And One to Die On(89)

“Demanding,” Cavender said. “What a word for it. They were both emotional vampires.”

“Was Tasheba Kent being—demanding—the night Cavender Marsh killed her?” Lydia Acken asked.

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Mr. Marsh knows, and he may tell us or not, as he cares to. What I do know is that on the night she was killed, Tasheba Kent showed up at the villa in the south of France that Cavender Marsh was sharing with his wife and his three-month-old baby daughter. Tasheba was not supposed to be there.”

“She’d been threatened with mayhem if she so much as showed up in town,” Cavender Marsh said. His voice was very firm. He did not sound worried. “But not by me, Mr. Demarkian. By Lilith.”

“That may be true,” Gregor said, “but you killed Tasheba Kent. If it had been your wife who had committed the murder, she would have been arrested and tried for it, because you would never have helped her escape from the law. The only possible reason for your doing what you did, in fact do over the next few months and years, is that you knew damn well that if you did not do it, you would end up in jail yourself.”

“But what did he do?” Kelly Pratt asked plaintively. “And what does all this have to do with the money?”

“What money?” Mathilda Frazier asked.

“I’ll get to the money in a minute,” Gregor said. “The first thing Cavender and Lilith did was to heave the body of Tasheba off the terrace and into the sluice, where it was sure to get severely mangled. The reason for this was not necessarily what you might think. They weren’t worried about Tasheba Kent’s appearance tipping the police off to her identity, because Tasheba Kent’s appearance was what her makeup made it be. By that time, that was true of both the sisters. They weren’t so very much alike if you knew them well without their makeup, but if you didn’t—and almost nobody did—”

“Including me,” Cavender Marsh said.

“—if you didn’t, what you thought of when someone said ‘Lilith Brayne’ or ‘Tasheba Kent’ was a paint job, and paint jobs are easily manipulated. No, the reason they had to mangle the body was because the one thing that could destroy their whole plan was a full body autopsy.”

“But what was their plan?” Lydia Acken asked.

“They were going to pass the death off as the death of Lilith Brayne, an accident that was probably a suicide,” Gregor said. “This was a brilliant scenario, especially in the France of the time, which was addicted to tragedies of that sort. It was also psychologically coherent. There was no way to pass the death of Tasheba Kent off as suicide. Nobody would have believed it. And accident wouldn’t have gone over too well, either. There had been too many very good reasons, trumpeted in the press month after month, why Cavender Marsh or Lilith Brayne would have wanted to kill Tasheba Kent. If it ever became clear that it was Tasheba Kent who was dead, there was going to be a major investigation.”

“I still don’t understand what a full body autopsy had to do with it,” Mathilda Frazier said. “Do you mean they were worried about fingerprints and things like that?”

“I don’t think so,” Gregor told her. “I doubt if any of their fingerprints were on file anywhere. What a full body autopsy would have revealed was the obvious. It would have shown clearly that the woman whose body this was had never had a child.”

“Oh,” Lydia Acken said.

“So,” Gregor Demarkian continued, “they rolled the body into the sluice. Then Lilith Brayne took off all her makeup, got Tasheba Kent’s handbag, and headed back to Paris looking like nothing so much as another frumpy middle-aged woman. When she got to Paris, she let herself into her sister’s apartment, made herself up very heavily, and proceeded to play the part of Tasheba Kent. I don’t know what she did about personal maids and that sort of person, but she must have done something, because it worked.”

“Lilith was a much better actress than anyone ever gave her credit for.” Cavender Marsh said it proudly.

“Cavender gave Lilith a few hours to get away,” Gregor went on, “and then called the police. At this point, the two of them began to make a series of mistakes that should have gotten them caught, but didn’t. The first of these concerned Tasheba Kent’s trademark black feather boa. She’d worn it when she came down to the villa from Paris, and left it lying across the bed in Cavender Marsh’s bedroom. Lilith had completely forgotten about it when she’d gone back to town to take up her masquerade. That’s why the black feather boa appeared on the first list the police made of the things belonging to Lilith Brayne that were found in the villa.”