Cheating at Solitaire (12 page)

Now it was ten o'clock on the morning of January 3rd, and Annabeth was standing on Main Street in Oscartown, making her way through the camera crews and television vans toward the grocery store. She was feeling a little better. Stewart had called last evening to tell her that Gregor De-markian had agreed to come to the island to help with the investigation of the death of Mark Anderman. He had called her again, an hour ago, to tell her they had left Philadelphia for Boston, by plane, and would be in this afternoon. Anna-beth had very carefully sat down at the computer and looked
for everything she could find on Gregor Demarkian, and she had found enough to feel reassured. He seemed like a very sensible man. He also seemed to be a good friend of Father Tibor Kasparian, who had to be the same Father Tibor Kas-parian who wrote about the Nestorians and the end of the Byzantine Empire and the demise of Greek learning in the Eastern churches. Annabeth was fairly certain there couldn't be two Armenian priests named Tibor Kasparian living in Philadelphia at the same time.

She had been less reassured by the other searches she had done. She had searched for Arrow Normand and for Mark Anderman, as a matter of course. She had searched for Ken-dra Rhode, who was somebody she had thought she knew something about. Finally, she had given up searching for any one of the young women who were involved in this thing and just let herself be washed by the tidal wave of items spilling across the screen. The items went on endlessly. As far as she could tell, there were dozens of people in places like Los Angeles and New York who were very young, very rich, and very stupid and who spent all their time getting their pictures taken by tabloid photographers. There were also dozens of other people—tabloid photographers and “entertainment reporters”—who spent all their time writing and illustrating articles about the first set of people. But that was not what was bothering her. She had actually known about all that, if only by rumor, and without understanding the breathtaking scope of it. There was something else going on here that made her uneasy at the base of her spine. There was something wrong, really wrong. She kept going around and around it without being able to put a name to it. It was more than outside her experience. It was outside the experience of decent people.

Her sons hadn't cared what it was; they had only wanted her to leave the island. John, who was the cardiologist, had been merely frantic. He seemed to think that Margaret's Harbor had suddenly become a hotbed of crime.

“You're not going off to lend your talents to the poor,” he said. “You're not volunteering to teach history to inner-city high school students. You're stuck up there with a bunch of
psychopaths. And don't think they're less dangerous just because they've got money.”

Annabeth had wanted to tell him that she understood they were very dangerous indeed, but she hadn't been able to find the words for it, because she still hadn't known (and didn't know now) how to define the danger. It hadn't mattered to Robbie, who was the lawyer, because the danger he saw was entirely different.

“Murder investigations are funny things,” he'd said when he called. “Not funny ha-ha. Funny peculiar. You never know where they're going to go. I don't like it that you found the body, and I don't trust this guy—”

“Stewart Gordon? You don't trust Stewart Gordon? You used to idolize Stewart Gordon.”

“I used to idolize Commander Rees,” Robbie said, “and I'm not twelve years old anymore. I don't know the district attorney up there, or is it the public prosecutor? It doesn't matter. I know some good people in Boston. I'll send you a lawyer.”

“Robbie, for goodness' sake. I don't need a lawyer. Nobody is going to arrest me for anything.”

“You don't know that for certain. You can't. You found the body. The woman they've arrested for the murder was in your living room. You're in this up to your neck. I'll send you a lawyer. I'll clear my desk and come up myself in a couple of days.”

Annabeth had gotten the impression that John was going to “clear his desk” and come up in a couple of days too, but she deliberately did not press him to make that explicit. At least Robbie understood why she couldn't just up and leave the place right now in the middle of everything. Even Ken-dra Rhode had been told to stick around for a while.

She looked up and down Main Street. The camera trucks and the people made an almost solid line, so that it was close to impossible to cross from one side of the street to the other without weaving through equipment trucks. Every once in a while she saw a man or woman standing in the middle of the street with a microphone in his hand, filming a “report” that at this point had to be about nothing. There had been news
in the first twenty-four hours. Now there was just gossip and innuendo, and lots of people who wanted to see if Marcey Mandret would come spilling out of a bar somewhere, just as drunk as she'd been the night it happened.

“I wouldn't hang around in the middle of the road like this if I were you,” a man said.

Annabeth turned around and saw that she was facing a thin, driven, intelligent man of medium height, incongruously dressed in a very good suit and a Baxter State Parker. He had no hat on his head and no gloves. She thought he must be freezing. He held out his hand to her, formal and polite.

“I'm Carl Frank,” he said. “We haven't met. I do public relations for the movie.”

“Ah,” Annabeth said.

“And I was telling you the truth. You shouldn't hang around in the middle of the road like that. They have to eat to live, those people. They don't know who you are at the moment, but they will, especially with Gordon off somewhere. You're news, you know. You found the body.”

“Ah,” Annabeth said again, surprised. “I think that's amazing.”

“What?”

“That you knew who I was.”

“We're not all Marcey Mandret,” Carl Frank said. “Some of us actually finished our educations. I went to the University of Texas, myself. I once managed to have
American Revolutions
assigned to me twice in a single year, once for a history course and once for a course in political science.”

“I'm surprised they were willing to use a popular book. University departments usually prefer academic scholarship.”

“They were courses for nonmajors, and I was in marketing. I think the professors were hoping to hell they could get us interested somehow. You got me interested. I've become one of those old farts who sit around reenacting the battles of the Civil War.”

“From the Union side or the Confederate?”

“I try not to take sides. It's good practice for my work. If you take sides in the celebrity wars, you get squashed flat by
rampaging egos. Except it isn't really ego. They've got no sense of self, most of these people. They're all flash and dash and surface. Before I got into the work I do, I used to think that was an illusion, that if you got to know them you'd find they were real people inside. And that's true for some of them, of course. Stewart Gordon, for instance. But for most of them?” Carl shrugged.

Annabeth looked up and down the street. Nobody was paying any attention to them, but it occurred to her that if this man was right, if she was considered to be “news” when Stewart was away, the quickest way to get their attention would be to stand here talking to a man they probably all knew.

The same thing seemed to have occurred to Carl Frank. “Well,” he said. “I don't want to keep you. I'll get you into a lot of trouble. Do you think you could do something for me?”

“Oh,” Annabeth said. “Well—”

“It's nothing huge. It's just that I'd appreciate it if you told our Mr. Gordon that I was asking about him, and mentioned that it might not be outside the bounds of reasonableness for me to wonder if he could bother to check in every once in a while. I am still responsible for the publicity on this thing, as long as it lasts, which may not be very long. But until the brass pulls the plug, here we are.”

“Oh,” Annabeth said. “All right. Yes, of course I could do that for you.”

“They blame you for it, you know,” Carl said. “When there's bad publicity on a picture, they blame you for it. I don't know how they're going to find a way to blame me for the fact that Arrow Normand decided to kill her latest toy boy, but they will. You'd better get going. It was very nice talking to you.”

“It was very nice talking to you, too,” Annabeth said. Then she watched him walk quickly down the street in the direction that led away from the center of town, his shoulders hunched, his hands in his pockets.

The news crews and equipment vans were still where they had been when she had stopped to talk, and the wind was worse. Annabeth pulled her coat collar high on her neck
over the cashmere scarf from Harbor Halls that Robbie had bought her at Thanksgiving and headed for the supermarket again. She supposed that Gregor Demarkian would stay at Stewart's house, or at the inn if there was any room, which there probably wasn't. Still, she needed coffee and cream and a lot of other things men liked that she didn't keep around anymore unless the boys were home, and then the boys would probably be coming too.

In all the strangeness of this situation, the very most strange was this: the longer it went on, the more it felt as if she were preparing for a family holiday.

2

If Linda Beecham had had someone around that she could talk to—if she had had the kind of friends most people have—they would have known that she found everything surrounding the murder of Mark Anderman to be oddly satisfying. It wasn't the murder itself that made her feel almost triumphant in self-satisfaction. She knew nothing at all about the young man who was dead, but she had no reason to think he was any better or worse than anybody else. She supposed he had family somewhere, and people who cared for him, but maybe not. She hadn't realized until she was closing in on middle age just how alone most people were. Still, she had no reason to think badly of him, and no reason to wish him dead. She could be sorry enough about that without being a hypocrite.

What struck Linda Beecham was what had happened because the murder had happened, and what was happening still. It had infected everybody. The movie people were behaving the way they had to behave. They put on brave faces for the cameras and spoke earnestly into microphones about how they were sure Arrow Normand had had nothing at all to do with killing their dear friend, this nice boy who had had everything to live for. Then they went back to their rented houses and made phone calls to California. The film-ing had been stopped dead in its tracks. Linda wasn't even sure it could resume with Arrow Normand in jail, since she
was playing a part in it. That thin, nervous man who did the public relations spent all his time in the bar at the Oscar-town Inn, not always drinking. Linda had always been sure, deep down inside herself, that this movie would never come off. It was just the kind of harebrained silliness Bitsy Win-thorp was prone to. Margaret's Harbor was never going to be a haven for movie people. The weather was bad, and the natives didn't like the intrusion.

If it had been just the movie people, though, Linda wouldn't have been feeling half as smug. The police also were acting just the way she'd expected them to, and so was the new public prosecutor, Clara Walsh. There was something about the sight of multitudes of television cameras that made everybody crazy. These days, Main Street in Oscar-town was packed with them, and so were some of the side streets. There were usually cameras on the beach now, too. The island police were all walking very much more upright than they usually did. The state police were putting on their best New Jersey swagger. Clara Walsh spent her time giving press conferences from her office or the Oscartown Inn, saying not much of anything and looking absolutely ridiculous. Somebody ought to tell that woman that she was much too short to wear magenta suits.

“It's television,” Linda said. “They all want to be on tele-vision. Everybody wants to be on television. It's as if they don't think they exist if they aren't on television.”

Across the room, Jack Bullard grunted. He had the tele-vision on, the small one Linda kept in her office for breaking news. It was tuned to a Clara Walsh press conference.

“So,” he said. “Do you know anything about this guy they're bringing in? This Gregor Demarkian?”

“I've heard of him,” Linda said. “He's been on some of those true-crime shows.
American Justice. City Confiden-tial
. He was in the papers a few months ago for something down in Philadelphia.”

“Why would Clara Walsh want to bring in a private detective? Why would the police want to let her?”

Linda snorted. “For God's sake,” she said. “It's all about
the publicity. This has ceased to be a crime investigation. It's ceased to be about anything except the media coverage. Why not bring in a celebrity detective? It guarantees you more print. It guarantees you more airtime. And you look like you're doing something, when you're not.”

“I wouldn't think Clara Walsh would want any more media than she's already got,” Jack said. “I mean, look at it around here lately. They're everywhere. And they're not all Walter Cronkite, either.”

“I think Walter Cronkite is dead.”

“I don't, but what does it matter?” Jack said. “You must see what I mean. This is completely insane as it is. There are news reports three or four times a day. Yesterday I heard from Kevin Kelly at the morgue, and he said they've had to post guards at the laundry chutes because he's got photographers trying to get in that way. And other ways.”

“And these are the people you wanted us to hook up with,” Linda said. “I told you what they were like.”

“All I wanted to do was sell a few pictures at a price that could help the paper out and help me out in the meantime,” Jack said. “I was just trying to cut you in on what I was going to do anyway.”