“You sure you couldn’t have done those things yourself, accidentally?”
“Positive.”
“Who do you think could have done them?”
Geraldine threw up her hands. “I don’t know,” she cried. “I just don’t know. The machine wasn’t right out in the open. It was at the very back of the pantry. It wasn’t as if somebody could have just stuck their head in there and seen it. Somebody would really have had to be snooping. And why would they be snooping in the pantry?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“Cavender and Tasheba and I were the only ones who knew about it,” Geraldine said. “And Cavender wouldn’t have fiddled with the controls himself. He would have sent me to do it. And before you ask, Tasheba wouldn’t have done it either. I’m not saying she couldn’t have. She was in incredibly good shape for a woman her age. But if she was going to do anything to that CD player, she was going to shut it off.”
“It doesn’t seem to make sense, does it?” Gregor asked gently. “I take it you got caught in the act of removing the CD player by Richard Fenster.”
“Yes, I did. But I wouldn’t make too much of that if I were you, Mr. Demarkian. He said he followed me and I believed him. I don’t think he knew where the CD player was beforehand, or even that there was a CD player. And besides—”
“Yes?”
Geraldine got up off the vanity table stool and began to pace around. “I told him most of what I’ve told you, at least about why we played the disc,” she said, “but in spite of the fact that he’d asked for the explanation, he didn’t seem to be interested. He had this little smile on his face and he kept staring past my left shoulder. It was like—”
“What?”
Geraldine slapped her hands together. “It was like he knew something the rest of us didn’t, and he thought we were all damned fools because we hadn’t figured it out. It was as if he had the ultimate piece of insider information. It was just as creepy as some of the other things that have gone on around here this weekend. Creepier. I think he likes to keep secrets, Richard Fenster does. I think it’s a kind of sickness.”
“I think you don’t like Richard Fenster much,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Geraldine blushed and looked away. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I’m acting like an hysterical little idiot, I know that. And you’re right. Richard Fenster makes my skin crawl.”
“Maybe he’ll do the right thing and come up here to talk to me,” Gregor Demarkian said. His eyes were on the red folder.
Geraldine shook her head violently. “He’s never going to do that. You don’t understand what he’s like. He’s never going to tell anybody at all. Mr. Demarkian, if you want to know what Richard Fenster has on his mind, you’re going to have to go downstairs and drag it out of him. And you’re going to have to threaten him with something serious before you even start to get anywhere.”
2
Down in the dining room, Richard Fenster—who loved secrets just as much as Geraldine Dart thought he did, or maybe more—was thinking of giving this one up. He did not care for the turn events had taken in this place. Ghostly laughter on a CD hadn’t bothered him very much—and the death of that ancient woman rolling down the stairs hadn’t disturbed him enough to interrupt his progress to sleep—but since then things had been getting out of hand. The death of Carlton Ji changed things. So did the steady escalation of all the lunatic elements in all their various venues. Sometimes it felt that the lunatic events, and not the murder of Cavender Marsh’s paramour, had become the point of this entire weekend. That was not a good sign. Richard Fenster thought he understood murder. He was positive that he understood that particular murder, just the way he understood all the ins and outs of what had happened to those three people. He understood determination and decision and plan. What he didn’t like was emotion and eccentricity. There were a fair number of people who would have said that Richard Fenster was very eccentric himself. Richard knew it was a different kind of eccentricity. He would never have played these kinds of giggling, childish, senseless practical jokes.
Lydia Acken was trying to arrange a pile of crepe-paper streamers into something like a manageable ball. Richard took the pile out of her hands and compacted it expertly, a skill acquired after years of having to deal with the shredded newspaper used for cushioning items sent through the mail. He handed the newly formed ball back to her and stood up, ignoring the nasty little exchange then going on between Cavender Marsh and Kelly Pratt. Cavender seemed to be suggesting that Kelly was personally responsible for the abysmal performance of Cavender’s money market fund. Lydia put the ball on the dining room table and smiled.