And One to Die On (22 page)

Richard got his handkerchief out of his pocket and tried to wipe some of the paint off, but it wouldn’t come. He went over to the one small window and undid the latch. With his luck, this window would be painted shut, or it would be one of those windows that was never meant to be opened. To his surprise, it opened easily. Richard stuck his handkerchief into the rain and waited until it was soaked. Then he wrung it out a little and brought it back inside.

This time, getting the makeup off was much easier. It smeared under the rainwater, but it came. Richard rubbed at the eyes until they were clear of everything but a thin black line of mascara on each eyelid. Then he went back to the window, washed the handkerchief out, and came back to do the sides of her face. The lips were hardest. Lipstick streaked and stuck and got stubborn. Richard had to go back to the window three times before he was finished with that. He got it all, though, and then he sat back to look at what he had left.

The problem, Richard thought a few minutes later, was that it was so hard to know what age could or couldn’t do to a human face. This was not the Tasheba Kent he dreamed about, the one whose great dark eyes stared down at him from his bedroom ceiling—but that Tasheba Kent was twenty-two years old. This one would have been one hundred if she had lived. Time and gravity had taken their toll. So had six decades of Cavender Marsh. Having met Cavender, Richard thought he would take a toll on anyone, even Gandhi or Jesus. Tasheba’s eyes looked smaller, but the size of them in the picture he had might have been a trick of the camera. The hands looked bigger, but Richard had never really paid attention to her hands. He had been lying when he had told Gregor Demarkian that he would never touch a corpse, and especially this one. Precisely what he wanted to do now was to touch this corpse. He wanted to put his hands on her face and feel the smoothness of her skin. He wanted to put his hands on her arms and feel them tighten into life against him. Sometimes he thought his touch was magic. If he could only lay hands on her in exactly the right way, she would not only rise from the dead but reconstitute herself. The evil witch’s enchantment would be broken. Tasheba Kent would be young again.

I am losing my mind, Richard thought in a sudden panic, backing away from the corpse. Now he hurried over to close the window, unhappy to see that a thick patch of damp had formed on the carpet. He went back to the couch and stared at the ancient face again, the wrinkles and folds and ugly slackness. Everybody always said that age brought individuality, but it wasn’t true. Tasheba Kent at twenty-two had had individuality. This woman was simply Old, made up of the bits and pieces of generic age, no different from dozens of other old people from one end of the country to the other. There was nothing here to prove that she had once been the most desirable woman alive.

Richard pulled the linen sheet off the corpse. The body that appeared to him stuffed into the ruffled negligee was a lumpy mess. It had no shape at all. Richard ignored it and went right to the feet. The feet had slippers on them, dyed to match the negligee, with a little heel, the kind of thing Richard associated most with movies in which Jean Harlow received visitors in her boudoir. Richard took the slippers off and examined them. Then he dropped them to the floor and looked over the naked feet.

The feet were like the rest of the body in a lot of ways. They were old and puffy, not the slim small elegant things of
Storms of Love.
The toenails were dry and yellow and cracked. In
Island Melody,
they had been shaped and painted—bright red, according to the magazines. Richard picked up the slippers and put them back on Tasheba Kent’s feet. He was thinking furiously.

Feet feet feet,
he kept telling himself, as he picked the linen sheet off the floor and draped it back over the body. There’s only so much that can be done about feet.

Now that he knew what he wanted to do next, he felt much better, not really sleepy at all.

Down in the library on the tables with all the things to be auctioned there were shoes, dozens of shoes.

What he had to do now was to get his hands on some of them.

Mathilda Frazier knew that Gregor Demarkian wanted to talk to her. She had known, since last night, that he would want to talk to everyone. She didn’t even object to talking to him, in principle. Lately, Mathilda had been congratulating herself on not being a woman like Hannah Graham. She didn’t go looking for excuses to go on the offensive. She didn’t throw monkey wrenches into other people’s plans just because she felt like being contrary. She understood why Geraldine Dart and Kelly Pratt and the rest of them wanted to let Demarkian do some investigating before the police arrived. She was no more interested in facing a full-scale murder inquiry than anyone else was. It was just that Gregor Demarkian made her so damned
nervous.

He came up to her just as everybody was filing out of the dining room after the discovery of the cufflink—an event that Kelly Pratt, at least, was treating like some episode in a Sherlock Holmes story—and it couldn’t have been a worse time. The sleeping pills she had taken hadn’t really worn off. Under ordinary circumstances, she would have been knocked out for hours yet. Apparently, watching an old woman die in front of you made a difference. Instead of conking right out, Mathilda had lain on the top of her bed and tossed and turned. Every once in a while, she’d had very disturbing dreams with dead bodies in them and old women floating on a sea of chiffon. Every once in a while, she had come awake, too, which never happened with these particular pills. That’s why she kept getting the prescription refilled. Eventually, she had just given it up and come downstairs. She hadn’t wanted breakfast and she hadn’t wanted company, but she hadn’t been able to stand the idea of staying alone in her room one moment longer.

Obviously, the same sort of thing had happened to Hannah Graham. Hannah always looked awful, but now she looked awful and ready to disperse into molecules. She wasn’t as quick with the nastiness, either. This morning she seemed to be a beat behind the beat.

Why couldn’t Gregor Demarkian want to talk to Hannah? Mathilda asked herself grumpily, but Demarkian was paying no attention to Hannah, and Hannah had already said that she would refuse to talk to him anyway. Gregor Demarkian was waiting patiently at the dining room door and smiling in her direction.

“I don’t suppose it would work if I said I absolutely had to fall asleep right this minute,” Mathilda said. “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I was about ready to pass out.”

“You look ready to pass out,” Gregor Demarkian told her. “But I only want you for a minute.”

“You don’t believe in that cufflink, do you?” Mathilda asked him. “You don’t think it’s a very important clue.”

“On the contrary.” Demarkian shook his big head. “I think it’s extremely important. I just don’t think it’s important in the way everybody else seems to think it’s important. If you understand what I’m saying.”

“No.”

“I just want you to come in here for a second. There are a couple of things I want to ask you about the auction.”

The “here” that Gregor Demarkian wanted her to come into was the library, dark and gloomy even though all its lights were lit, its three tables loaded with junk looking like they had no earthly reason for being.

“I wonder where the guard is this morning.”

“He’s still in the room over the garage,” Demarkian told her. “He isn’t due in until eleven thirty. I think the idea was to make the insurance company nominally happy, while not spending any more money than absolutely necessary.”

“Have you given any thought to the possibility that he might be the one who killed Tasheba?” Mathilda asked. “We don’t know anything about him. Even Geraldine only seems to know that he’s somebody from town.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Demarkian said impassively, “but I’ve also checked it out. It’s not feasible.”

“Why not?”

“Because all the doors on this house have automatic locks. You leave the house and pull the door shut behind you, and you’re locked out. And three different people saw the man leave by the front door.”

“Maybe he had a key.”

“Geraldine Dart says not.”

“I’m sure all the doors in the house don’t lock like that,” Mathilda said. “The French doors at the back couldn’t.”

“That’s true,” Gregor agreed, “but because of the terrain around here, those doors can only be approached through the house. You’d have to be an expert rock climber to get around to them on land even in the best of weather. Last night, the project would have been virtually impossible.”

“Oh,” Mathilda murmured, sitting down dejectedly in the nearest chair. “I suppose that leaves us with Carlton again. I wish we knew where he was. I wish we knew how he was. I keep thinking about Hannah’s scenario, you know, about him killing Tasheba Kent and then trying to escape and then getting drowned. It’s a terrible idea.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

He was standing next to the table with Tasheba Kent’s things on it, looking down at a set of black bangle bracelets with a pair of earrings to match. They weren’t among the more interesting items in the collection. Mathilda didn’t expect them to fetch much in the sale.

“There are much better things on that table than those,” she told Gregor Demarkian. “The cigarette holders are really valuable, especially the extra-long ones. The one with the silver inlays was the one she used in
Vamp.
She had it made for herself when the movie went into production and then she kept it. We think it’s going to bring in more than twenty thousand dollars.”

“For a cigarette holder?”

“Oh, yes. It may bring in even more now, after all of this. Auction buyers like mysteries and legends.”

Gregor Demarkian picked up the black cigarette holder with the silver inlays, looked it over, and put it down again. “Tell me. How was it decided, which items to put up for auction?”

“It hasn’t really been decided yet,” Mathilda Frazier said. “We’re still in negotiations. All these things on the tables are at least up for discussion.”

“Who will decide what will go and what will stay?”

“Well, I decide some of it. There are some things an auction house like Halbard’s just can’t sell. But I like most of these things. The more complete a collection like this is, even down to pieces you don’t expect are going to find a buyer, the better the auction tends to go. And sometimes you get lucky, and somebody like Richard Fenster comes in with a lot of money and a world-class obsession, and buys everything you have.”

“Do you think Richard Fenster would be interested in buying all these things?”

“I think he’d be interested in buying everything that belonged to Tasheba Kent, yes. He’s the world’s most famous collector of her memorabilia. He’d probably also be quite interested in anything belonging to Cavender Marsh or Lilith Brayne that had connections to Tasheba Kent.”

Gregor nodded. “Tell me something else now. Upstairs, in the room Cavender Marsh shared with Tasheba Kent, there are dozens of bound scrapbooks, covering every possible era in the public lives of the three of them—”

“Oh, I know,” Mathilda said. “I’ve seen them. Aren’t they wonderful? They’d bring hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. I told both Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent that, and then I told Lydia Acken, because I thought she could drum some sense into their heads, but nothing worked. They just don’t want to sell those scrapbooks.”

“All right. So Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent weren’t quite as willing to sell their things as I thought they were at first.”

“Oh, yes they were,” Mathilda said, “or are or whatever you want to call it. Those scrapbooks were practically the only things they held out. It’s Hannah Graham that everybody is worried about.”

“Hannah Graham?”

Mathilda shrugged. “You’d have to talk to Lydia Acken to get it all straight, because I don’t really understand it, but what it comes down to is that there are bases on which Hannah Graham can sue to keep at least Lilith Brayne’s things out of the auction. I mean, Lilith Brayne was her mother. And just because her father dumped her off on a relative or something, doesn’t mean she and her mother would have been estranged if her mother had lived. That’s why we invited her here, you see. We thought if we could get Hannah to come out here and pick a few of Lilith Brayne’s things to keep, then she would be less likely to try to stop us from selling the rest.”

“And would that matter? If she did stop you from selling any of Lilith Brayne’s things at auction.”

“It would matter a great deal, Mr. Demarkian. It’s like I told you. Auction buyers like mysteries and legends. This is one of the great Hollywood mysteries of all time, a scandal. Two beautiful older sisters after the same younger man. Passion and intrigue and law courts and newspaper headlines and a romantic ending in Hitchcockian seclusion. We’d do pretty well auctioning off just the things that belonged to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, but throw in the things belonging to Lilith Brayne and we’ll do spectacularly.”

Gregor Demarkian walked over to the table with Lilith Brayne’s things on it and looked down at it. Then he walked back to the table with Tasheba Kent’s things on it and looked down on that. There was a frown on his face and two deep lines of concentration across his forehead. Mathilda was fascinated. Was this the way a great detective worked? What was he thinking about? Had there been women great detectives, too? Mathilda made a note to herself to check it out.

Gregor pushed some things around on the table with Tasheba Kent’s things on it and then slapped the palm of his hand against the wood.

“A black feather boa,” he said. “There was a black feather boa in all the pictures of Tasheba Kent during the inquest.”

“We’re selling the black feather boa,” Mathilda said quickly. “It’s one of my favorite items.”

“It’s not here.”

Mathilda went over to the table with Tasheba Kent’s things on it and looked it over. Gregor Demarkian was right. The black feather boa wasn’t there.

“I’m going to have Richard Fenster’s head in a handbasket,” Mathilda said furiously. “He’s not going to get off this island until I’ve had every inch of his room, his luggage, and his person searched.”