Cheating at Solitaire (11 page)

The small boys weren't going to go away until they got what they wanted, so Donna invited them to sit in her living room and be quiet while “Commander Rees talks to Mr. Demarkian.” Gregor waited for the lecture about the bloody boneheaded ignorance of American tele vision producers to hire a Scot to play a Welshman, but it didn't come. Stewart was looming over Donna's kitchen table, pulling flat color photographs out of a big manila envelope. The envelope must have been there all along, lying on a table somewhere or stuffed into Stewart's coat, but Gregor hadn't noticed, and now he sat, fascinated, wondering how it hadn't burst. How many rolls of fllm had Stewart had with him? How many would he have needed? The last photograph was clearly the picture of a man who had been shot in the head. The color was so brilliant it was nearly gaudy.

Gregor leaned forward, picked it up, and turned it over in his hand. “This is the victim, I take it,” he said. “And he was—?”

“Mark Anderman,” Stewart said. “Not a bad kid, really. Worked as a grip. Didn't get paid much. The girls liked him, though. He was what's known these days as ‘hot.' ”

“You can't tell from this.”

“Well, no, you couldn't, could you?” Stewart looked at the huge pile of photographs and sat down. “I shot everything my cell phone camera would let me, then I shot everything her cell phone camera would let me. She thought I was crazy.”

“Who's she?”

“Dr. Falmer. Annabeth Falmer.”

Gregor heard the tone so clearly, it could have been a dinner gong going off in his ear. “What's that?” he said.

“Don't be ridiculous.” Stewart looked uncomfortable. “She's not a twit, you know. She's a lady. She's a very intelligent and graceful lady.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There's also the fact that she doesn't seem to be open to that kind of suggestion at the moment,” Stewart said. “She's, uh, she's devoted to her family. She's got a grandchild on the way. She's a little young for it, but she's very excited about it. She hasn't got any of the attitude. I don't think she even knew the attitude existed before we came to the island, and I've had to work overtime to prove I don't have it in me.”

“I don't think that should have been hard,” Gregor said blandly. “You were with her when you found the body.”

Stewart nodded. “It's something of a long story. Filming shut down early that day because of the storm. If these people had had any sense, there would have been no filming at all that day. The weather reports had been full of it for a week. But they're from Los Angeles, these people. They think they know everything.”

“They probably just don't understand snow.”

“Filming shut down early,” Stewart said, “and I went over to this place they've got on Main Street, this sort of pub, except it's rich people on this island so the place is all tarted up. I went to have a pint or whatever you call it over here, and Marcey Mandret was there, and she was drinking some kind of champagne cocktail. You ever had a champagne cocktail? The stuff tastes like rat piss.”

“I think we're having some at my wedding.”

“Yes, well. That happens. So, Marcy Mandret was drinking these things, one after the other, and she was obviously completely gone. She had this little dress on that wasn't suitable for the weather, straps and no sleeves, cut high on the thigh, and it kept slipping half off and exposing her breasts. She would get up and stagger around and the dress would fall half off and it was getting out of hand. So I went up to talk to her, to tell her to get her act together and get herself home, and she threw up on the bartender and more or less passed out.”

“She did this on Margaret's Harbor?” Bennis chimed in from the sidelines.

Stewart turned around. “I know. Bloody the worst place. I thought the golf ladies were going to have aneurysms. So. She passed out, and I wrapped my coat around her so that her private parts wouldn't be swinging in the wind—did I mention that these women never wear underwear?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“Well, they don't, and she wasn't this time. I wrapped my coat around her and threw her over my shoulder and got out of there, and fortunately the only photographer on the premises was the guy from the
Home News
, which up until this acted like we weren't even on the island. I got out on Main Street and then I decided not to use the regular route, because there have been photographers on the island, the nasty ones, and I didn't want what was defnitely going to happen if they got sight of us the way we were. So I went around to the back, but the snow was coming down very fast and I got disoriented. I knew I had to head to the sea, because that's where the house Marcey and Arrow rented was, and I followed the sounds of the water, but I got turned around. I was hopelessly lost. Then I saw this one place, way out on the beach, and it had all its lights on. So I went there.”

“Annabeth Falmer can afford a house directly on the water on Margaret's Harbor?” Gregor asked. “That can't be history, no matter how popular. Does she have family money?”

“Not the way you mean,” Stewart says. “She's got grown sons, a cardiologist and a litigator, as she puts it. They think she walks on water.”

“Ah.”

“Here's the thing,” Stewart said. “She let me in. She offered me a cup of tea with brandy in it. And she already had Arrow Normand in the house. Arrow had shown up about twenty minutes before we did, staggering around, with her hair soaked in blood and, again, no underwear. Annabeth thought there had been a rape.”

“That's logical,” Gregor said. “I probably would have too. Did you say her hair soaked in blood?”

“By the time I got there, the blood was close to drying and the hair was caked, but it would have been soaked. And it's longish hair. Thin, but longish.”

Gregor picked up the picture again. “He was shot by someone on the driver's side. The blood went back, not out. She couldn't have had her hair soaked with it unless she was standing behind him when it happened.”

“There,” Stewart said. “You see? That's the kind of thing I need. The whole setup is just wrong. And the police aren't listening.”

“I doubt that the police aren't listening to that sort of thing,” Gregor said. “When they don't, the prosecutors go fairly nuts because they end up looking foolish. Why couldn't she have been standing behind him when it happened?”

“I don't know that she couldn't have,” Stewart said, “but when we found him, when Annabeth and I found him, he was in the passenger's-side seat of the truck, lying against the side window, because the truck had gone down the slope to the beach and rolled onto its side. There was beach and rock behind him, and if a person had been there, she'd have been crushed.”

Gregor considered it. “All right,” he said. “Then the question becomes when he was killed, before or after the truck rolled onto the beach. Why were you and Annabeth Falmer on the beach?”

“We were looking for the truck,” Stewart said. “Arrow had shown up at Annabeth's door a mess and babbling about how she was in the truck with Mark and there'd been an accident on the beach, and Annabeth got fairly convinced that Mark was still in the truck. She tried calling the emergency services to go out and find him, but we were in the middle of a major storm and she couldn't actually confirm any of what she'd heard and Arrow was in no shape to talk, so they put her off. So, when I showed up, she was thinking of walking out that way herself and seeing if Mark was there, maybe still alive, maybe dying in the weather. It made sense, you know.”

“It made sense for somebody to go out there,” Gregor
agreed. “I'm not so sure that it made sense for a woman to go out there accompanied by a geriatric old fart like you. Is she athletic?”

“Annabeth? Not really. She looks like—she looks like Judi Dench at fifty. Do you remember Judi Dench at the start of that tele vision series,
As Time Goes By?
It's that kind of look. Not blond, you know, but that kind of look.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said. The only reason he didn't have to bite his lip until it bled to keep himself from laughing was that he had had many years of training with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He moved a few more of the pictures around. “So,” he said. “You and Annabeth Falmer went out into the storm, and found this truck lying on its side on the beach. Was it easy to find?”

“Here's another thing,” Stewart said. He pawed through the pile of photographs himself, found the one he wanted, and handed it across. “Look at this. What do you see?”

“The most violently purple vehicle that ever moved on wheels. Did you brush the snow off it?”

“Some. On the windshield.”

“The snow was coming down at the rate of what exactly?”

“Two inches an hour.”

Gregor looked at the picture again. He handed it back. “Do you have another one, close to the same shot but at a wider angle?”

“I've got two more.”

Stewart found them and handed them over. Gregor looked through them, but he wasn't finding what he wanted. They'd been shot from too close in. “I don't suppose that you took pictures of the area around the truck,” he said.

“No, I didn't,” Stewart said.

“Or that you noticed anything?” Gregor prodded. “Say, for instance, footprints?”

“No,” Stewart said. “The police were going on about footprints too. Arrow's footprints, I think. They couldn't find them. Although, you know, I understand that there's been a lot of technological progress in forensics, but I don't see that not finding footprints tells you much of anything in a situation
like this. The snow was coming down, the wind was fierce, and the ocean was no joke.”

“Assuming you've been accurate,” Gregor said, “and Arrow Normand showed up at Annabeth Falmer's house about twenty minutes before you did, and it took you a while, say at least two or three minutes, to find the truck—”

“It was more like ten.”

“So we're talking about half an hour. The only way the truck could have been clean of snow on its exposed side and part of the hood would have been if somebody had cleaned it off pretty close to the time that you arrived. There must have been somebody there. Right there. You must have just missed him. Or her.”

“There,” Stewart said. “You see? And whoever it was who did that couldn't have been Arrow Normand, because she was passed out at Annabeth's house. Although not as passed out as she was pretending to be, if you catch my drift. They're not actresses, these girls, but they do know how to play dead.”

Gregor looked through the pictures again. Whoever had shot Mark Anderman had put the bullet in the side of his head, and that was not the safest way to shoot someone. It was better than a direct hit to the forehead, but it still risked the chance that the victim would survive.

“How many shots were there?” Gregor asked. “I can only see one probably.”

“There was only one.”

“He was killed with a single gunshot to the head?”

“That's what the police say.”

“What happened to the bullet?”

“It exited the head on the other side. That's why there's so much blood on the window and the passenger-side door.”

“Did it go through the window?”

“Yes,” Stewart said. “Clean. When we got to the truck and I started taking pictures, I couldn't even see something that looked like a crack. Not that the visibility was ideal, mind you. It was the middle of the afternoon, but it was dark.”

“Did they find the bullet?” Gregor asked.

“What do you mean, find it?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “if he was shot in the truck, which he seems to have been, and the bullet went through his head and then through the glass of the window, it has to be somewhere. If he was shot where you found him, it should be somewhere on the ground underneath the truck. I take it the police didn't find it.”

“Not that I've heard.”

“Interesting.”

“So it's interesting,” Stewart said. “So you'll do it. You'll come to Margaret's Harbor and do something about that bloody cow and the games she's playing.”

“I can't just come to Margaret's Harbor and interfere with a police investigation,” Gregor said. “Cold cases, yes, those I can take on, but an ongoing police investigation is sacrosanct. I get involved in those only when the police themselves ask me in.”

Stewart Gordon's face lit up. “That's what she said. That's exactly what she said. I take everything back about how stupid the police up there can be, I mean they all are pretty stupid, except for this one.” He reached under his sweater and came out with an envelope that had started out clean and white and straight but was now a wrinkled, squashed mess. “She gave me this. She said it was what you needed.”

Gregor took the envelope and opened it. It was not from a policeman. It was from the Margaret's Harbor Public Prosecutor, and it was about as clear an invitation as it was possible to get. She'd even italicized the word “desperate,” and offered a fee she must have known was twice what he usually charged.

Gregor looked up at Stewart. Stewart shrugged. “Commander Rees of the Starfleet Cruiser
Intrepid
. You've got no idea how useful that television series has been in my life.”

Gregor thought he did have an idea of just that, and also of how useless it must have been on occasion, because the small boys had reached the limit of their patience. There was a groundswell of noise from the living room, and then
they all came marching down the hall, led by Tommy Mora-danyan Donahue himself.

Half of them were carrying little plastic action figures that were supposed to look just like Stewart Gordon, and did.

1

Before All the Trouble Started—as that silly real estate woman put it, as if what they were going through were a neighborhood feud or a bad divorce—Annabeth Falmer had heard a lot of the women on the island complain about the publicity “the Hollywood people” brought with them. She had even sympathized. Margaret's Harbor was the kind of place, after all, where people who really wanted their privacy went to get it. In the rare cases where one of those people had become too famous, or infamous, to escape the relentless eye of public scrutiny, a silent bargain was struck, without anybody having to say anything, and that person either limited his visits or left the island altogether. This was something else, different not only from old-style infamy but from civilization as An-nabeth understood it. It was as if, during all those years when she had concentrated on her work and her children and the unending bills, something had happened to the world that she had known nothing about.