Gregor was about to argue—in the world in which he had grown up, women were not forced to move corpses or do other heavy things if there were men around to do it for them—but he knew what kind of a fight he would cause if he raised his voice in protest, and he just wasn’t up for it. Instead, he nodded at the two of them. They followed him to the foyer and stood at the foot of the stairs, solemnly staring at the body of Tasheba Kent under its white linen sheet. Geraldine Dart came, too. She was the only one who knew the way to the television room.
“All right,” Gregor said. “We have to be very careful here, because the corpse is going to be very stiff. And bodies in rigor are very brittle. If you hit them too hard against a corner or a piece of furniture, it’s not impossible that pieces of them might break off.”
“Yuck,” Bennis said.
“I’ll take the shoulders,” Kelly. Pratt told her. “They’ll be heavier and harder to move. You take the feet.”
To find out where the shoulders were and where the feet were, Kelly Pratt had to take the sheet off Tasheba Kent’s body. Gregor was watching Bennis’s face, but she didn’t flinch. She just waited until Kelly Pratt got a grip under Tasheba Kent’s arms and then picked up at her end.
“Which way?” Bennis asked Gregor and Geraldine.
Geraldine scurried around and pointed them in the right direction. Gregor followed behind them as they went, past the elevator doors, off into a corner. Geraldine got the door open and the lights on. Kelly and Bennis maneuvered the body into the room and waited for further instructions.
“Lay it out on the couch,” Gregor told them. “It might as well be there as anywhere else.”
“It really is stiff,” Bennis said. “Does it stay like this forever?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Gregor said. “It doesn’t stay like that very long at all, and it’s a nuisance while it’s going on. Once you get her down, we’d better cover her up again. She’s going to begin to look fairly awful by the time Sunday comes around.”
Bennis and Kelly put the body down on the couch—much more carefully, Gregor noticed, than they needed to. The linen sheet had dropped off in the foyer. Bennis went back out to get it. She returned with it folded over her arm. For some reason, she couldn’t get it so that it hung perfectly, without showing any part of the corpse. She took it off again and went to reposition the body on the couch.
“What’s this?” Bennis said suddenly. She dropped the sheet to the floor and leaned closer to the ruffles of the negligee that rose high on Tasheba Kent’s neck. “Gregor, come quick, take a look at this.”
Gregor was feeling guilty about leaving Bennis on her own to do all these unpleasant things. After his initial impulse to act like the stereotypical sexist male, he had simply mentally relaxed and allowed her to take all the responsibility she wanted to for something that really should have been his own job. Now that she was calling for him, however, he was galvanized into action. He rushed forward much more quickly than he had any reason to, as if she had just announced an emergency.
What Bennis had, however, was not an emergency. It was a cufflink, made of heavy gold with a flat top in the shape of an old-fashioned movie camera, that she had found stuck in the neck ruffle of Tasheba Kent’s negligee.
“Look at that,” she said, handing the piece over to Gregor. “What do you think that is?”
“I know what that is,” Geraldine Dart said. “It’s one of Cavender’s favorite cufflinks. He was wearing them when he came down to dinner last night.”
CHAPTER 4
1
EVENTUALLY, YOU HAD TO spend a little time sleeping. Richard Fenster had tried to find a way around it, but there it was. The human body was not made to go forever without sleep. Especially when it got older—and Richard was getting older; he hated to admit it, but it was true—it needed to expend significant amounts of time horizontal, blacked out, in another place. The problem was that it couldn’t be in that place and this one at the same time. And that was dangerous.
Richard Fenster had taken the discovery of Cavender Marsh’s cufflink with a grain of salt. When Geraldine Dart had run into the dining room babbling about it, he had gotten up for another piece of toast, and let the rest of them oooh and aaah about it. Gregor Demarkian hadn’t been very impressed, either, but nobody was paying any attention to Demarkian but Richard. Geraldine had gushed out her report. Kelly Pratt had asked the questions that established the fact that they couldn’t actually see the cufflink, because Gregor Demarkian had put it away in an envelope for the police. Mathilda Frazier had advanced the first of the amateur detective theories by announcing, “I don’t believe this has anything to do with anything at all. Husbands hug wives all the time. That doesn’t mean they’ve just bashed their heads in.”