CHUCK LARSON WAS WEARING A SPORT COAT WITH ENOUGH material to house a family in the Sudan. It would not have been an attractive sport coat even in a smaller size on a much slimmer man. It did, however, project a certain good cheer, with its faint yellow squares imposed on an olive-green background.
He was sitting on the couch in my living room. I had much nicer furniture than a bachelor should have, at least a bachelor like me. Marion had picked it out. Paid for it herself. Left it behind. Now Chuck was dwarfing it. His huge legs were spread apart, his hands clasped between his knees. He wanted to know how my visit with Paulie went.
I told him I was shot at.
Chuck’s massive face crumpled. “By who?”
I shrugged. There was a certain amount of spite in that shrug.
“Paulie wouldn’t have had anything to do with shooting anyone. Least of all you. You told me you used to be best buds.”
“I didn’t say it was McFetridge, Chuck.” I let the silence build just to see if he would get uncomfortable. Chuck Larson was, after all, the one who had sent me to Idaho, directed me there, at least, and I still had no idea who had shot at me.
But the big man outplayed me. His expression stayed mournful for so long that I could not stand it anymore. “All I know is that it happened.”
“On a path, when I was walking through the woods on my way back from a hot spring.”
“And were there, like, other people around?”
“Only Paul. He came running up right after.”
“And what did he say?”
“Said he couldn’t believe it. It had never happened before.”
“Oh.” Chuck tilted his head back to give himself a full range of ceiling to survey. “Could you have, like, been somewhere you shouldn’t have?” The marijuana-farm theory again. I wondered if they had talked, if Chuck Larson already knew what had taken place.
I could see only the underside of his chin, which was about the size of a dinner plate. I spoke to that. “I was just doing what McFetridge told all the rafters to do. Only I was alone and it was late and he was behind me and that’s all I can tell you.”
“Oh,” Chuck said again. He continued to search the ceiling.
I was sitting in a recliner chair. High leg, country style, it was called. It did not match the couch. But the two items of furniture went together. The chair was “taupe”; the couch was “smoke.”
Chuck’s eyes came down with an idea. “You don’t think he’s gone crazy, living out in the woods and all?”
It was an interesting question, not because there was any possibility of truth to it, but because it indicated that Chuck was thinking McFetridge might actually have fired the shots.
“Chuck, I don’t think he’s gone crazy.”
“All right, I’ll drop it. It’s just, you know, nobody in the family’s heard from him in years.”
“Not since he was here for the Figawi race.”
Chuck spent a moment deciding how to react. He went for innocence. “Yeah. Did he say, like, why?”
“No.”
Chuck was in a quandary. He needed information, but he also did not want it to appear that he was concerned about anything that had happened that last night McFetridge was at the Gregory compound. I wondered if he would examine the ceiling again.
“Did you get the feeling he was mad at the family?” That was his first foray.
“No.”
“Well, to just disappear like that, never be in touch again, something must have happened.” That was his second.
“I asked him what they did when they got back from Nantucket. And he told me he and Jason Stockover picked up a couple of girls and brought them over to the Gregorys’.”
If a stranger came into the room he might have thought Chuck was in agony, that, at the very least, he had hemorrhoids. “Is this the party old Mr. Telford’s been talking about?”
“He said they went down the beach behind the Senator’s home. He and Jason and the two girls.”
“One of life’s two most overrated pleasures,” Chuck declared. “Making love on the beach and reading in the bathtub.” Immediately, he looked apologetic. “ ’Course, could be me. A guy my size doesn’t always experience things the same way as other people.” He pressed his hands down on his thighs as if he was going to stand up. “So, that was it? That was all he said? About a party, I mean.”
I didn’t tell him about the golf. I just nodded.
Now Chuck smiled in that way he had of making his whole face crinkle. The hemorrhoids were gone. The stranger who thought he had them might now have guessed he had just been given a new pickup truck, one with comfortable cushions. “Okay, then. You ready to report back to Mr. Telford that he’s got to start focusing somewhere else?”
“I’d like to find those girls, talk to them.”
Agony, happiness, apology, helpfulness, confusion. Chuck Larson had an expression for each of them. “Paulie give you their names?”
“He said you had them.”
“Me?”
“Said they drove their own car and the Gregorys’ security guy writes down the license-plate number of every car that enters the grounds. Said it’s your job to know things like who is visiting. So, I’m thinking, why don’t I go talk to them, see what they know?”
Chuck gave that suggestion a good deal of contemplation. “How about if I have somebody do that?”
“Well, Chuck, it’s like this. You’ve got a couple of women who’ve never said anything for nine years because in all likelihood they don’t realize they know anything. A private person shows up, an investigator, a friend of the family, whatever, starts asking questions about being at the Gregorys’ house on a particular night when something bad happened in the area. You don’t think that’s running a risk as to who they’re going to tell about this visit from the mysterious visitor? I mean, chances are they’re married now, right? They’re going to tell their husbands, husbands tell the boys at the bar, next thing you know it’s in the tabloids.”
Chuck’s face was a portrait of worry.
“But me, I go up, show them my credential as an assistant district attorney for Cape and the Islands, tell them we are still looking into an unsolved event in our jurisdiction and it has just come to our attention that they were in Hyannis that night. Just want to know if they can tell me where they were, what they were doing, who they saw. I won’t have to get into specifics. I’d just be speaking with the voice of authority.”
Chuck Larson, for all his ability to get along with people, proved surprisingly easy to manipulate.
I wondered if that made me a worse person than I thought.