by Jane Haddam
“What do you need?”
The coffee was going crazy. Gregor watched Bennis turn around and take a pair of mugs out of the cabinet next to the sink.
“I need to sit down with somebody who was there at the time—at Engine House when your father died—to help me go over what the scene looked like when we found the body.”
“Ah,” Bennis said.
“I really don’t want to ask you to do that,” Gregor said. “I’m not an idiot. I know that you won’t be all right with it.”
“But you are an idiot,” Bennis said. She put the coffee mugs on the kitchen table. “You don’t need to talk to anybody. You can do better than that. There are pictures.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “yes. But I’m not sure—”
“The City Confidential TV program,” Bennis said. “There were pictures of the study, and my father’s body, and that silly bust of Aristotle—anyway, I think they were still pictures and they were in black and white, but they were there. We watched that together. Don’t you remember?”
“I remember that we shouldn’t have watched it,” Gregor said. “Or you shouldn’t have.”
“It doesn’t matter now. Tibor’s got the complete set of all those City Confidential and American Justice and Snapped things you’ve been in. All of them. On DVD. All you have to do is go over there and get him to play them for you. It’ll be a lot better than talking to my brothers. Christopher won’t remember much, and Bobby will embellish what he does know, and if you could find Teddy, he’d just lie.”
2
Gregor Demarkian did not call ahead to make sure Father Tibor was at home. Father Tibor was always at home at this time of the evening, unless he was having dinner in the city, and if that had been the case, he would have mentioned it at breakfast. Gregor walked up the street toward Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, crossed in the middle of the block, and then made his way down the alley and to the back where Tibor’s apartment was. This was a new apartment, just as the church was a new church, both having been rebuilt only a few years ago. The alley had been spruced up, too, and decked out in security lights. The whole thing reminded Gregor of those little side streets in London where traffic was no longer allowed to go.
Gregor made his way into the courtyard and knocked on Tibor’s front door. Overhead, the second-floor apartment that had been built in the hopes of finding Tibor a priest assistant for the church was still empty, dark and a little forlorn looking. It was not shabby, because the women on the street made a point of keeping it up, but it still looked wrong.
Tibor opened the door and stood back to let Gregor in. The little front foyer was full of books, stacked one on top of the other against the wall, just as the foyer in the old apartment had been. The books were cleaner now, because with the new apartment the women’s auxiliary had insisted on hiring a housekeeper. This was not altogether a happy thing—it wasn’t just the foyer that was full of books stacked against the walls—but this apartment was at least more comfortable for Gregor to sit in, and he was grateful for that.
“I take it Mrs. Flack wasn’t in today,” he said, waiting for Tibor to close up.
Tibor shrugged. “She was here this morning, but I’ve finished putting everything back. Why is it that she can’t understand that Jacqueline Susann belongs with Aristotle and Augustine belongs with Stephen King?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Gregor said.
Tibor led the way into the living room. It was a much larger living room than the one in the old apartment, but it already looked cramped. Gregor sat down in a big overstuffed armchair, then immediately stood up again. He felt around in the cushions and found Last Exit to Utopia by Jean-François Revel.
“Oh, thank you,” Tibor said, taking the book. “I was looking everywhere for that. I must have left it on the chair. Mrs. Flack wouldn’t put it there, would she?”
“It doesn’t seem like her kind of thing.”
“She must have missed it. Maybe I’m wearing her down. It’s hard enough to keep track of the books in here when I don’t have somebody moving them around, but with Mrs. Flack.” Tibor shrugged. “I spent forty-five minutes last weekend trying to find my copy of Irenaeus to use in the homily, and she’d put it on a bookshelf in the bedroom. In the bedroom. The church fathers do not belong in the bedroom.”
Gregor was afraid to ask where they did belong. He didn’t put it past Tibor to say the breadbox, or the refrigerator. He stretched out his legs and put his head back.
“Have you been watching the news today?” he asked.
Tibor sat down, too. “Yes, of course, Krekor. The murder in the house where Bennis grew up. But it isn’t her family there now. She said that the other day. It’s somebody her brother has rented to.”
“A reality TV show,” Gregor said. “Do you remember the first time we ever met?”
“Yes, of course, Krekor. How could I forget?”
“That was when Bennis was still living in Boston, before she bought the apartment on the street. And she bought it because we were all here, because she’d met us when—”
“Yes, Krekor, I know. When her father was murdered in that house and when you solved the case.”
“That’s when we all met John Jackman, too. It’s odd the things you forget.”
“I haven’t forgotten any of it,” Tibor said. “But then, you know how it is. I have less on my mind than you do.”
Gregor sat forward. “Yes, well,” he said, “here’s the thing. I went to that house today on a whim. I was talking to the people dealing with Sophie Mgrdchian, and this woman, Karen we know now her name to be . . . or she says it is. Never mind. I get tangled. But that was it. I was feeling tangled and frustrated, so I got in a cab and paid the price of a trip on the space shuttle to get out to Bryn Mawr, and when I got there there was a body—there was a body right where the other body was.”
“What?”
“It was right where the other body was. I told Bennis it was in the study, and it was, but it was more than that. It was laid out in front of the hearth just like old Robert Hannaford’s body was when I first saw it.”
“And it was the same?” Tibor said. “This girl, she had her head—”
“No,” Gregor said. “No head bashed in, no bust of Aristotle to do it with. There were three visible bullet holes in her chest. Which isn’t official, by the way. I haven’t been hired by anybody at the moment. I don’t have access to official information. It looked like three bullet holes from what I could see. But the whole thing was wrong. It was just wrong. And I can’t quite put my finger on why.”
“Do you usually put your finger on things that quickly?” Tibor said. “Of course there is something wrong that you should have noticed, Krekor. That’s how a detective works. You told me that. Agatha Christie told me that.”
“Bennis says you have DVDs of the episodes I’ve been on for things like City Confidential.”
“Yes, Krekor, of course. I have all of them. Do you want to see them?”
“I want to see the City Confidential episode about the murder at Engine House. How do DVDs work? Can you pause them the way you could the VHS tapes, so they stay still on one frame and you can look at it?”
“Of course, Krekor. You want to see just one frame?”
“I want to see the picture the police took of Robert Hannaford’s body on that floor. There is a picture like that. I remember it.”
“All right, Krekor. You will give me a minute and I will find it. In the meantime, you will tell me what is going on with Sophie Mgrdchian.”
“Nothing much is going on with Sophie Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “I talked to her doctor. She gave me a list of the medications Mrs. Mgrdchian was taking. They didn’t amount to much. A lot of vitamins. Some painkillers for the rheumatoid arthritis. One of those medications to help with high blood pressure. The police even had the stuff analyzed. There was nothing in it that could cause a semicoma, or whatever is wrong with her. And the two women have been separat
ed for days. Lily—Karen—whoever it is, can’t be feeding Sophie Mgrdchian some kind of voodoo poison when she doesn’t have any access.”
“Voodoo?” Tibor said.
“Something Dr. Halevy said, “Gregor said. “That Sophie Mgrdchian’s condition is practically like voodoo.”
“So what will happen to, what shall I call her, Krekor? Mrs. Mgrdchian? If she is Marco Mgrdchian’s wife—”
“Widow,” Gregor said. “At least, as far as I could tell before her lawyer got me out of there. At the moment, nothing is happening to her. She was bound over for a four-day psych evaluation, so she’ll be in the hospital for a four-day psych evaluation. After that, it’s anybody’s guess. I can’t see that they’re going to be able to hold her. There isn’t actually any evidence that she did anything to Sophie Mgrdchian. If she really is the sister-in-law, there’s no reason not to think that it’s probable she was invited in. Then the two of them had some kind of physical breakdowns, or something, coincidentally at the same time—”
“Tcha,” Tibor said. “Everybody in this country always assumes that when someone is old, it only makes sense that they have physical breakdowns. Look at the Very Old Ladies. They could probably walk to Washington, D.C., from here if they had a good reason to. Being old does not necessarily mean that you are falling apart.”
“For most of us, it does,” Gregor said.
Tibor had been paging through a big black carrying case for DVDs. There were hundreds of them all placed in clear plastic pockets, one after the other, page after page. Now he had stopped on a particular page and was tapping through the possibilities.
“This one, I think,” he said, taking a DVD out of one of the pockets. “I should label these more clearly, but most of them have all the information you need on the disk itself, so there doesn’t seem to be a point. Have you met this woman, this Sheila Dunham that everybody talks about? Is she as awful as they say?”
“She’s very rude,” Gregor said. “But I wasn’t all that impressed. I’ve met rude people before.”
Tibor put the DVD in the DVD player, fiddled with his television set, got a blue screen, then got the DVD to play. It was a really magnificent television set, and a really magnificent set of equipment to go with it. When the parish had replaced Tibor’s apartment, they had defined the word “replaced” the way most people would define “upgraded.”
Tibor had the DVD started. He held up a remote and stopped the action. “Here is what we can do,” he said. “We can go through the scenes as if they were still pictures, and you can tell me the one you want me to stop on to look at. Will that work?”
“I think so,” Gregor said.
Tibor sat on the couch, aimed the remote at the set, and started clicking. It was like watching somebody turn the pages of a photo album. There were pictures of Bryn Mawr, the self-consciously “quaint” downtown, and the wide roads winding through the estate areas. There were pictures of Gregor himself, and of various members of the Hannaford family. It took a while to make it through to what he wanted to see. Then, there it was, on the screen.
“Wait,” Gregor said. “Go back to the last one.”
Tibor obligingly clicked again, and the screen was filled with a black-and-white photograph of the last murder scene in Engine House, a picture of Robert Hannaford’s dead body lying across the hearth.
Gregor wasn’t looking at the body. He’d seen the body up close and personal when it had been lying on that hearth for real. Instead, he looked up the photograph at the big mirror over the fireplace. He sat forward. Then he sat back. Then he sat forward again.
“I knew it,” he said.
“Knew what?” Tibor asked.
Gregor’s phone began to beep in the way it did when he got a text message. He pulled it out of his pocket without looking at it.
“I knew you couldn’t see the body in the mirror,” he told Tibor. “Today, you could see the body in the mirror. I saw the body in the mirror. But when Robert Hannaford’s body was in the same place, all you could see was stuff on the opposite wall of the room.”
“This is important?” Tibor asked.
“I don’t know,” Gregor said, looking down at his phone and clicking the little button that would allow him to read the text message.
He expected it to be from Bennis, wanting to know what they were going to do about dinner, but it wasn’t.
MEET ME 745 AM DEXMALI CITY AVE, the message said. IT’S ABOUT THE GUN. DAVID.
Gregor tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. He hated text messages. David Mortimer should have called.
FOUR
1
Olivia Dahl was not afraid of Sheila Dunham’s rages, even when they were public rages. She’d been with this circus long enough to realize that the rages were always at least half calculated. Even when they seemed to be both spontaneous and off the wall, there was some part of Sheila’s brain working in the background there, little hamster elements among the synapses making the world go round. The image was so compelling, Olivia was having a hard time getting it out of her head—Sheila’s skull full of hamsters, all furiously pumping on wheels.
At the moment, Olivia was mostly worried about getting the legal pads placed on the table in front of the chairs where Sheila expected the other judges to sit. It was a ridiculous gesture. The judges were not corporate heavyweights or government heads of departments about to attend a meeting that would change the lives of thousands of people forever. They were just a small collection of D-list celebrities whose careers were long over, trying to look both important and unintimidating for a television audience that didn’t care about them in the least.
Olivia knew the numbers that were important to this show. She knew them even better than Sheila did, and Sheila was surprisingly coherent on the subject of numbers. What the viewers of this show wanted to see was the eliminations, which girl would go home this week, who would be caught on camera crying or fuming as they dragged their bags into the night.
Olivia had not been in favor of renting Engine House for this show. It was a wonderful place; she understood why rich and reticent people had lived here. But that was the thing, wasn’t it? The people who had lived here were the kind of rich people who had no interest in being famous. That was why they’d tucked themselves out in the country where almost nobody was likely to drive by.
All the pads were on the table. Next to each pad were two ballpoint pens and a water glass. Three carafes of iced water were standing on trivets in the middle of everything. The tablecloth was gone. This was not a conference room. It was the Engine House formal dining room. Dinner parties had been held here, and in the distant past there had been dinner parties with a hundred people at them. Olivia thought that would have been something to see.
Sheila was standing near the baize door to the kitchen, leaning against the wall just next to a portrait of a woman in a gauzy long dress. She was not having a fit or a meltdown. She was just standing there.
“I don’t like this picture,” she said. “Do you? It looks like she’s wearing a prom dress instead of a ball gown. I hate prom dresses.”
“I think it was the style of the time,” Olivia said.
“I hated the prom, come to think of it,” Sheila said. “But then, nobody asked me. I had to ask a boy I knew from drama club, and you know how that kind of thing works out. He’s some kind of enormously important gay rights activist in San Diego now. Did you go to your prom?”
“We’ve been through this,” Olivia said. “I went to my prom with a boy I’d dated since the seventh grade. He went off to college. I went off to secretarial school. That was the end of that, and there isn’t anything interesting about my life since. How could there have been? I’ve been working for you for nearly twenty years.”
Sheila pushed off from the wall and pulled out the chair she was supposed to sit in for the meeting. It was at the head of the table. It couldn’t have been anywhere else. She sat down.
“It’s a long time, twenty years,”
she said. “Don’t you ever want to get up and go someplace else? Take another job? Take a vacation?”
“I took a vacation once,” Olivia said. “You had a nervous breakdown in O’Hare Airport and I had to come back.”
“You didn’t like coming back.”
“I don’t like a lot of the things you do,” Olivia said. “We got all that straightened out a long time ago, too. We don’t have to like each other to work together. I like this job. I like the perks it brings. You wouldn’t know how to break anybody else in. We go on with it. I should get the judging panel. If we wait much longer, Deedee’s going to be too drunk to stand up. She’s not doing all that well even now.”
“Do you know who that girl was, the one that died in the study today?”
Olivia was looking down the table again, counting the pads and water glasses. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t. I didn’t know who she was back at the Milky Way Ballroom. It doesn’t matter who she was.”
“It must matter to somebody,” Sheila said. “She must have family, or friends, or people she worked with. She wasn’t a hooker, or a bum. You could see that by looking at her.”
“Maybe she was mentally ill,” Olivia said. “A lot of people walk around mentally ill without being diagnosed until they finally do something too odd to ignore. Maybe this was her too-odd thing.”
“She also didn’t kill herself,” Sheila said.
“Didn’t she?” Olivia said. “Did the police tell you that?”
“The police didn’t tell me anything,” Sheila said. She was sitting aslant in the chair, stretching out her legs under the table. “They didn’t tell anybody anything. Your Mr. Demarkian didn’t, either. But I did overhear things.”
“She must have killed herself,” Olivia said. “Why else would she be dead? None of us knew her. Why would any of us want to kill her?”
Sheila picked up the ballpoint pen and twirled it through her fingers. “I thought you were going to get that Mr. Demarkian to look into all this for us.”