“And the body was definitely in the trailer,” Howard said. “I just saw it, sitting up in an armchair stark naked and going a little to seed after all this time. Gregor Demarkian thinks I put it there.”
“What?”
“Gregor Demarkian thinks I put it there,” Howard repeated. “He won’t come out and say it in so many words, but that’s what he thinks. He thinks I’m trying to avoid having the state do an autopsy.”
“Well,” Marianne said.
“Yeah, well,” Howard said. “But Christ Almighty, Marianne, if that’s what I wanted I could get it done without dragging the body all over hell and gone. Whoever’s doing that has got to be some kind of idiot. Maybe he’s an alien and he has a teleportation device. At least that would explain how somebody got that body into that trailer without anybody noticing anything. I think I’m going to have a migraine.”
“Well,” Marianne said again.
Howard looked away from her. There were two windows in the far wall. They looked out on West Main Street.
“Well,” Marianne said again.
“Don’t tell me,” Howard said. “It was a bad idea to bring Gregor Demarkian into this case. I’ve already come to that conclusion. But damn it, Marianne. There’s absolutely no reason why things should be turning out like this.”
FIVE
1
Gregor Demarkian did not spend all night standing watch by the body of Chester Morton—although he thought about it, and he probably would have done it, if he hadn’t been able to hear Bennis’s voice in his head telling him what an idiot he was. Instead, he went back to his hotel room, set up his laptop, and started running the only kind of searches he knew how to run that might be some help in finding a missing person.
It was Tony Bolero he sent to keep watch over the body of Chester Morton, and he was shocked nearly speechless when he got no interference from Howard Androcoelho.
“They must be embarrassed,” he told Tony. “If I was in Howard Androcoelho’s shoes, I’d have screamed bloody murder if anybody had suggested anything like that. Never mind. Go. Sit. I’ll get a cab over there in the morning, and then I’m meeting Ferris Cole. I can’t imagine that a new autopsy is going to give us any more information than we already have, but by now I want it done just because somebody doesn’t.”
Tony had made noncommittal grunting noises and gone off, and Gregor had sat down to his computer again. Then he had taken out his cell phone and called Bennis. Sometimes, these days, he felt as if he’d entered an old-fashioned science fiction movie.
“There’s no change,” Bennis said, when he was finally able to make her sit down and talk. “Unless you count a request as change.”
“What request?”
“Well, we finally got his dates straightened out,” Bennis said. “He is about to be a hundred, but not the day after tomorrow, the way we originally thought. It’s a week from tomorrow. He wanted to know if you’d be finished with the case by a week from tomorrow.”
“If I’m not, I’ll finish it myself by shooting half the people I’ve met here,” Gregor said. “He wants me to be there on his birthday?”
“He wants a cake. Lida and Angela are arguing about who gets to bake it. I figure that’s preliminary to whoever wins arguing with Hannah and Sheila about who gets to bake it. But you get the picture.”
“He wants a birthday party.”
“A hundredth birthday party, yes.”
“Even if he’s still in the hospital?”
“The impression I got was especially if he’s still in the hospital. But that’s been it. He wants a birthday party. But he actually seems fairly well, Gregor, considering. I mean, he’s very old, and he’s very frail, but he’s—himself. If you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, yes. All right. I’ll make a point of being back for his birthday, if not earlier. Whether I’ve finished the case or not.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“That’s not like you,” Bennis said. “You like to finish things.”
“I’m getting old,” Gregor said. “I’m running out of patience. And besides. There’s nothing to say that I can’t come down there for the birthday and then come back up, if I have to. I like Tony Bolero. He does what I tell him to. He’s a good listener. And you’re paying for him.”
“Right.”
“I’m going to go back to playing with this computer. I’ll talk to you later.”
Gregor put the phone down next to the laptop and thought that this was one of the very odd things about his second marriage. In his first, he and Elizabeth never said good-bye to each other without saying, “I love you.” He and Bennis never said, “I love you,” or barely ever. And yet, Gregor was as sure that Bennis loved him as he had been that Elizabeth had. And he was sure that he loved Bennis as much as he had Elizabeth. Maybe that was age, too, along with the lack of patience. He’d only been half kidding when he’d told Bennis he was getting old.