And One to Die On (28 page)

“It doesn’t seem to make sense, does it?” Gregor asked gently. “I take it you got caught in the act of removing the CD player by Richard Fenster.”

“Yes, I did. But I wouldn’t make too much of that if I were you, Mr. Demarkian. He said he followed me and I believed him. I don’t think he knew where the CD player was beforehand, or even that there was a CD player. And besides—”

“Yes?”

Geraldine got up off the vanity table stool and began to pace around. “I told him most of what I’ve told you, at least about why we played the disc,” she said, “but in spite of the fact that he’d asked for the explanation, he didn’t seem to be interested. He had this little smile on his face and he kept staring past my left shoulder. It was like—”

“What?”

Geraldine slapped her hands together. “It was like he knew something the rest of us didn’t, and he thought we were all damned fools because we hadn’t figured it out. It was as if he had the ultimate piece of insider information. It was just as creepy as some of the other things that have gone on around here this weekend. Creepier. I think he likes to keep secrets, Richard Fenster does. I think it’s a kind of sickness.”

“I think you don’t like Richard Fenster much,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Geraldine blushed and looked away. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I’m acting like an hysterical little idiot, I know that. And you’re right. Richard Fenster makes my skin crawl.”

“Maybe he’ll do the right thing and come up here to talk to me,” Gregor Demarkian said. His eyes were on the red folder.

Geraldine shook her head violently. “He’s never going to do that. You don’t understand what he’s like. He’s never going to tell anybody at all. Mr. Demarkian, if you want to know what Richard Fenster has on his mind, you’re going to have to go downstairs and drag it out of him. And you’re going to have to threaten him with something serious before you even start to get anywhere.”

Down in the dining room, Richard Fenster—who loved secrets just as much as Geraldine Dart thought he did, or maybe more—was thinking of giving this one up. He did not care for the turn events had taken in this place. Ghostly laughter on a CD hadn’t bothered him very much—and the death of that ancient woman rolling down the stairs hadn’t disturbed him enough to interrupt his progress to sleep—but since then things had been getting out of hand. The death of Carlton Ji changed things. So did the steady escalation of all the lunatic elements in all their various venues. Sometimes it felt that the lunatic events, and not the murder of Cavender Marsh’s paramour, had become the point of this entire weekend. That was not a good sign. Richard Fenster thought he understood murder. He was positive that he understood that particular murder, just the way he understood all the ins and outs of what had happened to those three people. He understood determination and decision and plan. What he didn’t like was emotion and eccentricity. There were a fair number of people who would have said that Richard Fenster was very eccentric himself. Richard knew it was a different kind of eccentricity. He would never have played these kinds of giggling, childish, senseless practical jokes.

Lydia Acken was trying to arrange a pile of crepe-paper streamers into something like a manageable ball. Richard took the pile out of her hands and compacted it expertly, a skill acquired after years of having to deal with the shredded newspaper used for cushioning items sent through the mail. He handed the newly formed ball back to her and stood up, ignoring the nasty little exchange then going on between Cavender Marsh and Kelly Pratt. Cavender seemed to be suggesting that Kelly was personally responsible for the abysmal performance of Cavender’s money market fund. Lydia put the ball on the dining room table and smiled.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s nice to see somebody being helpful to somebody else around here.”

“I’m going to take a walk,” Richard told her. “It’s beginning to get impossibly close in this room.”

“It’s impossibly close in this whole house,” Hannah Graham snapped. “When I get off this island, I’m going to go straight to my lawyers, and they’re going to get an earful.”

As far as Richard Fenster was concerned, anybody who spent any time at all for any reason around Hannah Graham was going to get an earful, even if they never did anything more provocative than breathe. He left the dining room. He went to the foyer windows and looked out across the choppy ocean to the docks at Hunter’s Pier. He could just about see them, in spite of the dark sky and the fog and the mist sent up by the waves slapping against the massive rocks of the island. He could see the dock lights, glowing red and white and green.

“None of you people has any backbone,” Hannah Graham was saying, her California caw knifing through the air like static on the radio. “You let these people get away with everything. And what for? What for? Just because you think they’re some kind of
celebrities.
”

Richard left the foyer and went into the living room. He was relieved to see that nothing had happened to it since the last time he had seen it. Nobody had overdecorated this room with crepe paper and balloons. Nobody had overturned all the furniture or knocked the pictures and the mirrors out of true. He looked around behind the couches and found them a little dusty, but otherwise uninhabited. He didn’t know what it was he half expected to find, but he knew that whatever it was couldn’t be good.

When he was sure there was nothing to see in the living room, Richard left it and went into the library. The guard should have been at the door there, keeping an eye on things, but he wasn’t. Donnie was sitting in the dining room, drinking a beer he had found in the kitchen and complaining of the hangover he had acquired last night. Richard thought it was probably not a hangover, in the usual sense, but a reaction to whatever pills he had been given. Gregor Demarkian was surely right about that. Richard didn’t care, as long as it left him free to look over the library tables on his own.

The trick, he told himself, was not to make a mistake. The trick was not to think you knew something that you only suspected. That way lay trouble.

Richard looked over a few of the things on the long tables—it was really too bad that this auction was never going to come off; he would have bought so much; maybe he could make some kind of deal with the estate and get hold of it anyway—and then took one of the black shoes with the rhinestone buckles and put it under the loose roll of sweater that hung over his waist. Then he took a shoe from a pair on the other table and put that under there, too. The second shoe was not important, not famous, not a trademark, not a prop. It was an ordinary blue leather pump in a style that had been popular around 1935. Its heel dug into his belly when he walked, stabbing him right through the cotton of his shirt and undershirt, so that he had to hold onto it when he walked. If anyone had seen him, he would have looked ludicrous. Fortunately, he thought, no one had seen him.

Richard crossed the foyer again and went around to the back. He opened the door to the television room and looked inside. Nothing had been disturbed in here either. Richard went in and closed the door behind him.

The linen sheet was back on the corpse. Richard wondered who had put it there. He took both the shoes out from under his sweater and put them on the floor.

Know, he told himself. Don’t guess. Always double-check.

He took the linen sheet off the corpse again and threw it down without noticing where it landed. Then he picked up the shoe with the rhinestone buckle on it and went for the feet.

He was so intent on what he was doing, he didn’t hear the door to the television room open.

His concentration was so perfect, that when the ball of cast iron hit him on the side of the head, he was completely unaware that he was not alone in the room anymore at all.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN KNEW THAT
the paper he wanted to see was sitting in Kelly Pratt’s briefcase, which was lying on the vanity table in Kelly Pratt’s bedroom. Gregor knew that because he’d seen the paper before—Kelly had brought it to him, as a kind of visual aid, during the conversation they had had about the mysterious 1938 disappearance of one hundred thousand dollars from Lilith Brayne’s French bank account—and because Kelly had felt it necessary to explain to him at the time where he kept his briefcase and why he kept it there. It seemed that Kelly Pratt never did anything because it was convenient. He had to have not only reasons but philosophies. He had to believe that whatever he was doing was tied into the Great Chain of Being and the search for the Holy Grail. Gregor didn’t remember why Kelly Pratt had thought it was so important to keep his briefcase on his vanity table instead of on his bureau. Gregor liked Kelly Pratt in a number of ways, but the man was intellectually exhausting.

Gregor packed up the papers he had spread across Carlton Ji’s bed, putting each back in its proper colored folder. The collection was pathetic, really. Carlton Ji hadn’t had half as much as he’d thought he had. He hadn’t had a third as much as he’d promised the publisher he was trying to interest in a book about the death of Lilith Brayne. He had, however, had something. And that had been the end of him.

Gregor really did need one more look at Kelly Pratt’s piece of paper. He put Carlton Ji’s folders on the top of the bureau and left the bedroom. This far down the hallway, he couldn’t hear anything coming up from the first floor. He went into Kelly Pratt’s bedroom. The briefcase was on the vanity table, just where Kelly Pratt had said it would be. Gregor sat down on the vanity table stool and opened the briefcase with a single flick of the spring lock. Kelly obviously didn’t believe in keeping his private papers safely shut away.

The piece of paper Gregor was looking for—the single sheet with the numerical exposition of when and how, after the death of Lilith Brayne, the French equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars had been siphoned from Lilith Brayne’s account—was sitting in solitary splendor in the pocket on the briefcase’s left-hand side. The deep well on the right-hand side was filled with folders and thick sheafs of paper marked “Real Property” and “Bond Investments” and “Limited Partnerships.” Gregor looked at these without much interest. (“Oil Lease Holdings—Cavender Marsh (John Day).”) Then he turned his attention to the piece of paper he really wanted to see. “Account of Lilith Brayne (Lillian Kent),” it was headed at the top. Underneath that was a thick paragraph in French that ended with the words
Mme Jean Day.
Gregor looked down the page at the columns of figures, the dates and times of the withdrawals, always made at the busy hours of the day and always in central branches in Paris or (in one case) at what was probably the single branch in the busy market area of a small town. Kelly had made a big thing of the fact that no withdrawal checks had ever been found, but Gregor didn’t think that was important. This was 1938 they were talking about. It had probably been 1939 before all the paperwork had been gathered together in one place and sent on to Lilith Brayne’s lawyers in New York. There were no computers, and the Nazis were swallowing Czechoslovakia and about to invade Poland. It would be more surprising if a few things
hadn’t
got lost.

Satisfied that he had seen what he wanted to see, Gregor closed up Kelly Pratt’s briefcase. He went down the hall to Hannah Graham’s room and looked in on the body of Carlton Ji, which was exactly where he had left it. Then he went out to the landing. Voices drifted up to him, probably from the library. One of them, inevitably, belonged to Hannah Graham.

“That phony ghost attack last night gave me a bad case of hives,” Hannah Graham was saying. “They’re still all up and down my back. They’re very painful. And the consequences could very well be
permanent.
”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bennis Hannaford said.

Gregor went downstairs. The dining room doors were propped open. Every once in a while a helium balloon tried to pop out. Strings were yanked and the balloon was dragged back in. Gregor crossed the foyer to the back.

As far as he could tell, they were all in the dining room together. If he wanted to stage a confrontation scene, he could do it in a minute or two, after he’d checked to make sure that everything was all right. The doors to the television room were closed. Gregor opened them, stepped inside, and turned on the light.

He didn’t see the body of Richard Fenster immediately. He was too busy looking at the television room couch, which was empty of a corpse and a linen sheet and everything else. The body they had laid out here just a few hours ago was gone. It hadn’t fallen to the floor or been shoved behind one of the small pieces of furniture. There was no closet in the television room to hide it in. Gregor knew it couldn’t have gone far. It would have to have been moved by one person—at the very most, two. There were all those other people in the dining room. Certainly what Gregor most feared could not have happened. The body could not have been taken out and thrown into the sea. Not just yet.

Gregor was turning to leave the television room to search the closets in the utility hall outside when he saw Richard Fenster’s body. Richard’s legs were sticking out from under a round occasional table that was covered with a pale blue embroidered cotton tablecloth. Gregor had been so sure that the furniture in this room was too small to hide a body, he hadn’t even checked. Now he did check. He looked behind sofas and chairs. He looked under the other occasional table. He looked into the one dark corner. There was nothing, just this single pair of legs and feet, emerging from a field of blue.

Gregor knew the feet belonged to Richard Fenster, because no one but Richard Fenster wore clothes like this in this house. He had been sure as soon as he saw the legs that Richard Fenster was already dead. That was why he hadn’t rushed to check on him. Checking on him now, Gregor was careful anyway. He moved the table, not the body. He got down on one knee and felt for Richard Fenster’s pulse.

Gregor didn’t think he had ever been as shocked in his life as when he felt that vein begin to beat against his fingertip. It was a very faint beat, but it was unmistakably there. Gregor dropped Richard Fenster’s arm and moved quickly to his head. The wound there was just like the other two he had seen, except that it was lower and a little off-center. The killer had been standing above Tasheba Kent when whatever it was had been smashed into the side of Tasheba Kent’s head. The killer had been standing above Carlton Ji, too. In the case of Richard Fenster, the killer had had to swing upward, and it hadn’t worked so well. Almost all of the right side of Richard Fenster’s face had been caved in. Unlike Tasheba Kent’s and Carlton Ji’s, very little of Richard Fenster’s skull had been destroyed, if they could get him out of here and to a hospital right away, he might get off without even a hair of brain damage.