“Stewart Gordon got a picture of her, too,” Gregor said. “She wasn’t just covered with blood, she’d been sprayed with it. Look at the photographs. The blood didn’t spray toward the driver’s side. It wouldn’t have, but it’s clear in the photographs that it didn’t. It didn’t spray to the passenger side, either, although there was blood there because the bullet seems to have gone through that window. It sprayed back. In order to get sprayed with blood, Arrow Normand would have to have been behind the passenger seat and sitting pushed forward toward the open area in the center.”
“She could have been doing that,” Jerry Young said automatically. “It was a pickup truck, but it was a fancy pickup truck. There was a backseat.”
“I wonder if somebody was following it on the road,” Gregor said. “Or if somebody was following on foot, or watching on foot.”
“You mean you think it’s for sure that she didn’t commit the murder?” Jerry Young said. “Just like that? You haven’t been here, what, an hour? And you just know?”
“All I know is that logic is always right, even if you can’t make yourself believe it,” Gregor said. “And right now, I have a set of facts that would make more sense if there were a third person involved. Of course, if there is a third person involved, there’s the big question. Arrow Normand must have some idea who that person is. She must have seen the murder happen, or somehow been out of the way and then come back right after it happened, or at least been on the scene—knocked out, maybe, by the accident—and that means that she must either know who did it, or suspect who did it. So, why isn’t she telling anybody?”
Chapter Seven
1
Stewart Gordon liked to think of himself as a straightforward man, and in most areas of his life this was absolutely true. It was simply easier to speak his mind than to remember what it was that would offend somebody this week, especially since the defnition of “offensive” seemed to change on a daily basis, and in ways he could never anticipate. Hell, even the words you were allowed to use changed on a daily basis, and it didn’t help much if you were known to be an outspoken Man of the Left, as he had always been. The trouble was that he was a Man of Another Left, not the Marxist one that saw all the events of history through the distorting lens of socialist inevitability. You had to be an idiot if you thought socialism was inevitable, and Stewart was no idiot. But he wasn’t a man of the New Left, either. He had no stomach for the romance of the primitive. He didn’t think that Western civilization was the most corrupt, the most racist, the most sexist, the most oppressive civilization in the world. He’d seen a lot of the world, and he’d had a decent education. He had no illusions about Nature, either, or primitive peoples. The Noble Savage was the pipe dream of all left-wing movements. The only way you could believe it is if you had never really met a savage—or if you had, and you were as accomplished at self-delusion as Michelangelo was at sculpture. He’d never understood all of that, that screaming need so many people had to declare that having to live in a world with Fox News was much more oppressive than living under a government that would execute you for sleeping with your boyfriend, especially if you also happened to be a boy. Stewart was a Man of the Left in the sense of being in favor of a welfare state that really provided things for people, like food and shelter, when they had no other way of getting them. He believed not only in safety nets, but in thick safety nets, and in never trusting anything said by any large organization. That took care of both corporations and government bureaus, and Stewart thought that was exactly where his suspicions ought to be.
The other thing Stewart was sure of was that he did not like drama and fuss, and speaking his mind saved him from both. Almost all the drama and fuss in the world came from either trying to hide something, or trying to pretend you hadn’t really meant to do something you had really meant to do. Stewart had always thought that Don Imus was a pompous jerk, but if he’d been Don Imus he wouldn’t have apologized no matter what he’d said, and he wouldn’t have ended up out of a job. If you were honest, you stood by what you believed, even if other people didn’t like it, and you were open about who you were. That was why he was always very clear about the fact that he did not believe in God and did not approve of religion, and the fact that he thought the American government was in thrall to the most vicious kinds of capitalists, and the fact that he was not interesting in shacking up with some woman without benefit of matrimony. Back in the days when he was playing Commander Rees, the network had truly hated it whenever he gave interviews. At one point, they had even threatened to fire him if he did any more.