And One to Die On(77)
Gregor sighed. “All right,” he said, “let’s make a guess. The dining room or the living room?”
“The dining room or the living room for what?” Lydia Acken asked.
“For the next act in this circus,” Gregor said. “I plump for the dining room myself. It’s easy to close off, which means it would be easy to hide whatever you wanted to do in there, especially if you had to take a little time.”
“Where’s that security guard?” Bennis asked suddenly. “I haven’t seen him all day. Isn’t that odd?”
“It’s very odd,” Gregor agreed, “but it’s not what we’re going to investigate right now. Now we’re going to go into the dining room and see what we can find there.”
It was obvious from the looks on their faces that there were now quite a few of them who thought, as Hannah Graham had always thought, that he was crazy. They followed him anyway, and they were rewarded.
Like Hannah Graham’s bedroom, the dining room had been decorated for a birthday party, but much more elaborately. There were so many helium-filled balloons it was impossible to see any of the upper third of the chandelier. The chairs were literally upholstered in crepe paper, wound around and around the backs and seats and legs in different colors. A banner spelling out “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” had been attached to one wall. Another banner spelling out the number 100 had been attached to the opposite wall. Every place at the table had been set with special happy birthday paper napkins and special happy birthday paper plates and special happy birthday paper cups. In the middle of the table there was a big quilted crepe-paper-and-cardboard sculpture spelling out “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” in fat, bloated red, white, and blue letters. It was like a children’s party with a thyroid condition.
“Oh, my God,” Mathilda Frazier said, for what felt to Gregor like the two thousandth time since she had arrived on this island.
Gregor wasn’t having any.
“Excuse me,” he told the assembled company. “I’m going upstairs to search Carlton Ji’s room. If any of you should decide that you have something to tell me, I’d be glad of the company.”
“That’s it?” Richard Fenster demanded hotly. His face was red. “That’s all you’ve got to say about—about all this?”
“That’s it.”
“The great detective,” Hannah Graham said.
“The great detective has work to do,” Gregor told her impassively. “Oh. There is one more thing. Mr. Pratt?”
“What is it?” Kelly Pratt asked.
“Mr. Pratt, when Geraldine Dart comes back downstairs, I would very much appreciate it if you would ask her for the keys to the chauffeur’s apartment. Then go over there and release the security guard. He’ll probably appreciate it, too. It’s my guess that you’ll find him tied up on the floor of the bedroom or the bathroom, or possibly on the bed itself. I’m sure he won’t have been hidden too well. There wouldn’t have been any point to it, and it would have been too difficult. All right?”
“But Gregor, wait,” Bennis said. “Won’t this solve everything? Won’t he be able to tell us who tied him up?”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “I think he was probably sent over there last night carrying a nicely doctored bottle of something ninety proof and expensive. Now, if you will excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to go.”
And go Gregor Demarkian did, steadily and relentlessly, out of the dining room and through the foyer and up the stairs.
He’d had as much as he wanted to take of the whole lot of them.
CHAPTER 2
1
AS SOON AS GERALDINE Dart heard that Gregor Demarkian wanted to talk to people—“to anyone who has something to tell him,” was the way Richard Fenster explained it to her—she knew she ought to be the first one upstairs. But the thought of it made her weak and teary, and the idea of spending half an hour or so trying to unravel what all this had started out to be—it was just impossible, that was all. She had gone upstairs and found the CD player sitting on top of her bureau, playing the music from The Tingler into the intercom microphone embedded in her bedroom wall. The night before she had left the CD player on the shelf in her closet with the little stack of plastic disc casings beside it: Howls and Whispers, The House on Haunted Hill, Screams in the Night, The Tingler, Song of the Werewolf. It hadn’t been hidden. Anybody could have come in and found it, if they had known she had it. Richard Fenster might have told his story to anyone at all. Geraldine snatched the disc off the machine, then turned the intercom microphone off. She’d had to suppress an urge to shout imprecations into it or to tell them all to get out of the house. They couldn’t get out of the damn house if they wanted to, and most of them probably desperately wanted to. Then Geraldine had gone downstairs and found them all in the dining room, and the mess there, and she had just wanted to sit in a chair and cry. It was going to take hours to get all this nonsense cleaned up. It might take days to chase down all the balloons, which had already started to drift into the foyer and other rooms. Then there was Donnie Hacket to take care of. Donnie Hacket was the man they had hired to act as a security guard. Donnie wasn’t much security and he wasn’t much of a guard. He drank when he could afford to, and he slept too much even when he couldn’t. Gregor Demarkian had sent Kelly Pratt over to fetch him, and Kelly had found him tied up with bed linen and laundry rope on the bathroom floor of the chauffeur’s apartment, and suddenly Donnie was threatening lawsuits as frequently and fervently as Hannah Graham.