“Could he have committed these murders?”
“Could he? Sure. But why would he? I know he’s been playing father-mentor to Marcey and sometimes to Arrow, but he’s not so old-world that he’d kill off their boyfriends. Never mind kill off the men pretending to be their boyfriends. I think he thinks he’s going to convince the both of them to go back and finish high school. Or something. It’s that kind of a relationship.”
“What about Arrow Normand?”
“Ah, the principle twit,” Carl Frank said. “Well, she’s getting fifteen for this movie—”
“Really?” Gregor was surprised. “I don’t keep up with these things, but I’d gotten the impression that her career was somewhat on the wane.”
“If you mean that she’s in a downward spiral without much choice but to self-destruct, your impression is entirely valid. My guess is that that girl has about another year, or maybe two, before she becomes radioactive. And with all this, it may happen sooner. Five years ago, she’d have gotten thirty million to make a movie.”
“Fifteen is still not minor money.”
“No, it isn’t,” Carl Frank said. “And I wasn’t the only one who told Michael he could get her for less if he held out for it. I think he felt sorry for her. That Michael felt sorry for her. Hell, pretty much everybody does. She’s young, and ‘stupid’ is giving her more credit than she deserves, but she’s a nice enough girl, she’s not a raving bitch to people or anything. It’s just that she was always just one of those things. She’s not particularly talented. She can’t act worth a damn, and her singing voice is weak. It has to be teched up when she records and when she performs. She’s not even particularly pretty. She was just young, that was all, and she was in the right place at the right time, and she was willing to wear not much in the way of clothes when she made music videos, and for a few years there wasn’t much in the way of competition. Now she’s not as young as she was and there are people coming up who are younger and better looking and actually talented. She hasn’t released an album in two years. She hasn’t made a movie or a video, either. And she’s got a family that spends money like water.”
“But you don’t think she killed Mark Anderman.
” “No,” Carl Frank said. “And neither do you. She wasn’t even available to kill Kendra Rhode, although I think she could have done it and made a case for justifiable homicide. The woman was absolutely poison to someone like Arrow Normand. Arrow could never understand that people like Kendra could get away with things that she herself couldn’t.” “
Like getting caught without wearing underwear?”
Exactly like getting caught without wearing underwear.” Carl Frank stared at the ceiling. “Of all the things that have come down the pike these last five years, that’s the one I’m never going to understand. Do these girls get it at all? Do they understand that showing that part of themselves and getting it caught on camera is toxic to any hope they ever have of being taken seriously? Do they have mothers?” “
Let’s try one more person,” Gregor said. “You.”
Carl Frank stopped looking at the ceiling. “Me? What makes you think I’d murder Mark Anderman? Or even Kendra Rhode.”
“You had opportunity, in both cases,” Gregor said. “In fact, you’re the only one who did have clear opportunity in both cases. I don’t see that the means would have been difficult for you to obtain. You’d know where to get a gun. And as for motive—well, there’s the movie. You’ve said yourself that your job here is to make sure the filming goes smoothly and with no bad publicity. It was to hold off bad publicity that you got rid of Steve Becker.”
“I got rid of Steve Becker by getting him a far better job on another movie,” Carl Frank said, “and I didn’t do it because he was making the filming go screwy. I did it because Arrow went off and married him in Vegas, and Arrow has too many liabilities already to pull that kind of stunt and get away with it. Remember when Britney Spears married that childhood sweetheart or whatever he was and then got it annulled four days later? It didn’t do her any good, and a similar stunt wasn’t going to do Arrow any good, so I made it go away. If I’d wanted Mark Anderman to go away, I’d have done the same kind of thing.”
“Maybe he refused to go away.”
“There was nothing for him to refuse to go away from,” Carl said. “He wasn’t dating Arrow Normand. Oh, I mean, he was in public, they hung out, but that was one of those little things Arrow was doing for Kendra Rhode. It was Kendra Rhode that Mark Anderman was married to in Vegas.”