And One to Die On(64)

Richard pulled the linen sheet off the corpse. The body that appeared to him stuffed into the ruffled negligee was a lumpy mess. It had no shape at all. Richard ignored it and went right to the feet. The feet had slippers on them, dyed to match the negligee, with a little heel, the kind of thing Richard associated most with movies in which Jean Harlow received visitors in her boudoir. Richard took the slippers off and examined them. Then he dropped them to the floor and looked over the naked feet.

The feet were like the rest of the body in a lot of ways. They were old and puffy, not the slim small elegant things of Storms of Love. The toenails were dry and yellow and cracked. In Island Melody, they had been shaped and painted—bright red, according to the magazines. Richard picked up the slippers and put them back on Tasheba Kent’s feet. He was thinking furiously.

Feet feet feet, he kept telling himself, as he picked the linen sheet off the floor and draped it back over the body. There’s only so much that can be done about feet.

Now that he knew what he wanted to do next, he felt much better, not really sleepy at all.

Down in the library on the tables with all the things to be auctioned there were shoes, dozens of shoes.

What he had to do now was to get his hands on some of them.





2


Mathilda Frazier knew that Gregor Demarkian wanted to talk to her. She had known, since last night, that he would want to talk to everyone. She didn’t even object to talking to him, in principle. Lately, Mathilda had been congratulating herself on not being a woman like Hannah Graham. She didn’t go looking for excuses to go on the offensive. She didn’t throw monkey wrenches into other people’s plans just because she felt like being contrary. She understood why Geraldine Dart and Kelly Pratt and the rest of them wanted to let Demarkian do some investigating before the police arrived. She was no more interested in facing a full-scale murder inquiry than anyone else was. It was just that Gregor Demarkian made her so damned nervous.

He came up to her just as everybody was filing out of the dining room after the discovery of the cufflink—an event that Kelly Pratt, at least, was treating like some episode in a Sherlock Holmes story—and it couldn’t have been a worse time. The sleeping pills she had taken hadn’t really worn off. Under ordinary circumstances, she would have been knocked out for hours yet. Apparently, watching an old woman die in front of you made a difference. Instead of conking right out, Mathilda had lain on the top of her bed and tossed and turned. Every once in a while, she’d had very disturbing dreams with dead bodies in them and old women floating on a sea of chiffon. Every once in a while, she had come awake, too, which never happened with these particular pills. That’s why she kept getting the prescription refilled. Eventually, she had just given it up and come downstairs. She hadn’t wanted breakfast and she hadn’t wanted company, but she hadn’t been able to stand the idea of staying alone in her room one moment longer.

Obviously, the same sort of thing had happened to Hannah Graham. Hannah always looked awful, but now she looked awful and ready to disperse into molecules. She wasn’t as quick with the nastiness, either. This morning she seemed to be a beat behind the beat.

Why couldn’t Gregor Demarkian want to talk to Hannah? Mathilda asked herself grumpily, but Demarkian was paying no attention to Hannah, and Hannah had already said that she would refuse to talk to him anyway. Gregor Demarkian was waiting patiently at the dining room door and smiling in her direction.

“I don’t suppose it would work if I said I absolutely had to fall asleep right this minute,” Mathilda said. “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I was about ready to pass out.”

“You look ready to pass out,” Gregor Demarkian told her. “But I only want you for a minute.”

“You don’t believe in that cufflink, do you?” Mathilda asked him. “You don’t think it’s a very important clue.”

“On the contrary.” Demarkian shook his big head. “I think it’s extremely important. I just don’t think it’s important in the way everybody else seems to think it’s important. If you understand what I’m saying.”

“No.”

“I just want you to come in here for a second. There are a couple of things I want to ask you about the auction.”

The “here” that Gregor Demarkian wanted her to come into was the library, dark and gloomy even though all its lights were lit, its three tables loaded with junk looking like they had no earthly reason for being.

“I wonder where the guard is this morning.”

“He’s still in the room over the garage,” Demarkian told her. “He isn’t due in until eleven thirty. I think the idea was to make the insurance company nominally happy, while not spending any more money than absolutely necessary.”