And One to Die On(58)

“Let’s just hope they don’t keep it in Geraldine Dart’s room,” Gregor told Bennis. “Then I’ll have to wait until morning, and I can’t sleep.”

“Keep what in Geraldine Dart’s room?” Bennis asked.

When Gregor found what he was looking for—in Cavender Marsh’s room, on a bookshelf that seemed to have been built just to hold them—he showed her.

“Scrapbooks,” he explained, pulling one of the big leather-bound volumes off the top shelf. “I knew they wouldn’t be able to resist keeping scrapbooks.”

There were dozens of album-size scrapbooks on the bookshelf, six rows of them, some in black and some in light brown and some in leather that looked almost white. At the bottom there were three in black leather with gold lettering on them. Bennis pulled one of these out and opened it up.

“You’re right,” she said. “They did keep a scrapbook with articles about the murder investigation in it. How odd.”

“It would have been odder if they hadn’t,” Gregor told her. “They kept scrapbooks of everything else.”

They both looked over at the still-sleeping form of Cavender Marsh, still perfectly still, still perfectly happy.

“I wish I knew what kind of medication he was on,” Bennis said. “I’d get some for myself.”

Gregor took down all three of the books with the gold lettering, and then one each at random of the other kinds—black leather, white leather, light brown leather—and put them aside. The glow-in-the-dark digital clock on Cavender Marsh’s bedside table said six twenty-two, but the sky outside his bedroom windows was still black. Gregor put the scrapbooks in a stack and lifted them up. They were each at least five inches thick and a foot and a half wide. They made him stagger a little.

“What do you want the other ones for?” Bennis said, pointing to the three without gold lettering. “They can’t all be about the death of Lilith Brayne.”

“Even the ones with the gold lettering aren’t all about the death of Lilith Brayne,” Gregor told her. “They’re just about Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent together. I need the background.”

“Background,” Bennis repeated.

“You ought to go back to bed and get some sleep. Just because I’m going to be up doesn’t mean you have to be.”

“Are you sure you ought to be taking these things out of Cavender Marsh’s room without permission?” Bennis asked him.

Gregor took her back to her room and then went back to his own. He spread the scrapbooks out on his bed and opened each one. The all-black ones were full of stories about Cavender Marsh, movie magazine stories with headlines that promised to reveal “his startling confession” and “his secret shame.” The articles seemed to date from an era well before the arrival of Tasheba Kent and Lilith Brayne in his life. Gregor knew that when Cavender Marsh had decided to marry Lilith Brayne—a woman who was not only twenty years older than he was but who looked it—the story had caused a sensation. It had spilled off the fan magazines and into the regular press, even into The New York Times. A congressman from Kentucky had made a speech about it from the floor of the House of Representatives. The cardinal archbishop of Boston had given a radio speech explaining why the Catholic Church found such backward-lopsided matings unnatural. There was no hint of any of that in the scrapbook Gregor had chosen at random. There was no hint that Cavender Marsh had ever even met Lilith Brayne.

The white leather scrapbooks belonged to Lilith Brayne. The one Gregor had concentrated on movie stills and newspaper stories from the early part of her career. Lilith always seemed to be posed from the side and back, looking over her shoulder. It made her neck look long and swanlike. Every once in a while she was photographed from the side, but that didn’t work as well. Her nose was very long and very pointed. Caught at the wrong angle, it looked like a sewing needle stuck on the front of her face. Several of the pictures were full-length shots, usually of Lilith looking not quite flapperish but very stylish in 1920s café society clothes. In those pictures, she was wearing the black shoes with the rhinestone buckles Gregor had seen downstairs, or copies of them.

The light brown leather scrapbooks belonged to Tasheba Kent, and the one Gregor had laid hands on was the most dramatic of any he had seen yet. Lilith Brayne had done a fair amount of work to appear “normal” even while she was a movie star. Tasheba Kent had gone over the top and stayed there. The scrapbook Gregor had was from the height of her career. All the clippings of movie advertisements from newspapers and magazines showed her name above the title, usually in bigger letters than the title. The pictures of Tasheba Kent herself were melodramatic. Her dresses were so tight, it was difficult to understand how she could have moved in them. Her cigarette holders were so long it was difficult to understand how she could have smoked in her car without setting her driver’s hair on fire. Her eyes were rimmed with so much kohl, they looked like they had been blackened in a fight. Tasheba Kent had a long, thin nose very much like her sister’s, but she did nothing to hide it. She exaggerated it, the way she exaggerated everything about herself. Exaggeration, not individuality, was what you noticed when you looked at her. It was as if there were nobody at all named Tasheba Kent, just a series of constantly shifting surfaces, sparkling and flashing and much too bright.