Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

  “But there are people who live full-time on the Harbor,” Gregor said.

  “Of course there are,” Clara said.

  “What do they do to make a living? The Harbor doesn’t have industry, from what I understand. There’s no manufacturing, or anything like that.”

  “No,” Clara said. “Most of the people who live on the island work for the tourist trade. They run hotels or bed-and-breakfasts, they have lawn services and cleaning services, that kind of thing. And a lot of that runs year-round. You need your house looked after if you’re not going to be in it for several months at a time.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “But there must be other things, things that people would do on the island even if no tourists had ever appeared. There were people on the island before there were tourists, weren’t there?”

  “There were people on the island all the way back to the American Revolutionary War, and before,” Clara said. “Fishermen, mostly. There are still a fair number of fisher-men. There were farmers here once, but I don’t think that there are any real working farms here anymore. We’ve got a couple of Potemkin farms, if you get my drift, the sort of thing rich men like to buy and have somebody else run for them, but not anything a real farmer could make a living at. And there are stores, of course, like groceries, that operate all year round. Body shops. But everybody makes more money when the tourists are here.”

  Gregor looked out at the shore again. There really wasn’t anybody there. “So,” he said, “everybody is better off when there are tourists on the island, and in the winter there aren’t any tourists on the island, or not many. So this was a good thing, the movie coming to Margaret’s Harbor. It meant more people on the island in the winter, and that meant more money for everybody concerned.”

  “Hah,” Stewart Gordon said. “You’ve got to ask yourself whether it was enough money for the trouble. It wouldn’t have been enough money for my trouble.”

  Clara Walsh ignored him. “The movie is fairly contained,” she said. “Mostly, it was good business for the people in Oscartown, but not really elsewhere on the island. Everybody seems to have packed right into Oscartown and just stayed put most of the time, except for the drinking.”

  “They drink like fish, these girls,” Stewart Gordon said, “except why we should say that, I don’t know. I mean, fish don’t drink, do they? But they do. Marcey and Arrow and the rest of them. There are road houses all over the place up here, and they’ve hit most of them.”

  “They have been seen in quite a few,” Clara said. “We do have local police, and by and large they have not been happy. You always get a lot of drunk driving in a resort area, but in the past few months it’s been excessive.”

  “And ask yourself why it’s been excessive,” Stewart Gordon said. “Kendra Rhode doesn’t drink. Well, she does, but barely. I’ve never seen her drunk, or high, to the point where it could impair her driving, and she’s been on these road trips more than once, and she’s never the designated driver. Never.”

  “Kendra Rhode has been up here for the entire time the movie has been here?” Gregor asked. “That’s been—how long?”

  “About six weeks,” Clara Walsh said. “And no, she hasn’t been. She’s been in and out. They’ve all been in and out, except for some of the technical people, and the director, and people like that. Most of them have been here for the last couple of weeks, though. I think it depends on when they’re needed for filming.”

  “I’ve been here the whole time,” Stewart Gordon said. “Didn’t make any sense to me to go running off to wherever the hell just because they didn’t need me for a couple of days.”

  “This Mark Anderman, the man who died,” Gregor said. “Was he here the whole time?”

  “Yes,” Stewart Gordon said.

  “I think so,” Clara Walsh said. “He was definitely one of the technical people. Unlike Mr. Gordon here, I’d have to check.”

  “Thank you,” Gregor said. “But I’m still not getting a picture here. For the past six weeks or so, the technical people have been here, some of the actors have been here, and the local people have been here. The local people include fishermen, and people who run grocery stores and that kind of thing—what about nonessential retail? Clothing stores, that kind of thing.”

  “Most of it’s shut up for the winter,” Clara said. “There are several stores here that have winter branches in Boca Raton and Palm Beach. The owners do the season here, then pack up and open down there.”

  “You say there’s a lot of national press here. What about local press? Are there local newspapers on Margaret’s Harbor? A local television station?”

  “The television stations are out of Boston,” Clara said,“but there is a local newspaper. It’s called the Home News. It comes out weekly.”

  “And a wonderful paper it is, too,” Stewart said. “Down-to-earth. Sensible. Intelligent.”

  “Printing almost nothing about the movie people,” Clara Walsh said.

  “Printing absolutely nothing,” Stewart said. “At least as long as I’ve been reading it. Oh, except for traffic advice. Don’t use Main Street Tuesday morning, it’s going to be closed for filming.”

  “You’d have to know Linda Beecham,” Clara said, “which almost nobody does. We went to high school together, but I think that’s the last time I ever really had a chance to talk to her. She’s not—I don’t know how to put it. Social. And, of course, she’s had a very hard life. But she either isn’t interested in the movie people, or positively dislikes them, because she’s run nothing at all on them. Jack Bullard is ready to kill her.”

  “Who’s Jack Bullard?”

  “Her one full-time reporter,” Clara said. “She’s also got one technical person, and that’s it. It’s not a big project. Jack’s young, and he’s her photographer as well as her reporter, and he’s taken plenty of photographs of the movie people and sold several of them to the tabloids, which is good for him. But I’ve talked to him. He tries every time to get her to run them in the Home News first, and she isn’t having any.”

  “Does the Home News make money?” Gregor asked.

  “It makes enough to do a little more than break even,” Clara said, “but it doesn’t have to make a mint. Linda actually managed to get lucky about ten years ago or so and hit a small jackpot in the Big Bucks game. I don’t think it came to more than five million or so after taxes, but that’s not negligible, and in Linda’s case it made all the difference in the world. Like I said, she’s had a hard life.”

  “From a poor family?” Gregor asked.

  “From a middle-class family,” Clara said, “but then there were terrible things that happened. Her mother and her sister both died of some kind of god-awful cancer that took forever to take its course, and Linda had to leave school to take care of them. Then, when that was over, Linda was stuck with the bills. It just sort of went on and on for decades, and then one morning there was this. The next thing we knew, she’d bought the Home News, and she’s been there ever since.”

  “Interesting,” Gregor said. “You’d think she’d be interested in maximizing her income. There’s money to be made covering the film people, isn’t there?”

  “A ton of it,” Stewart Gordon said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with Americans, and it isn’t just Americans. Think of Diana Spencer. People lose their minds. They can’t get enough of it. They can’t get enough of this lot, and that’s worse than mystifying.”

  “You’d have to know Linda,” Clara Walsh said again. “She’s a very unusual person. She doesn’t have enthusiasms, and she doesn’t get excited about things. She’d be a good person to talk to, though. She might not have run any stories about the film people, but I’ll guarantee she knew all about them, and more than anybody else. Linda’s like that. And what she doesn’t know, Jack probably will.”

  “I haven’t met her,” Stewart said. “At least, not that I know of.”

  “Mr. Gordon likes to run around Oscartown doing his own shopping,”
Clara Walsh said. “He startles the hell out of practically everybody. But he’s very polite. If they say hello, he always says hello back.”

  “Well, it’s nonsense, isn’t it?” Stewart said. “The way these people behave. Entourages. Bodyguards. They create their own problems, don’t they? I’ve never in my life had to worry about being hounded by paparazzi, and do you know why? Because I don’t live like a Latin American dictator who’s made too many enemies. Never mind that it’s expensive, living the way they do. Forty thousand dollars a night for a hotel room, for God’s sake. And then who knows how much more for the entire crew she had with her.”

  “What?” Gregor asked.

  “That’s the answer to Mr. Demarkian’s question,” Clara Walsh said. “No, Mark Anderman wasn’t on the island without a break during the entire time of the filming. About three weeks ago, he went off with Arrow Normand and the entire rest of that group to Las Vegas for the weekend, and they rented something called the Hugh Hefner Suite at the Palms Hotel. I’ve never been to Las Vegas, and I don’t have any idea what this means, but it was on CNN. They were gone for the weekend and came back.”

  “A nine-thousand-square-foot hotel suite,” Stewart Gordon said. “Think about it. The house I grew up in wasn’t a third that size. I bet the house you were brought up in wasn’t either.”

  “I was brought up in an apartment,” Gregor said. “You said they had people with them?”

  “Oh, yes,” Clara said. “There was the whole crew, really. Kendra Rhode and that odious boy who doesn’t seem to do anything but be vulgar. Marcey Mandret. Another film crew person, Steve something—I can’t remember how this went. I think Arrow Normand went out with Steve whoever he was, but came back with Mark Anderman. They met some people from Los Angeles, I think. It really was on CNN. We can look it up on the Internet if you’re interested.”

  Gregor didn’t know if he was interested or not, but the dock was coming up fast, and they could all talk about it later. They were approaching land, and out there, waiting for them, was—nothing at all. Gregor had the feeling that he had stepped into the kind of movie he would have refused to watch if Bennis had wanted to stay up late to do it.

  Chapter Five

  1

  Carl Frank understood the attractions of café society. He had understood them as a child, when he had watched his mother sitting over the social pages morning after morning in their kitchen in Saddle Ridge, New Jersey. He had understood them in college, when it seemed as if every rich girl with a recognizable Old Money name had wanted nothing more than to see a photo spread of herself in Life, milking cows on a commune in California. He even understood them now, although, being older, his understanding was more multifaceted. The advertising agencies only cared about reaching a great honking chunk of the eighteen-to-thirty-five year-old demographic, and the closer the skew was to the eighteen, the better. It was one of the things that left him faintly baffled. When he was eighteen, nobody he knew would have admitted to a fascination with society. Most of them wouldn’t even admit to a fascination with being part of the popular crowd in high school. Now it was as if the whole world were a high school, the kind of high school where lots of rich kids dominated the sports teams and the cheerleading squad, and the smart kids went unnoticed by anybody at all.

  Until they founded Microsoft and become the richest people on the planet, Carl thought—and then brushed that away. Nobody ever saw Bill Gates on the red carpet, except maybe at the White House, and probably not even then. The White House probably didn’t even have a red carpet. His mind had turned into some kind of mush. He was sweaty, in spite of the cold, and he was frustrated as hell.

  “No,” he had told Michael Bardman earlier, using every ounce of sanity he had not to hang up the phone in the idiot’s ear, “it is not possible to spin a murder in a way that will have positive results for the movie, assuming there ever is a movie, since Arrow Normand is unavailable to work at the moment. And maybe, for a good long time.”

  This was not entirely fair. From what Carl understood about celebrity murder cases, he was fairly sure that some judge somewhere would make it possible for Arrow to finish her work on the movie, if only so that she could make enough money to pay her legal bills. Even so, the whole thing was a mess, and it didn’t look likely to clean up anytime soon. What was worse, he was having an unusually difficult time getting information. He had approached Annabeth Falmer this morning, thinking that she would be the best bet. Arrow Normand had been in her house on the afternoon in question, after all, and Marcey Mandret had too, and so had Stewart Gordon. It was practically a little Court TV true-crime documentary right there on her living room rug. At the last minute, he hadn’t been able to go through with any of the things he had been thinking of. Dr. Falmer was just as clueless as he’d hoped she would be, but it wasn’t the right kind of clueless. She wasn’t a snob, intellectual or social. She wasn’t a fool, or an airhead like Marcey and Arrow. She was just a pleasant, well-meaning, quietly dressed woman who probably didn’t have the faintest idea what she’d gotten herself into. Carl Frank hadn’t wanted to be the one to let her in on the secret.

  The problem was, there weren’t a whole lot of sources of information on Margaret’s Harbor. The local police weren’t talking to him, and the state police weren’t talking to him either. Eventually, down the line somewhere, some secretary in a back office would pick up the phone and spill to the nearest reporter, just to make herself feel important, but it hadn’t gotten to that point yet. The police had called in this outside consultant, this Gregor Demarkian, and that was all they would tell anybody for the time being. Carl had looked up Gregor Demarkian on the Internet, and been suitably impressed. God only knew what this guy charged. Considering his reputation, it was probably a lot. whatever it was, he wouldn’t be talking to Carl Frank, unless it was to get information instead of give it.

  Of course, there were all those professional sources of information, meaning the press. Carl was no more of a snob than Annabeth Falmer was. He didn’t turn up his nose at the paparazzi. They often knew things nobody else did, because they were practically as good as spies. Hell, the best of them, if they didn’t have cameras in their hands, would have been charged as stalkers. They were stalkers. They went everywhere, and they thought nothing of breaking into somebody’s house or climbing a tree outside a bedroom window to get a few money shots of the stuff going on inside. Practically the first thing Carl did when he took over publicity for a movie was to sit down with the principal actors and try to get them to deal with the reality of the attention they were getting. He almost never succeeded. There was something about actors—about “celebrities” of every stripe—that needed to believe that the paparazzi would never turn on them, that needed to forget that the point was not to make them famous but to make them pay.

  “Bad news sells newspapers,” he would tell them. He would look straight into their eyes and know they weren’t hearing a word he was saying. He would try anyway. “From their point of view,” he would say, “watching you screw up, watching you crash and burn and destroy yourself, is by far the better story. There are more people out there who are willing to pay to see that than are willing to pay to see you succeed. Hell, practically nobody is willing to pay to see you succeed.”

  Right now, of course, they would pay for anything, because there was nothing. He had managed to get Marcey out of the public eye for the next half second, and Arrow was where they couldn’t get to her. But the paparazzi didn’t have access to the local police or the state police or that prosecutor, Clara Walsh, and neither did the “legitimate” reporters now camped out on Main Street in Oscartown. He could see ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox from the window of this silly upscale diner. They would hang around here until it was time for the press conference Clara Walsh had promised to give as soon as Gregor Demarkian arrived. Then they would cover that. Then they would come back here. There was nothing to do in Oscartown in the winter. There was barely anything to do in Oscartown in the s
ummer, but then, at least, the local celebrities would be more to the liking of the national press. Katie Couric wasn’t impressed with Arrow Normand. She was impressed with nearly any Kennedy.

  The young woman who had taken his order for coffee had come back with his cup. She put it down on the table just as the front door opened and the man Carl was sure he was supposed to meet came in from outside. The blast of cold that came in with him made Carl’s spine creak. The storm had been over for days, but it often felt as if it were still with them. The weather in California got better after storms. Out here, it just seemed to get worse.

  The man was very young, so young Carl wondered for a moment if he was even of legal age. He seemed to know the waitress, which was not surprising. He came down the long line of booths and stopped next to Carl with his parka hood still pulled up over his head.

  “Mr. Frank?” he said.

  “Mr. Bullard?” Carl said.

  Jack Bullard pulled back the parka hood, unzipped the parka, and sat down. Everything about him was not only big but outsized. His feet were too big for the slenderness of his legs. His head was too big for his torso. He had to be six foot five.

  The waitress came back with another cup of coffee and put it on the table. She went away without speaking, even though Jack Bullard thanked her in a voice loud enough to be heard outside on the street. Then Jack pulled over the sugar and the cream and began to load up as if he were making a milk shake.

  Carl found himself wishing he still smoked cigarettes. It would at least give him something to do with his hands.