He started to put it on as soon as he saw Gregor and Clara. “Well,” he said. “That was interesting.”
“Was it interesting?” Clara asked. “Was it something I should know about? Or something somebody should know about? Mr. Demarkian here has just reminded me that the line of command in this case is, ah, fuddled.”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with the case,” Stewart said. “She says she took a ‘little too much Valium,’ which sounds about right. I don’t see why she’d lie about it. Although, if you ask me, the problem isn’t the Valium, it’s the drinking on top of the Valium, and she’s been at it. Am I the only person left in the universe these day who knows what the signs of alcoholism are? It’s the middle of the day.”
Clara Walsh shook her head. “And that’s all she had to say? That she’d taken too much Valium? Did she mention if she took too much on purpose? Was she trying to commit suicide?”
“I don’t think so,” Stewart said. “You’d better ask Dr. Ingleford about that. No, that wasn’t what she wanted to say. She wanted to say that she wanted me to know that she hadn’t stayed in the Hugh Hefner Suite in Vegas.”
“What?” Gregor said.
Clara Walsh just blinked, but it had the same effect.
For once, Stewart Gordon looked surprised. “I’ve mentioned this, I know I have. The trip to Vegas a couple of weeks ago. More than that. Four or five. We had a break in the shooting schedule and they all took off there overnight, on a whim or something, I think it was. You must have seen it in the papers. It made every tabloid from here to Guam. Because of the Hugh Hefner Suite.”
“You haven’t mentioned it,” Gregor said carefully, “but—”
“Of course I mentioned it,” Stewart said. “It’s high on my list of absolute stupidities. Nine thousand square feet. Its own indoor pool. I’ve got no idea what else. Forty thousand dollars a night. Arrow wanted to stay in the Hugh Hefner Suite because Britney Spears had stayed there. So she did. Or something. I don’t know. They took off for the night. Arrow checked into the Hugh Hefner Suite. And then, you know, somebody sold the story to the tabloids, which was inevitable.”
“Who sold the story to the tabloids—Mark Anderman? The one who died?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, hell no,” Stewart said. “They don’t stay in relationships that long, these girls. Arrow was going out with Steve Becker at the time of the Vegas trip. He worked as a grip. Arrow dumped his ass either on the trip or just after it. I don’t know. And I don’t know if he sold the story to the tabloids. I don’t remember seeing one of those front-page things with a little thumbnail picture of him on it. But somebody did. The story was everywhere before they’d even got back here. And there were pictures.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“There’s no ah about it,” Stewart said. “That’s another thing about them, these girls, I mean. The men are awful. I mean awful. Chorus boys. Grips. Minor-league hangers-on. The relationships last a couple of months and then the men disappear, because they weren’t visible to begin with. If that makes any sense. If any of it does.”
“It makes sense,” Gregor said. “In a odd sort of way.”
The door to the waiting room was now bulged out far enough that Gregor was half afraid it would crack into pieces, in spite of being made of metal.
Clara Walsh gave it a long hard look, and took out her cell phone.
Chapter Two
1
By this time in her life, Annabeth Falmer had a long list of things she knew to be true, and one of the most important was this: it is not the case that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. In fact, in Annabeth’s experience, actions produced overreactions, or no reactions at all, but almost never the sort of reasoned, proportionate response that took into account the mitigating circumstances in whatever it was that had happened. Mitigating circumstances and proportionate responses were for other people’s problems, not your own. It was easy to keep your head when at the very base of it you didn’t care. When you did care, there was too much at stake for “rational” to be something you were interested in pursuing. When you cared because you were in pain, very little would do as a response short of a total annihilating blast. Annabeth didn’t like to admit it, but she had been thinking about annihilating blasts now for the better part of two months.
Actually, she was only thinking about annihilating blasts in that not-quite-subconscious substratum of her mind, the one that played the background music to everything else she did. In the foreground, at the moment, was the fact that she had become increasingly afraid of her telephone. Lately, there was always something coming over it that she didn’t want to hear. That designation applied especially to her sons, who seemed to be coming apart at the seams. From the way they were behaving, you would have thought Margaret’s Harbor was a crack-infested inner-city hood, complete with vacant lots, burned-out buildings, and drive-by shootings.