“There’s somebody at the window,” Clara Walsh said, pointing toward the ceiling.
Stewart and Gregor turned to look. The window was a very small one, not meant to open, almost exactly where the ceiling met the wall, and there was indeed somebody in it, hitting against it in a way that was sure to break it eventually.
Stewart shrugged. “It’s got wire. They can break through it, but they can’t get in.”
“However did they get up there?” Clara Walsh said. “What do they think they’re doing? What does anybody around here think they’re doing?”
“It’s like Anna Nicole Smith,” Stewart said, turning his attention to Gregor again. “You have to ask yourself, I have to ask myself, if what you’re dealing with is a form of mental retardation. Or ignorance so profound that it becomes impenetrable. They don’t understand, do you know that? They don’t understand that people are making fun of them, that they’re not famous in a way anybody would want to be. They don’t know the rules.”
There was yet another set of fire doors in the center of the block, but it was surrounded entirely by emergency room cubicles, and there were no photographers pushing to come through. Leslie O’Neal came through this set and looked around until she found Stewart Gordon. She did not look at the doors secured with boards or at the window near the ceiling, even though the glass broke over her head.
“Mr. Gordon,” she said. “Miss Mandret is asking to speak to you. Dr. Ingleford doesn’t approve, but Miss Mandret is staging a fit, so come along.”
3
If Marcey Mandret was really having a fit, it couldn’t have been much of one. It was only a minute or two before Stewart Gordon was back in the emergency room’s tiny central core, looking bemused and more than a little flustered. In the meantime, Gregor Demarkian and Clara Walsh tried to talk to each other, hampered by the fact that they really had nothing to talk about. Clara Walsh was the public prosecutor, not the chief of police or the head of the homicide investigation—assuming there even was a head of the homicide investigation. Gregor had no idea what the chain of command was here, or even who was responsible for seeing that the police work got done. There had been some talk about the state police, but Gregor didn’t think that was the direction to look. The only time he had ever heard of the state police taking charge of a municipal homicide was in those small towns in Connecticut that had what they called a “resident trooper,” a statie who lived in town and acted as a one-man police department. Oscartown was small, but not that small, and in season it probably needed a force of at least three or four. Somewhere there had to be police, and forensics, and all the other things he had come to count on in both his long careers. The forensics were never as good as television cop shows made them look like they were, but they at least gave you something.
Once or twice, Gregor tried to get a look out of one of the fire doors. He peeled back a corner of Scotch tape and lifted the heavy wad of printout paper to look out, but all he saw was people looking back in, dozens of them, their faces pressed to the glass. There were even dozens of them now in the back landing, which was not good news. All of them seemed to have cameras. None of them seemed to be going away. He wondered where the state police were, the ones who were supposed to come in and break this up. Then it occurred to him that if Oscartown didn’t have enough police to break up a riot, they might not have enough to conduct a homicide investigation.
Clara Walsh peered into his face. She looked concerned, but Gregor thought she might be one of those women who always look at least a little concerned. “Are you all right?” she asked him.
He shrugged and looked back toward one of the sets of fire doors. “I was wondering who had jurisdiction. Who was actually investigating this homicide.”
“Ah,” Clara Walsh said. “That bothers you, too. Well, it’s Jerry, of course, even though he’s not really set up for it. We can get the state police to help, but they don’t have jurisdiction. Which leaves Jerry up a creek. I don’t think there’s ever been a homicide in Oscartown before, at least not one where the perpetrator was in any way in doubt.”
“Domestics,” Gregor said.
“Exactly,” Clara Walsh said. “Or else somebody gets high as a kite and into a fight, as we used to say when I was growing up. There isn’t a lot to do on the island during the off-season. People get cabin fever.”
Gregor was going to say that cabin fever was unlikely when there were ferries to the mainland available, even if they didn’t run very often, but Stewart Gordon was emerging from the bowels of the emergency room, his jacket off and on his arm, as if he were a butler bringing it in to a guest in a hurry to be gone.