Cheating at Solitaire

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Cheating at Solitaire Page 36

by Jane Haddam


  Linda was five minutes late for the appointment. Gregor considered that mildly interesting, since she didn’t seem to him to be the kind of woman who was often late to anything. She came in just as he was gathering up the papers to put them back in Jack’s file. She caught a glimpse of one of the pictures the hospital had taken of the hand before it had been worked on, and made a face. Then she sat down. Her eerie calm was still in evidence, except that it wasn’t really calm, which is what made it eerie. It didn’t matter that Gregor had met other people with this same dead flatness of affect, and that none of them had been mass murderers or even petty thieves. There was something about being in the presence of a person like this that made the nerves beneath his skin begin to jump.

  Linda folded her hands on the table in front of her and waited. She could wait forever. Gregor knew that. You might goad somebody else into talking just by staying silent, but you wouldn’t goad her.

  “It’s funny,” he said.

  “What’s funny, Mr. Demarkian? I don’t see anything funny in any of this.”

  “I was just thinking how alike you are to Carl Frank,” Gregor said. “Not really, of course, but you have one thing in common and it’s an unusual thing. And with unusual things, the fact that they’re unusual makes people think that they must also be important.”

  Linda sat there, with her hands folded. Nothing about her moved except her eyes, and they weren’t particularly active. She was small and gray and compact and incredibly neat. She was not particularly interested.

  “Aren’t you interested in knowing what you’ve got in common with Carl Frank?” Gregor asked.

  “Not really. I thought that if you thought it was important, you’d tell me. But I don’t know him, do I? I’ll probably never see him again after all this is over. I don’t see why I should care that we share some characteristic in common.”

  “Do you care about Jack Bullard?” Gregor asked.

  This time, her eyes got a little more active. If Gregor believed eyes could narrow, he would have imagined hers had.

  “I’ve known him half my life,” Linda said. “I’ve known him all his life. I remember him as a baby in a carriage in town. His father used to walk him in on the weekends and buy bait and go out fishing with Jack in the carriage beside him. He was the cutest thing on wheels.”

  “Which doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Your question is impossible to answer. I suppose I care about him. I’m fond of him. He’s—there’s something very innocent about Jack. Not just naive, but innocent.”

  “Was it innocent, going out to Las Vegas with Kendra Rhode and Arrow Normand?”

  Linda flicked this away. “Jack wanted to be a photographer, a celebrity photographer. It was his chance. The whole filming thing was. His chance to take a shot at getting out of here and doing something with his life.”

  “Do most people want to get out of Margaret’s Harbor? I thought this was where rich people went to retire.”

  “Which is fine if you’re a rich person,” Linda said. “Jack wasn’t, any more than I am. If you’re a year-rounder, the Harbor is deadly dull and deadly ended, if that makes any sense. Jack went away to college, and we thought that would be the last we’d see of him, but he came back. His father was ailing. Not that that lasted long. The man keeled over and died within a month, but Jack never seemed to be able to get the momentum going to get all the way out, if you see what I mean. Then they came and there it was, his shot. So he took it.”

  “You didn’t mind?”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “He is your employee,” Gregor said. “Going off to Vegas for a weekend had to cut into the time he had to work for you.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Linda said. “Really, Jack’s taken weekends before. And it’s not as if it was in the season, when we’ve got a lot to do. Margaret’s Harbor in the late fall is not a hotbed of news that has to be rushed to the printers.”

  “Not even with the film people here?”

  “I didn’t run stories about the film people,” Linda said. “And I’m not going to run them now, except to report on the criminal investigations, and the trials, if we ever get to those. I am running a story about what happened to Jack. I wrote it myself. It will be out at the end of the week.”

  “What will it say?”

  “It will say Jack was attacked,” Linda said, “which is more than any other paper will say, anywhere. Nobody is much interested in Jack Bullard’s hand when they’ve got Kendra Rhode to talk about, or that other one. I didn’t mind Kendra Rhode so much. She was at least local.”

  “I thought she came from New York.”

  “Local as in from a Margaret’s Harbor family. A summer family, but a family.” Linda shrugged. “I’m sorry. I’m a snob. It matters to me.”

  “Do you want to tell me what happened to Jack Bullard?”

  “I don’t know what happened to Jack,” Linda said. “How could I know? I only know about finding him.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “In back of the Home News Building. There’s a place back there, a little open space between our building and the Coach store on the other side, the Coach store on Melville Street. We put the garbage out back there and then on garbage day we wheel it out to the front. Well, we do at the Home News, and the people at the Coach store do, but Bill Grady that has the pharmacy takes his stuff to the dump in his truck. It makes me crazy. It’s a pharmacy, for God’s sake. It’s not like he’s some widower fisherman living on his own in a cabin. But you can’t talk to Bill Grady. You never could.”

  “Do you know what Jack was doing out in back of the building? Was he taking out garbage? Had he gone to meet someone?”

  “He’d gone out for air,” Linda said. “He was up in my office, and he started to feel sick to his stomach. Or he said he did. And he got up and went out back to get some air. He was away for nearly half an hour and I got worried. So I went back there to see if I could find him.”

  “And? ”

  “And,” Linda said, “I did find him. He stumbled into the building, and there was blood everywhere. It looked to me like somebody had tried to take his hand off. Then I went to look at the other one, to see if somebody had tried to take that one off, too, but of course it had the glove on it.”

  “Why of course?” Gregor asked.

  “Because it was cold,” Linda said. “It’s freezing up here this time of year, Mr. Demarkian, in case you hadn’t noticed. But you can’t operate those cameras he has with a hand in a thick leather glove, and you can’t go without the gloves completely or your fingers fall off. So he wore the glove on his left hand and kept his right hand free to work the cameras.”

  “And it was his camera hand that was attacked,” Gregor said. It was not a question.

  “I think it was one of those other photographers,” Linda said. “One of those people from New York or Los Angeles. Jack is a very good photographer. I think those people didn’t like the competition from somebody local, and then of course there was all that stuff about the Vegas trip, where Jack was the only photographer to be asked along. I think they’re jealous.”

  “I think they very probably are,” Gregor said. “Somebody I talked to in town said that Jack had a crush on Kendra Rhode, or possibly on Marcey Mandret. That he was emotionally involved.”

  Linda Beecham shrugged. “He was, of course he was. He was way out of his league in terms of the personalities. They all seemed special to him. You couldn’t tell him otherwise. And I suppose, to someone with limited experience, they did seem special. They are special. They’re, I don’t know, shinier than the rest of us.”

  “But not better?”

  “Better at what?” Linda asked. “They’re not very bright, at least not the ones I’ve talked to, and I’ve talked to most of them these past few months. They tend to be rude, and to think they can do whatever they want without consequences. They’re rich and they’re spoiled, but so are a lot of other people on Marga
ret’s Harbor. They get their pictures in the news a lot, although I’ve never been able to figure out what for. I think that for Jack, there was just too much dazzle and he was just too unused to it. He’ll figure it out in the long run.”

  “You don’t think he had a particular crush on any one of the group of them?”

  “I don’t think Jack’s ever had a particular crush on anybody.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “What happened after you found him behind the building?”

  “I went back into the building and called the hospital,” Linda said, “and then I called Jerry Young, because it was obvious that what we had was a crime scene. It was a criminal attack. It had to be. I mean, there he was, drugged up like that, and his hand bleeding all over everything. But Jerry didn’t come out, not right away. He had to wait until somebody came in to babysit Arrow Normand.”

  “Was that illegitimate?” Gregor asked. “He couldn’t leave Arrow Normand in a cell without supervision, could he?”

  “Why not?” Linda asked. “This isn’t Rikers Island. We have people in those jail cells all the time without supervision. Not in the summer, of course, but during the offseasons. Drunks, mostly. Nobody bothers to get somebody to sit around and babysit them. And what did Jerry think Arrow Normand was going to do in his absence? Stage a jail-break? Commit suicide?”

  “Maybe,” Gregor said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Arrow Normand wouldn’t commit suicide unless she could be guaranteed ringside seats at her own funeral, and if she staged a jailbreak she’d be caught in a minute and a half when she stopped to pose for the first set of photographers. It wasn’t that. It was just that Jack is Jack and not some Hollywood celebrity. It’s like a virus everybody’s been catching around here. Jerry Young had too much to do to actually investigate a crime.”

  “Are you saying he didn’t come to the scene at all?”

  “He came, at the last minute. By then the ambulance was already there, and they were loading Jack into it. They had to do that. Jack was alive. It was an emergency. They couldn’t just leave him lying in the snow while Jerry took his own sweet time showing up.”

  “Did anybody else show up?”

  “Some of those photographers poked their noses in when the ambulance first got there, just to see what the siren was about, but they didn’t stay long. There isn’t much money in photographs of Jack Bullard with an injured hand. There isn’t much money in photographs of Jack Bullard. They went away.”

  “And then what? ”

  “Then the ambulance took Jack to the hospital, and I stayed around for a while, and then I went looking for Clara Walsh,” Linda said. “And then I met you, come to think of it. But none of you were much interested in Jack either.”

  “We did come and interview Dr. Ingleford, on the spot.”

  “And then Marcey Mandret turned up drunk and you all went running,” Linda said. “It’s embarrassing, really, the way you all behave. He was lying there in bed, unconscious, or something like it, and you were all more interested in Marcey Mandret being drunk. What does that woman do, anyway? She’s supposed to be a movie star, but I never see her in a movie.”

  “I haven’t either,” Gregor said. “But what did you do when we all went to see about Marcey Mandret? Did you stay with Jack?”

  “Yes, I did. For another half an hour, at least. And then I went home.”

  “Did anyone else come to see Jack when you were there?”

  “No.”

  “Did he get any phone calls? Did anyone inquire about him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see anyone coming into or out of the hospital when you left?”

  “Well, there were a million people around the emergency room entrance,” Linda said. “They looked like one of those invading armies from the Lord of the Rings movies. But there was no one on Jack’s ward, no. Even Dr. Ingleford left.”

  Gregor was about to say that she couldn’t fault Dr. Ingle-ford about that, since he seemed to be the only full-fledged doctor on duty at the time, but he let it go. Linda Beecham only seemed to be dead flat and without emotion. In truth, she was angry to the point of explosion, and keeping control of it by a continual act of will.

  He wondered what happened when the will broke down.

  Then he didn’t wonder anymore, because he realized he knew.

  Chapter Six

  1

  Stewart Gordon was glad to hear that Carl Frank had moved Arrow Normand and her mother out of Annabeth Falmer’s living room. He’d thought the entire idea was cracked from the start, because there was no way Annabeth’s house could be “secured” against paparazzi in any meaningful sense, and because the paparazzi wouldn’t be back in force for at least another day or two. There was also the problem of Annabeth herself, who wasn’t used to people like Arrow Normand, and who really wasn’t used to people like Arrow Normand’s mother. Besides, the paparazzi hadn’t really disappeared. They’d only gone into hiding. They were waiting for the moment when it would be safe for them to return in force, or impossible to resist, whichever came first. At best, Stewart gave them another twenty-four hours. It would be less if somebody was arrested for causing the death of Kendra Rhode.

  Stewart was less glad to hear that Marcey Mandret had not left Annabeth’s living room, and didn’t seem to be intending to.

  “She’s lying on the couch with a blanket, drinking tea and reading W. B. Yeats,” Annabeth said when Stewart called to say he was coming over.

  “She can’t be reading Yeats,” Stewart said. “She won’t get any of the references.”

  “I’m explaining things,” Annabeth said. “And really, Stewart, you can’t complain that much. It’s better than having her drunk in the middle of the day and falling out of her clothes where photographers can catch her at it. I mean, I admit I would have started her on Byron maybe, or even Dickens, but she liked the cover on the Yeats.”

  “Isn’t there something somewhere about not judging books by their covers?”

  “I don’t know if she knows that one,” Annabeth said.

  “I just got a call from Carl Frank,” Stewart said. “He said Gregor Demarkian was asking him about my suitability as a suspect for these murders.”

  “You are a suitable suspect for the murders,” Annabeth said. “You’re a more suitable suspect than Arrow Normand. I don’t think that young woman could plan her way into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

  “Possibly true,” Stewart said. “But there’s no malice in her.”

  And that, he thought, as he made his way from his house to the boardwalk so that he could walk along the beach to Annabeth’s, summed up his entire position in this endless mess. The twits were twits, but with the exception of Kendra Rhode they had no malice in them. They were ignorant, and vulgar, and shallow, but they wished no one harm, and they tried to be nice to the people who had to work with them. Maybe it was too much to ask them to behave like thoroughgoing professionals at their ages and their levels of experience. Had he been a thoroughgoing professional at the age of twenty-one? Well, actually, he probably had. He’d just left the Royal Academy then, where they’d trained his voice, already too deep by half, until it sounded like a foghorn. But he hadn’t had the disadvantages these girls had had. He hadn’t been famous at fifteen, or surrounded by adults whose only purpose was to suck money out of him. He’d had a decent home life with two people who had worked with their hands and been paid for it, and who didn’t take any nonsense from “teenagers.” Stewart tried to imagine his father referring to anybody at all as a “teenager,” and failed. His father was not fond of fads. Not even a little bit.

  Annabeth’s house was easy to reach, and there was nobody on the boardwalk this afternoon. Stewart wouldn’t have cared if there had been. His policy had always been to treat fame as if it didn’t exist. He employed no bodyguards. He didn’t travel with an entourage. The only assistant he’d ever had had been the one the studio hired to help with his fan mail while he was playin
g Commander Rees. She’d been a very nice, sensible, middle-aged Scotswoman whose idea of a night on the town was shrimp and pasta at an Olive Garden followed by three stiff shots of unadulterated whiskey when she got home. Mrs. Mackindle, her name had been, and Stewart still sent Christmas cards to her place in Aberdeen.

  He got to Annabeth’s house and knocked on the door. Annabeth had The Well-Tempered Clavier on the stereo. It was a good stereo, a Bose, that her sons had bought her because she liked music. The disc of The Well-Tempered Clavier she was playing featured a harpsichord, which was what it was supposed to feature, instead of a piano, which most of them did. He knocked a second time, just in case she hadn’t heard him, and the door opened.

  “Hello,” Annabeth said. It was a door to the kitchen, not the one to the living room, because that one faced the sea. “I’ve got more tea on. You look good. This is very odd.”

  “I want to talk to you about something,” Stewart said.

  Annabeth was already headed back toward the stove. The kettle was blowing, but not sounding, because she had put the whistle up.

  “I think Marcey may have fallen asleep,” she said. “I really don’t know what to do about the mood she’s in. I mean, you can’t just make up ten years of schooling in an afternoon. Not that I’m necessarily wedded to the idea of education taking place in schools. But you can’t go from not reading anything at all except menus to reading Yeats just like that. I finally got her to give it up and gave her Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She likes Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”

  “She probably thinks it’s song lyrics,” Stewart said. “Is she going to stay here all day? Is she moving in? She does have a house to go to.”

  “Oh, I know,” Annabeth said. “I think she’s just worried about the publicity, you know, and the photographers. I mean, she does realize they’re not much in evidence today, but she seems to be sure they’ll be back any minute. Is that right? Will they be back any minute?”

 

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