Flowering Judas(68)
“Right,” Kyle Holborn said. “I remember. I mean, I don’t remember the titles of the books, but that’s in the report, and—”
“I want to know what is being done about the baby in the backpack,” Shpetim said. “Something should be done. You people should be taking it seriously.”
“But I’m not on that case anymore,” Kyle said. “I really can’t help you.”
Shpetim Kika leaned against the counter, and folded his arms in front of his chest, and frowned.
“I’m willing to stay here all day,” he said. “But I want to know what’s being done.”
2
The screaming had started early, almost at midnight, when the first calls had started to come in saying that Chester’s body had gone missing from The Feldman Funeral Home. Except that the screaming wasn’t really screaming, Kenny thought. If it had been, he’d have had less of a problem with it. His mother didn’t get right in there and make loud noises so that the neighbors could hear. She sat in a chair with her arms folded over her chest and talked in a voice that sounded like it was coming from something made of metal. It sounded—Kenny didn’t know how it sounded. He only knew he was going to have to get out of there, sooner rather than later. He was not an idiot about Chester. He knew Chester had not been a saint. He also knew why Chester had had to get out of this house. It was as if the walls were closing in, sometimes. It was as if the walls had already closed in and were starting to crush him.
His mother was in the living room when he left, sitting in the overstuffed armchair next to the hearth.
“It was Howard Androcoelho who did this,” she said, as Kenny opened the front door. “He’s afraid of a real autopsy. He’s afraid of what it will show.”
Kenny had no idea if this was true or not. He didn’t know Howard Androcoelho, except as the object of his mother’s enduring and very terrible wrath. He thought his mother could be one of those Viking women in the movies, the kind who could wield a broadsword with precision.
Kenny did have an idea of where he wanted to go, but he wasn’t sure how he was going to get there. One of the difficult things about falling in love with a girl before you really knew her was that you didn’t have all her habits and routines down to where you wanted them. You didn’t know where she was supposed to be when.
He drove over to the trailer park and sat for a while at the entrance. Then he remembered what Haydee had said about the drug dealers parking in that place and moved the truck inside. He got out and asked a woman sitting on a stoop if she knew where Haydee Michaelman lived. The woman pointed to the trailer right next to Chester’s trailer and Kenny felt like an idiot. He had known that. He really had. He had talked to Haydee about it.
Kenny knocked on the door of Haydee’s mother’s trailer. A woman came to the door with half her clothes on and a cigarette in her mouth and asked him what the fuck he wanted. He asked her where Haydee was.
“How the fuck am I supposed to know where Haydee is?” the woman said. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Kenny went back to sit in the truck and think. If that was really Haydee’s mother, he thought he loved Haydee even more than he thought. He’d never heard a single person use the “F” word that many times in that few sentences. Even in junior high school, when half the boys he knew seemed to be working on using it as often as it could be used, nobody had done it like that.
The next obvious place to look for Haydee was the Quik-Go. He knew which one she worked at, and he knew she worked as often as she could. He didn’t want to go there, though, because he didn’t want to get her into trouble at work. He had a good idea that if he ended up getting Haydee fired, she’d dump him faster than garbage.
He pulled the truck back out onto Watertown Avenue and started driving through town. It took him a while to realize that he knew where he was going. He was heading out to school. This made a certain amount of sense. Haydee was taking a full academic load as well as working full time, so she’d be just as likely to be at school as at work. Kenny just wished he’d gotten her schedule.
He was pulling up to the main entrance and thinking about how to look for her—maybe start at the cafeteria first, keep a lookout for that friend of hers—when he realized there was something going on around the sign. There was a car parked there, and two men. One of the men was leaning up against the car. The other, the taller one, was walking back and forth from the front of the sign to the grassy area behind it, looking up.
Kenny pulled the truck around, through the entrance. Then, when he got to the roundabout at the top, he pulled through the circle so that he was going back the other way. The school roads were busy this time of day. He had to watch out for a Volkswagen and two more trucks when he made his way around. Then he got a violent honking from a little Chevy Cavalier when he pulled off into the grass where the billboard was. As soon as he did, the man who had been leaning against the car stood all the way up, and the man who had been walking around the sign walked toward him.