by Jane Haddam
“I thought so myself in the beginning,” Gregor said judiciously, “but I’ve changed my mind. I can think of a couple of perfectly good reasons for murdering this woman.”
“Name one,” Cavender Marsh demanded.
Gregor could have named two, but he didn’t get the chance. The house was suddenly torn apart by a giggle and a laugh, and then a scream rent the air, powerful and piercing.
“Oh, my God,” Mathilda Frazier said from outside in the foyer. “It’s back again.”
“What is that?” Cavender Marsh had gone white.
“That’s your ghost,” Gregor told him. “Last night it was doing the sound track from The House on Haunted Hill. Tonight I think we’re doing The Conqueror Worm. It might be The Tingler.”
Bennis stuck her head into the television room. “Gregor?”
“I’m coming,” Gregor said.
3
The first thing Gregor Demarkian noticed when he got out to the foyer was Geraldine Dart. She looked like a character in a Twilight Zone episode or a child playing statues. Her eyes were wide and wild. Her mouth was open. Her hands were out in the air in front of her, stiff and useless. Gregor went past her and out toward the front door. The sound was louder there and the light was better. It didn’t take him very long to find what he was looking for. Up at the top corners of the front door, imbedded discreetly in the walls, were two tiny speakers for an intercom system.
“All right,” he said. “Miss Dart?”
Geraldine Dart unfroze. “Oh, dear,” she whimpered. “Oh, dear. I don’t know what’s happening. I really don’t.”
“Don’t worry about what’s happening for the moment,” Gregor told her. “Answer a few questions for me, please. Is there a microphone for this intercom system in the foyer?”
“What? Oh. Oh, no. There aren’t many microphones. We didn’t need them. We just had them in the bedrooms and the bathrooms upstairs. And there’s one in the pantry.”
“In the pantry?”
“It was a mistake. We got some local man from Hunter’s Pier to put the system in and he made a mistake. And it wasn’t worthwhile to correct it. Oh, my God. The pantry.”
“What is she talking about?” Richard Fenster demanded.
“I’ve got to go,” Geraldine Dart cried.
She turned away from them and rushed down the hall to the kitchen. One or two of the others started to follow, but when they saw that Gregor wasn’t going to, they stopped. Gregor stayed where he was and waited. Screams crashed down around them, soprano-high and hysterical. Gregor was more and more sure that what he was hearing was from The Tingler. In no time at all, Geraldine Dart came rushing back, even more frightened and frantic than she had been before.
“It’s not there,” she burst out. “It’s not there. I don’t understand it.”
“Did you leave it there?” Gregor asked her. “It was—what? A CD player? A tape machine?”
“A CD player,” Geraldine replied miserably. “And of course I didn’t leave it there. I wasn’t that stupid. I took it upstairs and put it in my room.”
“Is there a microphone in your room?”
“Yes, there is. There are microphones in all the rooms on the family wing.”
“It’s probably still there, then,” Gregor said. “I think we’d all appreciate it if you went upstairs and turned it off.”
“Wait a minute,” Kelly Pratt said brusquely. “Do you mean she did it on purpose? She put some kind of record on a stereo and made us all jump out of our skins?”
“If you’d been listening to me, you’d have known that all along,” Hannah Graham said. “I told you they were setting us all up. I told you.”
“Go,” Gregor told Geraldine Dart. “The noise is getting on my nerves.”
“It’s getting on everybody’s nerves,” Mathilda Frazier said.
“But I didn’t do this.” Geraldine Dart was nearly in tears herself now. “I didn’t do this. I have no idea how it happened.”
“It doesn’t matter who did it,” Gregor told her. “It only matters that you make it stop.”
Cavender Marsh pushed forward. “It matters to me who did it.”
“She was the one who did it last night,” Richard Fenster said. “I caught her at it when she was trying to take the stuff away.”
Geraldine Dart backed away from them. “I’m going,” she said. “I’m going right away. And if it’s not in my bedroom, I’ll check all the others.”
She ran to the staircase and then up, up and up, pounding on the stairs as she went.
Gregor turned his attention back to the rest of them. Gregor had filed away quite a bit of information for future use, but he didn’t want to go into any of it now. Richard Fenster had caught Geraldine Dart removing the CD player from the pantry after the incident last night. That was interesting. In spite of all the melodramatic overreacting, Cavender Marsh’s blood pressure didn’t seem to have been raised a bit by any of this nonsense, including sudden bloodcurdling screams loud enough to shake the rafters of his home. That was interesting, too. Most interesting of all was what hadn’t happened, last night, while all that insane laughter was going on and Tasheba Kent’s body was rolling down the stairs. It was what hadn’t happened that made Gregor so sure that he was right.
Unfortunately, being right wasn’t enough. Gregor Demarkian was going to have to play this farce through right to the end, whether he liked it or not, and all the rest of these people were going to have to play it right through with him. They definitely weren’t going to like it, but there was nothing Gregor could do about that, either.
There was a sudden bounce and skip and giggle above their heads—Geraldine taking the disc off the CD upstairs and doing it badly—and then there was silence in the house again, broken only by the wind.
“I’m going to sue somebody,” Hannah Graham declared. “I’m going to sue everybody in sight.”
Gregor sighed. “All right,” he said, “let’s make a guess. The dining room or the living room?”
“The dining room or the living room for what?” Lydia Acken asked.
“For the next act in this circus,” Gregor said. “I plump for the dining room myself. It’s easy to close off, which means it would be easy to hide whatever you wanted to do in there, especially if you had to take a little time.”
“Where’s that security guard?” Bennis asked suddenly. “I haven’t seen him all day. Isn’t that odd?”
“It’s very odd,” Gregor agreed, “but it’s not what we’re going to investigate right now. Now we’re going to go into the dining room and see what we can find there.”
It was obvious from the looks on their faces that there were now quite a few of them who thought, as Hannah Graham had always thought, that he was crazy. They followed him anyway, and they were rewarded.
Like Hannah Graham’s bedroom, the dining room had been decorated for a birthday party, but much more elaborately. There were so many helium-filled balloons it was impossible to see any of the upper third of the chandelier. The chairs were literally upholstered in crepe paper, wound around and around the backs and seats and legs in different colors. A banner spelling out “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” had been attached to one wall. Another banner spelling out the number 100 had been attached to the opposite wall. Every place at the table had been set with special happy birthday paper napkins and special happy birthday paper plates and special happy birthday paper cups. In the middle of the table there was a big quilted crepe-paper-and-cardboard sculpture spelling out “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” in fat, bloated red, white, and blue letters. It was like a children’s party with a thyroid condition.
“Oh, my God,” Mathilda Frazier said, for what felt to Gregor like the two thousandth time since she had arrived on this island.
Gregor wasn’t having any.
“Excuse me,” he told the assembled company. “I’m going upstairs to search Carlton Ji’s room. If any of you should decide that you have something to tell me, I’d be glad of the company.”
“That’s it?” Richard Fenster demanded hotly. His face was red. “That’s all you’ve got to say about—about all this?”
“That’s it.”
“The great detective,” Hannah Graham said.
“The great detective has work to do,” Gregor told her impassively. “Oh. There is one more thing. Mr. Pratt?”
“What is it?” Kelly Pratt asked.
“Mr. Pratt, when Geraldine Dart comes back downstairs, I would very much appreciate it if you would ask her for the keys to the chauffeur’s apartment. Then go over there and release the security guard. He’ll probably appreciate it, too. It’s my guess that you’ll find him tied up on the floor of the bedroom or the bathroom, or possibly on the bed itself. I’m sure he won’t have been hidden too well. There wouldn’t have been any point to it, and it would have been too difficult. All right?”
“But Gregor, wait,” Bennis said. “Won’t this solve everything? Won’t he be able to tell us who tied him up?”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “I think he was probably sent over there last night carrying a nicely doctored bottle of something ninety proof and expensive. Now, if you will excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to go.”
And go Gregor Demarkian did, steadily and relentlessly, out of the dining room and through the foyer and up the stairs.
He’d had as much as he wanted to take of the whole lot of them.
CHAPTER 2
1
AS SOON AS GERALDINE Dart heard that Gregor Demarkian wanted to talk to people—“to anyone who has something to tell him,” was the way Richard Fenster explained it to her—she knew she ought to be the first one upstairs. But the thought of it made her weak and teary, and the idea of spending half an hour or so trying to unravel what all this had started out to be—it was just impossible, that was all. She had gone upstairs and found the CD player sitting on top of her bureau, playing the music from The Tingler into the intercom microphone embedded in her bedroom wall. The night before she had left the CD player on the shelf in her closet with the little stack of plastic disc casings beside it: Howls and Whispers, The House on Haunted Hill, Screams in the Night, The Tingler, Song of the Werewolf. It hadn’t been hidden. Anybody could have come in and found it, if they had known she had it. Richard Fenster might have told his story to anyone at all. Geraldine snatched the disc off the machine, then turned the intercom microphone off. She’d had to suppress an urge to shout imprecations into it or to tell them all to get out of the house. They couldn’t get out of the damn house if they wanted to, and most of them probably desperately wanted to. Then Geraldine had gone downstairs and found them all in the dining room, and the mess there, and she had just wanted to sit in a chair and cry. It was going to take hours to get all this nonsense cleaned up. It might take days to chase down all the balloons, which had already started to drift into the foyer and other rooms. Then there was Donnie Hacket to take care of. Donnie Hacket was the man they had hired to act as a security guard. Donnie wasn’t much security and he wasn’t much of a guard. He drank when he could afford to, and he slept too much even when he couldn’t. Gregor Demarkian had sent Kelly Pratt over to fetch him, and Kelly had found him tied up with bed linen and laundry rope on the bathroom floor of the chauffeur’s apartment, and suddenly Donnie was threatening lawsuits as frequently and fervently as Hannah Graham.
Eventually, Geraldine decided to go back upstairs to see Gregor Demarkian because it was the only way she could think of to get any peace and quiet. Mathilda Frazier and Lydia Acken were busy stripping crepe paper from chairs and folding up the quilted crepe-paper-and-cardboard sculpture. The men were sitting around complaining. Hannah Graham was with them. The sniping was awful. It had been bad all weekend, but now it was ultrafast and supernasty. It was as if they had all decided that they had nothing to lose. They might as well be thoroughly, outrageously, unrepentantly hateful. It was more fun than staring out the windows and trying too hard to be very, very nice.
“Tasheba always hated fans,” Cavender Marsh told Richard Fenster. “She said they were vampires of the spirit.”
“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with the surgery,” Mathilda Frazier told Hannah Graham spitefully. “You look older than your father does.”
“Do you always have to act as if you were right in the middle of a Rotary Club meeting?” Richard Fenster asked Kelly Pratt. “We have two people dead here, and you’re bouncing around like you’re cheerleading for the Chamber of Commerce.”
The only people who weren’t behaving like absolute scum were Lydia Acken and Bennis Hannaford. Geraldine knew from experience that Lydia was always polite to the point of the ridiculous. She could only decide that Bennis Hannaford had decided mentally and emotionally to distance herself from the rest of them. After a little hesitation, Bennis had gone to work helping Mathilda and Lydia clean up. Prodded by comments from Cavender Marsh and Hannah Graham—“Oh, look,” Hannah had said at one point. “The great American writer knows just what to do with Scotch tape.”—Bennis behaved as if she were blind, deaf, and dumb. Geraldine wasn’t used to thinking of Hannah Graham as Cavender Marsh’s daughter except in a very formal, abstract way. Now she saw that there was nothing at all abstract about the relationship. Hannah Graham might have been brought up by an aunt. Cavender Marsh might not have seen his daughter in nearly sixty years. But it didn’t matter. They were a lot alike.
“What I don’t understand is why people with noses like yours wear their hair forward the way you do,” Hannah told Geraldine at one point. “I mean, it only makes the protuberance much more prominent, doesn’t it?”
Geraldine knew she had a large nose. She had heard enough about it in her life. She had stopped really minding years ago. For some reason, however, Hannah’s comment really got to her. She was piling paper party plates in a stack and nesting paper party cups together. She stopped where she was and swung around to look at Hannah Graham.
“At least it’s my own nose,” Geraldine told her.
Hannah Graham sniffed. “Not being able to afford the necessary medical attention,” she said, “is hardly something to be proud of.”
Keeping her temper would be something to be proud of. Geraldine knew that. If she stayed in this room much longer, she was going to blow up. She was going to hit somebody on their cosmetically improved nose. Carefully, she put the stack of paper plates and the nested cups at the end of the dining room table. She wiped her palms across the top of her skirt and patted her hair. She looked at Bennis Hannaford tying a dozen balloons together with a piece of string.
“Don’t look in the mirror,” Hannah Graham said. “Every time you crack a mirror like that, it’s seven years’ bad luck.”
Geraldine went out of the dining room and into the foyer. She went up the stairs and down the guest room wing. Carlton Ji’s door was open and light was spilling out. Geraldine stopped in the doorway. Gregor Demarkian sat on the bed, taking stapled sheafs of paper out of a red cardboard folder. The bed was full of other papers and other cardboard folders. One of the cardboard folders, the bright orange one, was labeled “LILITH BRAYNE” in tall black letters. Geraldine raised her hand to the door and knocked.
“Mr. Demarkian?”
“Come in,” Gregor said, barely looking up. “Grab the stool and sit down.”
Geraldine did grab the stool and sit down. It gave her something to do for a moment. Gregor was still looking over the papers from the red folder. Every once in a while he would nod and mutter to himself. Finally, he pushed the folder away from himself and looked up at Geraldine, for real, for the first time.
“He was writing a book,” he told Geraldine. “He’d collected some very interesting stuff.”
“About Tasheba Kent?”
“About the death of Lilith Brayne. And about that black feather boa.”
Geraldine grimaced. “God, I’m beginning to hate that thing. Not that I ever liked it. It’s been sitting around the house for years, collecti
ng dust. But now. Why do you think it was wrapped around his neck? Was something done to his neck that it was covering up?”
“Not that I could see. He may have had it with him when he died.”
“But why?”
Gregor Demarkian tapped the red folder. “He has quite a bit of documentation here about a rather odd glitch in the evidence records that exist from 1938.”
“What kind of glitch?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “on the night Lilith Brayne died, one of the things listed as being at the scene—at the general scene, you understand, in the villa, not in the water with her—was a black feather boa. That’s the only time a black feather boa is mentioned among her things. When the possessions list was made for the inquest, no black feather boa was on it. No black feather boa was ever mentioned in connection with Lilith Brayne again. But a black feather boa was worn almost every day during the investigation by Tasheba Kent, and worn very publicly, too. You can see it in every photograph of her from the time.”
“That’s odd,” Geraldine said.
“That’s very odd,” Gregor agreed. His finger absently tapped the red folder again.
“Maybe the explanation is something very simple,” Geraldine suggested. “Maybe it was just a mistake. Or maybe it belonged to Tasheba all along, and she’d left it at the villa, and Cavender sneaked it back to her after Lilith died.”
“That’s not bad. We’d have to find out if Tasheba Kent was ever in that villa before her sister died. The women I know wouldn’t have had her in the same town, under the circumstances, but movie stars seem to be unusual people.”
“Even ex-movie stars are that,” Geraldine said. She stared at her hands. “Well. Here I am. Somebody told me that if any of us had anything to tell you, we should come right up, so—”
“So you’ve come to tell me about the laughs in the night,” Gregor said.
Geraldine nodded. “But I don’t know what happened this afternoon. I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“I didn’t think you did.”