I nodded. Susan said, “Isn’t it? The Bartletts seem so resilient, though. They keep bearing up.”
“How about the boy?” Croft asked. “Is there any trace of him?”
I shook my head. “Haven’t been able to look for him lately. I’ve had to stick around his mom.”
Croft rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Looks like I’m empty,” he said. “Excuse me while I fix myself a new one.
Getting through one of these parties sober is more than I could do.” He bared his brilliant shark smile again and then closed it off like a trap shutting and went to the kitchen.
“He appeared to be patting you on the hip,” I said.
“That’s why you came over.” Susan smiled and shook her head. “Were you prepared to defend my virtue?”
“I’m in pursuit of it myself, and I don’t like poachers.”
“He’s a very big man in this town,” Susan said. “Board of Selectmen, Conservation Commission, adviser to the Board of Health, used to be Planning Board chairman. All the best people have him when they’re sick.”
“He’s a hip patter,” I said.
“Very wealthy,” she said. “Very big house.”
“Pushy bastard,” I said.
“I wonder what it is in women,” she said. “Whenever they find a big strong guy with a wide adolescent streak running through him, they get a powerful urge to hold his head in their laps.”
“Right here?” I said.
“About now I think we could probably marry and raise a family here without anyone noticing.”
She was right. It looked like a Busby Berkeley production of Dante’s Inferno. To my left in the dining room the food was scattered on the table and floor. The platters were nearly empty, and the tablecloth was stained and littered with potato salad, cole slaw, miniature meatballs, tomato sauce, mustard, ham scraps, ring tabs, ashes, and things unrecognizable. The detritus of jollity.
The hockey coach had departed, but his buddy remained, red-eyed and nearly motionless, in his oversized right hand a can of beer, and a platoon, perhaps a company, of its dead companions in silent formation on the highboy beside him.
His wife was speaking sharply to him with no effect.
Marge Bartlett was back on the couch between two of the business types in the razor-styled haircuts and the double knit suits. She was talking thickly, her mouth loose and wet, an iceless drink in her right hand, her left rubbing the thigh of one of the men. As she talked, the two men exchanged grins behind her head, and one of them rolled his eyes upward and stuck his tongue out of the left corner of his mouth.
“I’m a very nice person,” she was saying. It came out “nishe pershon.”
“Hey Marge,” one of the business types said, “you know the definition of a nice girl?”
“One who puts it in for you,” I murmured to Susan.
“I know,” she said. “It’s a very old joke.”
“One that puts it in for you,” the business type answered his own question, and both men laughed very loudly.
Marge Bartlett looked puzzled, a look I’d seen before.
She took a slug from her glass.
Roger Bartlett had gone to bed. The good-looking guy who ran confidence courses seemed to be running one in the oversized chair in the corner with a woman I hadn’t seen before. There was a flash of bare thigh and lingerie as they moved about.
“Maybe I will take that guy’s confidence seminar,” I said to Susan.
She looked and glanced away quickly. “Jesus,” she said, “I think I’m shocked.”
“I guess you don’t want to make reservations for the chair later on then?”
She shook her head. “That poor kid,” she said. “No wonder he’s gone.”
“Kevin?”
She nodded.
“You think he ran away?”
“Wouldn’t you,” she said, “if you lived here?”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” I said.
Chapter 17
Marge Bartlett got to bed about four. I helped her up the stairs, and she stumbled into her bedroom in a kind of stupefied silence. The lights were on. Roger Bartlett was sleeping on his back with his mouth open. On the bureau a small color TV set flickered silently, the screen empty, a small barren buzz coming from it. Marge Bartlett moved painfully toward her twin bed. I closed the door, went to the guest room, undressed, and flopped on the bed. If I lived here, I might run away. The room was warm, and some of the smoke from downstairs had drifted up. But if the kid ran away, why the merry prankster kidnap gig? Why all that childish crap with the coffin? Maybe that was it. Childish. It was the kind of thing a kid would do. Why? “The little sonova bitch hates us,” Marge Bartlett had said. But Maguire, that wasn’t the kind of thing a kid would do. Or could do. Somebody had hit Maguire very hard. Where would the kid go if he ran away? Harroway’s place? He had something for Harroway, obviously. Harroway could hit somebody very hard. I fell asleep.
When I woke up it was ten o’clock. No one else was up. I stood for a long time under the shower before I got dressed.
Downstairs looked like the rape of Nanking. Everywhere there was the smell of stale cigarettes and booze and degenerating shrimp salad. Punkin appeared very pleased to see me and capered around my legs as I let him out the back door. The Smithfield police cruiser was parked in the driveway again. Ever vigilant. I found an electric percolator and made coffee. I brought a cup out to the cop in the driveway.
I hadn’t seen him before. He had freckles and looked about twenty-one. He was glad to get the coffee.
“You going to be here all day?” I asked.
“I’m on till three this afternoon, then someone else comes on.”
“Okay. I’m going to be gone for a while, so stay close. If they’re looking for me, tell them I’m working. Don’t let her go out alone, either.”
“If I have to take a leak, is it okay if I close the door?”
“Why don’t you wait till you’re off duty,” I said.
“Why don’t you go screw an onion,” he said.
There seemed little to say to that, so I moved off. The morning was glorious, or maybe it just seemed so in contrast to the situation indoors. The sky was a high bright blue with no clouds. The sun was bright, and the leaves had begun to turn. Some of the sugar maples scattered along Lowell Street were bright red already. There weren’t many cars out. Church or hangover, I thought. I found the turn for Harroway’s house, drove about a hundred yards beyond it, and pulled off on the side of the road.
If my mental map was right, I could cut across the woods and get a look at the house and grounds from a hill to the right of the road we’d driven in. It had been awhile since I took a walk in the woods, and the sense of it, alone and permanent, was strong as I moved through the fallen leaves as quietly as I could. I was dressed for stalking: Adidas sneakers, Levi’s jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, blue nylon warm-up jacket, thirty-eight caliber Smith and Wesson.
Kit Carson.
A swarm of starlings rose before me and swooped off to another part of the woods. Two sparrows chased a blue jay from a tree. High up a 747 heaved up toward California, drowning out the protests of the jay. There was low growth of white pine beneath the higher elms and maples, and thick tangles of thorny vines growing over a carpet of leaf mold that must have been two feet thick.
The land rose slowly but steadily enough so that I began to feel it in the tops of my thighs as I reached the crest. The hill down was considerably steepe, and the house was below in a kind of punch-bowl valley, a shabby building in a cleared patch of gravel and weeds among the encroaching trees.
The engine noise had been a generator. I could see it from here. There were five-gallon gasoline cans clustered around it, but it was silent at the moment. Conserving energy? Out of gas? A late model two-toned pink and gray Dodge Charger was parked, sleek and incongruous, behind the house. I looked at my watch. Twelve minutes past ten in the morning. Probably sleeping late out here on nature’s bosom.