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And One to Die On(73)



“All right,” he said out loud. “That was just for effect.”

“Effect?” Lydia Acken sounded indignant.

“A lot gets done for effect around here, haven’t you noticed that?” he asked her. “Screaming ghosts in the night. Corpses rolling downstairs. Although, that was probably accidental.”

“I’m glad you said that,” Richard Fenster said. “How could anybody possibly have set that up?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Last summer, I took the niece and nephew of a friend of mine to a movie about dinosaurs where the dinosaurs looked absolutely real. People seem to be able to do a lot of things these days.”

“Gregor,” Bennis said. “I think you’re losing it.”

Gregor was examining the scratches on Carlton Ji’s head. Actually, they were worse than scratches in some places. They were tears. Carlton Ji had been cut and he had bled badly.

“Before he died,” Gregor told them, not unhappy to see how mystified they were. He turned to Geraldine Dart and asked, “Where are the bats?”

“Bats?”

“Bats,” Gregor said firmly. “Before this man died, he had a major argument with some bats. There are bat droppings in his hair. And there are scratches and gouges on his scalp, which bled heavily, which means they were made while his heart was still beating healthily. There have to be bats somewhere in this house.”

“In the attic,” Geraldine said hastily. “We’ve had them in the attic once or twice.”

“That figures.” Gregor straightened.

“So what are you going to do now?” Bennis asked him. “Do you want to go search the attic?”

“No.” The last thing Gregor wanted to do was to go wandering around in a dark attic full of bats that might be just as unhappy to see him as they had been to see Carlton Ji. Bats in the United States were often rabid. As far as Gregor was concerned, the police could take care of them.

“What I want to do is go down to Carlton Ji’s room and really look around,” Gregor told them. “I want to find his notes.”

“You searched his room last night,” Kelly Pratt said. “You didn’t find anything.”

“I didn’t search his room,” Gregor told him. “I just looked around to see if anybody was there or if there was any sign that Mr. Ji had packed up and taken off. Although it was fairly obvious even then that he had to be dead.”

“Was it?” Mathilda Frazier looked utterly bewildered. “It wasn’t obvious to me.”

“It was obvious to him because he’s the great detective.” Hannah Graham sounded triumphant.

“I want to go down there and look through all his pieces of paper,” Gregor continued, as if they hadn’t spoken. “I want to get into his computer, if he brought one. Bennis? Can you do that?”

“If it’s something normal like an Apple or an IBM,” Bennis said. “And if he wasn’t too much of a hacker.”

Gregor rubbed fragments of bat droppings from his fingers. “Somehow, Carlton Ji didn’t seem to me to be the type to be much of a hacker,” he said.

“Why not?” Kelly Pratt demanded. “He was an Oriental.”

Gregor ignored this. “What we need to find out is if Carlton Ji was killed because of something he knew or because he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I tend to the latter theory, but I can’t just let it go without checking. So what I want to do next is to go down the hall and make a systematic—”

“My God,” Cavender Marsh said. “That young man is dead.”





2


They should have been expecting it, of course. They should have known that Cavender Marsh wouldn’t sleep forever. They should have been ready to take care of him. They weren’t. Even Gregor wasn’t. Cavender Marsh came tripping into the room with his spry old man’s jaunty gait, leaned down over Carlton Ji’s body, and paled.

“He isn’t just dead,” Cavender Marsh said. “He’s been hit. Somebody’s killed him.”

“Now, Mr. Marsh.” Geraldine Dart rushed forward and began to tug the old man away from the body. “It’s really quite all right. Mr. Demarkian is a detective, and he’s taking care of everything.”

“I know Mr. Demarkian is a detective.” Cavender Marsh spoke scornfully. “I read People magazine just like you do. Why has this young man been killed in my house? Does Tash know about it yet?”

“Oh,” Geraldine said. “Well—”

“Miss Kent is in the television room,” Mathilda Frazier rushed in with anxious brightness. “We haven’t had a chance to tell her about any of this as of yet.”