And One to Die On (30 page)

“What do the shoes have to do with it?” Lydia Acken asked.

“They’ve been torn up,” Hannah Graham put in. “You can’t tell anything at all from them.”

“Not from this particular pair of shoes, no,” Gregor agreed. “These were the best ones, but they weren’t the only ones. There are dozens of pairs of shoes out there in the library. It doesn’t matter which pair you try. It will always come out the same.”

“Why were those the best shoes?” Bennis asked.

“The black shoes with the rhinestone buckles were one of Lilith Brayne’s trademarks,” Gregor replied. “She wore them in her movies, but she also wore them later, after she retired, in much the same way and for much the same reasons her sister went on wearing black feather boas. If you look through some of the scrapbooks Cavender Marsh has kept all these years, you can see them. Tasheba’s wearing them in one of the most widely circulated of the photographs ever taken of her and Cavender Marsh together, the one with the two of them standing on the terrace of the villa where Lilith Brayne was assumed later to have died.”

“I’m sure this all seems very clever to you,” Cavender Marsh spat, “but it doesn’t seem all that clever to me. What difference do the shoes make?”

“They make all the difference in the world,” Gregor said. “Go out to the library and look at the two sets of shoes. Lilith had very small feet. Tasheba had very large ones. Tasheba’s shoes might have fit Lilith, if she stuffed them full of tissue paper. Lilith’s shoes could never have fit Tasheba. What Richard Fenster probably found out was that that pair of shoes with the rhinestone buckles fit the feet of the woman who was calling herself Tasheba Kent perfectly—even after all these years.”

I
T WAS ALL STARTING
to go wrong. Cavender Marsh could see that. Even if the rest of them couldn’t, he could. There she was, lying on the floor dead at last. She had been as hard to kill as the creature in a Boris Karloff movie. He could still see her coming out of the shadows on that terrace in the south of France, floating across the checkerboard marble with a big smile on her face. He could still see Tash out cold at his feet after he had hit her, so close to the edge and so easy to roll over. But that wasn’t fair. He had killed Tash himself. He had struck her across the windpipe with the side of his hand. He had stepped on the back of her neck and broken it after she was down. He had done all the things Lilith had said the papers would say he had done. It was just that he had wished at the time that he was doing them to Lilith.

The Demarkian man was waiting. He was being very patient. Considering the fact that there was a man sprawled half-dead on the floor of the television room, the detective was being very patient indeed. Cavender didn’t think this would last long. Geraldine Dart and Bennis Hannaford had their signal lamps. They wanted to go out on the balcony to test them. They would have been gone already if they hadn’t been so fascinated in what was going to be said around here next.

Cavender said the only thing he could say, under the circumstances. “You don’t really believe,” he drawled in great deliberation, “that I killed two people and maimed a third in this house this weekend. I’m eighty years old.”

Gregor Demarkian sighed. “That’s true. You didn’t kill any of them yourself. Not this time. You just planned the way they were going to die.”

“Really? All of them?” Cavender was carefully contemptuous.

“Richard Fenster may have been your accomplice’s idea.”

“It was more than Richard Fenster,” Cavender Marsh said.

There were stirrings in the crowd. The sympathy was definitely directed away from him this time. The hero of this hour was Gregor Demarkian. Cavender didn’t think he had ever seen such a large and solid man.

“Start from the beginning,” Bennis Hannaford said suddenly. “I don’t understand any of this.”

Gregor Demarkian regarded Bennis very seriously and said, “I’ll explain it all to you later. I want you to go out and put those lights to use. Do it now.”

“All right,” Bennis Hannaford said, although she didn’t sound happy. “Geraldine and I—”

“No,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Just you. I need Miss Dart here.”

“Oh, dear,” Geraldine Dart said. She wrung her hands, just like a character in a Lilith Brayne movie.

“You can’t really believe that I threw my lot in with this plain and unstylish little blob of lower-middle-class sensibilities,” Cavender Marsh insisted. “Even your audience doesn’t believe it, and they’re far more naive about this sort of thing than you and I are.”

“He didn’t say that you were sleeping with her,” Kelly Pratt said.

Bennis Hannaford gave them all one last look and hurried out of the room. Mathilda Frazier began to rock back and forth, from the balls of her feet to her heels.

“The beginning,” Gregor Demarkian said, nodding his massive head, “was a marriage. The marriage of Cavender Marsh and Lilith Brayne. A marriage that could only have been made among actors. He was in his early twenties. She was in her early forties, or maybe even older. It was unheard-of, but they got away with it, in a way. The attitude of the fan magazines, from what I’ve been able to glean from looking through some scrapbooks, was that Cavender was a fine young innocent who had been corralled and brainwashed by a consummate witch.”

Cavender Marsh burst out laughing. “Oh, she was that,” he said. “She was surely that.”

“Yes,” Gregor Demarkian agreed. “I think she was. Anyway, the two of them married. When Lilith got pregnant, the fan magazines didn’t thaw to her much, but then Cavender did something to destroy his own reputation. He had an affair. Now that, in and of itself, was not necessarily a bad thing. The press had been waiting for him to get tired of the old woman he had married. There had probably been fill-in-the-blanks instant news stories on file for months about how the brave young beauty saved Cavender Marsh from the clutches of the evil temptress. But the brave young beauty turned out to be not so young. In fact, she was a year older than the evil temptress, and the evil temptress’s own sister. At that point, Lilith Brayne began to get a little sympathy from the press.”

“I’m beginning to think this is very ageist,” Mathilda Frazier interrupted disapprovingly. “What difference does it make how old they both were?”

“In 1938, it made a great deal of difference,” Gregor Demarkian said. “It made so much difference, that it began to look to a lot of people that Cavender might have something psychologically wrong with him. This was, after all, an era when women were considered to be aging at thirty.”

“Oh, yes,” Lydia Acken put in, “that was really true. I remember. My mother told people she was twenty-eight for nearly fifteen years.”

“Everything Cavender Marsh did was public,” Gregor went on. “His wife’s pregnancy was public. His affair with Tasheba Kent was public. He was photographed everywhere, and he always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He was involved with two sisters. They were very different in many ways, but they were also very much alike. For one thing, they were both highly competitive. For another, they were both very demanding.”

“Demanding,”
Cavender said. “What a word for it. They were both emotional vampires.”

“Was Tasheba Kent being—demanding—the night Cavender Marsh killed her?” Lydia Acken asked.

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Mr. Marsh knows, and he may tell us or not, as he cares to. What I do know is that on the night she was killed, Tasheba Kent showed up at the villa in the south of France that Cavender Marsh was sharing with his wife and his three-month-old baby daughter. Tasheba was not supposed to be there.”

“She’d been threatened with mayhem if she so much as showed up in town,” Cavender Marsh said. His voice was very firm. He did not sound worried. “But not by me, Mr. Demarkian. By Lilith.”

“That may be true,” Gregor said, “but you killed Tasheba Kent. If it had been your wife who had committed the murder, she would have been arrested and tried for it, because you would never have helped her escape from the law. The only possible reason for your doing what you did, in fact do over the next few months and years, is that you knew damn well that if you did not do it, you would end up in jail yourself.”

“But what did he do?” Kelly Pratt asked plaintively. “And what does all this have to do with the money?”

“What money?” Mathilda Frazier asked.

“I’ll get to the money in a minute,” Gregor said. “The first thing Cavender and Lilith did was to heave the body of Tasheba off the terrace and into the sluice, where it was sure to get severely mangled. The reason for this was not necessarily what you might think. They weren’t worried about Tasheba Kent’s appearance tipping the police off to her identity, because Tasheba Kent’s appearance was what her makeup made it be. By that time, that was true of both the sisters. They weren’t so very much alike if you knew them well without their makeup, but if you didn’t—and almost nobody did—”

“Including me,” Cavender Marsh said.

“—if you didn’t, what you thought of when someone said ‘Lilith Brayne’ or ‘Tasheba Kent’ was a paint job, and paint jobs are easily manipulated. No, the reason they had to mangle the body was because the one thing that could destroy their whole plan was a full body autopsy.”

“But what was their plan?” Lydia Acken asked.

“They were going to pass the death off as the death of Lilith Brayne, an accident that was probably a suicide,” Gregor said. “This was a brilliant scenario, especially in the France of the time, which was addicted to tragedies of that sort. It was also psychologically coherent. There was no way to pass the death of Tasheba Kent off as suicide. Nobody would have believed it. And accident wouldn’t have gone over too well, either. There had been too many very good reasons, trumpeted in the press month after month, why Cavender Marsh or Lilith Brayne would have wanted to kill Tasheba Kent. If it ever became clear that it was Tasheba Kent who was dead, there was going to be a major investigation.”

“I still don’t understand what a full body autopsy had to do with it,” Mathilda Frazier said. “Do you mean they were worried about fingerprints and things like that?”

“I don’t think so,” Gregor told her. “I doubt if any of their fingerprints were on file anywhere. What a full body autopsy would have revealed was the obvious. It would have shown clearly that the woman whose body this was had never had a child.”

“Oh,” Lydia Acken said.

“So,” Gregor Demarkian continued, “they rolled the body into the sluice. Then Lilith Brayne took off all her makeup, got Tasheba Kent’s handbag, and headed back to Paris looking like nothing so much as another frumpy middle-aged woman. When she got to Paris, she let herself into her sister’s apartment, made herself up very heavily, and proceeded to play the part of Tasheba Kent. I don’t know what she did about personal maids and that sort of person, but she must have done something, because it worked.”

“Lilith was a much better actress than anyone ever gave her credit for.” Cavender Marsh said it proudly.

“Cavender gave Lilith a few hours to get away,” Gregor went on, “and then called the police. At this point, the two of them began to make a series of mistakes that should have gotten them caught, but didn’t. The first of these concerned Tasheba Kent’s trademark black feather boa. She’d worn it when she came down to the villa from Paris, and left it lying across the bed in Cavender Marsh’s bedroom. Lilith had completely forgotten about it when she’d gone back to town to take up her masquerade. That’s why the black feather boa appeared on the first list the police made of the things belonging to Lilith Brayne that were found in the villa.”

“Only on the first list?” Kelly Pratt asked.

“That’s right,” Gregor told him. “That was what got Carlton so excited. He got hold of those lists. After that first one, the black feather boa disappeared. It did appear on the neck of the woman calling herself Tasheba Kent, though. That woman wore a black feather boa prominently for weeks afterward. I can only assume that Cavender Marsh found some way of getting it away from the villa and to his play-acting wife.”

“I told the police the boa had belonged to Tash,” Cavender Marsh said. “I told them Lilith had stolen it one day when we visited Tash in Paris, because Lilith was obsessed with my relationship with her sister. They said they understood.”

“I’m sure they did,” Gregor said drily. “Especially after you spread around the French franc equivalent of twenty-five thousand dollars to increase their capacity for empathy. That was your second mistake, by the way. Not that you bribed the French police. That was not only necessary, but customary at the time in cases of the sort this was supposed to be. The mistake was in where you got the money, in four twenty-five-thousand-dollar chunks.”

Cavender said nothing. His eyes were on Gregor Demarkian, as if he were a snake charmer.

“Where did they get it?” Lydia Acken asked.

“They got it from Lilith Brayne’s bank account,” Kelly Pratt put in excitedly. “That’s where they got it. But how did they get it?”

“Mr. Pratt found the discrepancy in the bank account,” Gregor Demarkian explained to them. “Four very large withdrawals to the tune of the French franc equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars, all made after the supposed death of Lilith Brayne.”

“But how could they do that?” Mathilda Frazier asked. “She couldn’t just show up at the bank looking like Lilith Brayne, could she? The story must have been in all the papers. She would have caused a sensation.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Gregor told her. “If Lilith Brayne had shown up at a French bank looking like Lilith Brayne and trying to withdraw twenty-five thousand dollars—even once, never mind four times—she would most certainly have caused a sensation. But the explanation is very simple. The money was not in fact withdrawn from
Lilith Brayne’s
bank account. It was withdrawn from
Lillian Kent Day’s
bank account.”

“Who’s Lillian Kent Day?” Lydia Acken asked.

“Lillian Kent was the name with which Lilith Brayne was born,” Gregor explained. “Lillian Kent Day was the name by which she was legally known in France in 1938, because she was the wife of one John Day, otherwise known as Cavender Marsh. Like a lot of famous people, Lilith Brayne preferred not to be famous every minute of every day. My guess is that the people at the bank didn’t even know she was Lilith Brayne. She was just a respectable bourgeois woman called Madame Day.”