Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “It’s over here,” Olivia said, pulling Gregor toward the right of the foyer.

  That was when Gregor Demarkian got the oddest feeling of déjà vu. There was the door to the study. There was the study. When they opened the door to the study they would find a man on the floor in front of the fireplace, his head bashed in with a bust of Aristotle, his wheelchair pushed back a little toward the desk.

  But that was not, of course, what they did find. Olivia opened the door and there was no man and no wheelchair and no bust of Aristotle.

  There was a small, thin blond girl lying across the stone hearth.

  She had been shot at least three times in the chest.

  PART II

  It is never right to do wrong.

  —G. K. Chesterton

  ONE

  1

  By the time the police arrived, Gregor Demarkian had managed to get himself past the point where he felt that he was living in one of his own nightmares. He even called Tibor to talk about it, twice.

  “I can’t call Bennis,” he pointed out. “I mean, she wanted me to come out here and talk to these people about what happened in Merion, but you’ll notice she didn’t come out here herself. She never comes out here. I thought, after Bobby got the house back—well, I thought with childhood memories, and that kind of thing. But it didn’t happen. She hates it out here.”

  “This is not surprising, Krekor,” Tibor said. “Her father was murdered there. It doesn’t matter that it was many years ago now.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “And I also know that unless Bobby Hannaford committed this murder himself, the weird correlations have to be just coincidence. The study. The body in front of the hearth. It’s still very unnerving. And I don’t like the fact that she’s going to hear about it. And she will hear about it. She can’t keep herself off the news shows.”

  “She will be fine, Krekor. Bennis is not an irrational woman. Are you going to investigate this murder that is there now, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor had said.

  And he didn’t know. He really didn’t. He had forced all the people from the show into the hall and left the room untouched, but not until he had walked around the body once or twice. He had always been glad that he had not been the kind of law enforcement agent that has to deal daily with the results of violent death. By the time his unit of the FBI had come in on a case, the bodies were in the morgue or buried, and he had only pictures to look at. Still, he knew how to study a corpse if he had to, and he had looked over this one.

  The three entry wounds were unmistakable. Gregor didn’t know enough about pathology to know if those would turn out to be the only ones, or if somebody had pumped God-only-knew how much lead into this tiny young woman. There were the three, and he could see, just by looking around, two of the bullets, both lodged in the wall next to the huge fireplace. He walked around the room a few times. He thought that whoever had done the shooting had done it from the direction of the delicate French secretary near the tall arched windows—whoever had done the shooting had been all the way inside the room, and not standing in the doorway.

  He went out into the hall and looked around. Some of the young women had left, he presumed to go upstairs to their rooms and lie down, but most of them were still milling about, as were Olivia Dahl and Sheila Dunham. Except that Sheila wasn’t milling as much as she was pacing, and wasn’t upset as much as she was furious. That might be just her way. Gregor had known people who could only show upset as anger.

  “I want to know what’s going on around here,” Sheila was saying, stalking from one end of the broad foyer to the other. “This is ridiculous. Why is that girl even here? And don’t tell me I should call her a woman. All that crap went out in the eighties, and she’s not a woman, she’s a damned twit. And she’s here.”

  Olivia made a sour face and shrugged in Gregor’s direction. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It just occurred to me. You’ve been here before, haven’t you? You’ve investigated another murder in this house.”

  “That’s right,” Gregor said.

  “I should have realized. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it to begin with. It was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Over a decade,” Gregor said.

  “And it was somebody you knew—your wife’s father, or something like that.”

  “My present wife’s father,” Gregor said. “I hadn’t met her at the time. Well, I met her in the course of that investigation.”

  “I should have realized,” Olivia said again. “I do remember that case, and when we decided to rent this house for the show, I looked into it. You have no idea the kind of nonsense we have to put up with with all of this. I had to make sure I could fend off any paranormal phenomena—”

  “What?”

  “Not real paranormal phenomena,” Olivia said. “But the girls, you know, they get—I don’t know how to explain how they get. But I wanted to know enough about what happened here so that if one of them decided she was seeing ghosts, I could head it off at the pass. And of course I talked to Mr. Hannaford about it. He hasn’t ever seen any ghosts. At least he says he hasn’t. And I don’t believe in them.”

  Gregor looked back toward the study. “Do you still not know who that is?” he asked. “She doesn’t look familiar to you in any way?”

  “Really. She does in a way, but it’s not anything I can put my finger on,” Olivia said. “I suppose it’s just possible that she sent in an audition tape at some point or the other and I just don’t remember it. We send back the ones we aren’t interested in if they come with a self-addressed stamped envelope. We throw away the ones that don’t. But I do know she was never in consideration for casting, because we keep copies of all of those.”

  “And you’ve looked through them all?”

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t,” Olivia said. “For one thing, I don’t have them. They’re on file back in California. But there aren’t that many of them, and I’m sure I would have remembered.”

  “What’s not that many of them?”

  Olivia looked at the floor. “We ask three hundred people to interview,” she said. “I know that sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t. We routinely get over ten thousand tapes when we put out a call for them. Of course, we didn’t get that many at first. In the first couple of seasons, we were really straining to find girls to cast, in some ways. We could always have just taken whatever we happened to get, but those first two years there weren’t necessarily enough girls we thought were plausible. So in those days we went out looking for girls. We went to malls. We went to small towns and set up shop in the local theater. There aren’t as many theaters on Main Street anymore as you’d think there’d be.”

  “I suppose it would be safe to say that this girl wasn’t from those first two seasons, because those you might have remembered.” Gregor didn’t know if this would be true, but he knew it was what Olivia believed, and he wanted to move forward. “What about the girl herself. Is she a plausible candidate? Could she have been invited to an interview?”

  Olivia looked back to the study door. Everybody was avoiding it. The girls who were still downstairs were either in the living room or sitting on the stairs. Sheila Dunham was still stalking. The two gay men Gregor had been told were judges were leaning against the wall next to the front door, looking tired.

  Olivia looked away. “I don’t know,” she said. “She was certainly pretty enough. I remember thinking that the first time, in the first incident, back in Merion. Pretty is a consideration. Beautiful would be better, but it’s unusual to find really beautiful girls who haven’t figured out how to make that work for them without us. Really beautiful girls have options, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “When we get the really beautiful ones, it’s usually because they’re from very small towns. Rural South Dakota. Godforsaken places in Wyoming. But she wasn’t that kind of beautiful. She was pretty enough, though. It would have depended on the audition tape. Y
ou have to do more than look good to work on television. You have to have some kind of spark, and the camera has to like you. Some girls are too stiff, and some of them are just too retiring. They fade into the background.”

  “Is that what this one did, fade into the background?”

  “Well,” Olivia said, “she must have. I know we talked about what happened in Merion, but it was very odd. This girl must have just walked in with the rest of them and skipped the sign-in table. It just didn’t occur to me that anybody would bother. To be interviewed, you had to be on my list. In order to be on my list, you had to check in at the table. Just doing what this girl did and wandering off to sit in one of the waiting rooms wouldn’t get you, well, it wouldn’t get you anything—”

  “It got her access to Sheila Dunham,” Gregor pointed out.

  “Oh, I know it did,” Olivia said. “But I wasn’t watching for that. It did occur to me that some girls might try to sneak past the sorting system and get interviews when we’d rejected their tapes, so we had a rather elaborate system worked out to make that impossible. And this girl seems to have drifted in, gone to a waiting room, then went from station to station and just blended in with the crowd. Some of the girls remember seeing her, on and off, and didn’t think anything of it. Why would they? It was a huge casting call.”

  “And in the room where this girl took a shot at Sheila Dunham,” Gregor said. “How many people were there?”

  “There were thirty girls—well, thirty-one, with this one—and Sheila and the judges and the camera people, and that kind of thing. We were filming. Those would have been the first group of girls that would get air time during the show. The usual procedure is to pick those final thirty, then run a few of what we call challenges, then whittle those down to twenty, then run a few more challenges, then whittle those down to fourteen. It’s the fourteen who come here and live in the house. Or whatever house we have. And usually we do it all in two days. That day when we pick them, and then the next when we do the challenges. Except, of course, we couldn’t do it that fast this time. The police were involved.”

  “So you did what?” Gregor asked. “What happened to those original thirty girls?”

  “We put them up in a hotel for three days,” Olivia said. “It cost an arm and a leg. Sheila was livid. But we just couldn’t go directly to filming with all the trouble. Eventually the police got whatever it was they wanted, and we got a day to film and sort and do the first big eliminations. And then we moved out here.”

  “With fourteen girls.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What happened to the sixteen who didn’t make it?”

  “They went back to wherever they’re from,” Olivia said. “That’s how it works. You compete, and if you’re eliminated, you go home. In the meantime, we get a lot of film of you talking, we do on-camera interviews, we have cameras filming everything almost all the time, and we edit that footage and use it on the show to punctuate the challenges and things. Sometimes I think we could skip the entire thing and go directly to eliminations. It’s eliminations that the audience likes to see.”

  “When you say you’re filming them all the time, what do you mean?”

  “Oh, we’ve got stationary cameras everywhere, running nonstop,” Olivia said. “We’ve got them in the bedrooms, in the kitchen—there are two here in the hall; if you look up you’ll see them. The whole point of a reality show is to have as much raw, unscripted footage as you can, and this is a reality show in spite of the fact that it’s also a kind of game show. Sheila says it’s a game show for women, because women like all the drama.”

  Gregor looked around. There really were two cameras in the foyer, fixed up near the ceiling and pointing down. He saw another one near the ceiling on the landing to the stairs.

  “Are there cameras in there where the body is?” he asked.

  2

  David Mortimer did not show up at Engine House by accident, or by epiphany. Gregor called him as soon as he realized what a royal mess of jurisdiction he was about to get himself into. The police arrived first, with sirens blazing and lights whirling, as if this were an inner-city neighborhood instead of one of the quietest and most discreet in the county. Gregor waited by the door to the study until the tech crews had come in.

  “I didn’t want people wandering in and out,” he said to the taller of the two plainclothesmen who came in.

  He didn’t want himself wandering in or out either. It was bad enough to look into that room. There is always something wrong about a dead body. It never looks as if it were sleeping. Then there was the blood, everywhere, blood that Gregor hadn’t noticed at first. The bullets had gone through her and out the other side. There was blood not only on the carpet and the wall and some of the furniture, but on the ceiling.

  When David Mortimer arrived, Gregor had left the professionals to their work and gone to wander around the hall by himself. He was familiar enough with this house to make the walk difficult. It is always hard to observe properly when you know what you expect to see. Even so, he didn’t think there was anything to see. The foyer was, as always, broad and high ceilinged and highly polished. Whatever else was wrong with Bennis’s brother—and he thought a lot was wrong with him—he obviously kept up the house. The people belonging to the show were less easy to read. The two judges, Mark and Johnny, both looked a little sick. Sheila looked as if she wanted to hit somebody. The girls were mostly crying, except for one Asian girl who seemed to be almost as angry as Sheila herself. Only Olivia Dahl was behaving the way Gregor expected the bystander at a murder scene to behave, and he had the feeling that she was doing it from force of will.

  Mortimer did not arrive in a police car with the sirens blasting, but he did arrive in a car that was driving very fast, too fast to negotiate the Engine House drive with anything like equanimity. The car screeched to a halt behind half a dozen police cars and Mortimer got out of the back. Gregor found himself wondering if he’d had a lot of trouble convincing his bosses that he needed a car and driver to get out to Bryn Mawr, or if John Jackman’s office had simply assumed it. Whatever it was, Mortimer took the front steps two at a time and then fairly sprinted through the foyer to the murder scene.

  He was back in a moment with the tall plainclothesman in tow.

  “Gregor Demarkian,” he said, “this is Detective Borstoi. Len Borstoi, Gregor Demarkian.”

  Gregor held out his hand. He was thinking that his life was about to be a nightmare of competing police forces. He wondered who had handled the attempted murder in Merion.

  “I’ve heard of you,” Borstoi said.

  Gregor made a noncommittal noise.

  “I thought you only worked for police departments,” Borstoi said.

  “I do only work for police departments,” Gregor said. “As a consultant, usually.”

  “Are you working for a police department now?”

  “I’m not working for anybody.” Gregor glanced toward the study. By now, most of the people going in and out were doing lab work, collecting fibers, taking pictures, sampling blood. “There’s been an, ah, incident. Back in Philadelphia, where I live. Anyway, I was looking into that when Miss Dahl here asked me to look into the shooting in Merion last weekend. But I said I wasn’t interested. And then—”

  “What?” Borstoi said.

  Gregor shrugged. “Curiosity, I guess. I thought I’d come out and talk to her. I investigated a murder in this house once. A long time ago.”

  Borstoi gave him a long stare. “Did you solve it?”

  “I helped to solve it. John Jackman was the detective on that case at the time. John Jackman who’s now the mayor of Philadelphia.”

  “Did he solve it?”

  “I think both of us sort of contributed something,” Gregor said.

  “Look,” Mortimer said. “The mayor—”

  “He’s not my mayor,” Borstoi said, “and I don’t understand what business he’s got messing around in this. This is a reality show going on
here?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “America’s Next Superstar.”

  “Oh, that one,” Borstoi said. “My wife loves that one. I can’t stand it. This girl was one of the contestants?”

  “Definitely not,” Olivia Dahl said, suddenly thrusting herself into the conversation. “She was pretty enough, but she was just too—it was almost as if she didn’t have a personality.”

  Len Borstoi seemed to consider this. “If she’s not a contestant,” he said reasonably, “what’s she doing here?”

  Gregor took a deep breath and explained the whole thing as far as it could be explained: the shooting in Merion during casting, the girl’s arrest and subsequent release, presumably on bail.

  “But I don’t know that much about it,” Gregor said, “because I really was not investigating it. I was just sort of wandering around poking into things because I was bored, and later I was doing it because I was frustrated. I only came out here because I thought I’d talk to Miss Dahl here and get my mind off other things.”

  “Nobody knows how she got here,” Olivia said. “Nobody has the faintest idea. She didn’t bring a car. There isn’t an extra car parked anywhere that I saw, anyway. And besides, if she had a car, the police in Merion would have been able to figure out who she was. There would have been a registration, or a rental agreement. Instead, all we know is that she told one of our girls here that her name is Emily, and then—well, you’d have to talk to the Merion police about then.”

  “Which of the girls?” Borstoi said. “Which one did she talk to?”

  “Janice Ledbedder,” Olivia said.

  “Is this Ledbedder girl here?”

  “Of course she’s here,” Olivia said. “She’s either in the living room or upstairs. Some of the girls went running up to their rooms after we found the body. They were upset. Do you want to talk to Janice Ledbedder?”

  “Yes,” Borstoi said.