Cheating at Solitaire (16 page)

“A nine-thousand-square-foot hotel suite,” Stewart Gordon said. “Think about it. The house I grew up in wasn't a third that size. I bet the house you were brought up in wasn't either.”

“I was brought up in an apartment,” Gregor said. “You said they had people with them?”

“Oh, yes,” Clara said. “There was the whole crew, really. Kendra Rhode and that odious boy who doesn't seem to do anything but be vulgar. Marcey Mandret. Another film crew person, Steve something—I can't remember how this went. I think Arrow Normand went out with Steve whoever he was, but came back with Mark Anderman. They met some people from Los Angeles, I think. It really was on CNN. We can look it up on the Internet if you're interested.”

Gregor didn't know if he was interested or not, but the dock was coming up fast, and they could all talk about it later. They were approaching land, and out there, waiting for them, was—nothing at all. Gregor had the feeling that he had stepped into the kind of movie he would have refused to watch if Bennis had wanted to stay up late to do it.

1

Carl Frank understood the attractions of café society. He had understood them as a child, when he had watched his mother sitting over the social pages morning after morning in their kitchen in Saddle Ridge, New Jersey. He had understood them in college, when it seemed as if every rich girl with a recognizable Old Money name had wanted nothing more than to see a photo spread of herself in
Life
, milking cows on a commune in California. He even understood them now, although, being older, his understanding was more multifaceted. The advertising agencies only cared about reaching a great honking chunk of the eighteen-to-thirty-five year-old demographic, and the closer the skew was to the eighteen, the better. It was one of the things that left him faintly baffled. When he was eighteen, nobody he knew would have admitted to a fascination with society. Most of them wouldn't even admit to a fascination with being part of the popular crowd in high school. Now it was as if the whole world were a high school, the kind of high school where lots of rich kids dominated the sports teams and the cheerleading squad, and the smart kids went unnoticed by anybody at all.

Until they founded Microsoft and become the richest people on the planet, Carl thought—and then brushed that away. Nobody ever saw Bill Gates on the red carpet, except maybe at the White House, and probably not even then. The White House probably didn't even have a red carpet. His mind had turned into some kind of mush. He was sweaty, in spite of the cold, and he was frustrated as hell.

“No,” he had told Michael Bardman earlier, using every ounce of sanity he had not to hang up the phone in the idiot's ear, “it is not possible to spin a murder in a way that will have positive results for the movie, assuming there ever is a movie, since Arrow Normand is unavailable to work at the moment. And maybe, for a good long time.”

This was not entirely fair. From what Carl understood about celebrity murder cases, he was fairly sure that some judge somewhere would make it possible for Arrow to finish her work on the movie, if only so that she could make enough money to pay her legal bills. Even so, the whole thing was a mess, and it didn't look likely to clean up anytime soon. What was worse, he was having an unusually difficult time getting information. He had approached Annabeth Falmer this morning, thinking that she would be the best bet. Arrow Normand had been in her house on the afternoon in question, after all, and Marcey Mandret had too, and so had Stewart Gordon. It was practically a little Court TV true-crime documentary right there on her living room rug. At the last minute, he hadn't been able to go through with any of the things he had been thinking of. Dr. Falmer was just as clueless as he'd hoped she would be, but it wasn't the right kind of clueless. She wasn't a snob, intellectual or social. She wasn't a fool, or an airhead like Marcey and Arrow. She was just a pleasant, well-meaning, quietly dressed woman who probably didn't have the faintest idea what she'd gotten herself into. Carl Frank hadn't wanted to be the one to let her in on the secret.

The problem was, there weren't a whole lot of sources of information on Margaret's Harbor. The local police weren't talking to him, and the state police weren't talking to him either. Eventually, down the line somewhere, some secretary in a back office would pick up the phone and spill to the nearest reporter, just to make herself feel important, but it hadn't gotten to that point yet. The police had called in this outside consultant, this Gregor Demarkian, and that was all they would tell anybody for the time being. Carl had looked up Gregor Demarkian on the Internet, and been suitably
impressed. God only knew what this guy charged. Considering his reputation, it was probably a lot. whatever it was, he wouldn't be talking to Carl Frank, unless it was to get information instead of give it.

Of course, there were all those professional sources of information, meaning the press. Carl was no more of a snob than Annabeth Falmer was. He didn't turn up his nose at the paparazzi. They often knew things nobody else did, because they were practically as good as spies. Hell, the best of them, if they didn't have cameras in their hands, would have been charged as stalkers. They were stalkers. They went everywhere, and they thought nothing of breaking into somebody's house or climbing a tree outside a bedroom window to get a few money shots of the stuff going on inside. Practically the first thing Carl did when he took over publicity for a movie was to sit down with the principal actors and try to get them to deal with the reality of the attention they were getting. He almost never succeeded. There was something about actors—about “celebrities” of every stripe—that needed to believe that the paparazzi would never turn on them, that needed to forget that the point was not to make them famous but to make them pay.

“Bad news sells newspapers,” he would tell them. He would look straight into their eyes and know they weren't hearing a word he was saying. He would try anyway. “From their point of view,” he would say, “watching you screw up, watching you crash and burn and destroy yourself, is by far the better story. There are more people out there who are willing to pay to see that than are willing to pay to see you succeed. Hell, practically nobody is willing to pay to see you succeed.”

Right now, of course, they would pay for anything, because there was nothing. He had managed to get Marcey out of the public eye for the next half second, and Arrow was where they couldn't get to her. But the paparazzi didn't have access to the local police or the state police or that prosecutor, Clara Walsh, and neither did the “legitimate” reporters now camped out on Main Street in Oscartown. He could see
ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox from the window of this silly upscale diner. They would hang around here until it was time for the press conference Clara Walsh had promised to give as soon as Gregor Demarkian arrived. Then they would cover that. Then they would come back here. There was nothing to do in Oscartown in the winter. There was barely anything to do in Oscartown in the summer, but then, at least, the local celebrities would be more to the liking of the national press. Katie Couric wasn't impressed with Arrow Normand. She was impressed with nearly any Kennedy.

The young woman who had taken his order for coffee had come back with his cup. She put it down on the table just as the front door opened and the man Carl was sure he was supposed to meet came in from outside. The blast of cold that came in with him made Carl's spine creak. The storm had been over for days, but it often felt as if it were still with them. The weather in California got better after storms. Out here, it just seemed to get worse.

The man was very young, so young Carl wondered for a moment if he was even of legal age. He seemed to know the waitress, which was not surprising. He came down the long line of booths and stopped next to Carl with his parka hood still pulled up over his head.

“Mr. Frank?” he said.

“Mr. Bullard?” Carl said.

Jack Bullard pulled back the parka hood, unzipped the parka, and sat down. Everything about him was not only big but outsized. His feet were too big for the slenderness of his legs. His head was too big for his torso. He had to be six foot five.

The waitress came back with another cup of coffee and put it on the table. She went away without speaking, even though Jack Bullard thanked her in a voice loud enough to be heard outside on the street. Then Jack pulled over the sugar and the cream and began to load up as if he were making a milk shake.

Carl found himself wishing he still smoked cigarettes. It would at least give him something to do with his hands.

Jack Bullard had big hands, too. He finished with the cream and sugar and pushed them away. Then he shrugged the parka all the way off.

“So,” he said.

“So,” Carl said.

“Here's the thing,” Jack said. “I'm a reporter. I may be a reporter for a little pissant paper, but I'm still a reporter. I don't get paid to withhold information.”

“I understand that,” Carl said. “I don't want you to withhold information. I thought you said it was your editor who doesn't want you to print any stories about the case.”

“Oh, we're printing stuff about the case,” Jack said. “You can't avoid it, really, it's the biggest thing to hit the Harbor in decades. She doesn't like printing stories on movie stars.”

“Unusual, in this day and age.”

“Yeah, well. It's the Harbor. The people here aren't much interested, if you know what I mean. The people who are usually here. But anything she doesn't want to print, I'm allowed to sell elsewhere. So.”

“So.” Carl looked out the window again. When he looked back, he had made up his mind for the first time since this mess had started. “I'm not asking you to withhold information. You can sell anything you've got to anybody you've got. All I'm asking is that you tell me first.”

“And for that you're willing to pay me some ridiculous amount of money a week.”

“A thousand dollars.”

“A thousand dollars,” Jack said. “It's a ridiculous amount of money. If you don't want me to withhold information, what do you want?”

“I want you to tell me before you give the information to the world so I can get a head start on spinning it. It's what I do, Mr. Bullard. I spin. That's what they pay me for.”

“I don't see that there's much of anything to spin here,” Jack said. “She shot him. They've arrested her. There's going to be a trial. Isn't that what usually happens?”

“Absolutely. That's what usually happens. But it occurs to
me you might have heard something, or seen something, on the day in question, or since the filming has been going on here. Something somebody said, or did, or something like that. Your editor may not like to run stories about movie stars, but you've been taking pictures of them. I've seen you.”

“It's like I said,” Jack said. “She lets me sell what she doesn't want. I offered to cut her in on it, but she doesn't want the money.”

“She's an interesting woman, your editor.”

“She owns the paper,” Jack said. “She's okay.”

“One of the things you could do is let me see the pictures,” Carl said. “Before you sell them, I mean.”

“I don't take the really nasty kinds of pictures,” Jack said. “I don't have pictures of people naked, or that kind of thing.”

“You've got a picture of Marcey Mandret on the day of the murder, don't you? In that bar, fairly drunk off her ass.”

“Sure. But I wasn't the only one. Those guys from New York and Los Angeles have been in and out for weeks. And I didn't take the kind of picture you have to fuzz parts out of before you print.”

“Understood,” Carl said. “But you've got others, don't you? You went to Vegas?”

“Yeah, but it doesn't matter. I got that one picture, you know, of the bunch of them together, but I sold it, and that was that. It's one of those places, you know. I don't have any advantage there. I don't know the place, or how it works. Here, I can find things nobody else can because I know things nobody else knows. At least, nobody from outside. With that one, I got a shot and that was all there was to it. They ran around town, they did things, and mostly I could never get there in time to get anything interesting. And there were always those other guys.”

“Photographers.”

“Paparazzi,” Jack said. “I hate that name.”

“Yes,” Carl said.

Then he reached into the back of his pants and came out with his wallet.

2

Here was the odd thing: Arrow Normand didn't really mind being in jail. She minded not having access to her prescriptions, and not being able to get anything to drink more serious than Diet Coke, but jail itself was something she found it surprisingly easy to take. It might have been different if she had been in an actual prison, or in one of those big-city jails where she would have been locked up with a couple of dozen people. The Margaret's Harbor jail was not like any of that. There were only three serious cells, and neither of the other two was occupied. The police here didn't seem to have watched any of the shows on Court TV about life behind bars. She was never handcuffed, and the night guard had gotten so embarrassed by coming in on her at a private moment that he'd brought her a standing screen to shield herself when she was on the toilet. It was less like jail than like being involuntarily committed to rehab. She even had a pack of lawyers to talk to if she needed therapy.

Actually, Arrow had tried rehab once, years ago, and it hadn't worked out. They kept wanting her to talk about herself, which was fine—she'd probably spent more time talking about herself in the last ten years than she'd spent talking about anything else—but the things they wanted her to say didn't make any sense to her. She was supposed to have “insight.” She didn't know what that meant. When other people in group had “insight,” they talked about Their Addiction and Their Cycle of Codependency. Or something. Arrow had never been able to figure it all out. In the end, she had just let herself drift through a couple of weeks of beautiful sunsets and group meals in the big cafeteria that seemed to serve nothing but seafood and fruit, and then one morning she'd woken up and decided to leave. People said they were changed in rehab, but Arrow had not been. She still wasn't able to see the point.