“Oh, God,” Geraldine Dart said. “Oh, God, it’s still wet. How did it get like that?”
“She probably brushed against it as she was getting out of bed,” Gregor said.
“Do you mean she was already bleeding when she got out of bed? How could she have been?”
“Very easily,” Gregor said. “People do a great deal after they’ve had a head trauma, even if they’re the next best thing to technically dead. She was sitting up when she was hit, though. If she’d been lying down, there would be blood all over the pillowcase and the sheets.”
“Sitting up,” Geraldine Dart repeated. “I don’t believe that. You didn’t know Tasheba Kent, Mr. Demarkian. A hundred years old or no hundred years old, she wouldn’t have sat there and let somebody come at her with a poker—”
“Not a poker.”
“—or whatever it was. She just wouldn’t have.”
“All right, she wouldn’t have,” Gregor said, “so that isn’t what she did. She sat up in bed and listened to this person talk, and when she wasn’t expecting it this person whipped out a weapon and coshed her on the head. Then she started acting very strangely.”
“You mean she put on the wig,” Bennis said, edging closer.
Gregor checked the wall behind the place where Tasheba Kent’s pillow had been. There was a faint stain there that might have been fresh blood. He wasn’t going to know for sure until he got some lab technicians to check it out. He walked away from the bed and looked at the carpet next to it. There were no stains there, but a little farther along, near the bed’s foot, there was an unmistakable red splotch. They would have to check the nightgown under Tasheba Kent’s negligee. There had certainly been no splotch of blood on the negligee. That meant that Tasheba Kent not only hadn’t been wearing it in bed—interesting enough, Gregor thought, if she had been talking to a visitor—but hadn’t been wearing it when she went to her vanity table, either. Gregor was sure that Tasheba Kent had been going to her vanity table. There was an empty wig stand there.
Gregor traced Tasheba Kent’s possible path around the bed to the vanity table, but didn’t find any bloodstains. He sat down at the vanity table and looked over the jars and implements without really knowing what most of them were. There weren’t any bloodstains there, either. The wig stand was different. There was a big red-brown smear on the back of it, at the place on a person that would have been the start of the nape of the neck. Gregor got a Kleenex out of his pocket to protect the stand from his fingerprints and picked it up. Then he put the stand down again and sighed. Everything he saw confirmed the conjectures he had made downstairs about what had happened up here tonight, but it was impossible to get any really important information out of physical evidence without the help of the lab technicians.
“Tell me,” he said, turning to Geraldine Dart, “what time did she come up here tonight?”
“Time? I don’t know if I could pinpoint a time. It was right after dinner. Maybe nine thirty or ten o’clock.”
“It was ten minutes to ten when we all went into the living room,” Bennis said. “I checked my watch.”
Gregor nodded. “Now, Miss Dart. Tasheba Kent didn’t come up to her room alone.”
“No, no, of course not,” Geraldine Dart said. “I brought her up here myself. I used the elevator at the back of the foyer.”
“And you settled her down to sleep.”
“I helped her to get ready for bed and then I gave her her glasses and the book she’s been reading. Miss Kent always read a little before she went to bed. Of course, she didn’t read very well anymore. She could barely see words on a page. But she’d read a paragraph or two every night.”
“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.”