And One to Die On (10 page)

The only other person in this small waiting room was a young woman in a very formal suit—navy blue raw silk with a short jacket; high-necked white silk blouse peeking up over the jacket’s plain round neckline—who kept pacing back and forth and staring at the clock on the wall above the check-in desk. She had a handful of sunflower seeds she seemed more interested in playing with than eating. She would move them from one hand to the other over and over again, then bump her elbow on a concrete post or one of the chairs. The sunflower seeds would scatter everywhere, and she would have to go back to her handbag to get another handful to play around with. Richard had tried a couple of times to talk to her, but she hadn’t been having any. Obviously, young women in raw silk suits didn’t fraternize with men in ragged jeans and cotton sweaters.

There was the sound of footsteps in the hall and they both looked up. This was the very last waiting room at this end. Nobody came down here unless they wanted to take a Maine Air flight to Portland or Augusta. Richard couldn’t remember where he was supposed to land to get to Hunter’s Pier. He watched the hallway carefully, and a few seconds later a man came striding down it, a beefy overblown man with too much color in his face who looked a little like John Forsyth. He was followed by a MaineAir reservations clerk who had to run to keep up with him.

“The problem is, Mr. Pratt, this end of the airport has been closed all day,” the clerk was saying, out of breath from running. “We haven’t been able to take off since six fifteen this morning.”

“I’m not supposed to take off until quarter to three,” Mr. Pratt told her, still striding along. He was carrying one large suitcase. He came into the waiting area and set it down. He nodded first to the young woman and then to Richard. Then he sat down.

The reservations clerk looked around, too. “These are the passengers from the eleven twenty-four flight,” she said. “They haven’t left yet.”

The young woman in the raw silk suit came closer. “Are we going to leave soon? It’s getting to be ridiculously late.”

The reservations clerk looked distressed. “Oh, we know, Miss Frazier, we know. It’s absolutely terrible. But there’s nothing we can do about it. Airport security simply won’t let us leave.”

“They’re going to have to let us leave sometime,” Miss Frazier said.

“They must realize by now that these bomb threats are hoaxes,” Richard said. “There have been at least four of them. There hasn’t been a bomb yet.”

The reservations clerk whipped around, looking more flustered by the second. “Oh, Mr. Fenster, yes, of course that’s occurred to everybody. But you really can’t blame airport security. Maybe all the bomb threats have been hoaxes up until now because somebody is trying to wear us down. Maybe somebody is trying to get us to stop paying attention. Then, as soon as our guard is down—”

“Oh, Jesus,” Miss Frazier moaned.

“That’s a load of crap,” Richard said.

“No,” the newly arrived Mr. Pratt said, “I don’t think it is. Better safe than sorry. I don’t want to get blown out of the air.”

“The only thing they have to do to make sure we don’t get blown out of the air,” Richard told him, “is to check out the plane.”

The reservations clerk was sliding from flustered into angry. In Richard’s experience, clerks were like nurses. They could be pleasant to the people they were supposed to be serving just as long as those people were accommodating and polite. One whiff of independence and rebellion, and they were ready for war.

“Well,” the reservations clerk sniffed now, “I know it’s been a frustrating day, but it’s been a frustrating day for
all
of us. MaineAir will be in the air as soon as it’s safe to fly.”

“Will MaineAir post a general boarding announcement?” Mr. Pratt inquired.

“Of course,” the reservations clerk sniffed. “MaineAir is always careful to follow mandated airport procedures.”

She turned her back on them and walked off into the corridor, bouncing along in her uniform suit, huffy and mad.

“I just thought if I had to wait forever anyway, I might as well get myself a drink,” Mr. Pratt said. “Either of the two of you want to come along?”

“Sure,” Richard said, getting out of his seat and stretching. He held out a hand. “I’m Richard Fenster.”

“I’m Kelly Pratt,” Mr. Pratt said, shaking his hand.

Miss Frazier was looking from one to the other of them, always pausing a little bit longer on Richard. She looked nonplussed.

“Excuse me,” she said finally. “Did you say your name was Richard Fenster?
Richard
Fenster?”

“That’s right,” Richard said.

“The Richard Fenster who’s going up to Hunter’s Pier, Maine, for the weekend?”

“That’s right again,” Richard said.

“Hey,” Kelly Pratt said.
“I’m
going up to Hunter’s Pier, Maine, for the weekend.”

“I take it you’re going there, too,” Richard said to Miss Frazier.

Miss Frazier was now looking more than nonplussed. She was looking downright annoyed. She kept giving Richard the once-over, up and down, back and forth, checking out every hole in his sweater and every frayed thread in his jeans. Richard was beginning to think she had them both mentally cataloged.

“I’m Mathilda Frazier. I’m with Halbard’s Auction House. I’m the one who’s coordinating the auction of the personal effects of… well, you see what I mean.”

“I see what you mean,” Kelly Pratt said. “This is wonderful. I’m Kelly Pratt of Kahn and Pratt. We’re the accountants.”

Mathilda Frazier ignored him. “You don’t look at all the way I expected you to look,” she told Richard. “You are the same Richard Fenster I’m thinking of? The one who bought the gold evening sandals Tasheba Kent wore in
Dark Passions
? At Christie’s in London?”

“For one hundred fifty-two thousand dollars.” Richard nodded. “That’s me.”

“You mean you paid a hundred fifty thousand dollars for a pair of evening slippers? Used?” Kelly Pratt was astounded. “I think you need to get yourself some decent financial advice. Obviously, you’re a young guy who’s made himself a lot of money he doesn’t know what to do with.”

“Mr. Fenster is a collector,” Mathilda Frazier said.

“Mr. Fenster is in need of a tall glass of Budweiser,” Richard announced. “Is there actually a bar around here somewhere? I’d kill for something cold.”

“You have to go down to the core and out of the boarding area and around to the right,” Kelly Pratt said. “I know the way. It won’t take long. When you get that beer into you, though, you’ve got to tell me about those evening slippers. Do you do that kind of thing often?”

“I do it once or twice a year.”

“That must be a very expensive hobby, Mr. Fenster. That must be worse than keeping racehorses.”

Kelly Pratt was out in the corridor, trying to get them started on their way to the bar. Richard Fenster was holding back, to see what Mathilda Frazier would do.

“You coming along?” Richard asked her finally.

Mathilda Frazier seemed to start, and then sigh, expressions of emotions that seemed to have nothing to do with him at all. Then she got her handbag from the seat she had left it on and nodded.

“All right,” she said. “After a day like this, I suppose I could use a glass of wine.”

If Mathilda Frazier had been asked to name the fairy tale she liked least as a child, that fairy tale would have been
The Ugly Duckling.
Mathilda Frazier didn’t like reversal-of-fortune stories of any kind. In her mind, the world was supposed to be an orderly place, where the people who started out being the best went on being the best forever. It bothered her no end that of the women she had graduated from high school with, only one of them was already a really enormous success—and she had been the plainest, nerdiest, most unhip girl in the class, the girl who had never gotten invited to anything, the girl who was considered an absolute square and a bore. The fact that this girl had turned out to be a success in rock music—all tarted up and dressed in miniskirts and bustiers—made the situation even worse.

There were plenty of reversal-of-fortune stories out there, Mathilda knew, and every one of them made her angry. She couldn’t hear the name of Bill Gates without wanting to spit. If there was an up-from-nowhere story about a movie star or a novelist in one of the magazines, complete with before-and-after ugly-duckling-to-swan photographs to illustrate the transformation, Mathilda paged right past it. Obviously, Richard Fenster was an ugly duckling who had turned into a swan. In spite of the fact that he was still ugly—and so badly dressed he might have been taken for a street bum, except that he was so clean—he was impressively rich. All the auction houses had had his finances checked out, discreetly, and those checks always said the same thing. Richard Fenster had money to burn, and he liked to burn it—but all he was willing to burn it on were things that had belonged to Tasheba Kent.

On the walk from the waiting area to the bar, Mathilda Frazier developed a violent dislike of Richard Fenster. She disliked the clothes he wore, the way he walked, the manner in which he tilted his head to the left when he spoke. She disliked his accent, which was a thick south Boston twang. She disliked the thick stainless-steel Timex watch he wore on his right wrist. Most of all, she disliked his arrogance. She was sure it was evident in everything he did. The man breathed arrogance, she told herself. The man sweated arrogance every time he overexerted himself. He was impossible.

The airport bar was a plastic-looking place where even the real looked fake. The ferns in the great clay pots at the entrance were real, but at first sight they seemed to be molded out of polyethylene. The wood of the bar and the tables was real, but it looked simulated.

The bar was mostly empty, so they took a table next to the low brick wall that divided the bar from the corridor. The table was right under a loudspeaker, so they would be sure to hear about it if their flight ever decided to take off. Kelly Pratt didn’t want to wait for the waitress. He found out what they were all having and rushed off to the bar.

“Maybe it’s alcoholism,” Richard Fenster said.

Mathilda Frazier couldn’t ignore him—rule one in the trade was that you never offended high bidders—so she said something noncommittal about their all being nervous. What it was they were all supposed to be nervous about, she couldn’t have said.

Fortunately, Kelly Pratt did not take long. He came back carrying three dissimilar glasses—a tall one for the beer, a stemmed one for the wine, a squat one for his whiskey and soda—and spread them out on the table. Mathilda looked at hers and decided that the wine looked like urine. She took a sip and decided that it tasted like urine, too. Normally, Mathilda did not drink house wines. She ordered from the wine list and made sure she got the proper year.

Kelly Pratt took a long swig of his whiskey and then looked around the table happily.

“You don’t know how pleased I am to run into you two,” he began. “I hate flying on these small planes. They make my stomach ache. And going up to Maine.” He shrugged. “Either of you ever been up to this Hunter’s Pier place before?”

Mathilda and Richard shook their heads.

“I should have gone up when we were first in negotiations for the auction,” Mathilda said. “It’s almost unheard-of for us to schedule a major auction of this kind without some representative of the company physically checking out the material. But we tried and tried and—they’re extremely secretive.”

“Oh, yes,” Kelly Pratt agreed. “You never see them. I’ve never been out to the island, and they’ve never been in to my offices in New York. When I have something I need them to sign, I have to send it Federal Express. Or by messenger.”

“I don’t think secretive is really what they are,” Richard Fenster said. “I think it’s more like gun-shy. You forget what it must have been like for them, when the scandal broke. And the death, too. It would have been bad enough if Marsh had just left his wife for Tasheba Kent. But with Lilith Brayne dying or committing suicide or whatever it was in that awful way…” Richard shrugged.

“I think their behavior was peculiar in spite of all that,” Mathilda said. “Back at the office we have these pictures of them, taken at the time, that one of the researchers found and put up all around our section. You know, newspaper pictures, black-and-white things, taken during the investigation. And there she is, Tasheba Kent I mean, with this big black thing wrapped around her neck—”

“A black feather boa.”

“A black feather boa,” Mathilda ignored Richard’s interruption, “and these dark glasses, huge ones, covering up the entire top half of her face, and if you ask me, that’s no way to be inconspicuous. I look at those pictures and all I can think of is that she was doing it on purpose. Dramatizing herself. Getting her picture in the paper as much as possible.”

“Oh, I don’t think that can be right.” Kelly Pratt shook his head. “We do the accounting for them now, you know. I’ve seen all the records. Even the old ones. I can tell you right off that these are very private people. Have been, from the beginning. If you ask me, they spend more time hiding their affairs than they really need to.”

“Maybe they do now,” Mathilda said crisply, “but I think then was a different story. Was your firm doing the accounting for them then?”

“Well, now,” Kelly Pratt admitted. “Our firm wasn’t even in existence then. I wasn’t even born then.”

“I think they were trying to pull it off,” Mathilda said. “I think they thought that if they made it enough of a big glamorous deal, a kind of love story for the ages, they might be able to come out on the other side of it without Cavender Marsh’s career being permanently ruined. Do you know what else we’ve got in our office, besides all those pictures?”

“Haven’t a clue.” Richard Fenster hadn’t touched his beer.

“We’ve got a copy of an interview Tasheba Kent gave to
Photoplay
magazine about two weeks after Lilith Brayne died. It was a telephone interview, by the way. According to the text, Miss Kent was in seclusion, prostrated with grief over the tragedy. Well, she may have been prostrated with grief, but it hadn’t affected her voice. She certainly did talk a lot.”