“Fights about what?”
“We don’t know that,” Gregor said. “I’ll ask Charlene Morton, but I’m not sure I’ll get anything like an accurate answer. But there were fights, not just Chester’s need for independence, that led him to move out. In fact, I wonder if there was anything going on about independence at all, because the other thing I know that I didn’t before is that Chester wanted to reconcile with his family, at least enough to get some financial support.” Gregor tapped his fingers against his knees. “You know, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“What doesn’t?” Tony Bolero asked. “I mean, it makes sense to me, you know. Kids used to picking up pretty good change from not much work, doesn’t have to kiss the butt of a boss, doesn’t like being out on his own where things are different.”
“Oh, I agree,” Gregor said. “But the story, from everybody—from Howard Androcoelho, from Darvelle Haymes, even from Kenny and Charlene Morton—has been that Chester had a mind of his own, he was independent, he was going to move out if he wanted to, and he was going to date the girl he wanted to and he didn’t give a damn about the family. But is that really the case? Does he sound like somebody who would do that?”
“Well, he did it, didn’t he?” Tony Bolero said.
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “There were fights, and he moved out of the house. He wasn’t forced out. That is, they didn’t tell him he had to leave. Everybody agrees on that. And yet—And what is it with Darvelle Haymes? Supposedly he was so in love with Darvelle Haymes, he was willing to do anything not to give her up. Even go through with that ridiculous plan of buying a baby so that he could have his cake and eat it, too. But maybe that’s wrong. Myabe he didn’t give a damn about Darvelle Haymes at all, except that she was the kind of person he thought he could talk into the things he wanted to talk a girl into.”
“You’ve gone to the moon, Mr. Demarkian.”
“No, I haven’t,” Gregor said. “The impression I got from Howard Androcoelho was that Chester Morton moved out of his family’s house because he wanted to date Darvelle Haymes without getting a lot of hassle about it. But that isn’t true. He started dating Darvelle after he moved out. The arguments at home were about something else. What if he started dating Darvelle because he thought she was the kind of girl he could get to go along with, say, getting royally pregnant out of wedlock and then keeping the baby?”
“You mean he was looking to knock somebody up.”
“I mean I think he was looking for somebody to have his baby because he thought the baby would bring his mother around on—on whatever it actually was that the problem was. Which brings me right back to the problem I had when I started talking to you. If Chester Morton’s primary motivation in the months between the time he left his family’s house and the time he disappeared was to make some kind of peace with his family and get taken back into the fold—presumably on his own terms, there was something he wanted a concession for, I don’t know what—but anyway, if that was his primary motivation, why did he leave at all? Well, okay, that was always the question. Why did he leave at all. And if he cared so much about being in his family’s good graces, or good enough graces, maybe I should say, then why disappear?”
“If I keep going the way I’m going, I’m going to be at the police station in a minute or two. Do you want me to circle around some more? Or are you ready to go in?”
“No,” Gregor said. “Find me one of those places—you know, where they let me plug the computer in and get on the Internet.”
2
Tony Bolero’s GPS found a coffee shop one town over with unlimited Wi-Fi access. Gregor didn’t know if he’d gone out of his way to pick something away from Mattatuck proper, or if this was just the closest place that had what they needed. Gregor didn’t think it was the closest place. He was pretty sure there was a Barnes & Noble in Mattatuck, and pretty sure that Barnes & Nobles had coffee shops that let you plug into the Internet.
“They don’t let you plug in,” Tony said, as he helped Gregor set up at a table along the back wall. “So, you know, your battery runs out and that’s it. Of course, we could have just stayed at the hotel, but I figured you had to have some reason. So we came here.”
“Here” was nice enough. Gregor hadn’t asked to go back to the hotel because he hadn’t thought of it. You got up, you got dressed, you got out of the house—there seemed like there was something essentially wrong with going back again, as if you weren’t really working. He looked at the big menu over the counter where coffee was being ordered and being served.