Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “I’m trying, Sheila. He doesn’t usually work for private individuals. He works for police departments as a consultant. He does take private cases sometimes, if he’s interested in them. So I’ve got my fingers crossed, and I’m going to get in touch with him tomorrow.”

  “Good,” Sheila said. “Because I think he’s the only person who might actually get this through your thick skull. And your skull is thick, Olivia. You’re an excellent assistant, but your mind works at the speed of molasses.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something? Or are you just insulting me for the hell of it?”

  Sheila sat forward. “That’s supposed to mean that I do know what you’re trying to do, and you aren’t going to get away with it. That wasn’t Mallory on that study floor. Believe it or not, I haven’t been completely cut off from Mallory all these years.”

  “Haven’t you? And I didn’t think it was Mallory.”

  “No, I don’t think you did,” Sheila agreed. “But I think you expected me to think so. Or maybe you just expected me to suspect. But I saw Mallory only last year. I know where she is. I know what she’s doing. I know what she looks like.”

  “I thought the two of you didn’t speak.”

  “We don’t,” Sheila said. “You don’t have to speak to someone to see them. What I want to know is who that girl is, because no matter what you say, I think you do know. I think you have to know.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Olivia said.

  Suddenly, she was having one of her rare fits of anger. It wasn’t very useful, getting angry at Sheila Dunham. It didn’t make a dent, and Sheila was too good at using it against you. Still, this made Olivia furious, and it was all she could do to stop herself from taking one of those pitchers of ice water and pouring it over Sheila’s head. Wouldn’t that be something for the camera footage? There were a good six cameras in this dining room. They’d catch the whole thing, and there would be YouTube videos for a month.

  Olivia looked down at her clipboard. Counted nothing in particular, just to give herself a chance to calm down, and then said:

  “Why don’t you sit still for a minute and I’ll get the others.”

  It was not a question. Olivia did not expect an answer. She went to the door on the other side of the room, the one that led to the living room, and opened it. They were all out there in a little cluster, milling around and eating little finger things that Olivia had had put out on a tray. That was whistling in the dark. She’d hoped that if there was enough food, Deedee’s trips to her pocket flask would have less effect than usual.

  It hadn’t worked. Deedee Plant rarely ate anything, because she thought that would keep her from getting fat. She was a middle-aged woman, though, and she looked it, thick around the middle even without having gained any significant weight. She didn’t have the money for personal trainers and liposuction. Either that, or she spent all the money on the pocket flask.

  Olivia looked up and across the living room and saw the yellow crime-scene tape still up across the study door. There was a uniformed policeman sitting on a chair just outside it. She had no idea how long that was going to stay up or when they would be able to get back to their lives. She did know that none of it would interrupt the filming. They had no time to allow themselves to be interrupted.

  Olivia stood back and held the door open. “Come right in,” she said. “Sorry to call on you all in the evening like this, but we have some things to discuss. I’ve got water waiting if anybody wants it.”

  “It’s a terrible thing,” Deedee Plant was saying to Johnny Rell. “Somebody dead and right here. Right on the set of the show. And it’s funny, too, isn’t it? I’d have thought that if there was a dead body on America’s Next Superstar, it would have been Sheila.”

  “Everybody wants Sheila dead,” Johnny said. “That’s why she’s going to live forever.”

  Down at the far side of the dining room, Sheila was still sitting in her chair. She was leaning back in it and stretching out her legs. And she had gone back to twirling the pen through her fingers. Olivia did not like the look on her face, or the way her body moved.

  Something was coming. Olivia knew it. She always did.

  2

  It was Ivy Demari’s idea to listen in on the meeting, and some of the other girls were not happy with the idea.

  “Of course I want to know what’s going on,” Grace said, “but I’m already in trouble. This will get all of us in trouble if we get caught. And you know what she’s like. You must know what she’s like.”

  “Everybody knows what she’s like,” Alida said. “I don’t see any reason for putting ourselves in jeopardy for nothing that concerns any of us. We didn’t know this girl. She wasn’t even cast in the show. She was just some crazy person looking for publicity.”

  Ivy looked out at the group of them, spread out in the hall outside their bedroom doors. There were still fourteen of them, and would be for another week. They should have been spending the evening doing individual camera interviews to be used in the show to break up the action. None of them looked like they were competing on a reality show that required them to be glamorous. None of them looked entirely dressed.

  Ivy tried to think of a way to put it. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “It’s not just that that girl died here, it’s who killed her. Because somebody must have killed her.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Alida said. “She committed suicide. I heard Miss Dahl say so.”

  “Olivia Dahl may have said so,” Ivy said, “but it isn’t true, and if you think about it, you’d know it isn’t true. I looked into that room. I could see the body and I could see it again in the mirror. She had three holes in her chest.”

  “So?” Alida said.

  “So,” Grace said, “people who commit suicide don’t usually shoot themselves in the chest?”

  “Well, usually is usually,” Alida said. “That doesn’t meant it couldn’t happen.”

  “It couldn’t happen three times.” Ivy was trying, trying very hard, to be patient. She was not Grace, or Alida. She didn’t look down on these girls because so many of them seemed never to have gotten a good education, even on the elementary level, or because they were from places that weren’t very sophisticated. Still, she thought, you’d expect they’d be able to think their way out of a paper bag.

  “Look,” she said. “If this girl had managed to shoot herself even once in the chest, the pain would have been excruciating. She’d almost certainly have dropped the gun. She wouldn’t have been able to shoot herself two more times. And then there’s the issue of the gun, too. If she shot herself, the gun would be there, in the room, wouldn’t it? Did you see any gun?”

  Nobody said anything. Grace and Alida looked angry. They always looked angry. The rest of the girls looked miserable.

  “The gun wasn’t there in the study,” Ivy said. “I stayed as close to that Mr. Demarkian as I could, and I heard him talking with one of the police officers. The gun wasn’t there where the body was, so somebody must have taken it away. Somebody murdered this girl, whoever she was. Somebody murdered her while we were all out.”

  “But it wasn’t me,” Coraline said suddenly. Then she burst into tears. “It wasn’t me. It really wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t say it was you,” Ivy said.

  “I know you didn’t,” Coraline said. “Nobody says it, but they’ve all got to be thinking about it. The police and everybody. I mean, I was here. I was in the house the whole time. I didn’t go to the restaurant.”

  “You were here,” Alida said.

  “But I’ve got no reason to want to kill anybody,” Coraline said. “I didn’t even know that girl. I wasn’t even one of the people who talked to her at casting. And I thought she was in jail, anyway. We all thought she was in jail.”

  Ivy closed her eyes and counted to ten. She opened her eyes again. This was really very simple, and they were all wasting time.

  “You were here but you were upstairs,” Ivy said. �
�You didn’t hear anything because—well, because you can’t really hear anything in this house. It’s huge, and the walls are all six inches of plaster instead of drywall or whatever it is that modern houses use. And we don’t know about the gun, you know. It might have had a silencer. That would explain why none of the staff heard anything—”

  “None of the staff heard anything because they were all out back smoking cigarettes.” Alida made a face. “I’ve seen them. They all go out in the back courtyard near the garages and smoke. Anytime anybody is not looking.”

  “I guess,” Ivy said, “but it still comes back to what I said. She was here, and somebody murdered her here. Either she found out that we were here and came on her own, or somebody told her where we were and asked her to come. We can’t just ignore the fact that somebody murdered her. And that means it’s really important for us to know what’s going on down there at that meeting.”

  “Why?” Grace demanded.

  “Maybe they’re going to cancel the season,” Mary-Louise said. “Do you think they would do that? There’s been a death. That’s a big thing. Maybe they just won’t want to go on with it.”

  “They’ll go on with it,” Ivy said. “It’s expensive to do something like this. If they don’t do the season, they don’t make the money they’re expecting to make, and they’ll still have to pay all these bills. I’m not worried about them canceling the season. I’m worried about what they’re going to do about the murder—oh, I don’t know. Security measures, maybe? More background checks for the bunch of us? Guards?”

  “Do you have something to worry about from a background check?” Alida asked.

  “No,” Ivy said. “I don’t. But there’s another consideration that none of you seems to have thought of. She was murdered here. Maybe there’s somebody here right now—”

  “It doesn’t have to be somebody here right now,” Coraline said frantically, bursting into tears again. “It could be somebody from the outside. It could. Somebody could have come in and done it, somebody who has nothing to do with the house and nothing to do with the show. Maybe somebody just snuck in here and—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, make sense,” Grace said. “You’re such an idiot. Really. Of course it has to have something to do with the show. It’s always about the show. It’s at casting. Now it’s here. Why would that girl have been at casting and here if it hadn’t anything to do with the show?”

  “Maybe somebody is just using us,” Janice Ledbedder said. Ivy felt sorry for her. She was so obviously working hard to say calm, and to sound reasonable. “Maybe somebody who knew the show was going to be filmed out here, maybe they convinced this girl to come, and then they called her out here. I know, they could have said they were somebody from the show, and told this girl that there was a place—”

  “And then what?” Grace demanded. “Then this girl got to casting and decided to shoot Sheila Dunham because there wasn’t a place? Where did she get the gun? She had a gun at casting, in case you don’t remember.”

  “Maybe,” Mary-Louise Verdt said, “maybe she was somebody who didn’t get called in for an interview, and she was upset about it. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would work for the shooting at casting,” Ivy said, “but it doesn’t make so much sense with her getting murdered here. If she was a girl who sent in a tape and didn’t get asked in for an interview, I could see her coming in and shooting Sheila Dunham because she was angry about it. I can even see her coming out here to try it again once she got released from jail. What I can’t see is somebody shooting her once she got here.”

  “Maybe it was self-defense,” Janice Ledbedder said. “Maybe she came out here, with a different gun, I guess, because I don’t think the police would have given back the gun, would they? Anyway, maybe she came out here and somebody found her in the library and she tried to shoot them and—”

  “And now we’ve got two guns,” Ivy said.

  “I’m sorry,” Janice said.

  “The thing is, it just seems so sensible, doesn’t it?” Ivy said. “A lot of people want Sheila Dunham dead. She’s such a terrible woman.”

  “True,” Grace said.

  “Look,” Ivy said. “At the very least, they’re likely to discuss what they know about what the police are doing at that meeting. All we have to do is to go to the end of this hall and use the attic access. I’ve already scouted it out. You go up, then you go over to the left a little, and then the ceiling is lower and you sort of have to go down, and you end up in this little space right above the kitchen, which is right next to the dining room. And there’s a vent.”

  “You don’t even know if you can really hear anything from there,” Alida said.

  “There are a lot of vents,” Ivy plowed on. “If we all go, we can team up and listen at all the vents, and some of us can go a little farther in the access space. It could even be me. I wouldn’t mind crawling. Then we’d be right there, and we’d be able to hear at least something. And that would give us some idea of what’s going on around here.”

  “Well, I’m not going to do it.” Alida said. “The rest of you can all jeopardize your chances of winning this competition if you want to, but I’ve never been that stupid.”

  “She can’t throw us all off the show at once,” Ivy said. “If we all go together, we’ll be pretty safe.”

  “We’ll be nothing of the kind,” Alida said. “You know what she’s like. We’ll all get in trouble at once, and then she’ll pick one of us to unload on. Well, it’s not going to be me. I don’t care what the police are thinking.”

  Alida stood up, and turned her back to them, and marched back to her room. She did not slam the door, but she closed it with such a determined click that she might as well have.

  Mary-Louise, who was Alida’s roommate, blushed. “Sorry,” she said. “She’s always like that, really. She’s always angry all the time.”

  Ivy looked from one girl to the other in the hall. There were still so many of them. The schedule called for two weeks of filming before the first elimination, in order for the crew to get in enough individual interview time and challenge time to give themselves some backup in case one of the later weeks got a little thin. Over time, some of these girls would become more sophisticated. Some of them just needed a chance to get away from home, to be on their own at last. Ivy wondered if she should tell them the other thing that had occurred to her, and decided that, no, that wouldn’t be helpful.

  But it was always a possibility. There was a girl dead. They didn’t know who she was or where she came from, but that wasn’t really comforting. Ivy knew that if they didn’t know those things, they also didn’t know why she was dead. And if they didn’t know why she was dead, they didn’t know why somebody wanted to kill her. And that meant, of course, that they didn’t know that there wasn’t somebody out there who still wanted to kill one of them.

  Ivy stood up.

  “Come on,” she said. “We can at least find out something about something. It’ll make us all feel better.”

  “Until Alida turns us in,” one of the girls in the crowd said.

  Then somebody giggled, and somebody else started to cry.

  Ivy thought her head was about to explode.

  3

  Andra Gayle did not think her head was about to explode, but she was cold all over, and feeling sick, and nothing she did could make it go away. She was not like these other girls. She had seen dead bodies before. In the neighborhoods were she had grown up—and there had been so many neighborhoods, she found it hard to keep them straight in her mind—dead bodies were a fact of life. Dealers got into turf wars, or just got tired of some guy stiffing them for the money they were owed. Users got frantic because they had no money to buy dope. There were always old people around. Old people were easy to hit when you wanted to pick up a little cash. The Korean grocery stores were less easy to hit, but they had more money.

  The rest of the girls were making their way to the attic access place on
the landing, and for the moment, Andra was following them. She was not as interested as they were in knowing what the police were doing. She did not trust the police. She did not trust that other detective, the one who wasn’t the police, which was something she just couldn’t figure out. These girls did not understand how things like this worked. It wasn’t hard to get a gun. It wasn’t hard to get a dozen guns. If you had the money, you could pick up anything you wanted on any street corner in the Bronx on any day of the week. Even if you didn’t have much, you could get something, although it was usually something foreign that wasn’t made very well and jammed.

  Once, when Andra was six years old, she had gone with her mother to a neighborhood where all the houses had been abandoned. She hadn’t understood that at the time. She had only known that the houses all looked empty. They had gone up to one of the empty houses and gone inside, and her mother had talked to a man for a long time. Then her mother had grabbed her by the wrist and pushed her in the man’s direction, and then—

  But there was no “and then.” Andra remembered what had happened. She remembered exactly, and she remembered that that was the split second when she knew she was going to do something else with her life, that she was going to get up and get out some day. She did not think about the “and then” unless she had to, to keep herself motivated.

  What she was thinking about now was what had happened after the “and then.” The man had pulled her dress back down over her body and then pushed and shoved her until they got to the front door. Then he’d opened the door and had almost thrown her down the steps to the street. Andra’s mother was there, sitting on the bottom step of the stoop, so high she couldn’t keep her head up.

  “Fuck it,” she’d said, looking at Andra up and down. “Nobody killed you. You’re all right.”

  Then there was the sound of a car in the street, and Andra looked up just as something rackety and loud pulled up to the curb. It was full of people, and the radio was on so loud it hurt her ears.