Flowering Judas(91)

“I go in at three. I’m awake.”

Darvelle sat down at the kitchen table. “Well?” she said.

Kyle was making an omelet. It had mushrooms and cheese in it. Darvelle could see the scraps on the cutting board next to the sink.

“Well?” she said again.

“If you want to start saying, ‘I told you so,’ I suppose you’ve got the right,” Kyle said. “This is getting to be a bigger mess by the minute.”

“We didn’t kill anybody,” Darvelle said. “I don’t care what kind of a mess this is, it can’t be that kind of a mess.”

“But it can,” Kyle said. “You’ve got no idea. It doesn’t matter if we didn’t kill anybody. It only matters if they think we did.”

“And do they think we did?”

“I don’t think so. I think if they did, they’d have gotten me out of the station by now. Hell, I don’t even know if they suspect us, one way or the other.”

“Do they suspect me?”

“Well, you’re on Howard’s hot list,” Kyle said. “I don’t know about Gregor Demarkian. He’s calling in the state, if I haven’t told you that already. There’s a rumor around that he’s been in contact with the FBI.”

“Charlene talked to the FBI,” Darvelle said. “It didn’t seem to make much difference.”

“Charlene was just the pain in the ass mother of a missing person with a background that sounded halfway to organized crime,” Kyle said. “Gregor Demarkian used to work there. They’re going to take him seriously.”

“Yes, I know,” Darvelle said, “but I still come back to the same thing. We didn’t kill anybody. We didn’t. We had no reason to kill anybody. Why would they think of us at all.”

Kyle picked up the frying pan and slammed it down again, hard, against the top of the stove.

“Because people kill other people for a lot less reason than you’d think,” he said, finally angry. “Because you just don’t get it. A prosecutor doesn’t even have to prove motive at a trial. Motive is irrelevant. People kill other people over a pair of shoes, or because she dissed her husband one too many times, or because it’s Tuesday. It doesn’t matter if we had no reason, even if we had no reason. And as things stand, I can think of a really good one.”

Darvelle put her face in her hands. “The baby.”

“Bingo.”

“But it wasn’t my baby,” Darvelle said. “I had nothing to do with it. He told me we were going to buy a baby and I told him to pack up and get lost. I didn’t want any part of it. I didn’t help him buy it. And you had nothing to do with it at all. For God’s sake, Kyle, what else were we supposed to do? What else would anybody have done in that situation?”

“Call the cops, that would be one thing.”

“But we couldn’t have done that, and you know it. You know what Chester was like. It would have been a matter of he said, we said, and we’d have gotten screwed, because you know what he’d have said. He’d have said that we were in on it. And even if we’d gotten it straightened out eventually, there’d have been a nice long meantime when they’d all have run around believing him, because he was a Morton and we were just trailer trash.”

“You were just trailer trash,” Kyle said. “I grew up in a split-level in Kiratonic.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Kyle was finished with the omelet. He got a knife out of the drawer next to the stove and cut it in half in the pan. Then he got the spatula and put one half of the thing on a plate. The house was suddenly much too quiet.

“There’s the other thing, of course,” Kyle said. “There’s the fight in the parking lot.”

“It wasn’t much of a fight. Chester made a remark and you decked him. He must have been flying higher than Venus that night.”

“I knocked him over. He fell on his back.”

“So?”

“Maybe he had the baby in the backpack then,” Kyle said. “Maybe that’s what killed it. Maybe I knocked him over, and he fell on it, and that cracked its skull.”

Darvelle got up off the chair she’d been sitting in and marched back toward the bedroom.

“If that baby was in that backpack that last night in Miss London’s class, it was dead already. If it hadn’t been, it would have made a noise. It would have made a lot of noise.”

Darvelle was sure this was true, but she didn’t want to talk to Kyle anymore anyway. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.

3

If there was one thing Shpetim Kika was sure of, it was that somebody had to take this seriously, and nobody was. The problem had kept him up all night. Part of it was that he didn’t know what to do next. Most of it was a slow burning fury at all the members of the Mattatuck Police Department. Shpetim Kika was a law-abiding man. Since coming to America, he had never once entertained the idea that the local police were incompetents, or fools, or corrupt to the core. That was the kind of problem you had back in Albania, before the Communists left, because all the Communists could do was to produce incompetents and fools and thieves. This was America. In America, the policeman was your friend.