Cheating at Solitaire (49 page)

All he wanted was the pictures of the wedding, and it was good luck for him that Jack Bullard was temporarily incapaci tated and unable to prevent a little foray into his own house.

1
At the Oscartown Police Department, Gregor Demarkian was still sitting at the table in the conference room, but the other side of the table was occupied by Clara Walsh, Bram Winder, and Jerry Young, and Gregor had a big piece of paper to write on.

“Your problem,” he said, not looking up to see if they were paying attention, “is that you had a series of events that had to be explained to make sense of what happened, and they couldn't be explained in the usual way. Real life is not like a detective story, no matter how much we want it to be. Real murderers are messy. They're haphazard. They panic. Most of them can't plan their way out of paper bags. And murder for hire is a lot more rare in the real world than it is on CSI. Here are your problems.”

He passed the big piece of paper across the table. On it, he had written in capital letters:

MURDER OF MARK ANDERMAN
ATTACK ON JACK BULLARD
GUN IN ANNABETH FALMER'S HOUSE
DEATH OF KENDRA RHODE

“My problem,” Gregor said, “was to assume that life was never like a detective story, because the four things on that list could not have been committed by the same person.”

“Do you mean there was an accomplice?” Bram Winder

asked. “There's nothing odd about that. Perpetrators have accomplices all the time.”

“There was no accomplice in the ordinary sense,” Gregor said. “This wasn't a plot hatched by two people, or even a case where person A commits a crime and gets person B to help him cover it up. If it had been, the attack on Jack Bullard would never have happened. Or if it did, it wouldn't have happened the way it did. As for the gun in Annabeth Falm-er's house”—Gregor shrugged—“I suppose that could have happened the way it did, but it was a stupid move, and unnecessary, and did more harm than good.”

“The forensics came back on that, right?” Bram said. “It wasn't even the right gun. I don't understand why anybody would want to plant it in Annabeth Falmer's house, if somebody did plant it there. What was the point?”

“The point was that it was Jack Bullard's gun,” Gregor said.

“Do you mean somebody was trying to implicate Jack?” Clara Walsh said. “That doesn't make sense. It would make more sense to mail the gun to the police station, or to me.”

“Nobody was trying to implicate Jack,” Gregor said. “Turn it around, and see what you have. First, the person who planted the gun in Annabeth's house thought that it was the gun that had been used to kill Mark Anderman. Second, the person who planted the gun in Annabeth's house knew that both Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret had been in that living room all the afternoon of the storm. The idea wasn't to implicate Jack. It was to implicate Arrow Normand.”

“But she was already in jail,” Clara Walsh said.

“She was in jail, but not for long,” Gregor said. “In fact, even you admitted to me, yesterday, that you couldn't understand why she was still in jail. She has good legal repre sentation. She could have been out any time she wanted to be. The only reason she wasn't out was that she didn't want to be. She used a few days in jail to hide from the crazy people around her, and having met her, and several of the crazy people, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. I don't think anybody,
anywhere, thought that you were going to end up prosecuting Arrow Normand for the murder of Mark Anderman, not as things stood, at any rate. And nobody thought you'd ever get a conviction. But the person who planted the gun didn't care whether you got a conviction or not. The only point was to get you to concentrate on Arrow Normand and not on anybody else.”

“We didn't have anybody else to concentrate on,” Clara Walsh said. “I wish we had.”

“So let me get this straight,” Jerry Young said. “First the perpetrator murdered Mark Anderman. Then the perpetrator attacked Jack Bullard. Then the perpetrator hid Jack's gun in Annabeth Falmer's house—”

“No,” Gregor said. “The perpetrator murdered Mark Anderman, but since then, everything we've been looking at has been the work of somebody else. It's been smoke, pure and simple. And that was what I had to get past before I could understand what was happening. It wasn't the work of only one person, but it also wasn't the work of one person and an accomplice, because the person who killed Kendra Rhode wouldn't have agreed to the attack on Jack Bullard, and if that person had known about the planting of the gun, the gun wouldn't have been the wrong one, or it wouldn't have been planted at all. And as for Kendra Rhode, the last thing the murderer of Mark Anderman wanted was the death of Kendra Rhode.”

“You keep saying ‘death,' ” Bram Winder said, “not ‘murder.' Wasn't Kendra Rhode murdered?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said. “I don't think the person who killed her knows. My guess is that there was a single murderous moment, but I know there was no planning, and no conscious intent. Which is very different from the murder of Mark Anderman, which was not only planned but plotted out, and then followed up. It had to be, because if it hadn't been it would have been too obvious. So I'll hand over to you the murderer of Mark Anderman, and tell you how it happened, and lay out what you need to get your conviction, but the death of Kendra Rhode is going to be
solved only if the person who killed her tells you about it, and I have no idea if that's going to happen or not.”

“So where do we go from here?” Jerry Young said. “We've got enough staties in town to open a barracks, and the paparazzi are going to be back, and you know it. What can we do about any of this?”

“We can go and ask one more set of questions,” Gregor said. “Why don't you all come with me. I need to have you along. With any luck you'll be able to make your arrest before the paparazzi get back, and then you can try to equip the Harbor with advanced security equipment to keep them under control.”

“They haven't actually left the island,” Jerry Young said gloomily. “They're just hiding. And not doing that good a job at it.”

“If we're going to go somewhere, we ought to go,” Clara Walsh said. “Where are we going?”

“To see Jack Bullard,” Gregor said. “I talked to Mike Ingleford half an hour ago. Mr. Bullard is up and around and due to go home as soon as Dr. Ingleford stops stalling so that we can get there first.”

2

The Oscartown Hospital was actually named the Betty Larkin Halle Memorial Hospital. Gregor had no idea how he had missed that the first time through, especially since it was spelled out in shiny letters over the hospital's front door, and then again in the glass next to the emergency room entrance. Then again, he only noticed it now because he was looking at the places in which the glass was broken and boarded over, a relic of the half riot of just yesterday. Gregor looked up and down the street as Clara Walsh's car pulled to a stop right in the middle of the curving front drive. He had no idea why they had driven from the Oscartown Inn, which was close enough to see from where they were now, but Clara had insisted, and here they were. Nobody else was here, though, at least as far as he could see. Linda Beecham was not entirely wrong when she said that nobody was interested in somebody like Jack.

Gregor got out of the car and waited for the rest of them. Bram Winder looked disgruntled. Jerry Young just looked depressed. It was colder than Gregor thought it ever got in Philadelphia.

“So,” Clara said. “What are we going to do, charge Jack with ruining his own hand?”

“Maybe,” Gregor said.

She walked past him and in through the big plate glass doors. It occurred to Gregor that the United States was the least security-conscious of nations, in spite of the way they hyperventilated about it in public. There were so many glass doors, everywhere, that couldn't be defended with less than an army at hand. There were so many windows, too.

They went through the lobby, waving at the woman at the desk, and to the elevators. The entire place felt as deserted as it had the first time Gregor had been there. The elevator was sitting on their floor. Clara shooed them all into it and then punched the button for the third floor.

“Honest to God,” she said. “I thought you were going to have me arrest Marcey Mandret. Wouldn't that have been a show?”

Gregor didn't say anything. The door was opening at the third floor. Stepping into the corridor, he could see Leslie at her desk—he guessed she would never leave her desk during a shift again, even if it meant she would have to urinate in a Dixie cup—and then, looking left, Mike Ingleford standing near a door at the end of the hall. Gregor looked from Ingleford to the fire doors at the end, and back to Ingleford. That was going to work out, but it was something he should have checked out before.

They were halfway to Jack Bullard's room when Linda Beecham came out, holding one of those big paper shopping bags with handles.

“Now what?” she said. “Don't tell me you want to question him now. He's going home. He'd have been home in an hour. Go away now.”

Clara Walsh had puffed on ahead of the rest of them. She reached Linda Beecham first.

“It's all right,” she said. “It's something of an emergency, that's all. For goodness' sake, Linda, you saw what happened yesterday. You can't believe they've gone away for good. I've got half the state police force on the Harbor this morning and I still don't feel safe enough. Let's get this over with before there's more trouble.”

“He's been unconscious for most of a day,” Linda said. “He's been drugged. How is he supposed to remember anything?”

“He wasn't drugged on the night of the storm,” Clara Walsh said. “Come on, Linda, stop playing the mother hen. This will only take a minute. Won't it, Mr. Demarkian? You're not intending to give Jack the third degree, or whatever it is? I don't know why people say ‘the third degree.' I haven't got the faintest idea what it means, and I don't think anybody else does, either.”

The rest of them had reached the door where Linda Beecham and Mike Ingleford were standing. Gregor said hello to the doctor and went inside. Jack was standing near the windows, looking out at Oscartown, his back to the door. The room was bare except for a small bouquet of flowers in a thin glass vase. Gregor wondered if Linda had brought it, or if one of the nurses had, uncomfortable at how barren and sterile Jack's room was.

Jack turned around and looked at them. He was young and good-looking in the way that only young men of a certain age can be. He was very tired.

“Well,” he said.

“Do you know why I'm here?” Gregor said.

“I think so,” Jack said.

“Does she know?”

Gregor meant Linda Beecham, and Jack understood him.

“She knew before you did,” he said. “She's a very strange woman.”

“She could have gotten herself into a great deal of trouble. She might have been wrong. You might have pressed charges.”

“But she wasn't wrong, was she?” Jack said. “She's never wrong, if you want to know the truth. Wrongheaded, sometimes. Lots of times. This time. But never wrong.”

“You're still drugged to the gills,” Linda Beecham said. “You shouldn't let them do this to you. They're only trying to railroad you because it's better for them to get hold of you than to get hold of one of those people. They're afraid of those people. They've got money.”

“I wanted to have money once,” Jack said. “That's how this started. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “But it wasn't where it ended.”

“No,” Jack agreed. “If what I'd wanted in the end was money, I could have had it. I've got a stack of photographs from the Vegas trip back at the house. They're worth a fortune. Literally. Arrow Normand. Marcey Mandret. Kendra Rhode. In clothes and out of them, at the weddings, in bars, everything. Absolute exclusives. Nobody else has them, or anything like them. I could have done a seven-figure deal with any one of the tabloids. But even before we went to Vegas, it wasn't about the money anymore. And she knew it.”

“Kendra Rhode knew it,” Gregor said. It was not a question.

“Of course,” Jack said. “I knew her a long time before anybody else did. Did you know that? She used to come here summers as a child, when we were both children. She used to play out on the beach by the Point. Her mother used to bring her into Oscartown for ice cream, along with her sisters. She always looked like that, you know. Blond and slim and tall. They don't all look like that. Even her sisters don't all look like that. But she did. As if she'd been created just to represent—well, whatever it was.”

“It was rich twits,” Linda Beecham said. “You were born on the Harbor. You should know that.”

Gregor was fairly sure he was now the only person who was listening to Linda Beecham. Clara Walsh, Bram Winder, and Jerry Young were all staring at Jack Bullard as if they'd never seen him before. Jack was not staring back. He was
still looking tired, more and more tired as the seconds ticked by. He moved away from the window and sat down in the single vistor's chair.

“It was the storm,” Gregor said. “In case you're wondering how I knew. The storm created the opportunity, because it meant you were free of your fellow photographers. Nobody was going out in that mess if they could help it, and at the time it didn't look like there was anything new to see. The papers had enough pictures of Marcey Mandret getting plowed and falling out of her clothes so that a few more weren't going to be worth risking your life for. But you weren't risking your life. You'd been in nor'easters before. You'd grown up on the island. You could follow them without that much trouble, even in the mess the weather was making.”