Cheating at Solitaire (15 page)

“So why be so sure she committed the murder?” Gregor asked.

“Well,” Clara said, “let's see. First, she had his blood in her hair. A lot of it. Her hair was soaked with it. Then, he died in the truck—it was a purple pickup truck, did Mr. Gordon tell you that?—and her fingerprints were all over it, and so were his.”

“Everybody's fingerprints were all over it,” Stewart said. “So were mine. We'd all been in that truck.”

“Her fingerprints were in the blood in the truck,” Clara said. “Which is somewhat more incriminating. Then there's the way she's been behaving since, which has been, let's say, less than cooperative.”

“Has she offered an explanation for any of it?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Clara Walsh said. “It seems that no matter how stupid she is, she's seen enough true-crime documentaries to know she doesn't have to talk to the police without a lawyer present, and as soon as the lawyer showed up, she refused to say anything at all. And this wasn't a good lawyer. It was one of the entertainment lawyers the movie people have on tap for things like disputes over permits. When we try to ask her questions, all Arrow Normand says is ‘I don't have to talk to you,' and then she completely shuts up. She's very good at shutting up.”

Gregor thought about this. “What about the rest of them?” he asked finally. “You must have talked to other people, even other people who are part of this movie. Would they talk to you? At all?”

Clara Walsh shrugged. “Marcey Mandret ran off at the mouth for a bit, but none of it made any sense. I've seen the tapes. I think she was high as a kite at the time. We talked to Kendra Rhode. She didn't say much of anything and looked bored. We talked to Mr. Gordon here, and to Dr. Falmer, because Arrow Normand went to her house. We talked to some people on the set, including the guy who does public relations for the movie. He's the one I feel sorry for. Anyway, nobody has said much of anything. And it was the day
of the storm. Nobody was doing much of anything. It was hard to get around.”

“Yes,” Gregor said.

The boat made a sudden, dramatic lurch and then seemed to glide, so slowly Gregor thought he could have walked faster.

Clara Walsh came to the windows and looked out. “Oh, good,” she said. “We're on the water.”

2

Gregor would have said they'd been on the water the whole time, but he knew what Clara Walsh meant, and he distrusted himself when he began to be fussy over trivialities. Still, he found himself thinking that television had done a great disservice to real detectives in real police departments all across America. Television detectives were always strong and resolute and dedicated and clearsighted. When they weren't, there was always some good reason why they were having a bad day, or something particularly spectacular to compensate. That was why Gregor truly hated the show
Monk
, even though he was forced to sit through it several times a week, since Tibor and Bennis and Donna loved it. He especially didn't like it because they kept asking him whether it was anything at all like realhomicide detective work in a real police department, and of course it was nothing like it at all.

It was not a long passage from the mainland of Cape Cod to Margaret's Harbor. Gregor could see the shore of the island almost as soon as they set off, and the closer they got the clearer it was that their dock would be deserted when they reached it. Gregor found this very interesting, in a case in which everybody went out of his way to tell him just how much press there would be watching his every move. Apparently, they weren't watching it yet. He paced back and forth in front of the line of windows. He wondered what people usually used the ferry for, when it was running on full schedule.

“It can't be a commuter route,” he said.

Stewart Gordon and Clara Walsh looked up. They had been talking about something else near the bar. They hadn't expected him to speak.

“It can't be a commuter route,” Gregor said again. “This ferry, I mean. If it were a commuter route, it would have to be operating pretty close to full schedule even in the winter.”

“Oh,” Clara said. “Well, it is a commuter route in the summer, when there are a lot of people on the island. There's no point in making it a commuter route at this time of year, though, because nobody lives on Margaret's Harbor year-round and commutes to work in the city.”

“Why not?” Gregor asked.

“It's too long a way, I suppose,” Clara said. “It's about ten to twelve minutes on the ferry to the mainland, and then it's another hour into Boston at least, even with perfect traffic conditions, and traffic conditions are seldom perfect in Boston. Add that to the increased possibility of bad weather conditions during the winter and early spring, and I suppose most people find the idea just too much trouble. They come up for the summer though, and commute from the Harbor then.”

“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.”