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Cheating at Solitaire(143)

By:Jane Haddam


Gregor got out of the car and waited for the rest of them. Bram Winder looked disgruntled. Jerry Young just looked depressed. It was colder than Gregor thought it ever got in Philadelphia.

“So,” Clara said. “What are we going to do, charge Jack with ruining his own hand?”

“Maybe,” Gregor said.

She walked past him and in through the big plate glass doors. It occurred to Gregor that the United States was the least security-conscious of nations, in spite of the way they hyperventilated about it in public. There were so many glass doors, everywhere, that couldn’t be defended with less than an army at hand. There were so many windows, too.

They went through the lobby, waving at the woman at the desk, and to the elevators. The entire place felt as deserted as it had the first time Gregor had been there. The elevator was sitting on their floor. Clara shooed them all into it and then punched the button for the third floor.

“Honest to God,” she said. “I thought you were going to have me arrest Marcey Mandret. Wouldn’t that have been a show?”

Gregor didn’t say anything. The door was opening at the third floor. Stepping into the corridor, he could see Leslie at her desk—he guessed she would never leave her desk during a shift again, even if it meant she would have to urinate in a Dixie cup—and then, looking left, Mike Ingleford standing near a door at the end of the hall. Gregor looked from Ingleford to the fire doors at the end, and back to Ingleford. That was going to work out, but it was something he should have checked out before.

They were halfway to Jack Bullard’s room when Linda Beecham came out, holding one of those big paper shopping bags with handles.

“Now what?” she said. “Don’t tell me you want to question him now. He’s going home. He’d have been home in an hour. Go away now.”

Clara Walsh had puffed on ahead of the rest of them. She reached Linda Beecham first.



“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s something of an emergency, that’s all. For goodness’ sake, Linda, you saw what happened yesterday. You can’t believe they’ve gone away for good. I’ve got half the state police force on the Harbor this morning and I still don’t feel safe enough. Let’s get this over with before there’s more trouble.”

“He’s been unconscious for most of a day,” Linda said. “He’s been drugged. How is he supposed to remember anything?”

“He wasn’t drugged on the night of the storm,” Clara Walsh said. “Come on, Linda, stop playing the mother hen. This will only take a minute. Won’t it, Mr. Demarkian? You’re not intending to give Jack the third degree, or whatever it is? I don’t know why people say ‘the third degree.’ I haven’t got the faintest idea what it means, and I don’t think anybody else does, either.”

The rest of them had reached the door where Linda Beecham and Mike Ingleford were standing. Gregor said hello to the doctor and went inside. Jack was standing near the windows, looking out at Oscartown, his back to the door. The room was bare except for a small bouquet of flowers in a thin glass vase. Gregor wondered if Linda had brought it, or if one of the nurses had, uncomfortable at how barren and sterile Jack’s room was.

Jack turned around and looked at them. He was young and good-looking in the way that only young men of a certain age can be. He was very tired.

“Well,” he said.

“Do you know why I’m here?” Gregor said.

“I think so,” Jack said.

“Does she know?”

Gregor meant Linda Beecham, and Jack understood him.

“She knew before you did,” he said. “She’s a very strange woman.”

“She could have gotten herself into a great deal of trouble. She might have been wrong. You might have pressed charges.”

“But she wasn’t wrong, was she?” Jack said. “She’s never wrong, if you want to know the truth. Wrongheaded, sometimes. Lots of times. This time. But never wrong.”

“You’re still drugged to the gills,” Linda Beecham said. “You shouldn’t let them do this to you. They’re only trying to railroad you because it’s better for them to get hold of you than to get hold of one of those people. They’re afraid of those people. They’ve got money.”

“I wanted to have money once,” Jack said. “That’s how this started. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “But it wasn’t where it ended.”

“No,” Jack agreed. “If what I’d wanted in the end was money, I could have had it. I’ve got a stack of photographs from the Vegas trip back at the house. They’re worth a fortune. Literally. Arrow Normand. Marcey Mandret. Kendra Rhode. In clothes and out of them, at the weddings, in bars, everything. Absolute exclusives. Nobody else has them, or anything like them. I could have done a seven-figure deal with any one of the tabloids. But even before we went to Vegas, it wasn’t about the money anymore. And she knew it.”