Cheating at Solitaire (46 page)

Let's try one more person,” Gregor said. “You.”

Carl Frank stopped looking at the ceiling. “Me? What makes you think I'd murder Mark Anderman? Or even Kendra Rhode.”

“You had opportunity, in both cases,” Gregor said. “In fact, you're the only one who did have clear opportunity in both cases. I don't see that the means would have been difficult for you to obtain. You'd know where to get a gun. And as for motive—well, there's the movie. You've said yourself that your job here is to make sure the filming goes smoothly and with no bad publicity. It was to hold off bad publicity that you got rid of Steve Becker.”

“I got rid of Steve Becker by getting him a far better job on another movie,” Carl Frank said, “and I didn't do it because he was making the filming go screwy. I did it because Arrow went off and married him in Vegas, and Arrow has too many liabilities already to pull that kind of stunt and get away with it. Remember when Britney Spears married that childhood sweetheart or whatever he was and then got it annulled four days later? It didn't do her any good, and a similar stunt wasn't going to do Arrow any good, so I made it go away. If I'd wanted Mark Anderman to go away, I'd have done the same kind of thing.”

“Maybe he refused to go away.”

“There was nothing for him to refuse to go away from,” Carl said. “He wasn't dating Arrow Normand. Oh, I mean, he was in public, they hung out, but that was one of those little things Arrow was doing for Kendra Rhode. It was Kendra Rhode that Mark Anderman was married to in Vegas.”

“I know,” Gregor said.

“And you think I'd lift a finger to keep Kendra Rhode out of trouble? Why? She wanted a part in this movie, you know, and she asked for it several times, but she never got it, and she wasn't going to get it. That one, Michael promised me. Not that he was keen to have her. I mean, for God's sake. And as for Arrow hanging out with Mark Anderman—why not? It made people forget about Becker. There was nothing to discover about Arrow and Mark. It was the perfect arrangement, before somebody put a bullet through his head. The last person in the world I had a motive to shoot was Mark Anderman, and it would have been beyond counterproductive to do it in a way that got Arrow
Normand thrown in jail and the filming stopped for a week and a half.”

“Did you have a motive to shoot someone else?” Gregor asked.

“I keep a list,” Carl Frank said. “I'm going to wait until I have my fuck-you money, and then I'm going to get a machine gun and have at it.”

2

For the next interview, Gregor had gone back and forth in his head between protocol and practicality. It often made good sense to interview someone outside the official institutions of the law, to do it in a way that stressed humanity and not the function of a witness or a suspect. For Linda Beecham, Gregor thought it would be better to be as official as possible, and as serious. He didn't think she was worried about being a witness, and he was sure she had no idea that she might be a suspect. He did think that she resented the fuss and bother made over people like Arrow Normand and Kendra Rhode, and that she was sure that Jack Bullard's problems would go unresolved because they were the problems of someone nobody important would have any interest in attending to.

Gregor had asked for the file on Jack's attack to be sent up to him, and it arrived in the hands of another young state policewoman almost as soon as Carl Frank left the conference room. Gregor spread the contents of the file on the conference table in front of him. There wasn't much to see. Linda Beecham had, indeed, reported the attack on Jack to Jerry Young, and Mike Ingleford had sent over a medical report, but so much else had been going on over the last few days that nothing had been done to identify the person or persons who had made such a mess out of Jack's hand. And it was a mess. The tips of the fingers of the right hand were almost entirely ruined, and the palm had been cut in a dozen places, seemingly haphazardly. The left hand was clean. It was the drugs that were the most confusing thing about the incident. Date rape drugs were not the sort of thing most
people had lying around the house, and they weren't the sort of thing that would first come to the mind of someone who needed to knock somebody else out to—what? Mutilate him? What had been done to Jack, exactly? He didn't know, and so far, nobody had tried to find out.

Linda was five minutes late for the appointment. Gregor considered that mildly interesting, since she didn't seem to him to be the kind of woman who was often late to anything. She came in just as he was gathering up the papers to put them back in Jack's file. She caught a glimpse of one of the pictures the hospital had taken of the hand before it had been worked on, and made a face. Then she sat down. Her eerie calm was still in evidence, except that it wasn't really calm, which is what made it eerie. It didn't matter that Gregor had met other people with this same dead flatness of affect, and that none of them had been mass murderers or even petty thieves. There was something about being in the presence of a person like this that made the nerves beneath his skin begin to jump.

Linda folded her hands on the table in front of her and waited. She could wait forever. Gregor knew that. You might goad somebody else into talking just by staying silent, but you wouldn't goad her.

“It's funny,” he said.

“What's funny, Mr. Demarkian? I don't see anything funny in any of this.”

“I was just thinking how alike you are to Carl Frank,” Gregor said. “Not really, of course, but you have one thing in common and it's an unusual thing. And with unusual things, the fact that they're unusual makes people think that they must also be important.”

Linda sat there, with her hands folded. Nothing about her moved except her eyes, and they weren't particularly active. She was small and gray and compact and incredibly neat. She was not particularly interested.

“Aren't you interested in knowing what you've got in common with Carl Frank?” Gregor asked.

“Not really. I thought that if you thought it was important,
you'd tell me. But I don't know him, do I? I'll probably never see him again after all this is over. I don't see why I should care that we share some characteristic in common.”

“Do you care about Jack Bullard?” Gregor asked.

This time, her eyes got a little more active. If Gregor believed eyes could narrow, he would have imagined hers had.

“I've known him half my life,” Linda said. “I've known him all his life. I remember him as a baby in a carriage in town. His father used to walk him in on the weekends and buy bait and go out fishing with Jack in the carriage beside him. He was the cutest thing on wheels.”

“Which doesn't answer my question.”

“Your question is impossible to answer. I suppose I care about him. I'm fond of him. He's—there's something very innocent about Jack. Not just naive, but innocent.”

“Was it innocent, going out to Las Vegas with Kendra Rhode and Arrow Normand?”

Linda flicked this away. “Jack wanted to be a photographer, a celebrity photographer. It was his chance. The whole filming thing was. His chance to take a shot at getting out of here and doing something with his life.”

“Do most people want to get out of Margaret's Harbor? I thought this was where rich people went to retire.”

“Which is fine if you're a rich person,” Linda said. “Jack wasn't, any more than I am. If you're a year-rounder, the Harbor is deadly dull and deadly ended, if that makes any sense. Jack went away to college, and we thought that would be the last we'd see of him, but he came back. His father was ailing. Not that that lasted long. The man keeled over and died within a month, but Jack never seemed to be able to get the momentum going to get all the way out, if you see what I mean. Then they came and there it was, his shot. So he took it.”

“You didn't mind?”

“Why would I mind?”

“He is your employee,” Gregor said. “Going off to Vegas for a weekend had to cut into the time he had to work for you.”

“Oh, for goodness' sake,” Linda said. “Really, Jack's taken weekends before. And it's not as if it was in the season, when we've got a lot to do. Margaret's Harbor in the late fall is not a hotbed of news that has to be rushed to the printers.”

“Not even with the film people here?”

“I didn't run stories about the film people,” Linda said. “And I'm not going to run them now, except to report on the criminal investigations, and the trials, if we ever get to those. I am running a story about what happened to Jack. I wrote it myself. It will be out at the end of the week.”

“What will it say?”

“It will say Jack was attacked,” Linda said, “which is more than any other paper will say, anywhere. Nobody is much interested in Jack Bullard's hand when they've got Kendra Rhode to talk about, or that other one. I didn't mind Kendra Rhode so much. She was at least local.”

“I thought she came from New York.”

“Local as in from a Margaret's Harbor family. A summer family, but a family.” Linda shrugged. “I'm sorry. I'm a snob. It matters to me.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened to Jack Bullard?”

“I don't know what happened to Jack,” Linda said. “How could I know? I only know about finding him.”

“Where did you find him?”

“In back of the Home News Building. There's a place back there, a little open space between our building and the Coach store on the other side, the Coach store on Melville Street. We put the garbage out back there and then on garbage day we wheel it out to the front. Well, we do at the Home News, and the people at the Coach store do, but Bill Grady that has the pharmacy takes his stuff to the dump in his truck. It makes me crazy. It's a pharmacy, for God's sake. It's not like he's some widower fisherman living on his own in a cabin. But you can't talk to Bill Grady. You never could.”

“Do you know what Jack was doing out in back of the
building? Was he taking out garbage? Had he gone to meet someone?”

“He'd gone out for air,” Linda said. “He was up in my office, and he started to feel sick to his stomach. Or he said he did. And he got up and went out back to get some air. He was away for nearly half an hour and I got worried. So I went back there to see if I could find him.”

“And? ”

“And,” Linda said, “I did find him. He stumbled into the building, and there was blood everywhere. It looked to me like somebody had tried to take his hand off. Then I went to look at the other one, to see if somebody had tried to take that one off, too, but of course it had the glove on it.”

“Why of course?” Gregor asked.

“Because it was cold,” Linda said. “It's freezing up here this time of year, Mr. Demarkian, in case you hadn't noticed. But you can't operate those cameras he has with a hand in a thick leather glove, and you can't go without the gloves completely or your fingers fall off. So he wore the glove on his left hand and kept his right hand free to work the cameras.”

“And it was his camera hand that was attacked,” Gregor said. It was not a question.

“I think it was one of those other photographers,” Linda said. “One of those people from New York or Los Angeles. Jack is a very good photographer. I think those people didn't like the competition from somebody local, and then of course there was all that stuff about the Vegas trip, where Jack was the only photographer to be asked along. I think they're jealous.”

“I think they very probably are,” Gregor said. “Somebody I talked to in town said that Jack had a crush on Kendra Rhode, or possibly on Marcey Mandret. That he was emotionally involved.”

Linda Beecham shrugged. “He was, of course he was. He was way out of his league in terms of the personalities. They all seemed special to him. You couldn't tell him otherwise. And I suppose, to someone with limited experience, they
did seem special. They are special. They're, I don't know, shinier than the rest of us.”

“But not better?”

“Better at what?” Linda asked. “They're not very bright, at least not the ones I've talked to, and I've talked to most of them these past few months. They tend to be rude, and to think they can do whatever they want without consequences. They're rich and they're spoiled, but so are a lot of other people on Margaret's Harbor. They get their pictures in the news a lot, although I've never been able to figure out what for. I think that for Jack, there was just too much dazzle and he was just too unused to it. He'll figure it out in the long run.”

“You don't think he had a particular crush on any one of the group of them?”

“I don't think Jack's ever had a particular crush on anybody.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “What happened after you found him behind the building?”

“I went back into the building and called the hospital,” Linda said, “and then I called Jerry Young, because it was obvious that what we had was a crime scene. It was a criminal attack. It had to be. I mean, there he was, drugged up like that, and his hand bleeding all over everything. But Jerry didn't come out, not right away. He had to wait until somebody came in to babysit Arrow Normand.”

“Was that illegitimate?” Gregor asked. “He couldn't leave Arrow Normand in a cell without supervision, could he?”

“Why not?” Linda asked. “This isn't Rikers Island. We have people in those jail cells all the time without supervision. Not in the summer, of course, but during the offseasons. Drunks, mostly. Nobody bothers to get somebody to sit around and babysit them. And what did Jerry think Arrow Normand was going to do in his absence? Stage a jail-break? Commit suicide?”

“Maybe,” Gregor said.

“Don't be ridiculous. Arrow Normand wouldn't commit suicide unless she could be guaranteed ringside seats at her
own funeral, and if she staged a jailbreak she'd be caught in a minute and a half when she stopped to pose for the first set of photographers. It wasn't that. It was just that Jack is Jack and not some Hollywood celebrity. It's like a virus everybody's been catching around here. Jerry Young had too much to do to actually investigate a crime.”