Cheating at Solitaire (33 page)

“I know,” Gregor said, “but it's been one of those things I've been thinking about. The toy boys aren't anybody, but neither is anybody else involved in this thing. There's enormous publicity, and apparently enormous public interest, and yet most of these people have minimal if any claims to prominence. They're not great singers or actors. They haven't invented anything. They don't run governments or corporations. The most diligent of them are like the teen idols of the fifties, except that they've taken on the kind of significance that used to be reserved for—I don't know whom it used to be reserved for. I've never seen anything like this before. Do you know that a horde of photographers tried to break down a door in the emergency room this afternoon to get pictures of Marcey Mandret lying in a hospital bed? Who the hell is Marcey Mandret?”

“She's an actress. She's been in a couple of movies.”

“Not any of the movies I've ever seen,” Gregor said. “It's almost a form of mass hysteria.”

“Maybe it is,” Bennis said. “I don't think you're going to save the soul of popular culture from the Oscartown Inn, though.”

“I don't want to save the soul of popular culture,” Gregor said. “I just want to find out enough about Mark Anderman to discover why somebody would want to risk virtually everything to kill him. Not that murderers are great at risk assessment, but you know what I mean.”

“You mean you want me to find Steve Becker,” Bennis said. “Not just stories about him, or even by him, but him.”

“It does occur to me that if I had to have a suspect for the
killing of Mark Anderman, Steve Becker, or somebody in Steve Becker's position, would be the most likely one.”

“I've got to go get a tail pinned on me,” Bennis said. “It's a game Donna thought up. I'll get Donna when this is over and we'll take a whack at it.”

“A tail pinned on you with what?” Gregor asked.

Bennis had already hung up in his ear. Gregor put the phone back into the cradle and looked around the room. It was a very nice room, but he had to do something serious about getting dressed, and then he had to do something serious.

2

Gregor didn't know what he'd expected to find when he finally got Clara Walsh to let him talk to a real, live policeman, but it wasn't what he found when he made his way downstairs and was shown to “the Ivory Room” by one of the young men who manned the desk. He tried not to be too judgmental about the naming of the room. He hated it when hotels named rooms. He even hated it that the White House named rooms. He had expected, when he'd asked Clara Walsh to bring him somebody in law enforcement, that they'd meet in his own room, which would be cramped but private, and he really didn't care what a mess it was. Instead, exactly sixteen minutes after he'd hung up on Clara Walsh, there was a phone call from the desk and a request that he meet Clara in “the Ivory Room.”

In his mind, men who served as the single law enforcement officer in small towns were older, and balding, and running to fat. They were also not very bright. He had no idea where he had come up with that image. It didn't even fit Andy Taylor, and that was the single most famous image of a small-town sheriff in American popular culture. Still, it was the image he had, and when he walked through the door of the Ivory Room—which was being held open, politely, by the young man from the desk—he at first didn't realize what he was seeing. He saw Clara Walsh, looking like herself,
and Bram Winder and Jerry Young, and a young man standing beside them, looking like a marine out of uniform.

A second later, Gregor realized that the young man who looked like a marine was a cop, and a second after that he was sure that the cop had once actually been a marine. He looked very young, barely out of high school, in fact, but Gregor guessed he was probably closer to thirty. He had the kind of posture that made you wonder if he had swallowed a flagpole.

The cop came forward and held out his hand. “Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “I'm Don Hecklewhite. I'm with the state police. I'm sorry to be out of uniform. It's my day off.”

“Marines?” Gregor said.

“Yes, sir. Six years.”

Clara Walsh cleared her throat. “It's no time to be talking about the military,” she said. “If you were both marines, you can go someplace and get some beers and talk about it later. I have a press conference due to start in ten minutes, and we can hold them up for a while, but they're going to get restless. Could we get this done, whatever this is?”

“I was in the army,” Gregor said. Then he let himself look around the Ivory Room. There was some real ivory in it, which surprised him. It was illegal to trade in ivory, and Oscartown was the kind of place where the guests would care. The ivory was in the form of carved pieces, many of them very elaborate, all of them looking a little yellow with age. Maybe ivory was morally all right if it was old enough. Maybe the guests had pieces at home, brought back from tours of India by grandparents in the days when killing elephants was just as natural as having champagne at debutante parties.

Gregor pushed all these images out of his head and concentrated on Don Hecklewhite. “You're on your own? You don't have a partner?”

“No, sir,” Don Hecklewhite said. “We don't usually ride together. It's not efficient. And in this part of Massachusetts”—he shrugged—“there's not much call for us. It's like Oscar-town. They take on some extra people in the season, but for the winter, Jerry here is it.” Don Hecklewhite hesitated, then
looked apologetically at Jerry. “I did talk to the town council about taking on at least one other man while the filming was going on. It's not as crowded as it is when the summer people are here, but at least in Oscartown itself there's been a significant uptick in the population. And an uptick in the population usually means trouble of one kind or another.”

“And has there been that?” Gregor asked. “Trouble?”

On the other side of Clara Walsh, Jerry Young snorted. “Sort of. Nothing serious. A real rash of drug-related crap, the drugs they use for date rapes, and now there's Jack, and I haven't talked to him yet. And a lot of drinking and driving, which we get here in the winter in any case. Mostly the big problem has been the photographers. They camp.”

“They camp?” Gregor asked.

“They don't put up at hotels,” Clara Walsh put in. “Not that there'd be enough room for all of them anyway. But it's the middle of the winter. You'd think they'd want somewhere warm to go. Instead, most of them sleep in their cars, right outside the houses where the girls live. Young women. whatever. They camp.”

“Ah,” Gregor said. “And these photographers, they're around all the time?”

“They came in when the film people did,” Jerry Young said, “and they've been in ever since. Hordes of them. They camp out in front of the inn here, and at the houses where Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand live, and outside where the filming is going on, and in the bars and places like that, anywhere they think they'll be able to get a photograph. W e're falling over them all the time. They're falling all over each other. It's insane. And I think it's catching. Jack was getting like that for a while there.”

“Jack, the man who just got drugged and hacked at?” Gregor asked.

“Yes, sir,” Jerry Young said. “Jack's a photographer too, he's just local. He was chasing after them for a while there. He said he got good money for the pictures when Linda didn't want them. I used to have such a crush on Arrow Normand when I was in high school. Now she's in our jail, and
nobody can figure out why. I thought these people had lawyers that got them out no matter what.”

“Jack Bullard got attacked?” Don Hecklewhite said. “Why didn't anybody tell me that?”

“He got drugged and beat up,” Jerry Young said. “I'll fill you in after all this. Somebody went at his hands and cut them up. No, not true. Just one hand. The right hand.”

“Linda must be close to losing it,” Don Hecklewhite said.

Clara Walsh looked exasperated. “O.J. had to stay in jail awaiting trial,” she said. “It makes me crazy, this idea that the justice system stops dead just because the defendants are rich and famous.”

“Well, it works for the rich,” Jerry Young said. “Sorry, Ms. Walsh, but you know it's true.” He turned to Gregor. “Do you know why I'm the only cop in town? Do you know why we take on a couple of extra men in the season, but we never really man up to a full complement? It's because nobody wants to arrest anybody here. These people who come in the summer, they're the heads of corporations, they're the heads of foundations and museums, we even get congressmen and senators and sometimes presidents. They get drunk and drive. Their kids get drunk and drive. We aren't really supposed to arrest anybody. We just pour them into the back of the cruiser and drop them at home, and if we pick up any one somebody too often, we suggest that maybe it might be a good idea to do a stint in rehab.”

“And there aren't any real crimes?” Gregor asked. “At all?”

“Burglaries,” Jerry Young said. “We get a fair amount of those, and I've gotten pretty good at handling them. And we get what are probably rapes, but nobody calls them that. And nobody will.”

Gregor thought about it. In a way, this made perfect sense. The FBI and the Secret Service operated on similar principles when it came to guarding high-ranking government officials or their children. If a senator got nailed for driving drunk, it was almost always by the regular D.C. police
or the police of some town where he wasn't known and nobody cared. He shifted focus.

“So,” he said. “I asked for some information about Mark Anderman.”

Don Hecklewhite leaned over Clara Walsh's shoulder and took a thick manila envelope off the lamp table at her side. “This is it,” he said. “Everything we know about the man. Everything Jerry knows, and everything I know, plus a summary of the forensic report. It looks like a lot, but it isn't much. The bulk is mostly pictures of him with Arrow Normand. He was twenty-four. He graduated from some high school in California, not a place I'd ever heard of. He had a little string of m i nor arrests, disorderly conduct, public drunk-enness, that sort of thing. Nothing much.”

“And family?”

“None that we could find,” Jerry Young said. “The stuff we got faxed from California mentioned a younger sister, but we weren't able to track her down. His father seems to have been long gone. His mother died about three years ago. He had a job, you know, that wasn't a very good one, except it let him hang around with Arrow Normand.”

There was a knock on the door. Clara Walsh got up to see what it was about, and came back looking agitated. “That was the management,” she said. “The Versailles Room is full of reporters and they're not being well behaved. The inn wants us to get in there and get this over with.”

“In a second,” Gregor said. “Something just occurred to me. You said the photographers were everywhere, all the time. They always hung out where they thought they could get pictures of Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand.”

“That's right,” Jerry said. “Leeches have a less firm grip, if you ask me.”

“Where were they the night of the murder?” Gregor asked. “I don't remember seeing anything about them being near the truck when it crashed, or after the crash. And I've talked to Stewart, at length. He brought Marcey Mandret to Annabeth Falmer's house over his shoulder, and Arrow Normand showed up at Annabeth Falmer's door dead drunk,
and yet nobody has mentioned anything about photographers being there at any time.”

“It was the storm,” Jerry Young said. “You weren't here when it happened, and you're not from around here, so I don't know if you understand just how bad a nor'easter like that can get. It doesn't usually, this early in the season, but this was a kicker. Most of these guys are from California. They're not used to that kind of weather.”

Gregor thought about it some more. “Stewart showed me photographs taken at the scene that he took with his cell phone camera. I've got those photographs upstairs in my things somewhere, and I can show you later, but what I remember was that the hood, windshield, and the driver's-side door of the car were almost entirely cleaned off. This was before you got there, and before the state police got there. Was that a function of the truck being on and running warm?”

“I'll check,” Jerry Young said, “but I don't think so. By the time I got there there was snow all over the truck and it wasn't running, but I don't know if it was running when Mr. Gordon got there and he turned it off, or what.”

“No,” Gregor said. “He would have known better than to turn it off.”

“We really have to go,” Clara Walsh said. “If this press conference turns into a brawl, we're going to be in more trouble than we are now.”

Gregor reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and came up with Stewart Gordon's surprise, still in its clear plastic freezer bag. Jerry Young blinked. Don Hecklewhite leaned forward. Clara Walsh blanched. Only Bram Winder had no reaction at all, and he wasn't paying attention.

Gregor handed the gun to Jerry Young, since he was technically the man in charge of the investigation. “Anna-beth Falmer found that in her couch this afternoon,” he said. “You'd better get it checked out. It was the same couch Arrow Normand was collapsed onto the day Mark Anderman was murdered, but I'd be willing to bet it wasn't Arrow Normand who brought it into the house.”

1

In the first few moments after waking up, Jack Bullard thought he was in his bed at home. Then, when that didn't work—the light was all wrong; the windows were too large and horizontally rectangular; the colors were sickly and green—he wondered if he had ended up in the bed of some girl. There used to be a lot of girls when Jack was younger. That was especially true in high school. Margaret's Harbor was like a lot of places where the local community lived hand in glove with people much richer and more sophisticated than they were themselves. Advancement fever had infected it, and that meant that the local high schools were full of year-round kids with dreams of going off to the Ivy League, or something close. It was not “cool” to be stupid at Margaret's Harbor High School, even though the school served the whole island instead of any one town, and it was full of fishermen's children who resented the hell out of the entire system. No, the biggest status symbol at MHHS was an acceptance letter to someplace “good,” and until you were in your senior year and had one, the assumption was that you were “smart” enough to get one. Jack had always been smart enough. He had always had a place at the best table in the lunchroom, and the attention of the best girls, who were all “smart” enough too. There were dumb blondes at MHHS, and even cheerleaders, but nobody ever took them seriously.