“General practice.” Again the big brilliant smile. When he smiled, the lines around his mouth became very pronounced. “I’m a specialist in general practice. It’s what medicine is about, I believe. People to people. Is Mrs. Silverman here with you?”
“Yes.” I phrased a remark about hip touchers but thought it would be immature to make it. So I didn’t.
“I understand you’re a detective.”
“Yes.”
“I understand you kicked Vaughn Meadows through a screen a little while ago.” His wide mouth was almost lipless, and when he smiled he looked less like an Arabian horse and more like a shark.
“Mistaken identity,” I said.
“That’s okay,” he said. “Vaughn Meadows would be a far better person if someone would give him a kick in the ass about weekly.” His smile shut off, and a serious frown replaced it. “It’s a terrible sequence of things that has befallen this family.”
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?”
