And One to Die On

by Jane Haddam

  “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.”

  2

  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 mo
ment 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.

  Still, Carlton Ji was missing. There was no doubt about that. They went to his room and found it empty. His bed hadn’t been slept in and his suitcase, although rummaged through, hadn’t been unpacked. Gregor didn’t think the rummaging had been a search job. It looked more like the kind of thing someone would do when he was looking for a clean pair of socks. They checked all the other bedrooms, too, just in case Carlton Ji had wandered off and fallen asleep and not been woken by all the subsequent noise. They checked the bedroom closets, too, and any containers—a steamer trunk in Geraldine Dart’s room; an oversize wardrobe in a guest room in the family wing—big enough to hide a body. Then they checked the rooms downstairs. They looked behind the living room couch. They looked under the tables in the library where the things for the auction were kept. They even opened the sideboard in the dining room.

  “There are those other floors,” Bennis told Gregor, after they’d failed to find either Carlton Ji or any trace of Carlton Ji anywhere else in the house. “Maybe we’d better try those.”

  “I think we’re going to have to,” Gregor agreed, “but I don’t see how we’re going to do it tonight. We’re all exhausted. Christ, I wish we could get hold of the police.”

  “I wish we could, too. Do you think Carlton Ji killed Tasheba Kent?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think he’s dead?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  The storm thundered overhead. “I don’t like this,” Bennis said. “I’ve never heard you be so uncertain. Usually when I ask you questions like this, you tell me it’s perfectly obvious what happened and if I just used my head, I could figure it all out for myself.”

  Gregor let Bennis go back to looking around the dining room and went out into the foyer. From there he could see Lydia Acken making her way down the utility hallway to the kitchen, hesitantly opening door after door and peering inside. Every time she opened a door, she seemed to shudder. Every time she closed one she looked relieved. Gregor went up to her and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Oh,” she said, jumping. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to squeak. I’ve just been looking in these closets, and every time I open a door I’m just sure I’m going to find—well, and then there’s another one, you know, another hallway like this, on the other side of the house. I don’t think I’m going to be able to stand it.”

  “You don’t have to search the other hallway as well as this one,” Gregor told her. “You can let somebody else do that. Are these all closets?”

  Lydia laughed thinly. “They’re all specialty closets. You wouldn’t believe it. There’s one with nothing but baseball equipment in it. There’s another one with nothing but rubber rain boots. This is an incredible place.”

  Gregor opened the next door down and found a closet full of sets of flatware. They were stacked in boxes on the floor and the shelves. He opened the next door after that and found what appeared to be chauffeurs’ uniforms, all separated neatly into sizes. Lydia Acken laughed again.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, somewhat shrilly. “Oh, dear. Do you think the two of them were insane? Or do you think these things were left over from a previous tenant? What would anybody want with so many chauffeurs’ uniforms?”

  “I think I want to give up on these closets for a minute and go look into the kitchen,” Gregor said. “Do you want to come with me? We can get back to this hall later.”

  “I want to come with you,” Lydia Acken said quickly.

  Gregor motioned her along the hallway and they went, Lydia staying just a little behind, as if she were sure a lion was going to jump out at them, and she didn’t want to be in the way of an attack. In spite of the fact that Gregor had said what he’d said about the closets, he looked in a couple more of them as they went along. One was full of old books that had not been cared for and smelled of mildew. One was full of plastic cat feeder dishes. They came to a heavy swinging door and Gregor pushed it open. Beyond it was a brightly lit room that was obviously a kitchen, but so large and well-equipped it could have served a small hotel.

  “Here we are,” Gregor said—and then he saw it, stuck to the wall next to the refrigerator, a perfectly ordinary everyday plastic phone. Gregor couldn’t remember another time in his life when he had been this relieved. He couldn’t remember another time in his life when he had been this desperate to get in contact with the local police.

  “Just a minute,” he told Lydia Acken.

  He strode across the room to the phone and picked up the receiver. He dialed 0 for Operator and stood back to wait. A few seconds later he hit the disconnect bar and started all over again.

  The reason it took so long for Gregor to realize what was going on was due to his own disbelief. It was such a cliché, he was sure that it couldn’t have happened. It was such an obvious next step in the drama, he was positive that no self-respecting twentieth-century murderer would have indulged in it. It was the kind of thing that happened in books but never in real life to real people with real things to worry about—except, of course, that it had.

  The phone was dead.

  CHAPTER 2

  1

  THE PHONE CORD HAD been cut at the side of the house just outside the kitchen window. Somebody had climbed up onto the sink and leaned out the window there to get at it, using a smooth-edged slicing blade from the knife rack and leaving it—the blade covered with bits of black rubber—on the drainboard when the job was through. This was not the worst of what was going on. It was just the thing that upset Geraldine Dart the most. For some reason, unlike the bloody death of Tasheba Kent, unlike the sight of Cavender Marsh in his peaceful uninterruptable sleep, the slashed phone cord made it clear to Geraldine that everything had now gone permanently and irretrievably wrong.

  It was almost dawn by the time they were all able to go upstairs, and even then Geraldine had to herd them there. She would have left them alone if Gregor Demarkian had asked her to. She was glad he didn’t, because the thought of the bunch of them loose in the downstairs rooms of this house made her skin crawl. One of them had smashed something round and heavy into the side of Tasheba Kent’s head—or Carlton Ji had, and to Geraldine that amounted to the same thing. One of them had given Cavender Marsh a lot of sleeping pills and cut the cord on the phone, too. Then there was the record, which had been played much too loud and much too long. Somebody must have gotten into the pantry and changed the settings.

  If there was one thing Geraldine wanted to do, it was to go into the pantry and get a good look at the CD machine. She had already been in the pantry once since Tasheba Kent died—ostensibly to check for Carlton Ji or Carlton Ji’s corpse—but with the way things had been then, she had barely had a chance to notice that the machine was, in fact, still there, never mind whether its volume control was up or if it had been set to replay. It was just about that time that the Demarkian man had discovered that the phone was out. Then everybody had gone running into the kitchen, hysterical and angry, and she had had to follow them. She hadn’t wanted to appear conspicuous. She hadn’t been hysterical then, because she hadn’t expected the lines to be cut. She had only thought that the phone lines were down between the island and the mainland. That happened without the need of outside interference at least once a month.

  The Demarkian man seemed to have forgotten all about the ghostly laughter of the beginning of this evening. For that, Geraldine was more than grateful. She knew she would have to explain it to somebody sometime. If she didn’t talk to Gregor Demarkian, she would have to talk to Dick Morrow, who served as sheriff for Hunter’s Pier, or to the state police. She didn’t want to talk tonight, while she was tired and upset a
nd hadn’t had a chance to think.

  Outside, the storm was really turning into something special. That hadn’t been in the forecast. Geraldine had been checking the forecasts all week. The worst she had heard was that they were supposed to get “a little rain” on Thursday night. This was more like the start of a wet-weather nor’easter, complete with howling winds and rain that turned unexpectedly to hail, pelting the windows and the side of the house with round hard balls. This house was so solidly built, it was possible not to notice that the weather out there was awful. You had to really listen to hear the hail. Geraldine was the only one who was really listening. The rest of them, she could see, thought things were going to get better when the sun came up.

  Which it would, of course. It was just that the sun might not come up until Saturday afternoon.

  Geraldine had gotten them all to the second floor. Now she shooed them in the direction of the guest wing.

  “I’m not going to set up breakfast until nine o’clock,” she told them. “Nobody is going to want to eat before then. You should all go to bed and get some rest.”

  “Rest,” Mathilda Frazier said. “Oh, God.”

  “I’m not just going to lock my door, I’m going to bolt it, and I’m going to put a chair in front of it, too,” Hannah Graham declared. “I’m sure I’m not going to be able to get any sleep. How can I know that this house isn’t full of secret passageways?”

  “Of course it isn’t full of secret passageways,” Geraldine said wearily. “It’s just a house.”

  “It’s going to be a house with a lien on it to pay the fees from a lawsuit when I’m through,” Hannah Graham said.

  “I don’t think you’re ever going to be through,” Bennis Hannaford told her. “I’m going to go to bed.”

  “I’m going to bed, too,” Mathilda Frazier said.

  “We aren’t going to make any sense until we get a little sleep,” Kelly Pratt said.