True Believers(161)

Garry stopped the car and got out. Lou got out of the front passenger seat. Gregor, who had been sitting in the back, hesitated only a moment. Then he climbed out of the car and looked around. The drive the car was standing on was dirt. Nothing in this trailer park was paved, even in the places where lack of paving left ruts so deep and so hard-edged, they were dangerous to tires. There were a lot of cars, and just as many motorcycles, but everything there was ancient. Gregor saw makes and models that he was sure had been discontinued years ago. Most of the vehicles looked as if they would not be able to move no matter how hard anyone tried to make them. Nobody was out and around. One or two of the trailers had lights showing from inside them, and one or two of the others showed flickering in the windows that meant a television set was playing somewhere inside. Otherwise, the place seemed deserted.

“You can see the trailer where Bernadette lived with Marty,” Garry said, “but it won’t do you any good. It was clean as a whistle when we found it, and it’s been gone over thoroughly since then. There was a report on it in those papers we sent you when you started to work with us. Did you see it?”

“I saw it,” Gregor said. “I don’t want to see Bernadette’s trailer. I don’t think it’s necessary. Are we all agreed that she must have died here?”

“We’re agreed, but it won’t do us any good,” Lou said. “We can’t prove it.”

“I know. Sometimes that’s just the way it is. But look at this place. She could have died on the ground anywhere around here, and nobody would have noticed. Even if somebody had seen her, I doubt if they would have noticed. How many times do you think the people around here have seen somebody collapse on the ground while being thoroughly sick to their stomach?”

“Drunks,” Garry Mansfield said solemnly.

Gregor pointed a toe in the direction of the nearest trailer. It was up on cinder blocks, and peeking out from under it were dozens of beer cans and wine bottles. The wine was of the sort that came with screw caps and had names like Strawberry Nectar.

“Mrs. Kelly is down the line here,” Garry said, chugging off between the trailers. “We call her Mrs. Kelly because we don’t want to get accused of prejudice. I’d bet you anything you want she’s never been married.”

“I hope you’re right that we didn’t need to call before coming,” Gregor said.

“She’ll be here,” Lou Emiliani said. “And if she’s not, there’s only two other places she could be—the pawnshop or the liquor store. You can walk to both of them from here. She lost her license years ago, and she never has enough money for a car, which is good news for the innocent motorists of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. She had fourteen convictions for DWI between 1964 and 1973. That was when she lost her license—1973. She was still hooking then. It must have been a hardship.”

“Cars are how the hookers operate on this stretch of road,” Garry Mansfield said. “They drive out to the less particular parts of the strip and just sort of sit on their hoods. Maybe we shouldn’t have been so worried about being prejudiced, though. I mean, she’s white, this woman. It’s not prejudiced to think some white woman is trash, is it?”

“Jesus Christ,” Lou Emiliani said.

They had reached the door of a trailer that actually looked to be in somewhat better shape than the ones around it. Gregor started out to be surprised, and then he remembered that one of the notes he had been given had said that Marty and Bernadette had looked after Mrs. Kelly’s trailer, out of Bernadette’s apparently boundless sense of duty. That was the most important thing to remember about Bernadette. She took the idea of duty very seriously, and she expected her husband to take it seriously, too.

Garry Mansfield knocked on the trailer’s narrow door and stood back. The three of them listened while somebody inside banged and rattled against what must have been furniture. Garry knocked again.

“Fucking hell,” somebody said, and then the door was opened and an old woman was standing in front of them, wearing a dress that seemed to be longer on one side than it was on the other and a cardigan sweater whose buttons were done up unevenly. Other than that, she was wearing nothing at all. Her legs and her feet were bare. Her head was not only bare, but nearly bald. What hair she had left was half-grey and halfginger, as if she had dipped pieces of it in dye and let the rest of it go.

“Shit,” she said, looking at the three of them. “Cops. More cops. What do I want with cops?’

“There’s just a couple of things we wanted to check out with you,” Garry Mansfield said politely. “If you wouldn’t mind. This is Mr. Gregor Demarkian—”