And One to Die On(88)

The Demarkian man was waiting. He was being very patient. Considering the fact that there was a man sprawled half-dead on the floor of the television room, the detective was being very patient indeed. Cavender didn’t think this would last long. Geraldine Dart and Bennis Hannaford had their signal lamps. They wanted to go out on the balcony to test them. They would have been gone already if they hadn’t been so fascinated in what was going to be said around here next.

Cavender said the only thing he could say, under the circumstances. “You don’t really believe,” he drawled in great deliberation, “that I killed two people and maimed a third in this house this weekend. I’m eighty years old.”

Gregor Demarkian sighed. “That’s true. You didn’t kill any of them yourself. Not this time. You just planned the way they were going to die.”

“Really? All of them?” Cavender was carefully contemptuous.

“Richard Fenster may have been your accomplice’s idea.”

“It was more than Richard Fenster,” Cavender Marsh said.

There were stirrings in the crowd. The sympathy was definitely directed away from him this time. The hero of this hour was Gregor Demarkian. Cavender didn’t think he had ever seen such a large and solid man.

“Start from the beginning,” Bennis Hannaford said suddenly. “I don’t understand any of this.”

Gregor Demarkian regarded Bennis very seriously and said, “I’ll explain it all to you later. I want you to go out and put those lights to use. Do it now.”

“All right,” Bennis Hannaford said, although she didn’t sound happy. “Geraldine and I—”

“No,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Just you. I need Miss Dart here.”

“Oh, dear,” Geraldine Dart said. She wrung her hands, just like a character in a Lilith Brayne movie.

“You can’t really believe that I threw my lot in with this plain and unstylish little blob of lower-middle-class sensibilities,” Cavender Marsh insisted. “Even your audience doesn’t believe it, and they’re far more naive about this sort of thing than you and I are.”

“He didn’t say that you were sleeping with her,” Kelly Pratt said.

Bennis Hannaford gave them all one last look and hurried out of the room. Mathilda Frazier began to rock back and forth, from the balls of her feet to her heels.

“The beginning,” Gregor Demarkian said, nodding his massive head, “was a marriage. The marriage of Cavender Marsh and Lilith Brayne. A marriage that could only have been made among actors. He was in his early twenties. She was in her early forties, or maybe even older. It was unheard-of, but they got away with it, in a way. The attitude of the fan magazines, from what I’ve been able to glean from looking through some scrapbooks, was that Cavender was a fine young innocent who had been corralled and brainwashed by a consummate witch.”

Cavender Marsh burst out laughing. “Oh, she was that,” he said. “She was surely that.”

“Yes,” Gregor Demarkian agreed. “I think she was. Anyway, the two of them married. When Lilith got pregnant, the fan magazines didn’t thaw to her much, but then Cavender did something to destroy his own reputation. He had an affair. Now that, in and of itself, was not necessarily a bad thing. The press had been waiting for him to get tired of the old woman he had married. There had probably been fill-in-the-blanks instant news stories on file for months about how the brave young beauty saved Cavender Marsh from the clutches of the evil temptress. But the brave young beauty turned out to be not so young. In fact, she was a year older than the evil temptress, and the evil temptress’s own sister. At that point, Lilith Brayne began to get a little sympathy from the press.”

“I’m beginning to think this is very ageist,” Mathilda Frazier interrupted disapprovingly. “What difference does it make how old they both were?”

“In 1938, it made a great deal of difference,” Gregor Demarkian said. “It made so much difference, that it began to look to a lot of people that Cavender might have something psychologically wrong with him. This was, after all, an era when women were considered to be aging at thirty.”

“Oh, yes,” Lydia Acken put in, “that was really true. I remember. My mother told people she was twenty-eight for nearly fifteen years.”

“Everything Cavender Marsh did was public,” Gregor went on. “His wife’s pregnancy was public. His affair with Tasheba Kent was public. He was photographed everywhere, and he always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He was involved with two sisters. They were very different in many ways, but they were also very much alike. For one thing, they were both highly competitive. For another, they were both very demanding.”