And One to Die On

by Jane Haddam

  “And to tell you the truth, the stuff last night wasn’t my idea, either. Well, I suppose you could have guessed that. It isn’t the kind of thing an employee does to an employer’s weekend party unless she’s looking to get fired, and I’m definitely not looking to get fired.”

  “You like working here?”

  “No, I don’t,” Geraldine said frankly. She sighed. “The old lady was a consummate bitch and Cavender isn’t much better. But it’s a very lucrative job. The salary is decent and there’s room and board besides. I’ve been putting quite a bit away.”

  “In an attempt to retire early, I hope.”

  “Very early.” Geraldine laughed. “Anyway, the idea for the ghost business was Cavender’s, and I didn’t like it much, but it seemed perfectly harmless.”

  “It was just Cavender Marsh’s idea? Not Tasheba Kent’s, too?”

  Geraldine shook her head. “Cavender was really worked up, you see, about what he kept calling ‘the potential for invasion of privacy.’ What he meant was that he was afraid the guests would get up here and want to talk about nothing but what had happened in 1938, and he just wasn’t going to have it. They didn’t talk about it, you know.”

  “Really? Never?”

  “Never while I was around. They might have talked about it when they were alone. The thing about this weekend, though, Mr. Demarkian, was that there were going to be so many people here they couldn’t control. Lydia Acken and Mathilda Frazier and Kelly Pratt don’t really count. They were all employees, in a way. They weren’t going to bring up anything Cavender didn’t want to bring up. At least, not for long.”

  “No, I can see that. Especially in the case of Mathilda Frazier. She wouldn’t want to see the auction collapse.”

  “The problems,” Geraldine said, “came with all the other people. Your friend Bennis Hannaford made Cavender very nervous because she insisted on bringing you. He was half sure that his uptight rich relatives had commissioned you to reopen the case and reinvestigate it and come to some final conclusions they could believe in. Cavender’s relatives never did accept the accident verdict. The ones who are still alive who were alive then just think that he’s a murderer.”

  “If they do,” Gregor told her, “they haven’t said anything about it to me. And they haven’t said anything about it to Bennis, either. She would have told me.”

  “Well, you and Bennis Hannaford weren’t the only problems. There was Richard Fenster, who was a wild card. There’s no telling what a fan like that will do, even a well-heeled one who can spend tons of money at auctions. And Carlton Ji was a reporter. Granted he was a reporter for Personality, which isn’t exactly like being a reporter for The New York Times, but a reporter is a reporter. The big worry, though, was Hannah. I mean, you can just imagine. Carlton was absolutely wild. At one point, he said he was going to sleep with a gun next to his bed.”

  “Does he own a gun?”

  “No,” Geraldine said. “But you get the idea of what things were like around here. So you see, when he decided that we ought to create a distraction to keep the guests’ minds off past history and onto the present, I went right along with it. It sounded a lot safer than guns.” She sighed again.

  “It surely was,” Gregor told her. “Were these plans discussed with Tasheba Kent?”

  “Oh, yes,” Geraldine said. “I think she thought it was all very silly and unnecessary, but she went along with it. I don’t think she minded all that as much as he did. I don’t mean her sister dying. I have no idea how she felt about that. I mean all the scandal and disgrace that came afterward. Her career was already over then. His was just getting into high gear. Tasheba was already a Hollywood legend. Cavender never really had a chance to become one.”

  “I think he’s legend enough because of the scandal. Everybody knows who he is and what’s gone on in his life.”

  “I know, but it isn’t the same thing. People don’t remember the movies he was in or even if he could act. Anyway, it bothered him more than it bothered her, but she went along with it, and I went into Boston one day last month and bought the CD player and the sound tracks.”

  “Good selection,” Gregor said drily.

  “I should have bought more of the generic ones,” Geraldine told him. “You know, 1001 Sounds of Terror. Werewolves of the Movies. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things you can buy. I brought the stuff back here and I got it all set up in the pantry. I was going to set it up in my room, just so I wouldn’t have to go running all over the house in the dark just in case something went wrong, but Cavender Marsh said that that was too dangerous. We didn’t want anybody to find the machine where it was too obvious that I was the one who was using it.”

  “So it was all set up in the pantry before any of us ever arrived on the island.”

  “Days before,” Geraldine confirmed. “Then, after dinner, when all the rest of you were having liqueurs and fighting with Hannah Graham, I went into the pantry and set the timer for one o’clock in the morning.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then nothing,” Geraldine said. “And then I went up to bed. I didn’t go to sleep. I knew I wasn’t going to get much. I stayed up and read until all the commotion started.”

  “And then you came out to us.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is your bedroom next to the one that Tasheba Kent shared with Cavender Marsh?”

  “Not exactly.” Geraldine sounded regretful. “They have an en suite bathroom. I’m on the other side of that. I couldn’t have heard anything, Mr. Demarkian, no matter what it was.”

  “That’s too bad.” Gregor sighed. “What about Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh? Were they supposed to come out when the commotion started?”

  “Oh, no,” Geraldine said. “That was part of the plan. They were supposed to stay right where they were. And then the next morning they were supposed to come down to breakfast and say they hadn’t heard a thing. We thought that would be spookier.”

  “So the first surprise you got was when Tasheba Kent started to come down the stairs?”

  “That wasn’t a surprise, Mr. Demarkian. That was a shock.”

  “Okay,” Gregor said. “Move forward a little. After we had done all the searching, after the rest of us went to bed, you came downstairs again.”

  “That’s right,” Geraldine said. “I’d already disconnected the machine, you see. When we searched, I made a point of being the one who went into the pantry, and I unplugged the CD and turned off the microphone. Then I went back after everybody was asleep to remove the machine and to check it, because I knew it had been tampered with. I just knew it. I was right, too. The volume had been pushed up way too high. And there’s this push-button doohickey that you can use to tell the machine how many times you want to play something, and it had been hiked way up, into the double digits, so that the laughs just played over and over again forever.”

  “You sure you couldn’t have done those things yourself, accidentally?”

  “Positive.”

  “Who do you think could have done them?”

  Geraldine threw up her hands. “I don’t know,” she cried. “I just don’t know. The machine wasn’t right out in the open. It was at the very back of the pantry. It wasn’t as if somebody could have just stuck their head in there and seen it. Somebody would really have had to be snooping. And why would they be snooping in the pantry?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  “Cavender and Tasheba and I were the only ones who knew about it,” Geraldine said. “And Cavender wouldn’t have fiddled with the controls himself. He would have sent me to do it. And before you ask, Tasheba wouldn’t have done it either. I’m not saying she couldn’t have. She was in incredibly good shape for a woman her age. But if she was going to do anything to that CD player, she was going to shut it off.”

  “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 Richar
d 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.”

  2

  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.

  CHAPTER 3

  1

  GREGOR 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 Bray
ne’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.