Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

  2

  If Linda Beecham had stayed just five more minutes in Jack Bullard’s room, she would have seen Kendra Rhode coming in, but she didn’t. Instead, she left while there was nobody else there, and not much of anybody on the floor. She walked down the long empty hall to the elevators, looking into empty rooms to the right and left of her. She wondered why nobody in Oscartown ever seemed to be sick in the winter, and then reminded herself that most of the residents who really were residents probably lacked health insurance. Health insurance was one of those things she had been careful to provide for all her employees at the Home News. She even provided it for part-time people and the cleaning staff. It was one of the things she remembered best about the years of having no money at all, and one of the things she resented most. If the Home News had had a political ideology, it would have been solidly liberal in most ways, but it would have been downright socialist on the subject of health insurance. If Linda Beecham got to run the country, health care would be universal, government-provided, and without limits. It would be like the best of the policies afforded to multimillion-dollar-earning CEOs, but for everybody.

  There was a lot of commotion on the ground floor at the front, and Linda stopped for a minute to watch it. There was an assault going on, against the emergency room. Linda recognized the signs of what she had come over the last few months to think of as “the barbarian hordes,” and she wondered which of the women they followed had managed to get herself into a state this time. There was too much of everything wandering around Oscartown these days. The film people brought in everything bad the summer people did, but they brought in more. They brought in this mania for public display. Linda thought there was something profoundly wrong with anybody who wanted to have her picture in the papers. Publicity meant exposure, and exposure turned you into a target. Linda knew all about being a target.

  She stood on the pavement near the hospital’s front door, watching the door a few yards down where the emergency room was. She thought that if there was a real emergency anywhere on the island, the ambulance wouldn’t be able to get out of its stall to get to it, and wouldn’t be able to get up to the emergency room door to bring the patient in. She thought about Jack upstairs in that empty room on that empty corridor, the nurse by herself at the station, reading through a magazine, noticing nothing that was going on. Lately, it was brought home to her again and again just how uninhabited Margaret’s Harbor really was. They were all out here, wandering around on their own. What they had once stood for didn’t matter to anybody, and most of them couldn’t remember what it had been. There was a Fox News van jammed right up onto the sidewalk in front, and Linda suddenly realized that its presence so far up on the pavement made the emergency room’s sliding glass doors stay permanently open, in the middle of winter, with temperatures below freezing and heading to something dangerous the closer it got tonight. They had a different set of priorities, these people. They cared about things that were—

  But Linda didn’t know what they were, and finally she turned away from the scene and began to make her way toward the center of town. Nobody was interested in her anyway. She wasn’t a recognizable face, and she was middle-aged and tired. These days you had to sparkle and shine to get noticed, and sometimes even that didn’t work.

  When she got out onto Main Street, she looked up at the Congregational church and the clock on its spire, and realized she’d spent more time than she’d thought she had watching the news vans. She’d left Jack’s room at one—she knew because she’d checked her watch while she was waiting for the elevator—and it was now almost quarter to two. Main Street was as deserted as it would have been if this were an ordinary winter. She passed Cuddy’s, looking through its tinted-glass windows while she walked. It was dead empty. Only Dora Malvern, who worked the afternoons as a waitress, and Chuck Verle, who did the same as a bartender, were inside. In a way, that was surprising. There were “real people” bars in Oscar-town, on the back streets and down near the ferry, but during the off-season the fishermen took possession of the places the summer people liked to go. It was a matter of pride.

  She passed the front of the Oscartown Inn, which was also deserted. She supposed Mr. Demarkian must be inside, doing whatever consultants did when they were called in to a crime the police couldn’t solve. She didn’t see the point of it. The police had Arrow Normand under arrest. If Arrow Normand had been any ordinary girl from the island, she’d have been locked up for serious and on her way to a trial without calling in con sultants from as far away as Philadelphia. Linda had an editorial about it, set and ready to go in the next issue of the Home News. It was taxpayer money Clara Walsh was wasting on this Gregor Demarkian, and taxpayer money she was wasting on her attempts to tie herself into a pretzel so that the world wouldn’t think she was being unduly harsh to Little Miss Pantyless Wonder. Or something. It was so very cold now. The wind was coming in off the ocean. It chased down Main Street and made the signs shudder and sway. Jack was up there at the hospital. He might never be able to use his right hand again. He would almost certainly never be able to feel anything with his fingertips.

  She got to the Home News and let herself in the front door. This was not something she usually did. She usually used the side entrance, which had stairs directly up to her office. She stopped in the big front room and looked at displays of last week’s edition. The lead story was about the proposed new system of charging for sewer services. It was the kind of thing people who lived on the island really needed to know. The story of the murder was below the fold. There were no pictures of Arrow Normand or Marcey Mandret or any of the rest of them, and the headline said: “Crime Scene on Beach.” There was a picture of Mark Anderman, lifted from a wire-service story, but it was tiny, so tiny you’d need a magnifying glass to make out the features. Linda suddenly felt enormously satisfied by the whole thing.

  She was just about to go upstairs when the door to the street opened, and instead of her usual customers—somebody from the IGA with this week’s ad; somebody who wanted to advertise a used lawn mower for sale or a litter of puppies in need of a home—a too-well-dressed middle-aged man came in, wearing a serious city coat instead of a parka. It took her a moment to recognize him. It was obvious to her, from the way he looked at her, that he didn’t expect her to recognize him at all.

  “Carl Frank,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m—”

  “I know who you are,” Linda Beecham said. “You’re Michael Bardman’s hit man.”

  “I’m the publicity director for the movie,” Carl Frank said.

  Linda turned away from him. It was time to go upstairs and get some work done. Without Jack here, there was a lot of work to do, a lot of work she had forgotten had to be done. It was odd how you got used to things like that.

  “I came to see you,” Carl Frank said. “If you wouldn’t mind. We could talk.”

  Linda turned back. “I do mind,” she said. “I don’t see what we have to talk about. I don’t print stories about the movie. I don’t even print stories about the people who are in the movie. Except for the one about the murder, and that was only because it was inevitable.”

  “I know,” Carl Frank said. He looked around the big front room, at the two young women taking telephone calls, at the blown-up covers of old editions of the Home News in their stainless-steel frames. The covers were from before Linda’s time, but she had kept them because she remembered them. The time JFK and Jackie had come to Oscartown. The time Amanda Kay Adams had made it all the way to the U.S. Olympic figure-skating team. Carl Frank didn’t seem to be impressed. “Couldn’t we talk,” he said, “somewhere out of the way?”

  Linda turned her back on him and headed upstairs, but she didn’t tell him he couldn’t come, and she didn’t protest when she heard him behind her. She let herself into her big second-floor office. This was still her favorite place in town. She could see everything from here, or at least everything on Main Street. She took off her parka and put it on the coat tre
e. She pulled out the chair behind her desk and sat down. Time seemed to be oddly warped. The clock on the Congregational church now said two fifteen.

  Carl Frank closed the door to the stairs and looked around for a chair. There was one, but not a comfortable one, because Linda didn’t like people to stay too long in her office.

  Carl Frank took the chair anyway and brought it as close to Linda’s desk as he dared. Then he sat down in it. “I know you don’t run stories about the movie,” he said. “I know you didn’t run much of one on the murder. But you’re not the only one here. You have a full-time photographer, and he takes a lot of pictures. I’ve seen one of them.”

  “He won’t be taking any more pictures anytime soon,” Linda said flatly. “He’s in the hospital. He’s going to be there for a while.”

  “In the hospital for what?”

  Linda almost said it was none of his business. “He was attacked by somebody who mangled his hand,” she said. “He was drugged, with one of those date rape drugs. Drugged enough to get knocked out cold.”

  “Really? You can die that way, taking that much of those things.”

  “I know.”

  “Do the police know who did it?”

  Linda treated this with the contempt it deserved. By now, Carl Frank had to know that Jerry Young was the only policeman in town, and that he’d hardly be in a position to “know who did it” almost as soon as it was done. Except, of course, that in other circumstances, in the normal way of life, he would know. That was part of what it meant to live in a small town. You got to know people too well. You got to understand them.

  “I’m sorry about your photographer,” Carl Frank said, “but it’s you I wanted to talk to. He takes pictures. I understand he takes pictures for you.”

  “He takes pictures for himself,” Linda said, “and I get first crack at them. I don’t publish stories on the movie, Mr. Frank, and I’m not interested in using those pictures. Jack sells them where he can for the extra money, and I’m happy to let him.”

  “He took pictures on the Vegas trip,” Carl Frank said. “Did you see those pictures?”

  “I saw the one everyone’s seen,” Linda said. “It’s impossible to avoid it, especially since the murder.”

  “He took other pictures.”

  “I’m sure he did,” Linda said, “but he wouldn’t have bothered to show them to me. If I’m not going to be interested in pictures of Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret and Kendra Rhode right here on the island, I’m not going to be interested in them in Las Vegas. It’s beyond my comprehension why anybody’s interested in them.”

  Carl Frank stared at her for a long moment, long enough to make her uncomfortable, and Linda Beecham was never uncomfortable. Then he turned around and looked out the big plate glass window onto Main Street.

  “You can see everything from here,” he said, turning back. “I envy you. Almost everything I need to keep track of is just out of sight. Is your photographer hurt too badly to talk to me about a proposition?”

  “When I left him, he wasn’t even awake.”

  “All right. Then I’ll wait a few days,” Carl Frank said.

  “But I’ll be back. And I’ve got the impression that you have some influence here, so I’ll leave the message with you. He did take other pictures on the Vegas trip. Do you know why he hasn’t sold any of them to the tabloids?”

  “No,” Linda said. “Do you?”

  “No,” Carl Frank said. “And I have to admit, I think it’s odd. But odd or not, it’s the fact, and I can work with the fact. I want to buy the pictures. Negatives, digital memory resources, whatever. I want them all, and I want all the possible avenues of reproducing them, and I’m willing to pay a lot to get them. Say, something on the order of one hundred thousand dollars.”

  “What?”

  Carl Frank stood up. “I told you I was serious,” he said. “One hundred thousand dollars. But I’ve got to have them all, and I’ve got to have a signed contract attesting to the fact that I have them all, because if one of them surfaces after I’ve paid for them, I have every intention of filling the world’s biggest bitch of a lawsuit. I don’t know what he’s saving them for. I don’t care. I’m pretty sure he’ll never do any better than what I’m offering. I’ll make the offer to him myself in a couple of days, when he’s feeling better. In the meantime, it would be good of you to mention my offer to him when you’ve got a chance.”

  Linda Beecham rubbed her hands together. Carl Frank was taller than she’d originally thought. Either that, or he had the ability to loom when he wanted to. She felt as if she were standing under a vulture. She was also suddenly cold again, although she shouldn’t be. Jack was always warning her that windows provided no insulation.

  “Well,” Carl Frank said. “I’ll go. Have a good day.”

  3

  Over at the Oscartown Memorial Hospital, Jack Bullard was considering the possibility that he had just made the biggest mistake of his life—except that he really couldn’t be said to be considering anything, because that would have taken too much energy. He was out of bed. He had been out of bed for minutes, or maybe hours. He didn’t know. He was out, and on his feet, and he should never have done it. Never. He thought he was going to throw up.

  The bed was a long way away. It was across the floor, on the other side of the world. He was in the hallway. He couldn’t remember exactly how he had gotten there. He was just so angry at being confined, so angry at his body for not working, and in the end he couldn’t just lie where he was and not move. His hand hurt. Both of them did, but the right hand, the one with the bandage on it, was killing him. It was not a pain he felt directly. If he had felt it directly, he would have died. Instead, the pain was out there somewhere, wandering around, teasing him. His head hurt too. His right hand was bleeding. He thought he might have stitches. He thought he might have ripped them open. There was blood everywhere.

  It was lying there holding the styrofoam cup of ginger ale that had done it. He remembered looking at the cup and the way it seemed to float above him, the way his own left hand seemed to float there too, but weigh a million pounds, and then the silence of the corridor, the silence that should have had footsteps in it.

  And then the silence wasn’t the silence. There was noise. He could hear it. There was noise from downstairs and noise in the stairwell and everything, nothing, it didn’t matter. He could hear himself calling out. His voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else. He wondered where the nurse was. He wondered why nobody had seen him. He thought he had been moving very fast, moving against the pain, moving and moving and moving until it was all over, and now the stitches on his hand were torn and there was blood and he was passing out in the middle of the empty corridor, with the emptiness and the ghosts all around him.

  Chapter Seven

  1

  Gregor Demarkian had been to press conferences before, more than he could count. He had even been to press conferences where there was a certain amount of fame involved. What he hadn’t done, and what he hadn’t had time to consider the ramifications of, was to be at a press conference where the object of interest was himself. Even now, checking his tie in a mirror in the men’s dressing room off the Ivory Room of the Oscartown Inn, he was thinking more of Arrow Normand than he was of Gregor Demarkian. He had noticed the crowd of people making its way into the Versailles Room—what did it mean, that an inn in one of the oldest parts of New England, an inn that could trace its continuous operation to before the American Revolution, named its largest and most prestigious ballroom after a palace of decadence in pre-Revolutionary France? The crowd looked as if it had blood on its hands, and there were too many photographers, but Gregor chalked it up to the level of competition involved in this thing. For reasons he would never fully understand, news outlets around the world would pay thousands of dollars for the right kind of pictures of people who had done little or nothing in their lives. Arrow Normand, Marcey Mandret, Kendra Rhode, even that silly woman Anna Nicole S
mith, who was constructing her life as a parody, could make a man a quarter of a million dollars in a single day if only he could get them where he wanted them and get them alone. It was the alone that mattered. It was exclusivity that brought in the real cash. It was something that made Gregor Demarkian wonder why these people wanted to pay any attention to him at all.

  “It’s the dead-air problem,” Bram Winder said helpfully while he waited for Gregor to stop fussing with himself and let them all get on with it. “In a story like this, there are a hundred different important things that happen, but they happen in clumps. The rest of the time, there’s nothing, there’s no news. But these people can’t handle the prospect of no news. They’ve got to have something. So they take whatever they can get.”

  “Can they always get something?” Gregor asked. “Isn’t there ever a point where there’s just no news at all?”

  “All the time,” Bram said. “Then they just blither. They get up there on television and talk about what happened, then they talk about why they’re so obsessed with it happening, then they talk about why the public is so obsessed with it happening, which is a little off if you ask me, because the public wouldn’t be so obsessed with it happening if the news media wasn’t obsessed with it happening. If you know what I mean.”

  Gregor considered it. His tie was straight, but for some reason he still wasn’t ready to go out and face questions, and that in spite of the fact that he had no real answers to give anybody. “Do you really think that’s true?” he asked. “That people only care because the media cares? I’ll admit, this isn’t my sort of thing—well, I mean people like Arrow Normand aren’t my sort of thing—but I’ve seen this material. I go to newsstands. I channel surf every once in a while. Somebody must be interested. The news is everywhere.”

  “It’s like a gigantic national high school,” Bram Winder said. He sounded sour. “And not a good high school, either. Not a New England high school. Like one of those high schools you see in the teen movies where everything depends on sports and the popular crowd. These people are the popular crowd. Nobody knows why. Nobody ever knows why. But they are.”