Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor considered it. “All right,” he said. “Then the question becomes when he was killed, before or after the truck rolled onto the beach. Why were you and Annabeth Falmer on the beach?”

  “We were looking for the truck,” Stewart said. “Arrow had shown up at Annabeth’s door a mess and babbling about how she was in the truck with Mark and there’d been an accident on the beach, and Annabeth got fairly convinced that Mark was still in the truck. She tried calling the emergency services to go out and find him, but we were in the middle of a major storm and she couldn’t actually confirm any of what she’d heard and Arrow was in no shape to talk, so they put her off. So, when I showed up, she was thinking of walking out that way herself and seeing if Mark was there, maybe still alive, maybe dying in the weather. It made sense, you know.”

  “It made sense for somebody to go out there,” Gregor agreed. “I’m not so sure that it made sense for a woman to go out there accompanied by a geriatric old fart like you. Is she athletic?”

  “Annabeth? Not really. She looks like—she looks like Judi Dench at fifty. Do you remember Judi Dench at the start of that tele vision series, As Time Goes By? It’s that kind of look. Not blond, you know, but that kind of look.”

  “Hmm,” Gregor said. The only reason he didn’t have to bite his lip until it bled to keep himself from laughing was that he had had many years of training with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He moved a few more of the pictures around. “So,” he said. “You and Annabeth Falmer went out into the storm, and found this truck lying on its side on the beach. Was it easy to find?”

  “Here’s another thing,” Stewart said. He pawed through the pile of photographs himself, found the one he wanted, and handed it across. “Look at this. What do you see?”

  “The most violently purple vehicle that ever moved on wheels. Did you brush the snow off it?”

  “Some. On the windshield.”

  “The snow was coming down at the rate of what exactly?”

  “Two inches an hour.”

  Gregor looked at the picture again. He handed it back. “Do you have another one, close to the same shot but at a wider angle?”

  “I’ve got two more.”

  Stewart found them and handed them over. Gregor looked through them, but he wasn’t finding what he wanted. They’d been shot from too close in. “I don’t suppose that you took pictures of the area around the truck,” he said.

  “No, I didn’t,” Stewart said.

  “Or that you noticed anything?” Gregor prodded. “Say, for instance, footprints?”

  “No,” Stewart said. “The police were going on about footprints too. Arrow’s footprints, I think. They couldn’t find them. Although, you know, I understand that there’s been a lot of technological progress in forensics, but I don’t see that not finding footprints tells you much of anything in a situation like this. The snow was coming down, the wind was fierce, and the ocean was no joke.”

  “Assuming you’ve been accurate,” Gregor said, “and Arrow Normand showed up at Annabeth Falmer’s house about twenty minutes before you did, and it took you a while, say at least two or three minutes, to find the truck—”

  “It was more like ten.”

  “So we’re talking about half an hour. The only way the truck could have been clean of snow on its exposed side and part of the hood would have been if somebody had cleaned it off pretty close to the time that you arrived. There must have been somebody there. Right there. You must have just missed him. Or her.”

  “There,” Stewart said. “You see? And whoever it was who did that couldn’t have been Arrow Normand, because she was passed out at Annabeth’s house. Although not as passed out as she was pretending to be, if you catch my drift. They’re not actresses, these girls, but they do know how to play dead.”

  Gregor looked through the pictures again. Whoever had shot Mark Anderman had put the bullet in the side of his head, and that was not the safest way to shoot someone. It was better than a direct hit to the forehead, but it still risked the chance that the victim would survive.

  “How many shots were there?” Gregor asked. “I can only see one probably.”

  “There was only one.”

  “He was killed with a single gunshot to the head?”

  “That’s what the police say.”

  “What happened to the bullet?”

  “It exited the head on the other side. That’s why there’s so much blood on the window and the passenger-side door.”

  “Did it go through the window?”

  “Yes,” Stewart said. “Clean. When we got to the truck and I started taking pictures, I couldn’t even see something that looked like a crack. Not that the visibility was ideal, mind you. It was the middle of the afternoon, but it was dark.”

  “Did they find the bullet?” Gregor asked.

  “What do you mean, find it?”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “if he was shot in the truck, which he seems to have been, and the bullet went through his head and then through the glass of the window, it has to be somewhere. If he was shot where you found him, it should be somewhere on the ground underneath the truck. I take it the police didn’t find it.”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “Interesting.”

  “So it’s interesting,” Stewart said. “So you’ll do it. You’ll come to Margaret’s Harbor and do something about that bloody cow and the games she’s playing.”

  “I can’t just come to Margaret’s Harbor and interfere with a police investigation,” Gregor said. “Cold cases, yes, those I can take on, but an ongoing police investigation is sacrosanct. I get involved in those only when the police themselves ask me in.”

  Stewart Gordon’s face lit up. “That’s what she said. That’s exactly what she said. I take everything back about how stupid the police up there can be, I mean they all are pretty stupid, except for this one.” He reached under his sweater and came out with an envelope that had started out clean and white and straight but was now a wrinkled, squashed mess. “She gave me this. She said it was what you needed.”

  Gregor took the envelope and opened it. It was not from a policeman. It was from the Margaret’s Harbor Public Prosecutor, and it was about as clear an invitation as it was possible to get. She’d even italicized the word “desperate,” and offered a fee she must have known was twice what he usually charged.

  Gregor looked up at Stewart. Stewart shrugged. “Commander Rees of the Starfleet Cruiser Intrepid. You’ve got no idea how useful that television series has been in my life.”

  Gregor thought he did have an idea of just that, and also of how useless it must have been on occasion, because the small boys had reached the limit of their patience. There was a groundswell of noise from the living room, and then they all came marching down the hall, led by Tommy Mora-danyan Donahue himself.

  Half of them were carrying little plastic action figures that were supposed to look just like Stewart Gordon, and did.

  Chapter Three

  1

  Before All the Trouble Started—as that silly real estate woman put it, as if what they were going through were a neighborhood feud or a bad divorce—Annabeth Falmer had heard a lot of the women on the island complain about the publicity “the Hollywood people” brought with them. She had even sympathized. Margaret’s Harbor was the kind of place, after all, where people who really wanted their privacy went to get it. In the rare cases where one of those people had become too famous, or infamous, to escape the relentless eye of public scrutiny, a silent bargain was struck, without anybody having to say anything, and that person either limited his visits or left the island altogether. This was something else, different not only from old-style infamy but from civilization as An-nabeth understood it. It was as if, during all those years when she had concentrated on her work and her children and the unending bills, something had happened to the world that she had known nothing about.

  Now it was ten o’clock on the morning of January 3rd, and An
nabeth was standing on Main Street in Oscartown, making her way through the camera crews and television vans toward the grocery store. She was feeling a little better. Stewart had called last evening to tell her that Gregor De-markian had agreed to come to the island to help with the investigation of the death of Mark Anderman. He had called her again, an hour ago, to tell her they had left Philadelphia for Boston, by plane, and would be in this afternoon. Anna-beth had very carefully sat down at the computer and looked for everything she could find on Gregor Demarkian, and she had found enough to feel reassured. He seemed like a very sensible man. He also seemed to be a good friend of Father Tibor Kasparian, who had to be the same Father Tibor Kas-parian who wrote about the Nestorians and the end of the Byzantine Empire and the demise of Greek learning in the Eastern churches. Annabeth was fairly certain there couldn’t be two Armenian priests named Tibor Kasparian living in Philadelphia at the same time.

  She had been less reassured by the other searches she had done. She had searched for Arrow Normand and for Mark Anderman, as a matter of course. She had searched for Ken-dra Rhode, who was somebody she had thought she knew something about. Finally, she had given up searching for any one of the young women who were involved in this thing and just let herself be washed by the tidal wave of items spilling across the screen. The items went on endlessly. As far as she could tell, there were dozens of people in places like Los Angeles and New York who were very young, very rich, and very stupid and who spent all their time getting their pictures taken by tabloid photographers. There were also dozens of other people—tabloid photographers and “entertainment reporters”—who spent all their time writing and illustrating articles about the first set of people. But that was not what was bothering her. She had actually known about all that, if only by rumor, and without understanding the breathtaking scope of it. There was something else going on here that made her uneasy at the base of her spine. There was something wrong, really wrong. She kept going around and around it without being able to put a name to it. It was more than outside her experience. It was outside the experience of decent people.

  Her sons hadn’t cared what it was; they had only wanted her to leave the island. John, who was the cardiologist, had been merely frantic. He seemed to think that Margaret’s Harbor had suddenly become a hotbed of crime.

  “You’re not going off to lend your talents to the poor,” he said. “You’re not volunteering to teach history to inner-city high school students. You’re stuck up there with a bunch of psychopaths. And don’t think they’re less dangerous just because they’ve got money.”

  Annabeth had wanted to tell him that she understood they were very dangerous indeed, but she hadn’t been able to find the words for it, because she still hadn’t known (and didn’t know now) how to define the danger. It hadn’t mattered to Robbie, who was the lawyer, because the danger he saw was entirely different.

  “Murder investigations are funny things,” he’d said when he called. “Not funny ha-ha. Funny peculiar. You never know where they’re going to go. I don’t like it that you found the body, and I don’t trust this guy—”

  “Stewart Gordon? You don’t trust Stewart Gordon? You used to idolize Stewart Gordon.”

  “I used to idolize Commander Rees,” Robbie said, “and I’m not twelve years old anymore. I don’t know the district attorney up there, or is it the public prosecutor? It doesn’t matter. I know some good people in Boston. I’ll send you a lawyer.”

  “Robbie, for goodness’ sake. I don’t need a lawyer. Nobody is going to arrest me for anything.”

  “You don’t know that for certain. You can’t. You found the body. The woman they’ve arrested for the murder was in your living room. You’re in this up to your neck. I’ll send you a lawyer. I’ll clear my desk and come up myself in a couple of days.”

  Annabeth had gotten the impression that John was going to “clear his desk” and come up in a couple of days too, but she deliberately did not press him to make that explicit. At least Robbie understood why she couldn’t just up and leave the place right now in the middle of everything. Even Ken-dra Rhode had been told to stick around for a while.

  She looked up and down Main Street. The camera trucks and the people made an almost solid line, so that it was close to impossible to cross from one side of the street to the other without weaving through equipment trucks. Every once in a while she saw a man or woman standing in the middle of the street with a microphone in his hand, filming a “report” that at this point had to be about nothing. There had been news in the first twenty-four hours. Now there was just gossip and innuendo, and lots of people who wanted to see if Marcey Mandret would come spilling out of a bar somewhere, just as drunk as she’d been the night it happened.

  “I wouldn’t hang around in the middle of the road like this if I were you,” a man said.

  Annabeth turned around and saw that she was facing a thin, driven, intelligent man of medium height, incongruously dressed in a very good suit and a Baxter State Parker. He had no hat on his head and no gloves. She thought he must be freezing. He held out his hand to her, formal and polite.

  “I’m Carl Frank,” he said. “We haven’t met. I do public relations for the movie.”

  “Ah,” Annabeth said.

  “And I was telling you the truth. You shouldn’t hang around in the middle of the road like that. They have to eat to live, those people. They don’t know who you are at the moment, but they will, especially with Gordon off somewhere. You’re news, you know. You found the body.”

  “Ah,” Annabeth said again, surprised. “I think that’s amazing.”

  “What?”

  “That you knew who I was.”

  “We’re not all Marcey Mandret,” Carl Frank said. “Some of us actually finished our educations. I went to the University of Texas, myself. I once managed to have American Revolutions assigned to me twice in a single year, once for a history course and once for a course in political science.”

  “I’m surprised they were willing to use a popular book. University departments usually prefer academic scholarship.”

  “They were courses for nonmajors, and I was in marketing. I think the professors were hoping to hell they could get us interested somehow. You got me interested. I’ve become one of those old farts who sit around reenacting the battles of the Civil War.”

  “From the Union side or the Confederate?”

  “I try not to take sides. It’s good practice for my work. If you take sides in the celebrity wars, you get squashed flat by rampaging egos. Except it isn’t really ego. They’ve got no sense of self, most of these people. They’re all flash and dash and surface. Before I got into the work I do, I used to think that was an illusion, that if you got to know them you’d find they were real people inside. And that’s true for some of them, of course. Stewart Gordon, for instance. But for most of them?” Carl shrugged.

  Annabeth looked up and down the street. Nobody was paying any attention to them, but it occurred to her that if this man was right, if she was considered to be “news” when Stewart was away, the quickest way to get their attention would be to stand here talking to a man they probably all knew.

  The same thing seemed to have occurred to Carl Frank. “Well,” he said. “I don’t want to keep you. I’ll get you into a lot of trouble. Do you think you could do something for me?”

  “Oh,” Annabeth said. “Well—”

  “It’s nothing huge. It’s just that I’d appreciate it if you told our Mr. Gordon that I was asking about him, and mentioned that it might not be outside the bounds of reasonableness for me to wonder if he could bother to check in every once in a while. I am still responsible for the publicity on this thing, as long as it lasts, which may not be very long. But until the brass pulls the plug, here we are.”

  “Oh,” Annabeth said. “All right. Yes, of course I could do that for you.”

  “They blame you for it, you know,” Carl said. “When there’s bad publicity on a picture, they blame you
for it. I don’t know how they’re going to find a way to blame me for the fact that Arrow Normand decided to kill her latest toy boy, but they will. You’d better get going. It was very nice talking to you.”

  “It was very nice talking to you, too,” Annabeth said. Then she watched him walk quickly down the street in the direction that led away from the center of town, his shoulders hunched, his hands in his pockets.

  The news crews and equipment vans were still where they had been when she had stopped to talk, and the wind was worse. Annabeth pulled her coat collar high on her neck over the cashmere scarf from Harbor Halls that Robbie had bought her at Thanksgiving and headed for the supermarket again. She supposed that Gregor Demarkian would stay at Stewart’s house, or at the inn if there was any room, which there probably wasn’t. Still, she needed coffee and cream and a lot of other things men liked that she didn’t keep around anymore unless the boys were home, and then the boys would probably be coming too.

  In all the strangeness of this situation, the very most strange was this: the longer it went on, the more it felt as if she were preparing for a family holiday.

  2

  If Linda Beecham had had someone around that she could talk to—if she had had the kind of friends most people have—they would have known that she found everything surrounding the murder of Mark Anderman to be oddly satisfying. It wasn’t the murder itself that made her feel almost triumphant in self-satisfaction. She knew nothing at all about the young man who was dead, but she had no reason to think he was any better or worse than anybody else. She supposed he had family somewhere, and people who cared for him, but maybe not. She hadn’t realized until she was closing in on middle age just how alone most people were. Still, she had no reason to think badly of him, and no reason to wish him dead. She could be sorry enough about that without being a hypocrite.

  What struck Linda Beecham was what had happened because the murder had happened, and what was happening still. It had infected everybody. The movie people were behaving the way they had to behave. They put on brave faces for the cameras and spoke earnestly into microphones about how they were sure Arrow Normand had had nothing at all to do with killing their dear friend, this nice boy who had had everything to live for. Then they went back to their rented houses and made phone calls to California. The film-ing had been stopped dead in its tracks. Linda wasn’t even sure it could resume with Arrow Normand in jail, since she was playing a part in it. That thin, nervous man who did the public relations spent all his time in the bar at the Oscar-town Inn, not always drinking. Linda had always been sure, deep down inside herself, that this movie would never come off. It was just the kind of harebrained silliness Bitsy Win-thorp was prone to. Margaret’s Harbor was never going to be a haven for movie people. The weather was bad, and the natives didn’t like the intrusion.