And One to Die On (33 page)

“There he goes,” Kelly Pratt said.

Cavender Marsh had been spinning slowly on the catwalk. Now Hannah gave him one more smash to the midsection and he pitched sideways, tumbling over the catwalk railing and onto the roof itself. His body slid down the shingles, dislodging two. It hit the gutter, hesitated for a moment, and then broke through. The next thing they knew, Cavender Marsh’s body was in space, falling toward the sea.

“I told you I’d kill him,” Hannah Graham said.

Gregor knew what was going to happen next. It was the only thing that could happen. He looked for a way to get onto the catwalk, but couldn’t see one. Obviously, it had been meant for decoration, not for use. A widow’s walk, some people called it. Hannah was walking back to the middle of it now, swinging the instrument in her hands. When she got to the place she had been when they first emerged onto the roof and saw her, she stopped.

“Here it goes,” she said, drawing her arm back and pitching the instrument as far out to sea as she could. It went farther than Gregor would have imagined it could, making an arc like a rocket in flight, disappearing into the clouds and rain.

“Here I go next,” Hannah Graham said.

“Gregor, for God’s sake, what’s she going to do? Can’t you stop her?” Bennis clutched Gregor’s arm.

Gregor could have pointed out that Bennis had asked this question before, and that his answer now would have to be the same, but he didn’t. With her back to them and her arms stretched out, she looked like a Druid celebrating ancient rites in a storm. Her wet hair could have been made of molten lead.

“Go
now
,” Hannah shouted suddenly, at the top of her lungs.

She drew backward and then launched herself forward, pushing against the catwalk as if it were a diving board. She did not hit the shingles or the gutter as she went down. She went right out into the air and fell, screaming, straight into the sea.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Kelly Pratt muttered.

Geraldine Dart turned her back to the rest of them and got violently and definitively ill.

Five minutes later, when they were all soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone and holding out on the roof only because they were more afraid of the bats than they were of the storm, they heard the sound of chopper blades in the distance, and looked up to see that the damn thing was right above their heads. The wind had been too high and blowing in the wrong direction for them to have heard it earlier. It was not an army helicopter, but a coast guard one—exactly the kind of detail, Gregor thought, that Bennis always did get wrong. It was, however, a serious vehicle, the kind with two propellers, one on each end. It had medical insignia as well as U.S. Coast Guard insignia painted on its sides.

“We’ve got to remind them to go down and get Lydia and Mathilda and Richard,” Bennis said unnecessarily.

“What are we going to be able to tell them about Hannah and Cavender?” Geraldine asked.

Hannah and Cavender were the least of it. Gregor knew that. There were two corpses down in that house, and a third body that might be a corpse by now and might not. They were going to have to explain all of those before they got around to the denouement, and it wasn’t going to be easy. Gregor knew what he would be thinking, if he were the law enforcement officer charged with the investigation of this case. He’d be thinking that the six people who were still alive and well in this house had a lot of talking to do.

A door in the side of the chopper opened. A man in rain gear and thick boots came swinging out, attached to a thick cord line. He blew around in the wind. The cord lowered him very slowly. Gregor and Bennis and Kelly and Geraldine stepped back to give him room to land.

The man was good at his work, and experienced. The wind was bad. Gregor expected him to fall at least once. Instead, he landed without difficulty, unhooked the cord, and looked around at the four people watching him.

“How do you do, sir,” he said to Gregor, holding his hand out. Maybe, Gregor thought, I look like I have more authority here than I really do. “I’m Petty Officer Robert Moreby. We were advised of a medical emergency here.”

“He’s downstairs,” Geraldine Dart said. “We couldn’t move him.”

“To get to him you have to go through bats,” Kelly Pratt offered. “The attic is lousy with them.”

Petty Officer Robert Moreby took all this in. Then he got his squawk box off his belt and spoke into it.

“Doctor will be down in a minute,” he told them, when he’d finished. “You people can go on up if you want to.”

“How are you going to get through the bats?” Bennis demanded.

“Rubber weather suits,” Petty Officer Moreby said. “I was wearing one when I got hit with half a bucket of flying glass during Hurricane Andrew. If that didn’t get through it, bats won’t.”

Gregor considered this. “Do you have any of these suits lying around that I could borrow?”

“Yes, sir,” Moreby said. “But you don’t have to do that. We can take care of everything from here on out. We’d just as soon you got into the chopper and let us take you to safety.”

Gregor looked up. Another man was coming down at them out of the sky. The chopper and the man were bouncing around in the wind like hollow plastic balls in a blow tank.

“That’s all right,” Gregor told Petty Officer Moreby. “First you’d have to get me into the chopper, and if you ask me, I’ve had a bad enough day already.”

T
HE HEADLINE IN
THE
Philadelphia Inquirer
Monday morning was the worst Gregor Demarkian had ever seen. Standing in front of the stack of them in the rest stop in northern New Jersey, Gregor thought about buying all of them and shredding them in the parking lot. “
TRAPPED BY A STORM
,” the enormous letters read, and then, underneath them: “Philadelphia’s Own Armenian-American Hercule Poirot Captures a Killer on a Storm-Bound Island.” Obviously, nothing serious had happened to the economy over the weekend. Saddam Hussein hadn’t had a cold. Bill and Hillary had spent the last few days reading paperbacks and doing crossword puzzles.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
was usually a serious newspaper, and one Gregor liked. It was just when it came to Gregor Demarkian that the
Inquirer
seemed to go off its nut.

Out in the parking lot, Bennis was putting the top down on the tangerine orange Mercedes. Gregor could see her through the rest stop’s plate-glass windows, walking around to the back of the car to make sure everything was secure. There was wind in her black hair and bright sunshine everywhere. It was one of those days in October that makes it possible to call fall “perfect.” In the distance, the leaves on all the trees had turned from yellow to gold and brilliant red. Even the parking lot seemed to be full of color.

Gregor paid for one copy of the
Inquirer
(there was a large black-and-white picture on the front page of Gregor talking to two policemen; the caption said they were “consulting,” but Gregor knew he was being read the riot act) and headed for the parking lot himself. It was colder than it looked. It was hard to understand how Bennis could walk around the way she did in nothing but a turtleneck and a J. Crew cotton sweater. Gregor walked over to the car and threw the copy of the
Inquirer
inside.

“It’s getting worse all the time. The papers were much better about it yesterday.”

“I don’t want to talk about the papers.” Bennis finished whatever she was doing with the canvas top and came around the side to get in behind the wheel. “I want to talk about Lydia Acken.”

Gregor got in, too. He had to take the
Inquirer
off his seat to do it.

“I don’t see why you want to talk about Lydia Acken. I have nothing to say about Lydia Acken.”

“You didn’t get her phone number,” Bennis said.

“I know I didn’t get her phone number.”

“Well, does that make sense, Gregor? I mean, you find a woman you’re attracted to, and she’s attracted to you back, and you don’t get her phone number.”

“Believe it or not, Bennis, unlike you, the rest of us have other things on our minds more than occasionally.”

“I wasn’t saying you had to go to bed with her, Gregor. I was only saying you ought to call her.”

“We weren’t attracted to each other in that way.”

“You were groping each other under the dining room table.”

“Where did you get such an idea? Where could you possibly get such an idea? I don’t grope.”

“You ought to.”

“If you go on driving the way you’ve been driving on the Garden State Parkway, Bennis, you’ll get us both arrested.”

Bennis bounced the tangerine orange two-seater Mercedes down the ramp, looked both ways to make sure the road was as clear of traffic as it had been all morning, and then stepped on the gas.

T
HEY WERE WELL OUT
and away in the New Jersey sunlight before Bennis slowed down again, bored with the kind of attention she had to pay to her driving to keep up her speed. Gregor privately thought that Bennis only went really fast when either he or Father Tibor Kasparian was in the car. She wanted both of them to know how hazardous it was for them to assume she would drive them places just because neither one of them knew how to handle an automobile. Father Tibor didn’t even have a license. Gregor had one that he kept current, but Bennis was always saying that it wasn’t worth its little laminated shield. Gregor Demarkian behind the wheel of a car was not a pretty sight.

Bennis slipped a Joni Mitchell tape into the tape deck and turned the volume up so that she could hear the music over the roar of the wind.

“So tell me again,” she said. “Cavender Marsh contacted Hannah Graham in California—”

“No, no,” Gregor said. “It was the other way around. Hannah Graham had been writing and calling for years, trying to get her father to talk to her. And finally, a few months ago, Cavender decided to answer.”

“And tell her that Tasheba Kent wasn’t really Tasheba Kent.”

“I don’t know how the negotiations went, Bennis. I wasn’t hiding in a closet when they went on. Eventually he told her that Tasheba Kent wasn’t really Tasheba Kent. It was probably the only way he could get her mad enough.”

“Mad enough to commit a murder.”

“Mad enough to go along with his plans to commit a murder. Remember that there was only supposed to be one murder. Carlton Ji was Hannah going freelance. So was Richard Fenster.”

“Richard Fenster didn’t die.”

“No, he didn’t,” Gregor said, “but that wasn’t deliberate on Hannah’s part. She was basically interested in getting rid of anybody who got in her way. I think she must have given her father quite a shock. Cavender had no way of knowing what she was like.”

“Did she intend to kill herself, right from the beginning?” Bennis asked.

“I don’t know,” Gregor told her, “but I’ll bet anything that she intended to kill her father. I almost sympathize. I mean, look at the two of them—the three of them, if you include Tasheba Kent—I mean Lilith Brayne. They never once thought of anybody but themselves. They never once cared what happened to other people as long as they got what they wanted. Lilith was perfectly willing to ditch her own infant child just to keep up the pretense that would allow her to spend her life with the man she was obsessed with. And Cavender Marsh—”

“What about Cavender Marsh?”

Gregor shrugged. “Hannah was his daughter, too. There was nothing to say that he couldn’t have put his foot down and made his wife bring the child with them. Quite frankly, I think he was relieved to be rid of it. Squawling and diapers and interruptions. They weren’t his style.”

“You make them all sound like such lovely people.”

“If there was one thing I learned pulling kidnapping detail in the Bureau, Bennis, it was that the last people on earth you want to deal with are actors and actresses. You ought to remember that the next time what’s-his-name blows into town and wants you to run off for a weekend in the Bahamas.”

“Never mind what’s-his-name,” Bennis said. “I still don’t see how you worked it all out. I thought it had to be Geraldine Dart, myself, with all the sound effects and the lights going on and off and the things being moved around. I thought it had to be someone who was very familiar with the house.”

“It
was
somebody who was very familiar with the house, Bennis. It was Cavender Marsh. But I agree with you. Geraldine was certainly a good guess. She was my first.”

“So why didn’t you stick with her?”

“Well, for one thing, I couldn’t figure out why she would want to set up all the things that were being set up. I don’t mean the ghost stories and the sound effects and all that. That might have been spur of the moment because Hannah Graham annoyed her. I mean all the distractions.”

“
What
distractions?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “there was all the makeup Tasheba Kent wore to dinner, and the strange clothes. Those things were deliberately engineered. I’m not a total recluse, Bennis. I read
People
every once in a while.”

“Especially when you’re in it.”

Gregor ignored this. “I’ve seen the odd occasional photograph of Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent together—Cavender Marsh and Lilith Brayne, but I’m trying not to get confused. Anyway, they looked like any old couple photographed from a distance. No feather boas. No strange makeup. No bizarre clothes. No wigs. So why was it, when they had us in the house face-to-face, that the old lady suddenly turned herself into a bad joke from an even worse movie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do. Or at least you do now. She didn’t want to take the chance that even after all this time, somebody might realize that she was not in fact Tasheba Kent. If you remember what Geraldine told us at the end, it was mostly Cavender who was worried about all this. Not that he told Geraldine specifically what he was worried about. He just said he wanted to make sure that nobody brought up all that business in 1938 during the weekend. That’s how he justified the sound effects prank to Geraldine, too.”

“Right,” Bennis said. “So she set up the CD player, and then—what? Hannah went and changed it?”