by Jane Haddam
“You did?” They had gotten into the elevator together. It was heading upward. It creaked. “Why?”
“Because it keeps them out of the cold,” LeeAnn said. “I know this isn’t the kind of thing I’m supposed to think, and I know why the courts did it, but I don’t think I’ve ever found anything so stupid as that bit where you can’t involuntarily commit somebody who isn’t a danger to themselves or others, and then you define being a danger as not actively going after people with an ax. Aren’t they a danger to themselves when they’re too paranoid to go to a homeless shelter when it’s minus six outside?”
“You really don’t want to make it too easy for people to be socked away against their will,” Gregor said. “We make that hard even when they have gone after people with an ax.”
“I know,” LeeAnn said. “I know. I know all the arguments. I just get fed up.” The elevator stopped and the doors opened. “Here we are. It’s just as bad as downstairs, isn’t it? Can you imagine being depressed and being committed to a place like this?”
Gregor did not think the fourth floor was as bad as the lobby, because it was full of people, and the people made it feel less dead. There were plenty of nurses up here, and plenty of patients, and not all the patients looked comatose.
“They’ve got them on so many meds, they’re like zombies,” LeeAnn said. “Give me a minute here.”
She went up to the nurse’s station and talked with one of the women there. Then she came back, nodding. “They’ll bring Lily down in a second. She’s got a room at the far end of the hall. We can go in here in the back.”
LeeAnn led Gregor into a small side room. It was painted pale pea soup green, too, and the floors were still linoleum, but there was a table with three chairs and the chairs had padded seats. Gregor wondered when she had time to acquaint herself with all this. She couldn’t have been Lily’s attorney for more than a day.
“Under the usual circumstances, I wouldn’t let you talk to her,” LeeAnn said. “You do work with the police, and the police are not our favorite people. But there doesn’t seem to be a crime here. At least not yet. And it isn’t as if she could say anything that’s likely to be admissible in court.”
“When I saw her, she seemed to be pretty disoriented.”
“She’s that, yes,” LeeAnn said.
“Maybe she has some kind of medication that she needs to have adjusted.”
LeeAnn looked into her briefcase again and came up with a small sheaf of papers. She looked through them for a while and shook her head.
“She had one of those plastic pill organizers on her when she was first brought in to the police station,” LeeAnn said. “There wasn’t much of anything in it except a diuretic and some vitamins. There wasn’t even any blood pressure medication. They did a workup when she first came here and her blood pressure was a little elevated, so they’re giving her something for it. But there weren’t any psychotropic drugs, or anything that would be likely to cause this kind of mental disorganization.”
“A plastic pill organizer means that somebody must have prescribed pills for her,” Gregor said.
“Of course,” LeeAnn said. “But there was just the organizer, as far as I can tell. The police didn’t find the actual prescription bottles. Which is too bad, really, because if they had, we’d have some clue to who she was and where she came from. I’d give a lot to be able to talk to her regular doctor right now.”
“You don’t find it odd,” Gregor asked, “that she’s got a pill organizer full of pills, and she’s very clean, both in her body and her clothes, and that even so all her fingertips are so damaged that the police couldn’t get a clear fingerprint reading from them?”
“Odd?” LeeAnn said. “Why? A lot of people have that sort of damage to their fingertips. I mean, you might not deal with them, but I do, all the time, they mess them up—freeze them to pipes, burn them accidentally on matches, and—”
“And those people are not only mentally ill, but homeless,” Gregor pointed out. “But we’ve just pretty much demonstrated that whoever Lily is, she couldn’t have been a homeless woman.”
“Ah,” LeeAnn said. She considered it. “Maybe this other woman, the one in the coma, maybe she was being a Good Samaritan and—”
“Taking in a stranger? That’s so unlikely as to be impossible. But even if it wasn’t likely given Sophie Mgrdchian’s character, the fact is that in order to get a pill organizer full of pills, Sophie would have had to take Lily to a doctor. And that would have taken time, time for an appointment, time for the prescriptions to be filled.”
“Maybe they went to the emergency room.”
“Did the police find evidence of Lily having been to an emergency room?”
“No,” LeeAnn said. “And they did check, at least preliminarily. It’s in my notes.”
There was a sound at the door. Gregor and LeeAnn both looked up. A woman in a nursing uniform was leading Lily in, leading her by the hand as carefully as if she were a kitten with a broken leg.
“Come over here and sit down, dear,” the woman was saying, patting Lily’s hand over and over again as she said it. “Just come over here and sit down. These people want to have a little talk with you.”
Lily allowed herself to be led to a chair. Then she sat down and looked from one of them to the other. She put her hands up on the table and folded them.
“I wish you wouldn’t do these things,” the woman in the nursing uniform said. “I do realize there are legal issues here, and we’d all like to know who this woman is, but you disrupt her entire routine. You make her more disoriented than she already is.”
Lily leaned forward. She was smiling.
“I’m not disoriented,” she said, in a perfectly clear and lucid voice.
The three of them turned to stare at her. It was, Gregor thought, the oddest thing. It was as if they had been looking at a statue, and the statue had ended up being a real person who moved. There was a change not just in the expression on Lily’s face, but in the way she held her body and the tilt of her head. Even her spine was straighter.
“Is there something wrong with the whole bunch of you?” Lily demanded. “Can any of you talk? Because I wish one of you would. I’d like to know where the hell I am.”
It was LeeAnn who moved first. “Maybe we ought to clear the room,” she said. “I’m this woman’s lawyer, and I want to make sure that there’s nothing said here—”
“You’re my lawyer?” Lily said. “Why do I need a lawyer? And where is this place and what am I doing here?”
“Clear the room,” LeeAnn insisted. “Lily, please, stop talking until I can make sure—”
“My name isn’t Lily,” the woman said. “Whatever made you think my name was Lily?”
“You told us your name was Lily,” Gregor said. “Yesterday, when we found you in the house of a woman named Sophie Mgrdchian. Do you remember anything about that at all?”
“I will not have you asking her questions,” LeeAnn said, now positively frantic. “And I don’t want you answering them, either. I’m your attorney, and—”
“Of course I remember being in Sophie’s house,” the woman said. “I’ve been staying there for two weeks. She’s my sister-in-law.”
2
A cab was pulled up to the curb right in front of the hospital when Gregor walked out, and the driver was willing to go to Bryn Mawr. That was the only reason Gregor went to Bryn Mawr at all, and it surprised him that he did. Not all cabs were willing to go out to the Main Line. Of course, not all times found Gregor more than happy to pay the asking price, either.
He sat in the cab and put his head on the back of the seat, trying to think. There would be no talking to Lily—no, to Karen—any time soon, and he could hardly blame LeeAnn Testenaro for that. He probably should have called Bennis and told her what had happened. The problem was, he didn’t know what he would say. That scene had been so bizarre, and so completely improbable, that—
He thought back to yeste
rday when he had first seen Lily. There she had been in Sophie Mgrdchian’s foyer, smiling and babbling like someone in a trance. He tried to picture it in his head exactly as it had been. He hadn’t thought to question the authenticity of it at the time. That was partly assumptions. He was on Cavanaugh Street in the presence of a harmless-looking old lady. You didn’t usually assume that harmless-looking old ladies would fake dementia. And what would they want to fake dementia for? He’d talked to the police and to the doctor who was looking after Sophie Mgrdchian. They didn’t know what had happened to her, or why she persisted in her coma, but they weren’t suggesting that anything had been done to get her that way, either. They’d checked for all the usual things and found nothing.
Part of the reason he had not questioned Lily’s dementia, though, was that it had not felt fake at the time. It frustrated him that he was not able to just recreate the scene in his head. It hadn’t felt fake at the time, so that meant that, if Lily was acting, she must be a good enough actress to convince nonexperts and distracted people. Later, though, she had been in the presence of experts and of people who were devoting their whole attention to her. They hadn’t spotted a fake, either.
They were out of the city now, and on those long roads that wound through big houses and wide stretches of lawn. It had been a long time since Gregor had been out here. It had been nearly a decade since he’d been at Engine House. He couldn’t remember what that first night had been like, either. He did remember he’d met Bennis then, and John Henry Newman Jackman, now mayor of Philadelphia, when he was just an investigator for the Bryn Mawr police.
Gregor got out his phone and looked at his speed dial list. He knew that the point of putting people on speed dial was so that he could call them just by tapping a single number and not worrying about looking them up, but he could never remember which number was tapped for who. He found Tibor and held that down, hard. Then he put the phone up to his ear and waited.
“Yes,” Tibor said.
Tibor answered the phone the way people did in Italy and Greece—Pronto! Embross!—but never in Armenian, so Gregor had always wondered. Gregor identified himself and then ran down the story of the day.
“So,” he said, “where we’re at the moment is where this woman claims to be Karen Mgrdchian, the wife of Marco Mgrdchian, who she says died last year. Is there any way we can check any of that out?”
“I’d think the police would be better at checking it out, Krekor,” Tibor said. “Don’t they have ways to run down identities, and things like that?”
“I was thinking of other kinds of checking out,” Gregor said. “There’s got to be a church, right? People of that generation went to church.”
“Yes, Krekor, there could be a church. But what church? This woman’s name, Karen, that is not Armenian for that generation, or even for yours. Maybe she was not a member of our Church. Maybe she and her family went to another church. That’s very common, the family goes to the wife’s church.”
“I thought you said that there was a marriage certificate. That they got married on Cavanaugh Street.”
“Ah. Krekor, I’m sorry. I don’t remember. I can look.”
“Thank you,” Gregor said. “Would you? And there’s a daughter, I think, to that marriage. I should have paid more attention when the Very Old Ladies were talking. I didn’t really think this could be anything like a crime—”
“You think now that this is a crime, Krekor? Why do you think it is a crime?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I can’t put my finger on it. And I may be crazy. But I’d like to get it all checked out. The best thing would be if we could find the church they went to in, where was it, Ohio, I think, if we can find that church and find out if they know anything about them. About the two of them. The couple. No,” Gregor thought. “The best thing would be to find the daughter.”
“All right, Krekor, I will look through the parish records. Maybe I will find something.”
“And maybe you can ask Bennis to do one of those Internet searches for obituaries of Marco Mgrdchian. Maybe for the last eighteen months, say, to make sure she isn’t being careless about the time. I want to know what he died of.”
“Krekor. The man must have been around eighty.”
“Yes, I know,” Gregor said. “But we all do that, don’t we? That was in one of the Agatha Christie’s you gave me. A Caribbean Mystery.”
“What was?’
“The fact that we don’t tend to pay too much attention when somebody dies, if we think it’s to be expected that he died. The old, you see. The very sick. We’re not surprised. We don’t look too closely.”
“I am no longer sure that Agatha Christie was such a good idea.”
“You have to get past the fluffy,” Gregor said. “All the villages and the costume party constables and that sort of thing. If you can ignore all that, the woman had some good ideas. And this is definitely a good one. I want to find that church, I want to find that obituary, and then I want to talk to the police in whatever town it is. I didn’t get much information at the hospital, because Karen Mgrdchian’s lawyer had me out of the room as soon as she could. You can hardly blame her. That’s her job.”
“No, Krekor, you can hardly blame her. You do not want to talk to Bennis yourself?”
“I’ll talk to her when I get home. I’m in a cab.”
“In a cab coming home?”
“It’s a long story,” Gregor said. “Would you mind going ahead with all of that? There’s just something—I don’t know.”
“All right,” Tibor said. “But possibly you should make the cab bring you home. I don’t like the way you sound.”
Gregor closed his phone and put it back into his pocket. They were way out into the suburbs now. The first time he had come out here, Bennis’s father had sent a car for him, complete with a driver in livery. It was incredible the way some people lived, right through inflation and taxes and all the rest of it. Bennis had shown him a picture, once, of her coming-out party—the real one, not the public cotillion that was apparently just for show. There was the terrace and the back lawn decked out in lights, and two bands, and a champagne bar. Bennis was wearing an ice blue dress and a necklace that looked like it should have come with bodyguards.
Gregor wondered what had happened to the necklace. Bennis had not inherited it, because Bennis had not inherited anything. There had been a little something from her mother, but that was all.
The cab was slowing down. The driver opened the privacy shield and said, “Is this it? Engine House?”
The name ENGINE HOUSE was engraved on a plaque bolted into a rock next to the tall gate. It had once been engraved directly onto the stone, but erosion had taken care of that. The house was close to a hundred and fifty years old. It was a little unnerving to think that there were houses in America like that.
“This is it,” Gregor told the driver.
The gate was open. Gregor wondered if that was usual, either for Bobby Hannaford or for these television people. Gregor watched as long columns of trees went by on either side, towering up into the air and blocking out the sky. It was an already dark day. It felt spooky. He’d witnessed the effect at night. It was spookier.
They drove up into the roundabout in front of the front door and stopped. Gregor got out and handed the driver what felt like all the money in the world. The driver handed Gregor a business card.
“Call me if you have to get back,” he said.
Gregor thanked him and put the card away. The ride had cost an arm and a leg, but it had gotten him where he wanted to go. He had to make allowances if he didn’t want to drive himself and he didn’t want to ask Bennis to drive him. He never wanted to drive himself. He thought it must have been five years since the last time he’d tried it. He never wanted Bennis to drive him, either. She thought of speed limits as minimums and brakes as largely unnecessary.
He looked around. He could hear the cab retreating up the drive. There was a black limousine off t
o the side, in the direction of the garages. There was still rain coming down. The house felt empty and looked it, but he knew that didn’t mean anything. Houses this large often felt and looked empty when they weren’t actually full of people.
He pressed the doorbell and waited. The door was opened a few seconds later by a very young girl who looked as if she had been crying. Gregor didn’t think she was a maid. She wasn’t dressed for it. She wasn’t acting like it, either.
“Excuse me,” Gregor said. “I’ve come to see a Miss Olivia Dahl.”
All of a sudden, the door was pulled back in a jerk and Olivia Dahl was standing there, looking a little disheveled and completely wild.
“My God,” she said. “It’s Gregor Demarkian. I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it. Get out of the way, Coraline. What do you think you’re doing?”
Olivia Dahl grabbed the crying girl and jerked her out of the way. Then she grabbed Gregor Demarkian by the wrist and pulled him into the house.
The foyer was full of people, most of them young girls, many of them hysterical. Gregor wondered why he hadn’t heard any of it when he was standing on the step.
Then a tall, thin, black-haired woman walked up to him and grabbed his lapel. “Get in there,” she said. “What’s the good of you anyway, if you can’t prevent something like this? Don’t you see somebody’s trying to kill me?”
“For God’s sake, Sheila,” Olivia said.
“Somebody is trying to kill me,” Sheila Dunham said. “That’s the truth. It really is. Do you honestly think that anybody cares about whoever that is? And what’s she doing out, anyway? She was in jail. She was supposed to stay in jail. How do you live with yourself if you let dangerous criminals out in public when you’re supposed to keep them in jail?”
“Sheila, make sense,” Olivia Dahl said. “This is Gregor Demarkian. He’s not part of the police department. He’s—”
“One of these filthy little whores is trying to kill me,” Sheila Dunham said, “and you’re all standing around talking about it.”