Cheating at Solitaire(146)
“To help her move the new garbage bins,” Jack said.
“To help her move the new garbage bins,” Gregor repeated. “Then, when Jack started to pass out, she went after him with what was probably a small knife. Go look at his injuries. They’re concentrated almost exclusively on the fingertips. The fingertips are slashed up to the point where wounds and scar tissue will make it impossible to match Jack’s fingers to anything he imprinted before the attack, unless he’s given prints for some other purpose—”
“No,” Jack said. “I’ve barely had parking tickets.”
“But where would she get Rohypnol?” Jerry Young said. “I know it’s supposed to be floating around all over everywhere, but most people wouldn’t know where to get it to save their lives.”
“She got it from me,” Jack said. “I gave it to her for safekeeping after I took it off Mark and Steve one night at Cuddy’s. They were going after one of the waitresses, a girl who was the younger sister of one of the girls I knew in high school. They had a lot of it.”
“I don’t think you can charge her with anything, unless Jack here wants to press charges for the attack,” Gregor said, “and I don’t think he will. She was just thinking the best of him. She was just thinking that he’d gotten stupid one night and done something that was going to ruin his life, and she didn’t want him to ruin his life. She’s very maternal when it comes to Jack. And she’s a very angry woman, which somebody ought to pay attention to sometime soon.”
“I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life,” Linda Beecham said. “Do you think I killed Kendra Rhode too? Jack couldn’t have killed her. He was a mess. He was drugged up and weak.
He couldn’t have gotten to that stairwell to save his life.”
“He was found in the hall, not half a foot from the stairwell door,” Gregor said. “We do know that he got that far.”
“And collapsed,” Linda said. “He was right there, on the floor. I heard all about it. I came to the hospital and complained. It was typical. All that fuss over Kendra Rhode, and Jack lying in the corridor passed out and nobody paying any attention to him. Leslie didn’t pay any attention to him until she’d finished with Kendra Rhode. It was more important to take care of a dead celebrity than a live local boy.”
“Leslie didn’t know that Kendra Rhode was dead,” Gregor said gently. “And she knew Jack wasn’t about to be. There isn’t much staff at this hospital this time of year.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Linda said. “Are you going to charge me for the death of Kendra Rhode? Because Jack couldn’t have killed her. He wasn’t physically capable.”
There was a strangled sound from the other side of the room. Gregor turned to see Jack smiling at them, a calm smile, a beatif c smile, the kind of smile people got in the movies when they were bathed in a divine light.
“But I did kill her,” he said. “I caught up to her in the stairwell, and I grabbed her, and I threw her down, and when she started falling I went back through the doors and passed out. But I did kill her. And I meant to. It was the only thing I could have done, after everything that happened.”