And One to Die On(36)

He didn’t have to wonder for long. She came through the living room door carrying a long silver tray of identical cocktails, exactly eight of them, one for each person in the room, not including herself. Gregor had no idea what the drinks were. They looked like they had grenadine in them. Obviously, guests in this house were supposed to take what they were served and make the best of it.

“Here we go,” Geraldine said, giving Hannah Graham a swift look of wariness and delight that passed so quickly it might not have occurred at all. “Everybody take one of these, and then we’ll be ready for the arrival of the king and queen.”

The arrival of the king and queen turned out to be a production with a lot in common with the way Bennis Hannaford’s more ardent fans liked to conduct their introductions. First, a gong sounded in the hall—not a chime or bell or the bass note of an old clock telling the hour, but a real gong, the kind of sound that could only be made by a felt-tipped hammer smashing against a large brass disc. Then Geraldine Dart shooed a few stragglers away from the living room doorway, and the procession began.

Cavender Marsh came in first. He was a very old man dressed in a tuxedo, but he still looked spry and alert and admirably, almost miraculously, trim.

The Tasheba Kent who followed him was something of a shock. The actress was an ancient woman, bearing all the usual marks of great age. Her skin was as soft as tissue paper and looked as thin. There was a lot of it, with wrinkle after wrinkle falling down the side of her face and along the bones of her arms. She did not have a dowager’s hump, but she was hunched over. Her head and neck hung low between her shoulders. She was not really able to stand up straight. She was not fat, but her body had lost whatever shape it ever had. Her breasts did not curve upward and outward. Her stomach was a round mound jutting out from beneath her rib cage.

None of this would have been particularly disturbing, if Tasheba Kent had been dressed like an old woman, or even in simple conservative clothes. Instead, she was dressed like the silent movie vamp she had once been. Her dress was a tight black tube of beaded satin, hugging every wayward contour. Wrapped around her shoulders was a black feather boa and a beaded satin shawl. Around her forehead was a beaded satin headband; the hair it held back was jet black and as thick as a full-cream chocolate mousse. It was a wig and it looked like a wig, but it was less grotesque than Tasheba Kent’s makeup. That was so highly colored and so thickly applied, it belonged more properly on a clown. Tasheba Kent’s eyes were laden down with at least three sets of false eyelashes and rimmed with kohl. Her lips were painted into a bright red cupid’s bow. Her cheeks were rouged into two shiny bright apples.

“Good God,” Lydia Acken whispered into Gregor’s ear. “Like niece, like aunt. Here we go again.”

But Gregor didn’t think that was really true. It was most definitely not the same, what Tasheba Kent was doing and what Hannah Graham was doing. Hannah actually expected to fool people. At least when the serious competition—meaning women like Mathilda Frazier and Bennis Hannaford—was out of sight, Hannah thought she would be able to wipe away time. Gregor didn’t think Tasheba Kent had any illusions about the way she looked. She knew she was grotesque. She wanted to be grotesque. She was reveling in it.

Now why, Gregor asked himself, would a woman want to do something like that?





3


After the entrance, dinner was inevitably an anticlimax. They sat around the long table in the dining room, eating impossibly bland food off Royal Doulton plates by the light of three eight-stick sterling-silver candelabra. They made polite conversation with each other of the kind common to people who do not know each other well and never expect to. The dining room table was strewn with happy birthday reminders, including a set of little plastic balloons with “100” written across each one. People kept picking those up and commenting on them, as if they were significant in some way.

Gregor had managed to get himself seated on Lydia Acken’s right, so when the conversation turned to ghosts just before dessert, he was not desperately bored and searching for something new to occupy his mind. Neither was Lydia, as far as he could tell. They had been talking for the last twenty minutes about his early years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, about how he had felt about J. Edgar Hoover (“a bigot and a psychopath”), about why he had stuck it out (“the idea of the Bureau is a good one, if you see what I mean”). They had just gotten started on the way the confidential files had been disposed of in the three long days after Hoover’s death—“the blackmail files,” they used to be called; the dirt Hoover had on senators and congressmen and presidents—when Cavender Marsh said what he did about the concubine.