And One to Die On (12 page)

Lydia finished locking up and came down the hall to him. He was, after all, standing at the head of the stairs.

“Are you waiting for your friend?” she asked him pleasantly. “I noticed her especially on the pier. She’s really quite beautiful.”

“Bennis?” It was true, of course, that Bennis Hannaford was beautiful. It was just that Gregor never noticed it. “I don’t know,” he said now, “I suppose I’ve known her so long, it just doesn’t register anymore.”

“Maybe that’s why she’s holding you up.” Lydia nodded at Bennis’s closed door. “Maybe she feels she’s being taken for granted, and she’s making you wait, so you’ll appreciate her more.”

“Bennis?”
Gregor said. “Oh. Oh, no. I mean, it’s not—we don’t—it isn’t like that, you see—we’re—”

“Oh.” Lydia Acken blushed scarlet. “Oh, I
am
sorry. I just assumed—and of course I shouldn’t have—that’s what comes of trying to be modern when you don’t have the faintest idea what it is that’s going on—”

“No, no,” Gregor said quickly. “I can see how you thought what you thought. Lots of people think it. It’s just that it doesn’t happen to be the way—”

“My mother always told me I didn’t have sense enough to mind my own business,” Lydia said miserably.

“Bennis isn’t home,” Gregor threw in, feeling desperate. “I came across the hall to see if she’d fix my tie, but she’s already gone.”

Lydia Acken stopped in the middle of the muttered recriminations she was still directing at herself and looked up into Gregor’s eyes. Then a smile began to spread across her face, and she bit her lower lip to stop its spreading.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Have I made a fool of myself, or what?”

“You made no bigger a fool of yourself than I made of myself. By the way, is my tie crooked?”

“Yes. Yes, it is, as a matter of fact. Here, give me a minute and I’ll fix it.”

Gregor stood very still. Lydia rose up on tiptoe and fussed around at his throat. The tickle against his Adam’s apple was comforting and familiar. Elizabeth had always fixed his ties for him and straightened out his collars. These are the kinds of things, Gregor thought, that any man can do for himself, but that most men don’t really want to.

“There,” Lydia Acken said. “You look fine now. Are you going to wait for Miss Hannaford to come back, or are you going downstairs for cocktails?”

“I suppose I’m going downstairs for cocktails. I don’t know when Bennis is going to be back, or even if. Can I come downstairs with you?”

“Yes,” Lydia said. “Of course you may. I’d like that.” Maybe on the way down I’ll pump you for the information everybody in the house is just dying to find out about you.”

“Really? What information is that?”

“Information on what you’re doing here, of course,” Lydia said. “I ran into Geraldine Dart this afternoon after lunch, in a back hallway while I was looking for the loo, and she’s absolutely convinced that Hannah Graham hired you to find out what really happened to Lilith Brayne.”

“I can’t imagine what would induce me to work for Hannah Graham. A personal visit from God Almighty, maybe.”

“Well, Hannah Graham also thinks you’ve been hired to find out what happened to her mother, or maybe to cover it up, but she thinks I hired you. Has somebody hired you? Are you here to find out what happened to Lilith Brayne?”

“In the first place,” Gregor said, as they started side by side down the stairs, “nobody can hire me. I don’t have a private detective’s license, and I don’t need money. Sometimes I look into things that interest me. I no longer investigate anything for money.”

“You’re a very intelligent man.”

“In the second place,” Gregor continued, “as far as I know, everybody already knows what happened to Lilith Brayne. A tragedy. An accident. A mess. But none of my business.”

“I wish it were none of my business.” Lydia sighed. “You know, Mr. Demarkian, when I went off to law school, back in the early fifties, when girls just didn’t get accepted, I had this vision of starting out on a great adventure, a modern crusade full of knights and dragons and damsels in distress. And what did I get? Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, two very old people who still think sex is the only point of life and who are just as silly and narcissistic in everything else they do.”

“Call me Gregor,” Gregor said.

“My name is Lydia. Lydia Ann. I’ve never liked it.”

“We’ll have to think of a suitable nickname, then. Look. I think we’re the first ones down. I wonder where everybody’s gone.”

Lydia Acken’s eyes flashed. “Hannah Graham has probably gone off for a spot of surgery before drinks,” she said tartly.

Then she marched off ahead of Gregor into the living room.

Tasheba Kent’s official birthday, and official birthday party, weren’t until Saturday, but while Gregor had been upstairs reading his book somebody had begun decorating the living room anyway. Most of the decorations were the standard sort of thing that could be found in any Hallmark card shop. There was a string of shiny-surfaced multicolored cardboard letters held together with tin swivel fasteners tacked up just above eye level on one wall, spelling out “
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
.” There were blue-and-white crepe-paper streamers wound barber-pole fashion around the two decorative posts that separated the living room from the study beyond it. There were quilted crepe-paper-and-cardboard stand-up happy faces in blue and yellow and green, scattered across the coffee tables and end tables and shelves, each proclaiming “
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
” in a riot of exclamation points. It would have looked like the setup for a children’s party, except that here and there there were indications that the woman for whom all this fuss was being made was not young. There was a metal walker tucked discreetly into a corner. There was an arm brace lying on the floor next to one of the larger couches. There were magnifying glasses everywhere, as if the person who needed them could never remember where she had put them down.

Lydia Acken walked over to the letters on the wall, touched the shiny surface of the
T,
and shook her head.

“Somehow, I wouldn’t have thought this was Tasheba’s style. Of course, it may not be out here for her. It may be out here for us. One more prop to make the auction a success.”

“Maybe Tasheba Kent has gone a little senile,” Gregor said. “At a hundred years old, she’d be entitled.”

“She might be entitled, but I know it hasn’t happened,” Lydia said. “I speak to her on the phone quite often. She’s in remarkably good shape for somebody her age. I had an aunt who died at seventy-five who wasn’t anywhere near as alert.”

“I think she’s practicing voodoo,” somebody said from the living room doorway.

Gregor and Lydia turned around to see Hannah Graham, wearing what might have been the single oddest piece of clothing Gregor had ever encountered. It seemed to be made of round plastic discs, bone white but painted over with designs in metallic blue and red and green, held together with white metal staples. It was very short, riding high on Hannah’s thighs, showing off skeletal legs with bright blue veins laced through them. It was both backless and strapless, exposing arms as thin as pipe cleaners and a back whose skin was so dry it looked like sandpaper. The whole extraordinary ensemble was set off by a pair of spike-heeled sandals at least four inches high, that Hannah Graham seemed to have trouble walking on.

Hannah Graham came into the room and picked up one of the quilted crepe-paper-and-cardboard happy faces. She put it down again and went over to look at the blue-and-white streamers.

“My God,” she said. “What a hokey lot of nonsense. I wonder how she thinks she’s going to get away with it.”

“I don’t think
she’s
trying to get away with anything,” Lydia said stiffly. “I don’t think any of these things here were her idea. They were probably put out by Miss Dart or Mr. Marsh.”

Hannah shot Lydia a cynical look. “I’ll bet Miss Dart doesn’t do a thing around here without permission. I’ll bet my father doesn’t either. He’s not talking to me, by the way.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lydia said. “We’ve barely got here. He hasn’t had a chance.”

“I’ve given him several chances,” Hannah countered. “He runs away every time he sees me coming. He locks himself in bathrooms. But he won’t be able to avoid me all weekend. I’m faster than he is.”

Oh, wonderful, Gregor thought. This is going to be just as bad as I feared. Then he looked toward the living room door again and saw a very young woman come in, someone he had not met, a girlish-looking woman with red-gold hair in a conservative long dress. Behind her were two men, the older in a tuxedo like Gregor’s own, the younger in a plain blue suit.

“Oh,” the young woman said. “This must be the right place for us to go.”

Hannah Graham was giving the young woman a hard look, one of the hardest Gregor had ever seen. It was a river of pure hate, made stronger by the fact that Hannah was not going to get a chance to do anything about it. Hannah had dieted and exercised and gone under the knife enough so that she looked nothing at all like an ordinary woman in her late fifties, but she looked nothing at all like a woman in her twenties, and that was what she was trying to look like. This was a woman in her twenties, and it showed.

Lydia Acken came forward with her hand outstretched. “How do you do,” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve met. My name is Lydia Acken.”

“We haven’t met but we’ve talked,” the young woman said. “I’m Mathilda Frazier, from the Halbard Auction House.”

“Oh, yes,” Lydia said.

Mathilda turned to the two men behind her. “The tall one is Kelly Pratt—”

“Kelly and I have met many times,” Lydia said.

“—and the other one is Richard Fenster. He’s a very important collector and dealer of movie memorabilia.”

“I know Richard Fenster.” Bennis came in with Carlton Ji in tow. She was wearing a strapless red sheath that seemed molded to her, and Carlton Ji looked stoned. “Richard deals in memorabilia from science fiction and fantasy movies,” Bennis went on. “We’ve been in touch.”

Gregor looked around and realized that they were all there, all the people who had been on the guest list, everybody who was expected for this party except for the people who actually lived in the house. The clock on the wall above the Happy Birthday letters said five minutes after seven. Gregor wondered where Geraldine Dart was.

He didn’t have to wonder for long. She came through the living room door carrying a long silver tray of identical cocktails, exactly eight of them, one for each person in the room, not including herself. Gregor had no idea what the drinks were. They looked like they had grenadine in them. Obviously, guests in this house were supposed to take what they were served and make the best of it.

“Here we go,” Geraldine said, giving Hannah Graham a swift look of wariness and delight that passed so quickly it might not have occurred at all. “Everybody take one of these, and then we’ll be ready for the arrival of the king and queen.”

The arrival of the king and queen turned out to be a production with a lot in common with the way Bennis Hannaford’s more ardent fans liked to conduct their introductions. First, a gong sounded in the hall—not a chime or bell or the bass note of an old clock telling the hour, but a real gong, the kind of sound that could only be made by a felt-tipped hammer smashing against a large brass disc. Then Geraldine Dart shooed a few stragglers away from the living room doorway, and the procession began.

Cavender Marsh came in first. He was a very old man dressed in a tuxedo, but he still looked spry and alert and admirably, almost miraculously, trim.

The Tasheba Kent who followed him was something of a shock. The actress was an ancient woman, bearing all the usual marks of great age. Her skin was as soft as tissue paper and looked as thin. There was a lot of it, with wrinkle after wrinkle falling down the side of her face and along the bones of her arms. She did not have a dowager’s hump, but she was hunched over. Her head and neck hung low between her shoulders. She was not really able to stand up straight. She was not fat, but her body had lost whatever shape it ever had. Her breasts did not curve upward and outward. Her stomach was a round mound jutting out from beneath her rib cage.

None of this would have been particularly disturbing, if Tasheba Kent had been dressed like an old woman, or even in simple conservative clothes. Instead, she was dressed like the silent movie vamp she had once been. Her dress was a tight black tube of beaded satin, hugging every wayward contour. Wrapped around her shoulders was a black feather boa and a beaded satin shawl. Around her forehead was a beaded satin headband; the hair it held back was jet black and as thick as a full-cream chocolate mousse. It was a wig and it looked like a wig, but it was less grotesque than Tasheba Kent’s makeup. That was so highly colored and so thickly applied, it belonged more properly on a clown. Tasheba Kent’s eyes were laden down with at least three sets of false eyelashes and rimmed with kohl. Her lips were painted into a bright red cupid’s bow. Her cheeks were rouged into two shiny bright apples.

“Good God,” Lydia Acken whispered into Gregor’s ear. “Like niece, like aunt. Here we go again.”

But Gregor didn’t think that was really true. It was most definitely not the same, what Tasheba Kent was doing and what Hannah Graham was doing. Hannah actually expected to fool people. At least when the serious competition—meaning women like Mathilda Frazier and Bennis Hannaford—was out of sight, Hannah thought she would be able to wipe away time. Gregor didn’t think Tasheba Kent had any illusions about the way she looked. She knew she was grotesque. She wanted to be grotesque. She was reveling in it.

Now why, Gregor asked himself, would a woman want to do something like that?

After the entrance, dinner was inevitably an anticlimax. They sat around the long table in the dining room, eating impossibly bland food off Royal Doulton plates by the light of three eight-stick sterling-silver candelabra. They made polite conversation with each other of the kind common to people who do not know each other well and never expect to. The dining room table was strewn with happy birthday reminders, including a set of little plastic balloons with “100” written across each one. People kept picking those up and commenting on them, as if they were significant in some way.