Cheating at Solitaire(96)
Clara Walsh looked exasperated. “O.J. had to stay in jail awaiting trial,” she said. “It makes me crazy, this idea that the justice system stops dead just because the defendants are rich and famous.”
“Well, it works for the rich,” Jerry Young said. “Sorry, Ms. Walsh, but you know it’s true.” He turned to Gregor. “Do you know why I’m the only cop in town? Do you know why we take on a couple of extra men in the season, but we never really man up to a full complement? It’s because nobody wants to arrest anybody here. These people who come in the summer, they’re the heads of corporations, they’re the heads of foundations and museums, we even get congressmen and senators and sometimes presidents. They get drunk and drive. Their kids get drunk and drive. We aren’t really supposed to arrest anybody. We just pour them into the back of the cruiser and drop them at home, and if we pick up any one somebody too often, we suggest that maybe it might be a good idea to do a stint in rehab.”
“And there aren’t any real crimes?” Gregor asked. “At all?”
“Burglaries,” Jerry Young said. “We get a fair amount of those, and I’ve gotten pretty good at handling them. And we get what are probably rapes, but nobody calls them that. And nobody will.”
Gregor thought about it. In a way, this made perfect sense. The FBI and the Secret Service operated on similar principles when it came to guarding high-ranking government officials or their children. If a senator got nailed for driving drunk, it was almost always by the regular D.C. police or the police of some town where he wasn’t known and nobody cared. He shifted focus.
“So,” he said. “I asked for some information about Mark Anderman.”
Don Hecklewhite leaned over Clara Walsh’s shoulder and took a thick manila envelope off the lamp table at her side. “This is it,” he said. “Everything we know about the man. Everything Jerry knows, and everything I know, plus a summary of the forensic report. It looks like a lot, but it isn’t much. The bulk is mostly pictures of him with Arrow Normand. He was twenty-four. He graduated from some high school in California, not a place I’d ever heard of. He had a little string of m i nor arrests, disorderly conduct, public drunk-enness, that sort of thing. Nothing much.”
“And family?”
“None that we could find,” Jerry Young said. “The stuff we got faxed from California mentioned a younger sister, but we weren’t able to track her down. His father seems to have been long gone. His mother died about three years ago. He had a job, you know, that wasn’t a very good one, except it let him hang around with Arrow Normand.”
There was a knock on the door. Clara Walsh got up to see what it was about, and came back looking agitated. “That was the management,” she said. “The Versailles Room is full of reporters and they’re not being well behaved. The inn wants us to get in there and get this over with.”
“In a second,” Gregor said. “Something just occurred to me. You said the photographers were everywhere, all the time. They always hung out where they thought they could get pictures of Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand.”
“That’s right,” Jerry said. “Leeches have a less firm grip, if you ask me.”
“Where were they the night of the murder?” Gregor asked. “I don’t remember seeing anything about them being near the truck when it crashed, or after the crash. And I’ve talked to Stewart, at length. He brought Marcey Mandret to Annabeth Falmer’s house over his shoulder, and Arrow Normand showed up at Annabeth Falmer’s door dead drunk, and yet nobody has mentioned anything about photographers being there at any time.”
“It was the storm,” Jerry Young said. “You weren’t here when it happened, and you’re not from around here, so I don’t know if you understand just how bad a nor’easter like that can get. It doesn’t usually, this early in the season, but this was a kicker. Most of these guys are from California. They’re not used to that kind of weather.”
Gregor thought about it some more. “Stewart showed me photographs taken at the scene that he took with his cell phone camera. I’ve got those photographs upstairs in my things somewhere, and I can show you later, but what I remember was that the hood, windshield, and the driver’s-side door of the car were almost entirely cleaned off. This was before you got there, and before the state police got there. Was that a function of the truck being on and running warm?”
“I’ll check,” Jerry Young said, “but I don’t think so. By the time I got there there was snow all over the truck and it wasn’t running, but I don’t know if it was running when Mr. Gordon got there and he turned it off, or what.”