Cheating at Solitaire(43)

“It makes enough to do a little more than break even,” Clara said, “but it doesn’t have to make a mint. Linda actually managed to get lucky about ten years ago or so and hit a small jackpot in the Big Bucks game. I don’t think it came to more than five million or so after taxes, but that’s not negligible, and in Linda’s case it made all the difference in the world. Like I said, she’s had a hard life.”

“From a poor family?” Gregor asked.

“From a middle-class family,” Clara said, “but then there were terrible things that happened. Her mother and her sister both died of some kind of god-awful cancer that took forever to take its course, and Linda had to leave school to take care of them. Then, when that was over, Linda was stuck with the bills. It just sort of went on and on for decades, and then one morning there was this. The next thing we knew, she’d bought the Home News, and she’s been there ever since.”

“Interesting,” Gregor said. “You’d think she’d be interested in maximizing her income. There’s money to be made covering the film people, isn’t there?”

“A ton of it,” Stewart Gordon said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with Americans, and it isn’t just Americans. Think of Diana Spencer. People lose their minds. They can’t get enough of it. They can’t get enough of this lot, and that’s worse than mystifying.”

“You’d have to know Linda,” Clara Walsh said again. “She’s a very unusual person. She doesn’t have enthusiasms, and she doesn’t get excited about things. She’d be a good person to talk to, though. She might not have run any stories about the film people, but I’ll guarantee she knew all about them, and more than anybody else. Linda’s like that. And what she doesn’t know, Jack probably will.”

“I haven’t met her,” Stewart said. “At least, not that I know of.”

“Mr. Gordon likes to run around Oscartown doing his own shopping,” Clara Walsh said. “He startles the hell out of practically everybody. But he’s very polite. If they say hello, he always says hello back.”

“Well, it’s nonsense, isn’t it?” Stewart said. “The way these people behave. Entourages. Bodyguards. They create their own problems, don’t they? I’ve never in my life had to worry about being hounded by paparazzi, and do you know why? Because I don’t live like a Latin American dictator who’s made too many enemies. Never mind that it’s expensive, living the way they do. Forty thousand dollars a night for a hotel room, for God’s sake. And then who knows how much more for the entire crew she had with her.”

“What?” Gregor asked.

“That’s the answer to Mr. Demarkian’s question,” Clara Walsh said. “No, Mark Anderman wasn’t on the island without a break during the entire time of the filming. About three weeks ago, he went off with Arrow Normand and the entire rest of that group to Las Vegas for the weekend, and they rented something called the Hugh Hefner Suite at the Palms Hotel. I’ve never been to Las Vegas, and I don’t have any idea what this means, but it was on CNN. They were gone for the weekend and came back.”

“A nine-thousand-square-foot hotel suite,” Stewart Gordon said. “Think about it. The house I grew up in wasn’t a third that size. I bet the house you were brought up in wasn’t either.”

“I was brought up in an apartment,” Gregor said. “You said they had people with them?”

“Oh, yes,” Clara said. “There was the whole crew, really. Kendra Rhode and that odious boy who doesn’t seem to do anything but be vulgar. Marcey Mandret. Another film crew person, Steve something—I can’t remember how this went. I think Arrow Normand went out with Steve whoever he was, but came back with Mark Anderman. They met some people from Los Angeles, I think. It really was on CNN. We can look it up on the Internet if you’re interested.”

Gregor didn’t know if he was interested or not, but the dock was coming up fast, and they could all talk about it later. They were approaching land, and out there, waiting for them, was—nothing at all. Gregor had the feeling that he had stepped into the kind of movie he would have refused to watch if Bennis had wanted to stay up late to do it.





Chapter Five


1

Carl Frank understood the attractions of café society. He had understood them as a child, when he had watched his mother sitting over the social pages morning after morning in their kitchen in Saddle Ridge, New Jersey. He had understood them in college, when it seemed as if every rich girl with a recognizable Old Money name had wanted nothing more than to see a photo spread of herself in Life, milking cows on a commune in California. He even understood them now, although, being older, his understanding was more multifaceted. The advertising agencies only cared about reaching a great honking chunk of the eighteen-to-thirty-five year-old demographic, and the closer the skew was to the eighteen, the better. It was one of the things that left him faintly baffled. When he was eighteen, nobody he knew would have admitted to a fascination with society. Most of them wouldn’t even admit to a fascination with being part of the popular crowd in high school. Now it was as if the whole world were a high school, the kind of high school where lots of rich kids dominated the sports teams and the cheerleading squad, and the smart kids went unnoticed by anybody at all.