by Jane Haddam
He was embarrassed now, but there was nobody to catch him at it, so he just got the damned thing out of his pocket, flipped through the phone book Bennis had made up for him—very carefully removing Susan’s number, or putting it someplace he’d never think to look—and tried only two companies before one agreed to send out a car for him. Then he had to stand in the cold, watching as the very few people who came here on a weekday made their way to the graves that were familiar to them. The very few people were almost universally old women in the solid black of traditional village mourning. Gregor found himself wondering if there were really that many old women in America who had come over on the boat instead of being born on the spot. It seemed to him the timing was wrong. That was his parents’ generation, not his own. His parents were buried in this cemetery too, and his brother, who had not been bright enough for scholarships to Penn and student deferments from the draft. Sometimes he thought they’d gotten it all wrong. The best idea was not to have only one or two children and husband your resources so that you and they could have all the best in clothes and education. The best idea was to have as many children as possible so that you didn’t end up standing in the wind on a cold January afternoon, wondering how all your family had disappeared.
Of course, Bennis was still young enough to have children, and she was one of seven, which meant she had to be not completely alien to the concept of large families. Gregor tried to envision Bennis as a mother and couldn’t. Her children would all have papier mâché in their hair, and quote Tolkein at three.
The cab finally showed up. Gregor got in and gave the address of Holy Trinity Church because it was easier than the explanations he would have to give if he gave the address of any other building on the street. A couple of years ago somebody had blown the hell out of Holy Trinity, and the story had made the news as far away as Djakarta. Gregor had a suspicion that tourists had come to look at the rubble for a while, if only to give themselves a thrill about the dangers of terrorism. For whatever reason, the cabbies all knew how to get to Holy Trinity without having to have the route explained to them, and Gregor was grateful.
They had turned onto Cavanaugh Street from Gregor’s least favorite cross street when he realized that he should have anticipated the problem. Stewart Gordon was no longer some guy he had known when they’d both been in the armies of their respective countries, training in intelligence and complaining about it. Stewart Gordon was now a Star, especially to small boys, and the small boys of Cavanaugh Street were lined up on the steps of Donna Moradanyan Donahue’s town house in the hopes of getting a look at him.
Gregor got out of the cab and contemplated the clutch of preadolescent maleness barring his way to Donna’s door. Then he got out his cell phone again and called.
“Use the alley and go around the back,” Donna said. “You can use the kitchen door.”
Gregor did as he was told. The alleys on Cavanaugh Street were like no other alleys he had ever seen anywhere, and the alley between Donna’s house and the house next door was the most spectacular in the neighborhood. People cleaned them, and not just the people from the city, either. When Donna wasn’t pregnant, she got out there with a broom and a bucket and a mop and washed the alley down at least once a month, no matter the weather.
Bennis was waiting for him at the kitchen door when he got there, a big mug of coffee in her hand. “This is interesting,” she said. “He says he’ll go out and sign things for people as soon as he’s talked to you, but I don’t think they trust him.”
“They’ve got to trust me,” Stewart bellowed from down the hall in Donna’s living room. “I’m Commander Rees. Everybody trusts me.”
Stewart Gordon could bellow better than anybody Gregor had ever met.
He shrugged off his coat and left it over the back of one of the chairs at Donna’s kitchen table and then went down the hall to the living room. Tibor had been telling the exact truth. Donna was, indeed, fixing ribbons to Stewart Gordon’s head. She was then draping them down his back and measuring them.
“What is it you think you’re doing?” Gregor asked her.
“Ah,” Stewart said. “It’s you. Damned bloody time. Excuse me, Mrs. Donahue.”
“I’ve heard worse,” Donna said. Then she turned to Gregor. “You’d disappeared. And he’s the right size. The right height, even the right build.”
“Congratulations, by the way,” Stewart said. “For all the usual reasons, but also because I’m impressed with your intestinal fortitude.”
“Do you know Bennis?”
“Only by reputation,” Stewart said. “And, of course, because I’ve just met her, here. She’s a very beautiful woman, in person.”
“That’s a nice way of getting around saying you think she’s crazy.”
“Everybody knows Bennis is crazy,” Donna said. “Even Bennis knows it. If you wouldn’t mind, Mr. Gordon, I just want to do a drape across your back and see how it falls on the shoulders. If I don’t get these measurements done, I’m never going to be on time for the wedding, and then what are you going to do? Postpone it until I’m ready?”
Gregor was ready to say that he and Bennis could always elope, but he didn’t, because he knew they couldn’t. Bennis didn’t want to elope. Donna had a long, thick length of ice blue satin ribbon in her hands and had started to pin it to Stewart Gordon’s back. Gregor sat down to watch the operation. It had occurred to him that now that he was here, she could make her measurements directly instead of using a substitute, but he wasn’t going to point it out to her.
“So,” he said, “I take it you didn’t just drop in. Didn’t I hear that you were in Scotland these days, teaching?”
“At St. Andrew’s, yes, on and off. It’s off, at the moment. I’m in a place called Margaret’s Harbor, making a movie.”
“Margaret’s Harbor,” Gregor said. “I’m impressed. Have you met any presidents lately?”
“This president of yours doesn’t go there,” Stewart said, “which is a damned good thing, considering. I’m making a silly movie, but they’re paying me a lot of money. Don’t you pay any attention to the news at all? It’s been on the news. It’s been all over the news.”
“That you’re in a movie on Margaret’s Harbor? I didn’t realize you’d gotten that important.”
“Be serious. The murder. The murder has been all over the news.”
Donna stopped with pins in her mouth. Even Bennis came in from the kitchen, as if she’d magically been able to hear the word. Gregor put the coffee mug Bennis had handed him on the small table next to his chair, then thought better of it, picked it up, got a coaster from the little stack next to the lamp, and put the mug down on that.
“Well,” Bennis said. “We’ve all been saying you need something to do.”
“Okay,” Gregor said. “I do think I’ve heard something about a murder, one of those girl singers killed her boyfriend, right, she’s—”
“She’s a first-class twit,” Stewart said, “but I’d be willing to bet nearly anything that she didn’t pull this off. Normand, by the way. Arrow Normand. That’s her name.”
“People in Khartoum know who she is,” Bennis said blandly.
“It’s to his credit that he doesn’t,” Stewart said. “She’s a twit. They’re all twits. The whole lot of them I’m working with. Well, you know, not the crew, those people. Those people are very competent. I like American film crews. They’re always very professional. Which is a lot more than you can say for American actresses, if that’s what you want to call this lot, which I don’t, as a matter of fact, but there’s nothing I can do about it. They’re all first-class twits, and if it hadn’t been for the money, I’d have walked out months ago. The money and Kendra Rhode. I found the body.”
It was liked being in a tornado. Gregor felt a little breathless. It didn’t help that Donna had gone back to draping her ribbon, openly listening, but diligently plying pins.
Gregor tried to piece it together. “I know who Kendra Rhode is. You
can’t be romantically involved with her, can you? She isn’t the sort of person I’d expect you to be romantically involved with.”
“Be serious,” Stewart said. “I’ve got better taste and a better mind, and Kendra Rhode doesn’t get romantically involved with anybody, any more than she drinks and drugs like the people she clubs around with. But she’s there. On Margaret’s Harbor. She came out about a week and a half ago and opened this big house her family has there so that she could give a New Year’s Eve party. That’s when the murder happened. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. There was a big storm.”
“A nor’easter,” Bennis said. “I heard about it. Boston was closed.”
“Damned near all of New England was closed,” Stewart said. “I’d never seen anything like it, not even in Scotland, and it snows in Scotland. That’s how we found the body. We weren’t looking for a body. We thought there’d been an accident in that ridiculous purple truck of his. Why is it that so many Americans seem to work at looking like bad jokes from the Daily Mirror? At any rate, we went looking for the truck, and we found it, and there he was—”
“Who’s we?” Gregor asked.
“Dr. Falmer. Annabeth Falmer. She—”
“She’s a historian, I know,” Gregor said. “Tibor gave me a book of hers about the abolitionist movement. So, let’s see, we’ve got you, this Arrow whoever person—”
“Normand,” Donna said.
“Kendra Rhode. Annabeth Falmer. Anybody else I should be worried about?”
“There are the rest of the twits,” Stewart said. “Marcey Mandret. Oh, and this real estate woman who’s making a completely nuisance of herself, named, I kid you not, Bitsy Winthorp. But they don’t matter. That’s not what I want from you. I want you to come up to Margaret’s Harbor and prove that Kendra Rhode did it.”
“Kendra Rhode,” Gregor said.
“Maybe not directly, because she’d never get her hands dirty,” Stewart said, “but she did it. I have no idea how to explain this to anybody who hasn’t met her, but she did it. I’ve got pictures.”
“You’ve got pictures of Kendra Rhode committing a murder?”
“Be serious,” Stewart Gordon said. “As soon as this nice woman takes the pins out of me, I’ll show you. I need you to come up to Margaret’s Harbor and do something about what’s going on, or she’s going to get away with it, and she gets away with too bloody much.”
2
Stewart Gordon didn’t have proof that Kendra Rhode had murdered somebody, or had somebody murdered, but Gregor wasn’t expecting that. In a lot of ways, Stewart was the simplest man he had ever known, even simpler than Father Ti-bor, for whom simplicity was a religious necessity. Stewartt was not religious to the point of being antireligious, but he was also a moralist of the straightforward and uncompromising kind. Intelligent and Educated people may have given up the idea of good and evil—or, at least, of evil—but Stewart Gordon never had. It shone out of him like a beacon from an old-fashioned light house. He was no more able to suppress it than he was able to sing soprano.
The small boys weren’t going to go away until they got what they wanted, so Donna invited them to sit in her living room and be quiet while “Commander Rees talks to Mr. Demarkian.” Gregor waited for the lecture about the bloody boneheaded ignorance of American tele vision producers to hire a Scot to play a Welshman, but it didn’t come. Stewart was looming over Donna’s kitchen table, pulling flat color photographs out of a big manila envelope. The envelope must have been there all along, lying on a table somewhere or stuffed into Stewart’s coat, but Gregor hadn’t noticed, and now he sat, fascinated, wondering how it hadn’t burst. How many rolls of fllm had Stewart had with him? How many would he have needed? The last photograph was clearly the picture of a man who had been shot in the head. The color was so brilliant it was nearly gaudy.
Gregor leaned forward, picked it up, and turned it over in his hand. “This is the victim, I take it,” he said. “And he was—?”
“Mark Anderman,” Stewart said. “Not a bad kid, really. Worked as a grip. Didn’t get paid much. The girls liked him, though. He was what’s known these days as ‘hot.’ ”
“You can’t tell from this.”
“Well, no, you couldn’t, could you?” Stewart looked at the huge pile of photographs and sat down. “I shot everything my cell phone camera would let me, then I shot everything her cell phone camera would let me. She thought I was crazy.”
“Who’s she?”
“Dr. Falmer. Annabeth Falmer.”
Gregor heard the tone so clearly, it could have been a dinner gong going off in his ear. “What’s that?” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Stewart looked uncomfortable. “She’s not a twit, you know. She’s a lady. She’s a very intelligent and graceful lady.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s also the fact that she doesn’t seem to be open to that kind of suggestion at the moment,” Stewart said. “She’s, uh, she’s devoted to her family. She’s got a grandchild on the way. She’s a little young for it, but she’s very excited about it. She hasn’t got any of the attitude. I don’t think she even knew the attitude existed before we came to the island, and I’ve had to work overtime to prove I don’t have it in me.”
“I don’t think that should have been hard,” Gregor said blandly. “You were with her when you found the body.”
Stewart nodded. “It’s something of a long story. Filming shut down early that day because of the storm. If these people had had any sense, there would have been no filming at all that day. The weather reports had been full of it for a week. But they’re from Los Angeles, these people. They think they know everything.”
“They probably just don’t understand snow.”
“Filming shut down early,” Stewart said, “and I went over to this place they’ve got on Main Street, this sort of pub, except it’s rich people on this island so the place is all tarted up. I went to have a pint or whatever you call it over here, and Marcey Mandret was there, and she was drinking some kind of champagne cocktail. You ever had a champagne cocktail? The stuff tastes like rat piss.”
“I think we’re having some at my wedding.”
“Yes, well. That happens. So, Marcy Mandret was drinking these things, one after the other, and she was obviously completely gone. She had this little dress on that wasn’t suitable for the weather, straps and no sleeves, cut high on the thigh, and it kept slipping half off and exposing her breasts. She would get up and stagger around and the dress would fall half off and it was getting out of hand. So I went up to talk to her, to tell her to get her act together and get herself home, and she threw up on the bartender and more or less passed out.”
“She did this on Margaret’s Harbor?” Bennis chimed in from the sidelines.
Stewart turned around. “I know. Bloody the worst place. I thought the golf ladies were going to have aneurysms. So. She passed out, and I wrapped my coat around her so that her private parts wouldn’t be swinging in the wind—did I mention that these women never wear underwear?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“Well, they don’t, and she wasn’t this time. I wrapped my coat around her and threw her over my shoulder and got out of there, and fortunately the only photographer on the premises was the guy from the Home News, which up until this acted like we weren’t even on the island. I got out on Main Street and then I decided not to use the regular route, because there have been photographers on the island, the nasty ones, and I didn’t want what was defnitely going to happen if they got sight of us the way we were. So I went around to the back, but the snow was coming down very fast and I got disoriented. I knew I had to head to the sea, because that’s where the house Marcey and Arrow rented was, and I followed the sounds of the water, but I got turned around. I was hopelessly lost. Then I saw this one place, way out on the beach, and it had all its lights on. So I went there.”
“Annabeth Falmer can afford a house directly on the water on Margaret�
��s Harbor?” Gregor asked. “That can’t be history, no matter how popular. Does she have family money?”
“Not the way you mean,” Stewart says. “She’s got grown sons, a cardiologist and a litigator, as she puts it. They think she walks on water.”
“Ah.”
“Here’s the thing,” Stewart said. “She let me in. She offered me a cup of tea with brandy in it. And she already had Arrow Normand in the house. Arrow had shown up about twenty minutes before we did, staggering around, with her hair soaked in blood and, again, no underwear. Annabeth thought there had been a rape.”
“That’s logical,” Gregor said. “I probably would have too. Did you say her hair soaked in blood?”
“By the time I got there, the blood was close to drying and the hair was caked, but it would have been soaked. And it’s longish hair. Thin, but longish.”
Gregor picked up the picture again. “He was shot by someone on the driver’s side. The blood went back, not out. She couldn’t have had her hair soaked with it unless she was standing behind him when it happened.”
“There,” Stewart said. “You see? That’s the kind of thing I need. The whole setup is just wrong. And the police aren’t listening.”
“I doubt that the police aren’t listening to that sort of thing,” Gregor said. “When they don’t, the prosecutors go fairly nuts because they end up looking foolish. Why couldn’t she have been standing behind him when it happened?”
“I don’t know that she couldn’t have,” Stewart said, “but when we found him, when Annabeth and I found him, he was in the passenger’s-side seat of the truck, lying against the side window, because the truck had gone down the slope to the beach and rolled onto its side. There was beach and rock behind him, and if a person had been there, she’d have been crushed.”
