Cheating at Solitaire (37 page)

“With somewhat more publicity?”

“A little more,” Bennis said, “but it was very early in the morning, around six or seven, so not as much as you might think. And it's driving everybody crazy. Because this local guy, the one Kendra Rhode turned into something like her personal photographer on Margaret's Harbor, he was with them, and people saw him taking pictures, but the only picture that's ever come out has been that one I told you about, the one you saw, with all of them together. There are people who'd pay a lot of money for a few more of them, especially if there are any from inside the Hugh Hefner Suite. Iris said people have contacted this guy, this—”

“Jack Bullard,” Gregor said.

“That's right. That's it. People have contacted him, but all he says is that he doesn't have anything to sell, which nobody on earth believes. The best guess there is that he's saving them up for a book for later, that there's something really nasty in what he's got, something unusual. But so far, not a thing. And Iris says the word around town is that Kendra Rhode has dumped him anyway—nobody will say why.”

“But presumably because of something in the pictures,” Gregor said.

“I told you I could do better than just look up things on the Internet,” Bennis said. “Is any of this any help to you at all? Does it make any sense? None of these people make any sense to me, and I've been around famous people most of my life.”

Gregor was going to tell her there was a difference between fame and celebrity—it was a lecture he'd heard more than once from Father Tibor—but Clara Walsh had slammed back the dressing room's swinging door and was marching on him, men's room atmosphere be damned.

3

When Gregor finally went into the Versailles Room, it wasn't as bad as he'd feared, although it was odd enough. The room lived up to its name in some ways. The walls were all lined with mirrors, making the space look seven or eight times as large as it was. And the space was large enough. Gregor had been to the palace at Versailles. He had seen the original Hall of Mirrors. It was, by modern standards, a rather smallish room, nothing to rival even Mrs. Astor's ballroom, never mind major public spaces like the Colosseum or Madison Square Garden. This space was twice the size of the room it was trying to imitate, yet in spite of that, and in spite of the illusion created by the mirrors, the men and women sitting in row after row of wooden folding chairs looked cramped. The cameras and the light crews just looked out of place.

Still, in spite of all Clara Walsh's talk—and Stewart Gordon's—about ravaging hordes, the crowd was polite and orderly enough, and at least the front ranks of it were filled with people Gregor recognized from news outlets he understood. CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, Fox. The names were familiar and familiarly unthreatening, and for some reason all their major correspondents seemed to be in their forties or above. It was in the rows at the back that Gregor could see the trouble coming. All those were filled by people he did not know, from places he had never heard of, and most of the correspondents were young. That, he thought, would be the Internet contingent, the infamous blogs, the people he
was supposed to be afraid of. He tried to concentrate on the rows in the middle, where most of the print media was.
The New York Times was
up front, but the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
—well. Gregor supposed that Cleveland was used to taking a backseat to New York.

Clara Walsh was up at the makeshift podium, introducing him. Gregor only half listened. Everybody said the same things about him when they were presenting him to an audience. They covered his career in the FBI and his time with the Behavioral Sciences Unit. They mentioned the latest case or two that had received some serious publicity. They stressed the fact that he was a consultant and not a private eye. Gregor was still fixated by the audience. The seats were in a block, without a row up the middle, even though the room had been set up horizontally, along the length instead of the width. It felt odd. He wondered why it was so.

Clara had turned to look at him, which probably meant he ought to get up. He did get up. He thanked her, although he didn't know for what, and stood at the podium, looking out. In spite of all the deference paid to the broadcast and cable media, the woman from
The New York Times
was front and center. From what he remembered, the reporter from The New York Times was always front and center, no matter what the story was, or where. Maybe there was some kind of protocol here, where everybody was required to acknowledge the importance of
The Times
above all other newspapers.

I'm up here blithering inside my head, Gregor thought, and then called on the woman from
The Times
because she was right there in front of him.

“Mr. Demarkian,” she said, “there have been rumors for the last few days that you have been asked here by members of Arrow Normand's family because they are unsatisfied with the level of professionalism exhibited by the local police. Is there any truth to those rumors?”

“No,” Gregor said, relieved beyond measure to be able to give a straight answer to the first question out of the box. “I'm sure Miss Normand has a wonderful and loving family
who care deeply about her interests, but I've never met or heard from any of them as far as I know. I was asked to come here by Clara Walsh, in consultation with the Oscar-town Police Department.”

The woman from
The Times
sat down. There were a hundred hands in the air. Gregor knew he wasn't going to be able to get away with calling on only people in the front row. If he tried, it would be all over the Internet in seconds. He squinted into the distance and picked a young man midway into the block of seats. The young man was clean-cut and reassuringly ordinary looking. He didn't even go in for flam-boyance in ties.

Gregor pointed to him. The young man stood up and said, “Tom Carlyle,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. Could you tell us what you're charging the Oscartown Police Department for your services? Do you think the Oscartown Police Department would be willing to pay your fee if this case had not involved celebrities?”

Gregor sighed. You couldn't trust anything these days. Back when he'd been with the FBI, “clean-cut” had almost always meant “respectful.” There was a pitcher of water and an empty glass on the podium. Gregor poured himself some water and drank it. “In the first place,” he said, “I'm not sure it's the Oscartown Police Department that's paying my fee. It may be Clara Walsh's office. In the second place, most of the cases I'm called in to consult on do not include celebrities. I have no particular expertise at working with celebrities, but I do have some expertise at working with the analysis and classification of evidence, which is what I'm doing here.”

“Are you trying to say that the fact that the accused in this case is Arrow Normand makes no difference at all?” The question came from a very young man all the way in the back of the room, and he was nothing like clean-cut. In fact, Gregor wondered what he'd done to get that hair. It looked as if he'd been electrocuted.

Gregor cleared his throat. “You are…?” he said.

The young man with the electric hair said, “I'm Bobby
Gedowski, from Caught in the Crosshairs dot com. And I'll repeat. Can you really say that the fact that this case is about Arrow Normand makes no difference at all? That you and the police are handling this the same way you'd handle a domestic disturbance in a trailer park?”

“No,” Gregor said, “but not necessarily for the kind of reasons you're implying. A domestic disturbance, in a trailer park or elsewhere, isn't usually a matter where it is difficult to unravel the facts of the case. The facts are presented to the officers who respond to the call. The officers may have to deal with differing claims of culpability, and who hit whom first, but almost always the universe of their investigation is right there in front of them, and there's no need to go further afield. This case, like most of the ones I'm called in to consult on, contains a high level of ambiguity. Evidence is there, but its import isn't clear. Some of the evidence is missing. What is and is not a fact is not clear. And in cases like that, whether they involve celebrities or not, it is in the interests of justice for everybody to be very careful. The system should be as good a system as we can make it. The fact that it can never be perfect, that it will convict the wrong person on occasion and release the wrong person on occasion, is no reason to stop trying to eliminate error in all its forms wherever we find it.”

The man who jumped up next was pudgy, middle-aged, and smug. “Lou Bandovan,
Christian Reporter
,” he said, without waiting for Gregor to call on him. “Wouldn't you say that the disgraceful acts committed in this place are the result of a popular culture steeped in obscenity and lawlessness meeting up with an elite liberal culture committed to moral relativism?”

There were groans, and not just from the front of the room. Gregor didn't know what to say. He wasn't even sure that there was anything to say.

“Well,” he started, because he was sure he had to say something, “I don't know about obscenity or relativism, but I do know that crime is a constant in all human societies, and murder especially is a constant. Some of the oldest
anthropological artifacts are the bodies of men and women murdered millennia ago. In fact—”

Gregor didn't have much to follow that “in fact.” He was spinning words in hopes that one of the reporters he thought he could trust would raise her hand. He was almost ready to get down on his knees and plead with the gentleman from MSNBC.

Then, at the very back of the room, an odd thing happened. There were a pair of double doors there, where the reporters had been let in before the start of the conference, and for a split second they pulled back and revealed the hall outside, along with two or three men in green blazers. Then the doors closed again. There were sounds from the hall. Somebody seemed to be shouting. Then the doors opened again, and Gregor saw, framed by the light coming in behind her, a very young woman with very red hair and the oddest assortment of clothes. She was poised and still for only a moment. Then she lurched forward, almost running, and fell into the last row of chairs.

“Shit,” she said, out loud, very much out loud. “Shit, shit, shit.”

The reporters were no longer the least bit interested in Gregor Demarkian. They were interested only in this young woman with her red hair and her odd clothes and this flailing performance she was putting on, falling into the lap of one person and then the other, pushing her way against the chairs instead of going around the block. She seemed to be trying to get to the front of the room, but that wasn't entirely clear, because she was laughing and crying at the same time and cursing in the middle of all of it.

Finally, she got to a place in the middle of the sea of reporters, with all the cameras and their lights aimed at her face, and let out a long, piercing, wailing scream that could have broken ear drums. Gregor was sure that she'd managed to break his.

“Goddamn it!” the young woman screamed. “Will somebody around here fucking listen to me? Kendra Rhode is dead.”

 

1

Later, Gregor Demarkian would tell Bennis Hannaford that the scene around Kendra Rhode's body had been “
crazy
,” but that was almost as if he'd called the
Mona Lisa “
cute.” Gregor had been at crazy crime scenes before. He'd been there in the dark when the Philadelphia Police Department had pulled an endless stream of bones out of a cellar, all thought to be the work of the Plate Glass Killer. He'd been in the middle of a hurricane in North Carolina when a young woman brought her smashed and bleeding baby out of the rain and blamed the death of it on witches. He'd even been on the scene at an attempted assassination of a president of the United States. He'd never seen a crime scene completely wrecked before. It was so completely wrecked that nothing and nobody could put it straight, and nothing the police managed to find would ever be credible evidence in a court of law. These were not crime reporters they were dealing with. The words “reasonable doubt” meant nothing to them, except as the hinge of suspense in a courtroom drama, which, like all dramas, they found inherently unreal. They were, however, much better at knowing where the news was than any other reporters Gregor had ever met, and they were fast.

The woman who had come careening into the Versailles Room in the middle of the press conference was Marcey Mandret, and in the beginning the photographers were concentrated on her. They should have been. She had been one of their main targets for weeks, and there she was, not exactly sober, unsteady on her feet, half undressed, hair a fright,
screaming at them. It didn't take them long, however, to realize that Marcey Mandret was talking about Kendra Rhode, and Kendra Rhode was a much bigger and better target than this everyday pop tart who had been in the tabloids far too often for far too little reason. They were out the door in a shot, and Gregor found himself staring across a vast expanse of empty space with only the old-line print reporters in it, and not many of those.

It was Gregor who got to Marcey Mandret first, soon followed by one of the older women reporters.

“She's in shock,” the woman said. “Did she say that Kendra Rhode was dead? How can Kendra Rhode be dead?”

Gregor could think of dozens of ways, and reasons, why Kendra Rhode could be dead, but he let it pass and tried to concentrate on this young woman. It was hard to identify what she was wearing. None of it seemed to go together, and none of it seemed to be useful to any present purpose. She was also crying, her head buried in her arms, her arms propped up against one of the folding seats.