“Is detecting things always this hard?” Tony Bolero said. “It looks a lot easier on Law and Order.”
Gregor looked at Tony’s immense, exploding sandwich. “I’m not going to ask why Howard Androcoelho brought me in,” he said. “That was to cover his ass with the Morton family. The question now is whether he’s going to try to get me out. And it still comes down to why he’d want to stop a second autopsy, and that is still a question I have no answer to.”
“Maybe you should go out on your own,” Tony Bolero said. “That’s the way Bruce Willis does it in the movies.”
Gregor didn’t want to know what Bruce Willis did in the movies. He did want one of those sandwiches, but after the fried clams a few hours ago, it would probably kill him.
2
Gregor reached old George Tekemanian, finally, in the morning. The crisp, bouncy voice of the nurse said, “Put him through to the room,” and he heard old George complaining about the food.
“I don’t understand why they think it’s better for sick people not to eat,” he said. “I tried to get Martin and Angela to bring me something from the Ararat, but they’re not listening to me. Nobody is listening to me. What do they expect, if they’re just careful enough, I’ll live another hundred years?”
“I think the food is made to nutritionists’ standards,” Gregor said. “The right amount of protein, the right amount of carbohydrates, the right amount of salt.”
“Well, Gregor, if this is what is healthy for me, I’ll be unhealthy. I never liked those hamburger places, but after three days of this, I’m ready for a Big Mac.”
Gregor put down the phone and thought that old George sounded better than he had expected him to. He sounded almost better than he had on that day at the Ararat. Gregor wondered when that had happened. He was beginning to feel like one of those comedians who annoyed him so much. He wanted to complain that nobody ever told him anything.
He phoned Ferris Cole’s office to warn him against coming down to look at a body nobody could find for the moment. Then he called Bennis and explained to her, as well as he could, what was going on.
“I don’t like these situations,” he said. “I don’t like it when I’m called in not to do a job, but to cover somebody’s ass, and especially not when the person who wants to cover his ass doesn’t want me to do the job. I told you back in Philadelphia that I shouldn’t have touched this one.”
“But if they’re covering up a murder,” Bennis said, “isn’t it a good thing that you’re there? If it’s the police who committed it, especially…”
“I’ve got no evidence that a murder occurred,” Gregor said. “At best, I’ve got a dead body that was moved sometime between the time the man died and the time he was found. And I’ve got a lot of garbage. A huge amount of garbage. Somebody shaved a bit of hair off the man’s chest and tattooed MOM on it in capital red letters—”
“I don’t get that part. Wouldn’t that take a long time?”
“No, not necessarily. Half an hour. Forty-five minutes. Tops. And that’s assuming that whoever it was that did it didn’t have professional tools. It really was a tiny thing. But it’s garbage, Bennis. It’s not a real clue—”
“Oh, you mean it’s a red herring.”
“Yes, all right, maybe,” Gregor said. “But I prefer to think of this kind of thing as garbage. It’s meaningless. It’s a distraction. I’d be willing to bet you anything you want, that whoever tattooed that word on Chester Morton’s chest wasn’t his mother, wasn’t his siblings, didn’t really have any point at all except to get us thinking about it. Assuming we ever noticed it to think about in the first place.”
“But wouldn’t he want you to notice it?” Bennis asked. “I mean, what would be the point if you didn’t notice it?”
“Backup, maybe,” Gregor said. “In case the original plan didn’t work.”
“What was the original plan?”
“To make everybody think that Chester Morton had committed suicide by hanging himself from the top of that billboard,” Gregor said. “And I think that the second half of that sentence is just as important as the first.”
“What second half?”
“From that billboard,” Gregor said. “Whoever put the body there didn’t just want people to think that Chester Morton had committed suicide, but that he’d committed suicide by hanging himself there. Since we know Chester Morton was hanged, either by his own hand or otherwise, then the point must be to make sure we don’t find out that he was hanged somewhere else. Which brings up all kinds of issues.”