And One to Die On (2 page)

“It comes to the same thing, John. That bitch drove him to it. He went away with her afterward. He left me to be brought up by dear old Aunt Bessie, the world paradigm for the dysfunctional personality.”

“There’s your father again. That’s it exactly. What you really want to do, whether you realize it or not, is brain your old man. I hope you aren’t taking a gun along on this weekend.”

“I’m thinking of taking cyanide. I also think I’m sick of therapy-speak. You know what all this is going to mean, don’t you? The auction and all the rest of it? It’s all going to come out again. The magazines are going to have a field day.
People. Us. Personality.
Isn’t
that
going to be fun?”

“You’re going to find it very good for business,” John said placidly. “People are going to see you as a very romantic figure. It’ll do you nothing but good, Hannah. You just watch.”

The really disgusting thing, Hannah thought, was that John was probably right. The really important people wouldn’t be impressed—they probably wouldn’t even notice—but the second-stringers would be all hot to trot. The agency would be inundated with people looking for
anything at all
in Beverly Hills for under a million dollars, who really only wanted to see her close up. If this was the kind of thing I wanted to do with my life, Hannah thought, I would have become an actress.

The jade green evening dress was much too much for a weekend on an island off the coast of Maine. Even if they dressed for dinner there, they wouldn’t go in for washed silk and rhinestones. What would they go in for? Hannah put the jade green evening dress back in the closet and took out a plainer one in dark blue. Then she put that one back, too. It made her look like she weighed at least a hundred and five.

“What do you think they have to auction off?” she asked John. “Do you think they have anything of my mother’s?”

“I don’t know. They might.”

“Aunt Bessie always said there wasn’t anything of hers left after it was all over, that everything she had was in their house in France and it was never shipped back here for me to have. Maybe he kept it.”

“Maybe he did.”

“Would you let him, if you were her? Reminders of the murdered wife all around your house?”

“You make a lot of assumptions, Hannah. You assume she’s the dominant partner in the relationship. You assume that if he has your mother’s things, they must be lying around in his house.”

“Her
house. It was always her house. She bought it before she ever met him.”

“Her house. Whatever. Maybe he put those things in an attic somewhere, or a basement. Maybe he keeps them locked up in a hope chest in a closet. They don’t have to be where your aunt is tripping over them all the time.”

“Don’t remind me that she’s my aunt, John. It makes me ill.”

“I think you better forget about all this packing and go have something to drink. Just leave it all here for the maid to finish with in the morning, and we can sleep in the guest room.”

“You only like to sleep in the guest room because there’s a mirror on the ceiling.”

“Sure. I like to see your bony little ass bopping up and down like a Mexican jumping bean.”

Hannah made a face at him and headed out of the bedroom toward the living room. She had to go down a hall carpeted in pale gray and across an entryway of polished fieldstone. Like most houses costing over five million dollars in Beverly Hills, hers looked like the set for a TV miniseries of a Jackie Collins novel. The living room had a conversation pit with its own fireplace. It also had a twenty-two-foot-long wet bar made of teak with a brass footrail. Hannah went around to the back of this and found a bottle of Smirnoff vodka and a glass. Vodka was supposed to be better for your skin than darker liquors.

Hannah poured vodka into her glass straight and drank it down straight. It burned her throat, but it made her feel instantly better.

“You know,” she said to John, who had followed her out to get a refill for himself, “maybe this won’t be so terrible after all. Maybe I’ll be able to create an enormous scene, big enough to cause major headlines, and then maybe I’ll threaten to sue.”

“Sue?”

“To stop the auction. You’re good at lawsuits, John, help me think. Maybe I can claim that everything they have really belongs to my mother. Or maybe I can claim that the whole auction is a way of trading on the name of my mother. Think about it, John. There must be something.”

John filled his glass with ice and poured a double shot of brandy in it. This time, he didn’t seem any more interested in mixers than Hannah was.

“Hannah,” he said. “Give it up. Go to Maine. Scream and yell at your father. Tell your aunt she deserves to rot in hell. Then come home. Trust me. If you try to do anything else, you’ll only get yourself in trouble.”

Hannah poured herself another glass of vodka and swigged it down again, the way she had the first.

“Crap,” she said miserably. “You’re probably right.”

T
HE FIRST TIME RICHARD
Fenster put a poster of Tasheba Kent on the ceiling of his bedroom, laid down on his bed, and masturbated while looking into those big dark eyes, he was thirteen years old. He was now thirty-six, and if he wanted to abuse himself in homage to the greatest movie star who ever lived, he no longer had to make sure his door was locked and keep himself from crying out in the clutch of passion. His mother and father still lived in the tiny two-bedroom house in Newton where he had grown up, but Richard didn’t. He had a nifty one-bedroom apartment just upstairs from this store he operated in Cambridge, where he could be private any time he liked. In fact, he owned the whole building, and nobody lived here he couldn’t stand. It was absolutely the best arrangement, and there were days when Richard couldn’t believe he’d lucked into it.

Actually, luck had nothing to do with it. Richard wasn’t doing what his parents wanted and expected him to do, which was something along the lines of being the next in line for a Nobel Prize in physics. Richard had been declared a math prodigy at seven, sent to MIT at fifteen, and received a doctorate in theoretical mathematics from the California Institute of Technology before he was twenty-four. At that point, he had decided that he’d had enough. He may have been a math prodigy, but he had never been that interested in math. Working with numbers came easily to him, but it also bored him silly. As it turned out, however, it was a highly translatable skill. Richard was in his second year of doctoral work at Cal Tech the first time he bought a block of stock. That first time, he used money from his fellowship, which was supposed to go into his living expenses. He never had to miss a meal. Three months after buying the stock, he sold, at a profit of almost 15 percent, a nice haul even after having to pay capital gains tax. He bought another block and then another, throwing dice on quick turnovers and hunches that came from so deeply inside him, they might not have been hunches at all. His success was astonishing even to him, and he was used to being successful.

What made Richard Fenster a rich man was the Black Monday minicrash of 1987. Just before it hit, he had pulled himself out of the stock market totally, not because of any business intelligence or sober analysis of the state of the deficit, but in a fit of pique. He had spent the Monday before the Monday of the crash bidding on the fan Tasheba Kent had used to seduce Ramon Navarro in
Flame of Desire.
He had lost it to an aggressive little man who reminded him of Peter Lorre and who had much too much money to be beaten. Richard had cashed out of the market because he was angry that he hadn’t had the cash when he needed it. The next thing he knew, he was buying back in at rock-bottom prices that wouldn’t be seen again for quite a while. Six months later, the market bounced back and he sold out again. It was scary, how much money he made. It was scary to look through the careful financial records he kept on his Macintosh and realize he was worth well over six million dollars.

By then, of course, Richard had been out of Cal Tech for some time and living in New York City. He had a room at the Y for a while and then a fifth floor walk-up studio on West Ninety-fourth Street. He bought his clothes at army-navy stores and thrift shops in Chinatown. He ate from street vendors and take-out places and called “really eating out” sitting down to a Whopper at a Lexington Avenue Burger King. He cared for only two things: his computer and his collection of Tasheba Kent memorabilia. Anyone who saw him on the street would have tagged him as a hopeless nerd, a rat-faced keyboard jockey, a failure.

He moved back to Massachusetts because he thought it was time to settle down, and because he liked Cambridge, and because the shop made sense. He sold movie memorabilia of every kind, from the ordinary to the very, very rare, from the silents to the present, and books and magazines about the movies, too. Reel To Reel had the best collection of artifacts from 1950s big bug movies west of the Mississippi. It had the best collection of props from 1930s musicals anywhere outside the MGM warehouse. Most of all, Reel To Reel was the acknowledged headquarters for every passionate cinema fan in the United States, and there were more of them than Richard ever imagined.

It was not Richard Fenster’s reputation as a fan but his reputation as a dealer that had gotten him invited to Tasheba Kent’s one hundredth birthday party, and he knew it. The party was a ruse. Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh were obviously in desperate need of money. They were going to sell all their things and use the cash for nursing homes or live-in help or whatever else it was people that ancient needed for their day-to-day lives. Richard supposed it was expensive to be old, although he didn’t know it for sure. He hated his parents with the passion of a Greek hating the Turks, and his parents were the only relatively old people he had any contact with. Richard did know that he was willing to spend a great deal of money to get his hands on a significant portion of that collection. He was sure Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh and their agents at the auction house knew it, too.

Richard Fenster’s idea of packing for a weekend was to stuff all his clean jeans, all his clean shirts, all his clean underwear, and his one extra sweater into a canvas duffel bag and sling the duffel bag over his shoulder. His idea of arranging for transportation up to Maine was to hitch. It was Katha Drosset who had talked him into taking the plane to Augusta and hiring a car from there, and now Katha was sitting on a tall four-legged bar stool shoved up against his five-drawer bureau, smoking a marijuana cigarette and looking bored. The bureau had come from the Salvation Army. Katha had come from Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence College. Richard had sex with her whenever she was willing to get on top, so that he could lie on his back in bed and stare into the eyes of Tasheba Kent when he came.

“So tell me,” Katha said, her voice sounding too high and tight coming through a rush of marijuana smoke, “just what is it you’re going to do up there all weekend, aside from meet this woman who’s been your idol forever now that she’s turned into a walking corpse?”

“Look the merchandise over.” Richard’s yellow velour shirt had a tomato stain on the collar. It might have been better not to have taken that one even if it had been clean.

“I bet I know what you want to do,” Katha said. “I bet you want to ask them all about the death of Lilith Brayne.”

“I wouldn’t bring it up. I’d probably get thrown out of the house.”

“They wouldn’t be able to throw you out of the house, unless they meant to drown you. I looked at that stuff they sent. It’s the luxury version of Alcatraz you’re going to.”

“It’s nothing of the sort. Is that my western belt under the bed over there?”

“You gave your western belt to that wino in Harvard Square who was trying to keep his pants up with one hand and drink muscatel with the other.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“It’s your rubber rattlesnake you see under the bed. Don’t you think it’s strange, that nobody’s ever written a book about it?”

“About what?”

“About the death of Lilith Brayne. It was a famous case at the time. All those books you have say so. And they all say Cavender Marsh murdered her and got away with it, too.”

“They don’t say that, Katha. If they did, they’d get sued.”

“I still say it sounds like just the thing. People are always digging up old Hollywood murders and writing best-sellers about them. I’m surprised you don’t write this one yourself.”

“I’m a lousy writer. And I don’t want to write a book about the death of Lilith Brayne. It’s Tasheba Kent I’m interested in.”

“They were sisters.”

“I don’t think it was a murder,” Richard said. “I think the coroner’s report was probably accurate. More accident than anything else.”

Katha lit another marijuana cigarette, held her breath, and stared dreamily at the ceiling. “I bet what’s-his-name doesn’t think so,” she said as she let the smoke out of her lungs. “You know, the guy that came here from
Personality
magazine last week. I bet he thinks it was a murder. I bet he wants to write about it, too.”

“He probably does.”

“I think you ought to get in there first,” Katha said. “Look at all the time and trouble and money you’ve put into Tasheba Kent. You’ve got moral rights in this case. Or squatter’s rights. Or something.”

“Right,” Richard said. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough of that stuff for today?”

“I never have enough of this stuff, Richard. It’s better than air.”

“Well, it’s got more of a kick.”

Richard was down to his two sweaters, the red V-necked one with the hole in the shoulder seam and the brown crew-necked one with the hole in the right elbow. Which to wear and which to take? The hole in the elbow was more embarrassing than the hole in the shoulder seam. Richard stuffed the brown sweater into his duffel bag and threw the red one onto the top of his bureau.

“That’ll do it,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get lucky this weekend. Maybe she’ll take to me, and sit me down and tell me all about her life.”

“Don’t be asinine,” Katha said scornfully. “She’s going to be a hundred years old. It probably takes all the brainpower she has left just to decide what she wants for breakfast.”