by Jane Haddam
“Kendra Rhode was driving,” Gregor said. “Mark Anderman was in the front passenger seat. Arrow Normand was in the backseat.”
“Yes.”
“They went over onto the beach and you stopped to check them out,” Gregor said. “But you had the gun. You’d brought the gun.”
“I told you. I always had the gun. I’d had it for weeks,” Jack said. “I hadn’t thought about what I was going to do with it. The truck was on its side. A purple truck. Who buys a purple truck? I went down there and I helped Kendra get out. The driver’s side was up. I got her out and then I stuck my head in to see the two of them, and there he was, on the other side. He’d been banged up a little, and he was pissing and moaning, and suddenly I thought, here I was, here we all were, it was the perfect opportunity. Because they would never give me up. They couldn’t. And they knew I knew it.”
“So you got out the gun and shot Mark Anderman in the head,” Gregor said, “and the blood went back, into the backseat, all over Arrow Normand.”
“I’d forgotten she was there,” Jack said. “I got out of the cab and opened the back door and pulled her out and she was screaming her head off. And Kendra—Kendra was just standing there. I’ve never seen anybody so still in all my life. And Arrow was screaming and screaming. And Kendra turned around and slapped her, hard, so that the sound was louder than the sound of the bullets had been. Arrow stopped screaming. And Kendra looked at me and said, ‘If you think this is going to get you anything you want, you’re out of your mind.’ And then she just walked away. Down the beach. That was the second to the last time I saw her in person.”
3
In the rest of the room, there was a sort of buzz, not really conversation, just an under-the-breath, not-exactly-articulate hum of dissatisfaction. Linda Beecham had stopped talking. She was not a stupid woman. Clara Walsh, Bram Winder, and Jerry Young had started talking, but Gregor knew they would stop at any moment. They were all probably ready to brain him.
“All right,” Clara started. “You said, not half an hour ago, that there were four problems that had to be solved, and the next one after the murder of Mark Anderman was the mess somebody made of Jack’s hand. You’re not trying to tell me that Jack made a mess of his own hand? And he couldn’t have put that gun in Annabeth Falmer’s house. And—”
“I want to know about the truck,” Bram Winder said. “When Stewart Gordon took his pictures of the truck, it had been cleared off, or a lot of it had. The windshield had, and the door, and most of the hood.”
“I cleared the truck off,” Jack said. “Right after I fired the shots, I went off down the beach. I was just sort of running in the bad weather, and I tossed the gun, and then I thought about it, about the pictures. And I came back and took them. A couple of dozen pictures. And then Mr. Gordon came down with some woman and I had to run.”
“He took the bullet, too,” Gregor said. “It wasn’t hard to find. It was stuck in the glass. Look at the official pictures one more time. You’ll see the hole. It isn’t big enough for the back of the bullet to go through.”
“But that wasn’t the gun Annabeth Falmer found,” Clara said. “What was that gun doing in her house? It was Jack’s gun.”
“Linda Beecham thought it was the gun,” Gregor said. “She knew Jack must have killed Mark Anderman. She was trying to make sure he wasn’t suspected.”
“By putting his gun where Annabeth Falmer could find it?” Jerry Young said.
“She didn’t put the gun where Annabeth Falmer could find it; she put the gun where Arrow Normand had been. Which she knew, just the way everybody else on the planet knew it, because that was one of the details that’s been all over the Internet and the tabloids. But she did a much more important thing to make sure Jack couldn’t be arrested, never mind convicted, of that murder. She got rid of the fingerprints on his right hand.”
“What?” Bram Winder said.
“She didn’t have to worry about his left hand,” Gregor said, “because when he’s out in the cold, Jack wears gloves. But when he’s photographing, he wears only the glove on his left hand, because he needs his right hand to operate the cameras.
So she was fairly sure that on the afternoon of the murder, Jack would have had the glove on his left hand and no glove on his right. But since he’s right-handed, that meant that the hand without the glove, the hand free to leave fingerprints on the gun, would be the hand he would use to fire the gun. So she dumped a bunch of Rohypnol into Jack’s coffee one day in the office, asked him out back on some pretext or the other—”
“To help her move the new garbage bins,” Jack said.
“To help her move the new garbage bins,” Gregor repeated. “Then, when Jack started to pass out, she went after him with what was probably a small knife. Go look at his injuries. They’re concentrated almost exclusively on the fingertips. The fingertips are slashed up to the point where wounds and scar tissue will make it impossible to match Jack’s fingers to anything he imprinted before the attack, unless he’s given prints for some other purpose—”
“No,” Jack said. “I’ve barely had parking tickets.”
“But where would she get Rohypnol?” Jerry Young said. “I know it’s supposed to be floating around all over everywhere, but most people wouldn’t know where to get it to save their lives.”
“She got it from me,” Jack said. “I gave it to her for safekeeping after I took it off Mark and Steve one night at Cuddy’s. They were going after one of the waitresses, a girl who was the younger sister of one of the girls I knew in high school. They had a lot of it.”
“I don’t think you can charge her with anything, unless Jack here wants to press charges for the attack,” Gregor said, “and I don’t think he will. She was just thinking the best of him. She was just thinking that he’d gotten stupid one night and done something that was going to ruin his life, and she didn’t want him to ruin his life. She’s very maternal when it comes to Jack. And she’s a very angry woman, which somebody ought to pay attention to sometime soon.”
“I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life,” Linda Beecham said. “Do you think I killed Kendra Rhode too? Jack couldn’t have killed her. He was a mess. He was drugged up and weak.
He couldn’t have gotten to that stairwell to save his life.”
“He was found in the hall, not half a foot from the stairwell door,” Gregor said. “We do know that he got that far.”
“And collapsed,” Linda said. “He was right there, on the floor. I heard all about it. I came to the hospital and complained. It was typical. All that fuss over Kendra Rhode, and Jack lying in the corridor passed out and nobody paying any attention to him. Leslie didn’t pay any attention to him until she’d finished with Kendra Rhode. It was more important to take care of a dead celebrity than a live local boy.”
“Leslie didn’t know that Kendra Rhode was dead,” Gregor said gently. “And she knew Jack wasn’t about to be. There isn’t much staff at this hospital this time of year.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Linda said. “Are you going to charge me for the death of Kendra Rhode? Because Jack couldn’t have killed her. He wasn’t physically capable.”
There was a strangled sound from the other side of the room. Gregor turned to see Jack smiling at them, a calm smile, a beatif c smile, the kind of smile people got in the movies when they were bathed in a divine light.
“But I did kill her,” he said. “I caught up to her in the stairwell, and I grabbed her, and I threw her down, and when she started falling I went back through the doors and passed out. But I did kill her. And I meant to. It was the only thing I could have done, after everything that happened.”
Epilogue
1
Stewart Gordon and Annabeth Falmer were married in St. Andrews, Scotland, on the twenty-eighth of February, in a snowstorm bad enough to make the nor’easter on Margaret’s Harbor look like spring. Marcey Mandret arrived by private jet to Heathrow and private car to St. Andrews, or rat
her cars, since it took a second one to carry her luggage. Coming up the walk of the university chapel ten minutes before the wedding was due to start, she was still trailing four wheeled suitcases, three carry-on bags, and a trunk. Fortunately, she had hired several luggage people to deal with them.
“What is that woman doing?” Bennis Hannaford asked, looking out the window of the “apartments” they had been assigned for the duration.
Gregor Demarkian and Stewart Gordon came to the window to look out. Stewart Gordon laughed.
“Ah,” he said. “That’s just Marcey. She thinks she’s traveling light.”
Bennis let that one pass, and went back to trying to do something about Gregor’s bow tie. Gregor could feel the exasperation coming off her in waves. First the bow tie would be all right, then she would turn her back, then the bow tie would not be all right again. There was that, and there was the little pile of information from Box Hill Confections lying on the dresser on the other side of the room. She’d been going on about the chocolates for more than three-quarters of an hour.
“All I asked you to do was call her when you got to Massachusetts,” Bennis said. “Was that really so hard? I know you were working, and I do understand that there was something of a crisis, but would a telephone call have been so much? You could have done it from anywhere. I gave you the cell phone.”
“I don’t see what difference it would have made where I called her from,” Gregor said. “It’s a phone call. It’s not as if I was actually in Maine and could go to see her.”
Stewart coughed the way cannons bark when they’re fired, and said, “I still don’t understand the timing of it all. It still seems a lot for him to have done in such a short time.”
“It wasn’t such a short time,” Gregor said. “That’s what was hard to get straight, even for me. There was probably between forty-five minutes and an hour between the time Jack shot Mark Anderman and the time you and Annabeth got to the truck to discover the body. There was more than enough time for Kendra Rhode to get back to the Point and for Arrow Normand to get to Annabeth’s house, and, most important, there was more than enough time for Jack to get back to his own house, realize he’d missed an opportunity, and go back to the truck himself. He was probably no more than five feet away from you and Annabeth when you got there. It was an incredible risk.”
“He took a lot of risks, if you ask me,” Bennis said. “Why would he do something like that? And why didn’t one of them say something about it?”
“Arrow Normand may not have known,” Gregor said. “The best I can understand, from her statement to me at the time, and her statements since, she may have been asleep before the gun went off. Or passed out, which would make things more confusing. And of course Kendra Rhode wouldn’t turn him in. The chances were too good that she’d get arrested herself, as an accessory, as something. And annoying as that woman was, she had good reason to suspect that under this par ticular set of circumstances, her celebrity would work against her instead of for her. She was in no danger from Jack, because he couldn’t say anything about her being in the truck without implicating himself. She was in no danger from Arrow, because Arrow couldn’t remember what had gone on and was half convinced it was her fault.”
“Not because it was,” Stewart said, “just because Arrow is always half convinced it’s her own fault.”
“But he had to have the pictures,” Gregor said, “because he was still operating on the assumption that he was going to be able to go on as he had before. He still had a life he wanted to live. And that life included being a famous photographer.”
“You mean a famous paparazzo,” Bennis said. “I thought you told me that all this was about him being obsessed with Kendra Rhode, and wanting Kendra Rhode for himself. Do celebrities marry paparazzi?”
“Why not?” Gregor said. “They marry everybody else. Women celebrities especially. Anyway, he was always careful to have a backup plan, so he went back to the truck to take pictures, and he cleaned off the hood and the windows to make that possible, and then he left again. We found the pictures in his apartment. Some of them, at any rate.”
“Why only some of them?” Bennis asked.
“Because somebody had gotten there before us,” Gregor said. “The files had been rifled through, and a number of things were obviously missing. For instance, they contained no pictures at all of Arrow Normand, and very few of Marcey Mandret.”
“Carl Frank,” Stewart said solemnly.
“Or somebody connected to Carl Frank, yes,” Gregor said. “Not that that’s going to help us any. And now Jack has what he wanted, of course. He’s famous. That’s what this was about all along. It was even the reason he wanted to be with Kendra Rhode.”
“He’s not famous for killing Mark Anderman, though,” Bennis said. “He’s famous for killing Kendra Rhode. And he isn’t even going to be charged with killing Kendra Rhode.”
“Nobody can be charged with killing Kendra Rhode,”
Gregor said. “There wasn’t enough left of the scene to provide any uncontaminated evidence.”
“So that leaves the question,” Bennis said. “Did he actually kill her?”
Gregor shrugged. Something happened to his bow tie. He wasn’t sure what, but it seemed to have exploded. “I don’t suppose it matters if he did or didn’t,” Gregor said. “Contrary to what Linda Beecham wants us to believe, he was probably capable of it, if he had a strong enough motivation, and he probably did. Kendra was doing this dipsy doodle around town, trying to get in for a meeting and out again with a minimum of fuss, so she was going through back doors and in and out of alleys. One of the other things I kept forgetting was that Kendra Rhode wasn’t one of the film people. She hadn’t shown up on Margaret’s Harbor just to make a movie. She’d been coming there here entire life. So she knew where to go if she wanted to keep out of sight. My best guess is that she thought she would cut through the hospital and then go up Birkwell Road, which is right behind it. But I’m not the best person to ask. I don’t know the roads that well. But she was trying to cut through the hospital, and Marcey was admitted to the emergency room—”
“Again,” Stewart said. “That girl spent the entire picture getting admitted to the emergency room.”
“And a lot of paparazzi came with her,” Gregor said. “So, to get away from the paparazzi, she went upstairs. She was looking for a stairwell and a way out without paparazzi all over it. I don’t know if she went up to see Jack in his room on purpose or if she saw him incidentally as she was passing through, but she went in to talk to him.”
“And got him so angry that he leaped out of his bed of pain and threw her down a flight of stairs?” Bennis said.
“I think he’d probably been angry for quite a long time,” Gregor said. “Angry at her. Angry at Arrow and Marcey. Angry at the entire setup, the entire thing he was involved with. Angry at not having been born at the right place in the right time to the right people. And he didn’t have to throw her down a flight of stairs. He only had to fall into her at the right angle, or push her. For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think he meant her to end up dead. That wasn’t the idea at all.”
“Was there an idea?” Stewart said.
“Sure,” Gregor said. “It was rather like Pinocchio. He just wanted to be a real boy.”
“You’re making absolutely no sense at all,” Stewart said.
But Gregor was making sense, and he knew it.
“If you hear a tree fall in the forest, but nobody notices you did,” he said, “did you hear it at all?”
Stewart Gordon looked like he wanted to brain him, but it was time to go, and they went.
2
Sitting in the chapel, Gregor Demarkian considered the various ways in which this wedding would be very much unlike his own. For one thing, it was taking place in a religious setting, even though it wasn’t religious. That was something Father Tibor could not find a way to allow, although everybody—including Father Tibor himself—wanted Gregor and Be
nnis to be married at Holy Trinity. Things were apparently much more relaxed among the university Presbyterians, or whatever they were, in Scotland. The wedding would take place at the altar, but be performed by some kind of government functionary, and nobody would say anything about God. Gregor thought this was good, since Stewart was likely to start lecturing if somebody mentioned God, and Stewart could lecture in a voice it was impossible to overcome.
The other way it was different was in the people who were attending, which in Stewart’s case included dozens he didn’t like very much but couldn’t avoid inviting: agents, managers, producers, God only knew what. Marcey Mandret had found a seat with Stewart’s children and Annabeth’s sons. Stewart’s daughter, Caroline, was an enormously sensible woman in tweeds, and she seemed to have taken on the role of mother hen to a mentally deranged chick. At least, Marcey Mandret looked mentally deranged. It would take mental derangement to show up in the middle of a snowstorm in Scotland in a dress that barely went to the bottom of her bum and had neither sleeves nor much of anything around the neckline. The plunge of the neckline had excited the interest of all four of the young men, both of Stewart’s sons and both of Annabeth’s, and Stewart’s youngest, the tanned one that looked like he had just come in from hunting lions, had managed to get himself right up behind her so that he could whisper in her ear. Marcey Mandret seemed to like what she was hearing, but Gregor thought that was no indication of anything. She was primed to look like she liked what she was hearing.
“Look,” Bennis said. “Your friend Stewart was right. She’s got a book with her. Do you know what he said it was?”
“What?” Gregor said.
“Milton’s Paradise Lost. Did you ever have to read that thing? It makes graduate students cry.”
“Maybe whatever his name is will explain it to her,” Gregor said.
