And One to Die On Read online

  “What it is, I think,” Bennis told Gregor back at the hotel, while she dragged on a Benson & Hedges menthol as if it were an oxygen mask, “is that people need to identify with something, and they don’t want to identify with their families anymore. Families are supposed to be a drag. So instead, they identify with a fictional landscape, like Zedalia.”

  “If you drink any more of that stuff,” Gregor told her, “you’re going to be in no shape to drive us to Maine tomorrow morning.”

  “What worries me, Gregor, is that I might be contributing to the spread of schizophrenia. I might be causing schizophrenia that wouldn’t otherwise exist in the world.”

  Back at the bookstore, all Bennis had been interested in was getting finished and getting out, but it hadn’t been easy. The customers had hundreds of books for her to sign, and even after she’d signed them, they hadn’t wanted to let her go. No sooner had Bennis pushed away the last copy of any of her books existing anywhere in the Cambridge Full Fantasy Bookstore, than Darcy Bentley and Natalia came running up, carrying something large between them that was covered by a sheet.

  “Look,” Darcy Bentley squealed, pulling the sheet off with her left hand. “Look what we got for you. And it was just a miracle that we were able to find it.”

  What they had found was a gigantic porcelain replica of a Stone Age fertility goddess, four feet high and almost as wide, with great drooping heavy breasts and a belly the size and shape of an NBA regulation basketball. Underneath the belly there were feet, but there didn’t seem to be legs. On the head there were long wild tresses of hair that stood up at the ends. Around the neck curled a long snake with flashing green eyes.

  The statue had flashing green eyes, too. That’s because the eyes on the snake and on the statue’s head were tiny green light bulbs, and the whole thing was kept working by four CC batteries and a little nest of plastic-coated wires.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Darcy demanded. “We took one look at it and knew that nothing else on earth would ever come so close to expressing the spirit of your books.”

  3

  Sitting in the Hilton dining room in front of her pitcher of orange juice and an enormous fruit salad, Bennis looked more depressed than Gregor had ever remembered seeing her. She was only picking at her fresh pineapple, which was her favorite thing on earth after dark chocolate. She hadn’t touched her coffee. She had drunk most of the pitcher of orange juice, but Gregor thought that that was mostly because she was hung over. She had to be hung over. After coming back from the bookstore last night, she had put away half of a large bottle of Drambuie, and no dinner.

  “Come on.” Gregor nudged her foot gently under the table. “Cheer up a little. We’ve got a long drive.”

  “I know we do,” Bennis said. “But do you know what I was just thinking?”

  “No.”

  “I was just thinking that they aren’t alone. Those people at the bookstore last night. They’re more colorful about it than most people, but most people are crazy.”

  “Are they?”

  Bennis nodded gloomily. “Take the people we’re going up to Maine today to see. Cavender Marsh. Do you remember Cavender Marsh?”

  “Movie star from the ’30s,” Gregor said. “Had an affair with his wife’s sister. Wife died, possibly a suicide. He ran off with the sister. We’ve been through all this before.”

  “I know we have. I know we have. But bear with me. In the first place, his name isn’t really Cavender Marsh. It’s John Day. He was—what? My mother’s first cousin once removed?”

  “He was your mother’s second cousin. Your mother’s first cousins once removed were the children of her cousins. Your mother’s second cousins are the children of your mother’s parents’ cousins. And there isn’t anything crazy about a man changing his name when he becomes an actor. People do it all the time.”

  “I think you’d have to be from the Main Line to understand how a connection like my mother’s second cousin could get me into a mess like this,” Bennis said. “I’m from the Main Line and I barely understand it.”

  “I was just trying to point out that, your pessimism notwithstanding, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the lunatic fringe here yet.”

  Bennis speared a piece of pineapple and bit off the end of it. “I think there’s enough on the lunatic fringe in this thing to satisfy a psychiatrist for a decade. Her name isn’t really Tasheba Kent, by the way. It’s Thelma.”

  “Kent?”

  “That’s right. And her sister called herself Lilith Brayne, but her name was really Lillian Kent. Can you imagine anyone wanting to name themselves Lilith, especially in the United States in the ’20s, with all that Bible-thumping and anti-Darwin stuff going on?”

  “Sure. It was probably worth its weight in publicity.”

  “Well, if it was, it was the wrong kind of publicity,” Bennis said. “Tasheba was the sexy bad-girl one. Lilith was the ever-pure virgin who got tied to the railroad tracks by the villain. They used to have Tasheba Kent-Lilith Brayne film festivals when I was in college.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of them in the movies. I don’t even remember the case, although I was alive at the time. I think I was five.”

  “The case was absolutely huge,” Bennis said, “and it was crazy even if nothing else was. I mean, Lilith Brayne was ground up by a hacksaw or something—”

  “She fell into an irrigation sluice and was battered by the steel wire grate,” Gregor corrected mildly. “Why do you do things like this? You always make the gore more gory than it was.”

  “It was pretty gory, Gregor. There was an article about it a couple of years ago in Life, one of those retrospective things. It said that not much was left of her but her face.”

  “They were probably exaggerating,” Gregor said.

  “And then the two of them that were left ran off to that island, and they’ve never come out and rejoined the world. Don’t you think that’s lunatic enough? Tasheba Kent was all washed up, but Cavender Marsh still had a pretty important career going. And he just walked right away from it.”

  “I doubt if there would have been much of it remaining when the scandal died down,” Gregor said. “There’s only so much you can get away with, even if you’re a Hollywood actor. Wasn’t there a child involved?”

  “They ditched her on a relative. She was three months old, and Cavender Marsh never saw her again. She’s supposed to be out at the island this weekend.”

  Gregor frowned. “That’s not a very good idea. This will be the first time she’s seen her father since all that happened in 1938?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe they’ve been corresponding,” Gregor said, “or talking on the phone.”

  Bennis shook her head. “There’s been nothing like that at all. I asked my brother Christopher about it. He always knows everything about everybody we’re connected to. He says Cavender Marsh has never said so much as a single word to his daughter in all this time, never even sent her a birthday card or a Christmas present, and it wasn’t his idea for her to come to the birthday party, either. His lawyer insisted. It has something to do with selling their things at auction, just like having me there does. The lawyer insists on having a representative of the heirs on each side of the family there to oversee what goes into the sale. Although why any of us on our side are supposed to care is beyond me. You know how the Main Line feels about Hollywood. After Cavender Marsh became an actor, my grandmother wouldn’t have him in the house.”

  “I wish your brother Christopher could have taken your place on this weekend. Then I wouldn’t have had to come up myself. Eat your fruit salad, Bennis. I want us to get started in plenty of time. I don’t want us to be late for that boat.”

  “We won’t be late.”

  “I would like to arrive on time without having had you drive me at your usual pace. And drink coffee. I want to make sure you’re awake.”

  Bennis got out another cigarette and lit up instead. “
Really, Gregor,” she said. “You’re such an old fuddy-duddy about cars.”

  4

  Gregor didn’t know if he was an old fuddy-duddy about cars. He did know that in a sane world, compassionate laws would have prevented a woman like Bennis Hannaford from buying a car that was described as “a true 140.” “A true 140,” Bennis had explained to him, was a car that ran best at 140 miles an hour. Driving it more slowly was possible, but not very good for the engine. Gregor didn’t think Bennis had ever driven him at 140 miles an hour. If she had, he must have passed out cold and forgotten all about it. But she did drive him fast enough to turn his stomach into a mass of knots and make his head feel stuffed full of cotton wool.

  “There’s no point in driving as fast as you do,” Gregor told Bennis, over and over again. “You barely save five minutes of time on any one trip, and you’re spending a fortune on speeding tickets.”

  “Five minutes is a lot of time,” Bennis replied solemnly. “Five minutes here and five minutes there. It can really add up.”

  “What it’s going to add up to is your losing your license. And I’m not going to blame the state of Pennsylvania one bit.”

  Gregor wouldn’t have blamed the state of Massachusetts if it had impounded Bennis’s car and forced her to go on foot. He had heard his share of jokes about Boston drivers, but he didn’t think even Boston had ever been able to handle Bennis Hannaford.

  “That was a speed bump we just bounced over,” Gregor pointed out, as they came tearing out of the parking garage. “It was supposed to slow you up.”

  “It didn’t.”

  Bennis went down a one-way street, turned right onto another one-way street, turned right again. It was getting close enough to rush hour so that the streets were filling up. There were a lot of eighteen-wheeler trucks on the road. There were a lot of people on bicycles weaving in and out among the cars. Bennis was driving as if she were on a pristinely clear test track at the Bonneville Salt Flats, and they hadn’t really gotten started yet.

  “Maybe we should take U.S. One,” Gregor suggested. “You know, the scenic route.”

  “Too slow,” Bennis answered. “I want to get on I Ninety-five.”

  Gregor gave up. He checked his seat belts twice, making sure that both the lap belt and the shoulder strap were tight. Then he closed his eyes. He got along so much better with Bennis driving if he couldn’t actually see what it was she was doing.

  What was it again that Bennis had said, about Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh and all those other people who were supposed to be in Maine for the weekend, that had upset him so much? Oh, yes. Cavender Marsh’s daughter. Some lawyer had insisted that Cavender Marsh’s daughter be on hand for the birthday party, even though she hadn’t seen or heard from her father since she was three months old.

  Gregor Demarkian had spent twenty years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had spent the last ten of those years either organizing or heading the Department of Behavioral Sciences, which was the division of the Bureau that coordinated nationwide manhunts for serial killers. He had stood at the edge of a shallow grave and watched a team of forensic pathologists bring fourteen bodies up into the light. He had sat in a darkened room and listened to a boy of seventeen tell him—in a voice that was eerily reminiscent of an old-fashioned grade-school teacher’s lecturing a class on the proper way to parse a sentence—that before he slit the throats on the prostitutes he abducted, he cut off the smallest toe on each of their right feet for a souvenir. Gregor Demarkian knew crazy when he saw it, and he didn’t throw the word around carelessly.

  In this case, however, he thought he was justified.

  Whoever had decided to ask Cavender Marsh’s daughter along on this weekend was crazy—and Cavender Marsh was just as crazy to have gone along with it.

  CHAPTER 2

  1

  SHE WAS STANDING ON the boardwalk leading to the piers when Bennis and Gregor drove up, a trim, compact woman with pure white hair and small hands and a deep purple suit that somehow wasn’t flashy. Gregor Demarkian noticed her right off. In fact, she gave him something of a shock. There he was, bouncing along in his self-inflicted stupor, ignoring Bennis’s driving completely—and then he was sitting straight up in his seat, rigid and cold and eager all at the same time. It took him a minute to understand what was wrong. Bennis was guiding the tangerine orange Mercedes into the big open lot with the sign on it that read, “PARKING SHORT AND LONG TERM.” The wind was turning the sea into black glass and whitecaps and crawling down his neck. The trim, compact woman with white hair was pacing back and forth on the boardwalk, moving very carefully in her mid-level stacked heels. Bennis backed the car into the space closest to the parking lot attendant’s shack, and Gregor finally got it: the trim, compact woman reminded him of Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth was the reason Gregor had left the FBI and gone back to the small Armenian-American neighborhood where he had grown up, on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia. Elizabeth was Gregor’s wife of many years, and just before he had retired she had died of cancer after a last, long, agonizing year that Gregor still saw over and over again in his dreams. He had been so exhausted by her dying, he had decided he never wanted to deal with death again. He certainly never wanted to deal with death delivered by lunatics and psychopaths again. He hadn’t realized how wearing living with all that was. Elizabeth had always protected him from it. Elizabeth had made it possible for him to be an emotional blank at the Bureau, because she had always been waiting at home to warm him up when he was through. Once she was gone he had two choices. He could either go on working and become an emotional blank for good, the law enforcement equivalent of the psychopaths he chased. Or he could quit.

  The woman did not really look like Elizabeth. Her body type was very similar, but her face was too tame. Elizabeth had been an Armenian-American woman with high cheekbones and large black eyes. This woman was some derivation of Northern European and rather middle-of-the-road in terms of looks. Hazel eyes. A short, straight nose. Small, pretty teeth. It was her attitude that reminded Gregor of Elizabeth, and the way she carried herself. This, Gregor thought, was a woman of enormous self-respect and enormous competence. This woman believed that manners were important and that true femininity resided in common sense.

  Bennis got the car parked to her satisfaction, pulled her keys out of the ignition, and sighed.

  “I hate leaving it out here in the open like this. I mean, there must be joyriders even in a place like Hunter’s Pier, Maine.”

  Gregor looked around. “There doesn’t look like there’s much of anybody in Hunter’s Pier, Maine.”

  “Don’t be snide, Gregor. People around here probably just have the sense not to build their houses too close to the ocean. Can you imagine what it’s like in the middle of a storm?”

  “I don’t want to imagine it.”

  Bennis got out of the car. “I’m going to talk to the attendant and see if I can’t make some kind of reasonable arrangement for the protection of this car. Why don’t you go over to the boardwalk and talk to the lady. She has to be one of us.”

  Gregor thought she was too, but he was curious. “Why would you say that?”

  Bennis looked disgusted. “Well, Gregor, I wouldn’t expect it’s customary for your ordinary inhabitant of Hunter’s Pier, Maine, to go running around town in a real Chanel suit. Will you get out of the car now and go make sense?”

  Gregor got out of the car. He was wearing a suit, as always, although today, in deference to the weather and the venue, he had a sober navy blue sweater on under his jacket instead of a vest. He walked across the asphalt of the parking lot and stepped over the low concrete curb to the boardwalk. The trim, compact woman was watching him.

  “Excuse me,” she said, in a pleasant, no-nonsense voice, as he began to walk toward her. “Are you Mr. Fenster or Mr. Pratt?”

  “Neither,” Gregor said, catching up to her. “I’m Gregor Demarkian. I’m here with Bennis Hannaford.”

  The trim, co
mpact woman looked over Gregor’s shoulder, not at Bennis herself, but at Bennis’s car. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Miss Hannaford. Mr. Marsh’s relation.”

  “Vaguely.”

  “I’m Lydia Acken,” the trim, compact woman said, holding out her hand for him to take. “I’m very glad to meet you. I was—intrigued—when I saw your name on the final guest list.”

  “There’s nothing to be intrigued about,” Gregor said firmly. “Miss Hannaford is a friend of mine. She seemed to think this situation was one that might call for moral support.”

  Lydia Acken laughed. It sounded like water from a spring, clear and soft. “It probably will. I should have thought of that myself. But still, Mr. Demarkian. It is intriguing. A famous detective and investigator of murders, coming to a house of someone once accused of murder.”

  “When Cavender Marsh was accused of murder, I was five years old. Quite frankly, I don’t care what he did when I was five years old. I don’t care if he butchered an entire village on the Côte d’Azur. It’s none of my business.”

  “I, too, was five years old when Cavender Marsh was accused of murder,” Lydia Acken said. “We must have been born in the same year. But I grew up hearing about the case, you see. My mother was a rabid fan of Lilith Brayne’s back in the ’20s, and she went on and on and on about the death and the people involved in it. She was a very isolated woman. I suppose she didn’t have much else to do.”