And One to Die On (17 page)

“Miss Dart,” he called back over his shoulder. “Come up here with me. I need you to show me which of those bedrooms belongs to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh.”

At first, Geraldine Dart protested. “You don’t want to wake him up out of a sound sleep for something like this,” she protested, running up the stairs at Gregor’s back. “You’ll give him a stroke. We need to find a way to break this to him gently.”

“Don’t worry,” Gregor told her. “I don’t think we’re going to have to break it to him at all tonight.”

Gregor reached the landing. Geraldine Dart rushed by him and went to a door in the middle of the left-hand wall. When she opened this, Gregor thanked her, passed inside the room, and looked around. The room was dark. The curtains that covered the windows on one wall were faintly backlit, as if there was a security light outside but not too close. The big dark bed had a canopy and a set of curtains but was otherwise a series of black lumps in the dark. Gregor reached around on the wall until he found the light switch and flicked it on. A chandelier almost the size of the one that hung over the foyer burst into light, lighting the room as cruelly as a movie set.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Geraldine Dart protested.

“Gregor? Gregor, what’s going on?” That was Bennis, coming in from the hallway. The rest of them were out there, too, moving around in a clump, because they were afraid to be alone. Gregor ignored them all.

He went over to the side of the bed closest to the door and looked down on the sleeping Cavender Marsh. The old man was tucked neatly under a top sheet and a pale blue blanket, both pristinely folded back and as unwrinkled as if they had been covering a doll. There was no doubt, however, that Cavender Marsh was breathing. His chest rose and fell rhythmically. His nose emitted a high-pitched, highly polite little snore.

“Why hasn’t he woken up?” Geraldine Dart asked anxiously. “Is he in a coma?”

“Of course he isn’t in a coma,” Gregor said. “He’s just asleep. He probably took a sleeping pill.”

“Mr. Marsh doesn’t take sleeping pills,” Geraldine Dart said.

“Then somebody gave him one, or more likely two or three.” Gregor went around to the other side of the bed.

At first, Gregor didn’t see anything unusual. The bedclothes were more rumpled there than they had been on Cavender Marsh’s side, but any bedclothes anywhere would have been. Gregor Demarkian had never seen anyone sleep with such perfect lack of movement as Cavender Marsh was displaying tonight. On Tasheba Kent’s side, the blanket was twisted and the top sheet was pushed down under it. Gregor pulled up the top sheet and untwisted the blanket and examined them both. They were clean. The pillow was wadded into a ball. Gregor unwadded it and found that it was perfectly clean, too. He almost thought he had been wrong in his conjectures, but then, as he was drawing his head out from between the bed-curtains, he caught sight of the ruffled border around the canopy over his head. Just at the start of the first curve, the border was soaked in blood.

“Oh, God,” Geraldine Dart said. “Oh, God, it’s still wet. How did it get like that?”

“She probably brushed against it as she was getting out of bed,” Gregor said.

“Do you mean she was already bleeding when she got out of bed? How could she have been?”

“Very easily,” Gregor said. “People do a great deal after they’ve had a head trauma, even if they’re the next best thing to technically dead. She was sitting up when she was hit, though. If she’d been lying down, there would be blood all over the pillowcase and the sheets.”

“Sitting up,” Geraldine Dart repeated. “I don’t believe that. You didn’t know Tasheba Kent, Mr. Demarkian. A hundred years old or no hundred years old, she wouldn’t have sat there and let somebody come at her with a poker—”

“Not a poker.”

“—or whatever it was. She just wouldn’t have.”

“All right, she wouldn’t have,” Gregor said, “so that isn’t what she did. She sat up in bed and listened to this person talk, and when she wasn’t expecting it this person whipped out a weapon and coshed her on the head. Then she started acting very strangely.”

“You mean she put on the wig,” Bennis said, edging closer.

Gregor checked the wall behind the place where Tasheba Kent’s pillow had been. There was a faint stain there that might have been fresh blood. He wasn’t going to know for sure until he got some lab technicians to check it out. He walked away from the bed and looked at the carpet next to it. There were no stains there, but a little farther along, near the bed’s foot, there was an unmistakable red splotch. They would have to check the nightgown under Tasheba Kent’s negligee. There had certainly been no splotch of blood on the negligee. That meant that Tasheba Kent not only hadn’t been wearing it in bed—interesting enough, Gregor thought, if she had been talking to a visitor—but hadn’t been wearing it when she went to her vanity table, either. Gregor was sure that Tasheba Kent had been going to her vanity table. There was an empty wig stand there.

Gregor traced Tasheba Kent’s possible path around the bed to the vanity table, but didn’t find any bloodstains. He sat down at the vanity table and looked over the jars and implements without really knowing what most of them were. There weren’t any bloodstains there, either. The wig stand was different. There was a big red-brown smear on the back of it, at the place on a person that would have been the start of the nape of the neck. Gregor got a Kleenex out of his pocket to protect the stand from his fingerprints and picked it up. Then he put the stand down again and sighed. Everything he saw confirmed the conjectures he had made downstairs about what had happened up here tonight, but it was impossible to get any really important information out of physical evidence without the help of the lab technicians.

“Tell me,” he said, turning to Geraldine Dart, “what time did she come up here tonight?”

“Time? I don’t know if I could pinpoint a time. It was right after dinner. Maybe nine thirty or ten o’clock.”

“It was ten minutes to ten when we all went into the living room,” Bennis said. “I checked my watch.”

Gregor nodded. “Now, Miss Dart. Tasheba Kent didn’t come up to her room alone.”

“No, no, of course not,” Geraldine Dart said. “I brought her up here myself. I used the elevator at the back of the foyer.”

“And you settled her down to sleep.”

“I helped her to get ready for bed and then I gave her her glasses and the book she’s been reading. Miss Kent always read a little before she went to bed. Of course, she didn’t read very well anymore. She could barely see words on a page. But she’d read a paragraph or two every night.”

“Glasses,” Gregor repeated.

He left the vanity table and went back to Tasheba Kent’s side of the bed, but there was no mystery about the glasses. They were on the bedside table next to the lamp, neatly folded up and unstained by blood or anything else. Gregor went back to the vanity table.

“After you got her ready for bed, what did you do?” he asked Geraldine Dart.

“I came downstairs to see that everything was going all right in the living room.”

“And was it?”

Geraldine shrugged. “Hannah Graham was back. I don’t know where she’d gone to when she walked out on dinner, but she was back. She had Cavender cornered and she was railing at him, so I had to pry the two of them apart.”

“Did Cavender Marsh go to bed then?” Gregor asked.

Geraldine shook her head. “He went and talked to Richard Fenster for a while. Cavender doesn’t like to go to bed early. He says it makes him feel like a hick.”

“Did he seem all right to you at that point?”

“Yes, he did, Mr. Demarkian, but I didn’t stay long after that. Cavender doesn’t need to be helped to bed in the same way Tasheba does—did. And I was tired. I made sure everybody had something to drink and knew where to get more, and then I went up to bed.”

“What about you?” Gregor asked Bennis.

“I finished my liqueur and went up to bed,” she said. “That was later than you’d think. Almost quarter to eleven. I was talking to Mathilda about buying books at auction. If it hadn’t been for Hannah Graham, I think we both would have stayed longer. We were having a very interesting conversation.”

“What did Hannah Graham do?”

Bennis made a face. “She behaved like Hannah Graham,” she said. “She’s impossible, Gregor, really. She’s the
most
abusive woman.”

“Practically the only way you could get away from her last night was to go into the library,” Geraldine said. “I told her at one point that she might want to look over her mother’s things, that Cavender wouldn’t be averse to her having some of them, and she acted as if I’d just threatened to poison her. She didn’t follow you when you went in there, either. And I know she wanted to talk to you.”

The idea that Hannah Graham had wanted to talk to him—and might still want to talk to him—was not a comforting thought, but Gregor put it firmly out of his mind for the moment.

“Do either of you remember Cavender Marsh going to bed?” he asked the two women.

Both Geraldine Dart and Bennis Hannaford shook their heads.

“Do either of you remember him acting at all strangely? Suddenly and overwhelmingly tired? Or as if it seemed he’d had too much to drink when you knew he hadn’t.”

Both women shook their heads again.

Gregor got up and went to the door of the bedroom to look out on the hall. They were there, standing in a little knot under the dim glow of the bracket lights, looking sullen and afraid. Richard Fenster was drinking out of a hip flask and leaning against the wall. Lydia Acken was standing very erect, with her arms wrapped around her waist. Her skin looked powdered gray.

“All right,” he said. “I know that this is a little unusual, but we’re going to be stuck out here alone for a little while, and I’d like to get a few things straight before the police arrive. Does anybody here mind answering a couple of questions?”

“I mind,” Hannah Graham said belligerently.

Mathilda Frazier let out a sharp bark of anger. “Oh, for God’s sake. Why do you always have to cause trouble for everybody in your vicinity? Why can you never cooperate about anything?”

“I’m not causing trouble,” Hannah said. “I’m just sticking up for myself. He doesn’t have any right to ask us questions.”

“I’d rather have him ask me questions than have a cop ask me questions,” Richard Fenster said. “I’d rather have him investigating this murder, too. He doesn’t have any kind of ax to grind.”

“It doesn’t matter if the police ask you questions, because you don’t have to answer them,” Hannah Graham shot back. “Any decent lawyer could tell you that. You don’t have to tell the police a thing.”

“No, you don’t,” Kelly Pratt said, “but they can punish you for that. They can make it very hard for you to leave the state. They can let things leak to the media—and oh, God, how this one is going to attract the media. Like blood attracts sharks.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Hannah Graham looked momentarily uneasy. “The media aren’t going to care one way or the other about this. She was just a has-been old movie star. She hasn’t been in the public eye in years.”

“She wasn’t just a has-been old movie star,” Richard Fenster said. “She was once the most famous woman in America. And she was involved in one of the most famous murder investigations of the century. And now she’s been murdered herself.”

“My mother died by accident,” Hannah Graham said. “That’s what all the papers said at the time. That’s what the police decided.”

“It was still a murder investigation, even if it wasn’t a murder,” Richard Fenster said. “There is going to be a mess when this gets out. People go out of their way to get this man to handle their messes, and here he is right in the middle of this one and willing to do it for free. Why shouldn’t we take advantage of his being here?”

Hannah Graham had been standing at the very far edge of the group, a little behind where Mathilda Frazier was seated on the floor. Now she moved forward until she was standing right in front of Richard Fenster and flicked a finger at his hip flask.

“I don’t have to talk to anyone I don’t want to talk to,” she said. “And I’m not going to, no matter what you say. And besides, I don’t think he’s such a great detective. If he were, he wouldn’t be questioning us. He’d be out looking for Carlton Ji.”

“What?” Gregor said.

Hannah whirled around, triumphant. “Carlton Ji,” she said again. “You remember. The odious little Chinaman. Well, he isn’t here. And he hasn’t been here. He didn’t come downstairs with us when the screaming started. He didn’t come down later, either. And he was gone before that. He wasn’t with the rest of us in the living room after dinner.”

“Maybe he was in the library,” Gregor said.

“He wasn’t while I was there,” Richard Fenster said thoughtfully. “And I was there for a good half an hour. The only other person who came in was Lydia Acken.”

“He wasn’t there while I was there,” Lydia said. “And he wasn’t in the living room just after dinner, either, Mrs. Graham is right about that.”

“I didn’t see him, either,” Kelly Pratt said.

“I saw him
right
after dinner,” Geraldine Dart said. “He
was
in the library for at least a minute or two. Then I don’t know what happened to him.”

“Don’t ask me,” Bennis told Gregor. “I never saw him at all.”

Hannah Graham’s triumph had grown into something bigger and worse. She was afire with self-righteousness and self-justification.

“There!” she exclaimed. “There! Didn’t I tell you. He disappeared right after dinner, and the Great Detective didn’t even notice. I don’t think this man is anything but a lot of hype in
People
magazine, and I’m not going to answer his questions no matter what any of the rest of you say. And I’m not afraid of the local police either. Tasheba Kent is dead and Carlton Ji is missing, and I say all anybody has to do to solve this case is find out where the little bastard has gone. I’ll bet he’s halfway to San Francisco by now.”

Carlton Ji couldn’t be halfway to San Francisco by now. Gregor Demarkian knew that. The timing wasn’t right. At least, Carlton Ji couldn’t have gotten off the island if he was in fact what Hannah Graham believed he was, the murderer of Tasheba Kent. A woman with a head wound that severe might be able to walk around for as long as five or six full minutes before collapsing, but after that it would have been impossible. Tasheba Kent had to have been struck in the head just about the moment that eerie cackling laughter had started. She might have been struck by Geraldine Dart or by Carlton Ji or by one of the people who had gathered in the hall and on the landing while the racket was going on, but whoever had struck her had not then gotten off this island. The storm was going full blast. There would have been no way for the murderer to have gotten off.