And One to Die On(48)

“She put it on after she was hit,” Gregor said suddenly.

“What?” Bennis asked him.

“The wig,” Gregor explained. “She put it on after she was hit. That’s the only way it makes sense. She was very careful about her appearance. She overdid her makeup and she wore clothes that were much too young for her, but she was careful. She would never have put a wig on that way, half on and half off, without looking at it in the mirror and checking the fit, and rearranging it if she had to.”

“Maybe she did check the fit,” Richard Fenster said doubtfully. “She was a hundred years old. Maybe she looked in the mirror and her eyes weren’t any good, and she thought it did fit.”

“If that’s what she did, she would have had to have lost her sense of touch as well as her sight. There’s a good three-inch gap between where the wig ends and where her hair ends on the side without the gash, and the wig hasn’t been pulled into the gash on the side with it. Did she sleep in a bedroom by herself?” he asked Geraldine Dart. “Or did she share a bedroom with Cavender Marsh?”

Geraldine Dart looked totally confused. “She shares a bedroom with Cavender. What difference does that make?”

Gregor stood up. Tasheba Kent started to roll again. He leaned over and caught her. He wished they could move her into the living room or the dining room or anyplace else where she might stay still, but he knew they couldn’t do that. The police would want everything in place when they arrived.

Gregor stepped carefully over the body—it made him wince, but there was nothing else he could do—and started up the stairs again.

“Miss Dart,” he called back over his shoulder. “Come up here with me. I need you to show me which of those bedrooms belongs to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh.”

At first, Geraldine Dart protested. “You don’t want to wake him up out of a sound sleep for something like this,” she protested, running up the stairs at Gregor’s back. “You’ll give him a stroke. We need to find a way to break this to him gently.”

“Don’t worry,” Gregor told her. “I don’t think we’re going to have to break it to him at all tonight.”

Gregor reached the landing. Geraldine Dart rushed by him and went to a door in the middle of the left-hand wall. When she opened this, Gregor thanked her, passed inside the room, and looked around. The room was dark. The curtains that covered the windows on one wall were faintly backlit, as if there was a security light outside but not too close. The big dark bed had a canopy and a set of curtains but was otherwise a series of black lumps in the dark. Gregor reached around on the wall until he found the light switch and flicked it on. A chandelier almost the size of the one that hung over the foyer burst into light, lighting the room as cruelly as a movie set.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Geraldine Dart protested.

“Gregor? Gregor, what’s going on?” That was Bennis, coming in from the hallway. The rest of them were out there, too, moving around in a clump, because they were afraid to be alone. Gregor ignored them all.

He went over to the side of the bed closest to the door and looked down on the sleeping Cavender Marsh. The old man was tucked neatly under a top sheet and a pale blue blanket, both pristinely folded back and as unwrinkled as if they had been covering a doll. There was no doubt, however, that Cavender Marsh was breathing. His chest rose and fell rhythmically. His nose emitted a high-pitched, highly polite little snore.

“Why hasn’t he woken up?” Geraldine Dart asked anxiously. “Is he in a coma?”

“Of course he isn’t in a coma,” Gregor said. “He’s just asleep. He probably took a sleeping pill.”

“Mr. Marsh doesn’t take sleeping pills,” Geraldine Dart said.

“Then somebody gave him one, or more likely two or three.” Gregor went around to the other side of the bed.

At first, Gregor didn’t see anything unusual. The bedclothes were more rumpled there than they had been on Cavender Marsh’s side, but any bedclothes anywhere would have been. Gregor Demarkian had never seen anyone sleep with such perfect lack of movement as Cavender Marsh was displaying tonight. On Tasheba Kent’s side, the blanket was twisted and the top sheet was pushed down under it. Gregor pulled up the top sheet and untwisted the blanket and examined them both. They were clean. The pillow was wadded into a ball. Gregor unwadded it and found that it was perfectly clean, too. He almost thought he had been wrong in his conjectures, but then, as he was drawing his head out from between the bed-curtains, he caught sight of the ruffled border around the canopy over his head. Just at the start of the first curve, the border was soaked in blood.