Flowering Judas (23 page)

“Listen,” he told Lora sometimes, at night. “It's a terrible thing. You should have seen it. No, all right, nobody should have seen it. But somebody should be caring about it. A baby is dead. That's not a small thing. A baby is dead and nobody knows who it was, or why it died. There should be an outcry.”

Public outcries were one of the things on Shpetim's long list of confusing facts about America. He loved America. He really did. He was overjoyed to have had a chance to come here, and he'd done very well since he'd set up shop, too. He would not have been able to build a business like this back in Albania. He would not have a son who had been to college and was about to be married to a girl whose wedding would be something out of a fairy tale. He did truly love America. He just thought Americans were crazy a lot of the time. The news would give you day after day and week after week about some politician who wasn't even in office anymore, or running for anything, making a sex tape with his mistress—and not say a single thing about the skeleton of a baby in a backpack.

Right now, Shpetim was sitting in the little construction shed, watching men walking along girders on the second floor of the new tech building. It was going to be a beautiful building when it was done. That was something else he liked about America. They talked and talked, back home, when the Soviets were still in power, about how they were doing everything for the people, and how in America the people were left to fend for themselves. Well, it was in America that there would be this beautiful new tech building and anybody who wanted to study in it could just come in and sign up, no approval necessary except for a high school diploma. And if you didn't have the money, there was financial aid.

Nderi was walking back across the site to the shed. Shpetim straightened up a little. He knew it was silly, but he wanted Nderi to be proud of him. He didn't want to be the kind of ignorant immigrant parent whose children couldn't wait to leave home.

Nderi made a pretense of knocking at the side of the shed door and poked his head inside. “We're going to get the shell on the south end of the second floor done today,” he said. “We're going a lot faster than I expected. I think we can be sure we'll have the whole thing enclosed before the really bad weather hits. Then we'll have to deal with the electricians.”

Shpetim nodded. There was an English word he had truly learned to hate. It was “subcontractors.”

“I thought that would cheer you up,” Nderi said. “I thought you were all worried we were getting behind.”

“I wasn't worried about getting behind,” Shpetim said. “Construction projects are always behind. I was worried about impossible.”

“Well, there's nothing impossible about this. I've been feeling really good about it. First really huge project we've had, and we're going to do a spectacular job. And that's sure to mean more big projects. So, you know, if everything works out all right—”

“I want to go out for awhile.”

“What?”

“I just—I want to go out. I want to take a drive. I'll be gone about an hour, I think. Could you look after things here?”

“I look after things here all the time,” Nderi said. “I did it for three days last spring when you had the flu. But you don't just go places. Where do you want to go?”

Shpetim took his keys off his belt and handed them over. “I'll be about an hour. Maybe two. I'll be right back.”

“You're making absolutely no sense,” Nderi said.

Out on the road, Shpetim thought that he wasn't making sense. He was bumping along in the downtown traffic in Mattatuck, and he had no idea what he was going to do when he got where he was going. He passed The Feldman Funeral Home and noticed the crime tape up along the sidewalk. That was where the body of Chester Morton had disappeared from just last night. Maybe the problem was that they weren't paying attention to anything. Shpetim was not entirely clear in his mind who “they” were. “They” were definitely the police, but “they” were also the television news reporters, and the people at the newspaper, and that kind of thing.

He got to the central station of the Mattatuck Police Department and pulled around the back to park. He sat for a moment behind the wheel of the truck and tried to think of what he wanted to say. He didn't know. He didn't even know who he wanted to talk to.

He got out of the truck and went around the front to enter the building by the door there. The door at the back was labeled
OFFICIAL PERSONNEL ONLY
, which was just another way of saying, “Keep Out.” This was a beautiful building, too, near new and very well kept. The town of Mattatuck might not know what it was doing in a lot of ways, but it did know what it was doing with buildings.

There was a counter just inside the door, and past the counter were dozens of people in uniform doing things at computers. Shpetim walked up to the counter and waited. A middle-aged woman in a police uniform came up to greet him, holding a clipboard in her hand.

“Yes?” she said.

Communism or capitalism,
Shpetim thought,
public officials were rude.

“I'd like to talk to somebody,” he said.

It sounded lame even as it was coming out of his mouth. He looked around the big area full of people in uniforms. All of a sudden, he was frantic. He was here, and he had no idea why he was here. Then he saw a young man he recognized, and felt better immediately.

“I want to talk to him,” he said, pointing. “That one over there.”

The middle-aged woman turned around. “Which one?”

“That one. The one with the—the young man. He's got a folder that he's carrying.”

“They've all got folders that they're carrying,” the middle-aged woman said. “Do you mean that one over near the cooler? Officer Holborn?”

Shpetim tried desperately to remember the names of the officers who had come to the building site when they'd called about the baby in the backpack, but he couldn't. He was still willing to bet that the young man with the folder was one of them.

“All right,” he said. “Yes. Officer Holborn.”

The middle-aged woman gave him a look. Then she turned around and shouted, “Hey, Kyle. Somebody here to see you.”

Shpetim waited patiently while Kyle Holborn came up to the counter. He didn't look glad to have been called. There was something else about public officials—communist or capitalist, they didn't like being called on to do any work.

“Yes?” Kyle Holborn said, stopping at the counter.

The middle-aged woman seemed to have disappeared. Shpetim straightened up a little.

“I am Shpetim Kika,” he said. “I remember you. It is my company that is building the new tech building for the community college. You came to the building site with another policeman on the night we found a yellow backpack with a skeleton in it.”

“Oh,” Kyle said. “Yes, yes I did. But I'm not on that case anymore.”

Shpetim had no idea how to interpret this. “I have come to find out what is happening about the baby in the backpack,” he said. “You came to the building site and took away the backpack and the skeleton, and then there was a mention in the news the next day, and after that there was nothing. Nothing. A baby is dead, and it seems to me nobody is doing nothing.”

“I'm sure people are doing something,” Kyle said. “We don't tell the newspeople everything. But I'm not on that case anymore.”

“I want to know what is being done about the baby in the backpack,” Shpetim said again. “Do you know what a horrible thing it was, to find it like that? Maybe you're a policeman, you see things like that every day, it doesn't bother you. I don't see things like that every day. There were the tiny bones. There was the tiny head, cracked in half like you do with eggs. And all of it lying there on top of schoolbooks. I can still see those school books.
Current Issues,
that was one of them. And
The Everyday Writer.
I know
The Everyday Writer.
My son, Nderi, had that book when he was in the community college.”

“Right,” Kyle Holborn said. “I remember. I mean, I don't remember the titles of the books, but that's in the report, and—”

“I want to know what is being done about the baby in the backpack,” Shpetim said. “Something should be done. You people should be taking it seriously.”

“But I'm not on that case anymore,” Kyle said. “I really can't help you.”

Shpetim Kika leaned against the counter, and folded his arms in front of his chest, and frowned.

“I'm willing to stay here all day,” he said. “But I want to know what's being done.”

2

The screaming had started early, almost at midnight, when the first calls had started to come in saying that Chester's body had gone missing from The Feldman Funeral Home.
Except that the screaming wasn't really screaming,
Kenny thought. If it had been, he'd have had less of a problem with it. His mother didn't get right in there and make loud noises so that the neighbors could hear. She sat in a chair with her arms folded over her chest and talked in a voice that sounded like it was coming from something made of metal. It sounded—Kenny didn't know how it sounded. He only knew he was going to have to get out of there, sooner rather than later. He was not an idiot about Chester. He knew Chester had not been a saint. He also knew why Chester had had to get out of this house. It was as if the walls were closing in, sometimes. It was as if the walls had already closed in and were starting to crush him.

His mother was in the living room when he left, sitting in the overstuffed armchair next to the hearth.

“It was Howard Androcoelho who did this,” she said, as Kenny opened the front door. “He's afraid of a real autopsy. He's afraid of what it will show.”

Kenny had no idea if this was true or not. He didn't know Howard Androcoelho, except as the object of his mother's enduring and very terrible wrath. He thought his mother could be one of those Viking women in the movies, the kind who could wield a broadsword with precision.

Kenny did have an idea of where he wanted to go, but he wasn't sure how he was going to get there. One of the difficult things about falling in love with a girl before you really knew her was that you didn't have all her habits and routines down to where you wanted them. You didn't know where she was supposed to be when.

He drove over to the trailer park and sat for a while at the entrance. Then he remembered what Haydee had said about the drug dealers parking in that place and moved the truck inside. He got out and asked a woman sitting on a stoop if she knew where Haydee Michaelman lived. The woman pointed to the trailer right next to Chester's trailer and Kenny felt like an idiot. He had known that. He really had. He had talked to Haydee about it.

Kenny knocked on the door of Haydee's mother's trailer. A woman came to the door with half her clothes on and a cigarette in her mouth and asked him what the fuck he wanted. He asked her where Haydee was.

“How the fuck am I supposed to know where Haydee is?” the woman said. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Kenny went back to sit in the truck and think. If that was really Haydee's mother, he thought he loved Haydee even more than he thought. He'd never heard a single person use the “F” word that many times in that few sentences. Even in junior high school, when half the boys he knew seemed to be working on using it as often as it could be used, nobody had done it like that.

The next obvious place to look for Haydee was the Quik-Go. He knew which one she worked at, and he knew she worked as often as she could. He didn't want to go there, though, because he didn't want to get her into trouble at work. He had a good idea that if he ended up getting Haydee fired, she'd dump him faster than garbage.

He pulled the truck back out onto Watertown Avenue and started driving through town. It took him a while to realize that he knew where he was going. He was heading out to school. This made a certain amount of sense. Haydee was taking a full academic load as well as working full time, so she'd be just as likely to be at school as at work. Kenny just wished he'd gotten her schedule.

He was pulling up to the main entrance and thinking about how to look for her—maybe start at the cafeteria first, keep a lookout for that friend of hers—when he realized there was something going on around the sign. There was a car parked there, and two men. One of the men was leaning up against the car. The other, the taller one, was walking back and forth from the front of the sign to the grassy area behind it, looking up.

Kenny pulled the truck around, through the entrance. Then, when he got to the roundabout at the top, he pulled through the circle so that he was going back the other way. The school roads were busy this time of day. He had to watch out for a Volkswagen and two more trucks when he made his way around. Then he got a violent honking from a little Chevy Cavalier when he pulled off into the grass where the billboard was. As soon as he did, the man who had been leaning against the car stood all the way up, and the man who had been walking around the sign walked toward him.

Kenny cut the engine and got out. The man who had been leaning up against the car came up to him.

“Can we help you?” the man said.

Kenny suddenly felt really stupid. His family didn't own this billboard, and they certainly didn't own the land underneath it.

The taller man came closer, and Kenny suddenly realized who he as. “Oh,” he said. “Mr. Demarkian. I'm sorry, I thought it was, I don't know, reporters, or people just screwing around, or something—”

“Who are you?” the shorter man said. Kenny thought he sounded faintly belligerent, but he didn't know why.

“I'm Kenny Morton,” Kenny said. “Chester Morton was my brother. I mean, I'm sorry I bothered you. I didn't mean to get in the way of anything. I just thought—”