And One to Die On(72)

“It’s like I said before,” Richard Fenster said. “She took the black feather boa.”

Bennis Hannaford pushed her way to the front of the crowd and presented herself to Gregor. “What’s going on?” she asked him. “Do you have the faintest idea what this is all about?”

“It’s about misdirection,” Gregor said.

“Wonderful,” Bennis told him. “Would you like to be more explicit?”

“No. I’d like to find out where it is, first, and then I’d like to go on from there.”

“Where what is?”

By now, Gregor had considered every corner and piece of furniture in the room, and come to the conclusion that there was only one possible place.

“It’s got to be in the closet,” he said, moving forward and opening the closet doors.

Since there was nothing else in the closet—not even Hannah’s dresses, which she had left in her suit bag and not bothered to hang up—it came out as soon as Gregor opened the closet door. First it slid forward. Then it slid sideways. Then it came to rest in a heap.

It was the body of Carlton Ji, and it was in very bad shape. The head was full of scratches and gouges. The side of its face had been smashed in by a blunt instrument.

And there was a black feather boa wrapped around its neck.





PART 3


The Orchestra Of Glass





CHAPTER 1


1


WHAT GREGOR REALLY WANTED to know, right this second, was when the music was going to start. Surely there ought to be something, preferably played on an organ, to highlight the impossible drama of this moment. At the very least there ought to be thunder and lightning—but the weather wasn’t cooperating. It was still bad, but it wasn’t angry-bad. The wind was raging and screaming. Gregor had no doubt that if he looked out the windows, he would find that the ocean was a mess. Thunder and lightning, however, were absent. What was taking their place at the moment was Geraldine Dart’s keening, high-pitched and hysterical, as automatic and robotic as the screeching of a car burglar alarm on a residential street at midnight.

I am losing my temper, Gregor told himself. I am losing my temper and that is not a good or smart or safe thing to do.

The whole group had now pushed its way into Hannah Graham’s room. They were ignoring Geraldine Dart’s noise completely, but they were fascinated with the body of Carlton Ji. Gregor half expected one of them to step forward and try to take Carlton Ji’s pulse. Mathilda Frazier seemed to be on the verge of tears. Bennis Hannaford looked as if she wanted to go somewhere and chain-smoke. Gregor knew that she wouldn’t do it here. If there was one thing he had taught her in all their time together, it was that it was absolutely forbidden to smoke at a crime scene.

Not that this was a crime scene, Gregor thought. At least, it wasn’t the right crime scene. He wondered where Carlton Ji had died.

“If you think I’m going to let this corpse lie here like a lump for the next two days,” Hannah Graham said, “you’re out of your mind. I want you to get him out of here right this second.”

“I’m not going to do anything of the kind right this second,” Gregor said. He stepped over the body and looked into the closet. It was not a closet as closets in more modern houses would be understood. When this house was built, closets and cupboards were not ordinarily included in the design of rooms. Those functions were taken over by large pieces of furniture like wardrobes and armoires. This was a wardrobe that had been grafted onto the wall at some more or less recent date. The floor of it was a good four inches above the floor of the room itself. Gregor looked around in the dust in there and found absolutely nothing. He looked on the overhead shelf and found a couple of plastic dry cleaning bags, folded. He swore under his breath. In Armenian.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Hannah Graham told him. “As far as I can see, you’re just tampering with evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” Kelly Pratt asked her. “The only evidence that’s going to be found in here is the evidence that proves you killed him.”

Hannah bristled. “Oh, you won’t find any evidence like that in here.”

“Oh, shut up, all of you,” Mathilda Frazier said. “I’m tired of this.”

Geraldine Dart had stopped screaming. It would have been a relief, but Gregor didn’t notice. He had stopped listening to her a while ago. He bent over Carlton Ji’s body and looked into the wound on the side of his face. As far as Gregor could tell, it was the same as the wound on the side of Tasheba Kent’s face. They had to have been made with the same weapon. Gregor turned the body on its back and went at the black feather boa. It was wound around and around Carlton Ji’s neck, like the woolen mufflers his mother used to wind around his own on cold days when he was a boy in Philadelphia. Gregor got the boa unwound and put it aside, noting to himself how old and delicate it was. A couple of small feathers came off in his hands. Others seemed to be hanging by a thread. He tilted Carlton Ji’s neck back and forth, to get a good look at the neck, but there was nothing to see.