by Jane Haddam
“Kendra and Arrow made them from the plane,” Marcey said. “Arrow wanted Kendra to have the Hugh Hefner Suite, but Kendra wouldn’t take it. She said it was ‘ostentatious.’ I had to look it up. Arrow didn’t even know what it meant.”
“So you got to Vegas and went to the Palms and checked in,” Gregor said. “That would be you, and Kendra Rhode, and Mark Anderman, and Steve Becker.”
“And Jack Bullard and that man. Carl Frank,” Marcey said. “We couldn’t believe it when we saw him there. He didn’t come with us. He’s like a spy. He’s around everywhere.”
“And Jack Bullard?”
“Oh, he was one of those people,” Marcey said. “I mean, he’s a photographer, but not a real one, don’t you see? And he’s local, and he’s cute. And Kendra liked to have him around. So he was with us that night. He took the pictures, for the, for the—”
“For the weddings?” Gregor Demarkian said.
Marcey sighed. “You know about the weddings.”
“I know about the weddings,” Gregor agreed. “It wasn’t hard to figure out. There’s that picture, with the ring on Mark Anderman’s hand catching the light and spoiling the shot. Kendra Rhode got married to Mark Anderman and Arrow Normand got married to Steve Becker.”
“God, you’re good,” Marcey said. “Carl Frank came rushing in the next morning and fixed it all, and nobody’s heard a thing about it. Steve just disappeared. Mark came back with us. Well.”
“Well, what?” Gregor Demarkian said.
“Well, he didn’t fix it all,” Marcey said. “He fixed Arrow and Steve, but not Kendra and Mark, because he said Kendra had nothing to do with him. So, you know, Mark came back with us on the plane when the weekend was over.”
“And he and Kendra were still friendly?”
“Yes, of course they were,” Marcey said. “Only he was paying more attention to Arrow, because Carl Frank paid him to. It was supposed to be a, you know, a diversion. He was supposed to hang out with Arrow so that nobody would ask what had happened to Steve. People would just think Arrow had dumped him and wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Why Mark Anderman and not Jack Bullard?”
“Carl Frank doesn’t trust Jack Bullard,” Marcey said. “He’s a photographer even if he isn’t a real photographer. Jack is. You know. And as it turned out, he was right not to trust him, because Jack Bullard sold that photograph, the one everybody sees, the one you were talking about, with the ring.”
“But he could have sold a lot more photographs, isn’t that right?” Gregor said. “He must have taken other pictures.”
“He did take other pictures,” Marcey said. “He told me about them. Later. The day you came. He wanted me to tell Kendra that he had them.”
“And did you?”
“Yes,” Marcey said.
“You said, when you came to the press conference, that now that Kendra was dead there was nobody to get Arrow Normand out of jail. What did you mean by that?”
Dr. Falmer had brought the new cup of tea some time ago. Marcey had noticed it but not paid attention to it. Now she picked up the cup and took a long drink, so long her throat felt as if it were melting. This was the part she was worried about. She was worried about it because she was sure she should have done something with the information days ago, and she was just as worried about it because she wasn’t sure what the information was. She put the cup back on the arm of the chair and took a deep breath.
“Kendra told me a couple of days after it happened that she’d seen Mark Anderman alive after the accident.”
“Seen him alive how?” Gregor said. “Do you mean she went to the scene of the accident and looked into the truck?”
“I don’t know,” Marcey said. “She wasn’t clear about it. She said she was in her bedroom at the Point and she looked out and she could see the truck on the beach. She could see there had been an accident. And her mother was there, helping with this party she was supposed to have for New Year’s Eve, except it never happened because of the storm. Anyway, she left the house and went out to the beach so that she could get away from her mother, which sounds like Kendra, the kind of thing Kendra would do. She said she went out on the beach and that the last time she saw Mark Anderman, he didn’t have a bullet hole in him. But she wouldn’t talk to the police about it. She said that if I told anybody she’d just say that I was lying. Or that she’d lied to me. She said she wanted to see, she wanted to see if they would give Arrow the death penalty.”
“Marvelous,” Stewart Gordon said.
Gregor Demarkian sat back. Marcey found him a very soothing person. Everybody in this house was soothing, except for her. She wished she understood why. Dr. Falmer had a big plate of cookies that she was passing around. Marcey took one when the plate came to her, and then wondered what she was supposed to do now.
She should have said something to the police when Ken-dra first told her. The only reason she hadn’t was because she was afraid Kendra would be angry at her, and when Kendra got angry enough she made you disappear.
Chapter Three
1
Marcey Mandret wanted to go back to the computer. Gregor could see that all through his conversation with her, and he thought Stewart Gordon and Annabeth Falmer could see it too. The two of them were looking the way parents would when their child was behaving oddly in a bad circumstance, and Gregor found that just a little relaxing. They were both so young, Arrow and Marcey, and they both seemed to him to be so alone. Maybe it was just the fact that he came from what had been, at least for his generation, an immigrant community, maybe it was just that he associated loneliness with middle age, but for some reason the way these girls lived looked to him to be completely unnatural, and he wasn’t thinking of the money, or of the publicity. Young girls were supposed to have parents and other relatives to look after them. They were supposed to have mothers to keep them safe and to have the suspicions they were too young to have. They were supposed to have fathers to protect them from the worst in human nature. They were supposed to have anchors to the past and to the future, so that they could keep their own lives in perspective. There was no perspective here. It was as if these girls had been born first thing in the morning and knew nothing else but the little they’d seen since.
Marcey drifted back to the computer, and Gregor followed Annabeth and Stewart into Annabeth’s kitchen. It was a beautiful kitchen, large and open to the outside. There was a solid line of windows along one wall that looked out onto the boardwalk and the beach. There were open shelves, painted white, carefully filled with multicolored crockery that had been chosen with an eye to the effect it would make. There was a long table, also painted white, with chairs to match. Stewart sat down in one of them and Annabeth headed for the kettle.
“I hope you don’t mind all this tea,” Annabeth said. “I don’t drink coffee. It’s not a thing, you know, not a matter of principle or anything, I just don’t like the flavor of coffee. I don’t even like coffee ice cream. So I tend not to have it in the house. And when I do have it, I do it wrong. Or people say I do.”
“She makes a very decent cup of tea,” Stewart said.
“Tea will be fine,” Gregor said. He went to the line of windows and looked out. On a clear day, like today, you could see quite a bit of the beach, but not far enough to catch the place where the truck had gone off the road. It was surprisingly noisy, too. Gregor wouldn’t say the surf was pounding. This was an island off Cape Cod, after all. The Cape kept the worst of the Atlantic from hitting the shores of Margaret’s Harbor. Still, the sound of the ocean was clear, as were the sounds of birds. Gregor thought the birds must be freezing to death.
Annabeth was getting tea mugs off one of the shelves and putting them down on the table. Gregor looked up and down the beach one more time, and then across, to the big house on the rocky outcropping at the end of the island.
“That’s the Point?” he said. “I didn’t realize you could see it from here.”
“You can see it
from most of the island, really,” Annabeth said. “It’s on very high ground. It’s like the Eiffel Tower. Although it’s odd to think of Margaret’s Harbor as having something like the Eiffel Tower.”
“Margaret’s Harbor doesn’t want anything like the Eiffel Tower,” Stewart said. “Damned ugly building, if you ask me. Just the kind of thing. Look at this, it’s so modern! It’s great art because you hate it! There’s something the Americans get right. Won’t give the time of day to that kind of bloody stupidity.”
“Some of us must give the time of day to that kind of bloody stupidity,” Annabeth said, putting a teapot down in the center of the table. “We’ve got the greatest collectors of modern art in the world in this country, and they’re always lending their collections to museums for shows.”
“Ever go to one of them?” Stewart said.
“No,” Annabeth said.
“There then,” Stewart said.
Gregor moved away from the windows. Annabeth was dumping loose tea into the teapot without benefit of a tea bell, which was the way the British did it. He made a mental note to find out later whether she had always done it that way, or if she’d begun to only recently, because of Stewart. Here was an idea: Stewart Gordon getting married again after all these years. Gregor thought it was as funny an idea as Gregor Demarkian getting married again after all these years.
Gregor took a seat at the table. The teapot was enormous, of a size to serve a small army. It had a cat on it. The real cat was sitting on a little navy blue cushion in a little wicker basket on the short counter that held the microwave.
“So,” Gregor said as Annabeth poured hot water over the loose tea in the pot, “two people, two requests for impressions and general information. Jack Bullard and Carl Frank.”
“Jack Bullard? Really?” Annabeth looked surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought. I mean, he can’t have killed Kendra Rhode, can he? I know I heard something about how he’d been found out of bed collapsed in a hallway or something, but he would have been too weak, wouldn’t he have? And then there’s his hand and the drugs somebody gave him. You’re not saying you think he drugged himself and cut up his own hand? Or are you saying that the drugging and the hand had nothing to do with the rest of it?”
Gregor sighed. Too many people read detective novels these days. Too many people watched cop shows. “I definitely think the drugging and the attack on Jack Bullard’s hand had something to do with the rest of it,” he said patiently. “As to Kendra Rhode—” Gregor shrugged. “We may find out, in the end, just what happened to her, but I’m not optimistic. Maybe she was pushed down those stairs, maybe she fell, but right now the most important question has to do with what she was doing there. Why was she in the hospital at all? She couldn’t have been trying to avoid the paparazzi. The paparazzi would have been there at least some of the time, and some of them would have been there all of the time. Most of them didn’t attend my press conference.”
“You think she went there to talk to Jack Bullard?” Stewart said.
“Either that or to find Marcey Mandret,” Gregor said, “and that doesn’t make much sense, because she could have seen Marcey Mandret more easily a little later. But she knew Jack Bullard, right? He was allowed to hang around the bunch of them.”
“As their pet photographer,” Stewart said. “Absolutely. I’ve seen that before. They pick someone, usually someone who’s really lame and nothing like top class—”
“Jack Bullard was lame? As a photographer?” Gregor asked.
“Actually, as a photographer, he was pretty good,” Stewart said, “at least if you look at his other work instead of that idiotic picture with the light contamination. It’s beyond me why he bothered to sell that one. He must have had others from the Vegas trip. No, professionally, the boy has a lot going for him. Personally, though, he’s way out of his league. He doesn’t know squat about the kind of people he’s dealing with, either the celebrities he’s trying to photograph or the photographers he’s trying to compete with. Which was why Kendra and the girls were attracted to him, if you ask me. He could be manipulated. If there had to be pictures, they could make sure they were the right pictures.”
“So he went on the Vegas trip,” Gregor said.
“Right,” Stewart said. “And he got that photograph, and he sold it, and that apparently caused some kind of falling-out. Anyway, he was around less after they all got back, and Marcey and Arrow were barely speaking to him. Kendra Rhode wasn’t speaking to him at all. They were all pissed off about that picture. I don’t see why. There wasn’t a single one of them doing anything they could get arrested for.”
Annabeth picked up the teapot and began to pour tea into mugs. “At least he came back,” she said. “That other one didn’t, do you remember, you were telling me? Some boy who worked on the movie that Arrow Normand had a crush on. He went to Vegas with her and now he doesn’t even work on the movie anymore.”
“He’s got another job,” Gregor said. “That’s Steve Becker. Carl Frank got rid of him and packed him off to another movie. I presume because he didn’t want Becker hanging around with Arrow Normand anymore. What I don’t understand is this—after they all got back from Vegas, Arrow Normand was hanging around with Mark Anderman, right?”
“Right,” Stewart said. “These girls have terrible taste in men, truly. They date the worst twits, you wouldn’t believe it. They never get interested in somebody whose career is on their own level.”
“You don’t get interested in women whose career is on your level,” Annabeth said. “And if you tell me that’s different because you’re a man, I’ll hit you with this teapot.”
“Seriously,” Gregor said. “They were hanging around together, Arrow Normand and Mark Anderman.”
“Yes, I said,” Stewart said.
“He wasn’t hanging around with Kendra Rhode?”
“Well, of course he was hanging around with Kendra Rhode,” Stewart said. “They run in packs, these girls. They’re always together.”
“Okay,” Gregor said. “But here’s the thing. The Vegas trip was weeks ago, right?”
“Right,” Stewart said. “In November.”
“And in November, Carl Frank ran interference with Steve Becker, got him a job on another movie, and got him out of the way. But I can’t find any indication whatsoever that Carl Frank attempted to do anything to get rid of Mark Anderman.”
“Don’t look at me,” Stewart said. “I wasn’t aware of the Steve Becker thing. But Carl Frank. Now there’s an interesting case. Have you met him yet?”
“No,” Gregor said. “Clara’s arranged a meeting for this afternoon. Why is he an interesting case?”
“He’s not what he seems, for one thing,” Stewart said. “He’s supposed to be head of public relations for the movie, but that’s ridiculous. You don’t send somebody of that caliber to be director of public relations for a movie that isn’t even in the can yet, never mind park him out on location for months at a time. Granted, none of us expected to be here this long, that’s a function of the twits. But you don’t do that. Carl Frank is a public relations specialist like I’m Father Christmas.”
“What is he then?” Gregor asked.
“Michael Bardman’s hit man,” Stewart said promptly. “Ask anyone. They all knew it. Even that woman, that Miss Beecham, who runs the local paper, she knew it. Bardman’s a notorious control freak. He’s got ten movies going at once and he hates to be out of control of any of them, so he always has somebody. On this movie, Carl Frank is that somebody.”
“And what does he do as that somebody?” Gregor asked.
Stewart seemed to drain the tea in his cup in a single gulp. “He spies,” he said. “He spies on all of us, but especially on the girls, because the girls are the big trouble. They get drunk. They get doped to the gills. They careen around in public making spectacles of themselves. They get the local population totally pissed, and then they’re late for work. Or worse. We’ve had three-day stretches where nothing
got done because one or the other of them was indisposed. The one truly satisfying thing about being stuck on this godforsaken rock is the fact that the local hospital doesn’t deal in admissions for ‘exhaustion.’ I like that doctor, that Ingleford guy. They’d show up screwed up, he’d pump their stomachs and send them home.”
“Did you know that Mark Anderman and Kendra Rhode were married during that trip to Vegas?” Gregor asked.
It was silly of him to care that he’d been able to cause surprise, but he did. Stewart looked so wonderfully flabber-gasted.
“For God’s sake,” Stewart said. “What was that about?”
“I think it was proof positive that Kendra Rhode was not always in control of herself and her life,” Gregor said. “My guess is a lot too much alcohol. That is, by the way, why Kendra Rhode and the other women were angry at Jack Bullard for publishing that picture. The light contamination comes from a glint off Mark Anderman’s wedding ring. Once you know what it is, it’s easy to see.”
“But it must have been the shortest honeymoon in existence,” Stewart said, “because by the time they got back here, Anderman was all over Arrow. They went everywhere together for weeks. It was worse than it had been with Steve.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I keep getting that impression. But that leaves us with a significant question. Why did Carl Frank get rid of Steve Becker but not Mark Anderman?”
“Maybe Mark Anderman refused to be got rid of,” Annabeth said. “I mean, he’d gotten one to marry him, maybe he was hoping to get another one. I can’t imagine that Kendra Rhode’s money wasn’t tied up legally six ways to Sunday. It’s what you do with trust funds, because there’s always the chance that the heir will be an idiot. Maybe he hadn’t realized that when he married Kendra Rhode, and then, when he did realize it, he decided to go for something else. Somebody else. To stay on the gravy train.”
“Nice,” Gregor said. “I don’t think I could have done better myself. There’s only one significant problem.”
“Only one?” Stewart said. “You always were a bloody genius.”
