Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  He pressed down hard on the number 6 and then held the phone to his ear to listen to it ring. He got David Mortimer on the first ring, which meant that Mortimer did without an assistant. When had they stopped calling them secretaries and started calling them assistants?

  “I’m wandering around in the city,” Gregor told Mortimer, “and I was wondering if I could come over and talk about things for a bit. I’ve just been with Dr. Halevy.”

  “Ah,” Mortimer said. “Yes, I talked to her this morning.”

  “Well, there’s that,” Gregor said. “And a few more things.”

  “Come on over. Maybe we can go to lunch. I’ve been here since five-thirty and I’m dying.”

  Gregor put the cell phone back in his pocket. He didn’t like the fact that phones didn’t just ring anymore. He was less attuned to the modern than Miss Jane Marple.

  Ack, he thought.

  Then there was a cab, and he was raising his arm in the street and watching it slow down.

  3

  There was no murder, and therefore no murder mystery, and that mattered. But something was going on, and Gregor didn’t like the way it felt, so he was here. Or something. Maybe he was just bored being without something professional to do.

  Gregor watched the floors go by as the elevator went up and thought that he would have to poke his head in to say hello to the mayor before he left. He’d known John Jackman too long not to do that. Then the elevator stopped and the doors slid open, and David Mortimer was right out there in the hall, waiting for him.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Come on back with me for a while. I’ve got some information printing out for you.”

  “As far as I can tell, there isn’t any information,” Gregor said. “At least there isn’t any from the doctor. Is there anything about this Lily woman?”

  “Not really.” David Mortimer was moving fast. Gregor watched offices go by, and then a big office full of cubicles, and then a little door at the end. Mortimer opened that door and ushered Gregor into a space that must once have been a biggish closet. It did not have a window.

  There was a visitor’s chair. Gregor sat in it. Mortimer sat behind the desk and looked into the little tray of the printer.

  “Here we are,” he said, picking up a little pile of papers. “And in case you’re wondering, yes, this was indeed a closet. But the mayor wanted his special liaison to have an office, not a cubicle, so here we are.”

  “That’s what your title is? Special Liaison?”

  “Yeah. Personally, I think Mr. Jackman just likes the word ‘liaison.’ You’ve known him forever, haven’t you?”

  “Something like that.” Gregor did not say, “He dated my wife before I did,” because he found that idea uncomfortable.

  Mortimer placed the papers on the desk as close to Gregor as he could get them. “We’ve done a preliminary search for the two brothers,” he said, “given the information you’ve given us. And for the niece, I think you said she was. So far, we don’t have much, but then we don’t have much, if you know what I mean. We’ve asked for a search warrant so that we can go into the house and look through the papers there to find some clue to where the rest of the woman’s family is, but it’s harder to get warrants like that than you’d think. There are privacy concerns, and legal concerns, and constitutional concerns. You weren’t really serious when you suggested that we just let this, um, this Mrs.—”

  “Vardanian,” Gregor said.

  “Vardanian,” Mortimer said. “You didn’t really mean we should turn a blind eye to her going into the house and rooting around?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Not really. But she suggested it, and I thought I should pass it along. She’s—maybe I should say understandably concerned.”

  “Yes, well,” Mortimer said. “Look. If this Mrs. Mgrdchian were any younger, we’d probably have homicide detectives assigned to the case already. Not that there’s been a homicide, but we don’t really know that there hasn’t been an attempted one. This whole thing gets odder the longer it goes on. We did check the public records, and we have birth data on Sophie and Viktor Mgrdchian and draft information on Viktor and his two brothers, plus records of the baptism, but not the birth, of a Clarice Ann Mgrdchian, who seems to have been Marco’s daughter. But Clarice Ann couldn’t be Lily. She’s too young by nearly thirty years.”

  “And you don’t know where she is?”

  “We’ve got a couple of people working the Internet,” Mortimer said, “but it’s not as easy as you think, especially when you don’t really know where to start geographically. And we don’t know. Those women you sent us to are very sharp, sharper than I expect to be at their age, but they don’t really know anything. Seeing somebody at a funeral more than a decade ago isn’t—”

  “Yes, I know,” Gregor said. “What about Lily herself? I understand that the thing with the fingerprints isn’t really all that unusual, but—”

  “It’s not unusual for homeless people,” Mortimer said. “They burn themselves. They cut themselves. Sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose. We run into it every winter when the cold hits and we have to try to identify the one or two who always die. Our problem here, of course, is that this Lily woman didn’t seem to be homeless. She was too clean—”

  “Yes, I thought about that,” Gregor said. “Maybe Sophie Mgrdchian saw her homeless and took her in.”

  “Was Mrs. Mgrdchian like that?” Mortimer asked. “Because I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I am saying that it’s unlikely. Homeless people tend to be scary for reasons other than the ordinary citizen’s prejudices. A lot of them are alcohol or drug addicted, and addicted people are volatile and unpredictable. A lot of them are mentally ill, and they’re even more volatile and unpredictable.”

  “That’s what we’re assuming here, aren’t we? That Lily is mentally ill?”

  “I guess. But she’s not mentally ill the way homeless people are usually mentally ill. She’s not belligerent. She comes with us when we ask her to. She obedient and mild mannered and not at all violent. She wouldn’t last half a day like that living on the street, not most places in this city. And I’ll tell you what. We’ve never picked her up before.”

  “Picked her up?” Gregor asked.

  “For causing a public nuisance, or something like that. We do keep records when we have to send the police to get homeless people out of stores or other places where they cause disturbances. A lot of them use the libraries in the winter, and if they stay out of the way and don’t get loud or smell too bad, we don’t bother them. The librarians don’t want us to bother them. But some of them go into libraries and bring up porn on the machines and, uh, well—”

  “Masturbate,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah,” Mortimer said. “That. They do that. Not the women, usually, though. Or they smell so bad it isn’t possible to get near them. Or they start shouting and threatening people. Mostly people who aren’t there, but still. And we’ve never picked her up for anything like that. Of course, if she was as clean and as quiet as she is now, we wouldn’t have been asked to pick her up, but then she couldn’t have been homeless. She’d have had to have someplace to go to wash.”

  “Have you checked the shelters?”

  “All of them, and the temporary housing organizations, too. She hasn’t been at any of them. This Lily of yours might have been a homeless person, but if she was, she wasn’t homeless in Philadelphia.”

  “I can’t see Sophie Mgrdchian taking in a homeless woman off the street,” Gregor said. “I didn’t know Mrs. Mgrdchian personally, except maybe back when I was twelve, but I know these women. I can see them baking all night and passing out bread to people they think need it, but I can’t see them taking in strangers.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “So,” Gregor said. “I guess there’s nothing to do but wait for the results of the new set of tests Dr. Halevy has ordered. I asked her if she thought we were going to find foul play, and she wasn’t able to give m
e an answer. I asked her if she knew what was wrong with Sophie Mgrdchian, and she couldn’t answer that, either.”

  “It’s probably going to end up being something natural, or an accident,” David Mortimer said. “But take that stuff. It’s all the test results we have on Sophie Mgrdchian, plus all the search results so far on Lily. If you can make something of them, we’d be glad of the help. I’m sorry we’re not being more efficient.”

  “You’re being fine,” Gregor said.

  He picked up the papers, and looked at them, and frowned. There really was nothing here. He wished he had something concrete in the old-fashioned sense, like a bullet hole in the ceiling. Then he put the papers down on the desk again.

  “Could I ask you a favor?” he said. “Could you get me some information about an incident in Merion.”

  “Merion?”

  “I think that was where it was. American’s Next Superstar seems to be filming its new season at my wife’s childhood home, and back last weekend there was a shooting at something the show was doing in Merion.”

  David Mortimer looked happy. “I know what you’re talking about. A girl we think is called Emily tried to shoot Sheila Dunham in the middle of some filming they were doing, or something. Oh, I can get you a lot on that one. And it’s even got interesting parallels. I mean, this Emily woman isn’t talking, either, last I heard.”

  SEVEN

  1

  Alida Akido had had no idea that it would be as hard as this to live with other girls in the house, or that she’d be so close to killing one of them because she just couldn’t stand the stupid endless chatter anymore. The one she wanted to kill was not Andra Gayle, who didn’t actually talk much—probably because, when she did, she sounded like a rap record or an actress playing a drug-addicted whore on Law & Order. No, the girl who was driving Alida crazy was her roommate, Mary-Louise Verdt.

  The situation was being made worse by the fact that Mary-Louise seemed to think, because they were roommates, they had to do everything together.

  Right now, they were sitting side by side in the limousine, and Alida wanted to tear the hair out of her own head. At least it would cause a scene. At least it would mean that Mary-Louise would stop talking.

  “This means Coraline won’t have any film from the challenge,” Mary-Louise was saying. “That’s fatal, it really is, especially at this point in the competition. I mean, it’s not like they’ve got days and days of film to judge by instead?”

  “Oh, I know,” Janice Ledbeddder said. “Wasn’t that awful? And don’t you worry about it? I mean, Sheila Dunham is, well, she’s like this all the time, isn’t she? Or at least she seems to be, on television. Any one of us could be next.”

  “At least we’ll all be at the challenge,” another of the girls said. Alida wracked her brains and came up with a name: Linda Kowalski. Linda roomed with a girl named Shari Bernstein, and as far as Alida was concerned, they might as well be twins.

  Shari was fluffing her hair in a mirror. It had been teased out beyond belief. “There’s always somebody who gets left behind at the beginning,” she said. “It’s never the first person to actually go home. Even Grace hasn’t gone home.”

  They all looked at Grace on the far end of the car. She was talking to Suzanne Toretti. She didn’t seem to have heard them.

  “It won’t be Grace, either,” Shari said. “Don’t you see? It’s got to be a surprise, and Grace and Coraline wouldn’t be surprises. Everybody would be expecting them. It’s got to be somebody the audience expects is going to stay forever, or maybe even win. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any drama.”

  “I just hope we’re not going to have to do another of those debriefing interviews, or whatever they call them,” Mary-Louise said. “I really hated the one I had the first day. I mean, you never know what you’re saying, do you? And they can do things with the tape so that when they show you on television, you look like a complete idiot. That’s just what I need, everybody watching at home and seeing me look like a complete idiot.”

  “At least you didn’t have to do one about how you were knocked out at the end of casting and didn’t get into the house,” Janice said. “I hate those. I leave the room when they come on. I won’t even watch them. I mean, just how embarrassing does that have to be? Everybody in the world knows you tried, and everybody in the world knows you failed.”

  “My mother says you can’t be afraid of failure if you’re going to succeed,” Linda said. “She says everybody who succeeds fails a lot at first, and then they pick themselves up and just go on with it. But I’m glad I didn’t have to do one of those interviews, either. I think they’re so sad.”

  The car was pulling up to the curb on a street that looked too quaint to be real. This would be the center of the town of Bryn Mawr, Alida supposed, although she had the impression that most of Bryn Mawr was like where they were living now, big houses on big estates laid back across wide lawns away from the roads. Still, it was interesting. This was supposed to be one of the richest towns in America. Alida liked the look of rich towns.

  “Oh, look,” Mary-Louise said. “There they are. The photographers.”

  “The paparazzi,” Shari Bernstein corrected her.

  Alida looked in the direction Mary-Louise was pointing. They were there all right, half a dozen men with cameras, half hiding in the doorway of the shop next door. In a real celebrity situation, there would be hundreds of them. They would fill the streets and stop traffic. Alida supposed that these people had been hired, and that there wasn’t enough money to hire enough of them. It did not look to her like much of a challenge.

  The driver stopped the car’s engine. The girls all hesitated, wondering what they were supposed to do next. Alida thought she was sure. Celebrities didn’t open the doors of their own limousines. They had drivers to to open the doors. She folded her hands in her lap. Down at the other end of the car, Grace Alsop and Andra Gayle were gathering up their things.

  The driver came around and opened the door closest to the curb. Shari Bernstein was closest to the door. She got out first, and when she did the photographs rushed up to her, screaming at her to turn to look at them, and snapping pictures all the while. Shari ducked her head and raced for the door to the restaurant.

  Linda Kowalski was next. By now, all the girls were looking out of the car windows, watching the performances as they came by. Grace looked very thoughtful, and that was important, because Alida thought Grace was her only real competition.

  Mary-Louise went out next, and Alida almost laughed out loud to see that performance. First she ran. Then she seemed to lose her way, then she skidded and fell. When she got up, she had dirt all along the side of her little black dress. She rushed toward the restaurant door and lost a shoe. She turned around, found the shoe, picked it up, and rushed some more.

  Alida was next. She got her umbrella from the floor where she had left it when she first got into the car. She stepped out of the limousine in that swiveling way her mother had taught her would not expose any part of her that she did not want people to see. The photographers rushed her as they had rushed all the others. She opened the umbrella directly into their faces and walked—not ran—to the restaurant’s front door. She was inside and out of the range of the cameras in no time at all.

  Mary-Louise was standing near the reception desk, crying softly into a napkin somebody had gotten her from someplace. Alida ignored her. Other girls were coming in: Janice Ledbedder, looking out of breath; then Ivy, Grace, and Suzanne; and then Andra and Marcia Lee. It took a while for all thirteen girls to enter the restaurant.

  Alida moved closer to Grace. “They’re all so pathetic,” she said. “They don’t look this pathetic on television, do you know what I mean?”

  “They’re edited for television,” Grace said.

  Alida shrugged. The restaurant door opened again and the judging panel came in, or some of them did—there was Sheila Dunham, and Mark Borodine and Johnny Rell, but not the other two. Alida had never
had much use for gay men, but the entertainment business was full of them, and she supposed she’d have to tolerate them.

  Sheila was walking up and down in front of them. Alida wondered if she took drugs. She was always so extreme, so angry and hyperactive. She did seem to have managed to make it into the restaurant without a hair out of place or an inch of stocking wet.

  Alida watched as Sheila stopped in front of Mary-Louise Verdt and looked her up and down. It really was very hard not to laugh in these situations. It really was. Mary-Louise looked terrified. She also looked like she’d been wrestling in mud.

  Alida could feel all the girls holding their breaths. They were waiting for Sheila to do something outrageous and violent, as she had already twice that day.

  Instead, Sheila just said, “Go home.”

  Mary-Louise’s tears welled up yet again. “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Go home,” Sheila said. “Get back in the car. You’re out of this challenge. No decent restaurant would allow you in looking the way you do.”

  “I slipped,” Mary-Louise said, and now the tears were coming down hard and fast. “I—they just all ran at me and so I was running to get away, and I slipped.”

  “I don’t care what you did,” Sheila said, “you can’t come into the restaurant like that. Go back and sit in the car. You’re out of this challenge.”

  “But I can’t be,” Mary-Louise wailed.

  “Get out or I’ll have you taken out,” Sheila said, and then she turned her back on the crying Mary-Louise, and looked down the line at the other girls.

  Alida didn’t know why she expected the next target of Sheila Dunham’s gaze to be herself, but she did. She was not surprised that Sheila stopped in front of her. She was not afraid, either. She knew she looked good. Unlike most of the rest of these girls, she had clothes that really suited the occasion. She was wearing Betsey Johnson and Gucci, not knockoffs from Kmart and JC Penney. Her hair was good, too, sleek and styled and combed, jet black and falling to her shoulders. She didn’t have too much makeup on. She wasn’t wearing too much jewelry.