Cheating at Solitaire(34)

If it had been just the movie people, though, Linda wouldn’t have been feeling half as smug. The police also were acting just the way she’d expected them to, and so was the new public prosecutor, Clara Walsh. There was something about the sight of multitudes of television cameras that made everybody crazy. These days, Main Street in Oscar-town was packed with them, and so were some of the side streets. There were usually cameras on the beach now, too. The island police were all walking very much more upright than they usually did. The state police were putting on their best New Jersey swagger. Clara Walsh spent her time giving press conferences from her office or the Oscartown Inn, saying not much of anything and looking absolutely ridiculous. Somebody ought to tell that woman that she was much too short to wear magenta suits.

“It’s television,” Linda said. “They all want to be on tele-vision. Everybody wants to be on television. It’s as if they don’t think they exist if they aren’t on television.”

Across the room, Jack Bullard grunted. He had the tele-vision on, the small one Linda kept in her office for breaking news. It was tuned to a Clara Walsh press conference.

“So,” he said. “Do you know anything about this guy they’re bringing in? This Gregor Demarkian?”

“I’ve heard of him,” Linda said. “He’s been on some of those true-crime shows. American Justice. City Confiden-tial. He was in the papers a few months ago for something down in Philadelphia.”

“Why would Clara Walsh want to bring in a private detective? Why would the police want to let her?”

Linda snorted. “For God’s sake,” she said. “It’s all about the publicity. This has ceased to be a crime investigation. It’s ceased to be about anything except the media coverage. Why not bring in a celebrity detective? It guarantees you more print. It guarantees you more airtime. And you look like you’re doing something, when you’re not.”

“I wouldn’t think Clara Walsh would want any more media than she’s already got,” Jack said. “I mean, look at it around here lately. They’re everywhere. And they’re not all Walter Cronkite, either.”

“I think Walter Cronkite is dead.”

“I don’t, but what does it matter?” Jack said. “You must see what I mean. This is completely insane as it is. There are news reports three or four times a day. Yesterday I heard from Kevin Kelly at the morgue, and he said they’ve had to post guards at the laundry chutes because he’s got photographers trying to get in that way. And other ways.”

“And these are the people you wanted us to hook up with,” Linda said. “I told you what they were like.”

“All I wanted to do was sell a few pictures at a price that could help the paper out and help me out in the meantime,” Jack said. “I was just trying to cut you in on what I was going to do anyway.”

“And did you? Sell some of those photographs?”

“One or two. But what about the Home News? This is a murder. You can’t say it’s not really news. We come out in two days. We are going to cover this, right?”

“I suppose we’re going to have to, if we don’t want to look like idiots,” Linda said. “Don’t worry. I put Dina Cole-man on it. We’ll give it the entire page above the fold and say all the usual things. Not that there’s anything much to say that hasn’t been said forty times already. We’ll use your picture of the ambulance taking the body away, unless you’ve sold that already to somebody else.”

“I’ve been waiting very patiently for you.”

“Thank you, I think. You are going to sell some of those, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely,” Jack said. “I’ll let you pick what you want, and then I’m going to sell the rest to the highest bidder. I was in the right place at the right time, and I was the only one there. I’m the only one with the stills and the only one with the footage.”

“You took video?”

“For a while. When I got bored. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world to stand out in the middle of a nor’easter waiting for the EMTs to get over having to handle a bloody corpse. I was freezing my ass off and thinking that this is the most remarkable place. Most EMTs are used to handling bloody corpses.”

“I don’t think it was the blood,” Linda said. “We have our share of traffic fatalities.”

“Well, whatever. They were lame. And so were the local police on the scene, from what I’ve heard. They weren’t used to handling a homicide. They screwed things up.”