But let someone else blow the whistle.
Someone with less to lose.
Warren Richardson started his car and went home to his pork chops and said nothing at all. Someone else would surely put a stop to it.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1.
On a day not long after Chuck’s first breakthrough, Johnny Smith stood in the bathroom of the guest house, running his Norelco over his cheeks. Looking at himself closeup in a mirror always gave him a weird feeling these days, as if he were looking at an older brother instead of himself. Deep horizontal lines had grooved themselves across his forehead. Two more bracketed his mouth. Strangest of all, there was that streak of white, and the rest of his hair was beginning to go gray. It seemed to have started almost overnight.
He snapped off the razor and went out into the combination kitchen-living room. Lap of luxury, he thought, and smiled a little. Smiling was starting to feel natural again. He turned on the TV, got a Pepsi out of the fridge, and settled down to watch the news.
Roger Chatsworth was due back later in the evening, and tomorrow Johnny would have the distinct pleasure of telling him that his son was beginning to make real progress.
Johnny had been up to see his own father every two weeks or so. He was pleased with Johnny’s new job and listened with keen interest as Johnny told him about the Chatsworths, the house in the pleasant college town of Durham, and Chuck’s problems.
Johnny, in turn, listened as his father told him about the gratis work he was doing at Charlene MacKenzie’s house in neighboring New Gloucester.
‘Her husband was a helluva doctor but not much of a handyman,’ Herb said. Charlene and Vera had been friends before Vera’s deepening involvement in the stranger offshoots of fundamentalism. That had separated them. Her husband, a GP, had died of a heart attack in 1973. ‘Place was practically falling down around that woman’s ears,’ Herb said. ‘Least I could do. I go up on Saturdays and she gives me a dinner before I come back home. I have to tell the truth, Johnny, she cooks better than you do.’
‘Looks better, too,’ Johnny said blandly.
‘Sure, she’s a fine-looking woman, but it’s nothing like that, Johnny. Your mother not even in her grave a year…
But Johnny suspected that maybe it was something like that, and secretly couldn’t have been more pleased. He didn’t fancy the idea of his father growing old alone.
On the television, Walter Cronkite was serving up the evening’s political news. Now, with the primary season over and the conventions only weeks away, it appeared that Jimmy Carter had the Democratic nomination sewed up. It was Ford who was in a scrap for his political life with Ronald Reagan, the ex-governor of California and ex-host of
‘GE Theater’. It was close enough to have the reporters counting individual delegates, and in one of her infrequent letters Sarah Hazlett had written: ‘Walt’s got his fingers (and toes!) crossed that Ford gets in. As a candidate for state senate up here, he’s already thinking about coattails. And he says that, in Maine at least, Reagan hasn’t any.’
While he was shortorder cooking in Kittery, Johnny had gotten into the habit of going down to Dover or Portsmouth or any number of smaller towns in New Hampshire a couple of times a week. All of the candidates for president were in and out, and it was a unique opportunity to see those who were running closeup and without the nearly regal trappings bf authority that might later surround any one of them. It became something of a hobby, although of necessity a short-lived one; when New Hampshire’s first-in-thenation primary was over, the candidates would move on to Florida without a glance back.
And of course a few of their number would bury their political ambitions somewhere between Portsmouth and Keene. Never a political creature before -except during the Vietnam era – Johnny became an avid politician-watcher in the healing aftermath of the Castle Rock business – and his own particular talent, affliction, whatever it was, played a part in that, too.