Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Clara said. “They wouldn’t have given him Rohypnol. Nobody would have given him Rohypnol.”

  Elyse brightened. “That’s right. They didn’t. That’s what Dr. Ingleford said. They didn’t give him hypnohol, or whatever it was, they gave him some cereal, and the cereal made him pass out, and now it’s going to be hours before he’s up and around again. I remember because I thought it was so odd, that cereal could make you pass out. But there he is, you know, up there, and his hand is a mess. Isn’t it terrible what goes on these days? Here’s Jack that everybody’s known forever and somebody cuts up his hand. And he’s not awake, so nobody knows why.”

  3

  Dr. Ingleford was not exasperated, although Gregor would never understand why. He was sitting at the nurse’s desk at the end of the small ward on the third floor, looking through papers and not seeming much interested in moving. Gregor had expected an older man, retired now, and happy to put his hand in on the very few cases that were likely to come his way in Oscartown—or a young one, with a distinct air of incompetence. Instead, Michael Ingleford looked and acted like a big-city surgeon with an operating schedule the length of Orlando Furioso, and he couldn’t have been more than fifty-two.

  Dr. Ingleford looked up when Clara, Bram, Linda, and Gregor got off the elevator, and put down the folder he’d been holding. “Ah,” he said. “The cavalry has arrived. Linda said she’d gone to get you out of the ocean.”

  “Just from the Oscartown Inn,” Clara Walsh said. “For goodness’ sake. What the hell is going on around here? Mr. Demarkian didn’t even get to register and park his suitcases.”

  “Tim Haling said that to me not an hour and a half ago,” Dr. Ingleford said. “I think that’s why Linda went to get you.” He turned to Gregor and held out his hand. “You must be Mr. Demarkian. I’m Mike Ingleford. Tim Haling is our guy in the emergency room today. You can’t blame him, you know. He knows he’s out of his depth. What we get mostly up here are drunks, heart attacks, and kids on dope. And the kids bring the dope from Boston.”

  Gregor raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t go any further than that. The ward was like the lobby had been: almost too clean, and almost deserted. He saw no sign of the nurse or nurse’s aide that Elyse had spoken of downstairs.

  Linda Beecham had started to pace, back and forth in front of the tiny nurses’ station. It was the first sign of emotion Gregor had seen in her. “You know as well as I do that kids have drugs up here even in the off-season,” she said, “and they don’t go to Boston to get them. Elyse said you said somebody gave Jack a drug, which I find interesting, because you didn’t say it to me.”

  “You’d have probably gone storming off before I knew,” Mike Ingleford said. “But to make you feel better, I’m getting ready to send samples of blood out to Boston as we speak. Stan Miltern is going to run them over to the mainland on his boat. Which is what we have to do, since we don’t have the ferry much this time of year.”

  “They came over on the ferry this time of year,” Linda Beecham said, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her voice had gone flat again. She had even stopped pacing.

  Gregor watched Mike Ingleford give Linda Beecham a long, steady look, then turn his eyes on the rest of them. “Well,” he said. “We got this far, anyway. Not that I didn’t know what it probably was when he came in, but then we’ve gotten some experience over the past few months. It’s interesting, really. It’s what I came up here from New York to get away from.”

  “You’re from New York?” Gregor asked.

  “I’m from Oscartown,” Mike Ingleford said. “But I went to Yale to college and then to medical school at NYU, and I just stayed in the city. And then I got tired of it, and tired of the way my children were turning out, so I came back here. I know you think I’m an idiot to think the kids here go to Boston for their drugs, but by and large it’s true. And that means that drugs can be hard to come by during the winter.”

  “But not this winter,” Clara said.

  “We’ve got movie stars,” Mike Ingleford said. “I’ve been running this hospital for a decade, and the first time I ever saw Special K, it was after the barbarians invaded. Lucy Guthorn showed up at two in the morning, a complete mess, and Sheri had to wake me up out of a sound sleep to come and fix it. Which I did, barely.”

  “And you’re sure that was the fault of the… barbarians?” Gregor said.

  “Of a guy named Steve Becker, yeah. I don’t know if you’ve picked up on him yet. He’s not actually part of the movie anymore. I think he got canned. He used to work on the crew, same as the guy who was murdered.”

  “Jerry Young tried to find a way for me to charge Steve Becker with rape,” Clara said, “but it was too late. Sheri had never had a rape case before. She didn’t know what to do. And Lucy, of course, Lucy just wanted to clean up. They all do.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  Mike Ingleford shrugged. “It’s one of those things. You don’t know where the better part of valor actually was. Maybe Lucy was better off with it turning out the way it did. This way, there was no publicity. She didn’t have to get hammered by that asshole’s lawyers. She didn’t have to have her face splattered all over the news—”

  “I wouldn’t have done that,” Linda said.

  “You wouldn’t have, but plenty of other papers would have,” Mike Ingleford said. “Steve Becker might not have been important in himself, but he was part of the movie and it happened here when the movie was filming, and all the rest of them were probably somewhere in the vicinity when the rape happened. It would have been absolutely lovely.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see Steve Becker convicted of something?” Clara said. “I would. I’d like to see any of them convicted of something.”

  “Everybody would,” Mike Ingleford said, “but I don’t think much would come of it. Not on a first conviction, assuming you even got one. Rape isn’t an easy crime to prosecute, and it’s harder when the alleged rapist is young and white instead of some scruffy old guy with a sex-offender record. Still, it’s worthwhile in this case to remember that the only time we’ve ever seen the drug before is when Lucy showed up after being with Steve Becker, because here we are.”

  “I thought one of you told me that Steve Becker wasn’t still on the island,” Gregor said.

  “He’s not,” Mike Ingleford said, “but the rest of them are. And they all hang out together.”

  Gregor looked up at the ceiling. It was a modern ceiling, and clean. It was as if the Oscartown Hospital kept itself always at the ready in case any patients decided to visit it, but they almost never did.

  “So,” Gregor said, glancing at Bram Winder, who had gone over to the window to lean against the sill. “Let me get this straight. This photographer, this Jack—”

  “Bullard,” Linda Beecham said.

  “Bullard,” Gregor repeated. “What is he? Young? Old? Experienced or not?”

  “He can’t be all of thirty,” Linda said. “He grew up here, I should know, but I get a little hazy about ages. He’s only been out of college a couple of years. This is his first job.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Young. In good shape? Fat and ungainly?”

  “In good shape,” Mike Ingleford said. “Very athletic, in a lot of ways.”

  “Good,” Gregor said. “So that means that it’s unlikely that anybody could have attacked him without his fighting back.”

  “Well, unless he’d been drugged to the gills,” Mike Ingleford said, “which he was. Is, really. We got as much of it out of him as we could, but he’s going to have to sleep the rest of it off, and there’s a lot of the rest of it.”

  “What did he take it with?” Gregor asked.

  Mike Ingleford looked nonplussed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re not really equipped to do that kind of analysis. I feel like an absolute idiot, because we could have been, but—”

  “The Department of Homeland Security was handing out money like candy after 9/11,” Clara Walsh said. “O
ne of the things they were handing out money for was updating crime labs and crime-analysis facilities. We got offered some money, but—”

  “But we thought it was stupid,” Linda said, “and it was. This isn’t a terrorist attack. There aren’t going to be any terrorists on Margaret’s Harbor. Not unless one of the summer people has a son who decides to convert to Islam and go fight with al Qaeda, which is the sort of stupid thing those people do. What’s Special K?”

  “Ketamine hydrochloride,” Mike Ingleford said. “It’s one of the drugs sometimes called date rape drugs.”

  “But it doesn’t usually knock you out, does it?” Gregor asked. “I thought it was a dissociative drug. It makes the user floaty, and compliant, and not aware of pain.”

  “Yeah,” Mike Ingleford said. “They use it as anesthesia for some things, both for humans and for some of the larger animals in a veterinary practice. But Special K will knock you out if you’ve had enough of it.”

  “It will also kill you if you’ve had enough of it,” Gregor said.

  “I know,” Mike Ingleford said. “In higher doses, it has a tendency to induce coma. It doesn’t seem to have this time, and if it’s any consolation, which I don’t suppose it is, I don’t think whoever gave it to Jack Bullard meant to kill him. If he had, he would have killed him. I think it was just a case of double dosing to make sure the job got done right.”

  “And what job was that?” Gregor asked.

  “The destruction of Jack’s hand,” Mike Ingleford said. “His right hand, by the way, the one he actually needs. Somebody went at it—”

  “With a small sharp hatchet,” Gregor said. “At least, that’s what Ms. Beecham told us.”

  “I said that was the right kind of thing,” Mike Ingleford said, “but since we don’t have it with us, we can’t know. My best guesses would be a small hatchet or a medium-sized meat cleaver. Went at his hand over and over again. Broke virtually all the bones and came close to severing his fourth finger and his pinkie. It was a sloppy job, by somebody without finesse or patience. If whoever it was had kept his nerve, he could have taken off Jack’s hand and been done with it.”

  “And the weapon wasn’t found on or near the body?” Gregor asked.

  “Nothing was found on or near the body,” Mike Ingleford said. “The only reason we found Jack is that he stumbled into the Home News Building and Linda found him. She called us as soon as she did.”

  Gregor turned to Linda Beecham. “He was conscious when you first saw him?”

  “He passed out in front of my eyes,” Linda said.

  “You’d better do something about security for this place as quick as you can,” Bram Winder said. He was still standing at the window, but he was no longer leaning against it. He had his back turned to them and was looking out. “This is it,” he said. “The rampaging hordes have arrived.”

  Part II

  Chapter One

  1

  It was this—the arrival of the rampaging hordes—that finally made Gregor Demarkian feel old, and then only after he realized that Bram Winder had not meant to be sarcastic. Bram hadn’t even meant to be metaphoric, but there was no time to think about that while the crisis was in progress, and the fact that it was a crisis became clear in no time at all. At first, all Gregor saw out the window where Bram stood pointing was a crowd of people, almost all male, near the hospital’s front portico. Then he realized that the people he could see were visible only because all the space under the portico was already taken. He pressed his face more closely against the glass and tried to see out onto the street beyond. It was difficult. The hospital was set back a little from the road. The best Gregor could get was the edge of a van here and there, and a street where the snow hadn’t been adequately cleared. Maybe snow on Margaret’s Harbor was like street signs in northern Connecticut. Only the people who didn’t belong here worried about it.

  Gregor stepped back a little. “Press,” he said. “National press. I take it they’ve decided that Jack here is connected with the murder of Mark Anderman.”

  “I don’t think so,” Bram said. “They’d never show up here like this for Jack Bullard, not unless he’d been arrested, and even then you wouldn’t get most of that crowd. It has to be something else. Something must have happened to one of the twits.”

  Clara Walsh was at the window now too. “I didn’t hear any sirens. It couldn’t have been an emergency.”

  “There aren’t always sirens in an emergency.” Bram turned to Mike Ingleford. “Are you the only doctor here? Is there somebody else on call?”

  “I’m the only doctor,” Mike Ingleford said, “but there’s a nurse practitioner in the emergency room. Leslie O’Neal. She doesn’t usually have anything to do. And Tim is on call if we need him.”

  Somebody’s cell phone went off. Everybody checked his pocket, automatically, even Gregor. He had no idea why. Bennis had “downloaded” a “ring tone” for him. When his cell phone went off, he got the first few notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. When Bennis’s cell phone went off, it played the first few notes of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.”

  The sound stopped. Mike Ingleford was staring at his phone. “You were right,” he said. “Somebody’s been admitted to emergency. Leslie wants me down there right away.”

  Bram Winder was pacing back and forth in front of Jack Bullard’s hospital bed. “It’ll be Marcey Mandret. It would have to be. There are only three people the nutcases would come out for, and those are Marcey Mandret, Arrow Nor-mand, and Kendra Rhode. And Arrow Normand is still locked up, as far as I know.”

  “But it could be Kendra Rhode,” Gregor suggested.

  Bram shook his head. “Do you pay any attention to celebrity news? No, I don’t suppose you do. I don’t. The whole thing is stupid beyond belief. But here’s the thing about Ken-dra Rhode, the one thing I think makes her an interesting person. You’ve never seen a picture of Kendra Rhode drunk, or stoned out of her gourd, or sloppy in public. Never. And do you know why?”

  “Why?” Gregor had barely been aware of the fact that there was somebody named Kendra Rhode until Stewart Gordon had brought his attention to her.

  “Because she doesn’t get plastered,” Bram said triumphantly. “She gets other people plastered. She loves to watch them make idiots of themselves. She loves to watch them crash and burn. But she’s not stupid, and she’s not some nobody out of Arkansas who’s impressed as hell at herself for having all this money. She’s always had it, and she’s always had influence. The secretary-general of the UN came to her fourth birthday party.”

  Gregor found himself wondering who had been the secretary-general then, but it was the kind of thought he had when the back of his mind was working on something else. Mike Ingleford was packing things into his pockets, getting ready to go downstairs, and Bram and Clara Walsh obviously expected to go with him.

  “Dr. Ingleford,” Gregor said. “Is it Marcey Mandret down there?”

  Mike Ingleford looked up. “Leslie didn’t say. She did say female, red hair, and overdose.”

  “Oh, good Lord,” Clara said.

  “Leslie will get the stomach pump going,” Mike Ingle-ford said. “I’d better get moving.”

  “I think we’ll all get moving with you,” Clara Walsh said. “For God’s sake, what’s going on around here? I feel like Jessica Fletcher.”

  Gregor stayed at the window for a moment more. The crowd was dissipating, but he was sure that was only because they had managed to get inside the building. The town beyond looked as deserted as it had when they’d been driving through it. He thought he’d seen paparazzi before. He’d had cases where the press was a constant and unyielding presence. There was something about the crowd downstairs that was new. It pulsed. He ran the word around in his head. It fit, but he didn’t know why it fit.

  He walked away from the window, preparing to follow Mike Ingleford, Bram Winder, and Clara Walsh out of the room, and found himself face-to-face with Linda Beecham.

  “It’s just Jac
k,” she said. “Up here, I mean. Date rape drug. Hand useless probably forever. But it’s just Jack.”

  “I think Dr. Ingleford said he’d be all right, in the long run,” Gregor said. When his voice came out of his mouth, it was unbelievably gentle. He didn’t know why.

  Linda Beecham had turned away while he’d been thinking of his voice. Now he saw only the side of her face as she stared toward the window. She wasn’t actually looking at anything. She was only not looking at him.

  “It’s only Jack,” she said again. “And the funny thing is, Jack used to talk about it. About how people aren’t real anymore if they’re not on television, if the photographers don’t follow them around. He had all these ideas—has them, I suppose. He’s not dead yet. About how there’s a fundamental injustice to it, about how there’s a corporate plot. Something. I didn’t listen much.”

  “I think he’ll be all right,” Gregor said again. “I think the general consensus is—”

  “When I was growing up,” Linda said, as if she hadn’t heard, “people had to do something to be famous, and people had to do something really important to be really famous. People paid attention to Marilyn Monroe, but they didn’t take her seriously. Einstein was really famous. Albert Schweitzer was really famous. Presidents were really famous.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you were old enough to remember Albert Schweitzer.”

  “I think he died before I was born,” Linda said, “but he was really famous. I remember hearing about him. The Mother Teresa of our time. Did you know she wrote a book?”

  “Who?”

  “Kendra Rhode,” Linda said. “Or rather, her dog wrote a book, theoretically. My guess is that some ghostwriter wrote the book, and got badly paid for it, and then the family had connections with some publisher. Like that record album she put out. She paid for it herself. Jack thought it had to be deliberate, the things that are going on, but I don’t think so. I don’t think life is deliberate. I think it’s all chance and circumstance.”