Cheating at Solitaire(133)

“I know,” Gregor said.

“And you think I’d lift a finger to keep Kendra Rhode out of trouble? Why? She wanted a part in this movie, you know, and she asked for it several times, but she never got it, and she wasn’t going to get it. That one, Michael promised me. Not that he was keen to have her. I mean, for God’s sake. And as for Arrow hanging out with Mark Anderman—why not? It made people forget about Becker. There was nothing to discover about Arrow and Mark. It was the perfect arrangement, before somebody put a bullet through his head. The last person in the world I had a motive to shoot was Mark Anderman, and it would have been beyond counterproductive to do it in a way that got Arrow Normand thrown in jail and the filming stopped for a week and a half.”

“Did you have a motive to shoot someone else?” Gregor asked.

“I keep a list,” Carl Frank said. “I’m going to wait until I have my fuck-you money, and then I’m going to get a machine gun and have at it.”

2

For the next interview, Gregor had gone back and forth in his head between protocol and practicality. It often made good sense to interview someone outside the official institutions of the law, to do it in a way that stressed humanity and not the function of a witness or a suspect. For Linda Beecham, Gregor thought it would be better to be as official as possible, and as serious. He didn’t think she was worried about being a witness, and he was sure she had no idea that she might be a suspect. He did think that she resented the fuss and bother made over people like Arrow Normand and Kendra Rhode, and that she was sure that Jack Bullard’s problems would go unresolved because they were the problems of someone nobody important would have any interest in attending to.

Gregor had asked for the file on Jack’s attack to be sent up to him, and it arrived in the hands of another young state policewoman almost as soon as Carl Frank left the conference room. Gregor spread the contents of the file on the conference table in front of him. There wasn’t much to see. Linda Beecham had, indeed, reported the attack on Jack to Jerry Young, and Mike Ingleford had sent over a medical report, but so much else had been going on over the last few days that nothing had been done to identify the person or persons who had made such a mess out of Jack’s hand. And it was a mess. The tips of the fingers of the right hand were almost entirely ruined, and the palm had been cut in a dozen places, seemingly haphazardly. The left hand was clean. It was the drugs that were the most confusing thing about the incident. Date rape drugs were not the sort of thing most people had lying around the house, and they weren’t the sort of thing that would first come to the mind of someone who needed to knock somebody else out to—what? Mutilate him? What had been done to Jack, exactly? He didn’t know, and so far, nobody had tried to find out.

Linda was five minutes late for the appointment. Gregor considered that mildly interesting, since she didn’t seem to him to be the kind of woman who was often late to anything. She came in just as he was gathering up the papers to put them back in Jack’s file. She caught a glimpse of one of the pictures the hospital had taken of the hand before it had been worked on, and made a face. Then she sat down. Her eerie calm was still in evidence, except that it wasn’t really calm, which is what made it eerie. It didn’t matter that Gregor had met other people with this same dead flatness of affect, and that none of them had been mass murderers or even petty thieves. There was something about being in the presence of a person like this that made the nerves beneath his skin begin to jump.

Linda folded her hands on the table in front of her and waited. She could wait forever. Gregor knew that. You might goad somebody else into talking just by staying silent, but you wouldn’t goad her.

“It’s funny,” he said.

“What’s funny, Mr. Demarkian? I don’t see anything funny in any of this.”

“I was just thinking how alike you are to Carl Frank,” Gregor said. “Not really, of course, but you have one thing in common and it’s an unusual thing. And with unusual things, the fact that they’re unusual makes people think that they must also be important.”

Linda sat there, with her hands folded. Nothing about her moved except her eyes, and they weren’t particularly active. She was small and gray and compact and incredibly neat. She was not particularly interested.

“Aren’t you interested in knowing what you’ve got in common with Carl Frank?” Gregor asked.

“Not really. I thought that if you thought it was important, you’d tell me. But I don’t know him, do I? I’ll probably never see him again after all this is over. I don’t see why I should care that we share some characteristic in common.”