And One to Die On(83)

Gregor packed up the papers he had spread across Carlton Ji’s bed, putting each back in its proper colored folder. The collection was pathetic, really. Carlton Ji hadn’t had half as much as he’d thought he had. He hadn’t had a third as much as he’d promised the publisher he was trying to interest in a book about the death of Lilith Brayne. He had, however, had something. And that had been the end of him.

Gregor really did need one more look at Kelly Pratt’s piece of paper. He put Carlton Ji’s folders on the top of the bureau and left the bedroom. This far down the hallway, he couldn’t hear anything coming up from the first floor. He went into Kelly Pratt’s bedroom. The briefcase was on the vanity table, just where Kelly Pratt had said it would be. Gregor sat down on the vanity table stool and opened the briefcase with a single flick of the spring lock. Kelly obviously didn’t believe in keeping his private papers safely shut away.

The piece of paper Gregor was looking for—the single sheet with the numerical exposition of when and how, after the death of Lilith Brayne, the French equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars had been siphoned from Lilith Brayne’s account—was sitting in solitary splendor in the pocket on the briefcase’s left-hand side. The deep well on the right-hand side was filled with folders and thick sheafs of paper marked “Real Property” and “Bond Investments” and “Limited Partnerships.” Gregor looked at these without much interest. (“Oil Lease Holdings—Cavender Marsh (John Day).”) Then he turned his attention to the piece of paper he really wanted to see. “Account of Lilith Brayne (Lillian Kent),” it was headed at the top. Underneath that was a thick paragraph in French that ended with the words Mme Jean Day. Gregor looked down the page at the columns of figures, the dates and times of the withdrawals, always made at the busy hours of the day and always in central branches in Paris or (in one case) at what was probably the single branch in the busy market area of a small town. Kelly had made a big thing of the fact that no withdrawal checks had ever been found, but Gregor didn’t think that was important. This was 1938 they were talking about. It had probably been 1939 before all the paperwork had been gathered together in one place and sent on to Lilith Brayne’s lawyers in New York. There were no computers, and the Nazis were swallowing Czechoslovakia and about to invade Poland. It would be more surprising if a few things hadn’t got lost.

Satisfied that he had seen what he wanted to see, Gregor closed up Kelly Pratt’s briefcase. He went down the hall to Hannah Graham’s room and looked in on the body of Carlton Ji, which was exactly where he had left it. Then he went out to the landing. Voices drifted up to him, probably from the library. One of them, inevitably, belonged to Hannah Graham.

“That phony ghost attack last night gave me a bad case of hives,” Hannah Graham was saying. “They’re still all up and down my back. They’re very painful. And the consequences could very well be permanent.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bennis Hannaford said.

Gregor went downstairs. The dining room doors were propped open. Every once in a while a helium balloon tried to pop out. Strings were yanked and the balloon was dragged back in. Gregor crossed the foyer to the back.

As far as he could tell, they were all in the dining room together. If he wanted to stage a confrontation scene, he could do it in a minute or two, after he’d checked to make sure that everything was all right. The doors to the television room were closed. Gregor opened them, stepped inside, and turned on the light.

He didn’t see the body of Richard Fenster immediately. He was too busy looking at the television room couch, which was empty of a corpse and a linen sheet and everything else. The body they had laid out here just a few hours ago was gone. It hadn’t fallen to the floor or been shoved behind one of the small pieces of furniture. There was no closet in the television room to hide it in. Gregor knew it couldn’t have gone far. It would have to have been moved by one person—at the very most, two. There were all those other people in the dining room. Certainly what Gregor most feared could not have happened. The body could not have been taken out and thrown into the sea. Not just yet.

Gregor was turning to leave the television room to search the closets in the utility hall outside when he saw Richard Fenster’s body. Richard’s legs were sticking out from under a round occasional table that was covered with a pale blue embroidered cotton tablecloth. Gregor had been so sure that the furniture in this room was too small to hide a body, he hadn’t even checked. Now he did check. He looked behind sofas and chairs. He looked under the other occasional table. He looked into the one dark corner. There was nothing, just this single pair of legs and feet, emerging from a field of blue.