Cheating at Solitaire(103)

Gregor considered it. His tie was straight, but for some reason he still wasn’t ready to go out and face questions, and that in spite of the fact that he had no real answers to give anybody. “Do you really think that’s true?” he asked. “That people only care because the media cares? I’ll admit, this isn’t my sort of thing—well, I mean people like Arrow Normand aren’t my sort of thing—but I’ve seen this material. I go to newsstands. I channel surf every once in a while. Somebody must be interested. The news is everywhere.”

“It’s like a gigantic national high school,” Bram Winder said. He sounded sour. “And not a good high school, either. Not a New England high school. Like one of those high schools you see in the teen movies where everything depends on sports and the popular crowd. These people are the popular crowd. Nobody knows why. Nobody ever knows why. But they are.”

The door to the dressing room popped open and Clara Walsh stuck her head in. “You can’t just stand around fidget-ing,” she said. “This thing is due to start any minute—”

Gregor checked his watch. “Five minutes,” he said.

“whatever,” Clara said. “We really can’t afford to be late. They’re in a very ugly mood, and the thing with Marcey Mandret this afternoon hasn’t made them any better. It’s useless trying to explain to people that a woman can’t grant interviews when she’s passed out cold, and it’s less than useless to explain why the hospital would be legally liable if it let you take a picture of the woman that way, and so now they’re all snarling, and blaming it on me. I wish you’d hurry up.”

“What about Jerry Young and Don Hecklewhite?” Gregor said. “It would be something if we could announce that we’d found the gun, or something that could be the gun. They don’t need complete forensics for that. They only need to check the raw facts against—”

Clara White made a face. “Honestly,” she said. “We can’t announce that now. We really can’t announce where we found it. I want to keep my job, and I’ll agree that looking like I’m doing something in this case would help with that, but I think Annabeth Falmer would probably have grounds to sue if I let it out like that. Or if you did. Jerry and Don will do what they can. Just hurry up.”

Gregor was hurrying. He watched Clara Walsh disappear through the swinging door and fixed his tie again, unnecessarily. Then he looked at Bram Winder, up and down.

“Are you worried about that?” he asked. “Losing your job?”

“No,” Bram said. “I don’t think Clara is either, not really. She’s just worried she’s going to screw this up.”

“Do you think that gun was the one used in the murder of Mark Anderman?”

“I think only the forensics could tell us for sure,” Bram said, “but you’ve got all the information right there. You’ve got manila envelopes full of it. You could make that call just as well as I could. Maybe better.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Then I will. I do think it’s going to turn out to be the gun. It smelled new, but that may only mean that it was fired just the one time, and then cleaned. In the short run, though, in the absence of a bullet, it’s going to be very hard to tell. It’s possible that it’s going to be too hard to tell even to bring it into a courtroom. Which leaves a couple of interesting questions.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “like how it got into Annabeth Falmer’s couch. I think the idea is that we’re supposed to believe Arrow Normand left it there when she was at Anna-beth’s house on the night Mark Anderman was murdered. But that’s got two problems. First is that, from all accounts, Arrow Normand was wearing so little in the way of clothes it would have been impossible for her to conceal a large, heavy gun of that kind on her person. But you know, that’s not really a deal breaker. Stranger things have happened. The deal breaker is something else.”

“What?”

“The fact that the gun smells new,” Gregor said. “If it’s ever been fired, it must have been cleaned. So either the gun is new, and it isn’t the gun used in the murder, or the gun is the one that was used in the murder, but it’s been cleaned. But Arrow Normand has been in jail more or less continuously since New Year’s Eve.”

“New Year’s Day,” Bram Winder said. “Jerry Young didn’t. Well, he wouldn’t. Right on the spot like that, if you see what I mean. He had to—”