And One to Die On(69)

Gregor stretched out his legs. “Believe it or not, I came down here with a purpose. I was wondering if you might know something that could help me out.”

Lydia frowned. “I don’t know what I could know. I’m afraid I couldn’t discuss any confidential business—”

“No, no,” Gregor assured her. “This shouldn’t come under the definition of confidential business. It’s about the death of Lilith Brayne.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been looking at some scrapbooks that belong to Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent, and there are quite a few newspaper stories about the death and the investigation and the inquest, but they aren’t big on forensic details, if you understand what I mean. And I’ve been thinking that there must be copies of the inquest transcripts around somewhere. And the most logical person to have them would be Cavender Marsh’s lawyer.”

“Oh, dear,” Lydia said. “We don’t have anything like that in the files at the firm. Of course, we do have some information about the case—”

“Yes?”

“Well, you see,” Lydia explained, “we were attorneys of record for Mr. Marsh even at the time, but we’re not a firm that handles criminal cases. We certainly don’t handle this kind of criminal case. From time to time, we’ve been involved in SEC investigations and tax evasion actions. We don’t handle the actual criminal litigation in those cases, but we cooperate with the contact firms that do. But a murder investigation…” Lydia shook her head.

“I see,” Gregor said slowly. “And of course, this case took place in France. I didn’t really expect that someone from your firm had gone across the Atlantic Ocean to represent Cavender Marsh at the inquest. I was just hoping there might be some material on the case floating around, and that you might have seen it.”

“Oh, no, there’s nothing like that,” Lydia said. Then she cocked her head in curiosity. “Exactly what is it that you’re looking for? What kind of information?”

Gregor yawned. “Oh, well,” he said, “the condition of the body mostly, when it was found. The articles I’ve read all say that Lilith Brayne’s body was a terrible mess when they fished it out of the water, but they never tell you what kind of mess. I suppose the details were too gruesome to be reported in the popular press, but that doesn’t help me any.”

Lydia Acken looked amused. “The details weren’t too gruesome to be reported in the popular press,” she said. “It’s just that those two old farts have been censoring their clippings.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll bet you the clippings you saw all made them look pretty good. I’m not saying they looked like saints, mind you—they hardly could have, under the circumstances—but I’ll bet those pieces all had that fawning flattered gush of ’30s celebrity journalism.”

“Not all of them did,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Some of them were from sources like the London Times.”

Lydia Acken waved this away. “The problem with the respectable press is that they’re too interested in being respectable to act like the press. Do you remember my telling you, when we first met, that my mother was a big fan of the case—that she made it a kind of hobby?”

“I remember something of the kind.”

“Well, those were the days before television and all the mothers thought children—especially girl children—shouldn’t be allowed to go to scary movies, so all I had for excitement were my mother’s clippings. And some of them were very, very exciting. I know what kind of mess Lilith Brayne’s body was in when it was found. It was described in detail years later in Confidential. And the things they had to say about Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh—if it were me, I wouldn’t put that kind of thing in my scrapbooks, either.”

“So what did it say?”

“Well,” Lydia Acken replied, “in the first place, Lilith Brayne fell over a balcony railing on a terrace high up on the side of a cliff. The terrace was part of a villa she and Cavender Marsh were renting at the time.”

“That’s in everything.”

“I know it is, but give me time. All right. When Lilith Brayne fell, her body apparently bounced off the side of the cliff as it went down, and instead of falling into the little river delta there, or farther out into the sea, it fell into a sluice that processed sewage for the town. You had to read the real sensationalist press to find out that it was sewage that was involved. Everybody else said water, as if she’d fallen into an irrigation ditch. Anyway, aside from the sluice itself, this thing had these big sharp-edged metal blades that turned whenever the water passed over them, that were supposed to chop up the solid sewage into manageable pieces—”