Cheating at Solitaire(130)

“Taking pictures of Kendra Rhode and Marcey Mandret is more significant than what you could do with law school?”

“There was this cartoon I saw once, in the New Yorker. One of those Hamilton cartoons with all these Waspy people at a cocktail party. This woman and this man are talking and the woman says, ‘You’re a lawyer? Everybody’s a lawyer.’ And that was the problem. It was too everyday.”

“Carl Frank came to see me,” Linda said. “He’s looking for some pictures he thinks you have. Pictures of the Vegas trip that haven’t been published anywhere yet.”

“There are pictures of the Vegas trip that haven’t been published anywhere yet,” Jack said. “I don’t see what Carl Frank wants them for.”

“He wants them,” Linda said, “and that ought to be enough. I don’t like that man. I think he’s dangerous. I don’t like the things he does to people.”

Jack put his head back as far as it would go. They were past the will now. They were talking about the funeral, even though it was obvious in no time that they had no actual news.

“It’s like a drug addiction,” Jack said. “They can’t stop. They don’t want to stop. They talk and talk about it.”

“Jack.”

“Never mind Carl Frank,” Jack said. “I can take care of Carl Frank.”





Chapter Five


1

Carl Frank was an official interview, and because of that it was to take place in an official venue, by which everybody meant the Oscartown Police Station. Putting it like that would have made anybody on Margaret’s Harbor laugh even twenty-four hours ago, but a lot had changed overnight. The death of Kendra Rhode had galvanized the Massachusetts State Police in a way the death of Mark Anderman had not. There were dozens of them on the island now, in patrol cars in the streets, at points of interest on foot, in the police station, as if Oscartown had suddenly become West Thirty-third Street. They were even staking out the stairwell where Kendra Rhode had died, although Gregor couldn’t for the life of him see what good that was going to do now. Maybe murderers returned to the scene of the crime in Massachusetts, the way they did in romantic suspense novels, and the staties were just waiting for their suspect to turn up and turn himself in.

Silly or not, there was something reassuring about all these professional law enforcement people. Gregor didn’t do a lot of thinking on Big Subjects. That was Father Tibor’s department, and Father Tibor never seemed to come to any specif c answers to any specif c questions where both the answers and the questions wouldn’t change next week. What Gregor did know, however, was that civilization was fragile. It took nothing at all to turn a place of comfort and safety into a hellhole, and rampaging hordes from the eastern steppes were not required. The paparazzi almost were rampaging hordes, but it wasn’t their rampaging that worried Gregor. It was their state of mind. They seemed to live in a world where common human decency had been abolished, as a matter of policy.

There was a young policeman on duty at the front desk when Gregor walked in. This was better than the first time he had visited the Oscartown Police Station, when there had been nobody on duty at the front desk, and only one comfortably padded, sleepy local policewoman watching the jail cells in the back. It said something about the survival of civilization, in a good way, that Arrow Normand hadn’t just got up and walked out one afternoon because she was tired of being in jail.

The policewoman recognized him on sight, and stood up. “Mr. Demarkian. Mr. Frank is already here. He’s in the conference room.”

“Is that the same room I was in this morning?” Gregor asked. “Biggish table, peeling veneer?”

“I couldn’t say for sure,” the policewoman said. “But I’d be surprised if this place had two conference rooms. It’s like a fairy tale around here, don’t you think so? I’m used to Boston. We have real law enforcement there.”

Gregor was sure that Jerry Young was “real law enforcement,” just at a level Margaret’s Harbor usually required, which was different from the level Boston usually required. He said nothing about it, though, and let the policewoman lead him down the narrow back corridor to the door he was sure he recognized. She swung it open and he looked inside. It was the room he had been in with Arrow Normand. This time, there was only one person waiting for him. Carl Frank had declined to bring an attorney.

The policewoman shooed Gregor inside, and Gregor let himself be shooed. He heard the door close behind him just as Carl Frank stood up, being polite in a way that very few people bothered with anymore. He was an interesting man, especially considering the people he worked with. His clothes were expensive without being fashionable. In fact, if Gregor had had to guess, he would have said that Carl Frank’s clothes were expensive because they were not fashionable, that he had gone to a lot of trouble to blend into the background in one sense while being impossible to ignore in another. He was, in other words, a very serious person. He was not the public relations flunky for a minor motion picture.