Cheating at Solitaire(141)

He picked his way through the old furniture and the boxes full of things that had never been used and made his way into the kitchen. The kitchen looked much more lived in than the living room did. It was obvious that somebody had been using the stove. There was a coffee cup on the round kitchen table, still half filled with coffee. If this had been summer instead of winter, the coffee would have gone to mold.

Carl turned around, and looked, really looked. There were cabinets, but the ones that were open seemed to be half empty. There was a sink full of dishes. They may have lain there, dirty, for weeks. There was the stove and the refrigerator and the sink. He opened the refrigerator and then the freezer. That was an old writer’s trick, from the days before digital, when a single manuscript copy might be all you had. You put it in the refrigerator when you weren’t working on it, because that would save it if the house burned down. There was nothing in the refrigerator but old food, almost all of it rotting and gone to mold.

Carl went to the line of cabinets and opened one. There were a couple of plates, a couple of coffee mugs of the same kind as the one on the table, a couple of small bowls. He opened the next one and found what had to be two dozen boxes of family-size beef Rice-A-Roni. He went to the next one and hit pay dirt: regular folders, accordion folders, loose photographs, documents held together by paper clips. There would be order to this mess that Jack Bullard would understand without thinking about it, but for Carl it was just a mess, and it would stay that way. He took out the three largest accordion folders and dumped them onto the kitchen table.

He would not kill anyone for Michael Bardman, or for a movie, and nobody would. By and large, people were just people. They did the small and usual things, and the really big ones, like homicide, were outside what they could work up the imagination to conceptualize. Violence didn’t even occur to most people most of the time, and the people to whom it did occur on a regular basis generally had too little control of themselves to hold a job for a week, never mind to launch and carry out a conspiracy that required the suborning of presidents. Carl Frank didn’t want Mark Anderman dead. He did n’t even want Steve Becker dead. He just wanted Jack Bullard’s pictures of the wedding, so that no matter what came out in the press, he’d have the upper hand for damage control.

“It’s as simple as that,” he said, out loud again, just to hear the sound of his own voice. He wasn’t talking to him self this time, though. He was talking to Gregor Demarkian, even though Gregor Demarkian would never hear it.

All he wanted was the pictures of the wedding, and it was good luck for him that Jack Bullard was temporarily incapaci tated and unable to prevent a little foray into his own house.





Chapter Seven


1 At the Oscartown Police Department, Gregor Demarkian was still sitting at the table in the conference room, but the other side of the table was occupied by Clara Walsh, Bram Winder, and Jerry Young, and Gregor had a big piece of paper to write on.

“Your problem,” he said, not looking up to see if they were paying attention, “is that you had a series of events that had to be explained to make sense of what happened, and they couldn’t be explained in the usual way. Real life is not like a detective story, no matter how much we want it to be. Real murderers are messy. They’re haphazard. They panic. Most of them can’t plan their way out of paper bags. And murder for hire is a lot more rare in the real world than it is on CSI. Here are your problems.”

He passed the big piece of paper across the table. On it, he had written in capital letters:


MURDER OF MARK ANDERMAN

ATTACK ON JACK BULLARD

GUN IN ANNABETH FALMER’S HOUSE

DEATH OF KENDRA RHODE

“My problem,” Gregor said, “was to assume that life was never like a detective story, because the four things on that list could not have been committed by the same person.”

“Do you mean there was an accomplice?” Bram Winder

asked. “There’s nothing odd about that. Perpetrators have accomplices all the time.”

“There was no accomplice in the ordinary sense,” Gregor said. “This wasn’t a plot hatched by two people, or even a case where person A commits a crime and gets person B to help him cover it up. If it had been, the attack on Jack Bullard would never have happened. Or if it did, it wouldn’t have happened the way it did. As for the gun in Annabeth Falm-er’s house”—Gregor shrugged—“I suppose that could have happened the way it did, but it was a stupid move, and unnecessary, and did more harm than good.”

“The forensics came back on that, right?” Bram said. “It wasn’t even the right gun. I don’t understand why anybody would want to plant it in Annabeth Falmer’s house, if somebody did plant it there. What was the point?”