Flowering Judas(82)

He was, he thought, keeping his manners glued on, which was a good thing. There had to be something wrong with letting the people at large know that their police commissioner was panicking.

Howard opened the door to Marianne’s office and found her sitting behind her desk, dressed in one of those perky pastel suits she thought was “professional” for a woman in an important political position. Howard was a little surprised that she was still mayor of Mattatuck. He’d expected her to run for the state legislature, and then maybe run for Congress, or for lieutenant governor, or something like that. The Marianne who had been his partner all those years ago had always had ambition.

He closed the door, got the spare chair from against the wall, and sat down. Marianne kept the spare chair just for him. It had no arms, so there were no issues about whether or not he’d fit.

Marianne was waiting for him to get settled. He got settled. It bought him a little time.

“Well?” she said finally.

Howard gave her a long look and then shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to tell what’s going on.”

“Well, something must be going on,” Marianne said. “This sort of thing doesn’t happen naturally. Or maybe I mean habitually. For God’s sake, Howard. Somebody’s treating that body like a prize piece in ‘Hide-the-Treasure.’ There’s got to be a reason for it.”

“I was thinking maybe the only reason for it might be Gregor Demarkian,” Howard said. “Maybe he attracts this sort of thing. People who want to see themselves on American Justice or City Confidential or one of those shows, so they do crazy stuff to make the case seem more interesting.”

“You can’t tell me you think it’s not interesting,” Marianne said. “You can’t tell me you still think Chester Morton committed suicide.”

“I still think that’s what makes the most sense,” Howard said. “And Demarkian doesn’t think that’s completely crazy, either. He said that one of the possible explanations would be that Chester Morton committed suicide someplace where he’d get somebody’s attention, and then that somebody decided to get out from under. The psychology of it works, too. It wouldn’t be crazy to think that people would be so traumatized by finding the body there that they wouldn’t think to look into it any farther.”

“You don’t think it would be crazy to think that?”

“No, it wouldn’t be,” Howard insisted. “I mean, Marianne, for God’s sake, it’s just what we all did. We didn’t ask Gregor Demarkian in here because we thought there was more to this case than Chester acting like the punk ass he was. We called him in because Charlene wouldn’t shut up. And all we expected him to do was come on to the scene, declare the thing an obvious suicide, and get us out from under.”

“But we’re not out from under.”

“No, Marianne. I know that.”

“And there are things,” Marianne said. “There’s that stupid tattoo, for one thing. And then the body going missing from Feldman’s and turning up in that goddamned trailer. Didn’t your people search the trailer last night?”

“We sent somebody out to look, yeah,” Howard said. “There wasn’t anything there. And somebody would have seen something, anyway. You know what that place is like. It’s more alive in the middle of the night than it is in the morning. Nobody could just waltz up there and drag a body into a trailer without being seen. Somebody would have noticed something.”

“But nobody did notice anything.”

“Not that they’re telling us,” Howard said. “But you know how that is. We’ll keep asking. There may be at least one person in that place that doesn’t hate cops on general principles. Or maybe it was one of them that did it. Maybe it was somebody from the trailer park that moved the body.”

“And you don’t think he’d be noticed, dragging the body into that trailer?”

“He’d be noticed, but nobody would tell us about it,” Howard said. “They don’t like to talk to us. You know that.”

“I know that they don’t think twice about running their mouths about their neighbors if they think it’s going to cause trouble,” Marianne said. “And you know that, too. They clam up about themselves, but they’re more than happy to get the guy next door landed in jail. If they’d seen one of their own dragging a body into that trailer, you’d have heard about it.”

“I didn’t hear about it.”

“I know.”