Cheating at Solitaire (50 page)

“She wanted him dead, you know,” Jack said. “Kendra did. She wanted him dead, or disappeared, or something. She didn't marry him because she loved him. She was stoked on Ecstasy and in one of those moods. Well, stoked for Kendra. She'd had like half a dose. She never took whole ones.”

“She told you she wanted him dead?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Jack said. “She just talked about him. To me, at first, but then there was the picture. I had to sell the picture. I had to make enough money to cover my expenses out there. She could never understand that. She could never understand why people needed money. So she stopped speaking to me. They all did, except for Marcey, on and off.”

“So you followed them out—wait,” Gregor said. “They were who? Arrow Normand and Mark Anderman and Kendra Rhode? All together, at first.”

“Yeah. It was the middle of the morning, but Arrow and Mark had been drinking. They'd all been on the set, even Kendra, and it was going to hell because of the weather, and Arrow had something in her trailer, and they all went in there. Carl Frank went crazy trying to keep Kendra off the set, but he never could do it. Anyway, they left there and went off in the car, and Marcey had had some kind of huge fight with Kendra over something, I don't know what, they all fight with each other all the time and it's impossible to
figure out why. And I followed them. But I didn't follow them because I meant to, I mean, you know. I just followed them.”

“You had the gun,” Gregor said.

“I'd had the gun for weeks. I carried it everywhere after she stopped talking to me.”

“To kill her with?” Gregor asked.

“To kill him with,” Jack said. “There was this big charade going on, that he was Arrow's boyfriend, that he had nothing to do with her, but he did. They were married. He had legal rights and things, and she liked being with him, even though she wasn't supposed to. She liked—I don't know what. I don't know what any of them see in anybody. I don't know what they see in each other. But it shouldn't have been Mark she married out in Vegas. It should have been me. I was the one she went out with.”

“Went out to Vegas with?” Gregor said.

“Yes,” Jack said. “Three couples. That's how we put it when we went. Arrow and Steve. Marcey and Mark. Kendra and me. Only when we got there, things went wrong. Marcey couldn't really stand Mark, and she got too high not to show it. Then I was the one with the camera. They weren't going to get pictures unless I took them. Then—I don't know. I don't know. I only know it was supposed to be me, but then it wasn't.”

“So you followed the car and there was an accident,” Gregor said.

“She spends all her time in California,” Jack said. “She didn't know how to drive in the snow. She skidded and went sideways down to the beach. It wasn't a bad accident. Not bad in the way they can get, you know. She wasn't stupid enough to try to go really fast in that weather. She wasn't stupid at all, really. People only thought she was.”

“Kendra Rhode was driving,” Gregor said. “Mark Anderman was in the front passenger seat. Arrow Normand was in the backseat.”

“Yes.”

“They went over onto the beach and you stopped to check
them out,” Gregor said. “But you had the gun. You'd brought the gun.”

“I told you. I always had the gun. I'd had it for weeks,” Jack said. “I hadn't thought about what I was going to do with it. The truck was on its side. A purple truck. Who buys a purple truck? I went down there and I helped Kendra get out. The driver's side was up. I got her out and then I stuck my head in to see the two of them, and there he was, on the other side. He'd been banged up a little, and he was pissing and moaning, and suddenly I thought, here I was, here we all were, it was the perfect opportunity. Because they would never give me up. They couldn't. And they knew I knew it.”

“So you got out the gun and shot Mark Anderman in the head,” Gregor said, “and the blood went back, into the backseat, all over Arrow Normand.”

“I'd forgotten she was there,” Jack said. “I got out of the cab and opened the back door and pulled her out and she was screaming her head off. And Kendra—Kendra was just standing there. I've never seen anybody so still in all my life. And Arrow was screaming and screaming. And Kendra turned around and slapped her, hard, so that the sound was louder than the sound of the bullets had been. Arrow stopped screaming. And Kendra looked at me and said, ‘If you think this is going to get you anything you want, you're out of your mind.' And then she just walked away. Down the beach. That was the second to the last time I saw her in person.”

3

In the rest of the room, there was a sort of buzz, not really conversation, just an under-the-breath, not-exactly-articulate hum of dissatisfaction. Linda Beecham had stopped talking. She was not a stupid woman. Clara Walsh, Bram Winder, and Jerry Young had started talking, but Gregor knew they would stop at any moment. They were all probably ready to brain him.

“All right,” Clara started. “You said, not half an hour ago, that there were four problems that had to be solved, and the next one after the murder of Mark Anderman was the mess
somebody made of Jack's hand. You're not trying to tell me that Jack made a mess of his own hand? And he couldn't have put that gun in Annabeth Falmer's house. And—”

“I want to know about the truck,” Bram Winder said. “When Stewart Gordon took his pictures of the truck, it had been cleared off, or a lot of it had. The windshield had, and the door, and most of the hood.”

“I cleared the truck off,” Jack said. “Right after I fired the shots, I went off down the beach. I was just sort of running in the bad weather, and I tossed the gun, and then I thought about it, about the pictures. And I came back and took them. A couple of dozen pictures. And then Mr. Gordon came down with some woman and I had to run.”

“He took the bullet, too,” Gregor said. “It wasn't hard to find. It was stuck in the glass. Look at the official pictures one more time. You'll see the hole. It isn't big enough for the back of the bullet to go through.”

“But that wasn't the gun Annabeth Falmer found,” Clara said. “What was that gun doing in her house? It was Jack's gun.”

“Linda Beecham thought it was the gun,” Gregor said. “She knew Jack must have killed Mark Anderman. She was trying to make sure he wasn't suspected.”

“By putting his gun where Annabeth Falmer could find it?” Jerry Young said.

“She didn't put the gun where Annabeth Falmer could find it; she put the gun where Arrow Normand had been. Which she knew, just the way everybody else on the planet knew it, because that was one of the details that's been all over the Internet and the tabloids. But she did a much more important thing to make sure Jack couldn't be arrested, never mind convicted, of that murder. She got rid of the fingerprints on his right hand.”

“What?” Bram Winder said.

“She didn't have to worry about his left hand,” Gregor said, “because when he's out in the cold, Jack wears gloves. But when he's photographing, he wears only the glove on his left hand, because he needs his right hand to operate the
cameras.

So she was fairly sure that on the afternoon of the murder, Jack would have had the glove on his left hand and no glove on his right. But since he's right-handed, that meant that the hand without the glove, the hand free to leave fingerprints on the gun, would be the hand he would use to fire the gun. So she dumped a bunch of Rohypnol into Jack's coffee one day in the office, asked him out back on some pretext or the other—”

“To help her move the new garbage bins,” Jack said.

“To help her move the new garbage bins,” Gregor repeated. “Then, when Jack started to pass out, she went after him with what was probably a small knife. Go look at his injuries. They're concentrated almost exclusively on the fingertips. The fingertips are slashed up to the point where wounds and scar tissue will make it impossible to match Jack's fingers to anything he imprinted before the attack, unless he's given prints for some other purpose—”

“No,” Jack said. “I've barely had parking tickets.”

“But where would she get Rohypnol?” Jerry Young said. “I know it's supposed to be floating around all over everywhere, but most people wouldn't know where to get it to save their lives.”

“She got it from me,” Jack said. “I gave it to her for safekeeping after I took it off Mark and Steve one night at Cuddy's. They were going after one of the waitresses, a girl who was the younger sister of one of the girls I knew in high school. They had a lot of it.”

“I don't think you can charge her with anything, unless Jack here wants to press charges for the attack,” Gregor said, “and I don't think he will. She was just thinking the best of him. She was just thinking that he'd gotten stupid one night and done something that was going to ruin his life, and she didn't want him to ruin his life. She's very maternal when it comes to Jack. And she's a very angry woman, which somebody ought to pay attention to sometime soon.”

“I've never heard such nonsense in my life,” Linda Beecham said. “Do you think I killed Kendra Rhode too? Jack couldn't have killed her. He was a mess. He was drugged up
and weak.

He couldn't have gotten to that stairwell to save his life.”

“He was found in the hall, not half a foot from the stairwell door,” Gregor said. “We do know that he got that far.”

“And collapsed,” Linda said. “He was right there, on the floor. I heard all about it. I came to the hospital and complained. It was typical. All that fuss over Kendra Rhode, and Jack lying in the corridor passed out and nobody paying any attention to him. Leslie didn't pay any attention to him until she'd finished with Kendra Rhode. It was more important to take care of a dead celebrity than a live local boy.”

“Leslie didn't know that Kendra Rhode was dead,” Gregor said gently. “And she knew Jack wasn't about to be. There isn't much staff at this hospital this time of year.”

“You didn't answer my question,” Linda said. “Are you going to charge me for the death of Kendra Rhode? Because Jack couldn't have killed her. He wasn't physically capable.”

There was a strangled sound from the other side of the room. Gregor turned to see Jack smiling at them, a calm smile, a beatif c smile, the kind of smile people got in the movies when they were bathed in a divine light.

“But I did kill her,” he said. “I caught up to her in the stairwell, and I grabbed her, and I threw her down, and when she started falling I went back through the doors and passed out. But I did kill her. And I meant to. It was the only thing I could have done, after everything that happened.”

1

Stewart Gordon and Annabeth Falmer were married in St. Andrews, Scotland, on the twenty-eighth of February, in a snowstorm bad enough to make the nor'easter on Margaret's Harbor look like spring. Marcey Mandret arrived by private jet to Heathrow and private car to St. Andrews, or rather cars, since it took a second one to carry her luggage. Coming up the walk of the university chapel ten minutes before the wedding was due to start, she was still trailing four wheeled suitcases, three carry-on bags, and a trunk. Fortunately, she had hired several luggage people to deal with them.

“What is that woman doing?” Bennis Hannaford asked, looking out the window of the “apartments” they had been assigned for the duration.

Gregor Demarkian and Stewart Gordon came to the window to look out. Stewart Gordon laughed.

“Ah,” he said. “That's just Marcey. She thinks she's traveling light.”

Bennis let that one pass, and went back to trying to do something about Gregor's bow tie. Gregor could feel the exasperation coming off her in waves. First the bow tie would be all right, then she would turn her back, then the bow tie would not be all right again. There was that, and there was the little pile of information from Box Hill Confections lying on the dresser on the other side of the room. She'd been going on about the chocolates for more than three-quarters of an hour.

“All I asked you to do was call her when you got to Massachusetts,” Bennis said. “Was that really so hard? I know you were working, and I do understand that there was something of a crisis, but would a telephone call have been so much? You could have done it from anywhere. I gave you the cell phone.”

“I don't see what difference it would have made where I called her from,” Gregor said. “It's a phone call. It's not as if I was actually in Maine and could go to see her.”

Stewart coughed the way cannons bark when they're fired, and said, “I still don't understand the timing of it all. It still seems a lot for him to have done in such a short time.”

“It wasn't such a short time,” Gregor said. “That's what was hard to get straight, even for me. There was probably between forty-five minutes and an hour between the time Jack shot Mark Anderman and the time you and Annabeth got to the truck to discover the body. There was more than enough time for Kendra Rhode to get back to the Point and for Arrow Normand to get to Annabeth's house, and, most important, there was more than enough time for Jack to get back to his own house, realize he'd missed an opportunity, and go back to the truck himself. He was probably no more than five feet away from you and Annabeth when you got there. It was an incredible risk.”

“He took a lot of risks, if you ask me,” Bennis said. “Why would he do something like that? And why didn't one of them say something about it?”

“Arrow Normand may not have known,” Gregor said. “The best I can understand, from her statement to me at the time, and her statements since, she may have been asleep before the gun went off. Or passed out, which would make things more confusing. And of course Kendra Rhode wouldn't turn him in. The chances were too good that she'd get arrested herself, as an accessory, as something. And annoying as that woman was, she had good reason to suspect that under this par ticular set of circumstances, her celebrity would work against her instead of for her. She was in no danger
from Jack, because he couldn't say anything about her being in the truck without implicating himself. She was in no danger from Arrow, because Arrow couldn't remember what had gone on and was half convinced it was her fault.”