Cheating at Solitaire (25 page)

“There's somebody at the window,” Clara Walsh said, pointing toward the ceiling.

Stewart and Gregor turned to look. The window was a very small one, not meant to open, almost exactly where the ceiling met the wall, and there was indeed somebody in it, hitting against it in a way that was sure to break it eventually.

Stewart shrugged. “It's got wire. They can break through it, but they can't get in.”

“However did they get up there?” Clara Walsh said. “What
do they think they're doing? What does anybody around here think they're doing?”

“It's like Anna Nicole Smith,” Stewart said, turning his attention to Gregor again. “You have to ask yourself, I have to ask myself, if what you're dealing with is a form of mental retardation. Or ignorance so profound that it becomes impenetrable. They don't understand, do you know that? They don't understand that people are making fun of them, that they're not famous in a way anybody would want to be. They don't know the rules.”

There was yet another set of fire doors in the center of the block, but it was surrounded entirely by emergency room cubicles, and there were no photographers pushing to come through. Leslie O'Neal came through this set and looked around until she found Stewart Gordon. She did not look at the doors secured with boards or at the window near the ceiling, even though the glass broke over her head.

“Mr. Gordon,” she said. “Miss Mandret is asking to speak to you. Dr. Ingleford doesn't approve, but Miss Mandret is staging a fit, so come along.”

3

If Marcey Mandret was really having a fit, it couldn't have been much of one. It was only a minute or two before Stewart Gordon was back in the emergency room's tiny central core, looking bemused and more than a little flustered. In the meantime, Gregor Demarkian and Clara Walsh tried to talk to each other, hampered by the fact that they really had nothing to talk about. Clara Walsh was the public prosecutor, not the chief of police or the head of the homicide investigation—assuming there even was a head of the homicide investigation. Gregor had no idea what the chain of command was here, or even who was responsible for seeing that the police work got done. There had been some talk about the state police, but Gregor didn't think that was the direction to look. The only time he had ever heard of the state police taking charge of a municipal homicide was in those small towns in Connecticut that had what they called a
“resident trooper,” a statie who lived in town and acted as a one-man police department. Oscartown was small, but not that small, and in season it probably needed a force of at least three or four. Somewhere there had to be police, and forensics, and all the other things he had come to count on in both his long careers. The forensics were never as good as television cop shows made them look like they were, but they at least gave you something.

Once or twice, Gregor tried to get a look out of one of the fire doors. He peeled back a corner of Scotch tape and lifted the heavy wad of printout paper to look out, but all he saw was people looking back in, dozens of them, their faces pressed to the glass. There were even dozens of them now in the back landing, which was not good news. All of them seemed to have cameras. None of them seemed to be going away. He wondered where the state police were, the ones who were supposed to come in and break this up. Then it occurred to him that if Oscartown didn't have enough police to break up a riot, they might not have enough to conduct a homicide investigation.

Clara Walsh peered into his face. She looked concerned, but Gregor thought she might be one of those women who always look at least a little concerned. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

He shrugged and looked back toward one of the sets of fire doors. “I was wondering who had jurisdiction. Who was actually investigating this homicide.”

“Ah,” Clara Walsh said. “That bothers you, too. Well, it's Jerry, of course, even though he's not really set up for it. We can get the state police to help, but they don't have jurisdiction. Which leaves Jerry up a creek. I don't think there's ever been a homicide in Oscartown before, at least not one where the perpetrator was in any way in doubt.”

“Domestics,” Gregor said.

“Exactly,” Clara Walsh said. “Or else somebody gets high as a kite and into a fight, as we used to say when I was growing up. There isn't a lot to do on the island during the off-season. People get cabin fever.”

Gregor was going to say that cabin fever was unlikely when there were ferries to the mainland available, even if they didn't run very often, but Stewart Gordon was emerging from the bowels of the emergency room, his jacket off and on his arm, as if he were a butler bringing it in to a guest in a hurry to be gone.

He started to put it on as soon as he saw Gregor and Clara. “Well,” he said. “That was interesting.”

“Was it interesting?” Clara asked. “Was it something I should know about? Or something somebody should know about? Mr. Demarkian here has just reminded me that the line of command in this case is, ah, fuddled.”

“I don't think it has anything to do with the case,” Stewart said. “She says she took a ‘little too much Valium,' which sounds about right. I don't see why she'd lie about it. Although, if you ask me, the problem isn't the Valium, it's the drinking on top of the Valium, and she's been at it. Am I the only person left in the universe these day who knows what the signs of alcoholism are? It's the middle of the day.”

Clara Walsh shook her head. “And that's all she had to say? That she'd taken too much Valium? Did she mention if she took too much on purpose? Was she trying to commit suicide?”

“I don't think so,” Stewart said. “You'd better ask Dr. Ingleford about that. No, that wasn't what she wanted to say. She wanted to say that she wanted me to know that she hadn't stayed in the Hugh Hefner Suite in Vegas.”

“What?” Gregor said.

Clara Walsh just blinked, but it had the same effect.

For once, Stewart Gordon looked surprised. “I've mentioned this, I know I have. The trip to Vegas a couple of weeks ago. More than that. Four or five. We had a break in the shooting schedule and they all took off there overnight, on a whim or something, I think it was. You must have seen it in the papers. It made every tabloid from here to Guam. Because of the Hugh Hefner Suite.”

“You haven't mentioned it,” Gregor said carefully, “but—”

“Of course I mentioned it,” Stewart said. “It's high on my list of absolute stupidities. Nine thousand square feet. Its own indoor pool. I've got no idea what else. Forty thousand dollars a night. Arrow wanted to stay in the Hugh Hefner Suite because Britney Spears had stayed there. So she did. Or something. I don't know. They took off for the night. Arrow checked into the Hugh Hefner Suite. And then, you know, somebody sold the story to the tabloids, which was inevitable.”

“Who sold the story to the tabloids—Mark Anderman? The one who died?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, hell no,” Stewart said. “They don't stay in relationships that long, these girls. Arrow was going out with Steve Becker at the time of the Vegas trip. He worked as a grip. Arrow dumped his ass either on the trip or just after it. I don't know. And I don't know if he sold the story to the tabloids. I don't remember seeing one of those front-page things with a little thumbnail picture of him on it. But somebody did. The story was everywhere before they'd even got back here. And there were pictures.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“There's no ah about it,” Stewart said. “That's another thing about them, these girls, I mean. The men are awful. I mean awful. Chorus boys. Grips. Minor-league hangers-on. The relationships last a couple of months and then the men disappear, because they weren't visible to begin with. If that makes any sense. If any of it does.”

“It makes sense,” Gregor said. “In a odd sort of way.”

The door to the waiting room was now bulged out far enough that Gregor was half afraid it would crack into pieces, in spite of being made of metal.

Clara Walsh gave it a long hard look, and took out her cell phone.

1

By this time in her life, Annabeth Falmer had a long list of things she knew to be true, and one of the most important was this: it is not the case that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. In fact, in Annabeth's experience, actions produced overreactions, or no reactions at all, but almost never the sort of reasoned, proportionate response that took into account the mitigating circumstances in whatever it was that had happened. Mitigating circumstances and proportionate responses were for other people's problems, not your own. It was easy to keep your head when at the very base of it you didn't care. When you did care, there was too much at stake for “rational” to be something you were interested in pursuing. When you cared because you were in pain, very little would do as a response short of a total annihilating blast. Annabeth didn't like to admit it, but she had been thinking about annihilating blasts now for the better part of two months.

Actually, she was only thinking about annihilating blasts in that not-quite-subconscious substratum of her mind, the one that played the background music to everything else she did. In the foreground, at the moment, was the fact that she had become increasingly afraid of her telephone. Lately, there was always something coming over it that she didn't want to hear. That designation applied especially to her sons, who seemed to be coming apart at the seams. From the way they were behaving, you would have thought Margaret's
Harbor was a crack-infested inner-city hood, complete with vacant lots, burned-out buildings, and drive-by shootings.

“You can be out of there in a day and you wouldn't have to do a thing,” John had said, only an hour ago, for what had to be the fortieth time. “You'll like Chicago. You'll be close. We can visit. At least you'll be away from all that craziness with the movie people.”

“I can send somebody to pack,” Robbie had said, not ten minutes later, and also for the fortieth time. “You've got no idea what's going on out there. It could be a serial killer. It could be a stalker. You had two of those women in your house.”

Annabeth had wanted to say that she had also had Stewart Gordon in her house, but she had a feeling that that would be something she would find hard to explain. It hadn't occurred to her until now that she and her sons had always had an unspoken agreement. It was so unspoken, she had never really agreed to it. It was odd the way it happened between parents and children, and maybe between parents and grown children most of all.

“You become an icon,” she said to the air while pretending to talk to Creamsicle. “You become a picture in a book. You have no movement.”

She heard the tap at the back door—she was standing in the kitchen waiting to hear it; she wasn't an idiot—and went to let Stewart in from what looked like the beginning of another windstorm. She'd forgotten how much she hated the cold when she'd decided to come up here. She'd always hated the cold. Even as a child, she had liked snow only when she could look at it from the safety of inside. She had hated it when her mother had bundled her up and shoved her out the door, with the admonition that she needed to “play in the fresh air.”

“I've always hated the fresh air,” she said to Stewart as she watched him stamp snow off his boots in her tiny mud-room. “I don't know if I've ever told you that about myself. I don't know if I've ever told myself that about myself.”

Stewart took off his navy watch cap and his scarf and threw them both over the hook next to the door. “Are you all right? You sound flustered. You haven't been bothered by the vermin, have you?”

“No,” Annabeth said. “There were some people taking pictures of the house before, but they didn't come to the door, and I can't stop them from taking pictures of the house. No, it's just my children. They're being—something.”

“Protective.” Stewart had his peacoat off. Annabeth found herself marveling at how incredibly careful he was to stay true to type. “If it was my gray-haired old mother in the middle of a murder investigation, I'd want to get her out of here too.”

“Remind me to dye my hair as soon as I can buy some L'Oréal at the drugstore.”

“I was being figurative,” Stewart said. He came through into the kitchen and let Creamsicle jump down onto his shoulders. Creamsicle liked him, although it might be mostly that he had his own cat and probably smelled like it. He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. His face was flushed and shiny under the thin layer of stubble that seemed to have sprouted from everywhere. It was a little disconcerting. Annabeth was used to seeing him as hairless as a baby.

“So,” Stewart said, “as I said on the phone, I've got Gregor Demarkian here, and Marcey's had another of her half-fake overdoses. And that's where things stand. Not much, I suppose, but better than we were.”

“And you're glad to have Gregor Demarkian here.”

“I am. Mostly I am because I know he won't jump to conclusions. He won't decide that Arrow must have killed Mark Anderman somehow, because she was there, or seems to have been, or—you know the thing. The thing the police do.”

“The police don't seem to be doing much of anything,” Annabeth said. “And I thought you liked the district attorney, or the public prosecutor, or whatever she's called.”

“Clara Walsh. I do like her. She's a smart woman. But with official authorities, the temptation is always there. Go for the easy target. And God only knows Arrow is an easy
target. The girl stupefies me. I can't figure out how she got into the position she's in. She's got nothing at all in the usual way of qualifications for it, and considering how low the qualifications are, that's really saying something.”