“If this were a Twilight Zone episode, we’d do ourselves a favor by running like hell,” Gregor said.
The waitress came by with her pad. Gregor ordered coffee. Tony Bolero ordered coffee and a hamburger club sandwich.
“Sorry,” he said. “I never got around to eating earlier.”
“That’s all right.”
“I figured what you wanted was someplace out of the way where it didn’t matter if you were overheard,” Tony said. “I figured twenty miles ought to do it for you.”
“I don’t know how much it matters if I’m overheard,” Gregor said, “because I’m fairly well convinced that anything I might have to say is already common knowledge among half of Mattatuck, or at least among those people in Mattatuck that I don’t want to know. So there’s that. But yes, at least trying to be discreet was what I had in mind.”
“I take it from what I heard that there’s a body missing,” Tony said.
Gregor sighed. The waitress had come back with the cups and the coffeepot. She set up the cups, poured coffee in them, and left little plastic packets of cream. Gregor tried his coffee and decided that it was not quite as good as the Ararat’s, but that that was to be expected.
“It’s not that the body is missing,” he said, “it’s that I knew it was going to be missing. I knew who was going to have had to make it missing, and I just can’t see the point. I mean, yes, I do see the point in some ways. Howard Androcoelho doesn’t want that body autopsied. Not by a real medical examiner, at any rate.”
“Howard Andro—”
“Androcoelho,” Gregor said. “The guy who got me up here. The man I went to see this morning. The chief of police, except he calls himself the police commissioner, which is so ridiculous I can barely stand it. Anyway, I was sitting there at dinner tonight, thinking that now that I had a way to get the body autopsied, it was going to disappear. And it’s Howard Androcoelho who has to be responsible for it, one way or the other, because not anybody could just wander down to The Feldman Funeral Home basement and take a body out of there. I wonder where they put it.”
“I saw the police searching the grounds,” Tony said. “They’d have found it if it were there.”
“Oh, I’m sure it left the premises in somebody’s trunk,” Gregor said. “It would be easy enough to get the thing out of there and into a car, because there’s that cellar door that opens right onto the service entrance lot. Just pull your car up there, go down the basement stairs, get the body out, and bring it back up.”
“But couldn’t anybody have done that?” Tony said.
“I suppose they might have,” Gregor said. “But I’d still be willing to bet anything that it was either Howard Androcoelho himself or Howard and an accomplice. He’s the only one I know of with a direct concern about the body—anybody else would have been willing to let the thing go once we’d figured out that Chester Morton didn’t die on that billboard. After that, if the issue was just the murder of Chester Morton, nothing mattered. Getting rid of the body is not going to change the finding or even put it in doubt. We’ve got the pictures from the first autopsy that show clearly that that little tattoo was applied after death. It’s not the murder-finding somebody wants to avoid, it’s the autopsy, specifically. Which leaves a lot of questions and not a lot of answers.”
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either,” Gregor said. “What could possibly be in that body, or on it, that didn’t come out in the first autopsy that might come out if a second and more professional autopsy was done? I was concerned about whether or not Chester Morton had been sedated so that somebody could hang him up and make him look like a suicide—but then we come back to the same thing I was talking about before. That’s a murder-finding, and we’d have that even if there was no second autopsy to confirm it. Assuming it even happened. Even an amateur autopsy isn’t going to miss a load of drugs stuffed into his stomach or his ass. It makes no sense.”
The waitress came with Tony’s sandwich. The sandwich came with a huge pile of french fries. Tony picked up the bottle of ketchup and opened it.
“So what do we do now?” Tony asked. “If you’re right and it’s the police who are hiding the body, it doesn’t make much sense to ask the police to go find it.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “I wish I knew why Chester Morton disappeared. I wish I knew why he came back. And then there’s the skeleton of the baby. There’s something. If Chester Morton was female, a second autopsy might have caught signs of a former pregnancy the first autopsy missed. But Chester Morton isn’t female.”