Carlton Ji wasn’t sure what he had done to make the computer do what it did, but one day there he was, staring at a list of seemingly unrelated items on the terminal screen, and it hit him.
“FOUND AT THE SCENE,” the screen flashed at him, and then:
GOLD COMPACT
GOLD KEY RING
GOLD CIGARETTE CASE
EBONY AND IVORY CIGARETTE HOLDER
BLACK FEATHER BOA DIAMOND AND SAPPHIRE DINNER RING
Then the screen wiped itself clean and started, “TASHEBA KENT IN PARIS.” This list was even longer than the previous one, because the researcher had keyed in everything she could find, no matter how unimportant. These included:
SILVER GRAY ROLLS-ROYCE WITH SILVER-PLATED TRIM
DIAMOND AND RUBY DINNER RING
BLACK BEADED EVENING DRESS
AMBER AND EBONY HOOKAH
BLACK FEATHER BOA
VIVIENNE CRI SHOES WITH RHINESTONE BUCKLES
If the black feather boa hadn’t been in the same position each time—second from the bottom—Carlton might not have noticed it. But he did notice it, and when he went to the paper files to check it out, the point became downright peculiar.
“It was either the same black feather boa or an identical one,” Carlton told Jasper Fein, the editor from Duluth House he was hoping to interest in a new book on the death of Lilith Brayne. Like a lot of other reporters from Personality magazine, and reporters from Time and Newsweek and People, too, Carlton’s dream was to get a really spectacular book into print. The kind of thing that sold a million copies in hardcover. The kind of thing that would get his face on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, or maybe even into Vanity Fair. Other reporters had done it, and reporters with a lot less going for them than Carlton Ji.
“You’ve got to look at the pictures,” Carlton told Jasper Fein, “and then you have to read the reports in order. The police in Cap d’Antibes found a black feather boa among Lilith Brayne’s things just after she died. That was on Tuesday night—early Wednesday morning, really, around two-thirty or three o’clock. Then later on Wednesday morning, around ten, they interviewed Tasheba Kent in Paris, and she was wearing a black feather boa.”
Jasper Fein shook his head. “You’ve lost me, Carlton. So there were two feather boas. So what?”
“So what happened to the first feather boa?”
“What happened to it?”
“That’s right,” Carlton said triumphantly. “Because after the black feather boa was seen around Tasheba Kent’s neck at ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, no black feather boa was ever found in Lilith Brayne’s things in the south of France again. That feather boa just disappeared without a trace.”
Jasper Fein frowned. “Maybe the police just didn’t consider it important. Maybe it’s not listed because they didn’t see any reason to list it.”
“They listed a lipstick brush,” Carlton objected. “They listed a pair of tweezers.”
“Twice?”
“That’s right, twice. Once at the scene and once again for the magistrate at the inquest.”
“And the only thing that was missing was this black feather boa.”
“That’s right.”
Jasper Fein drummed his fingers against the tablecloth. They were having lunch at the Four Seasons—not the best room in the restaurant, not the room where Jasper would have taken one of his authors who had already been on the best-seller lists, but the Four Seasons nonetheless. Carlton had no idea what lunch was going to cost, because his copy of the menu hadn’t had any prices on it.
“Okay,” Jasper conceded. “This is beginning to sound interesting.”
Carlton Ji beamed. “It certainly sounds interesting to me,” he said, “and I’m in a unique position to do something about it. I’m supposed to go up to Maine and spend four days on that godforsaken island where they live now, doing a story for the magazine.”
“Love among the geriatric set?”
“I can take any angle I want, actually. My editor just thinks it’s a great idea to have Tasheba Kent in the magazine. Hollywood glamour. Silent movies. Love and death. It’s a natural.”
“Did you say those feather boas were identical?”
“They were as far as I could tell from the photographs, and there are a lot of photographs, and most of them are pretty good. The descriptions in the police reports are identical, too.”
“Hmm. It’s odd, isn’t it? I wonder what it’s all about.”