By then, of course, Richard had been out of Cal Tech for some time and living in New York City. He had a room at the Y for a while and then a fifth floor walk-up studio on West Ninety-fourth Street. He bought his clothes at army-navy stores and thrift shops in Chinatown. He ate from street vendors and take-out places and called “really eating out” sitting down to a Whopper at a Lexington Avenue Burger King. He cared for only two things: his computer and his collection of Tasheba Kent memorabilia. Anyone who saw him on the street would have tagged him as a hopeless nerd, a rat-faced keyboard jockey, a failure.
He moved back to Massachusetts because he thought it was time to settle down, and because he liked Cambridge, and because the shop made sense. He sold movie memorabilia of every kind, from the ordinary to the very, very rare, from the silents to the present, and books and magazines about the movies, too. Reel To Reel had the best collection of artifacts from 1950s big bug movies west of the Mississippi. It had the best collection of props from 1930s musicals anywhere outside the MGM warehouse. Most of all, Reel To Reel was the acknowledged headquarters for every passionate cinema fan in the United States, and there were more of them than Richard ever imagined.
It was not Richard Fenster’s reputation as a fan but his reputation as a dealer that had gotten him invited to Tasheba Kent’s one hundredth birthday party, and he knew it. The party was a ruse. Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh were obviously in desperate need of money. They were going to sell all their things and use the cash for nursing homes or live-in help or whatever else it was people that ancient needed for their day-to-day lives. Richard supposed it was expensive to be old, although he didn’t know it for sure. He hated his parents with the passion of a Greek hating the Turks, and his parents were the only relatively old people he had any contact with. Richard did know that he was willing to spend a great deal of money to get his hands on a significant portion of that collection. He was sure Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh and their agents at the auction house knew it, too.
Richard Fenster’s idea of packing for a weekend was to stuff all his clean jeans, all his clean shirts, all his clean underwear, and his one extra sweater into a canvas duffel bag and sling the duffel bag over his shoulder. His idea of arranging for transportation up to Maine was to hitch. It was Katha Drosset who had talked him into taking the plane to Augusta and hiring a car from there, and now Katha was sitting on a tall four-legged bar stool shoved up against his five-drawer bureau, smoking a marijuana cigarette and looking bored. The bureau had come from the Salvation Army. Katha had come from Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence College. Richard had sex with her whenever she was willing to get on top, so that he could lie on his back in bed and stare into the eyes of Tasheba Kent when he came.
“So tell me,” Katha said, her voice sounding too high and tight coming through a rush of marijuana smoke, “just what is it you’re going to do up there all weekend, aside from meet this woman who’s been your idol forever now that she’s turned into a walking corpse?”
“Look the merchandise over.” Richard’s yellow velour shirt had a tomato stain on the collar. It might have been better not to have taken that one even if it had been clean.
“I bet I know what you want to do,” Katha said. “I bet you want to ask them all about the death of Lilith Brayne.”
“I wouldn’t bring it up. I’d probably get thrown out of the house.”
“They wouldn’t be able to throw you out of the house, unless they meant to drown you. I looked at that stuff they sent. It’s the luxury version of Alcatraz you’re going to.”
“It’s nothing of the sort. Is that my western belt under the bed over there?”
“You gave your western belt to that wino in Harvard Square who was trying to keep his pants up with one hand and drink muscatel with the other.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“It’s your rubber rattlesnake you see under the bed. Don’t you think it’s strange, that nobody’s ever written a book about it?”
“About what?”
“About the death of Lilith Brayne. It was a famous case at the time. All those books you have say so. And they all say Cavender Marsh murdered her and got away with it, too.”
“They don’t say that, Katha. If they did, they’d get sued.”
“I still say it sounds like just the thing. People are always digging up old Hollywood murders and writing best-sellers about them. I’m surprised you don’t write this one yourself.”
“I’m a lousy writer. And I don’t want to write a book about the death of Lilith Brayne. It’s Tasheba Kent I’m interested in.”