“I don’t have to talk to anyone I don’t want to talk to,” she said. “And I’m not going to, no matter what you say. And besides, I don’t think he’s such a great detective. If he were, he wouldn’t be questioning us. He’d be out looking for Carlton Ji.”
“What?” Gregor said.
Hannah whirled around, triumphant. “Carlton Ji,” she said again. “You remember. The odious little Chinaman. Well, he isn’t here. And he hasn’t been here. He didn’t come downstairs with us when the screaming started. He didn’t come down later, either. And he was gone before that. He wasn’t with the rest of us in the living room after dinner.”
“Maybe he was in the library,” Gregor said.
“He wasn’t while I was there,” Richard Fenster said thoughtfully. “And I was there for a good half an hour. The only other person who came in was Lydia Acken.”
“He wasn’t there while I was there,” Lydia said. “And he wasn’t in the living room just after dinner, either, Mrs. Graham is right about that.”
“I didn’t see him, either,” Kelly Pratt said.
“I saw him right after dinner,” Geraldine Dart said. “He was in the library for at least a minute or two. Then I don’t know what happened to him.”
“Don’t ask me,” Bennis told Gregor. “I never saw him at all.”
Hannah Graham’s triumph had grown into something bigger and worse. She was afire with self-righteousness and self-justification.
“There!” she exclaimed. “There! Didn’t I tell you. He disappeared right after dinner, and the Great Detective didn’t even notice. I don’t think this man is anything but a lot of hype in People magazine, and I’m not going to answer his questions no matter what any of the rest of you say. And I’m not afraid of the local police either. Tasheba Kent is dead and Carlton Ji is missing, and I say all anybody has to do to solve this case is find out where the little bastard has gone. I’ll bet he’s halfway to San Francisco by now.”
2
Carlton Ji couldn’t be halfway to San Francisco by now. Gregor Demarkian knew that. The timing wasn’t right. At least, Carlton Ji couldn’t have gotten off the island if he was in fact what Hannah Graham believed he was, the murderer of Tasheba Kent. A woman with a head wound that severe might be able to walk around for as long as five or six full minutes before collapsing, but after that it would have been impossible. Tasheba Kent had to have been struck in the head just about the moment that eerie cackling laughter had started. She might have been struck by Geraldine Dart or by Carlton Ji or by one of the people who had gathered in the hall and on the landing while the racket was going on, but whoever had struck her had not then gotten off this island. The storm was going full blast. There would have been no way for the murderer to have gotten off.
Still, Carlton Ji was missing. There was no doubt about that. They went to his room and found it empty. His bed hadn’t been slept in and his suitcase, although rummaged through, hadn’t been unpacked. Gregor didn’t think the rummaging had been a search job. It looked more like the kind of thing someone would do when he was looking for a clean pair of socks. They checked all the other bedrooms, too, just in case Carlton Ji had wandered off and fallen asleep and not been woken by all the subsequent noise. They checked the bedroom closets, too, and any containers—a steamer trunk in Geraldine Dart’s room; an oversize wardrobe in a guest room in the family wing—big enough to hide a body. Then they checked the rooms downstairs. They looked behind the living room couch. They looked under the tables in the library where the things for the auction were kept. They even opened the sideboard in the dining room.
“There are those other floors,” Bennis told Gregor, after they’d failed to find either Carlton Ji or any trace of Carlton Ji anywhere else in the house. “Maybe we’d better try those.”
“I think we’re going to have to,” Gregor agreed, “but I don’t see how we’re going to do it tonight. We’re all exhausted. Christ, I wish we could get hold of the police.”
“I wish we could, too. Do you think Carlton Ji killed Tasheba Kent?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know that either.”
The storm thundered overhead. “I don’t like this,” Bennis said. “I’ve never heard you be so uncertain. Usually when I ask you questions like this, you tell me it’s perfectly obvious what happened and if I just used my head, I could figure it all out for myself.”