And One to Die On(59)

After that scrapbook full of Tasheba Kent, the one about the death and trial was almost boring, and the other two—which mostly had to do with Tasheba and Cavender going away together, and retrospective articles on the level of Where Are They Now—were worse. In the 1938 photographs, all three of the principals looked oddly subdued; 1930s styles didn’t suit either of the sisters as well as 1920s styles had. Then, too, they were older, in that way women got older before the advent of aerobics tapes and small-weight lifting and macrobiotic diets. What struck Gregor was how depressed and tense they all looked, even before the death of Lilith Brayne. There was a picture of Cavender and Lilith standing on the deck of an ocean liner, surrounded by confetti and balloons. Both were smiling determinedly at the camera, but underneath it all they looked grim. There was a picture of Tasheba Kent sitting at a small round table at an outside cafe in Paris. She had adapted the 1930s styles as much as she could to her own personal taste. Since the style didn’t adapt very well, she had simply made herself look patently bizarre. Her cigarette holder was much shorter, though, and her dark glasses covered the wrinkles around her eyes. She looked like a vampire bat that had just turned itself into a self-important middle-aged woman.

In the pictures from the period of the investigation, Tasheba Kent seemed to get stranger and stranger by the second. In The New York Times photograph of her arriving at the jail in southern France where Cavender Marsh was being detained, she had added a black mink coat to the glasses and the cigarette holder. In the San Francisco Chronicle picture of her at her sister’s inquest, her throat was wrapped up in a black feather boa. What was even more distinctive was the way her makeup seemed to thicken, the closer she got to the point where she would have to answer questions herself. In the London Times photograph of her on the stand at the inquest, she had discarded the mink coat and the dark glasses and the feather boa, but her face was a mask of foundation and paint, so thick Gregor could almost see the texture of it through the cheap newsprint black-and-white grain.

Gregor went back to the articles about the death of Lilith Brayne and read them through. Then he went back to the articles about the inquest and read those through, too. When he was finished, he had some sympathy with the people, like Hannah Graham, who thought the French police had taken a dive in this case. In the very beginning, there were indications that the police were asking the right questions, but those indications did not last long. In no time at all, Gregor was scowling furiously at what seemed to him to be blatant evidence of raw incompetence. Of course, that went along with some of the theories he had formed earlier, before he had looked at this material, but he wasn’t sure that he wanted it to. The other possibility was that the newspapers were simply doing a very bad job of reporting. The French police might have been perfectly competent, but their competence might not have seemed like news to international editors in San Francisco and London and New York. But Gregor doubted it.

Gregor went through the light brown scrapbook one more time and concentrated on articles and magazine pieces and news reports from Los Angeles, to see if the perspective was any different. In theory, newspaper editors in Los Angeles ought to have a better idea than newspaper editors in other places what a bunch of movie stars was up to. Reading through the material, this was not a theory that seemed to be borne out by the physical evidence. The Los Angeles Times said all the same inane things the papers in other cities said. It just placed the story higher on its front page and gave it bigger headlines.

Gregor put the scrapbooks in a heap on the floor next to his bed and stretched out with his head on the pillow. Then he got the little traveling alarm clock he brought with him everywhere and set it for quarter to ten. His mind was racing, but it was racing on a kind of automatic pilot. The speed of his thoughts was not interfering with the need of his body for sleep. Gregor closed his eyes and let himself slide away, into a world where Tasheba Kent and Lilith Brayne and Cavender Marsh were all alive and much younger than they could have been today, where they wore curved-heeled shoes with rhinestone buckles and black feather boas and evening suits with velvet on the lapels.

Never get taken in by appearances, Gregor told himself just as he began to fall into a dark and dreamless sleep.

They always trip you up.





2


The alarm clock on Gregor’s bedside table emitted little high-pitched squeaks, like a mouse in danger of immediate execution, that never failed to wake him up. When Gregor opened his eyes, he found himself lying almost sideways across the bed, as if he had been wrestling with something in his sleep. He sat up and got himself turned around. The first thing he noticed was that the weather hadn’t gotten any better. It was lighter now than it had been when he had gone to sleep, but that wasn’t saying much. A thin stream of gray was forcing itself through the heavy curtains across his bedroom windows. A stiff wind was forcing itself against the windows themselves, making them rattle and creak. Gregor got out of bed and went to look out. The fog was so thick, he couldn’t see a dozen yards out to sea. Close to the island, the ocean was angry and strong, smashing against the rocks in great heavy swells that exploded into foam as soon as they connected to the land.