And One to Die On (20 page)

I
F GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD
had to rely on the report of Bennis Hannaford for information about the death of Lilith Brayne, he would have been up a tree without a ladder. Bennis knew the things everybody knew, and not much more. Cavender Marsh had been married to Lilith Brayne while having a very passionate, and very public, affair with Tasheba Kent. Cavender Marsh and Lilith Brayne went away together to the south of France, alone, to see if they could put their marriage back together. Lilith Brayne showed up dead and cut to pieces in a sluice, apparently after accidentally falling to her death from the stone balcony of their rented villa. The French police investigated Cavender Marsh for murder but finally decided he couldn’t have committed it. The movie magazines of two continents convicted Tasheba Kent of murder without worrying much about what evidence there was in any direction. The verdict of
Silver Screen
and
Photoplay
and their sisters was that Tasheba Kent had driven her beautiful, betrayed sister to suicide by first driving her beautiful, betrayed sister to despair.

It was the kind of information most people would have been satisfied with, but it was not the kind of information Gregor Demarkian needed. He wasn’t craving after exact times to the second or elaborate suspect location charts at this late date. He just needed some details. Kelly Pratt’s story about the missing one hundred thousand dollars was interesting, because Gregor could come up with an explanation for it—but if his explanation was true, things were much more odd here than he had expected. Before he jumped to conclusions like that, he ought to know more about what he was doing. After a while, he made Bennis get up and come downstairs with him. She didn’t want to walk past Tasheba Kent’s body, but Gregor didn’t think anybody did, and it had to be done. They searched all the bookshelves in the library and the living room and came up with nothing. Then they went upstairs again and Gregor started searching through the bedrooms in the family wing.

“Let’s just hope they don’t keep it in Geraldine Dart’s room,” Gregor told Bennis. “Then I’ll have to wait until morning, and I can’t sleep.”

“Keep what in Geraldine Dart’s room?” Bennis asked.

When Gregor found what he was looking for—in Cavender Marsh’s room, on a bookshelf that seemed to have been built just to hold them—he showed her.

“Scrapbooks,” he explained, pulling one of the big leather-bound volumes off the top shelf. “I knew they wouldn’t be able to resist keeping scrapbooks.”

There were dozens of album-size scrapbooks on the bookshelf, six rows of them, some in black and some in light brown and some in leather that looked almost white. At the bottom there were three in black leather with gold lettering on them. Bennis pulled one of these out and opened it up.

“You’re right,” she said. “They did keep a scrapbook with articles about the murder investigation in it. How odd.”

“It would have been odder if they hadn’t,” Gregor told her. “They kept scrapbooks of everything else.”

They both looked over at the still-sleeping form of Cavender Marsh, still perfectly still, still perfectly happy.

“I wish I knew what kind of medication he was on,” Bennis said. “I’d get some for myself.”

Gregor took down all three of the books with the gold lettering, and then one each at random of the other kinds—black leather, white leather, light brown leather—and put them aside. The glow-in-the-dark digital clock on Cavender Marsh’s bedside table said six twenty-two, but the sky outside his bedroom windows was still black. Gregor put the scrapbooks in a stack and lifted them up. They were each at least five inches thick and a foot and a half wide. They made him stagger a little.

“What do you want the other ones for?” Bennis said, pointing to the three without gold lettering. “They can’t all be about the death of Lilith Brayne.”

“Even the ones with the gold lettering aren’t all about the death of Lilith Brayne,” Gregor told her. “They’re just about Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent together. I need the background.”

“Background,” Bennis repeated.

“You ought to go back to bed and get some sleep. Just because I’m going to be up doesn’t mean you have to be.”

“Are you sure you ought to be taking these things out of Cavender Marsh’s room without permission?” Bennis asked him.

Gregor took her back to her room and then went back to his own. He spread the scrapbooks out on his bed and opened each one. The all-black ones were full of stories about Cavender Marsh, movie magazine stories with headlines that promised to reveal “his startling confession” and “his secret shame.” The articles seemed to date from an era well before the arrival of Tasheba Kent and Lilith Brayne in his life. Gregor knew that when Cavender Marsh had decided to marry Lilith Brayne—a woman who was not only twenty years older than he was but who looked it—the story had caused a sensation. It had spilled off the fan magazines and into the regular press, even into
The New York Times.
A congressman from Kentucky had made a speech about it from the floor of the House of Representatives. The cardinal archbishop of Boston had given a radio speech explaining why the Catholic Church found such backward-lopsided matings unnatural. There was no hint of any of that in the scrapbook Gregor had chosen at random. There was no hint that Cavender Marsh had ever even met Lilith Brayne.

The white leather scrapbooks belonged to Lilith Brayne. The one Gregor had concentrated on movie stills and newspaper stories from the early part of her career. Lilith always seemed to be posed from the side and back, looking over her shoulder. It made her neck look long and swanlike. Every once in a while she was photographed from the side, but that didn’t work as well. Her nose was very long and very pointed. Caught at the wrong angle, it looked like a sewing needle stuck on the front of her face. Several of the pictures were full-length shots, usually of Lilith looking not quite flapperish but very stylish in 1920s café society clothes. In those pictures, she was wearing the black shoes with the rhinestone buckles Gregor had seen downstairs, or copies of them.

The light brown leather scrapbooks belonged to Tasheba Kent, and the one Gregor had laid hands on was the most dramatic of any he had seen yet. Lilith Brayne had done a fair amount of work to appear “normal” even while she was a movie star. Tasheba Kent had gone over the top and stayed there. The scrapbook Gregor had was from the height of her career. All the clippings of movie advertisements from newspapers and magazines showed her name above the title, usually in bigger letters than the title. The pictures of Tasheba Kent herself were melodramatic. Her dresses were so tight, it was difficult to understand how she could have moved in them. Her cigarette holders were so long it was difficult to understand how she could have smoked in her car without setting her driver’s hair on fire. Her eyes were rimmed with so much kohl, they looked like they had been blackened in a fight. Tasheba Kent had a long, thin nose very much like her sister’s, but she did nothing to hide it. She exaggerated it, the way she exaggerated everything about herself. Exaggeration, not individuality, was what you noticed when you looked at her. It was as if there were nobody at all named Tasheba Kent, just a series of constantly shifting surfaces, sparkling and flashing and much too bright.

After that scrapbook full of Tasheba Kent, the one about the death and trial was almost boring, and the other two—which mostly had to do with Tasheba and Cavender going away together, and retrospective articles on the level of Where Are They Now—were worse. In the 1938 photographs, all three of the principals looked oddly subdued; 1930s styles didn’t suit either of the sisters as well as 1920s styles had. Then, too, they were older, in that way women got older before the advent of aerobics tapes and small-weight lifting and macrobiotic diets. What struck Gregor was how depressed and tense they all looked, even before the death of Lilith Brayne. There was a picture of Cavender and Lilith standing on the deck of an ocean liner, surrounded by confetti and balloons. Both were smiling determinedly at the camera, but underneath it all they looked grim. There was a picture of Tasheba Kent sitting at a small round table at an outside cafe in Paris. She had adapted the 1930s styles as much as she could to her own personal taste. Since the style didn’t adapt very well, she had simply made herself look patently bizarre. Her cigarette holder was much shorter, though, and her dark glasses covered the wrinkles around her eyes. She looked like a vampire bat that had just turned itself into a self-important middle-aged woman.

In the pictures from the period of the investigation, Tasheba Kent seemed to get stranger and stranger by the second. In
The New York Times
photograph of her arriving at the jail in southern France where Cavender Marsh was being detained, she had added a black mink coat to the glasses and the cigarette holder. In the
San Francisco Chronicle
picture of her at her sister’s inquest, her throat was wrapped up in a black feather boa. What was even more distinctive was the way her makeup seemed to thicken, the closer she got to the point where she would have to answer questions herself. In the
London Times
photograph of her on the stand at the inquest, she had discarded the mink coat and the dark glasses and the feather boa, but her face was a mask of foundation and paint, so thick Gregor could almost see the texture of it through the cheap newsprint black-and-white grain.

Gregor went back to the articles about the death of Lilith Brayne and read them through. Then he went back to the articles about the inquest and read those through, too. When he was finished, he had some sympathy with the people, like Hannah Graham, who thought the French police had taken a dive in this case. In the very beginning, there were indications that the police were asking the right questions, but those indications did not last long. In no time at all, Gregor was scowling furiously at what seemed to him to be blatant evidence of raw incompetence. Of course, that went along with some of the theories he had formed earlier, before he had looked at this material, but he wasn’t sure that he wanted it to. The other possibility was that the newspapers were simply doing a very bad job of reporting. The French police might have been perfectly competent, but their competence might not have seemed like news to international editors in San Francisco and London and New York. But Gregor doubted it.

Gregor went through the light brown scrapbook one more time and concentrated on articles and magazine pieces and news reports from Los Angeles, to see if the perspective was any different. In theory, newspaper editors in Los Angeles ought to have a better idea than newspaper editors in other places what a bunch of movie stars was up to. Reading through the material, this was not a theory that seemed to be borne out by the physical evidence. The
Los Angeles Times
said all the same inane things the papers in other cities said. It just placed the story higher on its front page and gave it bigger headlines.

Gregor put the scrapbooks in a heap on the floor next to his bed and stretched out with his head on the pillow. Then he got the little traveling alarm clock he brought with him everywhere and set it for quarter to ten. His mind was racing, but it was racing on a kind of automatic pilot. The speed of his thoughts was not interfering with the need of his body for sleep. Gregor closed his eyes and let himself slide away, into a world where Tasheba Kent and Lilith Brayne and Cavender Marsh were all alive and much younger than they could have been today, where they wore curved-heeled shoes with rhinestone buckles and black feather boas and evening suits with velvet on the lapels.

Never get taken in by appearances, Gregor told himself just as he began to fall into a dark and dreamless sleep.

They always trip you up.

The alarm clock on Gregor’s bedside table emitted little high-pitched squeaks, like a mouse in danger of immediate execution, that never failed to wake him up. When Gregor opened his eyes, he found himself lying almost sideways across the bed, as if he had been wrestling with something in his sleep. He sat up and got himself turned around. The first thing he noticed was that the weather hadn’t gotten any better. It was lighter now than it had been when he had gone to sleep, but that wasn’t saying much. A thin stream of gray was forcing itself through the heavy curtains across his bedroom windows. A stiff wind was forcing itself against the windows themselves, making them rattle and creak. Gregor got out of bed and went to look out. The fog was so thick, he couldn’t see a dozen yards out to sea. Close to the island, the ocean was angry and strong, smashing against the rocks in great heavy swells that exploded into foam as soon as they connected to the land.

If Gregor hadn’t been so hungry, he would have taken a shower before he went down for breakfast. As it was, his stomach felt not only empty but full of sandpaper. He was queasy and weak. He was sure he wouldn’t feel any better until he had eaten at least four eggs. He dressed in what he thought of as casual clothes, and what Bennis called his “Ozzie Nelson outfit.” It consisted of good gray slacks, a white button-down shirt, wool sweater with a V-neck, and a tie. Then he went downstairs in search of the dining room and breakfast, hoping against hope that it hadn’t already been removed.

Gregor had no need to worry. Once he was out of the guest wing and onto the second-floor landing, he could smell food and coffee. Once he was halfway down the stairs, he could hear people talking in the kind of tense, exasperated voices he supposed were only natural under the circumstances. Getting ready upstairs, Gregor had half hoped to find the dining room empty except for Lydia Acken, whom he very much wanted to talk to. Now he knew that even if Lydia Acken were eating her breakfast right this minute, he would never have a chance to get her alone. He could hear at least four different voices, snapping at each other.

Gregor made his way around the shrouded body of Tasheba Kent, through the foyer, and into the great double doors of the dining room. He was surprised to see that they were all there, with the exception of Cavender Marsh, although some of them looked far more awake and alert than others. Hannah Graham and Mathilda Frazier looked particularly awful, as if they were forcing themselves upright and inhaling too much coffee to keep themselves that way. Kelly Pratt, on the other hand, looked well-pressed and refreshed, as if he’d had a perfectly adequate night’s sleep. Lydia Acken was somewhere in the middle. She looked awake enough, but as if she would rather not be.