Until they founded Microsoft and become the richest people on the planet, Carl thought—and then brushed that away. Nobody ever saw Bill Gates on the red carpet, except maybe at the White House, and probably not even then. The White House probably didn’t even have a red carpet. His mind had turned into some kind of mush. He was sweaty, in spite of the cold, and he was frustrated as hell.
“No,” he had told Michael Bardman earlier, using every ounce of sanity he had not to hang up the phone in the idiot’s ear, “it is not possible to spin a murder in a way that will have positive results for the movie, assuming there ever is a movie, since Arrow Normand is unavailable to work at the moment. And maybe, for a good long time.”
This was not entirely fair. From what Carl understood about celebrity murder cases, he was fairly sure that some judge somewhere would make it possible for Arrow to finish her work on the movie, if only so that she could make enough money to pay her legal bills. Even so, the whole thing was a mess, and it didn’t look likely to clean up anytime soon. What was worse, he was having an unusually difficult time getting information. He had approached Annabeth Falmer this morning, thinking that she would be the best bet. Arrow Normand had been in her house on the afternoon in question, after all, and Marcey Mandret had too, and so had Stewart Gordon. It was practically a little Court TV true-crime documentary right there on her living room rug. At the last minute, he hadn’t been able to go through with any of the things he had been thinking of. Dr. Falmer was just as clueless as he’d hoped she would be, but it wasn’t the right kind of clueless. She wasn’t a snob, intellectual or social. She wasn’t a fool, or an airhead like Marcey and Arrow. She was just a pleasant, well-meaning, quietly dressed woman who probably didn’t have the faintest idea what she’d gotten herself into. Carl Frank hadn’t wanted to be the one to let her in on the secret.
The problem was, there weren’t a whole lot of sources of information on Margaret’s Harbor. The local police weren’t talking to him, and the state police weren’t talking to him either. Eventually, down the line somewhere, some secretary in a back office would pick up the phone and spill to the nearest reporter, just to make herself feel important, but it hadn’t gotten to that point yet. The police had called in this outside consultant, this Gregor Demarkian, and that was all they would tell anybody for the time being. Carl had looked up Gregor Demarkian on the Internet, and been suitably impressed. God only knew what this guy charged. Considering his reputation, it was probably a lot. whatever it was, he wouldn’t be talking to Carl Frank, unless it was to get information instead of give it.
Of course, there were all those professional sources of information, meaning the press. Carl was no more of a snob than Annabeth Falmer was. He didn’t turn up his nose at the paparazzi. They often knew things nobody else did, because they were practically as good as spies. Hell, the best of them, if they didn’t have cameras in their hands, would have been charged as stalkers. They were stalkers. They went everywhere, and they thought nothing of breaking into somebody’s house or climbing a tree outside a bedroom window to get a few money shots of the stuff going on inside. Practically the first thing Carl did when he took over publicity for a movie was to sit down with the principal actors and try to get them to deal with the reality of the attention they were getting. He almost never succeeded. There was something about actors—about “celebrities” of every stripe—that needed to believe that the paparazzi would never turn on them, that needed to forget that the point was not to make them famous but to make them pay.
“Bad news sells newspapers,” he would tell them. He would look straight into their eyes and know they weren’t hearing a word he was saying. He would try anyway. “From their point of view,” he would say, “watching you screw up, watching you crash and burn and destroy yourself, is by far the better story. There are more people out there who are willing to pay to see that than are willing to pay to see you succeed. Hell, practically nobody is willing to pay to see you succeed.”
Right now, of course, they would pay for anything, because there was nothing. He had managed to get Marcey out of the public eye for the next half second, and Arrow was where they couldn’t get to her. But the paparazzi didn’t have access to the local police or the state police or that prosecutor, Clara Walsh, and neither did the “legitimate” reporters now camped out on Main Street in Oscartown. He could see ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox from the window of this silly upscale diner. They would hang around here until it was time for the press conference Clara Walsh had promised to give as soon as Gregor Demarkian arrived. Then they would cover that. Then they would come back here. There was nothing to do in Oscartown in the winter. There was barely anything to do in Oscartown in the summer, but then, at least, the local celebrities would be more to the liking of the national press. Katie Couric wasn’t impressed with Arrow Normand. She was impressed with nearly any Kennedy.