Cheating at Solitaire (29 page)

He thought about it for a minute, and tried “Arrow Nor-mand” and “Hugh Hefner Suite.” This was better. The page that came up declared that there were only 12,224,488 results.
He looked through the ones on the first page and decided to try CNN first. He got five short paragraphs announcing that “it had been reported” that Arrow Normand and her friends had spent a “wild weekend” in the “very expensive Hugh Hefner Suite” at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, along with five or six photographs of Arrow Normand with various people, or in the vicinity of various people. He recognized Marcey Mandret from the hospital, and both of the people he had just seen in the restaurant downstairs, although the man was in the background and fuzzy. This was not helping. Gregor hit the Back button and looked through the rest of the results on the page.

The one he wanted was almost at the end. It was from something called SarahSurveysSociety, which seemed to be some kind of blog. The headline was: “Has Arrow Normand Lost Her Mind?”

For half a minute, but no longer, Gregor wished he'd already met Arrow Normand. Stewart could give all the lectures he wanted about how incredibly stupid the woman was, but Stewart thought everybody was stupid. Gregor dismissed the qualm and concentrated on the blog entry, which was immensely long for that kind of thing, and illustrated. He saw pictures of Arrow Normand at parties, and the beach. He saw pictures of Arrow Normand in shorts and halter tops, in bikinis, in ball gowns. He saw pictures of Arrow Normand happy, and sad, and wasted, and crying, and angry. He even saw one picture of Arrow Normand trying to fill her own gas tank.

In the beginning, the pictures bothered him, and he couldn't put his finger on why. Then it hit him. Arrow Normand was not beautiful. She wasn't even especially pretty. She didn't have that thing that some actresses and models have, where their looks are not conventionally attractive but are at least compelling. Arrow Normand looked like every high school cheerleader from the small towns of the Midwest, “cute” in that way high school girls are because they're very young, but also “cute” in that way that disappears as soon as they get older. And Arrow Normand's “cute” was definitely
disappearing. He could see it in the progression of the pictures. The older she got, the pudgier she got. She never got pudgy enough to be fat, but she no longer had clear physical definition, and her face had gone almost completely slack. There was no significant bone structure to hold it together. Even her hair got flatter and more colorless the closer to the present the pictures were taken. What was worse, she looked out of place. When she appeared in pictures next to other “celebrities”—and next to Kendra Rhode especially—she looked like that very same small-town ex-cheerleader, getting her picture taken with her favorite star. She did not look like a star herself, or like anybody who could ever be a star.

Gregor scrolled to the beginning of the blog's entry, which took a while.

“Everybody knows that celebrities are about excess,” the blog began,

and everybody knows that Arrow Normand is dumb, but this latest trip to Las Vegas really takes the cake. It's not just the fact that we've got one more piece of evidence that the woman can't count. The Hugh Hefner Suite is rumored to cost $40,000 a night, which is more than a lot of people make in a year, and Normand is rich, but not that rich, and she won't be rich for long if she goes on spending it like water. We've been through things like this with Arrow before, though, and you can't make people wise up. What with having her favorite latte flown in every morning from L.A. while she's location filming in Milan, by private jet yet, to the tune of $20,000 a flight, never mind the waste of fossil fuels, and the nearly daily shopping trips to Chez Guitarra at $6,000 a pop, we figure Arrow is going to end up flipping burgers in Cincinnati by the time she's thirty anyway. God only knows nobody is buying her records anymore, and her label is set to drop her, and money doesn't last forever.

But people can be stupid about money without being stupid about everything else, and Arrow Normand's
problem is that she's stupid about everything else, and especially about her image. Kendra Rhode and Marcey Mandret can afford to get drunk as skunks in public every night, but Arrow is supposed to be America's Little Girl, and when America's Little Girl goes to bed in an expensive hotel suite with one guy and wakes up with another, people start to wonder if she's worth the attention she's getting. And the men. For God's sake. Can't the woman find a decently employed guy to take her out once in a while? The one she checked in with was Steve Becker, who gets some minor pickup crew work on movies, and the one she checked out with was Mark Anderman, who does the same. Neither one of them is bringing home enough to afford the coffee at the Palms, never mind the suite, and you gotta know that when they go out to dinner, it's Arrow who's picking up the checks. Arrow flew back to her New England movie set with Anderman, but Sarah's ready to predict it won't last long. Sarah's ready to predict that Arrow won't either, either on that movie or in the universe of celebrities.

Arrow Normand hasn't lost her mind. She never had one.

Gregor sat back. That was something. He went back to the Google results page, then on to the second page. Arrow Normand seemed to inspire a lot of blogs. He wondered if she read these things. It couldn't be easy to read about yourself over and over again in entries like Sarah's. It was hard enough to read about yourself in ordinary news reports, which almost never got things entirely right. He went back to Sarah's page and bookmarked it. He would rather have had a printer and a hard copy. He hated reading things on a computer screen. At the moment, this was the best he could do.

He was just thinking he ought to get the dates worked out in his head when there was a thunderous pounding on his door, and the even more thunderous voice of Stewart Gordon said, “Gregor? Are you in there? Are you dead?”

3

If Gregor Demarkian had not met Stewart Gordon before Stewart Gordon was famous, he would have thought that the man was a prime ass. As it was, he had, from the beginning, thought that the man was crazy. Sometimes it was as if they were in some odd World War II movie, with their roles reversed: Gregor was the shy reserved one; Stewart was the confident energetic one; the Yanks and the Brits had changed personalities when nobody was looking. Gregor couldn't even blame it on Stewart's size. The man was tall, and broad, and not likely to fade into the background in any room, but neither was Gregor. It was more a matter of attitude, and Gregor had never been able to figure out how it worked.

When Gregor opened the door to the corridor, Stewart was not there alone. He had yet another small, neat middle-aged woman with him, so that Gregor found himself wondering if this had become a hobby. This woman was retiring rather than brisk, and not inclined to makeup, but she had that indefinable something that Gregor recognized in Clara Walsh and Bennis, that something you got from living all your life among the WASP establishment.

Stewart had her by the hand, and dragged her in past Gregor as if she were a small child needing to be led to a waiting train.

“This is Anna,” he said. “Annabeth. Annabeth Falmer. I knew her as Anna before I knew her as Annabeth. That's the trouble.”

“It doesn't matter,” Annabeth Falmer said desperately. “It's just that—it's just—Anna sounded better than Annabeth professionally.”

“She writes books,” Stewart said. “I told you about her. Father Tibor has heard of her. Everybody has heard of her. She's writing a book now, when she's not being invaded by drunken twits and finding firearms in her sofa. Here, sit down. Take the thing out and show him.”

Gregor was still standing at the door. With Stewart, everything went by quickly. Gregor closed the door to the corridor and came back into the center of the large room.

Stewart had practically pushed Annabeth Falmer into the wing chair, and now she was sitting in it with her feet flat on the floor and a large tote bag in her lap. She looked confused.

“How do you do,” Gregor said, holding out his hand. “I'm Gregor Demarkian.”

“How do you do,” Annabeth Falmer said. “I've seen you on television. And Stewart has, you know, told me a lot about you.”

“About you in the army,” Stewart said. “Those are the best stories about you, whether you know it or not. There he was, from one of the greatest cities in the world, with no more of a clue than the most mold-besotted hayseed. And they put him in intelligence. Intelligence.”

Annabeth put the tote bag on the floor and shrugged out of her coat, which was not the standard quilted thing Gregor had gotten used to seeing since he'd come off the ferry, but a good black wool that must once have been expensive and that seemed to have gotten only more so with age. She picked the tote bag up and looked inside it.

“Well,” she said.

“Yes,” Stewart said. “You have to tell him. There isn't anybody else to tell, and he'd be the best person anyway.”

Gregor gave a glance at the computer screen, still full of images of Arrow Normand, and came around to sit down on the edge of the bed. It was always awkward talking to people in hotel rooms, especially women.

Annabeth reached into the tote bag and came out with a big, see-through, self-closing plastic bag, the kind used to put things away in freezers. Gregor stared at it for a moment without realizing what he was seeing. Maybe it was because he was used to seeing those bags hauled out so that somebody could feed him, but for a split second he thought he was looking at an enormous pork chop that had been burned into an unyielding solid hunk. Then his brain adjusted to the situation he was in, and he saw it was a gun.

“Ah,” he said.

“I wish you'd stop saying ‘ah,' ” Stewart said. “This is
serious. Annabeth found this in her couch, the same couch she put Arrow Normand to sleep on the night we found the body. And we thought it might be the gun used in the killing, but maybe not. Why would it be in Annabeth's house?”

“We did try to be careful,” Annabeth said. “I mean, I did, and then later Stewart did. Neither one of us touched it with our hands. We used a handkerchief to pick it up.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well. Let's think. This is at your house? Have you owned it long?”

“Oh,” Annabeth said. “No. No. I've only been there since the end of the summer. It was to write a book, you see, and the boys found me this place, and I don't know what kind of deal they got, but it was fully furnished and I could bring Creamsicle—”

“The cat,” Stewart said helpfully. “It's a little orange cat.”

“I'd guessed that,” Gregor said. “So, it came fully furnished. That means the couch where you found the gun was there before you got there?”

“Yes. Yes, it was,” Annabeth said.

“And was this the first time you'd gone rooting around in it?” Gregor asked.

Annabeth looked confused for a moment, then brightened. “Oh, no. I clean as a hobby, or something. I've pulled the cushions several times and vacuumed out underneath them. If you don't do that, couches get really foul. I've taken the whole thing apart several times before this.”

“And that's what you were doing this time, taking the couch apart to clean it?” Gregor asked.

“Not really,” Annabeth said. “I sat down on it, which I don't usually do, but I was setting up to give Stewart some tea when he came and I was arranging some things on the coffee table, and I sat down to do it, and I sat down on something hard. So I went looking, and that was what I found. It was just there. Between the cushions and a little underneath.”

“And it's not yours?”

“Of course it's not hers,” Stewart said.

“No it isn't,” Annabeth said, “although you should hear
my sons on the phone these days. They want me to get one. They both live in suburbs, you see, and there are burglaries. But this is Margaret's Harbor. Nothing ever happens on Margaret's Harbor.”

“Somebody just got murdered here,” Stewart pointed out.

Annabeth ignored him. Gregor ignored him too. The gun in the plastic bag was large and heavy, not a “ladies' gun” as some of them were called, not small so that it could fit into a purse. He looked up instinctively and checked the pictures of Arrow Normand on his laptop screen. She was a very small woman, tiny, not much taller than five feet. She didn't look strong, and she didn't look athletic. Even in the pictures where she was supposed to be performing, the illusion of a toned and trained body was just that, an illusion. She faked it with spandex and Lycra.

Stewart turned his head to see what Gregor was looking at. “Aha,” he said. “You've looked her up. Our Arrow.”

“She's very small.”

“And? ”

“And this is a big gun,” Gregor said. “It's a heavy gun. It's heavy even for Ms. Falmer there—”

“Dr. Falmer,” Stewart said automatically.

“Annabeth,” Annabeth said.

“It's heavy even for Annabeth,” Gregor corrected himself, “and she's not only larger in terms of height and body build, but she's got more muscle on her. At least, as far as I can tell from photographs. Has it been fired recently?”

“We didn't fire it, if that's what you mean,” Annabeth said. “We only picked it up with a handkerchief, like I told you. I'm not sure I'd know how to fire it.”

“It's simple to fire a gun,” Stewart said. “You make sure it's loaded, you make sure the safety is off, and then you pull the trigger.”

Gregor opened the plastic bag. Then he reached behind him into his suitcase, took the first tie that was handy, and took the gun out with that. Then he smelled the barrel. There was nothing. He dropped the gun back into the bag.

“Well?” Stewart said.

“It smells new,” Gregor said, trying to be cautious. Trying to be cautious around Stewart was like trying to be—Gregor stopped. He didn't know what it was like. He had no meta phor. “It smells new,” he said again, “as if it has never been fired at all. Ever. Which I can't vouch for until we get it tested. Try to get that through your head.”