by Jane Haddam
“Well, there’s something else to think of,” Carl said. “Maybe we shouldn’t want her on the movie anymore. She’ll bring bad publicity. Or maybe she’ll just be so stressed she won’t be able to work. There are reasons why we might want to replace her, Stewart. The question becomes whether we should replace her with Kendra Rhode.”
“No.”
“It’s not as stupid an idea as it sounds,” Carl said. “She’s well known. A lot of people love to hate her. She’ll be at least something of a draw for those reasons alone. And this picture might need the help, if it ever gets done.”
“No,” Stewart said again. “And what’s more, you agree with me. You can’t stand the woman. So what’s this about?”
Carl Frank sat far back in his chair, smiling slightly. “Do you think Arrow Normand killed Mark Anderman?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s not, because she’s not—” Stewart didn’t know how to put it. “She wouldn’t blast somebody in the head at close range. She wouldn’t be able to stand the noise and she’d go completely crazy with the blood, but in the end she’d probably miss because she’d be closing her eyes as she went along. The whole scenario is wrong. It doesn’t fit her. And I don’t think she gave a damn about Mark Anderman, any more than she gave a damn about Steve Becker, or the six or seven others before that. She had no reason to kill him. And no capacity.”
“Do the police think Arrow Normand killed Mark Anderman? And don’t look like that, Stewart. You’re in contact with the police. You’ve got a lot more contact with them than I do.”
“It’s not a matter of the police,” Stewart said. “It’s the crown prosecutor, or whatever you call them here, that seems to be in charge. And I don’t know what she thinks. I think she thinks that she doesn’t have any other explanation. That’s why I called Gregor Demarkian.”
“Exactly,” Carl said. “But if they don’t come up with any other explanation, Arrow Normand will be assumed to have committed murder, whether they try her or not, and whether she did or not. And then the movie is left with a hole because we couldn’t put it out with her in it under the circumstances. So I’ll ask you straight-out. Would you have any objection to Kendra Rhode taking over Arrow’s part in this movie?”
“Yes,” Stewart said. “Of course I would.”
Carl Frank allowed himself a full, unrestrained smile. Then he said, “Good.”
Chapter Five
1
Gregor Demarkian needed to think, and the last thing he needed when he needed to think was something to think about. He realized that this sounded contradictory, put the way he’d put it, but he knew what he meant. The world was full of distractions. It contained more distractions than information. You had to be careful about what you allowed to grab your attention, or you’d find yourself spinning your wheels about nothing at all.
The first call he made was to Clara Walsh, and he made it on the hotel’s landline. He didn’t care about what Bennis said about the expense—and she didn’t have to worry about expenses, and he had enough to use a hotel landline if he wanted—but cell phones still made him nervous, and he was under the impression that they were easy to intercept. He had no idea why somebody would want to intercept his calls at this point in the proceedings, but he was dealing with people who risked death to get photographs of other people nobody could figure out what they were famous for. He didn’t think he was dealing with rationality.
He put the call in to Clara Walsh and looked at the gun in the clear plastic freezer bag while he did it. It sat there like a child’s version of major military artillery, too big to have been anything but—but what? What was the point of this, after all? Did somebody think he was going to start suspecting Annabeth Falmer of killing Mark Anderman? Or maybe it was Stewart he was supposed to suspect. At least Stewart had a hope in hell of actually being connected to the dead man. Gregor hated gestures. He especially hated gestures that were made gratuitously, by adolescents who thought they were smarter than everybody else.
It took Clara Walsh eight rings before she picked up. Gregor was surprised that he hadn’t been routed to her voice mail.
“Yes?” she said, sounding distracted.
Gregor realized that she probably had call waiting, and that she hadn’t recognized the number that had shown up on it. He made a mental note about one more thing to hate in modern technology. Then he said, “It’s Gregor Demarkian. I need to ask you to do something for me.”
“Oh.” Clara Walsh sounded confused. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—we’re supposed to meet in three-quarters of an hour, right before the press conference. Can it wait until then?”
“I’d rather it didn’t. Jerry Young is handling the details of this case, isn’t he?”
“More or less,” Clara Walsh said, “but there are things, you know. Forensics. The state has had to handle the forensics because we don’t have anything like the facilities for that here.”
“Somebody has to be coordinating the details,” Gregor said. “The forensics. The background checks. Who would that be?”
“I really don’t think there’s any one person,” Clara Walsh said. “I could check if you want me to.”
“I’d like you to check, and then I’d like you to get whoever that is over here in the next ten to fifteen minutes. Before the press conference. I need to know something about Mark Anderman. You know, Mark Anderman. The man who died. The guy nobody ever talks about.”
Clara Walsh let a long stretch of silence go by on her end of the line. “Mark Anderman,” she said. “It’s not that we never talk about him. It’s that there isn’t much to say.”
“There has to be something to say,” Gregor said. “Somebody killed him, and he didn’t die in a mugging or an attempted robbery. At least I assume that’s been fairly well established.”
“It has been,” Clara said. “But—”
“Somebody who has been murdered deliberately,” Gregor plowed on, “is somebody with something about him that made somebody want to kill him. That may seem simplistic to you, but it’s an important point. I can’t believe it was blackmail. I can’t believe it, for one, because there’s nothing to blackmail these people about. I’ve been on the Internet. They live their lives in public, and the more public the better. Besides, hangers-on in this group don’t blackmail their celebrity friends, they take the information to the tabloids and get paid for it. That makes them more money, and it has the added advantage of being legal. So there must be some reason why somebody wanted this man dead. The best way to find out what that was is to find out something about him. Do you think we could do that?”
“I,” Clara Walsh said. “Well. All right. Yes. We could do that. You said in fifteen minutes?”
“At least half an hour before the press conference. I want time to ask some questions.”
“All right,” Clara Walsh said. “I’ll—let me get on the phone. Do you want us to meet you over there? The press conference is there, so it would be—”
“Here will be fine. Come up to the room. I’ll get it straightened up before you arrive.”
He’d also get dressed before they arrived, but he saw no point in saying so. He hung up, then reached into his suitcase for a clean pair of pants. He pulled them on and went across to the desk to look at the computer. He typed in “Mark Anderman,” but all that came up were stories about the murder, which wasn’t surprising. He tried “Steve Becker,” but all that came up that time were stories of the murder too, and one or two about the Hugh Hefner Suite. He looked at the screen for a moment and got up again.
Here was what these people did, the way they lived, in a universe of publicity, a universe where nobody was really real unless he was very well known. It didn’t matter among whom he was well known, or what he was well known for. It only mattered that he was front and center, that his name was in papers and magazines and on television, that people he didn’t know had heard of him. There was no shame, in anything. Men of Gr
egor’s generation would have been ashamed to be thought of as living on a woman’s money. These men did not care, and some of them actively sought out women to take care of them. The public did not reject them for it. It laughed sometimes, but it didn’t reject them, and when they got dumped it sometimes found itself sympathetic. Men and women both, in Bennis’s generation, would have been ashamed to be seen living off family money. There was something snobbish about inheriting a pile of cash, and parasitic, and it had to be atoned for by good works. People like Kendra Rhode didn’t mind being known for living off family money at all, and didn’t see a reason why she should be expected to do anything. Doing was for people who absolutely had to, and boring. It wasn’t “hot,” and it wasn’t “fun,” and it wasn’t anything to worry about. Family money, unlike the kind you had to earn, lasted forever.
Gregor looked back at the computer. Then he got a clean shirt out of the suitcase. Then he sat down on the side of the bed again and picked up the phone. He knew Bennis’s cell phone number by heart, but he was hoping to get her at the apartment. More and more, he liked the entire idea of land-lines.
Bennis picked up, saying “Hello” against a chorus of voices elsewhere in the apartment. It hadn’t occurred to Gregor that she might have company.
“It’s me,” Gregor said. “What’s going on over there? It sounds like you’re holding a convention.”
“I’m in the bedroom. There’s a bunch of people in the living room. And some in the kitchen. Donna is throwing me a shower.”
“You’re having a party?”
“Sort of,” Bennis said. “What about you? Where are you? Did you get in touch with Janet? They said on the news that you were going to give a press conference, and we thought we’d settle down and watch you.”
“I have not gotten in touch with Janet,” Gregor said, “but I did look up Box Hill Confections on the Internet. I’ll get around to the other stuff you wanted me to do. Right now, I want you to do something for me. You’re pretty good at searching for things on the Internet, right?”
“I’m good enough,” Bennis said. “Donna’s better.”
“Fine, if Donna has time, get her to help you. I need you to find everything you can on a man named Steve Becker. I don’t know if it’s Stephen with a ph or with a v.”
“Who is he? Or is the point that you don’t know?”
“I’m not entirely sure who he is, in the ordinary way,” Gregor said. “He was some kind of minor functionary on the film out here, and for a while he was Arrow Normand’s boyfriend. Or something. I don’t know what you call it in circumstances like these. Anyway, she went to Las Vegas with him and a group of other people, and they stayed in this ridiculously expensive—”
“Oh, I know,” Bennis said. “The Hugh Hefner Suite at the Palms. I heard about that. It’s nine thousand square feet and has its own pool, and it costs forty thousand dollars a night. Do you really mean you hadn’t heard about that before you went out there?”
“It’s not the kind of news I tend to pay attention to,” Gregor said drily. “The thing is, Arrow Normand went out to Las Vegas with Steve Becker, but she came back with Mark Anderman—”
“The guy who was murdered,” Bennis said.
“Right. Who was also a minor functionary on the movie. Arrow Normand seems to have a habit of dating minor functionaries. Anyway, Steve Becker didn’t return to the film, from what I can understand because he’d been fired. I think the idea is that you don’t keep the toy boys around after they’ve outlived their usefulness, because they upset the stars, or something. My guess is that he’s either sold his story to a tabloid or is in the process of negotiation to sell it, hopefully the former, except that I can’t find it. There are stories with him in them, but nothing of him, you know, the way those stories are. ‘I Spent a Night with Arrow Normand!’ Nothing like that, that looks like he sold it himself. So maybe not. But I want to find him. I think it would be interesting to find out something about this situation from somebody with an ax to grind.”
“Those guys usually disappear when they lose their famous friends,” Bennis said. “There’s not much else for them to do, Gregor. They aren’t anybody.”
“I know,” Gregor said, “but it’s been one of those things I’ve been thinking about. The toy boys aren’t anybody, but neither is anybody else involved in this thing. There’s enormous publicity, and apparently enormous public interest, and yet most of these people have minimal if any claims to prominence. They’re not great singers or actors. They haven’t invented anything. They don’t run governments or corporations. The most diligent of them are like the teen idols of the fifties, except that they’ve taken on the kind of significance that used to be reserved for—I don’t know whom it used to be reserved for. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Do you know that a horde of photographers tried to break down a door in the emergency room this afternoon to get pictures of Marcey Mandret lying in a hospital bed? Who the hell is Marcey Mandret?”
“She’s an actress. She’s been in a couple of movies.”
“Not any of the movies I’ve ever seen,” Gregor said. “It’s almost a form of mass hysteria.”
“Maybe it is,” Bennis said. “I don’t think you’re going to save the soul of popular culture from the Oscartown Inn, though.”
“I don’t want to save the soul of popular culture,” Gregor said. “I just want to find out enough about Mark Anderman to discover why somebody would want to risk virtually everything to kill him. Not that murderers are great at risk assessment, but you know what I mean.”
“You mean you want me to find Steve Becker,” Bennis said. “Not just stories about him, or even by him, but him.”
“It does occur to me that if I had to have a suspect for the killing of Mark Anderman, Steve Becker, or somebody in Steve Becker’s position, would be the most likely one.”
“I’ve got to go get a tail pinned on me,” Bennis said. “It’s a game Donna thought up. I’ll get Donna when this is over and we’ll take a whack at it.”
“A tail pinned on you with what?” Gregor asked.
Bennis had already hung up in his ear. Gregor put the phone back into the cradle and looked around the room. It was a very nice room, but he had to do something serious about getting dressed, and then he had to do something serious.
2
Gregor didn’t know what he’d expected to find when he finally got Clara Walsh to let him talk to a real, live policeman, but it wasn’t what he found when he made his way downstairs and was shown to “the Ivory Room” by one of the young men who manned the desk. He tried not to be too judgmental about the naming of the room. He hated it when hotels named rooms. He even hated it that the White House named rooms. He had expected, when he’d asked Clara Walsh to bring him somebody in law enforcement, that they’d meet in his own room, which would be cramped but private, and he really didn’t care what a mess it was. Instead, exactly sixteen minutes after he’d hung up on Clara Walsh, there was a phone call from the desk and a request that he meet Clara in “the Ivory Room.”
In his mind, men who served as the single law enforcement officer in small towns were older, and balding, and running to fat. They were also not very bright. He had no idea where he had come up with that image. It didn’t even fit Andy Taylor, and that was the single most famous image of a small-town sheriff in American popular culture. Still, it was the image he had, and when he walked through the door of the Ivory Room—which was being held open, politely, by the young man from the desk—he at first didn’t realize what he was seeing. He saw Clara Walsh, looking like herself,and Bram Winder and Jerry Young, and a young man standing beside them, looking like a marine out of uniform.
A second later, Gregor realized that the young man who looked like a marine was a cop, and a second after that he was sure that the cop had once actually been a marine. He looked very young, barely out of high school, in fact, but Gregor guessed he was probably closer to thirty. He had the kind of posture that made you
wonder if he had swallowed a flagpole.
The cop came forward and held out his hand. “Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “I’m Don Hecklewhite. I’m with the state police. I’m sorry to be out of uniform. It’s my day off.”
“Marines?” Gregor said.
“Yes, sir. Six years.”
Clara Walsh cleared her throat. “It’s no time to be talking about the military,” she said. “If you were both marines, you can go someplace and get some beers and talk about it later. I have a press conference due to start in ten minutes, and we can hold them up for a while, but they’re going to get restless. Could we get this done, whatever this is?”
“I was in the army,” Gregor said. Then he let himself look around the Ivory Room. There was some real ivory in it, which surprised him. It was illegal to trade in ivory, and Oscartown was the kind of place where the guests would care. The ivory was in the form of carved pieces, many of them very elaborate, all of them looking a little yellow with age. Maybe ivory was morally all right if it was old enough. Maybe the guests had pieces at home, brought back from tours of India by grandparents in the days when killing elephants was just as natural as having champagne at debutante parties.
Gregor pushed all these images out of his head and concentrated on Don Hecklewhite. “You’re on your own? You don’t have a partner?”
“No, sir,” Don Hecklewhite said. “We don’t usually ride together. It’s not efficient. And in this part of Massachusetts”—he shrugged—“there’s not much call for us. It’s like Oscar-town. They take on some extra people in the season, but for the winter, Jerry here is it.” Don Hecklewhite hesitated, then looked apologetically at Jerry. “I did talk to the town council about taking on at least one other man while the filming was going on. It’s not as crowded as it is when the summer people are here, but at least in Oscartown itself there’s been a significant uptick in the population. And an uptick in the population usually means trouble of one kind or another.”
