Androcoelho puffing up and down the stairs giving every indication that he was about to have a heart attack while the new mobile crime unit did things with brushes and vials that Gregor wasn’t sure they knew how to use.

It was nearly eleven o’clock when they were all finished, and nothing had been discovered or decided that Gregor could tell. He had done his once-over of the area while they were waiting for the police to show up, so he knew all that was available to know. Jason Feldman kept pacing around the room and up and down the cellar stairs, moaning over and over again that it was all impossible, the funeral home was going to get sued, you couldn’t have the police crawling all over the place during a wake. The family wouldn’t stand for it.

Out in the car again, with Tony Bolero at the wheel, Gregor considered his options.

“We going back to the motel?” Tony asked.

Gregor shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I take it you don’t know this area any better than I do. You wouldn’t know where there might be an all-night diner somewhere, or a McDonald’s that stayed open twenty-four-seven, or something like that. Except, not in Mattatuck. I want to be at least two towns over.”

Tony Bolero cleared his throat. “Give me a minute,” he said. Strange clicking noises came from the front seat. Tony grunted. Then he said, “There’s a place called Five Brothers Fast Food. It’s about twenty miles from here. They’re supposed to be open all night. Will that do?”

“How did you know that?”

“I looked it up on the GPS.”

Gregor wasn’t sure what a GPS was—he’d thought it was a way to find routes to where you were going, but to do that you would almost surely need to know where you were going already. This would be something else digital he hadn’t heard about.

He filed the information away and said, “Yes, all right. That will be fine. When we get there, would you mind very much coming in with me and listening to me talk?”

“This is the bouncing-ideas-off-me-thing you were mentioning before?”

“Exactly.”

“I wouldn’t mind at all. It sounds kind of exciting. I’ve never had much to do with crime, you know, except watching it on TV. You know what I’ve learned from the TV? If your wife takes out an insurance policy on your life, run like hell.”

Gregor thought this made a great deal of sense. He sat back and watched the scenery go by, such as there was of it, and such as there was that he could see in the dark. The lights of Mattatuck lasted a little while, first as the town itself, then as the long stretches of strip malls and one-story buildings, then as houses that got farther and farther apart the longer they drove. A few miles after the last of these, Tony Bolero got onto a highway. After that, there was nothing to see by the big arched safety lights over their heads, and other cars, all of which seemed to be on the other side of the meridian and going in the opposite direction.

The exits were far apart and, for Gregor, hard to see. Tony Bolero got off at the third of them, swung around the curve to a stoplight, and turned right. A few seconds later, he was pulling into the parking lot of Five Brothers Fast Food—but it wasn’t a fast-food place, it was an old-fashioned diner, the kind that had been made out of an aluminum-sided dining car. The aluminum was polished to a high shine. The windows were lit up as if it were noon.

“This is wonderful,” Gregor said.

Tony got out and opened the passenger door. “It looks pretty empty,” he said. “I mean, there’s waitresses, but there doesn’t look like much of anybody else. That what you wanted?”

“It’s just what I wanted.”

The two of them went up a steep set of steps to the glass door and went in. There was one guy sitting at the counter on a stool with a revolving seat. There were waitresses. There was nobody else. Gregor and Tony went to a booth way in the back and sat down, Gregor in the seat that allowed him to see anybody coming in the front door. The menus were sitting in the clutch spring of a metal carrier for sugar, salt, and pepper. There was one of those little wall jukeboxes screwed into the wall. Gregor checked the music and found Patsy Cline, Conrad Twitty, and Frank Sinatra, but nothing from after 1963.