Flowering Judas (19 page)

“I know,” Haydee said. “But it costs a bomb to get a place of your own, and I wouldn't want to stay in the trailer park. What would be the point in that? Besides, I think this is just, you know, stuff. That man was here, the one the police brought in to find out what happened to your brother.”

“Gregor Demarkian? Really? He was at the trailer park?”

“Your mother was there, too. You'll probably hear about it at home. They were looking at your brother's old trailer. I can still hear the thumping.”

“Thumping?”

“I was really little,” Haydee said. “I was, I don't know, six years old, I think. When your brother disappeared, you know. And I had the small bedroom and it was right against the back of that trailer. And there was always thumping. My mother said she thought it was your brother and his girlfriend, you know…”

“Okay,” Kenny said.

“And then, of course, he went missing, and the police came, and that was the first time I was taken into foster care. Not that it lasted long. It never lasted long. I never knew what the point of all that was.”

They had come nearly full circle now, and were headed up Straits Turnpike toward the Middlebury Road. It would be an impossibly long walk this way, but Haydee loved it. The green hung down on all sides of them. The yards looked painted on.

“Have you ever noticed that even the grass looks better in the richer parts of town?” Haydee asked. “I wonder how they get it that way.”

“I was just thinking that my family keeps causing you an awful lot of trouble.”

Haydee had no idea what Kenny was talking about, but she let it go. First she'd get a car, then she'd get a better job, then she'd get her associate's degree, then she'd go on to a four year and get a bachelor's degree, then …

But there were a lot of “thens”, and now she wanted not to sound stupid in class.

 

EIGHT

1

For Gregor Demarkian, after Howard Androcoelho, Tony Bolero was something of a relief. The man didn't talk much, and he never said anything in clichés. The ride back to the Howard Johnson was peaceful, even though the bad rain started in the middle of it. The trip back up to his room was even more peaceful. Gregor closed the door behind himself and sat down on the bed to take a breath before he called Bennis and found out what was actually going on. He woke up five hours later because he had left the phone on the pillow next to his head and it was blaring out the
1812 Overture
.

The
1812 Overture
was the ring tone Bennis had picked out for him for “general” calls, meaning calls from people he either didn't know or didn't hear from often. The ring tone she had picked out for herself was that Disney song from
Mary Poppins
that was a word he could never pronounce right. For Tibor, she'd given him the theme music from
Star Wars.

Gregor sat up a little and looked at the phone. The caller ID listed a number he'd never heard of—or might have, but didn't recognize. It was a Philadelphia number, at any rate. The area code was 215.

He put the phone to his ear and said, “Hello?”

“Oh, good,” Bennis said, “I got you. I'm sorry, Gregor. I don't have my phone with me and I don't actually recognize anybody's phone number anymore. I've got it all stored.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm at a pay phone in a Chinese restaurant on City Avenue I couldn't believe it when I saw it. Does anybody have pay phones anymore? I thought they were phasing them out. Anyway, this is here, and I wanted to check in and make sure you were all right. Did you get all that information I sent you? Oh, and I talked to the guy, and if you don't call him, he's supposed to call you.”

Gregor did not think he was actually awake. He tried sitting up a little straighter. Just on the other side of his windows, rain was coming down in sheets.

“Gregor?”

“I'm here.”

“You were going to tell me if you got the information about the guy.”

“If you mean the guy from the New York State Police, yes I did,” Gregor said. “And I kept the text messages so that I wouldn't lose them. Thank you for all that. The people up here are driving me crazy.”

“It must be a very small town.”

“It's not as small as it thinks it is,” Gregor said. “It doesn't matter. I just want somebody to look at this thing that I can trust to see whatever's there. What about you? What about George? What are you doing in a Chinese restaurant on City Avenue?”

Bennis sighed. “I was eating dinner,” she said. “We went to see George, and then Donna took Tibor somewhere he had to go. Some meeting. So I decided to sit somewhere and have dinner and call you. That's when I looked through my bag and found I didn't have the phone. Which is just as well, I guess. They don't like phones in hospitals. It interferes with the equipment.”

“What about George?”

“Resting comfortably and as well as can be expected.”

“Which doesn't tell me anything.”

Bennis sighed again. “Okay,” she said. “Try not to overreact. Liver cancer.”

Gregor swung his feet off the side of the bed and stood all the way up. He had no idea why. He was not going to help himself, or George, pacing back and forth across a motel room in Mattatuck, New York.

“I'm coming home,” he said.

“I told you not to overreact,” Bennis said. “I knew you were going to overreact. There's no point in your coming back here right now. George is in no danger of dying anytime soon—well, you know, anytime in the next week or two, anyway. He's practically a hundred, so—”

“Why would I want to stay up here?” Gregor demanded. “I mean, what would be the point? I'm not all that interested in this case, the people are driving me crazy, I'm spending all my time worrying about what's going on down there—”

“And if you came down here right now, you'd only get in everybody's way, and you know it. Finish the case and get it over with. Then come back here.”

“For the end.”

“Gregor.”

“Do you know any other way to put it?” Gregor asked. “Is there some other prognosis I don't know about?'

“No,” Bennis said, “but for God's sake—”

“He's nearly a hundred years old,” Gregor said. “He will be a hundred next week sometime. They're not going to operate on him. He probably wouldn't survive it. They're not going to put him on the transplant list. He wouldn't last long enough to get a new liver. If he did, he wouldn't survive the surgery, and if he did survive the surgery, he wouldn't survive it for long. So what we're talking about here is—”

“Look,” Bennis said. “Stay where you are. Call him, if you really need to talk to him. He'd probably like the diversion. But stop acting like an idiot. I don't like this anymore than you do, but the man is very old, Gregor. Something like this was almost inevitable, one way or the other, eventually.”

Gregor stopped pacing when he got to the windows. The rain really was coming down, down, and down. He'd hate to be out in it.

“I know,” he said finally. “I do know. I'm not a complete idiot.”

“Well, yes you are, a lot of the time,” Bennis said, “but I love you for it. Look, I'm going to go find a cab and get back to Cavanaugh Street. George was asleep when I left, so you might want to wait until morning. But it's not a bad idea. Call him every once in a while. Talk to him. You'll feel better, and he'll like it.”

“How is Martin holding up?” Gregor asked. “He was frantic, the last time I saw him.”

“He's still frantic,” Bennis said, “but Angela's keeping her head straight. They'll be all right. And there are grandchildren, did you know that? And great-grandchildren. They've been piling in from as far away as Colorado. For some reason, I thought the family was small.”

“There was one son,” Gregor said. “Anton. He died in the service. Vietnam, I think. He left, I think, three.”

“Well, one of the other two must have had sextuplets. The kids are everywhere. It's really amazing. It makes me think I'm right, though, about not wanting to die in a hospital.”

“People go to hospitals when they're sick,” Gregor said. “Are you trying to tell me you want to be hit by a bus?”

“No, I'm saying that if I get to the end of my life and there isn't much anybody can do for me but lessen the pain, then I'd rather have them do it in my own bedroom. It would save on the amount of time nurses would have to run around telling everybody not to disturb the other patients.”

“I think I'd rather get hit by a bus,” Gregor said.

“I'm going to go back to Cavanaugh Street,” Bennis said. “I'm tired and I'm depressed and I miss you, but that does not mean I want you to come right back home. There's no place to sit in the living room, anyway. I've got curtain samples on the couch.”

“I don't understand why you're worrying about curtain samples when you say we've got to redo all the window treatments, whatever those are.”

“It's the windows themselves we're redoing. A lot of them have to be recaulked. I'm going to go, Gregor.”

“Call me when you get back to the apartment,” Gregor said. “I don't like City Avenue in the dark.”

Bennis hung up. Actually, she did the cell phone equivalent of hanging up, which was something like disappearing into thin air. Gregor missed real hanging up, where there was a
click
or a
bang
and you really knew where you were.

He walked back to the bed and put the phone down on the night table. There was a regular landline phone there. He wondered if anybody ever used it.

Then he walked over to his suitcase and started looking through the things Bennis had packed for him so that he'd have something clean to put on after he took a shower.

2

Gregor Demarkian called the hospital as soon as he got out of the shower, only to be told that Mr. Tekemanian was sleeping. The nurse at the desk said this as if he should have known, as if there was something about—
What? Seven o'clock?
—that made it obvious that people in hospitals would be asleep, that anybody with any sense would be asleep. He got less information out of the nurse than he had gotten out of Bennis. He thought about calling Martin, but that seemed excessive. Martin and Angela probably had enough to do with all this already.

He wasn't really very good at walking around doing nothing. He was less good at doing what had to be done next when there was something else he wanted and couldn't have. He got dressed. He put on a tie. He sat down at the room's little desk and picked up the things on it one after the other, as if they could tell him what he ought to be doing. Finally, he had a thought that required some kind of action.

He was hungry.

There was a restaurant downstairs. Of course there was. When Gregor was growing up, Howard Johnson meant restaurants to him, not “motor inns.” He left his room and went down the hall to the elevator. He went down the elevator to the lobby and then across the lobby to the restaurant. There was a hostess waiting at the door, which appeared to be necessary. The restaurant was nearly full.

The waitress showed him to a booth in a back corner, so far away from everything else that it was almost like being put in Siberia. Gregor didn't mind it. He had things to think about and he didn't really want to listen to people talk about their dogs or their relationships or the terrible things their mothers-in-law had done to them. The waitress brought a menu, and Gregor thought it would be a good time to indulge in something fried. Tibor wasn't here to rat him out to Bennis. Bennis wasn't here to give him the impression that, now that he was married, he had no right to try to commit suicide by saturated fat.

He had just about started on his enormous pile of fried clams when his telephone went off, the
1812 Overture
again, not a number he was supposed to recognize. He got the phone out and looked at the caller ID. It wasn't an area code he knew, which meant it wasn't likely to be Bennis or anybody else on Cavanaugh Street.

He put his fork down across his plate and said, “Yes?”

“Is this Gregor Demarkian?” a man said.

“This is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.

“Good. This is Ferris Cole. I'm with the New York State Police. I'm a medical examiner—”

“Oh,” Gregor said. “I was going to call you in the morning. Isn't it late? Are you working late?”

“I'm always working late,” Ferris Cole said. “Not that that's anything you have to worry about. Anyway, I saw the note and I decided to call right away. It isn't often we get a call from Mattatuck.”

Gregor picked at a fried clam. “The chief of police, police commissioner, I don't know what I'm supposed to call him. He told me they don't have much in the way of violent death down here.”

“Oh,” Ferris Cole said, “they
have
it. They just pretend that they don't. It's Howard Androcoelho you've been talking to, I guess.”

“That's the one,” Gregor said.

“Well, it's not like it's just Howard,” Ferris Cole said. “They're all like that down there. And it's not just police work, either. Couple of years in a row, they still hadn't passed a school budget. Teachers were working without getting paid. They won't vote the taxes for anything. They keep trying to pretend that it's thirty years ago. They've got fifty thousand people in that town these days. They need to face reality. I'm surprised they hired you. From what I hear, you're not particularly cheap.”

“Not particularly.”

“And you got them to call us in? You must be a miracle worker. Either that, or Charlene Morton has put the fear of God in them.”

“Ah,” Gregor said. “I was wondering if you knew what case I was calling about.”