Cheating at Solitaire (47 page)

“Are you saying he didn't come to the scene at all?”

“He came, at the last minute. By then the ambulance was already there, and they were loading Jack into it. They had to do that. Jack was alive. It was an emergency. They couldn't just leave him lying in the snow while Jerry took his own sweet time showing up.”

“Did anybody else show up?”

“Some of those photographers poked their noses in when the ambulance first got there, just to see what the siren was about, but they didn't stay long. There isn't much money in photographs of Jack Bullard with an injured hand. There isn't much money in photographs of Jack Bullard. They went away.”

“And then what? ”

“Then the ambulance took Jack to the hospital, and I stayed around for a while, and then I went looking for Clara Walsh,” Linda said. “And then I met you, come to think of it. But none of you were much interested in Jack either.”

“We did come and interview Dr. Ingleford, on the spot.”

“And then Marcey Mandret turned up drunk and you all went running,” Linda said. “It's embarrassing, really, the way you all behave. He was lying there in bed, unconscious, or something like it, and you were all more interested in Marcey Mandret being drunk. What does that woman do, anyway? She's supposed to be a movie star, but I never see her in a movie.”

“I haven't either,” Gregor said. “But what did you do when we all went to see about Marcey Mandret? Did you stay with Jack?”

“Yes, I did. For another half an hour, at least. And then I went home.”

“Did anyone else come to see Jack when you were there?”

“No.”

“Did he get any phone calls? Did anyone inquire about him?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone coming into or out of the hospital when you left?”

“Well, there were a million people around the emergency room entrance,” Linda said. “They looked like one of those invading armies from the
Lord of the Rings
movies. But there was no one on Jack's ward, no. Even Dr. Ingleford left.”

Gregor was about to say that she couldn't fault Dr. Ingle-ford about that, since he seemed to be the only full-fledged doctor on duty at the time, but he let it go. Linda Beecham only seemed to be dead flat and without emotion. In truth, she was angry to the point of explosion, and keeping control of it by a continual act of will.

He wondered what happened when the will broke down.

Then he didn't wonder anymore, because he realized he knew.

1

Stewart Gordon was glad to hear that Carl Frank had moved Arrow Normand and her mother out of Annabeth Falmer's living room. He'd thought the entire idea was cracked from the start, because there was no way Annabeth's house could be “secured” against paparazzi in any meaningful sense, and because the paparazzi wouldn't be back in force for at least another day or two. There was also the problem of Annabeth herself, who wasn't used to people like Arrow Normand, and who really wasn't used to people like Arrow Normand's mother. Besides, the paparazzi hadn't really disappeared. They'd only gone into hiding. They were waiting for the moment when it would be safe for them to return in force, or impossible to resist, whichever came first. At best, Stewart gave them another twenty-four hours. It would be less if somebody was arrested for causing the death of Kendra Rhode.

Stewart was less glad to hear that Marcey Mandret had not left Annabeth's living room, and didn't seem to be intending to.

“She's lying on the couch with a blanket, drinking tea and reading W. B. Yeats,” Annabeth said when Stewart called to say he was coming over.

“She can't be reading Yeats,” Stewart said. “She won't get any of the references.”

“I'm explaining things,” Annabeth said. “And really, Stewart, you can't complain that much. It's better than having
her drunk in the middle of the day and falling out of her clothes where photographers can catch her at it. I mean, I admit I would have started her on Byron maybe, or even Dickens, but she liked the cover on the Yeats.”

“Isn't there something somewhere about not judging books by their covers?”

“I don't know if she knows that one,” Annabeth said.

“I just got a call from Carl Frank,” Stewart said. “He said Gregor Demarkian was asking him about my suitability as a suspect for these murders.”

“You are a suitable suspect for the murders,” Annabeth said. “You're a more suitable suspect than Arrow Normand. I don't think that young woman could plan her way into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

“Possibly true,” Stewart said. “But there's no malice in her.”

And that, he thought, as he made his way from his house to the boardwalk so that he could walk along the beach to Annabeth's, summed up his entire position in this endless mess. The twits were twits, but with the exception of Kendra Rhode they had no malice in them. They were ignorant, and vulgar, and shallow, but they wished no one harm, and they tried to be nice to the people who had to work with them. Maybe it was too much to ask them to behave like thoroughgoing professionals at their ages and their levels of experience. Had he been a thoroughgoing professional at the age of twenty-one? Well, actually, he probably had. He'd just left the Royal Academy then, where they'd trained his voice, already too deep by half, until it sounded like a foghorn. But he hadn't had the disadvantages these girls had had. He hadn't been famous at fifteen, or surrounded by adults whose only purpose was to suck money out of him. He'd had a decent home life with two people who had worked with their hands and been paid for it, and who didn't take any nonsense from “teenagers.” Stewart tried to imagine his father referring to anybody at all as a “teenager,” and failed. His father was not fond of fads. Not even a little bit.

Annabeth's house was easy to reach, and there was nobody on the boardwalk this afternoon. Stewart wouldn't have cared if there had been. His policy had always been to treat fame as if it didn't exist. He employed no bodyguards. He didn't travel with an entourage. The only assistant he'd ever had had been the one the studio hired to help with his fan mail while he was playing Commander Rees. She'd been a very nice, sensible, middle-aged Scotswoman whose idea of a night on the town was shrimp and pasta at an Olive Garden followed by three stiff shots of unadulterated whiskey when she got home. Mrs. Mackindle, her name had been, and Stewart still sent Christmas cards to her place in Aberdeen.

He got to Annabeth's house and knocked on the door. Annabeth had
The Well-Tempered Clavier
on the stereo. It was a good stereo, a Bose, that her sons had bought her because she liked music.
The disc of The Well-Tempered Clavier
she was playing featured a harpsichord, which was what it was supposed to feature, instead of a piano, which most of them did. He knocked a second time, just in case she hadn't heard him, and the door opened.

“Hello,” Annabeth said. It was a door to the kitchen, not the one to the living room, because that one faced the sea. “I've got more tea on. You look good. This is very odd.”

“I want to talk to you about something,” Stewart said.

Annabeth was already headed back toward the stove. The kettle was blowing, but not sounding, because she had put the whistle up.

“I think Marcey may have fallen asleep,” she said. “I really don't know what to do about the mood she's in. I mean, you can't just make up ten years of schooling in an afternoon. Not that I'm necessarily wedded to the idea of education taking place in schools. But you can't go from not reading anything at all except menus to reading Yeats just like that. I finally got her to give it up and gave her Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She likes Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”

“She probably thinks it's song lyrics,” Stewart said. “Is
she going to stay here all day? Is she moving in? She does have a house to go to.”

“Oh, I know,” Annabeth said. “I think she's just worried about the publicity, you know, and the photographers. I mean, she does realize they're not much in evidence today, but she seems to be sure they'll be back any minute. Is that right? Will they be back any minute?”

“Sooner rather than later,” Stewart said, “which means it makes even more sense for her to be in her own house instead of here. She's got at least some security in that place.”

“She's also alone. She said she always used to have people with her, but Carl Frank made them leave.”

“They all travel with huge groups of people,” Stewart said. “Paid friendship, if you ask me. Anyway, the huge groups of people don't usually come to work with them, and Carl Frank had had enough of the schedule going to hell, so he packed them all home. I live alone. You don't worry about something happening to me.”

“Of course I worry about that. But you can take care of yourself. You'd probably do pretty well in hand-to-hand combat. She seems a lot more vulnerable.”

“I can take care of myself,” Stewart said. “But right now, there's something I want to talk to you about, so if she's asleep, that's all well and good.”

There was a sound from the living room, and Stewart realized that what he was hearing was Marcey Mandret, moving around. The disc had finished playing. He heard clicks and whirrs and then the sound of another disc, still
The Well-Tempered Clavier
, starting up.

“Well,” Annabeth said. “She must be awake. I've got those Moravian spice cookies you like over there in that tin. Let's bring them into the living room and relax.”

“Let's not go into the living room just yet,” Stewart said. “There really is something I want to talk to you about.”

Annabeth turned to look at him, quizzical. “You aren't going to confess to a murder, are you? Because I did think
about you and Kendra Rhode, and you didn't seem to have time. Or maybe I'm wrong. About the time.”

“I don't know,” Stewart said. He reminded himself that, for all her perfections, she was still an American. Then he admitted to himself that he often rather liked Americans. Next to the Brits he was used to dealing with at home, they had a terrific work ethic.

“Listen,” he said. “I was thinking. In spite of all this mess, the filming can't go on here longer than another two to three weeks. After that, I've got three months before I start another project. I think we should go to Australia together.”

“What?”

“Australia,” Stewart said. “You know. We've talked about Australia. You said you'd like to see it.”

“I would like to see it.”

“So,” Stewart said, “we should go together, and on the way, we should stop in London and get married.”

“Married,” Annabeth said.

“I know it's a little quick,” Stewart said, “but we're neither one of us teenagers, and we both have children who probably don't want to see their parents jetting off all over the world with a paramour. Or, you know what I mean. My children are all in and around London—well, except for Andrew, who's in the Amazon, but that's a long story. We'll get him out of there long enough to attend the wedding—and we can fly your boys in, and then we can take off and call Australia our honeymoon. Go see the fairy penguins. That kind of thing.”

“Married,” Annabeth said again.

Stewart had a sudden feeling that this was not going well. He didn't think he could have been that far off in judging the emotional climate between them. Why wasn't it going well? He was beginning to feel a little panicked.

“When I'm not filming,” he plowed on, “we could travel wherever you liked. We could go to Rome. We could travel across the United States and see the places you want to write about. We could go to China.”

Annabeth had stopped making tea. She had the hot water
half poured into a yellow and white polka-dot teapot, and she was still standing next to it, holding the kettle in the air, staring at him. Stewart had begun to feel like Jack the Ripper.

“Or not,” he said, in a last desperate bid to get a response out of her. “If you don't like traveling, we could stay home. In Scotland, if you wanted. Or in Los Angeles. Or London. Or even, ah, here.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Marcey Mandret said. “You've got to go down on your knees or have a ring or some flowers or do something romantic. Don't you know anything about anything?”

Stewart turned, feeling his face go brick red in a way he hadn't since he was a third-former caught with a copy of a girlie mag in his Latin workbook. He was only somewhat mollified by finding that Marcey was not in her usual strappy little dress, but wearing sweats that covered everything as thoroughly as a burka. She was not, however, making fun of him. She was deadly serious.

“If you're going to get her to marry you,” she said, “you've got to do something romantic. You've got to treat her like she's worth doing something romantic for.”

This seemed to do something to Annabeth, who until then had been frozen in place. She looked at the kettle she was holding and then at the teapot. She poured more water into the teapot until it was full. She put the kettle back on the stove. She bit her lip. Stewart had the terrible premonition that she was about to give him one of those lectures about how they would always be friends.

Instead, she said, “It's all right, I think. I don't need anything romantic, at least not right now. I'll marry you.”

“Don't do it,” Marcey Mandret said. “Not till he at least comes across with flowers. If you don't insist, he'll just go on forgetting to do anything romantic for the next fifty years.”

“We don't have the next fifty years,” Stewart Gordon said.

“Make him get you flowers,” Marcey said again. “Do it.”

Annabeth put the top back onto the teapot and brought the teapot over to the kitchen table. She put it down and then
sat down in front of it. The cat was there, waiting, the way it always was. Stewart didn't understand what it was about cats.