I went on answering questions until eleven-thirty, but the interview really ended when Durgin pushed the tape-player away with the heel of his hand. I knew it, and I’m pretty sure he did, too.
‘Mike! Mike, over here!’
Mattie was waving from one of the tables in the picnic area behind the town common’s bandstand. She looked vibrant and happy. I waved back and made my way in that direction, weaving between little kids playing tag, skirting a couple of teenagers making out on the grass, and ducking a Frisbee which a leaping German shepherd caught smartly.
There was a tall, skinny redhead with her, but I barely got a chance to notice him. Mattie met me while I was still on the gravel path, put her arms around me, hugged me — it was no prudey little ass-poking-out hug, either — and then kissed me on the mouth hard enough to push my lips against my teeth. There was a hearty smack when she disengaged. She pulled back and looked at me with undisguised delight. ‘Was it the biggest kiss you’ve ever had?’
‘The biggest in at least four years,’ I said. ‘Will you settle for that?’ And if she didn’t step away from me in the next few seconds, she was going to have physical proof of how much I had enjoyed it.
‘I guess I’ll have to.’ She turned to the redheaded guy with a funny kind of defiance. ‘Was that all right?’
‘Probably not,’ he said, ‘but at least you’re not currently in view of those old boys at the All-Purpose Garage. Mike, I’m John Storrow. Nice to meet you in person.’
I liked him at once, maybe because I’d come upon him dressed in his three-piece New York suit and primly setting out paper plates on a picnic table while his curly red hair blew around his head like kelp. His skin was fair and freckled, the kind which would never tan, only burn and then peel in great eczema-like patches. When we shook, his hand seemed to be all knuckles. He had to be at least thirty, but he looked Mattie’s age, and I guessed it would be another five years before he was able to get a drink without showing his driver’s license.
‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a five-course lunch, courtesy of Castle Rock Variety — grinders, which are for some strange reason called ‘Italian sandwiches’ up here . . . mozzarella sticks . . .
garlic fries . . . Twinkies.’
‘That’s only four,’ I said.
‘I forgot the soft-drink course,’ he said, and pulled three long-neck bottles of S’OK birch beer out of a brown bag. ‘Let’s eat. Mattie runs the library from two to eight on Fridays and Saturdays, and this would be a bad time for her to be missing work.’
‘How did the readers’ circle go last night?’ I asked. ‘Lindy Briggs didn’t eat you alive, I see.’
She laughed, clasped her hands, and shook them over her head. ‘I was a hit! An absolute smashola! I didn’t dare tell them I got all my best insights from you — ‘
‘Thank God for small favors,’ Storrow said. He was freeing his own sandwich from its string and butcher-paper wrapping, doing it carefully and a little dubiously, using just the tips of his fingers.
‘ — so I said I looked in a couple of books and found some leads there. It was sort of wonderful.
I felt like a college kid.’
‘Good.’
‘Bissonette?’ John Storrow asked. ‘Where’s he? I never met a guy named Romeo before.’
‘Said he had to go right back to Lewiston. Sorry.’
‘Actually it’s best we stay small, at least to begin with.’ He bit into his sandwich — they come tucked into long sub rolls — and looked at me, surprised. ‘This isn’t bad.’
‘Eat more than three and you’re hooked for life,’ Mattie said, and chomped heartily into her own.
‘Tell us about the depo,’ John said, and while they ate, I talked. When I finished, I picked up my own sandwich and played a little catch-up. I’d forgotten how good an Italian can be — sweet, sour, and oily all at the same time. Of course nothing that tastes that good can be healthy; that’s a given. I suppose one could formulate a similar postulate about full-body hugs from young girls in legal trouble.
‘Very interesting,’ John said. ‘Very interesting indeed.’ He took a mozzarella stick from its grease-stained bag, broke it open, and looked with a kind of fascinated horror at the clotted white gunk inside. ‘People up here eat this?’ he asked.
‘People in New York eat fish-bladders,’ I said. ‘Raw.’
‘Touché’ He dipped a piece into the plastic container of spaghetti sauce (in this context it is called
‘cheese-dip’ in western Maine), then ate it.
‘Well?’ I asked.
‘Not bad. They ought to be a lot hotter, though.’
Yes, he was right about that. Eating cold mozzarella sticks is a little like eating cold snot, an observation I thought I would keep to myself on this beautiful midsummer Friday.
‘If Durgin had the tape, why wouldn’t he play it?’ Mattie asked. ‘I don’t understand.’
John stretched his arms out, cracked his knuckles, and looked at her benignly. ‘We’ll probably never know for sure,’ he said.
He thought Devore was going to drop the suit — it was in every line of his body-language and every inflection of his voice. That was hopeful, but it would be good if Mattie didn’t allow herself to become too hopeful. John Storrow wasn’t as young as he looked, and probably not as guileless, either (or so I fervently hoped), but he was young. And neither he nor Mattie knew the story of Scooter Larribee’s sled. Or had seen Bill Dean’s face when he told it.
‘Want to hear some possibilities?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
John put down his sandwich, wiped his fingers, and then began to tick off points. ‘First, he made the call. Taped conversations have a highly dubious value under those circumstances. Second, he didn’t exactly come off like Captain Kangaroo, did he?’
‘No.’
‘Third, your fabrication impugns you, Mike, but not really very much, and it doesn’t impugn Mattie at all. And by the way, that thing about Mattie pushing bubbles in Kyra’s face, I love that. If that’s the best they can do, they better give it up right now. Last — and this is where the truth probably lies — I think Devore’s got Nixon’s Disease.’
‘Nixon’s Disease?’ Mattie asked.
‘The tape Durgin had isn’t the only tape. Can’t be. And your father-in-law is afraid that if he introduces one tape made by whatever system he’s got in Warrington’s, we might subpoena all of them. And I’d damn well try.’
She looked bewildered. ‘What could be on them? And if it’s bad, why not just destroy them?’
‘Maybe he can’t,’ I said. ‘Maybe he needs them for other reasons.’
‘It doesn’t really matter,’ John said. ‘Durgin was bluffing, and that’s what matters.’ He hit the heel of his hand lightly against the picnic table. ‘I think he’s going to drop it. I really do.’
‘It’s too early to start thinking like that,’ I said at once, but I could tell by Mattie’s face — shining more brightly than ever — that the damage was done.
‘Fill him in on what else you’ve been doing,’ Mattie told John. ‘Then I’ve got to get to the library.’
‘Where do you send Kyra on your workdays?’ I asked.
‘Mrs. Cullum’s. She lives two miles up the Wasp Hill Road. Also in July there’s VBS from ten until three. That’s Vacation Bible School. Ki loves it, especially the singing and the flannel-board stories about Noah and Moses. The bus drops her off at Arlene’s, and I pick her up around quarter of nine.’ She smiled a little wistfully. ‘By then she’s usually fast asleep on the couch.’
John held forth for the next ten minutes or so. He hadn’t been on the case long, but had already started a lot of balls rolling. A fellow in California was gathering facts about Roger Devore and Morris Ridding (‘gathering facts’ sounded so much better than ‘snooping’). John was particularly interested in learning about the quality of Roger Devore’s relations with his father, and if Roger was on record concerning his little niece from Maine. John had also mapped out a campaign to learn as much as possible about Max Devore’s movements and activities since he’d come back to TR-90. To that end he had the name of a private investigator, one recommended by Romeo Bissonette, my rent-a-lawyer.
As he spoke, paging rapidly through a little notebook he drew from the inside pocket of his suitcoat, I remembered what he’d said about Lady Justice during our telephone conversation: Slap some handcuffs on that broad’s wrists and some tape over her mouth to go along with the blindfold, rape her and roll her in the mud. That was maybe a bit too strong for what we were doing, but I thought at the very least we were shoving her around a little. I imagined poor Roger Devore up on the stand, having flown three thousand miles in order to be questioned about his sexual preferences.