And One to Die On (3 page)

Aside from clothes, the only important thing Richard had to take to Maine with him was his laptop with its little collection of discs. That folded into a case the size of a briefcase and never really had to be packed at all.

Richard fastened the top of the duffel bag and put it on the floor against the wall. He put his laptop on the floor next to it, so he wouldn’t forget it when it was time to leave.

He wished he had good reason for believing that Katha’s predictions on the state of Tasheba Kent’s mind were wrong, but he didn’t. It was just the kind of thing about which Katha tended to be deadly accurate.

Richard went into the bathroom, shut the door, and sat down on the closed cover of the toilet seat. In the beginning, having Katha around felt like a good idea. She was an assistant in the shop and a companion the rest of the time. She was somebody to talk to on a regular basis, which was something Richard had never had before, except when he was living at home. Lately, having her around had begun to make him feel as if he were living at home. She nattered and pried and criticized, just like his mother. Her standards were different, but her methods of attack were precisely the same.

The worst of it was, of course, that he didn’t really like having sex with her. Sometimes he positively hated it. She was too thin and too angular. She smelled of marijuana. She cluttered up the bed. What he wanted was to be left alone with the great dark eyes on his ceiling, the parted bowed mouth, the hint of decadence in the rounded flesh of breast and arm.

Sometimes, waking up in the dark with Katha curled into a ball beside him, Richard got a sudden flash of a historical moment: Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh making love to each other on the moonlit beach at Cap d’Antibes.

The vision always made him feel as if his intestines were going down the garbage disposal.

M
ATHILDA FRAZIER’S OFFICE OVERLOOKED
Madison Avenue, and whenever she got angry—really, impossibly, undeniably angry—she would stand at her windows and drop sunflower seeds onto the heads of pedestrians walking along the sidewalk three stories below. Mathilda had no idea what she would do if she got promoted. That would mean moving upstairs, literally. By the time she got to the fifth floor, she could drop all the sunflower seeds she wanted, nobody would notice. This did not mean that Mathilda Frazier did not want to be promoted. She wanted it desperately. If she hadn’t, she would never have put up with the kind of abuse she was getting from Martin Michaelson over the phone.

“Women weren’t brought up the way you were back in whenever-it-was,” Martin was saying. “They didn’t have the same assumptions. They were brought up to be
women.
”

“Right,” Mathilda said. She preferred to drop dry sunflower seeds in their seedpods. The dry-roasted kind were oily, and tended to get stains all over her suit.

“I don’t think you realize how profoundly alienating women like you can be to women with traditional values. I don’t think you realize what kind of antagonisms you create.”

“My mother is a woman with traditional values, Martin. We get along just fine. And you can hardly call Tasheba Kent a paragon of traditional values. This is a woman who played the sexual aggressor in twenty movies starting back before women had the vote.”

“The vote isn’t the point either, Mathilda. The point here is that Tasheba Kent was always very male-positive. She saw men as a good thing. Not like you.”

“Wonderful, Martin.”

“I’m just trying to warn you. This is an important account. I don’t want you to blow it.”

Actually, Mathilda thought, dropping a whole fistful of sunflower seeds this time, so that they fell like snow on the head of a young man dressed for the starring role in
Jesus Christ Superstar,
what Martin really wanted was to get her to quit. This
was
an important account, and it was driving him absolutely crazy that she had gotten it. What made it worse was that nobody had handed it to her. Martin’s usual tactic, when Mathilda got work he wanted for himself, was to blame it on “affirmative action”—a policy that Halbard’s Auction House, being a British company, did not in fact follow. Anybody could tell that much just by looking around at the third floor, where all the auction coordinators worked. It wasn’t that there weren’t plenty of women, because there were. It wasn’t that there weren’t plenty of black people and Asians and Indians from New Delhi and other people who might qualify as marginal in the ordinary scheme of things, because Halbard’s had a better record at that kind of thing than most American companies. The problem was that 99 percent of these people had British accents, and of the 1 percent left over, a fair number had Scots accents. That was the official and unofficial hiring practices policy at Halbard’s: hire British if at all possible, even if you have to bring a load of secretaries in on the boat.

With Tasheba Kent, though, Mathilda could not have been upstaged, or assigned out, or any of the other things Halbard’s upper management liked to do to make sure the Americans didn’t get their hands on anything important. The Tasheba Kent auction was Mathilda’s by right. She was the one who had seen the article—on a back page of the “Metropolitan” section of
The New York Times,
near the bottom—where Tasheba Kent’s lawyer had been quoted as saying that Miss Kent and Mr. Marsh were considering an auction of their movie mementos and personal things. She was the one who had called the lawyer to offer the services of Halbard’s Auction House. She was the one who had gone over the list of probable sale items with an acerbic young woman named Geraldine Dart. Nobody at Halbard’s could deny that the Tasheba Kent auction had been constructed out of almost nothing by Mathilda Frazier herself, and there was absolutely nothing Martin Michaelson could do about it.

“Mathilda?” Martin demanded. “Are you listening to me?”

“Always, Martin,” Mathilda said.

“I just want to be sure you’re listening to me. I just want to make sure I’m getting through to you. If you aren’t careful, this trip of yours could get to be an absolute
disaster.
”

“Well, Martin, that’s always true, isn’t it?”

“What are you going to do if you get there and just put her right off? You don’t realize it, but you’re
very
abrasive.”

“Thanks, Martin.”

“You’re very aggressive and
unfeminine.
You really are. I know that’s not supposed to count anymore, but this is an older woman you’re going to be dealing with.”

“I know who I’m going to be dealing with, Martin.”

“Some women can be very competitive without losing their femininity, but it’s like walking a tightrope. Most women just haven’t got what it takes.”

“Do you have a dictionary of clichés in your office, Martin, where you can look things up whenever you’re at a loss for words?”

“What?”

“Never mind. Listen, Martin, I’ve got to get off the phone now. I’ve got to go down the hall and see Phyllis.”

“Yes. Of course. None of us can afford to keep Phyllis waiting. But you’ll think about it, won’t you?”

“Think about what?”

“About not going to Maine, of course. Maybe it would be the best thing. Then Tasheba Kent would never have to know that the two of you don’t get along.”

“Good-bye, Martin.”

Mathilda hung up and rubbed her forehead. I’m not going to go check myself out in a mirror, she told herself, I’m just not. Martin Michaelson wouldn’t recognize femininity if it walked up and bit him on the ass. In the end, she couldn’t help herself. She fished an ancient compact out of the bottom of her purse and surveyed her eyes and eyebrows and eyelashes, her nose and cheekbones, the line of her jaw. Everything seemed to be in place. Nothing seemed to have “masculinized” while she wasn’t looking. She hadn’t started growing whiskers on her chin or—or
what,
for God’s sake?

Mathilda threw the compact back into her purse and the purse over her shoulder and left her office to go down to the other end of the hall. Phyllis Green was an American and the head of the auction coordination department. That way, Halbard’s had managed to promote her without moving her upstairs into the pure British precincts of upper management. Phyllis had decided to put up with this for reasons known only to herself. Unlike her staff—which was mainly made up of twentysomethings just graduated from the art history departments of the Ivy League and Seven Sisters—Phyllis was in her fifties and a veteran of the equal pay wars. If she hadn’t liked the arrangements at Halbard’s, she would either have left or hauled the auction house into court.

“Phyllis?” Mathilda asked, knocking on the open door.

Phyllis looked up from a pile of papers on her desk and waved Mathilda inside. “I thought you’d gone already. Aren’t you supposed to be in Maine?”

“I’m leaving first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Well, you’ll be lucky to get out of here. Do you know what I’ve spent my time doing all day? Going through the details of the Impressionist auction. Fifty paintings by Pissarro just sitting up there on the sixth floor, lying around like so many pieces of wood, and nobody’s cataloged them yet.”

“I thought that was Janey Lewis’s auction. What happened to Janey?”

“Jumped ship for Christie’s.”

“Oh.”

“Well, you’ve got to expect it,” Phyllis said. “Christie’s will actually promote Americans. So. Is there something you need from me, or did you just want to talk?”

Mathilda sighed. “Actually, I just needed an antidote to Martin Michaelson. I just got him off the phone.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I don’t know why I let him get to me, but I do.”

“He gets to everybody. He knows all the right buttons to push.”

“I guess I just wanted to hear you say I really was the right person to handle this auction, and Tasheba Kent isn’t going to loathe me on sight, and I haven’t lost my femininity, whatever that means—”

“It means you haven’t stopped making yourself look incompetent,” Phyllis told her. “Personally, I insist that the women who work for me lose their femininity as soon as they accept my offer of a job.”

Mathilda laughed. “I know I was being ridiculous. I just can’t help myself. That man just gets me going. I wish he’d do something awful and get himself fired.”

“Bring this auction off successfully and I’ll get you promoted to senior AC,” Phyllis said. “Then he can die of apoplexy.”

“He won’t, you know. He’ll just sit around at lunch and complain about how this company has been intimidated by the radical feminists.”

“Go to Maine,” Phyllis said.

Mathilda went back down the hall to her office instead. The phone was ringing, but she didn’t pick it up. It was probably just Martin, wanting to pick up where he had left off.

Mathilda got her file on the Tasheba Kent auction out of her file cabinet, spread the contents across her desk, and began to go over the probable sale lists one more time.

F
OR CARLTON JI, JOURNALISM
was not so much a career as it was a new kind of computer game, except without the computer, which suited Carlton just fine. Two of his older brothers had gone into computer work, and a third—Winston the Medical Doctor, as Carlton’s mother always put it—did a lot of programming on the side. For Carlton, however, keyboards and memory banks and microchips were all a lot of fuss and nonsense. If he tried to work one of the “simple” programs his brothers were always bringing him, he ended up doing something odd to the machine, so that it shut down and wouldn’t work anymore. If he tried to write his first drafts on the word processor at work, he found he couldn’t get them to print out on the printer or even to come back onto the screen. They disappeared, that was all, and Carlton had learned to write his articles out in longhand instead. It was frustrating. Computers made life easier, if you knew how to use them. Carlton could see that. Besides, there wasn’t a human being of any sex or color in the United States today who really believed there was any such thing as an Asian-American man who was computer illiterate.

Fortunately for Carlton Ji, his computer at
Personality
magazine had a mouse, which just needed to be picked up in the hand and moved around. It was by using the mouse that he had found out what he had found out about the death of Lilith Brayne. He didn’t have anything conclusive, of course. If there had been anything definitive lying around, somebody else would have picked it up years ago. What he had was what one of his brothers called “a computer coincidence.” The coincidence had been there all along, of course, but it had remained unnoticed until a computer program threw all the elements up on a screen. The trick was that the elements might never have appeared together if there hadn’t been a program to force them together, because they weren’t the kind of elements a human brain would ordinarily think of combining. Computers were stupid. They did exactly what you told them to do, even if it made no sense.

Carlton Ji wasn’t sure what he had done to make the computer do what it did, but one day there he was, staring at a list of seemingly unrelated items on the terminal screen, and it hit him.

“
FOUND AT THE SCENE
,” the screen flashed at him, and then:

GOLD COMPACT

GOLD KEY RING

GOLD CIGARETTE CASE

EBONY AND IVORY CIGARETTE HOLDER

BLACK FEATHER BOA DIAMOND AND SAPPHIRE DINNER RING

Then the screen wiped itself clean and started, “
TASHEBA KENT IN PARIS
.” This list was even longer than the previous one, because the researcher had keyed in everything she could find, no matter how unimportant. These included:

SILVER GRAY ROLLS-ROYCE WITH SILVER-PLATED TRIM

DIAMOND AND RUBY DINNER RING

BLACK BEADED EVENING DRESS

AMBER AND EBONY HOOKAH

BLACK FEATHER BOA

VIVIENNE CRI SHOES WITH RHINESTONE BUCKLES

If the black feather boa hadn’t been in the same position each time—second from the bottom—Carlton might not have noticed it. But he did notice it, and when he went to the paper files to check it out, the point became downright peculiar.