And One to Die On(82)

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s nice to see somebody being helpful to somebody else around here.”

“I’m going to take a walk,” Richard told her. “It’s beginning to get impossibly close in this room.”

“It’s impossibly close in this whole house,” Hannah Graham snapped. “When I get off this island, I’m going to go straight to my lawyers, and they’re going to get an earful.”

As far as Richard Fenster was concerned, anybody who spent any time at all for any reason around Hannah Graham was going to get an earful, even if they never did anything more provocative than breathe. He left the dining room. He went to the foyer windows and looked out across the choppy ocean to the docks at Hunter’s Pier. He could just about see them, in spite of the dark sky and the fog and the mist sent up by the waves slapping against the massive rocks of the island. He could see the dock lights, glowing red and white and green.

“None of you people has any backbone,” Hannah Graham was saying, her California caw knifing through the air like static on the radio. “You let these people get away with everything. And what for? What for? Just because you think they’re some kind of celebrities.”

Richard left the foyer and went into the living room. He was relieved to see that nothing had happened to it since the last time he had seen it. Nobody had overdecorated this room with crepe paper and balloons. Nobody had overturned all the furniture or knocked the pictures and the mirrors out of true. He looked around behind the couches and found them a little dusty, but otherwise uninhabited. He didn’t know what it was he half expected to find, but he knew that whatever it was couldn’t be good.

When he was sure there was nothing to see in the living room, Richard left it and went into the library. The guard should have been at the door there, keeping an eye on things, but he wasn’t. Donnie was sitting in the dining room, drinking a beer he had found in the kitchen and complaining of the hangover he had acquired last night. Richard thought it was probably not a hangover, in the usual sense, but a reaction to whatever pills he had been given. Gregor Demarkian was surely right about that. Richard didn’t care, as long as it left him free to look over the library tables on his own.

The trick, he told himself, was not to make a mistake. The trick was not to think you knew something that you only suspected. That way lay trouble.

Richard looked over a few of the things on the long tables—it was really too bad that this auction was never going to come off; he would have bought so much; maybe he could make some kind of deal with the estate and get hold of it anyway—and then took one of the black shoes with the rhinestone buckles and put it under the loose roll of sweater that hung over his waist. Then he took a shoe from a pair on the other table and put that under there, too. The second shoe was not important, not famous, not a trademark, not a prop. It was an ordinary blue leather pump in a style that had been popular around 1935. Its heel dug into his belly when he walked, stabbing him right through the cotton of his shirt and undershirt, so that he had to hold onto it when he walked. If anyone had seen him, he would have looked ludicrous. Fortunately, he thought, no one had seen him.

Richard crossed the foyer again and went around to the back. He opened the door to the television room and looked inside. Nothing had been disturbed in here either. Richard went in and closed the door behind him.

The linen sheet was back on the corpse. Richard wondered who had put it there. He took both the shoes out from under his sweater and put them on the floor.

Know, he told himself. Don’t guess. Always double-check.

He took the linen sheet off the corpse again and threw it down without noticing where it landed. Then he picked up the shoe with the rhinestone buckle on it and went for the feet.

He was so intent on what he was doing, he didn’t hear the door to the television room open.

His concentration was so perfect, that when the ball of cast iron hit him on the side of the head, he was completely unaware that he was not alone in the room anymore at all.





CHAPTER 3


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN KNEW THAT the paper he wanted to see was sitting in Kelly Pratt’s briefcase, which was lying on the vanity table in Kelly Pratt’s bedroom. Gregor knew that because he’d seen the paper before—Kelly had brought it to him, as a kind of visual aid, during the conversation they had had about the mysterious 1938 disappearance of one hundred thousand dollars from Lilith Brayne’s French bank account—and because Kelly had felt it necessary to explain to him at the time where he kept his briefcase and why he kept it there. It seemed that Kelly Pratt never did anything because it was convenient. He had to have not only reasons but philosophies. He had to believe that whatever he was doing was tied into the Great Chain of Being and the search for the Holy Grail. Gregor didn’t remember why Kelly Pratt had thought it was so important to keep his briefcase on his vanity table instead of on his bureau. Gregor liked Kelly Pratt in a number of ways, but the man was intellectually exhausting.