Widow’s Walk

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Maybe I should do what Susan said. I had rarely gotten in trouble doing that, and I had absolutely nowhere else to go. Susan had designated two areas of possible interest: Smith’s sexual orientation, and his marriage. Since Larson Graff was an associate of Mrs. Smith, and pretty surely gay, I thought I might as well start with him. Given what I had, I might just as well have started with Liberace if he were still with us.

I took Larson to lunch at Grill 23. I was quite sure that Hawk would make Larson nervous, so he had a sandwich at the bar while Larson and I took a table against the Stuart Street wall.

“Things have changed,” I said. “Several people have died. I’m going to need some truth here, Larson.”

“I’ll try to be forthcoming,” he said.

“You’ll need to be more so than you have been, I think.”

I gave him the hard eye. Larson looked around the room.

“How did you come to know Mary Smith?” I said.

Larson ate a shrimp from his shrimp cocktail. He leaned back a moment to savor it, breathing in as if there were a bouquet to experience. I waited.

“Oh, I’ve known Mary forever,” he said after he’d experienced his shrimp sufficiently.

“How long would that be,” I said.

“Oh.” He paused and sipped a small swallow of ice water and experienced that for a while. “Twenty years or so.”

Since Mary was thirty that meant he’d known her as a child.

“You from Franklin?”

He didn’t answer for a while. I waited. He couldn’t stand the silence.

“Yes.”

“You went to school with her?”

Again the pause. Again the wait. Again he capitulated.

“Grammar school, middle school, high school. Then I went on to college and she stayed in Franklin.”

“Friends?”

“Oh yes. Tight. Buddies, really. Franklin wasn’t the easiest place to grow up.”

“There may not be any easy places,” I said.

Larson carefully dabbed a little horseradish into his cocktail sauce. It bothered me that I hadn’t come across his name.

“You know her other friends?” I said.

He smiled. Apparently he’d decided that frank disclosure might relieve tension.

“Sure,” he said. “Roy, Pike, Tammy? Sure.”

“How about Joey Bucci?”

Larson had ordered a glass of Chablis with his appetizer. He sipped a small sip of it, savored it self-consciously, and smiled at me.

“Why do you ask about Joey Bucci,” he said.

“He was described as part of her group,” I said. “Nobody mentioned you.”

Larson had another shrimp. He looked thoughtful, but it might have been just his savoring look. He took in some air and let it out slowly.

Then he said, “I used to be Joey Bucci.”

“You changed it,” I said.

“I just didn’t feel like a Joey Bucci,” he said.

“You felt like a Larson Graff?”

He smiled. “In my business more Larson Graff and less Joey Bucci is a good thing,” he said.

“Mary says you came to her through her husband.”

“Only indirectly,” Larson said. “He called and said Mary was looking for a public relations advisor and had asked him to call me. That’s how I met him.”

His shrimp cocktail was gone, leaving him more time to fully examine the remaining Chablis. It was his third.

“Through Mary?” I said.

My head was beginning to hurt.

“Yes.”

“And you became friends independent of her?”

Larson smiled and tilted his head.

“We shared a common interest,” he said.

“Young men?” I said.

“S. You know about Nathan?”

“I do.”

“Poor old queen,” Larson said. “Still deep in the closet in this day and age.”

I nodded. He sipped his wine.

“Pathetic, really,” Larson said.

“Mary says she met her husband through you.”

He laughed. “That’s Mary. She can’t string five words together and make sense. She probably said it backwards from what she meant. I met Nathan through her.”

I nodded. Old Mary. Dumb as a flounder. As opposed to me, the brainy crimebuster, who seemed to be losing brain cells every day he was on this case.

“If Nathan was gay, what do you suppose Mary did for a sex life?”

Larson laughed again. Having committed to the conversation, he seemed to have jumped in feet first.

“Some of us can go both ways,” he said.

“Was Nathan one who could?”

“I don’t think so,” Graff said, a little singsong in his voice.

“So did Mary have any other possibilities for a sex life?”

“I hope so,” Graff said.

“And if she did, would you have any candidates?”

“For fucking Mary?” Graff said. “Hard to narrow it down.”

“She was promiscuous?”

“Oh,” Graff said. “I don’t know, really. I was being facetious.”

“So when you’re not being facetious,” I said, “who would be a good candidate to, ah, help Mary out.”

“I’d say,” Larson almost giggled, “I’d say the fickle finger of suspicion points at Roy.”

“Roy Levesque?” I said. “The former boyfriend?”

“Maybe once and future,” Graff said.

“Any dates and places?” I said.

“No. Just a guess.”

“Okay. You know anything about Smith’s banking business?”

“No.” Larson was working on his fourth glass of Chablis. “That’s not the business he and I shared an interest in.”

“Soldiers Field Development?” I said.

Graff shook his head.

I said, “Marvin Conroy? Felton Shawcross? Amy Peters? Jack DeRosa? Kevin McGonigle? Margaret McDermott?”

“I don’t know any of those people,” he said. “Conroy and Shawcross sound familiar. They might have been on Mary’s invitation list. The others…” He shrugged, putting a lot into it.

“You have any idea,” I said, “who killed Nathan Smith?”

“None,” he said.

He stood. So I stood.

“Thanks for lunch,” he said. “I really do have to get back to the office.”

We shook hands. I watched him go. I thought of Jay Gatsby. Somewhere back there, when he was a kid, Joey Bucci had invented just the kind of Larson Graff that a kid was likely to invent, and to that invention he was remaining faithful. I paid the check and when I left, Hawk eased off his bar stool and left with me. Which was comforting.