“Did he seem all right to you at that point?”
“Yes, he did, Mr. Demarkian, but I didn’t stay long after that. Cavender doesn’t need to be helped to bed in the same way Tasheba does—did. And I was tired. I made sure everybody had something to drink and knew where to get more, and then I went up to bed.”
“What about you?” Gregor asked Bennis.
“I finished my liqueur and went up to bed,” she said. “That was later than you’d think. Almost quarter to eleven. I was talking to Mathilda about buying books at auction. If it hadn’t been for Hannah Graham, I think we both would have stayed longer. We were having a very interesting conversation.”
“What did Hannah Graham do?”
Bennis made a face. “She behaved like Hannah Graham,” she said. “She’s impossible, Gregor, really. She’s the most abusive woman.”
“Practically the only way you could get away from her last night was to go into the library,” Geraldine said. “I told her at one point that she might want to look over her mother’s things, that Cavender wouldn’t be averse to her having some of them, and she acted as if I’d just threatened to poison her. She didn’t follow you when you went in there, either. And I know she wanted to talk to you.”
The idea that Hannah Graham had wanted to talk to him—and might still want to talk to him—was not a comforting thought, but Gregor put it firmly out of his mind for the moment.
“Do either of you remember Cavender Marsh going to bed?” he asked the two women.
Both Geraldine Dart and Bennis Hannaford shook their heads.
“Do either of you remember him acting at all strangely? Suddenly and overwhelmingly tired? Or as if it seemed he’d had too much to drink when you knew he hadn’t.”
Both women shook their heads again.
Gregor got up and went to the door of the bedroom to look out on the hall. They were there, standing in a little knot under the dim glow of the bracket lights, looking sullen and afraid. Richard Fenster was drinking out of a hip flask and leaning against the wall. Lydia Acken was standing very erect, with her arms wrapped around her waist. Her skin looked powdered gray.
“All right,” he said. “I know that this is a little unusual, but we’re going to be stuck out here alone for a little while, and I’d like to get a few things straight before the police arrive. Does anybody here mind answering a couple of questions?”
“I mind,” Hannah Graham said belligerently.
Mathilda Frazier let out a sharp bark of anger. “Oh, for God’s sake. Why do you always have to cause trouble for everybody in your vicinity? Why can you never cooperate about anything?”
“I’m not causing trouble,” Hannah said. “I’m just sticking up for myself. He doesn’t have any right to ask us questions.”
“I’d rather have him ask me questions than have a cop ask me questions,” Richard Fenster said. “I’d rather have him investigating this murder, too. He doesn’t have any kind of ax to grind.”
“It doesn’t matter if the police ask you questions, because you don’t have to answer them,” Hannah Graham shot back. “Any decent lawyer could tell you that. You don’t have to tell the police a thing.”
“No, you don’t,” Kelly Pratt said, “but they can punish you for that. They can make it very hard for you to leave the state. They can let things leak to the media—and oh, God, how this one is going to attract the media. Like blood attracts sharks.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Hannah Graham looked momentarily uneasy. “The media aren’t going to care one way or the other about this. She was just a has-been old movie star. She hasn’t been in the public eye in years.”
“She wasn’t just a has-been old movie star,” Richard Fenster said. “She was once the most famous woman in America. And she was involved in one of the most famous murder investigations of the century. And now she’s been murdered herself.”
“My mother died by accident,” Hannah Graham said. “That’s what all the papers said at the time. That’s what the police decided.”
“It was still a murder investigation, even if it wasn’t a murder,” Richard Fenster said. “There is going to be a mess when this gets out. People go out of their way to get this man to handle their messes, and here he is right in the middle of this one and willing to do it for free. Why shouldn’t we take advantage of his being here?”
Hannah Graham had been standing at the very far edge of the group, a little behind where Mathilda Frazier was seated on the floor. Now she moved forward until she was standing right in front of Richard Fenster and flicked a finger at his hip flask.