“The guy who was murdered,” Bennis said.
“Right. Who was also a minor functionary on the movie. Arrow Normand seems to have a habit of dating minor functionaries. Anyway, Steve Becker didn’t return to the film, from what I can understand because he’d been fired. I think the idea is that you don’t keep the toy boys around after they’ve outlived their usefulness, because they upset the stars, or something. My guess is that he’s either sold his story to a tabloid or is in the process of negotiation to sell it, hopefully the former, except that I can’t find it. There are stories with him in them, but nothing of him, you know, the way those stories are. ‘I Spent a Night with Arrow Normand!’ Nothing like that, that looks like he sold it himself. So maybe not. But I want to find him. I think it would be interesting to find out something about this situation from somebody with an ax to grind.”
“Those guys usually disappear when they lose their famous friends,” Bennis said. “There’s not much else for them to do, Gregor. They aren’t anybody.”
“I know,” Gregor said, “but it’s been one of those things I’ve been thinking about. The toy boys aren’t anybody, but neither is anybody else involved in this thing. There’s enormous publicity, and apparently enormous public interest, and yet most of these people have minimal if any claims to prominence. They’re not great singers or actors. They haven’t invented anything. They don’t run governments or corporations. The most diligent of them are like the teen idols of the fifties, except that they’ve taken on the kind of significance that used to be reserved for—I don’t know whom it used to be reserved for. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Do you know that a horde of photographers tried to break down a door in the emergency room this afternoon to get pictures of Marcey Mandret lying in a hospital bed? Who the hell is Marcey Mandret?”
“She’s an actress. She’s been in a couple of movies.”
“Not any of the movies I’ve ever seen,” Gregor said. “It’s almost a form of mass hysteria.”
“Maybe it is,” Bennis said. “I don’t think you’re going to save the soul of popular culture from the Oscartown Inn, though.”
“I don’t want to save the soul of popular culture,” Gregor said. “I just want to find out enough about Mark Anderman to discover why somebody would want to risk virtually everything to kill him. Not that murderers are great at risk assessment, but you know what I mean.”
“You mean you want me to find Steve Becker,” Bennis said. “Not just stories about him, or even by him, but him.”
“It does occur to me that if I had to have a suspect for the killing of Mark Anderman, Steve Becker, or somebody in Steve Becker’s position, would be the most likely one.”
“I’ve got to go get a tail pinned on me,” Bennis said. “It’s a game Donna thought up. I’ll get Donna when this is over and we’ll take a whack at it.”
“A tail pinned on you with what?” Gregor asked.
Bennis had already hung up in his ear. Gregor put the phone back into the cradle and looked around the room. It was a very nice room, but he had to do something serious about getting dressed, and then he had to do something serious.
2
Gregor didn’t know what he’d expected to find when he finally got Clara Walsh to let him talk to a real, live policeman, but it wasn’t what he found when he made his way downstairs and was shown to “the Ivory Room” by one of the young men who manned the desk. He tried not to be too judgmental about the naming of the room. He hated it when hotels named rooms. He even hated it that the White House named rooms. He had expected, when he’d asked Clara Walsh to bring him somebody in law enforcement, that they’d meet in his own room, which would be cramped but private, and he really didn’t care what a mess it was. Instead, exactly sixteen minutes after he’d hung up on Clara Walsh, there was a phone call from the desk and a request that he meet Clara in “the Ivory Room.”
In his mind, men who served as the single law enforcement officer in small towns were older, and balding, and running to fat. They were also not very bright. He had no idea where he had come up with that image. It didn’t even fit Andy Taylor, and that was the single most famous image of a small-town sheriff in American popular culture. Still, it was the image he had, and when he walked through the door of the Ivory Room—which was being held open, politely, by the young man from the desk—he at first didn’t realize what he was seeing. He saw Clara Walsh, looking like herself,and Bram Winder and Jerry Young, and a young man standing beside them, looking like a marine out of uniform.