Cheating at Solitaire (43 page)

“Gregor?” she said.

Gregor hated caller ID. It made everybody sound psychic, and he did not believe in psychics.

“Gregor?” Bennis said again.

“I'm here,” Gregor said. “I'm sitting in a bar called Cuddy's, at ten o'clock in the morning, having coffee. I've had a very odd day.”

“Already? I'm surprised there's a bar called Cuddy's that's open already. Or is it like New York, where they can open at eight and serve alcohol straight through?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said. “I'm having coffee. Everybody here is having coffee. The place is absolutely pitch dark. Let me ask you something. Why have all the paparazzi disappeared?”

“What?”

“The paparazzi have disappeared,” Gregor said. “Yesterday, they were everywhere, and I mean everywhere. They were crawling out of cracks in the sidewalks. We couldn't get away from them except by locking ourselves in rooms, and then they were right outside. They stormed the emergency room where Marcey Mandret was yesterday after she did something to herself, I don't know what. They were at the press conference. They were at the scene where Kendra Rhode died before we were. And now they're nowhere at all.”

“Ah,” Bennis said. “Did I hear something about the paparazzi ruining the crime scene? I mean, where Kendra Rhode died?”

“If there was a crime scene,” Gregor said. “I don't know if we'll ever know. Yeah, they got there before anybody else did and they ripped the place apart. There's not going to be any uncontaminated evidence of what happened. It was a fair mess.”

“My guess is that they're looking to stay out of trouble,” Bennis said. “They do get into trouble, you know, Gregor. They get into a lot of it. After the Princess of Wales died, for instance. They get sued. They get prosecuted sometimes. There have been some pictures on the Internet this morning—”

“Yeah,” Gregor said. “I've seen them. Everybody's seen them. Marcey Mandret is fascinated with them. I suppose I don't blame her.”

“Yes, well, one of them shows what has to be a criminal act. I mean—”

“I know,” Gregor said. “I was there. And I mean I was
there when it happened. I haven't had to see a photograph of it. Stewart Gordon got the guy out of there and nearly beat him up.”

“Well, he could be prosecuted for that,” Bennis said. “I don't mean Stewart, I mean the guy. Well. If the prosecutor wanted to push it, he could be in a lot of trouble. So my guess is that the vast majority of these guys are just making themselves scarce for a few days until the outrage wears off. Most of them have probably already got money pictures enough to last a few weeks. And there will be time to get more. This story is going to last forever.”

“I haven't seen the news. I've been afraid to look.”

“They're treating it like the start of World War III,” Bennis said. “Nine-eleven wasn't as huge as they're making this. It's everywhere. Are you really going to solve this murder? You'll get offered your own show on Court TV.”

“I don't want my own show on Court TV. Tell me something else. People who work around people like Kendra Rhode, people who do publicity, for instance, or who work for the studios—”

“Kendra Rhode wasn't connected to a studio,” Bennis said. “You know that, don't you, Gregor? She made a music CD but she had to pay to have it put out herself. She's one of those people.”

“One of what people, this time?”

“For God's sake, Gregor, I grew up with girls like this. It's not true that you can't achieve anything if you're born with money, but it is true that you can't if you act like a spoiled brat. Kendra Rhode expected her name and her family and her cash to get her everything automatically, without actually having to work at it. And what happens in a situation like that is that nobody takes you seriously, and the public really doesn't like you. I saw the video of one of the singles off that album. It wasn't bad. It wasn't any worse than the stuff Arrow Normand does, or Britney Spears, or Jessica Simpson. Standard pop crap, but catchy enough. But practically nobody bought the album. It sold less than most midlist books. Which is saying something.”

“Did anybody like her?” Gregor asked. “I can't seem to find anybody who did. Even the people who were supposed to be her friends don't sound very friendly. They mostly sound afraid of her, even now that she's dead.”

“That, I couldn't tell you,” Bennis said. “There's a reason I walked out on all that twenty years ago, and a reason I'm still out. You will notice that you're not getting married anywhere on the Main Line.”

“Tell me about the people who work for these people,” Gregor said. “Do they hate them too? Do they resent them? Are they celebrities manqué?”

“I'd expect it depends on the person,” Bennis said. “A lot of them just have a job. Some of those can be good jobs to have. Some of them not so much. Why?”

“I've got to go see a man who's supposed to be standing in for the Man,” Gregor said. “The guy who is Michael Bardman's spy on this movie. The guy who has had to deal with all the nonsense these people have put out. The guy who is most likely to have had a standard motive for wanting Mark Anderman dead, and Kendra Rhode in the bargain. And I can't get a reading on him at all.”

1

The photographers started to creep back around noon. There were only a few, and they were keeping their distance, but Annabeth Falmer could see them from her kitchen window, hiding behind cars, shoving themselves against driftwood at the start of the beach, waiting. By then she had not only Marcey Mandret but Arrow Normand in her living room, and Arrow Normand's mother, who she thought was one of the most unpleasant human beings on the planet. Annabeth understood the photographers. They were trying to make a living, and they made a better living the more aggressive they got. Only a very few of them could have “special relationships” with celebrities that would let them get exclusives just for being who they were. Annabeth wouldn't for a moment excuse their behavior just because of that. Everybody had to make a living, and most people managed to do it without being crude, rude, objectionable jerks. It was just that she understood it, and she didn't understand Arrow Normand's mother at all.

“We'd be back in Los Angeles already if it wasn't for the filming,” Mrs. Normand said, her voice sounding like a television turned all the way up on speakers that had started to go bad. “I couldn't believe it when I heard they were going to go back to filming the day after tomorrow, but I talked to Carl Frank, that son of a bitch, and they are. Maybe Arrow could get some kind of medical exemption. You're a doctor, right? Stewart Gordon called you doctor? Maybe you could give Arrow a note and we could get out of here.”

Arrow was sitting in the big club chair. Her mother was sitting
at one end of the couch. Marcey Mandret was sitting at the other. Annabeth found herself wishing that Stewart had not gone off to do whatever it was he had to do, because at least he could find a way to talk to this woman. Oddly enough, Annabeth was having very little trouble talking to Marcey and Arrow, who seemed to be mostly young. Arrow was also deeply and profoundly stupid, but there was no malice in it, and she always seemed to be trying very hard. Mrs. Normand looked more like a caricature than a human being. Her hair was long and bright blond. Her makeup would have made more sense on someone fifteen years younger and several shades lighter complexioned. Her nails were several inches long and so red they would have glowed in the dark. Annabeth put the big tray of tea things and cookies and little cakes on the coffee table and then retreated to a straight-backed chair that she didn't usually consider comfortable. Right now, its principle distinction was being on the other side of the coffee table from all the rest of them, and that was comfort enough.

“Well?” Mrs. Normand said. She sounded annoyed. “Will you give Arrow a note so that she can skip the filming this week? I mean, you do talk, don't you? A couple of minutes ago, I think I even heard you.”

Deep in the club chair, Arrow stirred, looking mulish. “She isn't that kind of doctor,” she said. “And Mama, I told you, I don't want to skip the filming. We only have another week before we're finished—”

“If we all show up on time all the time and we're ready,” Marcey said from the couch.

“And I don't want to have to do this anymore,” Arrow said. “If I skip, I'll just have to come back and do it later.”

“What do you mean she's not that kind of doctor?” Mrs. Normand said. “Do you mean she's some kind of shrink?”

Annabeth Falmer had never used the “doctor” in front of her name except at academic exercises, where other people insisted, and this was why. Now she drew her chair up to the coffee table and began to pour out, starting with Marc-ey's cup, because she'd spent enough time with Marcey to know what she wanted. She tried to remember how Arrow
Normand and her mother had ended up in her house, but it was a blur. Stewart had thought it would be best “under the circumstances,” but she wasn't sure what the circumstances were, and she had no illusions about this house's security against rampaging paparazzi. For some reason, Mrs. Normand took the situation as given, so Annabeth thought that must be something, she didn't know what.

Marcey liked her tea with enough honey in it to re-create a beehive. Annabeth fixed it and handed over the cup. Marcey took it as if she were taking a life preserver, and then she drank half of it off in just one gulp. Annabeth didn't know how she did it. The water was scalding. She didn't seem to care. Annabeth looked at Mrs. Normand again. Arrow might be stupid, but her mother was something worse, ignorant and proud of it, and angry as hell.

“I don't understand,” Annabeth said, without meaning to—she hadn't meant to speak aloud at all, “why all of you are so angry all the time. You'd think you'd be ecstatic. You're young. You have more money than most people will ever see. You're famous. I 'd have killed for half of that at your age. But you don't seem to like it.”

“Oh, God,” Mrs. Normand said. “She is a shrink. That's just what we need. A shrink. Maybe we can get a psychological note. Maybe we could have you checked into the hospital for exhaustion.”

“She's not that kind of doctor,” Arrow said again. She sounded mulish and resentful. Annabeth got the impression that Arrow was mulish and resentful around her mother a lot. “She's a doctor of philosophy. She's like a college teacher. She teaches history.”

“A college teacher,” Mrs. Normand said.

“Well, no,” Annabeth said. “I don't teach. I mean, I used to, you know, but since the books have become reasonably successful, there's been no need, so—”

“You write books,” Mrs. Normand said. “What kind of books? Do you write romance books? I like those. Nora Lofts. That kind of thing. Arrow read a book once.
Chicken Soup for the Soul.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Arrow said.

Annabeth poured her a cup of tea and handed it over, but she had no idea how Arrow liked her tea. She gestured to things on the tray and Arrow got up to fuss among them for a moment, but she had said what she had to say to her mother. It was Marcey who was leaning forward to enter the fray.

“She writes history books,” Marcey said, picking up a ladyfinger and turning it over in her hand. She wasn't looking at it, though. She was looking straight at Mrs. Normand. “She writes books about women in American history, mostly, but sometimes about the founding fathers, and that kind of thing.”

“You mean she writes schoolbooks?” Mrs. Normand said.

“I mean she writes real books, for real people,” Marcey said. “The kind of books you see in bookstores. She writes about what history was really like instead of what we're told it's like. Stewart Gordon bought me one to read. It's about Abigail Adams. In case you're completely clueless, she was the wife of John Adams, who was the second president of the United States.”

“And people read history books when they don't have to and they're not in school?” Mrs. Normand said. “Well, it can't be too many people who do that, can it? I mean, what's the point? History has already happened, hasn't it. It's not important to people the way things are that happen today. I like to read about people, that's what I like, when I read. I don't do it much. It takes too much time.”

“You should read Shakespeare,” Marcey Mandret said. “He knew about people.”

“Nobody can read Shakespeare,” Mrs. Normand said. “He doesn't make any sense. People have changed too much, that's the problem. People aren't what they used to be like. They aren't even what they used to be like when I was growing up. And the music.” She stopped still, as if she had just realized there was music playing in the background, which there was. It was the first prelude of Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier
. “Well,” Mrs. Normand said. “There isn't much point to the music, either, is there? It's just depressing most of the time, and if there's one thing I know, it's that people
don't like to be depressed. What are we doing here, anyway? I mean, what was the point of bringing us here? This place gives me the creeps.”

“We've got to be somewhere,” Arrow said. “We can't go back to the house—the paparazzi will have totally staked it out. We've got to be somewhere while Carl Frank finds us another place to stay. If Kendra was still alive, maybe we could stay at the Point.”

“You couldn't stay at the Point,” Marcey said, sounding sharp. “Don't you know that? She wouldn't let any of us stay at the Point. She wouldn't let any of us get in the way if there was something she wanted to do.”

“I think it's a terrible thing,” Mrs. Normand said. “A young girl like that, so beautiful, and so rich. I think all the flags ought to fly at half-mast for a week. After all, we fly them at half-mast for politicians nobody has heard about for years. I mean, I thought Ronald Reagan was dead long before he actually died, and then when he did die, they made all that fuss about him, and who really cared? I mean it. Who really cared? You couldn't turn on the television for days without seeing something about it, and then there was the funeral, and it was on a million stations, you couldn't get away from it. Kendra Rhode did more for America than Ronald Reagan. She was a cultural icon.”