Cheating at Solitaire (42 page)

“Right,” Stewart said. “And he got that photograph, and
he sold it, and that apparently caused some kind of falling-out. Anyway, he was around less after they all got back, and Marcey and Arrow were barely speaking to him. Kendra Rhode wasn't speaking to him at all. They were all pissed off about that picture. I don't see why. There wasn't a single one of them doing anything they could get arrested for.”

Annabeth picked up the teapot and began to pour tea into mugs. “At least he came back,” she said. “That other one didn't, do you remember, you were telling me? Some boy who worked on the movie that Arrow Normand had a crush on. He went to Vegas with her and now he doesn't even work on the movie anymore.”

“He's got another job,” Gregor said. “That's Steve Becker. Carl Frank got rid of him and packed him off to another movie. I presume because he didn't want Becker hanging around with Arrow Normand anymore. What I don't understand is this—after they all got back from Vegas, Arrow Normand was hanging around with Mark Anderman, right?”

“Right,” Stewart said. “These girls have terrible taste in men, truly. They date the worst twits, you wouldn't believe it. They never get interested in somebody whose career is on their own level.”

“You don't get interested in women whose career is on your level,” Annabeth said. “And if you tell me that's different because you're a man, I'll hit you with this teapot.”

“Seriously,” Gregor said. “They were hanging around together, Arrow Normand and Mark Anderman.”

“Yes, I said,” Stewart said.

“He wasn't hanging around with Kendra Rhode?”

“Well, of course he was hanging around with Kendra Rhode,” Stewart said. “They run in packs, these girls. They're always together.”

“Okay,” Gregor said. “But here's the thing. The Vegas trip was weeks ago, right?”

“Right,” Stewart said. “In November.”

“And in November, Carl Frank ran interference with Steve Becker, got him a job on another movie, and got him out of the way. But I can't find any indication whatsoever
that Carl Frank attempted to do anything to get rid of Mark Anderman.”

“Don't look at me,” Stewart said. “I wasn't aware of the Steve Becker thing. But Carl Frank. Now there's an interesting case. Have you met him yet?”

“No,” Gregor said. “Clara's arranged a meeting for this afternoon. Why is he an interesting case?”

“He's not what he seems, for one thing,” Stewart said. “He's supposed to be head of public relations for the movie, but that's ridiculous. You don't send somebody of that caliber to be director of public relations for a movie that isn't even in the can yet, never mind park him out on location for months at a time. Granted, none of us expected to be here this long, that's a function of the twits. But you don't do that. Carl Frank is a public relations specialist like I'm Father Christmas.”

“What is he then?” Gregor asked.

“Michael Bardman's hit man,” Stewart said promptly. “Ask anyone. They all knew it. Even that woman, that Miss Beecham, who runs the local paper, she knew it. Bardman's a notorious control freak. He's got ten movies going at once and he hates to be out of control of any of them, so he always has somebody. On this movie, Carl Frank is that somebody.”

“And what does he do as that somebody?” Gregor asked.

Stewart seemed to drain the tea in his cup in a single gulp. “He spies,” he said. “He spies on all of us, but especially on the girls, because the girls are the big trouble. They get drunk. They get doped to the gills. They careen around in public making spectacles of themselves. They get the local population totally pissed, and then they're late for work. Or worse. We've had three-day stretches where nothing got done because one or the other of them was indisposed. The one truly satisfying thing about being stuck on this godforsaken rock is the fact that the local hospital doesn't deal in admissions for ‘exhaustion.' I like that doctor, that Ingleford guy. They'd show up screwed up, he'd pump their stomachs and send them home.”

“Did you know that Mark Anderman and Kendra Rhode were married during that trip to Vegas?” Gregor asked.

It was silly of him to care that he'd been able to cause surprise, but he did. Stewart looked so wonderfully flabber-gasted.

“For God's sake,” Stewart said. “What was that about?”

“I think it was proof positive that Kendra Rhode was not always in control of herself and her life,” Gregor said. “My guess is a lot too much alcohol. That is, by the way, why Kendra Rhode and the other women were angry at Jack Bullard for publishing that picture. The light contamination comes from a glint off Mark Anderman's wedding ring. Once you know what it is, it's easy to see.”

“But it must have been the shortest honeymoon in existence,” Stewart said, “because by the time they got back here, Anderman was all over Arrow. They went everywhere together for weeks. It was worse than it had been with Steve.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I keep getting that impression. But that leaves us with a significant question. Why did Carl Frank get rid of Steve Becker but not Mark Anderman?”

“Maybe Mark Anderman refused to be got rid of,” Annabeth said. “I mean, he'd gotten one to marry him, maybe he was hoping to get another one. I can't imagine that Kendra Rhode's money wasn't tied up legally six ways to Sunday. It's what you do with trust funds, because there's always the chance that the heir will be an idiot. Maybe he hadn't realized that when he married Kendra Rhode, and then, when he did realize it, he decided to go for something else. Somebody else. To stay on the gravy train.”

“Nice,” Gregor said. “I don't think I could have done better myself. There's only one significant problem.”

“Only one?” Stewart said. “You always were a bloody genius.”

“This doesn't take a genius,” Gregor told him. “The problem is simple. Carl Frank went to a lot of trouble to get rid of Steve Becker. He doesn't seem to have gone to any trouble at all to get rid of Mark Anderman. And Mark Anderman might have refused to be gotten rid of, but if Carl Frank is
Michael Bardman's man on this movie, he could have gotten Anderman fired. And he didn't. From what I've been able to find out, he didn't do anything at all. Why not?”

2

Of course, Gregor thought, walking back to the center of town, there was always one thing Carl Frank could have done about Mark Anderman, and that was to kill him, or to get him killed. The problem with that would be motive, and the problem with motive in this case was that all of them felt completely inadequate to Gregor. It wasn't that Gregor had illusions about murderers. He'd spent the better part of his career at the Bureau dealing with serial killers, and enough time since dealing with local police departments to understand without illusions that most people who killed did so with very little objective reason at all. Your average serial killer had a sexual itch he couldn't, or wouldn't, help scratching. Gregor would have said that half the serial killers he had known had been mentally ill in the commonsense definition of the term, delusional, haunted by voices. The rest of them lived lives so disconnected from the everyday that they might as well have been aliens, but deeply insecure aliens, always convinced that the world looked down on them for their stupidity, always desperate to prove that they were smarter than the people who rejected them. That was true even of the ones it shouldn't have been true of, which was why, when Gregor thought back on his life in behavioral sciences, the name that always came to mind was Theodore Robert Bundy. The average nondelusional serial killer was a nerdy nonentity or a pudgy loser. Ted Bundy was athletic, handsome, smooth. The average nondelusional serial killer was a constant failure in all things, large and small. Ted Bundy was an academic success, a man with a job in the governor's office, a law student. It was as if Ted Bundy had been invented for Hollywood and the best-seller lists. He was the kind of killer who interested people because he was, in fact, interesting. It made sense to most people that a loser or an ugly would give in to rage and start lashing out.

Besides, they didn't have to take that sort of person seriously, because they didn't have to think of him as somebody like themselves. It made everything a lot easier for everyone if the general public could see crime as something committed by people so vastly different from themselves, so utterly unlike anybody they knew, that criminals were literally a different species.

Of course, most crime wasn't committed by serial killers. Most crime was committed by ordinary people in the day to day, and most of the murders there made absolutely no sense at all. A couple of guys get into a fight at a bar and one of them has a knife. He probably never used the knife before, and he carried it only to make himself look cool to women. A guy stays home to babysit for his girlfriend's baby and the baby cries. He can't stand it and he can't stand it and so he picks the baby up by the feet and bashes its head into the wall, and when he's done he can't even remember doing it. Real violence was not like the violence in Agatha Christie novels. It was just there, out in the middle of nowhere, with no rhyme or reason, committed in an instant, finished in an instant. People's lives changed overnight. They ended whether the person you were talking about was the victim or the perpetrator. Often it turned out that the impetus was the same as the impetus for those serial killers who did not hear voices in their heads: the gaping nothingness of being nobody in particular, of trying to exist in the world with nothing and nobody to validate you. Gregor wondered if almost all crime might be like this, or at least if almost all violence might be. Maybe there was really only one motive, and that was the need to compensate for a deep and abiding sense of failure, a failure that went all the way down. He wondered how many people there were like that out there, and what they appeared to be on the surface. He wondered if his brain was beginning to freeze in the New England weather.

I sound like one of those women who does crime analysis on television, he thought, and then, since that was the worst insult he could make about anyone, he tried not to think about
it. He had been walking for only a little while, but the town was already in front of him. If he stayed on the road he was on, he would curve along the beach to the Point. If he turned inland and went right, he could make his way to the hospital, where paparazzi were still hanging out in search of… whatever. He turned to the left instead, and reached the beginning of actual blocks and actual town, which could be distinguished by the fact that there were sidewalks. There were not a lot of sidewalks in Oscartown. He passed a small bakery that seemed to be closed up for the winter, and two clothing stores that definitely were. He came out on Main Street and looked up and down it. He had no idea where the paparazzi were now, but they were not in front of the Oscar-town Inn, and they were not in front of the little bar where everybody went when they weren't filming a movie or doing whatever else people did here. Gregor looked up at the bar's sign. It was only a few feet in front of him, much closer than the inn. He turned and looked back the way he had come. It wouldn't be that long a walk for anybody. It wouldn't be that long a drive, even in a bad snowstorm. He'd been exaggerating the difficulty of getting around. When he had tried to imagine this scene, everything had been farther apart.

He turned back to Main Street and made his way up it to Cuddy's. He looked through the windows and satisfied himself that there was not much of anybody inside. So far, he had been very lucky not to be caught up in a maelstrom of publicity, but he had no idea how long his luck would last. He went into the bar and looked around. There were two men at the bar proper, and nobody at all at any of the tables. He didn't want to sit at the bar. He always felt silly doing that, and it was too public. He found a table at the back and sat facing the bar and the bar's door to the street. He could see everything from where he was, even though there was nothing to see.

The waitress must have been bored, because she arrived almost before Gregor was all the way into his seat.

“Good morning,” she said. “What can I get you? We don't
do food here in the morning, but we do pretty good coffee if you don't want that mocha latte whipped cream with sprinkles stuff.”

The waitress was young and bouncy and looked as if she had never had a moment's worry that she might not be the most important thing in the universe. Gregor looked at the two men at the bar. They were both nursing coffees. In New York, he had seen men sit at bars and drink at eight o'clock in the morning, drink steadily and with purpose, as if this were a job they expected to get paid for.

He turned back to the waitress and said, “Coffee would be excellent. No cream. No sugar. Just coffee.”

“Great. And I'm really glad you don't want that mocha latte whipped cream stuff. I mean, really. It's dessert. It's the coffee equivalent of a drink with a little umbrella in it.”

The waitress went off. Gregor tried to judge her age, and came up with “younger than Donna Moradanyan,” which didn't mean much of anything. He assumed that the drinking age in Massachusetts was twenty-one. It was in most states since the federal government had started to tie transportation funding to making sure the legal age was no lower. If the waitress was twenty-one, she had to be in college, or finished with it, or one of those people who had never gone.

Gregor got out his cell phone and opened it up. He turned it on. It promised him there was service. He tried the automatic dial thing and screwed it up somehow, he wasn't sure how. He could never get the technology straight. He punched in Bennis's number and listened to the ringing, which sounded far away, although he had no idea why that would be the case. The waitress came back and put his coffee down. He thanked her and, just then, heard Bennis pick up.