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“Please tell my mother,” Matt said.
“Your mother and dad are here,” Mr. Soames Browne said.
“Daphne was afraid you wouldn’t be coming, Matt,” Mrs. Soames Browne said.
“That was when I thought Daffy was going to do the cooking.”
“Matt, must I ask you yet again not to call her that?” Mrs. Soames Browne said.
Matt snapped his fingers in mock chagrin, indicating he had forgotten.
“Well, the birthday boy himself,” he said, extending his hand to Mr. Nesbitt IV. “Congratulations!”
“Thank you for coming, buddy.”
“And the mother of my goddaughter! About to spill out of her dress!”
“Oh, fuck you, Matt,” Mrs. Nesbitt IV said.
The grandparents pretended not to hear.
Mrs. Soames Browne remembered again, as she usually did on such occasions, that at age five Matt Payne had talked Daphne into playing doctor and that she had concluded at that time that there was something wrong with him.
Over the years, he had done nothing to disabuse her of that notion.
There is a screw loose in him somewhere, she thought. The policeman business was another proof of that. The very idea of someone with a background like his being an ordinary cop is absurd.
If the truth were known, he probably had more to do with Penny getting on dope than anyone knows. When you roll around in the mud with pigs, you’re going to get dirty.
FOUR
Matt Payne took a look at the buffet laid out in the game room, then at the line waiting to get at the food, and walked to the bar.
“A glass of your very best ginger ale, if you please, my good man,” he said, but then changed his mind. “Oh, to hell with it, give me a scotch, no ice, and soda.”
The barman smiled at him.
“My mother’s here. What I was going to do, was wait for the question, phrased accusingly, ‘What are you drinking? ’ to which I would have truthfully responded, ‘Ginger ale.’ Just to get her reaction.”
“What changed your mind?” the barman asked as he made the drink.
Matt gestured around the crowded room.
“I need a little liquid courage to face all these merry-makers.”
The barman chuckled.
And then Matt spotted a familiar face.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “There is someone human here, after all.”
He crossed the room to a small, wiry, blond-headed man standing beside a somewhat taller female. There was a thick rope of pearls around the woman’s neck, reaching down to the valley between her breasts, and on the third finger of her left hand was an engagement ring with a four-carat emerald-cut stone in it.
“Hello, Matt,” the woman said, smiling at him. “How are you?”
“Feeling sorry for myself,” Matt said.
“How’s that?” she asked.
