“Fuck if I know,” Teddy said. “All I got are questions. Every half an hour, it’s like there’re thirty more.”
“Agreed,” Chuck said. “Hey, here’s a question for you—who’s Andrew Laeddis?”
“You caught that, huh?” Teddy lit one of the cigarettes he’d won in poker.
“You asked every patient we talked to.”
“Didn’t ask Ken or Leonora Grant.”
“Teddy, they didn’t know what planet they were on.”
“True.”
“I’m your partner, boss.”
Teddy leaned back against the stone wall and Chuck joined him.
He turned his head, looked at Chuck.
“We just met,” he said.
“Oh, you don’t trus me.”
“I trust you, Chuck. I do. But I’m breaking the rules here. I asked for this case specifically. The moment it came over the wire in the field office.”
“So?”
“So my motives aren’t exactly impartial.”
,
Chuck nodded and lit his own cigarette, took some time to think about it. “My girl, Julie—Julie Taketomi, that’s her name—she’s as American as I am. Doesn’t speak a word of Japanese. Hell, her parents go back two generations in this country. But they put her in a camp and then...” He shook his head and then flicked his cigarette into the rain and pulled up his shirt, exposed the skin over his right hip. “Take a look, Teddy. See my other scar.”
Teddy looked. It was long and dark as jelly, thick as his thumb.
“I didn’t get this one in the war, either. Got it working for the marshals. Went through a door in Tacoma. The guy we were after sliced me with a sword. You believe that? A fucking sword. I spent three weeks in the hospital while they sewed my intestines back together. For the U.S. Marshals Service, Teddy. For my country. And then they run me out of my home district because I’m in love with an American woman with Oriental skin and eyes?” He tucked his shirt back in. “Fuck them.”
“If I didn’t know you better,” Teddy said after a bit, “I’d swear you really love that woman.”
“Die for her,” Chuck said. “No regrets about it, either.”
Teddy nodded. No purer feeling in the world that he knew of.
“Don’t let that go, kid.”
“I won’t, Teddy. That’s the point. But you gotta tell me why we’re here. Who the hell is Andrew Laeddis?”
Teddy dropped the butt of his cigarette to the stone walk and ground it out with his heel.
Dolores, he thought, I’ve got to tell him. I can’t do this alone. If after all my sins—all my drinking, all the times I left you alone for too long, let you down, broke your heart—if I can ever make up for any of that, this might be the time, the last opportunity I’ll ever have.
I want to do right, honey. I want to atone. You, of all people, would understand that.
“Andrew Laeddis,” he said to Chuck, and the words clogged in his dry throat. He swallowed, got some moisture into his mouth, tried again...
“Andrew Laeddis,” he said, “was the maintenance man in the apartment building where my wife and I lived.”
“Okay.”
“He was also a firebug.”
Chuck took that in, studied Teddy’s face.
“Andrew Laeddis,” Teddy said, “lit the match that caused the
fire—“
SHUTTER
ISLAND
“Because the NKPA doesn’t get weaponry like that from nowhere, honey. They got it from Stalin. We have to prove that we learned from Munich, that we should have stopped Hitler then, so we’ll stop Stalin and Mao. Now. In Korea.”
“You’d go.”
“If they called me up? I’d have to. But they won’t, honey.”