“So you don’t know when they went out last night?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, I know that,” Haydee said. “I was home for that. It was about, I don’t know, eight o’clock. They had to walk to get to the bar. They didn’t have a car, either. Half of everybody at the park doesn’t have a car. They get all their food at the convenience stores. Going the other way, you know, toward Mattatuck. They get all their stuff there. And at Kentucky Fried Chicken. There isn’t a real grocery store in two-and-a-half miles, and what would they do if they got there? How would they get anything home? All the frozen stuff would melt. But that’s not why, you know. There used to be a grocery store. All anybody bought was potato chips and beer, so it moved out and went to Sherwood Forest.”
Gregor let all this flow over him. “So you think they left about eight.”
“Eight or eight-thirty.”
“And what did you do?”
“I went over to Desiree’s place,” Haydee said. “Her mother was at work. Her mother doesn’t like me hanging around. She thinks Mike is going to come and bust up the place someday, because I’m there, you know, and he’s mad at me. But she was at work, so I just stayed there and then I went to sleep in Desiree’s room. I didn’t want to be back at my place when they got home. I thought they’d be, that they’d be—”
“Violent?” Gregor suggested.
“They’re never really violent,” Haydee said. “They’re just sort of—sort of crazy. And Mike punches things. Not usually people. You know. He breaks walls. He’s always angry about something. But last night he wasn’t angry, he was just nuts. And they had money. They had money to get the Johnnie Walker bottle, and they had money to go to the bar. Even though it’s the wrong time of the month for it.”
“The wrong time of the month?” Gregor asked.
“Disability,” Howard Androcoelho put in. “That pays on the third.”
“And it’s gone on the fourth,” Haydee said. “But they had money last night. They had a lot of it, for them.”
“Do you know where they got it?” Gregor said.
Haydee shook her head. “I thought they might’ve gotten lucky on a scratch ticket. That happens sometimes. But they didn’t say so. They usually tell me when they get lucky on a scratch ticket.”
“But they didn’t this time?”
“No,” Haydee said. “They didn’t. They didn’t say anything at all. They just kept flashing money around, and the bottle, and then they took off for the bar. And I didn’t think anything of it. I really didn’t. I just—I don’t know. And then it’s so strange, because I was telling Desiree about Chester Morton. And Chester Morton is dead.”
“For God’s sake,” Kenny said. “You don’t have to worry about Chester. You really don’t. Not at a time like this.”
“What about Chester?” Gregor Demarkian asked.
Haydee shrugged. “It was just that I was telling Desiree about it. Chester Morton used to spend a lot of time at our place. I don’t know how much, really, you know, I was only six. But he used to come over and sit around with my mother, and my mother would go over there. And I remember the day he disappeared, or when everybody finally decided he’d disappeared, or whatever, because that was the first time I was ever taken into foster care.”
“Foster care,” Gregor said slowly.
“I was always getting taken into foster care when I was little,” Haydee said. “Social services would show up at our door and I’d be taken away, and then in a few weeks I’d be brought back and the place would’ve been cleaned up. I used to sort of like it when that happened, to tell you the truth. I didn’t like the foster places, but when I got back home it would always smell of Pine-Sol and soap. It was kind of nice.”
“And the mess in the trailer, that was the reason you were taken into foster care?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t know,” Haydee said. “I suppose so. I was too little to really understand it, if you know what I mean. I just knew Chester was there all the time, and then I went away and he wasn’t anymore, and later people told me he had disappeared. Oh, and then there weren’t anymore fights from the other trailer.”
“There were fights from the other trailer?” Gregor asked.
Haydee flushed. “Really, Mr. Demarkian. I was too little. I didn’t understand anything that was going on, and I probably got a lot of it wrong. I don’t even know if my memories are right. But, yes, there were fights from the other trailer. It’s so close up against ours. There were people yelling a lot. And sometimes one of those people was my mother. But I couldn’t tell you who the other one was. I don’t even know if the other one was Chester Morton. It was just a lot of yelling through the walls, and it scared me to death.”