by Jane Haddam
Stewart had her by the hand, and dragged her in past Gregor as if she were a small child needing to be led to a waiting train.
“This is Anna,” he said. “Annabeth. Annabeth Falmer. I knew her as Anna before I knew her as Annabeth. That’s the trouble.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Annabeth Falmer said desperately. “It’s just that—it’s just—Anna sounded better than Annabeth professionally.”
“She writes books,” Stewart said. “I told you about her. Father Tibor has heard of her. Everybody has heard of her. She’s writing a book now, when she’s not being invaded by drunken twits and finding firearms in her sofa. Here, sit down. Take the thing out and show him.”
Gregor was still standing at the door. With Stewart, everything went by quickly. Gregor closed the door to the corridor and came back into the center of the large room.
Stewart had practically pushed Annabeth Falmer into the wing chair, and now she was sitting in it with her feet flat on the floor and a large tote bag in her lap. She looked confused.
“How do you do,” Gregor said, holding out his hand. “I’m Gregor Demarkian.”
“How do you do,” Annabeth Falmer said. “I’ve seen you on television. And Stewart has, you know, told me a lot about you.”
“About you in the army,” Stewart said. “Those are the best stories about you, whether you know it or not. There he was, from one of the greatest cities in the world, with no more of a clue than the most mold-besotted hayseed. And they put him in intelligence. Intelligence.”
Annabeth put the tote bag on the floor and shrugged out of her coat, which was not the standard quilted thing Gregor had gotten used to seeing since he’d come off the ferry, but a good black wool that must once have been expensive and that seemed to have gotten only more so with age. She picked the tote bag up and looked inside it.
“Well,” she said.
“Yes,” Stewart said. “You have to tell him. There isn’t anybody else to tell, and he’d be the best person anyway.”
Gregor gave a glance at the computer screen, still full of images of Arrow Normand, and came around to sit down on the edge of the bed. It was always awkward talking to people in hotel rooms, especially women.
Annabeth reached into the tote bag and came out with a big, see-through, self-closing plastic bag, the kind used to put things away in freezers. Gregor stared at it for a moment without realizing what he was seeing. Maybe it was because he was used to seeing those bags hauled out so that somebody could feed him, but for a split second he thought he was looking at an enormous pork chop that had been burned into an unyielding solid hunk. Then his brain adjusted to the situation he was in, and he saw it was a gun.
“Ah,” he said.
“I wish you’d stop saying ‘ah,’ ” Stewart said. “This is serious. Annabeth found this in her couch, the same couch she put Arrow Normand to sleep on the night we found the body. And we thought it might be the gun used in the killing, but maybe not. Why would it be in Annabeth’s house?”
“We did try to be careful,” Annabeth said. “I mean, I did, and then later Stewart did. Neither one of us touched it with our hands. We used a handkerchief to pick it up.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well. Let’s think. This is at your house? Have you owned it long?”
“Oh,” Annabeth said. “No. No. I’ve only been there since the end of the summer. It was to write a book, you see, and the boys found me this place, and I don’t know what kind of deal they got, but it was fully furnished and I could bring Creamsicle—”
“The cat,” Stewart said helpfully. “It’s a little orange cat.”
“I’d guessed that,” Gregor said. “So, it came fully furnished. That means the couch where you found the gun was there before you got there?”
“Yes. Yes, it was,” Annabeth said.
“And was this the first time you’d gone rooting around in it?” Gregor asked.
Annabeth looked confused for a moment, then brightened. “Oh, no. I clean as a hobby, or something. I’ve pulled the cushions several times and vacuumed out underneath them. If you don’t do that, couches get really foul. I’ve taken the whole thing apart several times before this.”
“And that’s what you were doing this time, taking the couch apart to clean it?” Gregor asked.
“Not really,” Annabeth said. “I sat down on it, which I don’t usually do, but I was setting up to give Stewart some tea when he came and I was arranging some things on the coffee table, and I sat down to do it, and I sat down on something hard. So I went looking, and that was what I found. It was just there. Between the cushions and a little underneath.”
“And it’s not yours?”
“Of course it’s not hers,” Stewart said.
“No it isn’t,” Annabeth said, “although you should hear my sons on the phone these days. They want me to get one. They both live in suburbs, you see, and there are burglaries. But this is Margaret’s Harbor. Nothing ever happens on Margaret’s Harbor.”
“Somebody just got murdered here,” Stewart pointed out.
Annabeth ignored him. Gregor ignored him too. The gun in the plastic bag was large and heavy, not a “ladies’ gun” as some of them were called, not small so that it could fit into a purse. He looked up instinctively and checked the pictures of Arrow Normand on his laptop screen. She was a very small woman, tiny, not much taller than five feet. She didn’t look strong, and she didn’t look athletic. Even in the pictures where she was supposed to be performing, the illusion of a toned and trained body was just that, an illusion. She faked it with spandex and Lycra.
Stewart turned his head to see what Gregor was looking at. “Aha,” he said. “You’ve looked her up. Our Arrow.”
“She’s very small.”
“And? ”
“And this is a big gun,” Gregor said. “It’s a heavy gun. It’s heavy even for Ms. Falmer there—”
“Dr. Falmer,” Stewart said automatically.
“Annabeth,” Annabeth said.
“It’s heavy even for Annabeth,” Gregor corrected himself, “and she’s not only larger in terms of height and body build, but she’s got more muscle on her. At least, as far as I can tell from photographs. Has it been fired recently?”
“We didn’t fire it, if that’s what you mean,” Annabeth said. “We only picked it up with a handkerchief, like I told you. I’m not sure I’d know how to fire it.”
“It’s simple to fire a gun,” Stewart said. “You make sure it’s loaded, you make sure the safety is off, and then you pull the trigger.”
Gregor opened the plastic bag. Then he reached behind him into his suitcase, took the first tie that was handy, and took the gun out with that. Then he smelled the barrel. There was nothing. He dropped the gun back into the bag.
“Well?” Stewart said.
“It smells new,” Gregor said, trying to be cautious. Trying to be cautious around Stewart was like trying to be—Gregor stopped. He didn’t know what it was like. He had no meta phor. “It smells new,” he said again, “as if it has never been fired at all. Ever. Which I can’t vouch for until we get it tested. Try to get that through your head.”
“What would Arrow have been doing carrying around a gun that had never been fired?” Stewart asked.
“Are you sure she was carrying it around?” Gregor said. “There was somebody else there that night, wasn’t there? You said you carried Marcey Mandret to Dr.—Annabeth’s house, and that’s how the two of you ended up finding the body of Mark Anderman.”
“Marcey Mandret wasn’t carrying a gun,” Stewart said. “I know. I had her over my shoulder. She wasn’t even carrying underwear.”
“In her purse?” Gregor suggested.
“Didn’t have one,” Stewart said. “I mean, I suppose she did have one, earlier in the day, but by the time I was wiping her up off the floor it had disappeared somewhere. Well, all right. I mean it didn’t occur to me she should have it. I was busy trying to get her out of that place before she la
nded on the front page of the Enquirer. Again. But she couldn’t have been carrying anything, and especially not anything that heavy. She was wearing so little, I would have noticed.”
“They were both wearing practically nothing,” Annabeth said. “When Miss Normand came to my door, I thought there must have been a rape, because she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Stewart explained it to me later, and it made sense, because of the shoes. You should have seen the shoes. There was nothing to them. They were just straps. And in that storm.”
Gregor looked down at the gun again. Arrow Normand shows up at Annabeth Falmer’s door wearing practically no clothes, no underwear and strappy sandals in the middle of a raging nor’easter. Stewart Gordon shows up at Annabeth Falmer’s door properly dressed for the occasion, but carrying Marcey Mandret, who is also wearing practically no clothes, no underwear and strappy sandals, over his shoulder. Arrow Normand is in shock. Marcey Mandret is dead drunk. There’s a body in a pickup truck down on the beach, and somebody has shot him through the head. Now there’s a gun in Annabeth Falmer’s couch, and nobody knows how it got there.
Gregor looked up. “When Arrow Normand got to your door, was she wearing a coat?”
“No,” Annabeth said, “why?”
“Was she carrying a purse?”
“No,” Annabeth said again.
“Was her dress long, to the floor or at least below the knee?”
“It was cut practically up to her—” Annabeth stopped. “Um. You know. Is this something I should be figuring out for myself?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “if she wasn’t wearing a coat, and she wasn’t carrying a purse, and she was dressed in practically nothing and wearing strappy sandals, I don’t see how she was any more capable than Marcey Mandret was of carrying around a whacking huge firearm like that without any of you noticing.”
Chapter Four
1
Arrow Normand understood that the time had come to do something about her situation, and she understood this most clearly because her mother was waiting for her in an interview room down the hall. That was how the guard had put it when he came to bring her the news, “Your mother is waiting for you in the interview room down the hall,” as if she ought to know about interview rooms, and halls, and everything else that happened in this place. The news made her dig even deeper under the pile of rough gray blankets they had given her. It was up to four now, and lying underneath their weight she sometimes thought she was back at home on one of those days when it snowed so hard that there wasn’t any school. That was real home, not home as she was supposed to think of it now. Los Angeles never felt like home to her. There was too much sunlight, and too many people who looked as if they weren’t entirely real.
After a while, the woman guard came down to see her, standing just outside the bars as if she were waiting for a dog to do its business. Arrow didn’t understand why she had to make so many decisions. It was nice here, with the blankets, and thinking about things she hadn’t really brought to mind in years. She missed Halloween, with candied apples and cider in pumpkin shells and kids running around in costumes knee deep in leaves. She missed sitting at the kitchen table in their old house with her paper dolls stretched out all along the surface, trying to decide if Sophisticated Suzy or Marvelous Melanie should wear the Dutch dress with its little wooden shoes. On the other hand, that last memory wasn’t as good as it should have been, since it always included the sound of her parents fighting. Her parents had fought nonstop when she was a child, but it wasn’t until after her mother had taken her to L.A. that they had ended up divorced.
The woman guard’s name was Marcia, or maybe Marsha. Arrow hadn’t asked her how it was spelled. She stood at the bars and waited, patiently, as if she had all the time in the world.
“Your mother is here,” she said finally. “Don’t you want to talk to her?”
Arrow closed her eyes and wished that the blankets on top of her were heavier. If they were heavy enough, nobody would be able to get them off, and she’d be able to stay put until she wanted to come out and eat some food. She didn’t mind the food. They brought her whatever she asked for. Marcia had even brought her a latte that had been flown in especially from her favorite place in L.A. The truth was, though, that Arrow didn’t like lattes all that much either. She only knew she had to drink them. Milk shakes made you fat and, even worse, made you look like a dork.
She turned around on the narrow little cot and sat up, still keeping the blankets clutched against her chest. People thought she had killed Mark Anderman, and she knew it, but she didn’t think Marcia did. She didn’t think the other guard did either, the male one. She wondered if her mother did. It was one of those things she had been working very hard not to know.
“I’m tired,” she said, looking at Marcia, square and solid in her dark blue uniform. “I just want to sleep.”
“But it’s your mother,” Marcia said. “And it’s perfectly safe. There aren’t any photographers here. I can get you all the way down to the interview room and back without your having to see anybody at all.”
“Is my mother by herself?” Arrow asked. Her mother was almost never by herself, but there were different kinds and different degrees of having someone with her.
“She’s by herself,” Marcia said. “I heard the sergeant say that they think you feel overwhelmed by the lawyers, and that’s why you’re acting the way you are. Most people don’t want to stay in jail for days at a time. They want to go back to their own homes if the police will let them.”
“It’s not like real jail here,” Arrow said. “It’s not like on television.”
“That’s true,” Marcia agreed. “It never is like television here, and you’re all we’ve got at the moment, so we can be even more accommodating, but it’s still jail. I read about you in People where it said you love to take hot baths. You aren’t going to get a hot bath here.”
Part of the problem was that she was very cold. She was cold even under the blankets, but she didn’t want to say so, because whenever she did, they brought in a doctor to look at her. She didn’t think she was sick. She didn’t think she was going to run a fever or fall over or do any of the things that got you hospitalized for exhaustion in L.A. She just thought she needed more blankets, all the blankets that they had in the world.
“Okay,” she said finally. She swung her legs off the cot and stood up. They had given her a jail jumpsuit to wear, and that was like television. It was orange. She actually liked wearing it. It was loose, and soft, almost like wearing nothing at all, but at the same time it covered her up entirely. That was another difference between real home and Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, she wore things that showed a lot of skin, halter tops, dresses and skirts cut way up high. At home, she wore things that kept her warm, like corduroy jeans and big, thick sweaters that had belonged to her older brothers and fell down halfway to her knees. She wished it wasn’t the case that people wouldn’t like her if she did the things she wanted to do. She wished she could dress in big thick sweaters without having stories about it written up in all the papers.
She shook out the folds of the jumpsuit. It never seemed to wrinkle. Everything Arrow owned wrinkled on sight, unless it was sparkly and had a lot of metal.
“Okay,” she said again.
Marcia was giving her one of those long looks people gave her a lot these days, as if by staring at her long enough they could reveal all her secrets. She didn’t have many secrets, though. It was hard to have secrets when people were photographing her all the time. She had just the one thing, or maybe two, and those weren’t secrets as much as they were things she just couldn’t talk about. There were a lot of things she couldn’t talk about, because it was very important not to get people angry with her.
“Life is like high school,” her mother had said once, before they had gone to L.A. “Everything is a popularity contest.”
Marcia had swung open the barred doors of the cell. Arrow looked around and wondered what real jail wo
uld be like. Everybody said she was going to go to jail, that she would be convicted of murder and sent to a penitentiary. She wasn’t supposed to hear the news, but she did. There was a little television set up at the guards’ desk at the end of the hall, and the guards always seemed to have it on blasting. She couldn’t imagine going to jail, but she couldn’t imagine singing in front of millions of people, and she’d done that dozens of times.
Marcia was waiting. Arrow went through into the corridor. Marcia started down the hall. Arrow followed her. Secretaries stood up from behind their desks, officers stood up in their cubicles. There weren’t very many people here, but all of them wanted to see Arrow pass. She tried to stand up very straight while she walked.
The interview room was a small place with a regular door and no windows, not 150 feet from where Arrow had been. There was a big conference table inside, surrounded by chairs. The conference table was made out of cheap pressed wood. It was peeling in the corners. The chairs were armless and had plastic pads on the backs and seats. Arrow’s mother was a violently blond woman with too much hair and too much jewelry. She had been like that even before they’d moved to California, but back at (real) home the jewelry had been fake.
Arrow suddenly wished that there were pockets in the jumpsuit. She couldn’t think of what she was supposed to do with her hands. Marcia gave her a little push in the small of her back, and she stumbled forward.
“I’ll leave you two alone for a while,” Marcia said, stepping back into the hall.
Arrow heard the door close behind her. Her mouth was dry. Her throat was dry. She was sure that if she tried to talk, the words would come out in a squeak.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” her mother said. “But you’ve got to stop doing it. You’ve got to let us get you out of here.”
The walls in this room were gray. Arrow seemed to remember being in another room where the walls were dingy white. She had no idea how big this building was, or how many people worked in it. When she was a child, her father used to take her to work every once in a while, holding her hand and leading her through threading corridors that were like avenues in a maze. He worked in a company that did something with insurance, Arrow wasn’t sure what. She only knew it was a dead end, and then only because her mother had told her so.
