Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

  Money. Liquor. The dress was coming off, again. The straps kept sliding down her shoulders. She was the only person in here with straps. Everybody else was dressed as if they were about to pose for an L.L. Bean catalog. Who bought things out of the L.L. Bean catalog? It was all such clunky stuff, and that other place, Harbor Halls, was even worse. All those pastels and twin sets and espadrilles, except in the winter, like now, when it was parkas and snow boots. Marcey had never worn a pair of snow boots in her life, and she didn’t intend to start now.

  She got the strap adjusted on her shoulder and made her way slowly in the direction of the bar. She wasn’t walking very well. Her head hurt, and she was very dizzy. She tried to remember the number of champagne cocktails she’d drunk since they’d shut down filming at eleven, but she couldn’t do it. They’d shut down filming. She’d come over here with Arrow Normand and Kendra and some other people. She’d started drinking and then she’d started watching the snow. Kendra was gone now. Arrow seemed to be gone too. Arrow’s boyfriend—Marcey looked around, and blinked. The only other person from the film who seemed to still be here was Stewart Gordon, and she would swear on her life that he was still nursing the same big mug of beer he’d bought when he first walked in the door.

  There was a bar stool in front of her. This was good news. She sat down on it and tried adjusting her strap again. She was fairly sure she could not be really drunk, because Kendra had told her that it wasn’t possible to get drunk on champagne. She felt drunk, though, and her right breast seemed to be completely exposed. She pulled at the strap again. The bartender had started pouring another champagne cocktail without being asked. He wasn’t much older than she was and he was looking straight at her nipple.

  Somebody squeezed in against the bar between her stool and the one on her right. She looked up and saw Stewart Gordon handing her cocktail back to the bartender.

  “Do something about your dress,” he said.

  “Why is it that everybody on this island wears bow ties?” Marcey asked him. “Have you noticed that? They all look like Porky Pig.”

  “Have you been running a tab?”

  “It’s okay,” the bartender said. “That guy from the film comes over once a week and settles the tabs. You know, the guy—”

  “Shit,” Stewart Gordon said.

  “I bet you don’t run tabs,” Marcey said. “I bet you pay for that beer right when you get it and then you drink only one. You can’t take my drink away. You’re not my father.”

  “Your problem is that nobody is your father, not even your father.”

  “I make more money than he does. I make more money than you do. You can’t tell me what to do.”

  The bartender was standing right there, holding the champagne cocktail in his hands. Marcey leaned across the bar and got it. Then she tilted her head back and swallowed almost all of it in a single long gulp. This was not the best thing she could have done. She hadn’t realized until she did it just what kind of a mess her stomach was in. She was probably going to throw up. This was all right, since she always threw up, but she preferred to do it without an audience. It was practically the only thing she preferred to do without an audience.

  “Arrow does everything in public,” she said, looking at the third button on Stewart Gordon’s dark blue chambray shirt. God, the man was tall. He was enormous. “She even vomits in public. Don’t you think that’s pathetic?”

  The bartender coughed. Stewart Gordon took what was left of the drink out of her hand. It didn’t matter. Marcey had won this round. She’d drunk most of it. Now if she could just stand up and get another one. She could go home, or up to Kendra’s, but she didn’t want to. The party wasn’t due to start for hours. There would be nothing to do up there.

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” she said.

  “I know,” Stewart Gordon said. “And you’re going to keel over before the ball drops. Do you have a coat?”

  Marcey waved into the middle of the room. “I’ve got my jacket. You know. My blue jacket.”

  “Your blue jacket is made of glitter and silk thread. Do you mean to say you came all the way out to New England in the middle of the winter without a decent winter jacket?”

  “I hate coats,” Marcey said. “They make me look fat.”

  Somebody came up with the jacket. Marcey didn’t see who it was. She really wasn’t seeing much of anything. Stewart Gordon handed it to her.

  “Put it on,” he said. “At least it will cover your breasts, one of which, at the moment, is waving in the breeze, to the enormous satisfaction of half the people in this room. And only most of them are men.”

  “It’s not just the breast,” Marcey said. “Don’t you know? Kendra and Arrow and I made a pact. We’re all going commando for the whole year. This year. Until midnight. We’re all going commando to show that we’re, that we’re—”

  “Ass,” Stewart Gordon said. “Kendra Rhode got a one-hundred-million-dollar trust fund the day she was born. She doesn’t need a career. You do. And you’re not going to have one by the time she’s through with you.”

  “Kendra Rhode is my friend,” Marcey said. “She’s my best friend. We’d do anything for each other.”

  “Kendra Rhode is a psychopath who likes to play with people’s heads. Button that jacket and I’ll take you home.”

  “I don’t want to go home. There’s nothing to do at home. And besides, I’m supposed to be out at the Point for a party. You weren’t invited to the party, were you? Kendra invites only the best people to her parties.”

  “Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Let’s go.”

  Marcey looked around the bar. There were a lot of people there, and most of them were looking at her. That was reassuring. That really was. Sometimes, when she got drunk enough, she began to feel as if she were trying to walk on water. It was all right as long as she didn’t notice that that was what she was doing, but when she did she suddenly realized that she couldn’t, and she was way out over the ocean and about to drown. She hated that feeling, that about-to-drown feeling. It made all her nerves go crazy and it made her want to cry. She wanted to cry right now. Crying seemed to be the best thing she could possibly do. Crying had substance, and she had no substance. Everybody said so. There was something coming up her throat. It might be vomit, but it might be something else. If she didn’t get Stewart Gordon away from her, he would start giving her a lecture about how she should have gone to school.

  “School isn’t important,” she said, leaning very close to him. Leaning was not good. Leaning was like falling. “What does school get for people? Jobs in offices. That’s it. Jobs in offices. Or mechanics. Or things. School—”

  There always came a point when the air looked slick and solid, when it could ripple. It was rippling now. It made her think of mayonnaise, and of the first time she had ever been in a movie, when she was seven years old. Her mother was always sitting in one of those folding chairs at the edge of the set, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, tense. Everything was always tense. That was the year she had been interviewed by Katie Couric. She had been given a big solid chair to sit on, and her legs had dangled from the seat without reaching the floor.

  “I can’t walk on water,” she said, as loud as she could, past Stewart Gordon to the room at large.

  Everybody was watching her. They really were. Everybody was always watching her. They would always watch her. This was what life was like and it would never end. Never never never.

  Somewhere at the back of her mind, though, there was that ocean of water she was walking on, and the thought that it was ending for Arrow. It was ending right now.

  Stewart Gordon was holding her up with one hand. She was standing up. She had no idea how she had got that way. She gripped the bar with both hands and wrenched herself away from him. Kendra got paid to go to parties. That was not fair. Arrow was starting to look like a fat slob. That was not fair either.
Nothing was fair, and she deserved better than this, although she was not sure for what. The most unfair thing was Stewart Gordon, who was like the voice of doom, or something, all the time. Somebody ought to do something about Stewart Gordon. Somebody ought to put a stop to him.

  Even so, when she finally decided to throw up, Marcey was careful to do it directly onto the bartender’s pink-and geen, tiny-fishhook-patterned bow tie, and not on Stewart Gordon’s chambray shirt.

  3

  Once, when he was younger, Carl Frank had liked to tell people that he didn’t believe in God but did believe in the devil. He didn’t tell people that anymore, because somewhere along the way it had become true. God was, as he understood it, a benevolent being, a cosmic Superperson whose first and most important characteristic was to wish his people well. Carl had been around for a long time, and he didn’t see any sign of anybody wishing anybody well. Even on a purely mundane level, the here and now, the day to day, all that was in evidence was bad luck and bad faith. Even the good luck was bad, more often than not. When he thought about the people he worked for, and the people they had him looking after, he sometimes wondered if there wasn’t a malevolent Superperson out there somewhere, making sure that everything turned out as badly as possible.

  About the devil, though, Carl had no need to get metaphorical. The devil was a person just like you and me, except not, and she lived in a cloud of celebrity she had done nothing to earn. In fact, she had never earned anything in her life, unless you counted the money people paid her to go to their parties, which was considerable. It made Carl stop and wonder every time he thought of it. A million dollars just to show up at a party, when you didn’t sing or dance or act or even sling hash in a cafeteria? A million dollars just to sit there and be. That was not luck, it was sorcery, and the devil’s name was Kendra Rhode.

  The pain-in-the-ass’s name was Michael Bardman, and he was getting hard to hear on this cell phone. Cells never worked all that well on Margaret’s Harbor, but in weather like this they were about as reliable as a schizophrenic on LSD. Of course, it was impossible to explain that to Michael Bardman, because he had never been on Margaret’s Harbor in the winter, and wouldn’t come. Michael liked L.A. Michael liked New York. Michael liked some place in the Greek islands where he could spend all day on his boat making phone calls to people he could have been screaming at in person if he weren’t so intent on taking a vacation. Carl wondered what it would be like if somebody decided to give Michael Bardman a taste of reality, and then he didn’t. The Michael Bardmans of this world, like the Kendra Rhodes, lived in an alternative universe.

  The snow looked like a solid sheet of white outside the big front windows of the Oscartown Inn. Carl took a long sucking pull at his Scotch and water and waited for the tirade to be over. It was the same tirade he had heard yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and the only reason he wasn’t scared to death that he was about to lose his job was that he knew that Michael Bardman knew that there was nobody out there who could do it any better.

  “Let me try to explain this to you again,” he said, when Michael’s screeching had subsided momentarily. Michael Bardman had made something of a career of screeching. It was what he did instead of actually producing movies.

  “You keep explaining things to me,” he said, “and I keep telling you I don’t want your explanations.”

  “You also don’t want me to walk out of here in the middle of everything, so you’re going to have to listen to them. We’re in the middle of some kind of huge snowstorm. They call it a nor’easter—”“I don’t understand why everything has to stop because of a little snow.”

  “It’s not a little snow, it’s a lot of snow. Half the island has already lost electricity and the rest will probably go before morning. We can’t film at all, outside or in. And it’s not your problem anyway. We’re not a month and a half late because of a snowstorm.”

  “It’s costing a fortune. And on a movie that isn’t going to make all that much. I mean, it will do all right, but—”

  “But it’s not going to be Lord of the Rings. Yes, I know, Michael, I know. But nothing is going to get any better, or any cheaper, as long as that woman is here screwing things up. And she’s not just screwing things up, Michael, she’s doing it deliberately.”

  “I don’t see why my actors have to drink like fish just because Kendra Rhode drinks like a fish. If Kendra Rhode jumped off a cliff, would they all just jump in after her?”

  Carl looked down into his Scotch. His glass was half empty. He would never have been so fatuous as to describe it as half full. He couldn’t believe he had just heard what he had heard. He was having a very hard time not bursting out laughing.

  “Listen,” he said. “Kendra Rhode does not drink like a fish. She gets other people to drink like fishes. She’s never late to appointments. She gets other people to be late to appointments. And, like I said, she does it deliberately. She likes to see people crack up.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You make her sound like, I don’t know—”

  “It doesn’t matter what I make her sound like, Michael. It’s true. And as long as she’s here, Marcey and Arrow are going to be shit out of control more days than not. And the longer that goes on, the more money you’re going to lose. You ought to be grateful as hell that Stewart Gordon is a thorough professional, because if he’d been less of one he’d have walked off this picture weeks ago.”

  “He can’t walk off the picture. He’s not important enough.”

  “He’s something better than important,” Carl said, think-trying that it was completely useless trying to explain to Michael that some people did not judge the success of their lives by how well they were doing in the movies. “He’s independent, Michael. He’s stashed most of the money he’s ever made—”

  “It can’t amount to much.”

  “It’s more than he needs to live on,” Carl said, “which means he doesn’t have to work if he doesn’t want to. And the pair of them are driving him nuts. And I don’t blame him. You’ve got to do something to get those two away from Ken-dra Rhode, at least for the next few months, or you’re not going to have a picture at all. And that’s assuming that Arrow doesn’t run away and get married to the latest toy boy.”

  “Oh, God,” Michael said. “I thought we got rid of the toy boy.”

  “We got rid of the first one, more or less. The divorce is in the works, at any rate. But there’s a new one, one of the camera people, not a serious one—one of the grips, I think—”

  “Can we just fire him and get him off the island?”

  “I’m already on it. But I stopped in at that little pub place on my way here this afternoon, and Marcey was all by herself at a table drinking champagne cocktails and letting her dress fall off her, and Arrow was missing in action completely. So I don’t think the news is good. You’ve got to let me do something about Kendra Rhode.”

  There was a very long silence on the other end of the line. Carl wished he could be surer of the cell phone reception in the inn. He needed to get himself a refill. Michael Bard-man’s voice came back on the line.

  “You can’t do something about Kendra Rhode,” he said. “She’s a Rhode. They’re, what, like the third-richest family in America?”

  “Hardly. It’s a whole new world these days. Old money barely makes the cut. I’m not talking about having her whacked, Michael. I’m talking about hiring her.”

  “Hiring her for what?”

  “For a picture. You’ve got to have a picture somewhere that she could be some use in. Or at least, seem to be some use in.”

  “I can’t hire her for a picture. And besides, even if I tried, what makes you thing she’d say yes?”

  “Make it a big picture. Brad Pitt. Sean Connery. Make it a picture she can’t refuse.”

  “You must be out of your mind. whatever in God’s name makes you think that somebody like Brad Pitt would agree to work with her?”

  “You don’t actually have t
o hire her, Michael. You just have to pretend to hire her. Ask her out to the coast for exploratory conversations. That kind of thing.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re seriously in need of medication. The woman can’t act. She can barely speak, from what I can see. And that family has lawyers. You can’t just go jerking her around and then thumb your nose at her. She’d sue.”

  “By which time you’d have your picture in the can and it wouldn’t have cost more than a single arm and leg. A few more weeks of what’s been going on out here and your totals are going to look like the Social Security budget. You won’t even need to inflate the expenses to make it look like it’s been losing money, because it will be losing money.”

  “I don’t see what Social Security has to do with it,” Michael said. “It’s a young picture, except for Stewart Gordon. Young actors. Appeal to the high school set. Rated R so that they’ll all feel good about themselves for sneaking in under the rating.”

  The Oscartown Inn looked out onto a picturesque village square, picturesque because it had been calculated to look that way, square because it had been hacked out of a tangle of existing streets when the Powers That Be decided that they wanted the town to look like the “real” New England. That would have been in the 1930s, when people like ken-dra Rhode tried as hard as they could to stay out of the public’s sight, and places like Margaret’s Harbor were important because they were places where rich people could go to live richly and not be observed by anyone doing it.

  “It didn’t matter in Hollywood anyway,” Carl said. “Even then.”

  “What?” Michael said.

  “I was thinking about the Great Depression,” Carl said. “People were scared to death that there was going to be a violent revolution. Rich people were. So they hired public relations experts to keep their names out of the newspapers. But it wasn’t like that in Hollywood even then. Stars ran around looking rich in public. They always do.”

  “Social Security. The Great Depression. I think you’re cracking up.”