Cheating at Solitaire(109)
It was Gregor who got to Marcey Mandret first, soon followed by one of the older women reporters.
“She’s in shock,” the woman said. “Did she say that Kendra Rhode was dead? How can Kendra Rhode be dead?”
Gregor could think of dozens of ways, and reasons, why Kendra Rhode could be dead, but he let it pass and tried to concentrate on this young woman. It was hard to identify what she was wearing. None of it seemed to go together, and none of it seemed to be useful to any present purpose. She was also crying, her head buried in her arms, her arms propped up against one of the folding seats.
The doors at the back opened up, and Stewart Gordon came in, striding, the way everybody remembered him striding across his spaceship on that tele vision series that assumed that manned space flight to other galaxies would take place in vehicles large enough to stage a political convention in. Stewart saw Marcey Mandret and walked right up to her, leaned over, and sighed. Then he straightened up.
“She’s supposed to be in the hospital,” he said. “We left her in the hospital. I talked to the doctor. She’s supposed to be there for two to three days.”
Marcey jerked her head up. “Kendra’s in the hospital. That’s where she is. Right at the bottom of the steps. And her head is on backward.”
“What?” Clara Walsh said.
Marcey had gone back to burying her head in her arms and sobbing, except that every once in a while she seemed to be giggling. It was hard to tell. All the sound coming out of her was muffled.
Stewart Gordon tapped the reporter on the shoulder to get her to move back, then gestured to Gregor, who moved back too. Clara Walsh and Bram Winder just stood there, which was all right, since there didn’t seem to be anything for them to do. Stewart knelt down on the floor and pulled Marcey up just a little.
“Calm down,” he said. “Take a deep breath.”
Marcey looked up at him. “Kendra’s dead. And if Kend-ra’s dead, that’s going to mean that Arrow’s dead, because there’s going to be nobody to say that Arrow couldn’t have been there when Mark was killed. I can’t say it, because I wasn’t there.”
“Wait,” Clara Walsh said. “Kendra Rhode could give Arrow Normand an alibi? And she didn’t? Why not?”
Stewart gestured frantically at Clara to be quiet, but Marcey was talking now, and it was obvious she had no intention of stopping. “She didn’t because she wanted to see if they’d give her the death penalty. Arrow. If they’d give Arrow the death penalty. She likes to get people in trouble and watch them squirm. She does. And now she’s dead, right there, I saw her. She’s lying there with her head on backward and she’s never going to be able to say and Arrow is going to go to the gas chamber and—”
“Lethal injection,” Clara Walsh said. “And I don’t think—”
“She’s just lying there,” Marcey said.
Stewart was more practical than any of the people who were supposed to be practical. Gregor was gratified to see it.
“Listen to me,” he told Marcey again. “You saw Kendra Rhode with her head on backward, which doesn’t surprise me a bit. It’s like The Exorcist. Possessed by demons seems to me to be just about right. But where did you see her? When did you see her?”
Marcey looked confused. “It was just now. I told you. I was trying to get out of the hospital without everybody seeing me, and there’s a way, going down these back halls and places, locker rooms, like that, and I was going around and around and I was at the back, which was good, because there were no paparazzi around the back. I just wanted to. I want to.” She looked confused.
“We’d better get over to the hospital,” Clara said. “Or, better yet, we’d better get Jerry Young and go. If there’s a body, or even if there isn’t—”
“And I went through these doors,” Marcey Mandret said, “and they were the kind they have in schools, you know, with the little window with the wire in it up near the top, and there she was, there she was, at the bottom of the stairs and she had her head on backward and she wasn’t breathing. I put my ear up to her chest and she wasn’t breathing.”
“Call Jerry Young, but call the hospital first,” Gregor said. “It sounds like Kendra Rhode fell down a flight of stairs. I don’t think we can count on Miss Mandret here to be accurate about the breathing—”
“I’m going,” Bram Winder said, and went.
“She’s not a liar,” Stewart Gordon said, more than a little indignant. “She’s a twit, and she’s a fool, and there are squirrels with better educations, but she’s not a liar. If she says she saw Kendra Rhode at the bottom of a staircase, she saw Kendra Rhode at the bottom of a staircase.”