Cheating at Solitaire(120)
“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.”