Cheating at Solitaire (24 page)

“Why?” Gregor had barely been aware of the fact that there was somebody named Kendra Rhode until Stewart Gordon had brought his attention to her.

“Because she doesn't get plastered,” Bram said triumphantly. “She gets other people plastered. She loves to watch them make idiots of themselves. She loves to watch them
crash and burn. But she's not stupid, and she's not some nobody out of Arkansas who's impressed as hell at herself for having all this money. She's always had it, and she's always had influence. The secretary-general of the UN came to her fourth birthday party.”

Gregor found himself wondering who had been the secretary-general then, but it was the kind of thought he had when the back of his mind was working on something else. Mike Ingleford was packing things into his pockets, getting ready to go downstairs, and Bram and Clara Walsh obviously expected to go with him.

“Dr. Ingleford,” Gregor said. “Is it Marcey Mandret down there?”

Mike Ingleford looked up. “Leslie didn't say. She did say female, red hair, and overdose.”

“Oh, good Lord,” Clara said.

“Leslie will get the stomach pump going,” Mike Ingle-ford said. “I'd better get moving.”

“I think we'll all get moving with you,” Clara Walsh said. “For God's sake, what's going on around here? I feel like Jessica Fletcher.”

Gregor stayed at the window for a moment more. The crowd was dissipating, but he was sure that was only because they had managed to get inside the building. The town beyond looked as deserted as it had when they'd been driving through it. He thought he'd seen paparazzi before. He'd had cases where the press was a constant and unyielding presence. There was something about the crowd downstairs that was new. It pulsed. He ran the word around in his head. It fit, but he didn't know why it fit.

He walked away from the window, preparing to follow Mike Ingleford, Bram Winder, and Clara Walsh out of the room, and found himself face-to-face with Linda Beecham.

“It's just Jack,” she said. “Up here, I mean. Date rape drug. Hand useless probably forever. But it's just Jack.”

“I think Dr. Ingleford said he'd be all right, in the long run,” Gregor said. When his voice came out of his mouth, it was unbelievably gentle. He didn't know why.

Linda Beecham had turned away while he'd been thinking of his voice. Now he saw only the side of her face as she stared toward the window. She wasn't actually looking at anything. She was only not looking at him.

“It's only Jack,” she said again. “And the funny thing is, Jack used to talk about it. About how people aren't real anymore if they're not on television, if the photographers don't follow them around. He had all these ideas—has them, I suppose. He's not dead yet. About how there's a fundamental injustice to it, about how there's a corporate plot. Something. I didn't listen much.”

“I think he'll be all right,” Gregor said again. “I think the general consensus is—”

“When I was growing up,” Linda said, as if she hadn't heard, “people had to do something to be famous, and people had to do something really important to be really famous. People paid attention to Marilyn Monroe, but they didn't take her seriously. Einstein was really famous. Albert Schweitzer was really famous. Presidents were really famous.”

“I wouldn't have thought you were old enough to remember Albert Schweitzer.”

“I think he died before I was born,” Linda said, “but he was really famous. I remember hearing about him. The Mother Teresa of our time. Did you know she wrote a book?”

“Who?”

“Kendra Rhode,” Linda said. “Or rather, her dog wrote a book, theoretically. My guess is that some ghostwriter wrote the book, and got badly paid for it, and then the family had connections with some publisher. Like that record album she put out. She paid for it herself. Jack thought it had to be deliberate, the things that are going on, but I don't think so. I don't think life is deliberate. I think it's all chance and circumstance.”

“All of it?” Gregor said.

“All of it,” Linda Beecham said, and now, suddenly, there was emotion in her voice, a lot of it, and none of it pleasant. “I think we invent things, religions, and philosophies, and problems, we invent them to make it seem like it all makes
sense, but nothing does. It's just chaos. We're all like bowling pins on a big hardwood floor and the bowling balls come flying at us for no reason at all and some of us fall over and some of us don't, and none of it means anything at all. None of it makes sense.”

“We can make sense of some of it,” Gregor said. “I can make sense of what happened to your friend Jack, if I look at the problem long enough. I can make sense of what happened to this man Mark Anderman. Crimes get solved. Crimes are deliberate.”

“They've all gone,” Linda Beecham said. “You'd better go after them, or you'll get left behind.”

2

What was downstairs was not “the press” as Gregor had known it. It wasn't even “the celebrity press” as Gregor had known it. Apparently, the kind of reporters and photographers who followed heavyweight personalities like national news anchors and presidents of the United States were different from the ones who followed people like Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand—which made a lot of sense, but Gregor had never had a reason to consider it before. He wondered if he should have taken Stewart Gordon more seriously than he had. Stewart fulminated. He did it a lot. He was doing it even when they were both twenty-two-year-old nobodies in army uniforms. Gregor tended to take the fulminating in the same spirit he took old George Tekema-nian's head shaking about the younger generation. It began to occur to him he might have been wrong.

Leslie O'Neal turned out to be a young and ferociously competent-looking woman in an old-fashioned nurse's cap, as if she'd stepped out full-blown from a movie about Cherry Ames. Gregor saw her for the first time as he came through the fire doors at the bottom of the stairs he had taken to get to the emergency room, and with her he saw Stewart Gordon, his peacoat unbuttoned, looking frazzled. Gregor assumed that Clara, Stewart, and Dr. Ingleford had taken the elevator, since he hadn't heard them on the stairs, but when
he pressed the button for the elevator himself it seemed to be stuck on the ground floor. Once he got through the fire doors he saw what might have been the reason. There was another set of fire doors on the opposite end of the hall he stepped into. They were being held shut by a plank of wood threaded through their handles, and the woman in the nurse's cap was Scotch-taping thick blue paper across the small windows near the top center of each one.

“It won't do any good,” Stewart said, seeing Gregor come through. “They'll just find a heating duct to crawl through. It's worth a small fortune to get a picture of the body.”

“Body?” Gregor asked. “Is she—?”

“Of course she's not dead,” Leslie O'Neal said. “She's not even OD'd, not really. She's just a silly girl who took a bunch of crap and passed out, and now we have to stop everything and deal with it. Honestly. These people. You two look big enough, though. You can hold the fort while I go help Dr. Ingleford.”

“I called nine-one-one,” Stewart said. “I had to call nine-one-one. I couldn't get her to talk to me.”

Leslie O'Neal turned her back on all of them and hurried away down yet another corridor. Gregor looked around. There was a lot back here, more than you would think there could be given what the lobby looked like. What there wasn't was any sign of people.

Stewart was looking at the fire doors Gregor had come through. “We'd better secure those,” he said. “They'll figure it out sooner rather than later. There's got to be another piece of that wood around here somewhere.”

“Is it always this deserted?” Gregor asked. “It's the oddest thing. It's like a ghost town.”

“It is, really, during the winter,” Clara Walsh said. “I remember it growing up here. There are all these houses and stores and restaurants and I don't know what, and not a tenth of them can operate without the summer people. I suppose it would be sad, except that it's always been this way as long as I've been alive. You'd have to go back to the nineteenth century
to find a Margaret's Harbor that was mostly about the people who actually lived on it.”

“They're in the stairwell,” Stewart said. “I can hear them. We'd better do something before this gets very bad.”

They did something, Stewart directing. Gregor did not mind that. Stewart had always been good at directing, and good at doing the sensible, straightforward thing. They found another plank of wood in a room that seemed to have been given over to the collection of junk. Stewart pawed through piles of boxed paper and old molded plastic until he came up with something suitable, and then said something under his breath about what the hell anybody had ever wanted it for. They got the door secured just as the first of the photographers came down the stairs from the second floor. Gregor found himself wondering if there were patients up there, or staff, or anyone, that these people might be disturbing. Stewart had a handful of printout paper. He slammed it against the windows in the door and began to Scotch-tape it up.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. “They'll be in here in twenty minutes.”

“I've called the state police,” Clara Walsh said. “I don't know what else I can do. Jerry can't handle something like this on his own.”

“Don't presidents of the United States vacation here?” Stewart said. “You've got to have something to take care of one of them.”

“We don't take care of them,” Clara Walsh said. “The Secret Service takes care of them.”

The doors to the landing were bulging. Literally. They were pushing in like the ones from that old horror movie,
The Haunting
. Gregor looked at the other doors and saw that they, too, were bulging. In fact, they were bulging even more dangerously because there were more people on that side trying to push in. This was insane.

“There've got to be laws,” Gregor said. “It can't be legal to do something like this. What if they compromise treatment? Couldn't they get sued?”

Stewart sighed. “They could, but it's worth the risk. The tabloids pay big for photographs of the right people, and even bigger for photographs of the right people in—what will we call it?—compromised circumstances. Dead. Dead drunk. Half undressed. Shoplifting.”

“And these are the right people,” Gregor said. “Marcey Mandret. What does Marcey Mandret do? I mean, she's in this movie with you, I know, but what else does she do?”

“She's been in a couple of movies,” Stewart said, “all minor, mostly aimed at teenagers.”

“And that's enough to cause that?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Stewart said. “There are lots of young, pretty actresses with more substantive careers than that, and they're not being followed around by a crowd of photographers who'd just as soon see them dead as alive. It's what I've been trying to tell you. They do it. The people like Marcey do it. They do it on purpose.”

“Do what on purpose?” Clara Walsh asked.

“Become targets of the paparazzi on purpose,” Stewart said. “Look. Be sensible, all right? There really are some people with enormous careers who become targeted against their will, but it's actually very rare. I was on the most popular science fiction program in the history of television. It's got a cult following. I saw somebody dressed up as me on line for voir dire at the O. J. Simpson trial. With a mask of my face, yet. But those idiots are not following me. They don't care what I do or where I am. Why?”

“I don't know,” Clara Walsh said. “I've spent the last several days wondering why they aren't following you. You seem like a better candidate than, well, the girls. If I may be so politically incorrect.”

“I think the phrase going around town is a lot more politically incorrect than calling them girls,” Stewart said. “But here's the thing. I don't ride around in limousines. I walk. I do my own shopping. I go out to ordinary pubs and a few restaurants on my own or with friends. I go to the bookstore. If somebody says hello, I'm polite and I keep on walking, because it's really incredible what kind of nuts there are
out there, but I don't make a fetish of my ‘privacy' or my ‘safety.' I just live like a human being. I'm boring. You can't do anything with me. I don't even show up for openings except every once in a while when I've got a friend I want to support. And it's not just me. Think about Julia Stiles.”

“Who?” Gregor asked.

“Lovely young woman,” Stewart said. “American actress. Very beautiful. Better looking than this lot. Very intelligent. Studied at Columbia. Been in a few serious movies.
Mona Lisa Smile
, for instance. But you never see her in the tabloids. And you never see her on the red carpet, as they all like to put it. Do you know what the ‘red carpet' actually is? It's a device for letting the lunatic press know that you're fair game. Everybody talks about how crazy these people are, and what scum, and they are scum, they're the embodiment of the decadence of late capitalism, but the thing is, they're not stupid. They know it's easier to make a living with people who are cooperating. They get into these symbiotic relationships with the twits who want the publicity, and then they ride the pony until it collapses. And it does collapse. It has to collapse. You can't run a career the way Marcey Mandret is running hers, or Arrow Normand used to be running hers, and I say ‘used to be' deliberately. She isn't going to have one left when this is over. You can't run a career like that and have it last. You can't run a life like that and have it last. Los Angeles is littered with people in their thirties who used to be famous and now show up only when they get hit with a drunk-driving hit-and-run, or overdose in an alley. I hate Los Angeles.”