And One to Die On (24 page)

Gregor smiled. “I think your courage is fine. I think if you want to do it you will. Maybe you just need to get yourself used to the idea.”

“Sometimes I think all I want is to spend the rest of my life dealing with real things that really matter. Not whether putting all the bonds into some multimillionaire’s second wife’s name will raise estate tax estimates if the estate tax is due and payable the year after next. You have no idea what old rich men are like. They can natter away about this nonsense for months on end.”

Actually, Gregor knew very well what old rich men were like. He had met quite a few of them in his time, in person or over the phone, including Bennis Hannaford’s father, who had been one of the oldest, one of the richest, and one of the most eccentric. Bennis refused to dignify her father’s personality by calling it “eccentric,” however. She just came right out and called the old man “the nastiest piece of business I’ve ever met.”

Gregor stretched out his legs. “Believe it or not, I came down here with a purpose. I was wondering if you might know something that could help me out.”

Lydia frowned. “I don’t know what I could know. I’m afraid I couldn’t discuss any confidential business—”

“No, no,” Gregor assured her. “This shouldn’t come under the definition of confidential business. It’s about the death of Lilith Brayne.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been looking at some scrapbooks that belong to Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent, and there are quite a few newspaper stories about the death and the investigation and the inquest, but they aren’t big on forensic details, if you understand what I mean. And I’ve been thinking that there must be copies of the inquest transcripts around somewhere. And the most logical person to have them would be Cavender Marsh’s lawyer.”

“Oh, dear,” Lydia said. “We don’t have anything like that in the files at the firm. Of course, we do have some information about the case—”

“Yes?”

“Well, you see,” Lydia explained, “we were attorneys of record for Mr. Marsh even at the time, but we’re not a firm that handles criminal cases. We certainly don’t handle this kind of criminal case. From time to time, we’ve been involved in SEC investigations and tax evasion actions. We don’t handle the actual criminal litigation in those cases, but we cooperate with the contact firms that do. But a murder investigation…” Lydia shook her head.

“I see,” Gregor said slowly. “And of course, this case took place in France. I didn’t really expect that someone from your firm had gone across the Atlantic Ocean to represent Cavender Marsh at the inquest. I was just hoping there might be some material on the case floating around, and that you might have seen it.”

“Oh, no, there’s nothing like that,” Lydia said. Then she cocked her head in curiosity. “Exactly what is it that you’re looking for? What kind of information?”

Gregor yawned. “Oh, well,” he said, “the condition of the body mostly, when it was found. The articles I’ve read all say that Lilith Brayne’s body was a terrible mess when they fished it out of the water, but they never tell you what
kind
of mess. I suppose the details were too gruesome to be reported in the popular press, but that doesn’t help me any.”

Lydia Acken looked amused. “The details weren’t too gruesome to be reported in the popular press,” she said. “It’s just that those two old farts have been censoring their clippings.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll bet you the clippings you saw all made them look pretty good. I’m not saying they looked like saints, mind you—they hardly could have, under the circumstances—but I’ll bet those pieces all had that fawning flattered gush of ’30s celebrity journalism.”

“Not all of them did,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Some of them were from sources like the
London Times.
”

Lydia Acken waved this away. “The problem with the respectable press is that they’re too interested in being respectable to act like the press. Do you remember my telling you, when we first met, that my mother was a big fan of the case—that she made it a kind of hobby?”

“I remember something of the kind.”

“Well, those were the days before television and all the mothers thought children—especially girl children—shouldn’t be allowed to go to scary movies, so all I had for excitement were my mother’s clippings. And some of them were very, very exciting.
I
know what kind of mess Lilith Brayne’s body was in when it was found. It was described in detail years later in
Confidential.
And the things they had to say about Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh—if it were me, I wouldn’t put that kind of thing in my scrapbooks, either.”

“So what did it say?”

“Well,” Lydia Acken replied, “in the first place, Lilith Brayne fell over a balcony railing on a terrace high up on the side of a cliff. The terrace was part of a villa she and Cavender Marsh were renting at the time.”

“That’s in everything.”

“I know it is, but give me time. All right. When Lilith Brayne fell, her body apparently bounced off the side of the cliff as it went down, and instead of falling into the little river delta there, or farther out into the sea, it fell into a sluice that processed sewage for the town. You had to read the real sensationalist press to find out that it was sewage that was involved. Everybody else said water, as if she’d fallen into an irrigation ditch. Anyway, aside from the sluice itself, this thing had these big sharp-edged metal blades that turned whenever the water passed over them, that were supposed to chop up the solid sewage into manageable pieces—”

“Oh, my God,” Gregor said.

Lydia nodded. “She was cut to ribbons. Of course, she wasn’t rendered into small pieces the way sewage would have been. The blades weren’t that strong. They couldn’t cut through bone. But still. If it hadn’t been for this fluke where her head got cut off and pitched outside the sluice by an action of the water, they wouldn’t have been able to identify her at all. I don’t think there was anything much left of her body.”

“Dear Christ,” Gregor said. “And this was in
Confidential,
was it?”

“I don’t remember.
Confidential
or one of the magazines like it. And they weren’t very friendly to Cavender Marsh or Tasheba Kent. There was a reason why Cavender Marsh never worked again after all that happened, in spite of the fact that he was one of the most popular and successful movie actors of his time before it. The hostility to him was enormous. When he and Tasheba got off the boat in New York Harbor, after Cavender had been cleared and they were allowed to come back to the States, there was a positive mob waiting for them, with eggs and old vegetables and all sorts of other things besides. One woman had a whole bottle full of urine she poured right onto Tasheba Kent’s head. The police had to be called out in force.”

“I think I’m beginning to be sorry that I never developed a taste for the gutter press,” Gregor said.

“Oh, I read that sort of thing all the time. It’s much more informative than the Op-Ed page of the
Times,
if you just skip all the nonsense about being kidnapped by UFOs and go straight to the murders.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“Was any of that any kind of help to you? I know it wasn’t the same thing as a coroner’s report, but it was probably as well as you’d do even if you had a coroner’s report. From 1938, I mean. It wasn’t as if they had DNA tracing and all that back then.”

“It was a great deal of help to me,” Gregor said. “It was one of those details that had to be cleared up, because I didn’t dare get it wrong, and now it is cleared up. So the next thing I have to do is—What the hell is that?”

“That” was a racket in the hallway, consisting of swearing and yelling and banging and stamping, and getting louder and less coherent by the second. Lydia raised her head to listen to it, and sighed.

“That,” she told Gregor Demarkian, “is Hannah Graham, having another first-class fit.”

Hannah Graham was indeed having another first-class fit. Hannah was having it in the middle of the guest wing hall, and Gregor understood as soon as he looked at her that she was having it to collect an audience. He and Lydia were the first to emerge from any of the rooms to see what was going on. They weren’t left alone in their contemplation for long. Hannah was jumping and yelling and kicking her door. Then she marched down the hall and kicked every other door she came to that was still shut. When she passed by Lydia and Gregor, Gregor thought she was going to kick them. Instead, she glared at them and started to kick the walls. First Kelly Pratt, then Mathilda Frazier, then Richard Fenster emerged from their rooms. When Bennis Hannaford came out, she gave Gregor and Lydia, still standing together in Lydia’s doorway, an amused smile, then lit up a cigarette and worked on looking bored. In no time at all, Geraldine Dart came hurrying in from the family wing, blowing smoke and breathing fire.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Geraldine demanded, grabbing Hannah’s arm and jerking her to a stop. “You’re going to wake up your father. You’re going to give him a heart attack.”

“The start of World War Three couldn’t give that old goat a heart attack,” Hannah Graham snarled, jerking her arm out of Geraldine’s grasp. “And don’t you touch me. Don’t you dare. I have every intention of suing the pants off everybody in this house as soon as I get off this damn island, and I’m going to start with you.”

“I don’t care who you sue,” Geraldine Dart snapped. “I won’t have you behaving like this when there’s a frail old man in the house.”

Bennis Hannaford blew a stream of smoke into the air. “Haven’t we had this argument before?” she asked.

But it was Mathilda Frazier, more than any of them, who had finally had enough. Gregor could see it in her face, and in the way she pushed herself forward until she was standing between Hannah and Geraldine.

“Look,” Mathilda said to Hannah, “is there a
point
to this commotion this time? I mean, do you have something in particular you want to share with us this time or is this just another one of your periodic bids for attention?”

“Maybe she’s the one who took the black feather boa,” Richard Fenster said.

Mathilda ignored him. “Because if this is one of your periodic bids for attention,” she told Hannah, “I swear to God, this time I’m going to slap your face.”

Hannah Graham gave Mathilda Frazier a tight little smile. “I was taking a nap,” she said. “I had all my doors locked just like the rest of you probably did, to make sure I was safe. Why don’t you all come into my room and see what happened while I was all locked up tight and fast asleep.”

A ripple of unease went up and down the hall. Hannah Graham was a world-class bitch, but she wouldn’t pull something like this unless she had something to show. They had all been lying down in their rooms with their doors locked. Gregor could practically hear them thinking:
Now what?

Gregor came forward—it was obvious that nobody else was going to; they were all waiting for him—and presented himself to Hannah Graham.

“So,” he said. “What is it?”

“Go in and look,” Hannah Graham told him.

Gregor went down the hall to Hannah’s room and stepped inside. He was expecting to find a mess—drawers pulled out, luggage turned upside down, clothes scattered across the floor. But the drawers were still neatly in their bureaus and the luggage was still intact and exactly where it belonged. That did not, however, mean that the room had not been tampered with. It had been tampered with in a distinct and elaborate way. It had been decorated for a birthday party.

Helium-filled balloons in six different colors bounced against the high ceiling. Crepe-paper rosettes the size of basketballs were tied to the backs of chairs and the foot of the bed. Crepe-paper streamers were wound around the window frame and left to dangle from the tops of the closet doors. A pile of popper party favors had been left on top of the chest of drawers. A tall layer cake with white icing topped by three fat candles (a one and two zeros, making 100) was on the glass top of the vanity table in front of the mirror. The candles were lit, and the wax was dripping down.

Hannah Graham came in and put her hands on her hips. “So what do you think?” she demanded. “Is this enough for me to start screaming about?”

The rest of them had followed her inside—or almost inside. They made a tight little knot now in the doorway.

“Oh, my God,” Mathilda Frazier was saying. “Oh, my God. Just look at all this.”

“This couldn’t have been done while you were just asleep,” Richard Fenster said. “You’d have woken up.”

“Maybe somebody slipped me whatever they slipped Cavender Marsh last night,” Hannah retorted.

Gregor Demarkian was looking over the crepe-paper rosettes and the crepe-paper streamers and the cake on the vanity table.

“Geraldine?” he asked.

“I’m right here,” Geraldine Dart answered in a shaky voice.

“Do you know where all this stuff came from?”

Geraldine Dart nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I made that cake myself. It’s been in the big refrigerator in the kitchen since the day before yesterday. And the other things have been in the pantry. Except that the balloons weren’t blown up, of course. There were just little plastic packages of them and a big tank full of helium to fill them with.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

He looked around the room a couple of times. Then he got down on the floor and looked under the bed.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Just as I thought. Mr. Fenster?”

“What is it?”

“It’s not a body I’m asking you to touch this time, just a large metal tank. I’m a little too old to go hauling that sort of thing around by myself. Would you mind getting it out where we could all see it?”

Richard Fenster got down on the floor, reached under the bed, and began to tug something toward them. A moment later, the top of a large metal cylinder emerged into view. Richard Fenster tugged again; the rest of the tank came out from under the bed. Then he got to his feet and set the thing upright.

“There,” he said. “And there’s paint on the side that says ‘helium,’ too.”

“Is this the tank you were talking about?” Gregor asked Geraldine Dart.