Cheating at Solitaire (19 page)

“All right,” he said. “You drive, I'll get the lay of the land.”

2

Jerry Young was waiting for them on the side of the road that ran along the beach on the other side of Oscartown from the place where the ferry docked, dressed in a high-waisted dark blue police uniform that looked as if it had been copied from a television show. If Gregor had had to guess, he would have said that Jerry Young was not much more than just past his twenty-first birthday. The only reason he wouldn't have guessed much younger than that was because of the badge. Gregor didn't think that even in as casual a place as Margaret's Harbor they would hire a police officer too young to buy the drinks he'd have to take away from the kids he caught with fake IDs. The beach road was actually named Holcomb Avenue, and it wasn't anything like on the way from the ferry to the Oscartown Inn. Gregor was fairly sure they had passed the inn as they came across
town, but they'd never gotten to Main Street, so he wasn't sure. He had seen not much of anything but stretch after stretch of New Englandy clapboard and shingle houses, packed as closely together as they would have been in the cheapest suburbs of Cleveland or Detroit. Some of the houses on those tiny lots were huge, filling their limited spaces as compactly as if they'd oozed in and then hardened. Margaret's Harbor might be a vacation enclave for Old Money, but unlike some of the other enclaves Gregor could think of—say, for instance, Newport—this one was an enclave for Old Money that didn't mind living as if it were in Levittown. Clara Walsh saw the expression on his face and coughed.

“It's Oscartown,” she said. “Everybody wants to be in Oscartown. Presidents have been here. Kennedys have been here.”

Gregor looked up and saw a towering Victorian pile rising up at the end of the beach. “What's that?” he asked.

Bram Winder laughed. “That's the Point. It's the Rhode family house on the island. They got here before all these other people did.”

The ferry. The beach. The Point. Gregor was fairly sure that they were stretched out along a single line, albeit a snaky one. He didn't think it was possible that Oscartown had two ocean frontages. The island was bigger than that. There would be other towns. He looked straight ahead as they began to pull in next to Jerry Young. There was a lot of wind. It was making the policeman's cap jiggle up and down.

Clara Walsh pulled the car to a halt at the curb and got out. Bram Winder got out too, and a moment later he was holding open Gregor's door, trying to be polite and professional without doing an imitation of a chauffeur. Gregor got out too, and looked around. There really was a wind, a good hard one. It was freezing.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Clara Walsh said. “This is Jerry Young. He's the Oscartown Police Department.”

“Not all of it,” Jerry Young said, grabbing Gregor's hand and pumping it. “I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Demarkian.

We've heard a lot about you. I'm hoping you can do something about this mess before we all go crazy.”

“Jerry doesn't like having Arrow Normand in his jail,” Clara said. “It upsets his equilibrium.”

“It upsets everything,” Jerry Young said. “You don't know what it's like. We've got photographers staking us out every hour of the day, trying to get in side doors, climbing through drains. They're crazy, all these people. And then there she is. She won't talk. She won't even talk to her lawyers. She won't talk to us. She just sits there, under a blanket, sacked out.”

“Shock,” Clara Walsh said solemnly.

“Oh, for God's sake,” Jerry Young said. “She was treated for shock. And it's been days. She can't still be in shock after all these days. I'll tell you what I think. I think she's some kind of mental defective. I think she never could talk except for what they wrote down for her. And now there's nobody to write things down for her, so here we are.”

Gregor was turning into an icicle. He thought about Ben-nis and Donna and the wedding arrangements back home. He thought about Tibor. He thought about Lida and how she had probably packed food into his suitcases somewhere. Then he looked down off the road onto the beach. They were standing just above an outcropping of rocks, deep and tall and solid looking, but with rounded edges, because they were so close to the sea. He looked beyond the rocks to the beach itself, and then to the ocean, which seemed to be very far out.

“Close to low tide,” Jerry Young said helpfully. “High tide, it comes all the way up to those rocks, and in a bad summer storm it will come up to the sidewalk. There aren't too many summer storms that bad, fortunately.”

“Huh,” Gregor said. He looked around again. “This is where it happened? This is where you found the body?”

“And the truck,” Jerry Young said. “Yes, sir. I'm not sure we can say that it happened here, though. I mean, I'd have assumed it did, but one of the guys from the state police said that since we didn't find the bullet, it might have been done
somewhere else. The bullet went through his head, you know, and out the other side, and then through the window over on that side—there was a hole. But we looked for the bullet, all over here. And we didn't find it.”

“Huh,” Gregor said again. He went as close to the edge of the sidewalk as he dared. He was wearing good city shoes. It hadn't occurred to him to wear anything else. He didn't like the idea of stepping off into the snow, which looked like it was at least ankle deep. “Did you just look,” he asked Jerry Young, “or did you get some equipment out here and clear the area and sift through it?”

Jerry Young looked surprised, but what bothered Gregor was that Clara Walsh looked surprised too. “Do you mean to say you want us to dredge the place?” she asked. “The way we'd, I don't know, the way we'd search a lake?”

“I'm saying that there's a lot of snow,” Gregor said, “and a bullet is a small thing. Granted, you'd think there ought to have been some sign of it, a hole, some melted place that shouldn't have been, but it seems like a lot of people were walking around here that night—”

“It wasn't really the night,” Jerry Young said. “By the time I got here, it was maybe four or four thirty in the afternoon. People just think of it as night because it was so dark. The storm, you know, was blocking out everything, and so the streetlights were on, and people thought—”

“Yes, I see,” Gregor said. “But I'm right, aren't I? There were a lot of people here.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jerry Young said. “Even before I got here. And then after I got here, I called the state police, and they came, you know, and then there were more of us. But we really did look. We looked hard. We looked right at the time, and then we looked later, when the wrecker came to take the truck away. We got down on our hands and knees and sifted through snow until we were blue.”

Gregor walked back and forth along the sidewalk. One of the pictures Stewart had shown him on Cavanaugh Street was of the truck on these rocks, on its side. The good thing about cell phone photographs was that they were available
in an emergency. The bad thing was that the image quality often sucked, and Gregor hadn't realized, from that particular photograph, just how steep and ragged the outcropping was. It didn't matter that it had no sharp edges. There were so many thrusts of rock going in so many different directions, any vehicle that landed on them would be totaled by definition.

“He was lying against the door, wasn't he,” Gregor said. “I'm trying to remember this from Stewart's photographs. He was lying against the door, and the door must have been lying against the rocks. He was in the front passenger seat.”

“Right,” Jerry Young said.

“Was he wearing a seat belt?” Gregor asked.

“No, I don't think he was,” Jerry Young said. “But does that matter? He didn't die in the crash. He died of a gunshot wound. Why would you care if he was wearing one or not?”

“I don't care if he wasn't wearing one,” Gregor said. “It doesn't mean anything. Lots of people don't wear seat belts when they should. If he was wearing one, though, it would mean he'd gotten into the car intending to go somewhere. Which would have been useful information.”

“Ah,” Jerry Young said, but he still looked confused.

“Okay,” Gregor said. “Let's see if I can get this straight. He was in the truck, and the truck was coming from the center of town when it went off the road. Is there any way you can know if he was in the passenger seat when the truck left town? I assume it had to have been coming from there, right, because he was with Arrow Normand and she would have been on the set of this movie they're making.”

“I don't think so,” Clara Walsh said. “I mean, they don't always shoot everybody every day, but Mark Anderman would have had to be on the set that morning because he had some kind of technical job.”

“And they did film that morning?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, yes, in the beginning,” Clara Walsh said. “We checked into that. It made the people in town laugh their heads off, but what are you going to do? If we'd said there
was a good chance of a major earthquake, they probably would have taken us seriously. But nobody knows what a nor'easter is really like unless they live here.”

“So,” Gregor said. “Mark Anderman was at work, and then work stopped sometime that morning—”

“About one in the afternoon,” Jerry Young said. “I was sitting in Cuddy's when Marcey Mandret came in and started drinking champagne cocktails like they were water. I guess by then the snow had gotten so bad they'd just given up.”

“Huh,” Gregor said again. He walked back and forth, back and forth, but there was nothing to see, and he had never understood fictional detectives who seemed to be able to bring insights out of obsessive behavior. There were the rocks, and the sea, and the picture in his mind of the truck crashed on them. He wanted to establish a sequence. His major problem was that he wasn't sure a sequence of what.

He tried one more time. “Mark Anderman was riding in the passenger seat,” he said, “and who was driving? Arrow Normand was driving?”

“She told Dr. Falmer she was,” Jerry Young said. “At least, that's what Dr. Falmer reported. Arrow Normand came to her door and started babbling about how there had been an accident, and it was her fault. I figure she wouldn't have said it was her fault if she hadn't been driving.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Let's assume that for the moment, for the sake of argument. They came along this road. Arrow Normand was driving. Mark Anderman was in the passenger seat. The truck went off the road. Here's the first question: why did the truck go off the road? Yes, I know there was a nor'easter. I know a lot of vehicles were going off the road. But why did this one go off the road? The first possibility is that somebody shot Mark Anderman in the head. Assuming he was shot in the car, it would have to have been somebody sitting next to him, not behind him. Again, assuming Stewart's pictures are correct—”

“Do you mean you think he doctored them?” Clara Walsh said.

“No,” Gregor said. “I don't. So it would have to have been somebody in the car, and then the chances are good that the person who did shoot him was not Arrow Normand.”

Now all three of them looked surprised. “How could you know that?” Bram Winder demanded. “If she was driving the car, and he was in the car—”

“Stewart Gordon got a picture of her, too,” Gregor said. “She wasn't just covered with blood, she'd been sprayed with it. Look at the photographs. The blood didn't spray toward the driver's side. It wouldn't have, but it's clear in the photographs that it didn't. It didn't spray to the passenger side, either, although there was blood there because the bullet seems to have gone through that window. It sprayed back. In order to get sprayed with blood, Arrow Normand would have to have been behind the passenger seat and sitting pushed forward toward the open area in the center.”

“She could have been doing that,” Jerry Young said automatically. “It was a pickup truck, but it was a fancy pickup truck. There was a backseat.”

“I wonder if somebody was following it on the road,” Gregor said. “Or if somebody was following on foot, or watching on foot.”

“You mean you think it's for sure that she didn't commit the murder?” Jerry Young said. “Just like that? You haven't been here, what, an hour? And you just know?”

“All I know is that logic is always right, even if you can't make yourself believe it,” Gregor said. “And right now, I have a set of facts that would make more sense if there were a third person involved. Of course, if there is a third person involved, there's the big question. Arrow Normand must have some idea who that person is. She must have seen the murder happen, or somehow been out of the way and then come back right after it happened, or at least been on the scene—knocked out, maybe, by the accident—and that means that she must either know who did it, or suspect who did it. So, why isn't she telling anybody?”

1

Stewart Gordon liked to think of himself as a straightforward man, and in most areas of his life this was absolutely true. It was simply easier to speak his mind than to remember what it was that would offend somebody this week, especially since the defnition of “offensive” seemed to change on a daily basis, and in ways he could never anticipate. Hell, even the words you were allowed to use changed on a daily basis, and it didn't help much if you were known to be an outspoken Man of the Left, as he had always been. The trouble was that he was a Man of Another Left, not the Marxist one that saw all the events of history through the distorting lens of socialist inevitability. You had to be an idiot if you thought socialism was inevitable, and Stewart was no idiot. But he wasn't a man of the New Left, either. He had no stomach for the romance of the primitive. He didn't think that Western civilization was the most corrupt, the most racist, the most sexist, the most oppressive civilization in the world. He'd seen a lot of the world, and he'd had a decent education. He had no illusions about Nature, either, or primitive peoples. The Noble Savage was the pipe dream of all left-wing movements. The only way you could believe it is if you had never really met a savage—or if you had, and you were as accomplished at self-delusion as Michelangelo was at sculpture. He'd never understood all of that, that screaming need so many people had to declare that having to live in a world with Fox News was much more oppressive than living under a government that would execute you for sleeping
with your boyfriend, especially if you also happened to be a boy. Stewart was a Man of the Left in the sense of being in favor of a welfare state that really provided things for people, like food and shelter, when they had no other way of getting them. He believed not only in safety nets, but in thick safety nets, and in never trusting anything said by any large organization. That took care of both corporations and government bureaus, and Stewart thought that was exactly where his suspicions ought to be.