Cheating at Solitaire(53)

Clara Walsh pulled the car to a halt at the curb and got out. Bram Winder got out too, and a moment later he was holding open Gregor’s door, trying to be polite and professional without doing an imitation of a chauffeur. Gregor got out too, and looked around. There really was a wind, a good hard one. It was freezing.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Clara Walsh said. “This is Jerry Young. He’s the Oscartown Police Department.”

“Not all of it,” Jerry Young said, grabbing Gregor’s hand and pumping it. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Demarkian.

We’ve heard a lot about you. I’m hoping you can do something about this mess before we all go crazy.”

“Jerry doesn’t like having Arrow Normand in his jail,” Clara said. “It upsets his equilibrium.”

“It upsets everything,” Jerry Young said. “You don’t know what it’s like. We’ve got photographers staking us out every hour of the day, trying to get in side doors, climbing through drains. They’re crazy, all these people. And then there she is. She won’t talk. She won’t even talk to her lawyers. She won’t talk to us. She just sits there, under a blanket, sacked out.”

“Shock,” Clara Walsh said solemnly.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Jerry Young said. “She was treated for shock. And it’s been days. She can’t still be in shock after all these days. I’ll tell you what I think. I think she’s some kind of mental defective. I think she never could talk except for what they wrote down for her. And now there’s nobody to write things down for her, so here we are.”

Gregor was turning into an icicle. He thought about Ben-nis and Donna and the wedding arrangements back home. He thought about Tibor. He thought about Lida and how she had probably packed food into his suitcases somewhere. Then he looked down off the road onto the beach. They were standing just above an outcropping of rocks, deep and tall and solid looking, but with rounded edges, because they were so close to the sea. He looked beyond the rocks to the beach itself, and then to the ocean, which seemed to be very far out.

“Close to low tide,” Jerry Young said helpfully. “High tide, it comes all the way up to those rocks, and in a bad summer storm it will come up to the sidewalk. There aren’t too many summer storms that bad, fortunately.”

“Huh,” Gregor said. He looked around again. “This is where it happened? This is where you found the body?”

“And the truck,” Jerry Young said. “Yes, sir. I’m not sure we can say that it happened here, though. I mean, I’d have assumed it did, but one of the guys from the state police said that since we didn’t find the bullet, it might have been done somewhere else. The bullet went through his head, you know, and out the other side, and then through the window over on that side—there was a hole. But we looked for the bullet, all over here. And we didn’t find it.”

“Huh,” Gregor said again. He went as close to the edge of the sidewalk as he dared. He was wearing good city shoes. It hadn’t occurred to him to wear anything else. He didn’t like the idea of stepping off into the snow, which looked like it was at least ankle deep. “Did you just look,” he asked Jerry Young, “or did you get some equipment out here and clear the area and sift through it?”

Jerry Young looked surprised, but what bothered Gregor was that Clara Walsh looked surprised too. “Do you mean to say you want us to dredge the place?” she asked. “The way we’d, I don’t know, the way we’d search a lake?”

“I’m saying that there’s a lot of snow,” Gregor said, “and a bullet is a small thing. Granted, you’d think there ought to have been some sign of it, a hole, some melted place that shouldn’t have been, but it seems like a lot of people were walking around here that night—”

“It wasn’t really the night,” Jerry Young said. “By the time I got here, it was maybe four or four thirty in the afternoon. People just think of it as night because it was so dark. The storm, you know, was blocking out everything, and so the streetlights were on, and people thought—”

“Yes, I see,” Gregor said. “But I’m right, aren’t I? There were a lot of people here.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jerry Young said. “Even before I got here. And then after I got here, I called the state police, and they came, you know, and then there were more of us. But we really did look. We looked hard. We looked right at the time, and then we looked later, when the wrecker came to take the truck away. We got down on our hands and knees and sifted through snow until we were blue.”