“And then Marcey Mandret turned up drunk and you all went running,” Linda said. “It’s embarrassing, really, the way you all behave. He was lying there in bed, unconscious, or something like it, and you were all more interested in Marcey Mandret being drunk. What does that woman do, anyway? She’s supposed to be a movie star, but I never see her in a movie.”
“I haven’t either,” Gregor said. “But what did you do when we all went to see about Marcey Mandret? Did you stay with Jack?”
“Yes, I did. For another half an hour, at least. And then I went home.”
“Did anyone else come to see Jack when you were there?”
“No.”
“Did he get any phone calls? Did anyone inquire about him?”
“No.”
“Did you see anyone coming into or out of the hospital when you left?”
“Well, there were a million people around the emergency room entrance,” Linda said. “They looked like one of those invading armies from the Lord of the Rings movies. But there was no one on Jack’s ward, no. Even Dr. Ingleford left.”
Gregor was about to say that she couldn’t fault Dr. Ingle-ford about that, since he seemed to be the only full-fledged doctor on duty at the time, but he let it go. Linda Beecham only seemed to be dead flat and without emotion. In truth, she was angry to the point of explosion, and keeping control of it by a continual act of will.
He wondered what happened when the will broke down.
Then he didn’t wonder anymore, because he realized he knew.
Chapter Six
1
Stewart Gordon was glad to hear that Carl Frank had moved Arrow Normand and her mother out of Annabeth Falmer’s living room. He’d thought the entire idea was cracked from the start, because there was no way Annabeth’s house could be “secured” against paparazzi in any meaningful sense, and because the paparazzi wouldn’t be back in force for at least another day or two. There was also the problem of Annabeth herself, who wasn’t used to people like Arrow Normand, and who really wasn’t used to people like Arrow Normand’s mother. Besides, the paparazzi hadn’t really disappeared. They’d only gone into hiding. They were waiting for the moment when it would be safe for them to return in force, or impossible to resist, whichever came first. At best, Stewart gave them another twenty-four hours. It would be less if somebody was arrested for causing the death of Kendra Rhode.
Stewart was less glad to hear that Marcey Mandret had not left Annabeth’s living room, and didn’t seem to be intending to.
“She’s lying on the couch with a blanket, drinking tea and reading W. B. Yeats,” Annabeth said when Stewart called to say he was coming over.
“She can’t be reading Yeats,” Stewart said. “She won’t get any of the references.”
“I’m explaining things,” Annabeth said. “And really, Stewart, you can’t complain that much. It’s better than having her drunk in the middle of the day and falling out of her clothes where photographers can catch her at it. I mean, I admit I would have started her on Byron maybe, or even Dickens, but she liked the cover on the Yeats.”
“Isn’t there something somewhere about not judging books by their covers?”
“I don’t know if she knows that one,” Annabeth said.
“I just got a call from Carl Frank,” Stewart said. “He said Gregor Demarkian was asking him about my suitability as a suspect for these murders.”
“You are a suitable suspect for the murders,” Annabeth said. “You’re a more suitable suspect than Arrow Normand. I don’t think that young woman could plan her way into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
“Possibly true,” Stewart said. “But there’s no malice in her.”
And that, he thought, as he made his way from his house to the boardwalk so that he could walk along the beach to Annabeth’s, summed up his entire position in this endless mess. The twits were twits, but with the exception of Kendra Rhode they had no malice in them. They were ignorant, and vulgar, and shallow, but they wished no one harm, and they tried to be nice to the people who had to work with them. Maybe it was too much to ask them to behave like thoroughgoing professionals at their ages and their levels of experience. Had he been a thoroughgoing professional at the age of twenty-one? Well, actually, he probably had. He’d just left the Royal Academy then, where they’d trained his voice, already too deep by half, until it sounded like a foghorn. But he hadn’t had the disadvantages these girls had had. He hadn’t been famous at fifteen, or surrounded by adults whose only purpose was to suck money out of him. He’d had a decent home life with two people who had worked with their hands and been paid for it, and who didn’t take any nonsense from “teenagers.” Stewart tried to imagine his father referring to anybody at all as a “teenager,” and failed. His father was not fond of fads. Not even a little bit.