Flowering Judas(95)

“It wasn’t much of a hole,” Nderi said. “It was—” He shrugged.

“Everything looked as if it had been cleaned,” Shpetim insisted. “Or better than it had been cleaned. Like it was new. It was a bright yellow backpack, it was so bright, it could have been bought from the store the same day. It was blazing yellow. There were little pieces of dirt on it from being in the ground, but it wasn’t dirty. And nothing inside it was dirty. There were books. Current Issues and Enduring Questions, that was one of them. And The Everyday Writer. I recognized them because Nderi had them when he was in school.”

“For English Composition,” Nderi said. “They’re the textbooks for that course. Or they used to be, when I was in school, and that was about the same time Chester Morton was in school. I think somebody may have said it, that he was taking English Composition.”

“Of course somebody said it,” Shpetim said. “Everybody said it. Last seen in his English class. But, Mr. Demarkian. The books were new, too, just like the backpack. They were clean, white, and stiff. You could have sold them in a bookstore. They didn’t look like they’d been carried around for even a day. They couldn’t have been stuffed in a backpack with a skeleton for twelve years. And nothing could have rotted on them for twelve years.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “the official findings were that the skeleton hadn’t been in the backpack. I mean, the body hadn’t decomposed in the backpack. It had decomposed somewhere else and then the skeleton had been put in the backpack.”

“Even without the skeleton,” Shpetim said, “those books could not have been carried around. They were new. They were brand new. And the backpack also. And that is a problem. I think all the police, everyone, they are trying to solve the death of Chester Morton. They think the baby is part of the death of Chester Morton. What if it isn’t? What if someone went out and bought all those things, bought them new, to make the baby look like it had something to do with Chester Morton, and now nobody is thinking about the baby because they are all thinking about Chester Morton.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “You mean you think the baby’s skeleton has nothing to do with Chester Morton at all?”

“That’s right,” Shpetim said. “It is, I think, a—a frame.”

“You think somebody is trying to frame the dead Chester Morton for the death of this baby?”

“Exactly,” Shpetim said.

“I think that somebody must have brought that backpack to the construction site with ghosts,” Nderi said. “That’s what I can’t get over. I heard on the news that the police think it was buried out there in the middle of the night, but that isn’t possible. I mean, not without somebody seeing. We’ve got security cameras out there. We have to. People steal material and equipment. But I’ve looked at those tapes, and the police have, too, and there’s nothing on them except the usual patrol cars checking up every once in a while to make sure nobody’s doing something they shouldn’t.”

“Here, the police guard your property,” Shpetim said. “In Albania, you have to worry they’re going to take it.”

“I thought you didn’t want people to think that the Albanians were bad people,” Nderi said.

“The Albanians are not bad people,” Shpetim said. “Only their government is bad. Maybe you can come out to the site with us now, and we can show you. We can show you where the backpack was. We can even show you the security tapes. We have them on the computer.”

Gregor blinked. “I’ve got to be at The Feldman Funeral Home at nine,” he said. “And I need a taxi. The desk says that if you call a taxi it takes a while for him to get here. So—”

“We can take you to Feldman’s,” Nderi said. “And you don’t have to hang around watching hours of tapes if you don’t want to. I can e-mail them to you and you can watch them on your own computer. It’s better to have lots of copies anyway. That way, they won’t all disappear.”

“That’s it, then,” Shpetim stood up. “You’ll come with us to the site, and you will look around, and then Nderi will take you to your appointment. I don’t envy you. I don’t like any appointment in a funeral home.”

2

Gregor called Tony Bolero while he was being driven down to “the site,” as the Kika men both called it. He found it hard to listen to a cell phone while he was being squished between the two men in the middle of the bench-like only seat of a pickup truck cab. He didn’t even know they made trucks with bench seats anymore. It worried him to think that the truck might be as old as it looked. It had a logo on the side that read: MATTATUCK VALLEY CONSTRUCTION. Gregor supposed it sounded better than “Kika Constuction,” but he thought that any Armenian-American he knew would have gone with “Kika” and been done with it. The name was very important.