Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

“All of it?” Gregor said.

  “All of it,” Linda Beecham said, and now, suddenly, there was emotion in her voice, a lot of it, and none of it pleasant. “I think we invent things, religions, and philosophies, and problems, we invent them to make it seem like it all makes sense, but nothing does. It’s just chaos. We’re all like bowling pins on a big hardwood floor and the bowling balls come flying at us for no reason at all and some of us fall over and some of us don’t, and none of it means anything at all. None of it makes sense.”

  “We can make sense of some of it,” Gregor said. “I can make sense of what happened to your friend Jack, if I look at the problem long enough. I can make sense of what happened to this man Mark Anderman. Crimes get solved. Crimes are deliberate.”

  “They’ve all gone,” Linda Beecham said. “You’d better go after them, or you’ll get left behind.”

  2

  What was downstairs was not “the press” as Gregor had known it. It wasn’t even “the celebrity press” as Gregor had known it. Apparently, the kind of reporters and photographers who followed heavyweight personalities like national news anchors and presidents of the United States were different from the ones who followed people like Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand—which made a lot of sense, but Gregor had never had a reason to consider it before. He wondered if he should have taken Stewart Gordon more seriously than he had. Stewart fulminated. He did it a lot. He was doing it even when they were both twenty-two-year-old nobodies in army uniforms. Gregor tended to take the fulminating in the same spirit he took old George Tekema-nian’s head shaking about the younger generation. It began to occur to him he might have been wrong.

  Leslie O’Neal turned out to be a young and ferociously competent-looking woman in an old-fashioned nurse’s cap, as if she’d stepped out full-blown from a movie about Cherry Ames. Gregor saw her for the first time as he came through the fire doors at the bottom of the stairs he had taken to get to the emergency room, and with her he saw Stewart Gordon, his peacoat unbuttoned, looking frazzled. Gregor assumed that Clara, Stewart, and Dr. Ingleford had taken the elevator, since he hadn’t heard them on the stairs, but when he pressed the button for the elevator himself it seemed to be stuck on the ground floor. Once he got through the fire doors he saw what might have been the reason. There was another set of fire doors on the opposite end of the hall he stepped into. They were being held shut by a plank of wood threaded through their handles, and the woman in the nurse’s cap was Scotch-taping thick blue paper across the small windows near the top center of each one.

  “It won’t do any good,” Stewart said, seeing Gregor come through. “They’ll just find a heating duct to crawl through. It’s worth a small fortune to get a picture of the body.”

  “Body?” Gregor asked. “Is she—?”

  “Of course she’s not dead,” Leslie O’Neal said. “She’s not even OD’d, not really. She’s just a silly girl who took a bunch of crap and passed out, and now we have to stop everything and deal with it. Honestly. These people. You two look big enough, though. You can hold the fort while I go help Dr. Ingleford.”

  “I called nine-one-one,” Stewart said. “I had to call nine-one-one. I couldn’t get her to talk to me.”

  Leslie O’Neal turned her back on all of them and hurried away down yet another corridor. Gregor looked around. There was a lot back here, more than you would think there could be given what the lobby looked like. What there wasn’t was any sign of people.

  Stewart was looking at the fire doors Gregor had come through. “We’d better secure those,” he said. “They’ll figure it out sooner rather than later. There’s got to be another piece of that wood around here somewhere.”

  “Is it always this deserted?” Gregor asked. “It’s the oddest thing. It’s like a ghost town.”

  “It is, really, during the winter,” Clara Walsh said. “I remember it growing up here. There are all these houses and stores and restaurants and I don’t know what, and not a tenth of them can operate without the summer people. I suppose it would be sad, except that it’s always been this way as long as I’ve been alive. You’d have to go back to the nineteenth century to find a Margaret’s Harbor that was mostly about the people who actually lived on it.”

  “They’re in the stairwell,” Stewart said. “I can hear them. We’d better do something before this gets very bad.”

  They did something, Stewart directing. Gregor did not mind that. Stewart had always been good at directing, and good at doing the sensible, straightforward thing. They found another plank of wood in a room that seemed to have been given over to the collection of junk. Stewart pawed through piles of boxed paper and old molded plastic until he came up with something suitable, and then said something under his breath about what the hell anybody had ever wanted it for. They got the door secured just as the first of the photographers came down the stairs from the second floor. Gregor found himself wondering if there were patients up there, or staff, or anyone, that these people might be disturbing. Stewart had a handful of printout paper. He slammed it against the windows in the door and began to Scotch-tape it up.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said. “They’ll be in here in twenty minutes.”

  “I’ve called the state police,” Clara Walsh said. “I don’t know what else I can do. Jerry can’t handle something like this on his own.”

  “Don’t presidents of the United States vacation here?” Stewart said. “You’ve got to have something to take care of one of them.”

  “We don’t take care of them,” Clara Walsh said. “The Secret Service takes care of them.”

  The doors to the landing were bulging. Literally. They were pushing in like the ones from that old horror movie, The Haunting. Gregor looked at the other doors and saw that they, too, were bulging. In fact, they were bulging even more dangerously because there were more people on that side trying to push in. This was insane.

  “There’ve got to be laws,” Gregor said. “It can’t be legal to do something like this. What if they compromise treatment? Couldn’t they get sued?”

  Stewart sighed. “They could, but it’s worth the risk. The tabloids pay big for photographs of the right people, and even bigger for photographs of the right people in—what will we call it?—compromised circumstances. Dead. Dead drunk. Half undressed. Shoplifting.”

  “And these are the right people,” Gregor said. “Marcey Mandret. What does Marcey Mandret do? I mean, she’s in this movie with you, I know, but what else does she do?”

  “She’s been in a couple of movies,” Stewart said, “all minor, mostly aimed at teenagers.”

  “And that’s enough to cause that?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Stewart said. “There are lots of young, pretty actresses with more substantive careers than that, and they’re not being followed around by a crowd of photographers who’d just as soon see them dead as alive. It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. They do it. The people like Marcey do it. They do it on purpose.”

  “Do what on purpose?” Clara Walsh asked.

  “Become targets of the paparazzi on purpose,” Stewart said. “Look. Be sensible, all right? There really are some people with enormous careers who become targeted against their will, but it’s actually very rare. I was on the most popular science fiction program in the history of television. It’s got a cult following. I saw somebody dressed up as me on line for voir dire at the O. J. Simpson trial. With a mask of my face, yet. But those idiots are not following me. They don’t care what I do or where I am. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Clara Walsh said. “I’ve spent the last several days wondering why they aren’t following you. You seem like a better candidate than, well, the girls. If I may be so politically incorrect.”

  “I think the phrase going around town is a lot more politically incorrect than calling them girls,” Stewart said. “But here’s the thing. I don’t ride around in limousines. I walk. I do my own shopping. I go out to ordinary pubs and a few restaurants on my own or
with friends. I go to the bookstore. If somebody says hello, I’m polite and I keep on walking, because it’s really incredible what kind of nuts there are out there, but I don’t make a fetish of my ‘privacy’ or my ‘safety.’ I just live like a human being. I’m boring. You can’t do anything with me. I don’t even show up for openings except every once in a while when I’ve got a friend I want to support. And it’s not just me. Think about Julia Stiles.”

  “Who?” Gregor asked.

  “Lovely young woman,” Stewart said. “American actress. Very beautiful. Better looking than this lot. Very intelligent. Studied at Columbia. Been in a few serious movies. Mona Lisa Smile, for instance. But you never see her in the tabloids. And you never see her on the red carpet, as they all like to put it. Do you know what the ‘red carpet’ actually is? It’s a device for letting the lunatic press know that you’re fair game. Everybody talks about how crazy these people are, and what scum, and they are scum, they’re the embodiment of the decadence of late capitalism, but the thing is, they’re not stupid. They know it’s easier to make a living with people who are cooperating. They get into these symbiotic relationships with the twits who want the publicity, and then they ride the pony until it collapses. And it does collapse. It has to collapse. You can’t run a career the way Marcey Mandret is running hers, or Arrow Normand used to be running hers, and I say ‘used to be’ deliberately. She isn’t going to have one left when this is over. You can’t run a career like that and have it last. You can’t run a life like that and have it last. Los Angeles is littered with people in their thirties who used to be famous and now show up only when they get hit with a drunk-driving hit-and-run, or overdose in an alley. I hate Los Angeles.”

  “There’s somebody at the window,” Clara Walsh said, pointing toward the ceiling.

  Stewart and Gregor turned to look. The window was a very small one, not meant to open, almost exactly where the ceiling met the wall, and there was indeed somebody in it, hitting against it in a way that was sure to break it eventually.

  Stewart shrugged. “It’s got wire. They can break through it, but they can’t get in.”

  “However did they get up there?” Clara Walsh said. “What do they think they’re doing? What does anybody around here think they’re doing?”

  “It’s like Anna Nicole Smith,” Stewart said, turning his attention to Gregor again. “You have to ask yourself, I have to ask myself, if what you’re dealing with is a form of mental retardation. Or ignorance so profound that it becomes impenetrable. They don’t understand, do you know that? They don’t understand that people are making fun of them, that they’re not famous in a way anybody would want to be. They don’t know the rules.”

  There was yet another set of fire doors in the center of the block, but it was surrounded entirely by emergency room cubicles, and there were no photographers pushing to come through. Leslie O’Neal came through this set and looked around until she found Stewart Gordon. She did not look at the doors secured with boards or at the window near the ceiling, even though the glass broke over her head.

  “Mr. Gordon,” she said. “Miss Mandret is asking to speak to you. Dr. Ingleford doesn’t approve, but Miss Mandret is staging a fit, so come along.”

  3

  If Marcey Mandret was really having a fit, it couldn’t have been much of one. It was only a minute or two before Stewart Gordon was back in the emergency room’s tiny central core, looking bemused and more than a little flustered. In the meantime, Gregor Demarkian and Clara Walsh tried to talk to each other, hampered by the fact that they really had nothing to talk about. Clara Walsh was the public prosecutor, not the chief of police or the head of the homicide investigation—assuming there even was a head of the homicide investigation. Gregor had no idea what the chain of command was here, or even who was responsible for seeing that the police work got done. There had been some talk about the state police, but Gregor didn’t think that was the direction to look. The only time he had ever heard of the state police taking charge of a municipal homicide was in those small towns in Connecticut that had what they called a “resident trooper,” a statie who lived in town and acted as a one-man police department. Oscartown was small, but not that small, and in season it probably needed a force of at least three or four. Somewhere there had to be police, and forensics, and all the other things he had come to count on in both his long careers. The forensics were never as good as television cop shows made them look like they were, but they at least gave you something.

  Once or twice, Gregor tried to get a look out of one of the fire doors. He peeled back a corner of Scotch tape and lifted the heavy wad of printout paper to look out, but all he saw was people looking back in, dozens of them, their faces pressed to the glass. There were even dozens of them now in the back landing, which was not good news. All of them seemed to have cameras. None of them seemed to be going away. He wondered where the state police were, the ones who were supposed to come in and break this up. Then it occurred to him that if Oscartown didn’t have enough police to break up a riot, they might not have enough to conduct a homicide investigation.

  Clara Walsh peered into his face. She looked concerned, but Gregor thought she might be one of those women who always look at least a little concerned. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  He shrugged and looked back toward one of the sets of fire doors. “I was wondering who had jurisdiction. Who was actually investigating this homicide.”

  “Ah,” Clara Walsh said. “That bothers you, too. Well, it’s Jerry, of course, even though he’s not really set up for it. We can get the state police to help, but they don’t have jurisdiction. Which leaves Jerry up a creek. I don’t think there’s ever been a homicide in Oscartown before, at least not one where the perpetrator was in any way in doubt.”

  “Domestics,” Gregor said.

  “Exactly,” Clara Walsh said. “Or else somebody gets high as a kite and into a fight, as we used to say when I was growing up. There isn’t a lot to do on the island during the off-season. People get cabin fever.”

  Gregor was going to say that cabin fever was unlikely when there were ferries to the mainland available, even if they didn’t run very often, but Stewart Gordon was emerging from the bowels of the emergency room, his jacket off and on his arm, as if he were a butler bringing it in to a guest in a hurry to be gone.

  He started to put it on as soon as he saw Gregor and Clara. “Well,” he said. “That was interesting.”

  “Was it interesting?” Clara asked. “Was it something I should know about? Or something somebody should know about? Mr. Demarkian here has just reminded me that the line of command in this case is, ah, fuddled.”

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with the case,” Stewart said. “She says she took a ‘little too much Valium,’ which sounds about right. I don’t see why she’d lie about it. Although, if you ask me, the problem isn’t the Valium, it’s the drinking on top of the Valium, and she’s been at it. Am I the only person left in the universe these day who knows what the signs of alcoholism are? It’s the middle of the day.”

  Clara Walsh shook her head. “And that’s all she had to say? That she’d taken too much Valium? Did she mention if she took too much on purpose? Was she trying to commit suicide?”

  “I don’t think so,” Stewart said. “You’d better ask Dr. Ingleford about that. No, that wasn’t what she wanted to say. She wanted to say that she wanted me to know that she hadn’t stayed in the Hugh Hefner Suite in Vegas.”

  “What?” Gregor said.

  Clara Walsh just blinked, but it had the same effect.

  For once, Stewart Gordon looked surprised. “I’ve mentioned this, I know I have. The trip to Vegas a couple of weeks ago. More than that. Four or five. We had a break in the shooting schedule and they all took off there overnight, on a whim or something, I think it was. You must have seen it in the papers. It made every tabloid from here to Guam. Because of the Hugh Hefner Suite.”

  “You haven’t m
entioned it,” Gregor said carefully, “but—”

  “Of course I mentioned it,” Stewart said. “It’s high on my list of absolute stupidities. Nine thousand square feet. Its own indoor pool. I’ve got no idea what else. Forty thousand dollars a night. Arrow wanted to stay in the Hugh Hefner Suite because Britney Spears had stayed there. So she did. Or something. I don’t know. They took off for the night. Arrow checked into the Hugh Hefner Suite. And then, you know, somebody sold the story to the tabloids, which was inevitable.”

  “Who sold the story to the tabloids—Mark Anderman? The one who died?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, hell no,” Stewart said. “They don’t stay in relationships that long, these girls. Arrow was going out with Steve Becker at the time of the Vegas trip. He worked as a grip. Arrow dumped his ass either on the trip or just after it. I don’t know. And I don’t know if he sold the story to the tabloids. I don’t remember seeing one of those front-page things with a little thumbnail picture of him on it. But somebody did. The story was everywhere before they’d even got back here. And there were pictures.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  “There’s no ah about it,” Stewart said. “That’s another thing about them, these girls, I mean. The men are awful. I mean awful. Chorus boys. Grips. Minor-league hangers-on. The relationships last a couple of months and then the men disappear, because they weren’t visible to begin with. If that makes any sense. If any of it does.”

  “It makes sense,” Gregor said. “In a odd sort of way.”

  The door to the waiting room was now bulged out far enough that Gregor was half afraid it would crack into pieces, in spite of being made of metal.

  Clara Walsh gave it a long hard look, and took out her cell phone.

  Chapter Two

  1

  By this time in her life, Annabeth Falmer had a long list of things she knew to be true, and one of the most important was this: it is not the case that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. In fact, in Annabeth’s experience, actions produced overreactions, or no reactions at all, but almost never the sort of reasoned, proportionate response that took into account the mitigating circumstances in whatever it was that had happened. Mitigating circumstances and proportionate responses were for other people’s problems, not your own. It was easy to keep your head when at the very base of it you didn’t care. When you did care, there was too much at stake for “rational” to be something you were interested in pursuing. When you cared because you were in pain, very little would do as a response short of a total annihilating blast. Annabeth didn’t like to admit it, but she had been thinking about annihilating blasts now for the better part of two months.