And One to Die On(87)

Geraldine looked into the closet, too. She blanched.

“I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it. Doesn’t anybody ever make any sense around here at all anymore?”

“Oh, this makes perfect sense,” Gregor said.

“I’m glad you think so.” Bennis was getting out her cigarettes, crime scene or no crime scene. Who knew what was a crime scene around here anymore? “Personally, I think somebody put funny little pills in the water around here and we’ve all become positively certifiable.”

“Why would anybody want to move Tasheba Kent’s body from the television room into that closet?” Mathilda Frazier said. “Whatever for?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “for one thing, because it isn’t Tasheba Kent’s body.”

“But, Mr. Demarkian,” Lydia said with mild indignation. “It has to be Tasheba Kent’s body. Who else’s body could it be?”

“Lilith Brayne’s,” Gregor said.

“Lilith Brayne’s?” Kelly Pratt repeated. “But, Mr. Demarkian, that couldn’t be. The kind of a switch you’re talking about—somebody would have noticed.”

“No, they wouldn’t have,” Gregor said. “Not after what happened to that body in that sluice.”

“But they didn’t even look all that much alike,” Mathilda Frazier objected. “Everybody always says they were very different.”

“They were very different,” Gregor told her. “With the makeup off. But they almost never had their makeup off. And with their makeup on, all either one of them ever looked like was what their makeup made them look like.”

“They were just about the same height,” Bennis Hannaford said thoughtfully.

“I think this is in terrible taste,” Cavender Marsh burst out. His body was trembling with rage. “Terrible taste. What makes you think you can come in here and make these ridiculous accusations, for which you have no proof whatsoever, as if you were God Almighty and better than the combined police forces of two countries, which is what it was, by the way, that investigation, two countries—”

“But I do have proof,” Gregor interrupted gently. Cavender Marsh fell silent, his eyes blazing. “I have the same proof Richard Fenster had. I have the shoes.”

“What do the shoes have to do with it?” Lydia Acken asked.

“They’ve been torn up,” Hannah Graham put in. “You can’t tell anything at all from them.”

“Not from this particular pair of shoes, no,” Gregor agreed. “These were the best ones, but they weren’t the only ones. There are dozens of pairs of shoes out there in the library. It doesn’t matter which pair you try. It will always come out the same.”

“Why were those the best shoes?” Bennis asked.

“The black shoes with the rhinestone buckles were one of Lilith Brayne’s trademarks,” Gregor replied. “She wore them in her movies, but she also wore them later, after she retired, in much the same way and for much the same reasons her sister went on wearing black feather boas. If you look through some of the scrapbooks Cavender Marsh has kept all these years, you can see them. Tasheba’s wearing them in one of the most widely circulated of the photographs ever taken of her and Cavender Marsh together, the one with the two of them standing on the terrace of the villa where Lilith Brayne was assumed later to have died.”

“I’m sure this all seems very clever to you,” Cavender Marsh spat, “but it doesn’t seem all that clever to me. What difference do the shoes make?”

“They make all the difference in the world,” Gregor said. “Go out to the library and look at the two sets of shoes. Lilith had very small feet. Tasheba had very large ones. Tasheba’s shoes might have fit Lilith, if she stuffed them full of tissue paper. Lilith’s shoes could never have fit Tasheba. What Richard Fenster probably found out was that that pair of shoes with the rhinestone buckles fit the feet of the woman who was calling herself Tasheba Kent perfectly—even after all these years.”





CHAPTER 4


1


IT WAS ALL STARTING to go wrong. Cavender Marsh could see that. Even if the rest of them couldn’t, he could. There she was, lying on the floor dead at last. She had been as hard to kill as the creature in a Boris Karloff movie. He could still see her coming out of the shadows on that terrace in the south of France, floating across the checkerboard marble with a big smile on her face. He could still see Tash out cold at his feet after he had hit her, so close to the edge and so easy to roll over. But that wasn’t fair. He had killed Tash himself. He had struck her across the windpipe with the side of his hand. He had stepped on the back of her neck and broken it after she was down. He had done all the things Lilith had said the papers would say he had done. It was just that he had wished at the time that he was doing them to Lilith.