Cheating at Solitaire (39 page)

Stewart stepped forward and threw his jacket over Kendra Rhode's torso. “Don't tell me we're preserving evidence,” he said. “There's no evidence to preserve.”

They could hear people in the corridor beyond the stairwell. The fire door opened and Jerry Young stood there,
with Don Hecklewhite behind him, and beyond them men in uniform Gregor didn't recognize. They all looked stupefied.

Clara Walsh came up behind them. Gregor could see her red hair moving among the uniforms. For some reason, it struck him as odd that both Clara Walsh and Marcey Mandret had red hair, although Marcey's actually looked red, and Clara's looked dyed red. This line of thought made no sense at all. If Gregor hadn't known himself better, he would have wondered if he was in shock. He thought the nurse named Leslie really was in shock.

Clara made it to the front of the police ranks and stepped into the stairwell. She looked down at Kendra Rhode's body. She looked up at Gregor and Stewart and Leslie. She said, “My God. What happened here?”

“She wasn't naked to begin with,” Stewart said. “They pulled her clothes off. Ripped them right off of her while I was standing here and Gregor, too. They pulled the body around. They took pictures. I can't imagine what they took for pictures.”

“She could be alive,” Leslie said. “She could be. She fell down the stairs, I think. I came out into the stairwell because of Mr. Bullard, Mr. Bullard got out of his bed somehow and he got into the corridor and the door to the stairwell was open when I found him, so I got worried about it, and I came into the stairwell and I looked down and there she was at the bottom. I think she fell down the stairs. But people fall down the stairs all the time and they break their necks and they're still alive, so I came down here, I came down here, I did come down here and then there was noise and then people started coming in, all those people, and then—”

“Listen,” Gregor said gently. “Try to think. Was she alive when you got to her?”

“I never got to her,” Leslie said. “I got partway down the stairs and then they were everywhere. I couldn't check. I couldn't check. But she could still be alive. Somebody should check.”

“She's not alive now,” Gregor said. “I think I can guarantee that. You can check her if you want to, though.”

Leslie looked up at the faces around her, police faces, Clara Walsh's face. Then she seemed to decide that she had been given some kind of permission. She went down a few more steps to the body itself and put her stethoscope in place on her ears. She put the scope under Stewart's jacket and felt around, then felt around again, then listened, then listened again. She withdrew the scope and shook her head.

“No,” she said.

“Didn't you say that Mr. Bullard was out of bed?” Gregor asked. “Maybe you should make sure he gets back into bed.”

“I did,” Leslie said. “I put him back into bed before I came out to the stairwell. I don't even know why I did. It was just that the door was open, and that didn't make any sense, and we don't know what happened to Jack, so I thought whoever had attacked him might still be around, or something, you know, the way it is on television. Attacked him before, I mean. I don't think he was attacked this afternoon. I think the door was open and she fell down the stairs and he heard her cry out and tried to go to her. I must have been in the ladies' room or downstairs picking up lunch. It doesn't make any sense to have just one nurse on duty when there's a patient on the ward, but then there are almost never any patients on the wards during the off-season and it costs so much money to keep people on. But I should have been there. I shouldn't have left the station. I don't even know what she was doing here.”

Gregor looked up and around the crowd again. Mike Ingleford was there, at the back, with his arms folded across his chest. “Dr. Ingleford,” Gregor said. “Do you think it's possible to find out whether Kendra Rhode died from the fall or from the actions that took place afterward?”

Mike Ingleford looked amused. “I'm not a pathologist,” he said, “but I think I can assure you that forensics has not advanced to the point where it could tell you if a woman died now or fifteen minutes from now, if that's what you're asking.”

“What about what she died of?” Gregor said. “She fell down the stairs, Leslie thinks, and probably broke her neck.
Could we find out if she died from the fall or from being manhandled later?”

“I doubt it,” Mike Ingleford said. “I don't want to be a pessimist here, but assuming the reports are accurate and that she fell down the stairs and broke her neck, then in all likelihood that's what she died from, whether she died instantaneously or because somebody pulled at her body while it was lying there and finished the job the broken neck started. But there would be no way that I know of to distinguish between the two.”

“That's what I was afraid of,” Gregor said.

Jerry Young came into the now-open central area next to the body. “We ought to secure the area,” he said. “This is a crime scene, no matter what the difficulties. We need to putup tape and get some people in here who can at least attempt to collect evidence.”

“You should collect evidence on them,” Stewart said, jerking his head in the direction of a generalized outside. “It can't be legal, what they did. It can't be legal.”

“It's not legal, but my guess is it also isn't going to be possible to pin any of it on anybody in particular,” Gregor said. “And I agree with Jerry. This is a crime scene and it ought to be secured. But the damage has been done now. If somebody murdered Kendra Rhode we're never going to know it and we're never going to put that person away. We'd better hope that if somebody did murder Kendra Rhode, it was the same person who murdered Mark Anderman.”

“Why?” Leslie said, looking confused.

“It's because he thinks he knows who killed Mark Anderman,” Bram Winder said, coming in from the rear and looking more disheveled than Gregor would have suspected he could get. “He thinks he knows right now, already. He hasn't even talked to anybody, and he thinks he knows.”

“I don't just think,” Gregor said. “I know, and after all this I'm positive. But for the moment we need to let Jerry Young and the people he's brought—”

“Sheriffs from the other towns on the island,” Jerry said. “I just called everybody, and I called the state police, and I
said emergency, and I said hurry, and here we are. We're not much, but we did some good.”

“You did a lot of good,” Gregor said, which was the truth. He had the horrible feeling that if the riot he'd just been involved in had gone on much longer, the rioters would have torn Kendra Rhode into pieces. “Now the rest of us should get out of your way. Stewart?”

“Christ on a crutch,” Stewart said.

There was a rustle in the crowd, and Marcey Mandret came through, still looking wild, still looking not quite sober. Then she started laughing, and couldn't seem to stop.

“I told you so,” she said. “I told you so. Look. She's got her head on backward.”

1

Arrow Normand could not have explained how she knew the things she knew, but she knew them, and she didn't have to wait that long for her information. She knew that Kendra Rhode was dead before dinner on the night it happened, and she knew, waking up the next morning with the sun streaming in through the small window at the top of the wall of her cell, that she would be leaving jail soon. She was much calmer, if not perfectly calm. Too much of her life was about to be over for her to be perfectly calm. She kept wishing there were a way to avoid all the things she would have to go through now. It would be much better if life were more like a dotted line than like a real line, with everything all connected. She thought she wouldn't mind so much having to leave California and her house and her cars and those big blown-up pictures of herself that she had on all her walls, if she could just wake up some morning, just like this one, and be without them. It was the process she was really afraid of. People would yell at her. Her mother would yell at her, and try to fix things, which would be worse. Nothing was fixable. Then there would be the stories, the photographers in her driveway while she moved her things out, the auction—she was sure there would be an auction, because it was what people did; they didn't put all their things in the trash, they sold them—and finally all the weeks and months and years of watching people talk about her as if she weren't really there. She wondered if it was possible to have cable TV without having either MTV or VH1. She didn't want to see herself in one of those half-hour programs about “where
are they now.” She didn't want to think about the people she knew, the people who were really not her friends, and the things they would say about her when she was gone. Maybe they wouldn't say anything at all. Maybe, when you didn't belong in the places where she had belonged until now, maybe it was just as if you had never been.

The guard who was on this morning was named Marcella, a new one, brought in from another town on the island. Arrow didn't know if she had ever been in any of the other towns on the island. She thought she must have. They'd been filming here for months. They'd been driving around in cars. It was hard to think. She wished her usual people were here, the ones who knew her, the ones she could trust to like her, at least for the moment. When you didn't have money and you weren't famous, people had to like you “for yourself,” and Arrow didn't have the faintest idea what that meant. She had a self, but it was all bound up in this, in what she was on the set of a movie or on a stage when she sang. There were people who said she didn't sing very well, and secretly, she had always known they were right. If she sang well, they wouldn't have to tech up her voice all the time, to make it stronger, to make it not so obvious when she couldn't hold a note or got the melody wrong.

Marcella was in a hurry, and she didn't understand why Arrow wasn't in a hurry too. “Come on, now,” she said, checking to see if Arrow had changed into the little pile of clothes she'd brought in with breakfast. “Your mother is waiting for you, and a lawyer, and some other man, the investigator they brought in. And there's not much time to talk, because there's a hearing. You're going to walk out of here today.”

“Yes,” Arrow said, and then, “thank you.” She had to remind herself to always say “thank you,” and “please,” and all those other things, because one of the biggest mistakes stars made was to think that they didn't have to say those things, that they didn't have to be polite, because they were not like other people. Stewart Gordon had told her that the first day they were on the set, when he had reamed her out about the way she'd spoken to one of the costume women, and then
he'd told her she'd better call her the “costume woman” and not the “costume girl,” because “girl” in a case like that was offensive. Stewart Gordon knew things like that, lots of them. Arrow could never help wondering how he had found out.

Marcella had brought her a pair of jeans and a white turtleneck and a crew-necked navy blue wool sweater. It was the kind of thing Arrow had seen pictures of students wearing on college campuses, but not the kind of thing she had ever worn herself. She wondered where the clothes had come from. She was sure the jail hadn't provided them, and she was sure her mother hadn't picked them out. If her mother had picked out something for her to wear, it would have been a designer dress of some kind, and it would have required strappy little sandals. The shoes that had come with this outfit were thick suede boots with a faux shearling lining that went halfway up her calf. They were the kind of boots that were meant to be worn in the snow.

Arrow got into the clothes. There were kneesocks to go along with the boots. Everything had come from L.L. Bean, which Arrow thought was a store in Maine. Back home, the kind of girls who hadn't liked her had all had clothes from L.L. Bean, the kind of girls whose families went whitewater kayaking on vacations and who grew up to go to colleges in the East. Some of those colleges were probably right around here, if not on Margaret's Harbor then near it. Margaret's Harbor was in Massachusetts, and Arrow was sure that one of the places was in Massachusetts, the same place Hillary Clinton had gone to for college, and Hillary Clinton was married to a president. Arrow sat down on the side of the cot and looked at her feet in the big suede boots. She looked exactly like everybody else on Margaret's Harbor looked, if they actually belonged on Margaret's Harbor and weren't part of the film crew. She wondered what she would wear when she got back home and couldn't have designer dresses anymore. She wondered what she would drink instead of the coffee she had flown in every day from L.A.

Marcella came back, and looked relieved that Arrow was dressed. “I don't know what's wrong with you,” she said.
“I'd be ecstatic if I was getting out of jail. I'd be over the moon. And I probably wouldn't be getting out either. Not in circumstances like these.”

Arrow didn't know what “circumstances like these” were, but she didn't ask, because she hated making herself look stupid. She followed Marcella down the hall to the same conference room where she had met her mother yesterday. The televisions were all off. The corridor was empty. The corridor was always empty. Arrow wondered what they were saying about Kendra now that she was dead. She didn't think it was going to be anything good.

Marcella opened the door to the conference room and shooed Arrow through it. Her mother really was there, sitting at one end of the long wooden table with her arms crossed over her chest. Standing next to her was the man who had been hired to be Arrow's attorney, not her regular attorney from Los Angeles, but a criminal defense attorney. Standing a little farther into the room was a big man Arrow recognized from television as Gregor Demarkian. She bit her lip and waited.