Cheating at Solitaire(28)

“Be serious,” Stewart said. “I’ve got better taste and a better mind, and Kendra Rhode doesn’t get romantically involved with anybody, any more than she drinks and drugs like the people she clubs around with. But she’s there. On Margaret’s Harbor. She came out about a week and a half ago and opened this big house her family has there so that she could give a New Year’s Eve party. That’s when the murder happened. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. There was a big storm.”

“A nor’easter,” Bennis said. “I heard about it. Boston was closed.”

“Damned near all of New England was closed,” Stewart said. “I’d never seen anything like it, not even in Scotland, and it snows in Scotland. That’s how we found the body. We weren’t looking for a body. We thought there’d been an accident in that ridiculous purple truck of his. Why is it that so many Americans seem to work at looking like bad jokes from the Daily Mirror? At any rate, we went looking for the truck, and we found it, and there he was—”

“Who’s we?” Gregor asked.

“Dr. Falmer. Annabeth Falmer. She—”

“She’s a historian, I know,” Gregor said. “Tibor gave me a book of hers about the abolitionist movement. So, let’s see, we’ve got you, this Arrow whoever person—”

“Normand,” Donna said.

“Kendra Rhode. Annabeth Falmer. Anybody else I should be worried about?”

“There are the rest of the twits,” Stewart said. “Marcey Mandret. Oh, and this real estate woman who’s making a completely nuisance of herself, named, I kid you not, Bitsy Winthorp. But they don’t matter. That’s not what I want from you. I want you to come up to Margaret’s Harbor and prove that Kendra Rhode did it.”

“Kendra Rhode,” Gregor said.

“Maybe not directly, because she’d never get her hands dirty,” Stewart said, “but she did it. I have no idea how to explain this to anybody who hasn’t met her, but she did it. I’ve got pictures.”

“You’ve got pictures of Kendra Rhode committing a murder?”

“Be serious,” Stewart Gordon said. “As soon as this nice woman takes the pins out of me, I’ll show you. I need you to come up to Margaret’s Harbor and do something about what’s going on, or she’s going to get away with it, and she gets away with too bloody much.”

2

Stewart Gordon didn’t have proof that Kendra Rhode had murdered somebody, or had somebody murdered, but Gregor wasn’t expecting that. In a lot of ways, Stewart was the simplest man he had ever known, even simpler than Father Ti-bor, for whom simplicity was a religious necessity. Stewartt was not religious to the point of being antireligious, but he was also a moralist of the straightforward and uncompromising kind. Intelligent and Educated people may have given up the idea of good and evil—or, at least, of evil—but Stewart Gordon never had. It shone out of him like a beacon from an old-fashioned light house. He was no more able to suppress it than he was able to sing soprano.

The small boys weren’t going to go away until they got what they wanted, so Donna invited them to sit in her living room and be quiet while “Commander Rees talks to Mr. Demarkian.” Gregor waited for the lecture about the bloody boneheaded ignorance of American tele vision producers to hire a Scot to play a Welshman, but it didn’t come. Stewart was looming over Donna’s kitchen table, pulling flat color photographs out of a big manila envelope. The envelope must have been there all along, lying on a table somewhere or stuffed into Stewart’s coat, but Gregor hadn’t noticed, and now he sat, fascinated, wondering how it hadn’t burst. How many rolls of fllm had Stewart had with him? How many would he have needed? The last photograph was clearly the picture of a man who had been shot in the head. The color was so brilliant it was nearly gaudy.

Gregor leaned forward, picked it up, and turned it over in his hand. “This is the victim, I take it,” he said. “And he was—?”

“Mark Anderman,” Stewart said. “Not a bad kid, really. Worked as a grip. Didn’t get paid much. The girls liked him, though. He was what’s known these days as ‘hot.’ ”

“You can’t tell from this.”

“Well, no, you couldn’t, could you?” Stewart looked at the huge pile of photographs and sat down. “I shot everything my cell phone camera would let me, then I shot everything her cell phone camera would let me. She thought I was crazy.”

“Who’s she?”

“Dr. Falmer. Annabeth Falmer.”