Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

  If it had been just the movie people, though, Linda wouldn’t have been feeling half as smug. The police also were acting just the way she’d expected them to, and so was the new public prosecutor, Clara Walsh. There was something about the sight of multitudes of television cameras that made everybody crazy. These days, Main Street in Oscar-town was packed with them, and so were some of the side streets. There were usually cameras on the beach now, too. The island police were all walking very much more upright than they usually did. The state police were putting on their best New Jersey swagger. Clara Walsh spent her time giving press conferences from her office or the Oscartown Inn, saying not much of anything and looking absolutely ridiculous. Somebody ought to tell that woman that she was much too short to wear magenta suits.

  “It’s television,” Linda said. “They all want to be on tele-vision. Everybody wants to be on television. It’s as if they don’t think they exist if they aren’t on television.”

  Across the room, Jack Bullard grunted. He had the tele-vision on, the small one Linda kept in her office for breaking news. It was tuned to a Clara Walsh press conference.

  “So,” he said. “Do you know anything about this guy they’re bringing in? This Gregor Demarkian?”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Linda said. “He’s been on some of those true-crime shows. American Justice. City Confiden-tial. He was in the papers a few months ago for something down in Philadelphia.”

  “Why would Clara Walsh want to bring in a private detective? Why would the police want to let her?”

  Linda snorted. “For God’s sake,” she said. “It’s all about the publicity. This has ceased to be a crime investigation. It’s ceased to be about anything except the media coverage. Why not bring in a celebrity detective? It guarantees you more print. It guarantees you more airtime. And you look like you’re doing something, when you’re not.”

  “I wouldn’t think Clara Walsh would want any more media than she’s already got,” Jack said. “I mean, look at it around here lately. They’re everywhere. And they’re not all Walter Cronkite, either.”

  “I think Walter Cronkite is dead.”

  “I don’t, but what does it matter?” Jack said. “You must see what I mean. This is completely insane as it is. There are news reports three or four times a day. Yesterday I heard from Kevin Kelly at the morgue, and he said they’ve had to post guards at the laundry chutes because he’s got photographers trying to get in that way. And other ways.”

  “And these are the people you wanted us to hook up with,” Linda said. “I told you what they were like.”

  “All I wanted to do was sell a few pictures at a price that could help the paper out and help me out in the meantime,” Jack said. “I was just trying to cut you in on what I was going to do anyway.”

  “And did you? Sell some of those photographs?”

  “One or two. But what about the Home News? This is a murder. You can’t say it’s not really news. We come out in two days. We are going to cover this, right?”

  “I suppose we’re going to have to, if we don’t want to look like idiots,” Linda said. “Don’t worry. I put Dina Cole-man on it. We’ll give it the entire page above the fold and say all the usual things. Not that there’s anything much to say that hasn’t been said forty times already. We’ll use your picture of the ambulance taking the body away, unless you’ve sold that already to somebody else.”

  “I’ve been waiting very patiently for you.”

  “Thank you, I think. You are going to sell some of those, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely,” Jack said. “I’ll let you pick what you want, and then I’m going to sell the rest to the highest bidder. I was in the right place at the right time, and I was the only one there. I’m the only one with the stills and the only one with the footage.”

  “You took video?”

  “For a while. When I got bored. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world to stand out in the middle of a nor’easter waiting for the EMTs to get over having to handle a bloody corpse. I was freezing my ass off and thinking that this is the most remarkable place. Most EMTs are used to handling bloody corpses.”

  “I don’t think it was the blood,” Linda said. “We have our share of traffic fatalities.”

  “Well, whatever. They were lame. And so were the local police on the scene, from what I’ve heard. They weren’t used to handling a homicide. They screwed things up.”

  “That’s probably just Clara Walsh’s office talking,” Linda said.

  Jack sighed. “It’s everybody talking,” he said. “The first really significant thing that’s happened on Margaret’s Harbor in forty years, and we’re all acting like a bunch of buffoons. They say the police told Kendra Rhode she’d have to stay put for the rest of the week. Do you think she’ll listen?”

  “I don’t think it matters what she does,” Linda said.

  Jack turned off the television and stood up. “Maybe it doesn’t,” he said. “But it would be good, this setup, if I wanted to write a Columbo episode. It’s got a kind of fairytale quality to it. Maybe everything on Margaret’s Harbor does. You’re wrong not to recognize the mystique of it. Everybody else does.”

  “It’s not mystique,” Linda said drily, “it’s stupefaction. I don’t care how much money you have. How big an idiot do you have to be to pay sixty-five dollars for a polo shirt?”

  “It’s not about the money,” Jack said.

  For a moment, Linda felt ashamed of herself. Jack was young. He still believed in possibility, and hope, and the future. He still thought they were all in control of their own destinies. She always made him depressed.

  “Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve lived here too long. I don’t have the—I don’t know what to call it. The thing you all have. I don’t see the magic in it.”

  “It’s not that,” Jack said. He had gone to the table near the window and started to pack up his professional gear, the cameras, the lenses, the film, everything in black leather carrying cases that had probably been as ridiculously priced as those polo shirts. Every once in a while he turned his head and looked out the big plate glass window onto Main Street. “You’d think you could do something with this,” he said. “Here they are, all these people that you never have any access to at all. Important people. People who report the real news.”

  “In the real world, there really is real news,” Linda said. “But no matter what you think, stories about Arrow Nor-mand and Marcey Mandret and Kendra Rhode going to parties and getting drunk and disorderly aren’t real news.”

  “These people report on other things,” Jack said. “They go to wars. They cover peace accords. They do special reports on epidemics. And they’re here. Where I can get to them. You’d think I’d be able to make something of that.”

  “Maybe you will,” Linda said. “Maybe you’ll get to them with all those photographs you took. Maybe you’ll get offered a job that will take you out of here, if that’s what you want.”

  “I think that when this is all over, I’m just going to go,” Jack said. “It’s not that I don’t like you. I do like you. It’s just that—I could sit here forever. I could still be here when I’m fifty. And I really don’t want to be.”

  Linda hadn’t wanted to be either, but here she was, and here she was going to stay. She looked down at her desk and saw the spreadsheets from the last quarter of last year, freshly arrived. She had a new person in accounting who understood computers and liked to use them. She knew what it was to be so desperate to get out of here that you would do anything—swallow razor blades, expose yourself in Times Square—for a ticket to somewhere else, to somewhere real. She knew what it was to feel that Margaret’s Harbor wasn’t real.

  “Hey,” she said. “Here’s the thing. I’ll take one picture of the crime scene, and one each of Arrow Normand and Mark Anderman, if you’ve got them, and you can sell the rest for yourself. Go show what you’ve got to CBS and see if you can get them to take you seriously.”
r />   “Thanks. Thank you very much.”

  “It’s nothing,” Linda said.

  It really was nothing, but Linda understood that it would be something to Jack. He had been distracted ever since the murder happened, as if Mark Anderman’s bloody wound had really driven home the fact that he wasn’t getting any younger, and he wasn’t where he wanted to be. He would go on being distracted until he’d had a chance to give it a shot.

  Linda turned back to her spreadsheets and found herself hoping that he would be luckier than she had been, that he would not end up still on the Harbor thirty years from now, with nothing to take comfort in but the uncompromising solidity of his isolation.

  3

  Marcey Mandret believed the world was an equitable place—or would have, if she’d known what the word “equitable” meant. The way she put it inside her own head was to say the world was “fair,” and then she tried very hard not to spell out the ways in which it was that. Here was the problem, the one she could never get out from under, no matter what she did: if the world was fair, then she deserved to have more money than other people, and more publicity; but if the world was fair, and she didn’t deserve to have these things, then she would eventually lose them. It went around and around and around. If the world was fair, she couldn’t have gotten these things if she didn’t deserve them. On the other hand, fair or not, it was possible she had cheated, maybe without meaning to, and then she would be—something. She was having that thing in her stomach again. People thought she was anorexic or bulimic, but she didn’t have to be. She only had to let her stomach get like this, knotted up, and in pain, so that it felt as if she had a knife sticking into her intestines. It was impossible to eat, and if she did try to eat anything, she threw it up. She even threw up some of what she drank.

  At the moment, she was drinking tea, although she hated it. She couldn’t drink alcohol with the way things were right now, and she couldn’t drink coffee, either, because coffee made her jumpy. It was very important that she not get jumpy at this stage of the game. It was like an obstacle course with live land mines. She had to get from here to the other side without getting hurt. It was almost impossible.

  Kendra Rhode did not look like she was jumpy. She looked bored. Marcey was in awe of Kendra Rhode. She never had to wonder for a moment if she deserved the things she had. She was born with them. She never had to worry that she would lose everything she’d worked for. She didn’t work for anything, and she couldn’t lose it, because she had family lawyers and family bankers and family accountants making sure it was safe, and she would inherit even more when her parents died.

  Kendra was sitting in the big wingback chair next to the fireplace, the only chair in this rental that wasn’t very low to the ground. Marcey and Arrow used to joke that they’d rented the place from an aging hippie. There were even beanbag chairs in some places. Kendra would never sit in a beanbag chair. Marcey thought about Arrow and took a long drink of tea. It didn’t help a bit.

  “So,” she said, thinking that they had to talk about something. You couldn’t sit for hours in the same room with a person and not say anything. Except that Kendra could sit like that. Marcey tried again. “So,” she said. “I’m getting a little crazy. They keep saying we shouldn’t go out and get into the papers with, you know, all that other thing going on.”

  “Do they have the death penalty in Massachusetts?” Ken-dra asked.

  Marcey blinked. This was something that hadn’t occurred to her. She usually didn’t think much of what was going to happen in the future, even if the future was only a year or two. She tried to think it through.

  “Well,” she said, “California has the death penalty, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose,” Kendra said.

  “Well,” Marcey said again, “California has the death penalty, and being for the death penalty isn’t hip, and California is hipper than Massachusetts. So if California has the death penalty, Massachusetts must have it too.”

  Kendra got that little smile on her face that Marcey had always laughed at when it was aimed at other people. When Kendra aimed it at her, it wasn’t funny at all. “Think of that,” Kendra said. “Using that logic, since California is the hippest state in the Union, every state must have the death penalty. But they don’t. Only thirty-eight states have the death penalty.”

  “That leaves how many without it?”

  “Twelve,” Kendra said. The smile was back.

  Marcey made herself take a deep, long, endless breath. It wasn’t as if she’d dropped out of high school to hang around on street corners. She’d been working, and working very hard. She couldn’t help it if she had missed some of the things other people might have gotten by sitting in classrooms. Arrow hadn’t graduated from high school either, and neither had Kendra. It was just that Kendra didn’t seem to have missed as much.

  “If they have the death penalty in Massachusetts, I wonder what kind it is,” Kendra said. “It’s probably lethal injection. Most places have lethal injection now. It’s too bad. I think it would be really interesting to watch somebody die in the electric chair.”

  “I don’t think you can watch,” Marcey said carefully. “I think they do it in private. At least, I’ve never seen pictures, and I think I would have.”

  “They don’t let just anybody watch,” Kendra said. “And they don’t let cameras in. They just allow a few people in a kind of audience, like a theater. I’ve seen it in movies. They allow the victim’s family if they want to come. And the person being executed gets to invite witnesses. Do you think Arrow would do that, if they decided to execute her? Do you think she’d invite us as witnesses?”

  Marcey was finding it impossible to take any more deep breaths. She was finding it close to impossible to take any breaths at all. “You can’t really think they’re going to execute Arrow Normand,” she said. “How can you think that? She didn’t kill that idiot.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Marcey said. “And you are too. You know she couldn’t have been the one who shot Mark. You know it.”

  “I don’t know anything,” Kendra said. “And besides, I’ve got a terrible memory. I can barely remember where I put my car keys.”

  This room was a very odd place. Marcey didn’t think she had ever really looked at it before. You didn’t look at rentals, really, unless there was something spectacular about them. This place was just “nice.” It was the best they could get, because the people who had the spectacular houses on Margaret’s Harbor didn’t rent them. Kendra should have had them to stay at the Point, but she hadn’t.

  This room had a lot of framed posters on the walls. The posters were all of old paintings, the kind they sometimes used to frontpiece a movie or do the cover on the kind of book she always passed by without checking into. Marcey didn’t know if the people who owned this house had put up posters because they couldn’t afford real paintings, or if they just didn’t like real paintings. These were not the kinds of paintings she would have wanted in her house in any case. They showed things that were ugly, like people dying.

  Marcey bit her lip and then instantly stuck out her tongue to wet it. She tried another deep breath. She was making herself dizzy.

  “You can’t do this,” she said finally. “This isn’t like leaving her passed out in a bar somewhere and then laughing at the pictures afterward. They’ve arrested her. She’s in jail. The judge wouldn’t even set bail.”

  “I know. That happens in murder cases,” Kendra said. “But they’ll set bail eventually. Just watch. They can’t keep somebody that famous in jail when she hasn’t been convicted yet. It was the same with Robert Blake and O.J.”

  “This isn’t O.J.”

  “It’s pretty close,” Kendra said. “It’s close to Robert Blake, too. Washed-up has-been who used to be famous goes on trial for murder. They don’t convict those people. Do you even remember why anybody would think Robert Blake was a celebrity? Had you ever heard of him?”

  �
�He was in In Cold Blood,” Marcey said automatically. “The first one, from the 1960s. It was in black and white. Kendra, seriously. She’s in jail. And she didn’t kill anybody. And you know it. You were there.”

  “Was I?”

  “Yes, you were. I saw you there. I was there.”

  “You haven’t said anything about it,” Kendra said.

  “No, I haven’t said, because—because you said not to. We talked about it. You said that nothing would happen, and it would only be the wrong kind of publicity. And that’s true. It is the wrong kind of publicity. But we can’t just not say anything if Arrow is going to go to jail unless we tell.”

  “I can,” Kendra said. “Besides, what would you say when they wanted to know why you hadn’t said anything up to now? You’d end up sounding like an idiot, and then they could charge you with one of those things. Accessory before the fact. Accessory after the fact. I don’t know. There are things.”

  “Things as bad as sending Arrow to the electric chair?”

  “She won’t have a career after this, you know,” Kendra said. “She barely had one before it. She’d been going completely to hell, and it was getting so boring I could barely stand it. But after this, she’ll be nowhere.”