And One to Die On Read online

  Actually, luck had nothing to do with it. Richard wasn’t doing what his parents wanted and expected him to do, which was something along the lines of being the next in line for a Nobel Prize in physics. Richard had been declared a math prodigy at seven, sent to MIT at fifteen, and received a doctorate in theoretical mathematics from the California Institute of Technology before he was twenty-four. At that point, he had decided that he’d had enough. He may have been a math prodigy, but he had never been that interested in math. Working with numbers came easily to him, but it also bored him silly. As it turned out, however, it was a highly translatable skill. Richard was in his second year of doctoral work at Cal Tech the first time he bought a block of stock. That first time, he used money from his fellowship, which was supposed to go into his living expenses. He never had to miss a meal. Three months after buying the stock, he sold, at a profit of almost 15 percent, a nice haul even after having to pay capital gains tax. He bought another block and then another, throwing dice on quick turnovers and hunches that came from so deeply inside him, they might not have been hunches at all. His success was astonishing even to him, and he was used to being successful.

  What made Richard Fenster a rich man was the Black Monday minicrash of 1987. Just before it hit, he had pulled himself out of the stock market totally, not because of any business intelligence or sober analysis of the state of the deficit, but in a fit of pique. He had spent the Monday before the Monday of the crash bidding on the fan Tasheba Kent had used to seduce Ramon Navarro in Flame of Desire. He had lost it to an aggressive little man who reminded him of Peter Lorre and who had much too much money to be beaten. Richard had cashed out of the market because he was angry that he hadn’t had the cash when he needed it. The next thing he knew, he was buying back in at rock-bottom prices that wouldn’t be seen again for quite a while. Six months later, the market bounced back and he sold out again. It was scary, how much money he made. It was scary to look through the careful financial records he kept on his Macintosh and realize he was worth well over six million dollars.

  By then, of course, Richard had been out of Cal Tech for some time and living in New York City. He had a room at the Y for a while and then a fifth floor walk-up studio on West Ninety-fourth Street. He bought his clothes at army-navy stores and thrift shops in Chinatown. He ate from street vendors and take-out places and called “really eating out” sitting down to a Whopper at a Lexington Avenue Burger King. He cared for only two things: his computer and his collection of Tasheba Kent memorabilia. Anyone who saw him on the street would have tagged him as a hopeless nerd, a rat-faced keyboard jockey, a failure.

  He moved back to Massachusetts because he thought it was time to settle down, and because he liked Cambridge, and because the shop made sense. He sold movie memorabilia of every kind, from the ordinary to the very, very rare, from the silents to the present, and books and magazines about the movies, too. Reel To Reel had the best collection of artifacts from 1950s big bug movies west of the Mississippi. It had the best collection of props from 1930s musicals anywhere outside the MGM warehouse. Most of all, Reel To Reel was the acknowledged headquarters for every passionate cinema fan in the United States, and there were more of them than Richard ever imagined.

  It was not Richard Fenster’s reputation as a fan but his reputation as a dealer that had gotten him invited to Tasheba Kent’s one hundredth birthday party, and he knew it. The party was a ruse. Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh were obviously in desperate need of money. They were going to sell all their things and use the cash for nursing homes or live-in help or whatever else it was people that ancient needed for their day-to-day lives. Richard supposed it was expensive to be old, although he didn’t know it for sure. He hated his parents with the passion of a Greek hating the Turks, and his parents were the only relatively old people he had any contact with. Richard did know that he was willing to spend a great deal of money to get his hands on a significant portion of that collection. He was sure Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh and their agents at the auction house knew it, too.

  Richard Fenster’s idea of packing for a weekend was to stuff all his clean jeans, all his clean shirts, all his clean underwear, and his one extra sweater into a canvas duffel bag and sling the duffel bag over his shoulder. His idea of arranging for transportation up to Maine was to hitch. It was Katha Drosset who had talked him into taking the plane to Augusta and hiring a car from there, and now Katha was sitting on a tall four-legged bar stool shoved up against his five-drawer bureau, smoking a marijuana cigarette and looking bored. The bureau had come from the Salvation Army. Katha had come from Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence College. Richard had sex with her whenever she was willing to get on top, so that he could lie on his back in bed and stare into the eyes of Tasheba Kent when he came.

  “So tell me,” Katha said, her voice sounding too high and tight coming through a rush of marijuana smoke, “just what is it you’re going to do up there all weekend, aside from meet this woman who’s been your idol forever now that she’s turned into a walking corpse?”

  “Look the merchandise over.” Richard’s yellow velour shirt had a tomato stain on the collar. It might have been better not to have taken that one even if it had been clean.

  “I bet I know what you want to do,” Katha said. “I bet you want to ask them all about the death of Lilith Brayne.”

  “I wouldn’t bring it up. I’d probably get thrown out of the house.”

  “They wouldn’t be able to throw you out of the house, unless they meant to drown you. I looked at that stuff they sent. It’s the luxury version of Alcatraz you’re going to.”

  “It’s nothing of the sort. Is that my western belt under the bed over there?”

  “You gave your western belt to that wino in Harvard Square who was trying to keep his pants up with one hand and drink muscatel with the other.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “It’s your rubber rattlesnake you see under the bed. Don’t you think it’s strange, that nobody’s ever written a book about it?”

  “About what?”

  “About the death of Lilith Brayne. It was a famous case at the time. All those books you have say so. And they all say Cavender Marsh murdered her and got away with it, too.”

  “They don’t say that, Katha. If they did, they’d get sued.”

  “I still say it sounds like just the thing. People are always digging up old Hollywood murders and writing best-sellers about them. I’m surprised you don’t write this one yourself.”

  “I’m a lousy writer. And I don’t want to write a book about the death of Lilith Brayne. It’s Tasheba Kent I’m interested in.”

  “They were sisters.”

  “I don’t think it was a murder,” Richard said. “I think the coroner’s report was probably accurate. More accident than anything else.”

  Katha lit another marijuana cigarette, held her breath, and stared dreamily at the ceiling. “I bet what’s-his-name doesn’t think so,” she said as she let the smoke out of her lungs. “You know, the guy that came here from Personality magazine last week. I bet he thinks it was a murder. I bet he wants to write about it, too.”

  “He probably does.”

  “I think you ought to get in there first,” Katha said. “Look at all the time and trouble and money you’ve put into Tasheba Kent. You’ve got moral rights in this case. Or squatter’s rights. Or something.”

  “Right,” Richard said. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough of that stuff for today?”

  “I never have enough of this stuff, Richard. It’s better than air.”

  “Well, it’s got more of a kick.”

  Richard was down to his two sweaters, the red V-necked one with the hole in the shoulder seam and the brown crew-necked one with the hole in the right elbow. Which to wear and which to take? The hole in the elbow was more embarrassing than the hole in the shoulder seam. Richard stuffed the brown sweater into his duffel bag and threw the red one onto the top of his bureau.
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br />   “That’ll do it,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get lucky this weekend. Maybe she’ll take to me, and sit me down and tell me all about her life.”

  “Don’t be asinine,” Katha said scornfully. “She’s going to be a hundred years old. It probably takes all the brainpower she has left just to decide what she wants for breakfast.”

  Aside from clothes, the only important thing Richard had to take to Maine with him was his laptop with its little collection of discs. That folded into a case the size of a briefcase and never really had to be packed at all.

  Richard fastened the top of the duffel bag and put it on the floor against the wall. He put his laptop on the floor next to it, so he wouldn’t forget it when it was time to leave.

  He wished he had good reason for believing that Katha’s predictions on the state of Tasheba Kent’s mind were wrong, but he didn’t. It was just the kind of thing about which Katha tended to be deadly accurate.

  Richard went into the bathroom, shut the door, and sat down on the closed cover of the toilet seat. In the beginning, having Katha around felt like a good idea. She was an assistant in the shop and a companion the rest of the time. She was somebody to talk to on a regular basis, which was something Richard had never had before, except when he was living at home. Lately, having her around had begun to make him feel as if he were living at home. She nattered and pried and criticized, just like his mother. Her standards were different, but her methods of attack were precisely the same.

  The worst of it was, of course, that he didn’t really like having sex with her. Sometimes he positively hated it. She was too thin and too angular. She smelled of marijuana. She cluttered up the bed. What he wanted was to be left alone with the great dark eyes on his ceiling, the parted bowed mouth, the hint of decadence in the rounded flesh of breast and arm.

  Sometimes, waking up in the dark with Katha curled into a ball beside him, Richard got a sudden flash of a historical moment: Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh making love to each other on the moonlit beach at Cap d’Antibes.

  The vision always made him feel as if his intestines were going down the garbage disposal.

  4

  MATHILDA FRAZIER’S OFFICE OVERLOOKED Madison Avenue, and whenever she got angry—really, impossibly, undeniably angry—she would stand at her windows and drop sunflower seeds onto the heads of pedestrians walking along the sidewalk three stories below. Mathilda had no idea what she would do if she got promoted. That would mean moving upstairs, literally. By the time she got to the fifth floor, she could drop all the sunflower seeds she wanted, nobody would notice. This did not mean that Mathilda Frazier did not want to be promoted. She wanted it desperately. If she hadn’t, she would never have put up with the kind of abuse she was getting from Martin Michaelson over the phone.

  “Women weren’t brought up the way you were back in whenever-it-was,” Martin was saying. “They didn’t have the same assumptions. They were brought up to be women.”

  “Right,” Mathilda said. She preferred to drop dry sunflower seeds in their seedpods. The dry-roasted kind were oily, and tended to get stains all over her suit.

  “I don’t think you realize how profoundly alienating women like you can be to women with traditional values. I don’t think you realize what kind of antagonisms you create.”

  “My mother is a woman with traditional values, Martin. We get along just fine. And you can hardly call Tasheba Kent a paragon of traditional values. This is a woman who played the sexual aggressor in twenty movies starting back before women had the vote.”

  “The vote isn’t the point either, Mathilda. The point here is that Tasheba Kent was always very male-positive. She saw men as a good thing. Not like you.”

  “Wonderful, Martin.”

  “I’m just trying to warn you. This is an important account. I don’t want you to blow it.”

  Actually, Mathilda thought, dropping a whole fistful of sunflower seeds this time, so that they fell like snow on the head of a young man dressed for the starring role in Jesus Christ Superstar, what Martin really wanted was to get her to quit. This was an important account, and it was driving him absolutely crazy that she had gotten it. What made it worse was that nobody had handed it to her. Martin’s usual tactic, when Mathilda got work he wanted for himself, was to blame it on “affirmative action”—a policy that Halbard’s Auction House, being a British company, did not in fact follow. Anybody could tell that much just by looking around at the third floor, where all the auction coordinators worked. It wasn’t that there weren’t plenty of women, because there were. It wasn’t that there weren’t plenty of black people and Asians and Indians from New Delhi and other people who might qualify as marginal in the ordinary scheme of things, because Halbard’s had a better record at that kind of thing than most American companies. The problem was that 99 percent of these people had British accents, and of the 1 percent left over, a fair number had Scots accents. That was the official and unofficial hiring practices policy at Halbard’s: hire British if at all possible, even if you have to bring a load of secretaries in on the boat.

  With Tasheba Kent, though, Mathilda could not have been upstaged, or assigned out, or any of the other things Halbard’s upper management liked to do to make sure the Americans didn’t get their hands on anything important. The Tasheba Kent auction was Mathilda’s by right. She was the one who had seen the article—on a back page of the “Metropolitan” section of The New York Times, near the bottom—where Tasheba Kent’s lawyer had been quoted as saying that Miss Kent and Mr. Marsh were considering an auction of their movie mementos and personal things. She was the one who had called the lawyer to offer the services of Halbard’s Auction House. She was the one who had gone over the list of probable sale items with an acerbic young woman named Geraldine Dart. Nobody at Halbard’s could deny that the Tasheba Kent auction had been constructed out of almost nothing by Mathilda Frazier herself, and there was absolutely nothing Martin Michaelson could do about it.

  “Mathilda?” Martin demanded. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Always, Martin,” Mathilda said.

  “I just want to be sure you’re listening to me. I just want to make sure I’m getting through to you. If you aren’t careful, this trip of yours could get to be an absolute disaster.”

  “Well, Martin, that’s always true, isn’t it?”

  “What are you going to do if you get there and just put her right off? You don’t realize it, but you’re very abrasive.”

  “Thanks, Martin.”

  “You’re very aggressive and unfeminine. You really are. I know that’s not supposed to count anymore, but this is an older woman you’re going to be dealing with.”

  “I know who I’m going to be dealing with, Martin.”

  “Some women can be very competitive without losing their femininity, but it’s like walking a tightrope. Most women just haven’t got what it takes.”

  “Do you have a dictionary of clichés in your office, Martin, where you can look things up whenever you’re at a loss for words?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Listen, Martin, I’ve got to get off the phone now. I’ve got to go down the hall and see Phyllis.”

  “Yes. Of course. None of us can afford to keep Phyllis waiting. But you’ll think about it, won’t you?”

  “Think about what?”

  “About not going to Maine, of course. Maybe it would be the best thing. Then Tasheba Kent would never have to know that the two of you don’t get along.”

  “Good-bye, Martin.”

  Mathilda hung up and rubbed her forehead. I’m not going to go check myself out in a mirror, she told herself, I’m just not. Martin Michaelson wouldn’t recognize femininity if it walked up and bit him on the ass. In the end, she couldn’t help herself. She fished an ancient compact out of the bottom of her purse and surveyed her eyes and eyebrows and eyelashes, her nose and cheekbones, the line of her jaw. Everything seemed to be in place. Nothing seemed to have “masculinized” whil
e she wasn’t looking. She hadn’t started growing whiskers on her chin or—or what, for God’s sake?

  Mathilda threw the compact back into her purse and the purse over her shoulder and left her office to go down to the other end of the hall. Phyllis Green was an American and the head of the auction coordination department. That way, Halbard’s had managed to promote her without moving her upstairs into the pure British precincts of upper management. Phyllis had decided to put up with this for reasons known only to herself. Unlike her staff—which was mainly made up of twentysomethings just graduated from the art history departments of the Ivy League and Seven Sisters—Phyllis was in her fifties and a veteran of the equal pay wars. If she hadn’t liked the arrangements at Halbard’s, she would either have left or hauled the auction house into court.

  “Phyllis?” Mathilda asked, knocking on the open door.

  Phyllis looked up from a pile of papers on her desk and waved Mathilda inside. “I thought you’d gone already. Aren’t you supposed to be in Maine?”

  “I’m leaving first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Well, you’ll be lucky to get out of here. Do you know what I’ve spent my time doing all day? Going through the details of the Impressionist auction. Fifty paintings by Pissarro just sitting up there on the sixth floor, lying around like so many pieces of wood, and nobody’s cataloged them yet.”