And One to Die On (25 page)

“Well, it must be,” Geraldine said. “I mean, there couldn’t be two of them, could there? You have to get them over from the mainland by boat, and it isn’t easy. I know from experience. This isn’t the kind of thing one of you people could have sneaked over in your luggage.”

“No,” Gregor agreed, “it’s not that.”

“I don’t think all this happened while Hannah was taking a nap,” Kelly Pratt said. “I don’t think it’s possible. I think she must have been prowling around in the house somewhere and she doesn’t want us to know what she was doing.”

“It’s like I said before,” Richard Fenster said. “She took the black feather boa.”

Bennis Hannaford pushed her way to the front of the crowd and presented herself to Gregor. “What’s going on?” she asked him. “Do you have the faintest idea what this is all about?”

“It’s about misdirection,” Gregor said.

“Wonderful,” Bennis told him. “Would you like to be more explicit?”

“No. I’d like to find out where it is, first, and then I’d like to go on from there.”

“Where what is?”

By now, Gregor had considered every corner and piece of furniture in the room, and come to the conclusion that there was only one possible place.

“It’s got to be in the closet,” he said, moving forward and opening the closet doors.

Since there was nothing else in the closet—not even Hannah’s dresses, which she had left in her suit bag and not bothered to hang up—it came out as soon as Gregor opened the closet door. First it slid forward. Then it slid sideways. Then it came to rest in a heap.

It was the body of Carlton Ji, and it was in very bad shape. The head was full of scratches and gouges. The side of its face had been smashed in by a blunt instrument.

And there was a black feather boa wrapped around its neck.

W
HAT GREGOR REALLY WANTED
to know, right this second, was when the music was going to start. Surely there ought to be something, preferably played on an organ, to highlight the impossible drama of this moment. At the very least there ought to be thunder and lightning—but the weather wasn’t cooperating. It was still bad, but it wasn’t angry-bad. The wind was raging and screaming. Gregor had no doubt that if he looked out the windows, he would find that the ocean was a mess. Thunder and lightning, however, were absent. What was taking their place at the moment was Geraldine Dart’s keening, high-pitched and hysterical, as automatic and robotic as the screeching of a car burglar alarm on a residential street at midnight.

I am losing my temper, Gregor told himself. I am losing my temper and that is not a good or smart or safe thing to do.

The whole group had now pushed its way into Hannah Graham’s room. They were ignoring Geraldine Dart’s noise completely, but they were fascinated with the body of Carlton Ji. Gregor half expected one of them to step forward and try to take Carlton Ji’s pulse. Mathilda Frazier seemed to be on the verge of tears. Bennis Hannaford looked as if she wanted to go somewhere and chain-smoke. Gregor knew that she wouldn’t do it here. If there was one thing he had taught her in all their time together, it was that it was absolutely forbidden to smoke at a crime scene.

Not that this was a crime scene, Gregor thought. At least, it wasn’t the right crime scene. He wondered where Carlton Ji had died.

“If you think I’m going to let this corpse lie here like a lump for the next two days,” Hannah Graham said, “you’re out of your mind. I want you to get him out of here right this second.”

“I’m not going to do anything of the kind right this second,” Gregor said. He stepped over the body and looked into the closet. It was not a closet as closets in more modern houses would be understood. When this house was built, closets and cupboards were not ordinarily included in the design of rooms. Those functions were taken over by large pieces of furniture like wardrobes and armoires. This was a wardrobe that had been grafted onto the wall at some more or less recent date. The floor of it was a good four inches above the floor of the room itself. Gregor looked around in the dust in there and found absolutely nothing. He looked on the overhead shelf and found a couple of plastic dry cleaning bags, folded. He swore under his breath. In Armenian.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Hannah Graham told him. “As far as I can see, you’re just tampering with evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” Kelly Pratt asked her. “The only evidence that’s going to be found in here is the evidence that proves you killed him.”

Hannah bristled. “Oh, you won’t find any evidence like that in here.”

“Oh, shut up, all of you,” Mathilda Frazier said. “I’m tired of this.”

Geraldine Dart had stopped screaming. It would have been a relief, but Gregor didn’t notice. He had stopped listening to her a while ago. He bent over Carlton Ji’s body and looked into the wound on the side of his face. As far as Gregor could tell, it was the same as the wound on the side of Tasheba Kent’s face. They had to have been made with the same weapon. Gregor turned the body on its back and went at the black feather boa. It was wound around and around Carlton Ji’s neck, like the woolen mufflers his mother used to wind around his own on cold days when he was a boy in Philadelphia. Gregor got the boa unwound and put it aside, noting to himself how old and delicate it was. A couple of small feathers came off in his hands. Others seemed to be hanging by a thread. He tilted Carlton Ji’s neck back and forth, to get a good look at the neck, but there was nothing to see.

“All right,” he said out loud. “That was just for effect.”

“Effect?” Lydia Acken sounded indignant.

“A lot gets done for effect around here, haven’t you noticed that?” he asked her. “Screaming ghosts in the night. Corpses rolling downstairs. Although, that was probably accidental.”

“I’m glad you said that,” Richard Fenster said. “How could anybody possibly have set that up?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Last summer, I took the niece and nephew of a friend of mine to a movie about dinosaurs where the dinosaurs looked absolutely real. People seem to be able to do a lot of things these days.”

“Gregor,” Bennis said. “I think you’re losing it.”

Gregor was examining the scratches on Carlton Ji’s head. Actually, they were worse than scratches in some places. They were tears. Carlton Ji had been cut and he had bled badly.

“Before he died,” Gregor told them, not unhappy to see how mystified they were. He turned to Geraldine Dart and asked, “Where are the bats?”

“Bats?”

“Bats,” Gregor said firmly. “Before this man died, he had a major argument with some bats. There are bat droppings in his hair. And there are scratches and gouges on his scalp, which bled heavily, which means they were made while his heart was still beating healthily. There have to be bats somewhere in this house.”

“In the attic,” Geraldine said hastily. “We’ve had them in the attic once or twice.”

“That figures.” Gregor straightened.

“So what are you going to do now?” Bennis asked him. “Do you want to go search the attic?”

“No.” The last thing Gregor wanted to do was to go wandering around in a dark attic full of bats that might be just as unhappy to see him as they had been to see Carlton Ji. Bats in the United States were often rabid. As far as Gregor was concerned, the police could take care of them.

“What I want to do is go down to Carlton Ji’s room and really look around,” Gregor told them. “I want to find his notes.”

“You searched his room last night,” Kelly Pratt said. “You didn’t find anything.”

“I didn’t search his room,” Gregor told him. “I just looked around to see if anybody was there or if there was any sign that Mr. Ji had packed up and taken off. Although it was fairly obvious even then that he had to be dead.”

“Was it?” Mathilda Frazier looked utterly bewildered. “It wasn’t obvious to me.”

“It was obvious to
him
because
he’s
the great detective.” Hannah Graham sounded triumphant.

“I want to go down there and look through all his pieces of paper,” Gregor continued, as if they hadn’t spoken. “I want to get into his computer, if he brought one. Bennis? Can you do that?”

“If it’s something normal like an Apple or an IBM,” Bennis said. “And if he wasn’t too much of a hacker.”

Gregor rubbed fragments of bat droppings from his fingers. “Somehow, Carlton Ji didn’t seem to me to be the type to be much of a hacker,” he said.

“Why not?” Kelly Pratt demanded. “He was an Oriental.”

Gregor ignored this. “What we need to find out is if Carlton Ji was killed because of something he knew or because he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I tend to the latter theory, but I can’t just let it go without checking. So what I want to do next is to go down the hall and make a systematic—”

“My God,” Cavender Marsh said. “That young man is dead.”

They should have been expecting it, of course. They should have known that Cavender Marsh wouldn’t sleep forever. They should have been ready to take care of him. They weren’t. Even Gregor wasn’t. Cavender Marsh came tripping into the room with his spry old man’s jaunty gait, leaned down over Carlton Ji’s body, and paled.

“He isn’t just dead,” Cavender Marsh said. “He’s been hit. Somebody’s killed him.”

“Now, Mr. Marsh.” Geraldine Dart rushed forward and began to tug the old man away from the body. “It’s really quite all right. Mr. Demarkian is a detective, and he’s taking care of everything.”

“I know Mr. Demarkian is a detective.” Cavender Marsh spoke scornfully. “I read
People
magazine just like you do. Why has this young man been killed in my house? Does Tash know about it yet?”

“Oh,” Geraldine said. “Well—”

“Miss Kent is in the television room,” Mathilda Frazier rushed in with anxious brightness. “We haven’t had a chance to tell her about any of this as of yet.”

Cavender was incredulous. “Tash is in the television room? The
television
room?”

“The cat was on the roof,” Gregor said to the ceiling.

Geraldine Dart had finally managed to get her employer away from Carlton Ji’s body and over near the bed, but she hadn’t been able to stop him from staring at it.

“Incredible,” the old man kept saying. “Incredible. And what was he doing with the feather boa?”

“He was wearing it,” Hannah Graham said.

“This is Ms. Graham’s room,” Kelly Pratt said.

Cavender Marsh looked from one to the other of them, frowning. “I think I’m going to go downstairs and see Tash,” he said finally, shaking free of Geraldine’s grasp. “I don’t like what’s going on around here. I don’t think she’ll like it either.”

“But you can’t go down and see Miss Kent.” Geraldine grabbed for him again. “You just can’t. She’s resting.”

“For God’s sake, Geraldine,” Cavender Marsh said with contempt. “Tash wouldn’t rest in the television room. She’d rest in her own bed. That’s why we put in the elevator.”

“I think you should let him go,” Gregor told them all quietly. “I think it’s an excellent idea for Mr. Marsh to go down and see his wife.”

Cavender Marsh took advantage of Geraldine Dart’s stunned paralysis in the next moment to slip through her grasp and head out into the hall. He was humming under his breath as he went, or maybe muttering, it was hard to tell. Geraldine Dart emerged from her deep freeze into an explosion. She advanced on Gregor Demarkian with both fists raised and damn near hit him.

“Just
what
do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. “Are you out of your mind? To all intents and purposes, you’ve just murdered that man.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Gregor said mildly. “Why don’t we follow him downstairs and see?”

“Why don’t we follow him downstairs and get ready to administer CPR,” Geraldine spat. “My God, how stupid could you be?”

“I’ll tell you how stupid I’m not,” Gregor said. “I’m not so stupid that I don’t realize that anybody who had taken a quantity of sleeping pills sufficient to keep himself asleep as long as Cavender Marsh has been pretending to be asleep—would now be dead.”

Geraldine Dart hesitated. Her eyes widened, her lips formed another angry retort. Then she turned and ran out of the room, saying nothing at all. No one stopped her. While she and Gregor had been talking, most of the others had started to follow Cavender Marsh downstairs. They were like the residents of Utah and Nevada who had sat on their porches to watch nuclear test explosions in the desert. Only Bennis was left, and she wasn’t going to go until Gregor did.

“Are you saying that Cavender Marsh already knows that Tasheba is dead?” she asked him now. “Or are you saying that he killed her?”

“Let’s just say I’m saying that Cavender Marsh knows that there is a corpse in the television room. No, that’s not right. He knows that there is another corpse in the house that isn’t Carlton Ji.”

“You are saying he killed her,” Bennis said, narrowing her eyes at him.

Gregor shook his head. “It’s more complicated than that. Let’s go downstairs now, Bennis. I want to see what happens next.”

“You make it sound like a soap opera.”

“It’s not a soap opera, Bennis. It’s a silent movie. Everything that goes on in this house is a silent movie. Never forget that for a moment. If you do, it will make you crazy.”

“I’m already crazy. And I haven’t noticed anybody being silent up to now.”

Gregor began to nudge Bennis down the stairs. She moved along without needing much prodding. Below them, they could see the tag end of the little group of guests, crowding around the television room door—but not too closely around. An explosion was coming and they didn’t want to be too near it.

“Come on, hurry up,” Gregor told Bennis.

Then he hurried up on his own, without looking back to see if she was keeping pace. He got to the bottom of the stairs and swung around to the back. Mathilda Frazier was standing farthest away. She had her arms wrapped around her upper body like a substitute for a bulletproof vest. Richard Fenster was the closest, practically hanging through the television room door. He had a nasty, sardonic grin on his face.