And One to Die On

by Jane Haddam

  “I thought that was Janey Lewis’s auction. What happened to Janey?”

  “Jumped ship for Christie’s.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, you’ve got to expect it,” Phyllis said. “Christie’s will actually promote Americans. So. Is there something you need from me, or did you just want to talk?”

  Mathilda sighed. “Actually, I just needed an antidote to Martin Michaelson. I just got him off the phone.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “I don’t know why I let him get to me, but I do.”

  “He gets to everybody. He knows all the right buttons to push.”

  “I guess I just wanted to hear you say I really was the right person to handle this auction, and Tasheba Kent isn’t going to loathe me on sight, and I haven’t lost my femininity, whatever that means—”

  “It means you haven’t stopped making yourself look incompetent,” Phyllis told her. “Personally, I insist that the women who work for me lose their femininity as soon as they accept my offer of a job.”

  Mathilda laughed. “I know I was being ridiculous. I just can’t help myself. That man just gets me going. I wish he’d do something awful and get himself fired.”

  “Bring this auction off successfully and I’ll get you promoted to senior AC,” Phyllis said. “Then he can die of apoplexy.”

  “He won’t, you know. He’ll just sit around at lunch and complain about how this company has been intimidated by the radical feminists.”

  “Go to Maine,” Phyllis said.

  Mathilda went back down the hall to her office instead. The phone was ringing, but she didn’t pick it up. It was probably just Martin, wanting to pick up where he had left off.

  Mathilda got her file on the Tasheba Kent auction out of her file cabinet, spread the contents across her desk, and began to go over the probable sale lists one more time.

  5

  FOR CARLTON JI, JOURNALISM was not so much a career as it was a new kind of computer game, except without the computer, which suited Carlton just fine. Two of his older brothers had gone into computer work, and a third—Winston the Medical Doctor, as Carlton’s mother always put it—did a lot of programming on the side. For Carlton, however, keyboards and memory banks and microchips were all a lot of fuss and nonsense. If he tried to work one of the “simple” programs his brothers were always bringing him, he ended up doing something odd to the machine, so that it shut down and wouldn’t work anymore. If he tried to write his first drafts on the word processor at work, he found he couldn’t get them to print out on the printer or even to come back onto the screen. They disappeared, that was all, and Carlton had learned to write his articles out in longhand instead. It was frustrating. Computers made life easier, if you knew how to use them. Carlton could see that. Besides, there wasn’t a human being of any sex or color in the United States today who really believed there was any such thing as an Asian-American man who was computer illiterate.

  Fortunately for Carlton Ji, his computer at Personality magazine had a mouse, which just needed to be picked up in the hand and moved around. It was by using the mouse that he had found out what he had found out about the death of Lilith Brayne. He didn’t have anything conclusive, of course. If there had been anything definitive lying around, somebody else would have picked it up years ago. What he had was what one of his brothers called “a computer coincidence.” The coincidence had been there all along, of course, but it had remained unnoticed until a computer program threw all the elements up on a screen. The trick was that the elements might never have appeared together if there hadn’t been a program to force them together, because they weren’t the kind of elements a human brain would ordinarily think of combining. Computers were stupid. They did exactly what you told them to do, even if it made no sense.

  Carlton Ji wasn’t sure what he had done to make the computer do what it did, but one day there he was, staring at a list of seemingly unrelated items on the terminal screen, and it hit him.

  “FOUND AT THE SCENE,” the screen flashed at him, and then:

  GOLD COMPACT

  GOLD KEY RING

  GOLD CIGARETTE CASE

  EBONY AND IVORY CIGARETTE HOLDER

  BLACK FEATHER BOA DIAMOND AND SAPPHIRE DINNER RING

  Then the screen wiped itself clean and started, “TASHEBA KENT IN PARIS.” This list was even longer than the previous one, because the researcher had keyed in everything she could find, no matter how unimportant. These included:

  SILVER GRAY ROLLS-ROYCE WITH SILVER-PLATED TRIM

  DIAMOND AND RUBY DINNER RING

  BLACK BEADED EVENING DRESS

  AMBER AND EBONY HOOKAH

  BLACK FEATHER BOA

  VIVIENNE CRI SHOES WITH RHINESTONE BUCKLES

  If the black feather boa hadn’t been in the same position each time—second from the bottom—Carlton might not have noticed it. But he did notice it, and when he went to the paper files to check it out, the point became downright peculiar.

  “It was either the same black feather boa or an identical one,” Carlton told Jasper Fein, the editor from Duluth House he was hoping to interest in a new book on the death of Lilith Brayne. Like a lot of other reporters from Personality magazine, and reporters from Time and Newsweek and People, too, Carlton’s dream was to get a really spectacular book into print. The kind of thing that sold a million copies in hardcover. The kind of thing that would get his face on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, or maybe even into Vanity Fair. Other reporters had done it, and reporters with a lot less going for them than Carlton Ji.

  “You’ve got to look at the pictures,” Carlton told Jasper Fein, “and then you have to read the reports in order. The police in Cap d’Antibes found a black feather boa among Lilith Brayne’s things just after she died. That was on Tuesday night—early Wednesday morning, really, around two-thirty or three o’clock. Then later on Wednesday morning, around ten, they interviewed Tasheba Kent in Paris, and she was wearing a black feather boa.”

  Jasper Fein shook his head. “You’ve lost me, Carlton. So there were two feather boas. So what?”

  “So what happened to the first feather boa?”

  “What happened to it?”

  “That’s right,” Carlton said triumphantly. “Because after the black feather boa was seen around Tasheba Kent’s neck at ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, no black feather boa was ever found in Lilith Brayne’s things in the south of France again. That feather boa just disappeared without a trace.”

  Jasper Fein frowned. “Maybe the police just didn’t consider it important. Maybe it’s not listed because they didn’t see any reason to list it.”

  “They listed a lipstick brush,” Carlton objected. “They listed a pair of tweezers.”

  “Twice?”

  “That’s right, twice. Once at the scene and once again for the magistrate at the inquest.”

  “And the only thing that was missing was this black feather boa.”

  “That’s right.”

  Jasper Fein drummed his fingers against the tablecloth. They were having lunch at the Four Seasons—not the best room in the restaurant, not the room where Jasper would have taken one of his authors who had already been on the best-seller lists, but the Four Seasons nonetheless. Carlton had no idea what lunch was going to cost, because his copy of the menu hadn’t had any prices on it.

  “Okay,” Jasper conceded. “This is beginning to sound interesting.”

  Carlton Ji beamed. “It certainly sounds interesting to me,” he said, “and I’m in a unique position to do something about it. I’m supposed to go up to Maine and spend four days on that godforsaken island where they live now, doing a story for the magazine.”

  “Love among the geriatric set?”

  “I can take any angle I want, actually. My editor just thinks it’s a great idea to have Tasheba Kent in the magazine. Hollywood glamour. Silent movies. Love and death. It’s a natural.”

  “Did you say those feather boas were
identical?”

  “They were as far as I could tell from the photographs, and there are a lot of photographs, and most of them are pretty good. The descriptions in the police reports are identical, too.”

  “Hmm. It’s odd, isn’t it? I wonder what it’s all about.”

  “Maybe I’ll have a chance to find out when I go to Maine. Maybe I can get someone up there to talk to me.”

  “Maybe you can,” Jasper said, “but don’t be worried if you don’t. They’re old people now. Tasheba Kent must be, my God—”

  “One hundred,” Carlton said.

  “Really?”

  “Among the other things that are going on during this weekend I’m supposed to attend is a hundredth birthday party for Tasheba Kent.”

  “There’s the angle for Personality magazine. That’s the kind of thing you want to play up over there. Not all this stuff about the death of Lilith Brayne.”

  “To tell you the truth,” Carlton said, “I’m going to have to play up the death of Lilith Brayne. My editor’s going to insist on it.”

  Jasper Fein looked ready to ask Carlton how that could, in fact, be the truth, when Carlton had said only a few moments before that his editor would take any angle he wanted to give her. Jasper took a sip of his chablis instead, and Carlton relaxed a little. At least they understood each other. At least Jasper realized that Carlton was going to hang onto his ownership of this idea. Now they could start to talk business for real, and Carlton had a chance of ending up with what he wanted.

  Carlton wasn’t going to talk money now, though. He wasn’t going to talk details. He was going to wait until he got back from Maine. Then he’d have more to bargain with.

  6

  LYDIA ACKEN SOMETIMES WONDERED what her life would have been like if she had been born fifteen years later than she was, if she had gone into law school when the law schools were trying to include women instead of keep them out, if she had joined the firm when it was desperate to prove that it did not discriminate in hiring or promotion on the basis of sex. Lydia Acken was sixty years old and a partner at Holborn, Bard & Kirby—but a partner in trusts and estates, which was where the firm put women in the bad old days. Lydia had long ago stopped wondering if she had any interest in trusts and estates. The answer was probably no, but in her time she hadn’t felt she had any choice. The most brilliant woman in her Harvard Law School graduating class—the woman who had, as a matter of fact, graduated first in her class—had ended up having to open an office of her own in the small town she had come from in Ohio. Nobody would hire her, because she wanted to be a litigator and she refused to do trusts and estates and she had no interest at all in divorce cases. “Don’t be like her,” recruiters would tell women also looking for jobs in their firms. “She acts like a man.”

  Now the firm was full of women, in every department. The younger women didn’t think there were enough of them yet, but from Lydia’s point of view, the change was astonishing. There were six women litigators in the firm now, two of them partners. There was a woman at the head of corporate liaison, when in the old days the fact that the firm hired any women lawyers at all was kept as secret from corporate clients as sex used to be kept from Victorian children. The new young women were different from the women of Lydia’s generation. They weren’t soft-spoken or particularly polite. They didn’t bow meekly to the idea that a professional woman simply couldn’t have a home and a family life. They not only got married—Lydia had been married, for twenty years, to a man who had left her in her fifties to marry his twenty-three-year-old personal assistant—but had children, too, sometimes rushing out in the middle of contract negotiations to deliver, and rushing back two days later before they’d even had a chance to catch their breath. Lydia was in awe of these young women, of their energy, of their intelligence, of their courage, of their wit. She wasn’t sure that even if she had been born fifteen years later, she would have been able to compete.

  Now it was four o’clock on the afternoon of the day before she was supposed to leave for Maine, and Lydia was sitting at the desk in her office, finding it impossible to concentrate. What she was supposed to be doing was going over the legal ramifications of the auction of the personal effects of Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, what belonged to who, what was already willed to somebody else, what the tax implications were for each sale of each item at each possible price. The situation was complicated by the fact that a fair amount of what Cavender Marsh owned might be said to be more correctly the property of his dead wife. The circumstances surrounding the death of Lilith Brayne were so chaotic and disorganized, Lydia could see immediately that the auction was rife with potential lawsuits. For one thing, the daughter, Hannah Graham, had never had her interests properly represented. If Hannah got herself some decent legal representation now, she could cause real trouble.

  This was exactly the kind of complicated mess Lydia had always been so good at straightening out, the kind of legal and emotional minefield she had always been so good at negotiating. Now she seemed to sit over the pages for hour after hour without being able to pay attention to them at all. Hannah Graham wanted to make a fuss to stop her father from selling her mother’s things? Well, so what? What did it matter if Cavender Marsh got to sell those things or not? Tasheba Kent wanted to make sure that her black feather boa went to some kind of show business museum, and not to a fan collector, because fan collectors sometimes did really disgusting sexual things with mementos of their favorite stars? Why, in the name of God, should that be Lydia Acken’s problem?

  What Lydia’s mind kept going back to, over and over again, was the sight of a storefront window on a side street in the East Village, a window she had passed by accident the first time, when her cab had been stuck in traffic and made a wrong turn. “LEGAL SERVICES,” the sign in the window had said, first in English, then in Spanish, then in some sort of Asian characters, then (Lydia hadn’t been sure about this) in the Cyrillic alphabet. Her cabdriver swore heavily in Spanish and speeded up. Turning the corner onto Third Avenue, Lydia was just able to catch the one sign on the one corner that hadn’t been torn down and hauled away: East Sixth Street.

  She had come back on a Saturday afternoon, walking down the avenue from St. Mark’s Place with increasing uneasiness, knowing that her plain denim skirt and white cotton blouse and blue canvas espadrilles were all wrong. The clothes she wore were all made of natural fibers, for one thing. They were also much too clean. The people around her looked not only worn, but grungy. They had dirt ground into the pores of their skin, so deep it looked as if it might never come out. Their clothes were almost invariably not only polyester and rayon, but the cheapest versions of these, the kinds that crackled like paper and chafed the skin. The children wore pants that were too big for them or too small for them or that just didn’t sit right on their hips—but there weren’t many children. The ones Lydia saw were either Spanish or Asian. They chattered away in languages she didn’t understand.

  When she got to the storefront with the sign about legal services in its window, she went in through the plate-glass door and sat down on a worn couch with green plastic cushions. All around her she saw women in sagging dresses and too-tight jeans, tired women and bruised women and women who looked as if they’d rather be dead. There were also a couple of men, but they kept to themselves, in a corner, as if they had stumbled into an old-fashioned hen party. The men looked as if they’d rather be dead, too.

  A very young woman with what Lydia now knew was called an “Isro” was sitting at a desk near the back, answering the phone and calling out the names of women who were then allowed to pass through the door behind her desk. The very young woman looked harried and annoyed. At the front of her desk there was a listing stack of brochures, printed in plain black and white, nothing fancy. “EAST VILLAGE LEGAL SERVICES,” the brochures announced on their covers. Lydia got up and went to the desk to take one.

  “Do you want to sign up to talk to one of the lawyers?” the young woman with the Isro
asked her.

  “No, no,” Lydia said, retreating.

  The young woman lost interest in her. Lydia sat back down on the couch and looked through the brochure. Like the sign out front, it was printed in four different languages. Lydia stuck to the English and found out that East Village Legal Services was made up of lawyers who devoted all or part of their time to providing members of the East Village community with the legal help they needed to “negotiate the system,” specializing in welfare law and “disputes with social services professionals” and battering and wife-abuse cases. At the very bottom of the English section, thick black letters spelled out IF YOU ARE A LAWYER. Underneath there was a short paragraph that said simply, “If you are a lawyer and would like to donate your time at EVLS, please contact Sherri at 212-555-2876.”

  I could devote all my time to something like East Village Legal Services, Lydia found herself thinking, at the oddest times, for days afterward. If I scaled down the way I lived, I wouldn’t have to work at all anymore. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting paid.

  It was a crazy idea, and it didn’t help her any with working out the details of the Tasheba Kent auction or getting ready to go to Maine. Lydia was even having a hard time packing. When she put her black wool dinner dress into her suit bag, she asked herself why anybody ever bothered to go to the trouble of dressing for dinner. When she zipped her mid-heeled dress pumps into the shoe pockets of her suitcase, she wondered how she could ever have decided to buy such silly shoes. Everything she did in her life was wrong, everything was silly, and nothing she tried helped her to settle down. Even her tranquilizers didn’t work. Her tranquilizers had gotten her through her divorce without so much as a headache.

  There’s something wrong with me, she thought now, staring at her desk, and it’s not natural.

  Natural or not, she had to go to Maine. She got her attaché case off the floor and began to stack her papers into it. At the end, she put in the brochure from East Village Legal Services, too. She had been carrying it with her everywhere for days, and she didn’t see why she shouldn’t bring it to Maine.