Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

  “She doesn’t have to be dead. Or locked up.”

  “It would come to the same thing,” Kendra said. “She won’t be able to go clubbing anymore. The clubs won’t let her in. Quite frankly, they were iffy even before this, but she was with us, so they let it pass. She won’t be invited to openings. I can’t imagine what that would be like. It would be like being wiped out, don’t you think?”

  “Wiped out?”

  “As if you didn’t exist anymore,” Kendra said. “You know what I mean. You said it to me. She’d gotten to be a terrible bore before this and now with this it will all be over. And if you get yourself charged with something, it will be over for you, too. Can’t you feel it? This is the first movie you’ve done in two years, and it isn’t exactly the kind of thing that wins an Oscar.”

  “You don’t have a career to worry about,” Marcey said. “And nobody is going to stop you from going clubbing. Your family has money in half the clubs in L.A. There’d be no reason for you not to tell.”

  “Except that I don’t want to,” Kendra said, “and I’m not sure I have anything to say. It’s ridiculous the kind of fuss they make about these things. He wasn’t anybody. Why should anybody care?”

  One of the posters on the wall the fireplace was on seemed to be a painting that was two paintings in one. In the front there were a lot of young men dressed up in old-fashioned clothes, all in bright colors, and with things in their hair. In the back, almost in black and white, there was a man in nothing but a rag around his waist tied against a pillar, and another man was beating him, and other men were around them both, watching. The juxtaposition of the two scenes made Marcey feel a little dizzy.

  Kendra turned around to see what Marcey was looking at, and made a face. “It’s by Piero della Francesca,” she said. “It’s called The Flagellation. I never liked it much. Bondage and discipline were never my thing.”

  Marcey looked back at the picture again. She was fairly sure that it wasn’t about bondage and discipline, but she didn’t know what it was about, and it made her sick to look at it.

  “You just can’t not say anything,” she said. “You just can’t.”

  Kendra Rhode looked into the fireplace and smiled.

  Chapter Four

  1

  It was possible to get from Philadelphia to Boston by Amtrak, going through New York. It was possible to get from Boston to Cape Cod by car, which was helpfully supplied by the Massachusetts State Police, complete with flashing lights and wailing siren.

  “The governor is very concerned that you get all the help you need while you concern yourself in this matter,” the officer who had been sent to drive them told Gregor as he first got into the car—and Gregor was careful not to ask who’d taught him to use exactly that phraseology, or why anybody would think it would be a help to sit in the back of a police car behind the metal mesh caging meant to keep violent prisoners from strangling their captors. It didn’t matter. Gregor had sat in the backs of police cars often in his career. He understood that most policemen didn’t understand how disorienting they were.

  It was when they got to the Cape that Gregor began to feel unhappy, and then he wondered how he couldn’t have guessed. He’d been to Margaret’s Harbor before. He’d been on detail for presidential visits back when he was first in the FBI and the president in the White House had liked to spend his vacations here. Margaret’s Harbor was one of those places, like Mackinac Island in Michigan and Fishers Island in Long Island Sound, where rich people went to pretend they were roughing it, or at least getting back to simplicity. Comfort, convenience, and common sense were dispensable when you had enough money to do what you wanted.

  “You’d have thought they’d have put in a bridge by now,” Gregor said as the police car eased up to the curb near a large wharf with a solid-looking ferryboat docked at the end of it. Gregor got out and looked around. “At least I don’t see any icebergs,” he said.

  “Well, now,” Stewart said. “You can see for yourself. All that bloody stupid nonsense about the Russians. They just wanted a warm-water port, that’s all. There was never any reason for you people to go off half cocked and practically start World War III over that.”

  “You people?”

  “Americans.”

  “Do you talk like this in Margaret’s Harbor?” Gregor asked. “Do they try to lynch you?”

  “I talk like this on CNN,” Stewart said. “And they’re fine with it. Of course, I’ve got a lot of other things to say about America, and a lot of them are complimentary. So that helps. But not about American actresses. With the exception of Meryl Streep. She’s a fine actress, and very professional. There’s Clara. I’ve got a lot to say about Clara, too. I like her.”

  Gregor looked up and saw that there was a very small woman waiting for them on the deck of the ferry. He hadn’t noticed her before because she was, really, very small, and it was easy to lose her among the ropes and life preservers. He followed Stewart onto the wharf itself and tried to make out something about the woman that wasn’t related to size. There wasn’t anything. She was bundled into a gigantic quilted down coat that went down past the boat’s side, so that she looked like an ice blue Popsicle with red sprinkles unaccountably scattered near the front of it.

  Stewart jumped from the wharf into the boat. He would. He always liked to show off just how vigorous he was at whatever age he was claiming these days. Gregor got into the boat the civilized way. The woman in the down coat hurried toward them, visibly shivering.

  “It’s impossible out here,” she said, bringing out a gloved hand for Gregor to shake. The gloves were good leather, and the impression of red sprinkles turned out to be wisps of her hair, which was very red indeed. It was red of a shade nobody on earth had ever had naturally, and it was a good ten years too young for her face.

  “I’m Clara Walsh,” she said, putting her hand back into her pocket. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Demarkian. Mr. Gordon has been talking about you endlessly ever since we first met, but of course I knew you by reputation before that. Couldn’t we all get inside and out of this wind? It’s six degrees today. It’s in the minus numbers with the wind chill.”

  “That’s six degrees Fahrenheit,” Stewart said. “If you people used the metric system like sensible countries, six degrees would at least be above freezing.”

  Gregor let this go. They had had the metric-system-versus-English-system argument before, and Celsius wasn’t even the metric system. The boat turned out to have a large upper deck cabin filled with seats in two sets of orderly rows, like a movie theater. There were also benches along the walls, and a bar that was obviously set up to serve drinks and coffee.

  “So this is the regular ferryboat,” Gregor said. “I’ve never been on it before.”

  “You’ve never been to the Harbor before?” Clara asked.

  “No, I’ve been to the Harbor,” Gregor said, “but it was when I was still with the FBI. We went out in our own launch, I think. If this is the regular ferry, shouldn’t it be ferrying? Won’t people be wanting to go back and forth?”

  “They may want to,” Clara said, “but during the winter, if you don’t have your own boat, you only get to go back and forth at seven in the morning and six at night. That’s as often as the ferry operates. They did schedule extra runs on New Year’s Eve because Kendra Rhode was having a large party, and the Rhode family got in touch with the ferry authority. But as it turned out, the extra runs didn’t run anyway, because of the storm.”

  “I’ve told Gregor about the storm,” Stewart said. He was pacing back and forth, as if he couldn’t stop moving. “Of course, the news about the storm was in all the papers, and on television, but Gregor never notices anything unless he’s looking for it.”

  “You said people have private boats,” Gregor said, thinking that he ought to sit down before the boat started to move. “Did they have private boats that night?”

  “I suppose they could have had,” Clara said, “but I can’t imagine an
ybody being able to manage it and coming out of it alive. Maybe if they were expert boatmen, and I don’t mean ‘expert’ the way people on the Harbor think of themselves as experts. I mean if they were professional fishermen or something, the guys who go out into the Atlantic in all weathers. And even some of them don’t come back when the weather is bad enough, and none of them I know of would have risked his neck just to get from the mainland to the Harbor. Well, I mean, maybe if his wife or his mother were dying and that was the only way he could get to see her. But to take somebody in, to make money on the fare? Not a chance.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. He went to one of the cabin’s small windows to look out. He could see the waters of the Cape again, and some men on the deck doing he didn’t know what. He supposed it was important in getting the boat to go. He hated boats.

  “So,” he said. “We can be fairly sure that the people we know of who were on the island at the time of the murder were the only people on the island at the time of the murder. Nobody could have come in and then gone out by boat.”

  “No,” Clara Walsh said. She had thrown back the hood of her dark coat. Her hair was as red as Rudolph’s nose, and she had to be over fifty. “But you have to understand something. We don’t think we’ve got the wrong person. I’ve looked at the evidence. The local police have looked at the evidence. The state police have looked at the evidence. We’ve thrown jurisdiction to the winds and let everybody and his brother see the evidence. And we’ve all come to pretty much the same conclusion. Arrow Normand shot Mark Anderman in the head. We don’t know why. We do know she did it.”

  “So why am I here?” Gregor asked.

  Stewart cleared his throat. “Ah,” he said.

  Clara Walsh ignored him. “Mr. Gordon made a fuss. A big one. And when we sat down and thought about it, we decided he was actually making a certain amount of sense. Not sense in relation to the solution of the crime. On that one, he’s talking through his hat. But the simple fact is that we have to be careful here. Everybody involved here is either a high-profile personality or a person of serious influ-ence, and I do mean everybody. It’s bad enough that we’re dealing with teen queen actresses and movie people, and the Harbor is now inundated with media. We’ve even got the BBC camped out on Oscartown’s main street.”

  “And Al Jazeera,” Stewart said blandly. “Great story about the decadence of the West with a great excuse to run pictures of girls in their underwear.”

  “Yes,” Clara said. “The fact is that we’re under a microscope, and we don’t want to be perceived as being amateurish, or stupid, or hasty. The local police have cause to worry about being charged with inexperience. I looked it up. The last murder on the Harbor was in 1932, and it didn’t require much of an investigation. There used to be lobstermen on the island. They couldn’t afford to live there now. Anyway, one of them killed his wife’s lover with a hatchet in full view of half a dozen people on the very dock we’re going to now. So you see, bringing in somebody who does know something about investigating a murder, and especially someone who has investigated murders with high-profile people involved in them, made a good deal of sense on a number of accounts. And, of course, we have to worry about the lawyers.”

  “The lawyers?” Gregor said.

  Clara Walsh shrugged. “It’s every prosecutor’s nightmare, another O. J. Simpson case. This young woman is not bright, but the people around her are bright, and she’s got the money to hire the best legal representation out there. And she will. She’s in the process of doing it as we speak. We need somebody who can think the way those lawyers think. I know a number of people who say that somebody is you.”

  The boat lurched underneath them. Clara Walsh and Stewart Gordon didn’t seem to notice. Gregor sat down abruptly sideways on the nearest chair.

  “So,” Stewart said. “Don’t listen to her. I’ve told you why I think Arrow Normand couldn’t possibly have done it. And that’s the way to go about it, isn’t it, if you want to help the prosecution? Do your damnedest to prove the case wrong, and then if you can’t, you know they’re on solid ground.”

  Gregor sighed. “Stewart said you’d managed to keep Arrow Normand in jail. Have you still?”

  “Yes,” Clara Walsh said. The boat was lurching some more. “For the moment, we’ve been able to get away with a judge who doesn’t want to grant bail. And he really doesn’t. He doesn’t trust those people, and I don’t blame him. But we’re at the lawyers again. Once her criminal team gets here, that won’t last too long. They’ll have her out sooner rather than later. You have no idea how I miss the days when we could just say that we don’t grant bail in murder cases and let it go at that.”

  “Can you keep her on the island?” Gregor asked.

  “Probably not,” Clara said, “although we had thought of that, and we’re going to try. For our purposes, though, it’s not enough just to keep her on the island. This is a complicated case in some ways, if not in others. For one thing, we’ve got no idea at all why she’d want to kill this man. We’ve gone through all the usual explanations. There’s no sign she was paying him blackmail, and whatever would he blackmail her about? All her dirty laundry is public anyway. She practically throws it onto the world stage to be photographed. There’s no indication from anybody who knew them that he was about to leave her, and why would he? She was the one with the money and the fame and the things a partner wants to hang on to, and they hadn’t been seeing each other long enough to make a Grand Passion credible. Sex and money, lust and lucre. All the usual explanations fall flat.”

  “So why be so sure she committed the murder?” Gregor asked.

  “Well,” Clara said, “let’s see. First, she had his blood in her hair. A lot of it. Her hair was soaked with it. Then, he died in the truck—it was a purple pickup truck, did Mr. Gordon tell you that?—and her fingerprints were all over it, and so were his.”

  “Everybody’s fingerprints were all over it,” Stewart said. “So were mine. We’d all been in that truck.”

  “Her fingerprints were in the blood in the truck,” Clara said. “Which is somewhat more incriminating. Then there’s the way she’s been behaving since, which has been, let’s say, less than cooperative.”

  “Has she offered an explanation for any of it?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Clara Walsh said. “It seems that no matter how stupid she is, she’s seen enough true-crime documentaries to know she doesn’t have to talk to the police without a lawyer present, and as soon as the lawyer showed up, she refused to say anything at all. And this wasn’t a good lawyer. It was one of the entertainment lawyers the movie people have on tap for things like disputes over permits. When we try to ask her questions, all Arrow Normand says is ‘I don’t have to talk to you,’ and then she completely shuts up. She’s very good at shutting up.”

  Gregor thought about this. “What about the rest of them?” he asked finally. “You must have talked to other people, even other people who are part of this movie. Would they talk to you? At all?”

  Clara Walsh shrugged. “Marcey Mandret ran off at the mouth for a bit, but none of it made any sense. I’ve seen the tapes. I think she was high as a kite at the time. We talked to Kendra Rhode. She didn’t say much of anything and looked bored. We talked to Mr. Gordon here, and to Dr. Falmer, because Arrow Normand went to her house. We talked to some people on the set, including the guy who does public relations for the movie. He’s the one I feel sorry for. Anyway, nobody has said much of anything. And it was the day of the storm. Nobody was doing much of anything. It was hard to get around.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  The boat made a sudden, dramatic lurch and then seemed to glide, so slowly Gregor thought he could have walked faster.

  Clara Walsh came to the windows and looked out. “Oh, good,” she said. “We’re on the water.”

  2

  Gregor would have said they’d been on the water the whole time, but he knew what Clara Walsh meant, and he distrusted himself when he b
egan to be fussy over trivialities. Still, he found himself thinking that television had done a great disservice to real detectives in real police departments all across America. Television detectives were always strong and resolute and dedicated and clearsighted. When they weren’t, there was always some good reason why they were having a bad day, or something particularly spectacular to compensate. That was why Gregor truly hated the show Monk, even though he was forced to sit through it several times a week, since Tibor and Bennis and Donna loved it. He especially didn’t like it because they kept asking him whether it was anything at all like realhomicide detective work in a real police department, and of course it was nothing like it at all.

  It was not a long passage from the mainland of Cape Cod to Margaret’s Harbor. Gregor could see the shore of the island almost as soon as they set off, and the closer they got the clearer it was that their dock would be deserted when they reached it. Gregor found this very interesting, in a case in which everybody went out of his way to tell him just how much press there would be watching his every move. Apparently, they weren’t watching it yet. He paced back and forth in front of the line of windows. He wondered what people usually used the ferry for, when it was running on full schedule.

  “It can’t be a commuter route,” he said.

  Stewart Gordon and Clara Walsh looked up. They had been talking about something else near the bar. They hadn’t expected him to speak.

  “It can’t be a commuter route,” Gregor said again. “This ferry, I mean. If it were a commuter route, it would have to be operating pretty close to full schedule even in the winter.”

  “Oh,” Clara said. “Well, it is a commuter route in the summer, when there are a lot of people on the island. There’s no point in making it a commuter route at this time of year, though, because nobody lives on Margaret’s Harbor year-round and commutes to work in the city.”

  “Why not?” Gregor asked.

  “It’s too long a way, I suppose,” Clara said. “It’s about ten to twelve minutes on the ferry to the mainland, and then it’s another hour into Boston at least, even with perfect traffic conditions, and traffic conditions are seldom perfect in Boston. Add that to the increased possibility of bad weather conditions during the winter and early spring, and I suppose most people find the idea just too much trouble. They come up for the summer though, and commute from the Harbor then.”