Cheating at Solitaire (10 page)

Philadelphia was a Great Big City. Elizabeth's grave was on a small knoll right next to an expansive family plot for some people named Haladanian. Next to Elizabeth's grave there was space for only one more, and the reason for that was obvious. When he'd buried Elizabeth, he'd never expected to have anyone else in his life. He and Elizabeth had had no children. What would have been the point of buying a bigger space, to put down bodies that did not and could not even exist?

“You'd probably kick me silly if you saw me behaving like this,” he said, out loud, to Elizabeth. There had been a time when he would have heard Elizabeth answering, but he didn't now. The stone he had selected for her sat in the ground, just slightly settled, the rose tint of its polished marble almost exactly the color that had been her favorite in life. He had not done that thing people did, where he forgot what she looked like. He remembered exactly. He could even hear the memory of the sound of her voice in his head. That was not the same as actually hearing the sound of her voice in his head, and it unsettled him.

Deep in the pocket of his trousers, his cell phone went off. This was a new one, called a Razr, that Bennis had
bought him for his birthday. He wasn't sure why it was important to buy a new cell phone every other year or so, but she thought it was, and she bought them for him, so he took them.

He pulled it out and checked the caller ID. It was Father Tibor. He almost let the call go to voice mail, even though he wasn't entirely sure how to operate the voice mail. Hadn't he come out here to get away from Cavanaugh Street, at least for a while?

He couldn't help himself. He'd never been able to ignore a ringing phone. He flipped the thing open and said, “Ti-bor?”

“Krekor,” Tibor said, sounding frantic. “You have to come back, right now. Wherever you are, you have to come back. There is somebody who has come here to see you.”

“Somebody threatening?” Gregor thought Tibor sounded threatened.

There were sounds in the background, including something that was best identified as a roar. Tibor cleared his throat. “There is somebody to see you,” he said. “I can't remember the name. He is a big man with an accent, also a bald head, nearly as big as you, and Donna has wrapped ribbons around his head.”

1

Gregor Demarkian would have gone a long way to see Stewart Gordon with ribbons on his head. As it was, he had only to go back to Philadelphia proper, and the only problem with that was finding a cab. His first driver had been right. It was nearly impossible to get back once you'd let your ride go on. The cemetery was too far out to be an ordinary cruising area. If he'd been on the other side of the city, he could have gone into the Carmelite monastery and asked Sister Beata for her help, but she would only have told him to use his cell phone, and he would have been embarrassed to have forgotten about it.

He was embarrassed now, but there was nobody to catch him at it, so he just got the damned thing out of his pocket, flipped through the phone book Bennis had made up for him—very carefully removing Susan's number, or putting it someplace he'd never think to look—and tried only two companies before one agreed to send out a car for him. Then he had to stand in the cold, watching as the very few people who came here on a weekday made their way to the graves that were familiar to them. The very few people were almost universally old women in the solid black of traditional village mourning. Gregor found himself wondering if there were really that many old women in America who had come over on the boat instead of being born on the spot. It seemed to him the timing was wrong. That was his parents' generation, not his own. His parents were buried in this cemetery too, and his brother, who had not been bright enough for scholarships to
Penn and student deferments from the draft. Sometimes he thought they'd gotten it all wrong. The best idea was not to have only one or two children and husband your resources so that you and they could have all the best in clothes and education. The best idea was to have as many children as possible so that you didn't end up standing in the wind on a cold January afternoon, wondering how all your family had disappeared.

Of course, Bennis was still young enough to have children, and she was one of seven, which meant she had to be not completely alien to the concept of large families. Gregor tried to envision Bennis as a mother and couldn't. Her children would all have papier mâché in their hair, and quote Tolkein at three.

The cab finally showed up. Gregor got in and gave the address of Holy Trinity Church because it was easier than the explanations he would have to give if he gave the address of any other building on the street. A couple of years ago somebody had blown the hell out of Holy Trinity, and the story had made the news as far away as Djakarta. Gregor had a suspicion that tourists had come to look at the rubble for a while, if only to give themselves a thrill about the dangers of terrorism. For whatever reason, the cabbies all knew how to get to Holy Trinity without having to have the route explained to them, and Gregor was grateful.

They had turned onto Cavanaugh Street from Gregor's least favorite cross street when he realized that he should have anticipated the problem. Stewart Gordon was no longer some guy he had known when they'd both been in the armies of their respective countries, training in intelligence and complaining about it. Stewart Gordon was now a Star, especially to small boys, and the small boys of Cavanaugh Street were lined up on the steps of Donna Moradanyan Donahue's town house in the hopes of getting a look at him.

Gregor got out of the cab and contemplated the clutch of preadolescent maleness barring his way to Donna's door. Then he got out his cell phone again and called.

“Use the alley and go around the back,” Donna said. “You can use the kitchen door.”

Gregor did as he was told. The alleys on Cavanaugh Street were like no other alleys he had ever seen anywhere, and the alley between Donna's house and the house next door was the most spectacular in the neighborhood. People cleaned them, and not just the people from the city, either. When Donna wasn't pregnant, she got out there with a broom and a bucket and a mop and washed the alley down at least once a month, no matter the weather.

Bennis was waiting for him at the kitchen door when he got there, a big mug of coffee in her hand. “This is interesting,” she said. “He says he'll go out and sign things for people as soon as he's talked to you, but I don't think they trust him.”

“They've got to trust me,” Stewart bellowed from down the hall in Donna's living room. “I'm Commander Rees. Everybody trusts me.”

Stewart Gordon could bellow better than anybody Gregor had ever met.

He shrugged off his coat and left it over the back of one of the chairs at Donna's kitchen table and then went down the hall to the living room. Tibor had been telling the exact truth. Donna was, indeed, fixing ribbons to Stewart Gordon's head. She was then draping them down his back and measuring them.

“What is it you think you're doing?” Gregor asked her.

“Ah,” Stewart said. “It's you. Damned bloody time. Excuse me, Mrs. Donahue.”

“I've heard worse,” Donna said. Then she turned to Gregor. “You'd disappeared. And he's the right size. The right height, even the right build.”

“Congratulations, by the way,” Stewart said. “For all the usual reasons, but also because I'm impressed with your intestinal fortitude.”

“Do you know Bennis?”

“Only by reputation,” Stewart said. “And, of course, because I've just met her, here. She's a very beautiful woman, in person.”

“That's a nice way of getting around saying you think she's crazy.”

“Everybody knows Bennis is crazy,” Donna said. “Even Bennis knows it. If you wouldn't mind, Mr. Gordon, I just want to do a drape across your back and see how it falls on the shoulders. If I don't get these measurements done, I'm never going to be on time for the wedding, and then what are you going to do? Postpone it until I'm ready?”

Gregor was ready to say that he and Bennis could always elope, but he didn't, because he knew they couldn't. Bennis didn't want to elope. Donna had a long, thick length of ice blue satin ribbon in her hands and had started to pin it to Stewart Gordon's back. Gregor sat down to watch the operation. It had occurred to him that now that he was here, she could make her measurements directly instead of using a substitute, but he wasn't going to point it out to her.

“So,” he said, “I take it you didn't just drop in. Didn't I hear that you were in Scotland these days, teaching?”

“At St. Andrew's, yes, on and off. It's off, at the moment. I'm in a place called Margaret's Harbor, making a movie.”

“Margaret's Harbor,” Gregor said. “I'm impressed. Have you met any presidents lately?”

“This president of yours doesn't go there,” Stewart said, “which is a damned good thing, considering. I'm making a silly movie, but they're paying me a lot of money. Don't you pay any attention to the news at all? It's been on the news. It's been all over the news.”

“That you're in a movie on Margaret's Harbor? I didn't realize you'd gotten that important.”

“Be serious. The murder. The murder has been all over the news.”

Donna stopped with pins in her mouth. Even Bennis came in from the kitchen, as if she'd magically been able to hear the word. Gregor put the coffee mug Bennis had handed him on the small table next to his chair, then thought better of it, picked it up, got a coaster from the little stack next to the lamp, and put the mug down on that.

“Well,” Bennis said. “We've all been saying you need something to do.”

“Okay,” Gregor said. “I do think I've heard something
about a murder, one of those girl singers killed her boyfriend, right, she's—”

“She's a first-class twit,” Stewart said, “but I'd be willing to bet nearly anything that she didn't pull this off. Normand, by the way. Arrow Normand. That's her name.”

“People in Khartoum know who she is,” Bennis said blandly.

“It's to his credit that he doesn't,” Stewart said. “She's a twit. They're all twits. The whole lot of them I'm working with. Well, you know, not the crew, those people. Those people are very competent. I like American film crews. They're always very professional. Which is a lot more than you can say for American actresses, if that's what you want to call this lot, which I don't, as a matter of fact, but there's nothing I can do about it. They're all first-class twits, and if it hadn't been for the money, I'd have walked out months ago. The money and Kendra Rhode. I found the body.”

It was liked being in a tornado. Gregor felt a little breathless. It didn't help that Donna had gone back to draping her ribbon, openly listening, but diligently plying pins.

Gregor tried to piece it together. “I know who Kendra Rhode is. You can't be romantically involved with her, can you? She isn't the sort of person I'd expect you to be romantically involved with.”

“Be serious,” Stewart said. “I've got better taste and a better mind, and Kendra Rhode doesn't get romantically involved with anybody, any more than she drinks and drugs like the people she clubs around with. But she's there. On Margaret's Harbor. She came out about a week and a half ago and opened this big house her family has there so that she could give a New Year's Eve party. That's when the murder happened. On the afternoon of New Year's Eve. There was a big storm.”

“A nor'easter,” Bennis said. “I heard about it. Boston was closed.”

“Damned near all of New England was closed,” Stewart said. “I'd never seen anything like it, not even in Scotland, and it snows in Scotland. That's how we found the body. We
weren't looking for a body. We thought there'd been an accident in that ridiculous purple truck of his. Why is it that so many Americans seem to work at looking like bad jokes from the
Daily Mirror?
At any rate, we went looking for the truck, and we found it, and there he was—”

“Who's we?” Gregor asked.

“Dr. Falmer. Annabeth Falmer. She—”

“She's a historian, I know,” Gregor said. “Tibor gave me a book of hers about the abolitionist movement. So, let's see, we've got you, this Arrow whoever person—”

“Normand,” Donna said.

“Kendra Rhode. Annabeth Falmer. Anybody else I should be worried about?”

“There are the rest of the twits,” Stewart said. “Marcey Mandret. Oh, and this real estate woman who's making a completely nuisance of herself, named, I kid you not, Bitsy Winthorp. But they don't matter. That's not what I want from you. I want you to come up to Margaret's Harbor and prove that Kendra Rhode did it.”

“Kendra Rhode,” Gregor said.

“Maybe not directly, because she'd never get her hands dirty,” Stewart said, “but she did it. I have no idea how to explain this to anybody who hasn't met her, but she did it. I've got pictures.”

“You've got pictures of Kendra Rhode committing a murder?”

“Be serious,” Stewart Gordon said. “As soon as this nice woman takes the pins out of me, I'll show you. I need you to come up to Margaret's Harbor and do something about what's going on, or she's going to get away with it, and she gets away with too bloody much.”

2

Stewart Gordon didn't have proof that Kendra Rhode had murdered somebody, or had somebody murdered, but Gregor wasn't expecting that. In a lot of ways, Stewart was the simplest man he had ever known, even simpler than Father Ti-bor, for whom simplicity was a religious necessity. Stewartt
was not religious to the point of being antireligious, but he was also a moralist of the straightforward and uncompromising kind. Intelligent and Educated people may have given up the idea of good and evil—or, at least, of evil—but Stewart Gordon never had. It shone out of him like a beacon from an old-fashioned light house. He was no more able to suppress it than he was able to sing soprano.