And One to Die On (23 page)

“Why are you so sure it was Fenster who took it?”

“Because he’s the only one here who would have wanted it.” Mathilda was pawing through all the things on the table. She didn’t see anything else missing, but that didn’t mean very much. She hadn’t memorized every item. “I’m going to have to get my articles list and go over every piece. Do you notice anything else gone?”

“No,” Gregor Demarkian said, “but I never had a very good idea of what was here. The shoes with the rhinestone buckles have been moved around on Lilith Brayne’s table, if that means anything.”

“It doesn’t matter if things have been moved around,” Mathilda said distractedly. “People are allowed to look.”

Mathilda Frazier’s mind was on one thing and one thing only: on Richard Fenster and what he had done to her, taking that feather boa and hiding it away.

Gregor Demarkian had gone back to the table with Lilith Brayne’s things on it and picked up the shoes with the rhinestone buckles on them. He was staring at them with a very curious expression on his face.

But Mathilda Frazier was already, mentally, someplace else.

Upstairs in the family wing, Cavender Marsh was awake and had been awake for nearly an hour. He was, however, pretending to be still asleep. Earlier, satisfied that they were all downstairs and likely to stay there for a while, he had sneaked out to the bathroom to have a good washing up. Then he had climbed back into bed, smoothed out his sheets and his blankets, and made himself lie still. He had noticed the gaps in the bookshelf full of scrapbooks and deducted that Mr. Gregor Demarkian had been here. He wondered if Mr. Gregor Demarkian had come in on his own or if he had gotten the permission of Geraldine Dart. Cavender Marsh didn’t think it mattered. The only thing that did matter was that nobody should know that Tasheba Kent was already dead.

Already dead, Cavender thought, and nearly burst out laughing.

Geraldine Dart was on the other side of the room now, tidying things up, moving things around. She was taking away all the bits and pieces of Tasheba Kent’s birthday, as if the sight of a Hallmark card in a red envelope or a two-inch-square jeweler’s box wrapped in red foil paper would give him a stroke. She was even taking the spools of unused gift ribbon off the top of the desk and putting them away in the long center drawer.

“What if he wakes up?” she kept saying to herself, in a guttural mumble that would have been enough to wake him if he had been asleep. “What if he wakes up?”

When Cavender Marsh woke up—officially this time—he had every intention of having the next best thing to a stroke, complete with screaming and crying and passing out. He had every intention of creating the biggest scene on record in the history of just about any. He was an excellent actor, one of the most talented and best trained of his generation. He knew how to give a convincing performance. He’d been giving one to his dear companion now for at least sixty years. She had never caught on for a moment.

“Oh, God,” Geraldine Dart was saying, holding a package of pink-and-white-striped birthday candles in the air. “Look at these. Just look at these.”

Cavender did look at them, for a minute, but then he shut his eyes again. Geraldine was getting very close to the bureau mirror. He didn’t want her to catch him when he wasn’t ready for her. He heard her pitch the package of candles into the drawer and then pick up something else.

“Oh, God, oh, God,” she said again. “This is incredible.”

Cavender Marsh had always thought that Geraldine Dart was incredible. He thought she was incredible now, fussing over birthday things that didn’t matter anymore. Nobody was going to be having a birthday in this house any time soon. He listened to her going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He listened to her moving things and opening and closing drawers. Finally, he listened to her walk past his bed to the door.

“This is absolutely unbelievable,” she said, very loudly, to no one at all.

Then she opened the door, went out, and closed the door behind her.

Cavender Marsh waited a little while, testing the atmosphere. There was no one in his room. If there had been, he could have felt them. There were no sounds in the hallway outside except for Geraldine Dart’s footsteps, and they were moving away.

Cavender Marsh opened his eyes. Geraldine had done a very thorough job. All signs of Tasheba’s impending birthday were gone. Even the little porcelain birthday cake music box had been whisked out of sight, and that had nothing to do with this birthday at all. It had been sent to Cavender himself by a fan from Tacoma five years ago. There had been a pair of red balloons near the window that were gone now. Cavender wondered if Geraldine had taken them with her or shoved them out into the weather to be battered into shreds.

The weather was really and truly awful. Cavender could hear it even if he couldn’t see it through the closed curtains. He had lived on this island off the coast of Maine long enough to know what it was all this wind and hail and thunder meant. It was going to be at least another day before they could get off this island, or get somebody onto it to help them out, and that was going to cause a major problem.

Cavender considered the possibility of going on with the pretense of being asleep for another twenty-four hours, but he knew it wasn’t feasible. Since he wasn’t actually asleep, he was very hungry. He also needed to use the bathroom and stretch his legs and do all the other things people did when they were alert and alive and expecting to stay that way.

A scene, Cavender Marsh decided, was his only way out.

Because he didn’t really care if that damned old bitch was dead.

But he did care if he stayed alive himself.

T
HE PROBLEM IN CASES
like these, Gregor. Demarkian told himself, was not in finding the solution. The solutions were easy, in spite of the confusion that surrounded them. From where he was sitting, he thought it would be only a matter of time. He knew (more or less) what had really happened in the death of Lilith Brayne. He knew what had happened in the death of Tasheba Kent, too. His suspect list was down to three people, and one of those remained under suspicion for purely aesthetic reasons. It never did to assume innocence where guilt was usually found.

The problem in cases like this was in knowing what they were really about, and understanding what was going to happen next. Criminals were not difficult to catch, only difficult to convict. Motives weren’t hard to fathom, even in the most pathological serial killer. It was details that tripped you up, every time. Gregor was fairly sure that they were safe now, that everything that was going to happen had already happened, but he wished he could be sure.

The next thing to do was to find Carlton Ji. Gregor knew that. Waking from a fitful nap to a vision of black storm clouds and smashing seas—he had left his window open when he’d fallen asleep this time; the weather was so black, there was no reason not to—he knew immediately that he should have insisted on looking harder when they first looked. Everybody else seemed to have forgotten about Carlton Ji, either accidentally or deliberately. Gregor didn’t blame them. The easiest thing to do, right now, with the whole bunch of them stuck together like this with no way to escape each other, was to demonize Carlton Ji as much as possible. Carlton Ji wasn’t around to protest. His disappearance was mysterious. They could blame him for everything and go on eating together, drinking together, and arguing with each other, without having to worry if someone was about to stick a tranquilizer in their drink or hit them over the head with a baseball bat. The second thing Gregor knew he ought to do was to look for the murder weapon, or at least for an instrument of the same kind as the murder weapon. Gregor would make himself look for the murder weapon itself eventually, because murderers were funny. If Gregor himself had committed a murder of this kind under circumstances of this kind, he would have dropped his weapon out a window and into the sea straight off, or gone out on one of the terraces and hurled it as far as it would go. There was no reason at all, on an island like this, to be caught with the equivalent of a smoking gun in your hand. Murderers got attached to their weapons, though. They began to feel about them the way short-breathed family men with too many obligations felt about their life insurance policies. Gregor sometimes thought that killing, outside of war, must be a very difficult thing, even for serial killers like Dahmer and Bundy. Murderers always seemed to want to use the same weapon over and over and over again, as if it were a magic wand given to them in trust by their fairy godmothers. There had been a time in his life when Gregor Demarkian wanted desperately to know why people killed each other. He could remember standing at the side of a shallow trench next to a rural road in southwestern Massachusetts, looking down at the bodies and skeletons of fourteen girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and wondering what it was, what started it, what made it continue, what brought it to an end. Murderers who killed like that were supposed to be different from other murderers. In Gregor’s experience, some of them actually were. Surely Ted Bundy had been a unique case. Most of the serial murderers Gregor had dealt with in his time at the FBI had been surprisingly similar to the nonserial, garden-variety murderers he had dealt with in his odd little retirement noncareer of sideline investigations. Serial murderers broke down into two main categories: crazies who belonged permanently in mental institutions and people (usually men) with practical motives that just weren’t the kind of practical motives most other people could identify with. The kind of murderer Gregor now dealt with also broke down into two categories: people who exploded in blind passion or heedless rage, usually helped along by alcohol or drugs, and people with practical motives that just about everybody could understand. Members of the general public insisted on believing that there was a fundamental difference between someone who killed his wife to get the insurance and someone who caused five babies in an emergency ward to go into convulsions—and one to eventually die—because she wanted to show what a good nurse she could be in an emergency. Gregor could see how the cases seemed different, but he was certain they weren’t fundamentally. Fundamentally, all murderers were alike, and their motives could be reduced to a single simple sentence:
I can get away with it.

Gregor thought he would start looking for Carlton Ji—on his own; he never liked asking Bennis’s help in a situation like this, and he didn’t trust any of the rest of them, not even the ones he knew perfectly well hadn’t committed this murder—by finding the back stairs Geraldine Dart had been talking about. But at the last minute he decided to make a detour. It was now two o’clock in the afternoon. Most of the guests in this house were undoubtedly either taking naps, as Gregor had been, or trying to. Gregor thought he would try the person he wanted anyway. If he woke her up, he could always apologize and go back to his original plan. He walked down the hall to Lydia Acken’s door and tapped gently—too gently, he thought, to wake her out of a sound sleep. He had nothing to worry about. As soon as he tapped, he heard movement behind the door. Then the door opened and Lydia’s head popped out, an anxious look spread across her face like makeup.

“Oh,” she said, “Mr. Demarkian. Oh, come right in. I tried to take a nap, but I couldn’t fall asleep, so then I was trying to get some work done, but I wasn’t managing that, either. I’ve never been involved in a murder case before. Is it always this—worrying—to the participants?”

“It is to some of them,” Gregor said, coming inside. Lydia’s room was just like all the other bedrooms in this wing, with the same furniture and the same curtains and the same rugs. It was as if somebody had gone through with the interior decoration equivalent of a tract house plan, doling out accoutrements like parts from an assembly line. Gregor sat down on the stool that went with the vanity table and picked up an amateurishly printed brochure emblazoned with the words
EAST VILLAGE LEGAL SERVICES
.
“What’s this?” he asked her.

“That,” Lydia said, taking the brochure out of his hand, “is my present escapist fantasy. East Village Legal Services is a group down around St. Mark’s Place that does free legal work with indigent people who need help negotiating the city bureaucracy or that kind of thing.”

“It sounds interesting.”

“I know it does. It sounds a great deal more interesting than trusts and estates and the annual partners’ dinner and one more bonus for my pension plan.”

“Is it something you do now, in your free time?”

Lydia Acken laughed. “Mr. Demarkian, in a law firm like mine, there is no such thing as free time. Oh, they’d give me a little space to do
pro bono
work if I asked for it. It’s good public relations. But someplace like EVLS needs more than that.”

“Like what?”

“Like lawyers who have other means of support and who can work full time. Like lawyers who can really concentrate on the cases, because the cases are very complicated. It’s not like Legal Aid. It’s not criminal things usually. It’s more—oh, you know. Child Protective Services took away some woman’s child because it was only four months old and she was feeding it taro root and good social work practice says that no child is supposed to have solid food until it’s at least nine months old, but back in the Virgin Islands or wherever this woman is from all children get solid food almost immediately because not to do it is supposed to be bad for the child. So then you have a big mess, and the woman wants her child back, and the social worker is some twenty-one-year-old graduate of City College who thinks she knows abuse and neglect when she sees it, and—” Lydia Acken shrugged.

“You sound excited when you talk about it.”

“I am excited when I talk about it,” Lydia said. “I’m excited when I think about it. I’ve even worked out how I could quit the firm and live more simply and all the rest of it. I suppose what it comes down to is that I just don’t have the courage. White-shoe Wall Street law firms are very womblike, cocoon sorts of places.”