by Jane Haddam
“You look ready to pass out,” Gregor Demarkian told her. “But I only want you for a minute.”
“You don’t believe in that cufflink, do you?” Mathilda asked him. “You don’t think it’s a very important clue.”
“On the contrary.” Demarkian shook his big head. “I think it’s extremely important. I just don’t think it’s important in the way everybody else seems to think it’s important. If you understand what I’m saying.”
“No.”
“I just want you to come in here for a second. There are a couple of things I want to ask you about the auction.”
The “here” that Gregor Demarkian wanted her to come into was the library, dark and gloomy even though all its lights were lit, its three tables loaded with junk looking like they had no earthly reason for being.
“I wonder where the guard is this morning.”
“He’s still in the room over the garage,” Demarkian told her. “He isn’t due in until eleven thirty. I think the idea was to make the insurance company nominally happy, while not spending any more money than absolutely necessary.”
“Have you given any thought to the possibility that he might be the one who killed Tasheba?” Mathilda asked. “We don’t know anything about him. Even Geraldine only seems to know that he’s somebody from town.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Demarkian said impassively, “but I’ve also checked it out. It’s not feasible.”
“Why not?”
“Because all the doors on this house have automatic locks. You leave the house and pull the door shut behind you, and you’re locked out. And three different people saw the man leave by the front door.”
“Maybe he had a key.”
“Geraldine Dart says not.”
“I’m sure all the doors in the house don’t lock like that,” Mathilda said. “The French doors at the back couldn’t.”
“That’s true,” Gregor agreed, “but because of the terrain around here, those doors can only be approached through the house. You’d have to be an expert rock climber to get around to them on land even in the best of weather. Last night, the project would have been virtually impossible.”
“Oh,” Mathilda murmured, sitting down dejectedly in the nearest chair. “I suppose that leaves us with Carlton again. I wish we knew where he was. I wish we knew how he was. I keep thinking about Hannah’s scenario, you know, about him killing Tasheba Kent and then trying to escape and then getting drowned. It’s a terrible idea.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said.
He was standing next to the table with Tasheba Kent’s things on it, looking down at a set of black bangle bracelets with a pair of earrings to match. They weren’t among the more interesting items in the collection. Mathilda didn’t expect them to fetch much in the sale.
“There are much better things on that table than those,” she told Gregor Demarkian. “The cigarette holders are really valuable, especially the extra-long ones. The one with the silver inlays was the one she used in Vamp. She had it made for herself when the movie went into production and then she kept it. We think it’s going to bring in more than twenty thousand dollars.”
“For a cigarette holder?”
“Oh, yes. It may bring in even more now, after all of this. Auction buyers like mysteries and legends.”
Gregor Demarkian picked up the black cigarette holder with the silver inlays, looked it over, and put it down again. “Tell me. How was it decided, which items to put up for auction?”
“It hasn’t really been decided yet,” Mathilda Frazier said. “We’re still in negotiations. All these things on the tables are at least up for discussion.”
“Who will decide what will go and what will stay?”
“Well, I decide some of it. There are some things an auction house like Halbard’s just can’t sell. But I like most of these things. The more complete a collection like this is, even down to pieces you don’t expect are going to find a buyer, the better the auction tends to go. And sometimes you get lucky, and somebody like Richard Fenster comes in with a lot of money and a world-class obsession, and buys everything you have.”
“Do you think Richard Fenster would be interested in buying all these things?”
“I think he’d be interested in buying everything that belonged to Tasheba Kent, yes. He’s the world’s most famous collector of her memorabilia. He’d probably also be quite interested in anything belonging to Cavender Marsh or Lilith Brayne that had connections to Tasheba Kent.”
Gregor nodded. “Tell me something else now. Upstairs, in the room Cavender Marsh shared with Tasheba Kent, there are dozens of bound scrapbooks, covering every possible era in the public lives of the three of them—”
“Oh, I know,” Mathilda said. “I’ve seen them. Aren’t they wonderful? They’d bring hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. I told both Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent that, and then I told Lydia Acken, because I thought she could drum some sense into their heads, but nothing worked. They just don’t want to sell those scrapbooks.”
“All right. So Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent weren’t quite as willing to sell their things as I thought they were at first.”
“Oh, yes they were,” Mathilda said, “or are or whatever you want to call it. Those scrapbooks were practically the only things they held out. It’s Hannah Graham that everybody is worried about.”
“Hannah Graham?”
Mathilda shrugged. “You’d have to talk to Lydia Acken to get it all straight, because I don’t really understand it, but what it comes down to is that there are bases on which Hannah Graham can sue to keep at least Lilith Brayne’s things out of the auction. I mean, Lilith Brayne was her mother. And just because her father dumped her off on a relative or something, doesn’t mean she and her mother would have been estranged if her mother had lived. That’s why we invited her here, you see. We thought if we could get Hannah to come out here and pick a few of Lilith Brayne’s things to keep, then she would be less likely to try to stop us from selling the rest.”
“And would that matter? If she did stop you from selling any of Lilith Brayne’s things at auction.”
“It would matter a great deal, Mr. Demarkian. It’s like I told you. Auction buyers like mysteries and legends. This is one of the great Hollywood mysteries of all time, a scandal. Two beautiful older sisters after the same younger man. Passion and intrigue and law courts and newspaper headlines and a romantic ending in Hitchcockian seclusion. We’d do pretty well auctioning off just the things that belonged to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, but throw in the things belonging to Lilith Brayne and we’ll do spectacularly.”
Gregor Demarkian walked over to the table with Lilith Brayne’s things on it and looked down at it. Then he walked back to the table with Tasheba Kent’s things on it and looked down on that. There was a frown on his face and two deep lines of concentration across his forehead. Mathilda was fascinated. Was this the way a great detective worked? What was he thinking about? Had there been women great detectives, too? Mathilda made a note to herself to check it out.
Gregor pushed some things around on the table with Tasheba Kent’s things on it and then slapped the palm of his hand against the wood.
“A black feather boa,” he said. “There was a black feather boa in all the pictures of Tasheba Kent during the inquest.”
“We’re selling the black feather boa,” Mathilda said quickly. “It’s one of my favorite items.”
“It’s not here.”
Mathilda went over to the table with Tasheba Kent’s things on it and looked it over. Gregor Demarkian was right. The black feather boa wasn’t there.
“I’m going to have Richard Fenster’s head in a handbasket,” Mathilda said furiously. “He’s not going to get off this island until I’ve had every inch of his room, his luggage, and his person searched.”
“Why are you so sure it was Fenster who took it?”
“Because he’s the only one here who would have wanted it.” Mathilda wa
s pawing through all the things on the table. She didn’t see anything else missing, but that didn’t mean very much. She hadn’t memorized every item. “I’m going to have to get my articles list and go over every piece. Do you notice anything else gone?”
“No,” Gregor Demarkian said, “but I never had a very good idea of what was here. The shoes with the rhinestone buckles have been moved around on Lilith Brayne’s table, if that means anything.”
“It doesn’t matter if things have been moved around,” Mathilda said distractedly. “People are allowed to look.”
Mathilda Frazier’s mind was on one thing and one thing only: on Richard Fenster and what he had done to her, taking that feather boa and hiding it away.
Gregor Demarkian had gone back to the table with Lilith Brayne’s things on it and picked up the shoes with the rhinestone buckles on them. He was staring at them with a very curious expression on his face.
But Mathilda Frazier was already, mentally, someplace else.
3
Upstairs in the family wing, Cavender Marsh was awake and had been awake for nearly an hour. He was, however, pretending to be still asleep. Earlier, satisfied that they were all downstairs and likely to stay there for a while, he had sneaked out to the bathroom to have a good washing up. Then he had climbed back into bed, smoothed out his sheets and his blankets, and made himself lie still. He had noticed the gaps in the bookshelf full of scrapbooks and deducted that Mr. Gregor Demarkian had been here. He wondered if Mr. Gregor Demarkian had come in on his own or if he had gotten the permission of Geraldine Dart. Cavender Marsh didn’t think it mattered. The only thing that did matter was that nobody should know that Tasheba Kent was already dead.
Already dead, Cavender thought, and nearly burst out laughing.
Geraldine Dart was on the other side of the room now, tidying things up, moving things around. She was taking away all the bits and pieces of Tasheba Kent’s birthday, as if the sight of a Hallmark card in a red envelope or a two-inch-square jeweler’s box wrapped in red foil paper would give him a stroke. She was even taking the spools of unused gift ribbon off the top of the desk and putting them away in the long center drawer.
“What if he wakes up?” she kept saying to herself, in a guttural mumble that would have been enough to wake him if he had been asleep. “What if he wakes up?”
When Cavender Marsh woke up—officially this time—he had every intention of having the next best thing to a stroke, complete with screaming and crying and passing out. He had every intention of creating the biggest scene on record in the history of just about any. He was an excellent actor, one of the most talented and best trained of his generation. He knew how to give a convincing performance. He’d been giving one to his dear companion now for at least sixty years. She had never caught on for a moment.
“Oh, God,” Geraldine Dart was saying, holding a package of pink-and-white-striped birthday candles in the air. “Look at these. Just look at these.”
Cavender did look at them, for a minute, but then he shut his eyes again. Geraldine was getting very close to the bureau mirror. He didn’t want her to catch him when he wasn’t ready for her. He heard her pitch the package of candles into the drawer and then pick up something else.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” she said again. “This is incredible.”
Cavender Marsh had always thought that Geraldine Dart was incredible. He thought she was incredible now, fussing over birthday things that didn’t matter anymore. Nobody was going to be having a birthday in this house any time soon. He listened to her going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He listened to her moving things and opening and closing drawers. Finally, he listened to her walk past his bed to the door.
“This is absolutely unbelievable,” she said, very loudly, to no one at all.
Then she opened the door, went out, and closed the door behind her.
Cavender Marsh waited a little while, testing the atmosphere. There was no one in his room. If there had been, he could have felt them. There were no sounds in the hallway outside except for Geraldine Dart’s footsteps, and they were moving away.
Cavender Marsh opened his eyes. Geraldine had done a very thorough job. All signs of Tasheba’s impending birthday were gone. Even the little porcelain birthday cake music box had been whisked out of sight, and that had nothing to do with this birthday at all. It had been sent to Cavender himself by a fan from Tacoma five years ago. There had been a pair of red balloons near the window that were gone now. Cavender wondered if Geraldine had taken them with her or shoved them out into the weather to be battered into shreds.
The weather was really and truly awful. Cavender could hear it even if he couldn’t see it through the closed curtains. He had lived on this island off the coast of Maine long enough to know what it was all this wind and hail and thunder meant. It was going to be at least another day before they could get off this island, or get somebody onto it to help them out, and that was going to cause a major problem.
Cavender considered the possibility of going on with the pretense of being asleep for another twenty-four hours, but he knew it wasn’t feasible. Since he wasn’t actually asleep, he was very hungry. He also needed to use the bathroom and stretch his legs and do all the other things people did when they were alert and alive and expecting to stay that way.
A scene, Cavender Marsh decided, was his only way out.
Because he didn’t really care if that damned old bitch was dead.
But he did care if he stayed alive himself.
CHAPTER 5
1
THE PROBLEM IN CASES like these, Gregor. Demarkian told himself, was not in finding the solution. The solutions were easy, in spite of the confusion that surrounded them. From where he was sitting, he thought it would be only a matter of time. He knew (more or less) what had really happened in the death of Lilith Brayne. He knew what had happened in the death of Tasheba Kent, too. His suspect list was down to three people, and one of those remained under suspicion for purely aesthetic reasons. It never did to assume innocence where guilt was usually found.
The problem in cases like this was in knowing what they were really about, and understanding what was going to happen next. Criminals were not difficult to catch, only difficult to convict. Motives weren’t hard to fathom, even in the most pathological serial killer. It was details that tripped you up, every time. Gregor was fairly sure that they were safe now, that everything that was going to happen had already happened, but he wished he could be sure.
The next thing to do was to find Carlton Ji. Gregor knew that. Waking from a fitful nap to a vision of black storm clouds and smashing seas—he had left his window open when he’d fallen asleep this time; the weather was so black, there was no reason not to—he knew immediately that he should have insisted on looking harder when they first looked. Everybody else seemed to have forgotten about Carlton Ji, either accidentally or deliberately. Gregor didn’t blame them. The easiest thing to do, right now, with the whole bunch of them stuck together like this with no way to escape each other, was to demonize Carlton Ji as much as possible. Carlton Ji wasn’t around to protest. His disappearance was mysterious. They could blame him for everything and go on eating together, drinking together, and arguing with each other, without having to worry if someone was about to stick a tranquilizer in their drink or hit them over the head with a baseball bat. The second thing Gregor knew he ought to do was to look for the murder weapon, or at least for an instrument of the same kind as the murder weapon. Gregor would make himself look for the murder weapon itself eventually, because murderers were funny. If Gregor himself had committed a murder of this kind under circumstances of this kind, he would have dropped his weapon out a window and into the sea straight off, or gone out on one of the terraces and hurled it as far as it would go. There was no reason at all, on an island like this, to be caught with the equivalent of a smoking gun in your hand. Murderers got attached to their weapons, though. They began to feel about them the way shor
t-breathed family men with too many obligations felt about their life insurance policies. Gregor sometimes thought that killing, outside of war, must be a very difficult thing, even for serial killers like Dahmer and Bundy. Murderers always seemed to want to use the same weapon over and over and over again, as if it were a magic wand given to them in trust by their fairy godmothers. There had been a time in his life when Gregor Demarkian wanted desperately to know why people killed each other. He could remember standing at the side of a shallow trench next to a rural road in southwestern Massachusetts, looking down at the bodies and skeletons of fourteen girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and wondering what it was, what started it, what made it continue, what brought it to an end. Murderers who killed like that were supposed to be different from other murderers. In Gregor’s experience, some of them actually were. Surely Ted Bundy had been a unique case. Most of the serial murderers Gregor had dealt with in his time at the FBI had been surprisingly similar to the nonserial, garden-variety murderers he had dealt with in his odd little retirement noncareer of sideline investigations. Serial murderers broke down into two main categories: crazies who belonged permanently in mental institutions and people (usually men) with practical motives that just weren’t the kind of practical motives most other people could identify with. The kind of murderer Gregor now dealt with also broke down into two categories: people who exploded in blind passion or heedless rage, usually helped along by alcohol or drugs, and people with practical motives that just about everybody could understand. Members of the general public insisted on believing that there was a fundamental difference between someone who killed his wife to get the insurance and someone who caused five babies in an emergency ward to go into convulsions—and one to eventually die—because she wanted to show what a good nurse she could be in an emergency. Gregor could see how the cases seemed different, but he was certain they weren’t fundamentally. Fundamentally, all murderers were alike, and their motives could be reduced to a single simple sentence: I can get away with it.