Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “Well,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “Oh, I know,” Janice said. “You have to solve it first. But you will solve it. I know all about you. So that’s all right. I just wish you’d do it soon, so that everybody could stop stressing about it. I mean, there’s one of us here who killed somebody, and we don’t even know why. Maybe they’ll kill somebody else.”

  “That’s true,” Mr. Demarkian said.

  “Nothing like this ever happens in South Dakota,” Janice said, “and nobody from Marshall ever gets famous, either, so this is going to be the biggest thing in years. Everybody in town’s going to want to talk to me when I get home, and they’d have wanted that even if I’d just gotten on the program.”

  “I’m sure,” the detective said.

  They weren’t very friendly, either of them, but Janice didn’t mind. She was just racing at the mouth, that was all. She’d like to be one of those people who could keep her cool no matter what, but she wasn’t, and that was that.

  Afterward, she wandered around in the dining room and looked at the food on the “sideboard,” which seemed to her to be just the bottom half of a hutch, but people here used different words for everything. They ate different food, too.

  She wondered if Coraline was going to come in to eat.

  3

  Grace Alsop was also wondering if Coraline was going to come in to eat, but she had more practical reasons in mind.

  “They tested all of us,” she told Alida and Suzanne, “and they didn’t find gun residue or whatever it is they were looking for on any of us. They didn’t find it on Olivia Dahl, either.”

  “Well, it couldn’t have been Olivia who did the shooting,” Alida said. “She was standing at the back there, not where we were. The bullets wouldn’t have been in the wood that way if she’d shot the gun—”

  “Right, and then she’d have had to get the gun around to the side of the couch,” Suzanne said. “That was where the gun was found, between us and Sheila Dunham.”

  “It was a little to the side,” Grace said impatiently. “And anybody could have dropped it there. We were all running around acting like lunatics. None of us was noticing anything. Anybody could have dropped a cannon on that floor and we wouldn’t have seen it.”

  “I was sitting on the couch,” Alida said. “I couldn’t have dropped it anywhere. I was sitting down.”

  Grace thought she was going to scream. “All right,” she said. “You were sitting on the couch. It probably wasn’t anybody sitting on the couch. I agree. But Coraline wasn’t sitting on the couch.”

  “Oh, don’t start that again,” Alida said. “She didn’t have any of that gun stuff on her hands any more than the rest of us did.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Grace said, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. She could have been wearing gloves.”

  “Did you notice her wearing gloves?” Suzanne asked.

  “No, I didn’t,” Grace said. “And I’d guess nobody else did, because nobody said anything. But it wouldn’t have been hard. Wearing gloves, or holding something that would protect her hand from the gun stuff. It wouldn’t have been that hard, and it wouldn’t have been hard for her to hide it—especially if it was gloves, or just one glove. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to hide it somewhere.”

  “Where?” Alida demanded.

  “In the couch, maybe,” Grace said. “Or, you know, anywhere. It’s a huge room. She didn’t have to hide it where we were. She could have put it anywhere.”

  “They’d have found it by now,” Alida said.

  A couple of the other girls had come up to listen. Grace saw Deanna, and Mary-Louise, and Janice, and Linda. They all looked wide-eyed and excited, as if this was some kind of murder game made for TV and completely unreal. They didn’t seem to understand that someone was dead, somebody else might end up dead before it was all over, and somebody was almost certainly going to jail. This being Pennsylvania, somebody could be going to a lethal injection.

  “Look,” Grace said. “In the first place, Coraline is the only one of us who could have done it. She was the only one here when the murder happened—”

  “You don’t know that,” Mary-Louise said. “You don’t know when it happened, I mean. Maybe it happened when we all got back.”

  “How?” Grace asked. “Think about it. We got back. The doors to the limo opened. We all piled out and came rushing into the house in a big wad—”

  “I wasn’t first,” Mary-Louise said quickly. “There were already people in the hall when I got there.”

  “There wasn’t even a full minute between the first person going into the house and the rest of us going in,” Grace said. “There wasn’t time enough for anybody to commit a murder. Coraline was the only one who was here. If it isn’t Coraline, then it isn’t any of us. And the crew didn’t stay behind, either. They came to the restaurant to film us.”

  “She makes me feel creepy,” Deanna said. “I know she’s my roommate, and we’re supposed to get along, but—”

  “Why would she kill somebody she didn’t even know,” Linda Kowalski asked. “I mean, we didn’t know this person, right?”

  “Coraline could have seen her before,” Grace said. “We don’t know who this girl was or where she was from or anything. And the police don’t know, either. She could be anybody. She could be somebody Coraline knew back home.”

  “What was she doing here?” Suzanne asked.

  “I don’t know,” Grace said. “How am I supposed to know? The girl was whoever she was. It doesn’t matter. The police will find out eventually.”

  “Maybe Coraline is one of those serial killers,” Mary-Louise said. “There are women serial killers. They just go around killing people. Except, you know, mostly it’s about sex.”

  Grace wanted to do more than scream. She wanted to jump around and hit somebody. These girls were all such idiots. They really were. They couldn’t think straight to save their lives, and they couldn’t actually reason their way through a problem for anything at all.

  “Listen,” she said. “The fact is, she’s the only one who could have done it, and she’s the only one I can think of who might have had a motive. I think she’s trying to wreck the show.”

  “Why would she want to wreck the show?” Janice asked. “Don’t be silly, Grace. She’s just as much involved in the show as any of the rest of us.”

  “She may seem like she is,” Grace said, “but she’s one of those born-again people, isn’t she? They’re all a little off-balance, if you ask me, and a lot of them are violent. They get crazy. That’s why they believe in God.”

  “Oh, come on,” Mary-Louise said. “I believe in God. Everybody believes in God.”

  “I don’t,” Grace said, “and not everybody believes in God in the same way. Some people believe in God and they’re very sensible about it. But the born-again types aren’t sensible about it. They’re fanatics. I think she’s trying to wreck the show. I think she thinks it’s sinful, or something, and she’s trying to shut it down.”

  “By killing somebody none of us knows and who wasn’t even supposed to be in the show?” Linda Kowalski said. “And anyway, that other girl had a gun, didn’t she? At the Milky Way Ballroom? There were shots and she was there holding the gun, and that was why the police arrested her.”

  “Well, guns can be planted,” Grace said.

  “In somebody’s hand?” Ivy said.

  Grace hadn’t heard her come in. She didn’t think anybody had. They all turned to look at Ivy’s green hair streak and then looked away again. Grace didn’t like any of the girls in this competition, but the longer they lived together, the more the one she liked least was Ivy Demari. It wasn’t just the tattoos or the weird hair. It was the attitude.

  “Guns can be planted,” Grace said again. “They can be. And I don’t know about in somebody’s hand, but that’s still not to say the gun wasn’t planted. After all, they let that girl out because the gun she was holding wasn’t the one that fired
the shots they got out of the wall at the Ballroom. I heard that police detective talking to Gregor Demarkian about it.”

  “We’re all hearing entirely too much about what the police detective said to Gregor Demarkian,” Ivy said, “and you’ve got to stop this now. You’ve got poor Coraline on the edge of a nervous breakdown as it is. I can’t get her in here to eat something, and she should eat something. She’s going to collapse.”

  “Good,” Alida said. “Let her collapse. Let them send her home. Get her out of here. Then I can go back to sleeping at night.”

  “She could do it again,” Deanna broke in. “The next victim could be any of us.”

  Grace thought Ivy was going to slap somebody. “Why would it be any of us?” she asked. “It’s Sheila Dunham somebody has been firing guns at. It’s Sheila Dunham somebody wants to kill. And no, I don’t think that somebody is Coraline, and neither do any of you.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Grace said. “I think that somebody is Coraline. And wanting to kill Sheila Dunham makes even more sense. It is a religious thing. Sheila Dunham has to represent the worst kind of cultural depravity as far as somebody like Coraline is concerned. She probably looks like an agent of the devil. Maybe Coraline thinks she can wipe out depravity and sin and get us all back to God if she just gets rid of Sheila Dunham.”

  “And the other girl?” Ivy asked.

  “Sheila Dunham has a daughter,” Janice said suddenly. “I heard about it. They don’t talk to each other anymore. Maybe the girl who died was Sheila Dunham’s daughter, and—”

  “And what?” Ivy said.

  “Oh,” Janice said. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t think Coraline did it, either, you know, because, well, she isn’t that kind of person. She’s very nice.”

  “For God’s sake,” Grace said.

  Ivy took a plate from the stack on the sideboard and started loading it with food. “I’m going to take this to Coraline,” she said. “She’s sitting out on the stairs. She doesn’t want to go into the living room and she really doesn’t want to go into the study. I think the entire pack of you are first-rate bitches, I really do.”

  “Somebody has to make sense in a situation like this,” Grace said. “Somebody has to do something to protect us from getting hurt, and the show doesn’t seem to give a damn. I think they ought to post a guard in here to make sure she doesn’t go off her nut again and kill somebody else.”

  “I think that if anybody dies, it’s going to be you,” Ivy said, “and I’m going to do the killing.”

  Then she took the full plate, and a fork and a knife, and marched out of the dining room.

  Grace watched her go, and the rest of the girls watched with her.

  It didn’t matter what Ivy thought. Grace knew as much as she needed to know about what was going on around here now.

  THREE

  1

  For Gregor Demarkian, Len Borstoi’s announcement that he was to consider himself hired, or on the case, or whatever the man had said, felt unreal. That was not how he was hired to consult on cases. First there was a letter, or a fax, or a phone call from the chief of police or the mayor. Then there was a discreet little talk about money. Then there was the advance prep, lots of paperwork with forensic reports and detective logs scattered through it. This was more like the sort of thing that would happen in dreams, except that Gregor never had dreams about work. His dreams always had to do with Bennis and Elizabeth meeting, sometimes for lunch, sometimes in the afterlife. He’d talked to Father Tibor about that once, but neither one of them had been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation.

  “You love both your wives,” Tibor said. “You hope that if they met, they would get along.”

  In the dreams, Bennis and Elizabeth always did get along, but Gregor wasn’t sure they would have if they’d met in real life. They were opposites in ways that weren’t supposed to matter much, but always did: Bennis had grown up rich on the Main Line while Elizabeth had grown up poor in a tenement in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia; Elizabeth had been very traditional about marriage while Bennis had treated marriage like a poison she’d be lucky if she managed to escape; Elizabeth had believed in women being homemakers and Bennis had the career from hell.

  Of course, they had both gone to Vassar, about ten years apart, so there was that. But maybe not. Gregor himself had gone to the University of Pennsylvania for his undergraduate work, and he could remember better than he liked to, the divide between the live-at-school, come-from-Ivy-League-families crowd and the students who, like him, commuted from home and had really large scholarships.

  It had been years since Gregor had thought so much about Elizabeth, who had died of cancer before he’d ever moved back to Cavanaugh Street. He didn’t really know why he was thinking about her now. He was married again, yes, and just back from his honeymoon—but it wasn’t like that was a sudden thing. He’d not only known, but been practically living in Bennis’s lap for years. Thoughts of Elizabeth had never bothered him before.

  Donna pulled Bennis’s car to the curb in front of Gregor’s building and cut the engine. “I’ve got to go put this back in the garage,” she said. “Can you believe that Bennis spends three hundred dollars a month just to keep this thing in a garage?”

  “If it was mine, I’d probably put it in a vault,” Gregor said. “It’s not the kind of thing that blends into the background.”

  “Oh, I know,” Donna said. “And I know it’s supposed to be silly to have a car like this when you live in the city. But it’s a lot of fun to drive.”

  “Why don’t you get one?”

  “Well,” Donna said, “I’ve got a son and a daughter. And there are going to be tuitions.”

  “True,” Gregor said.

  He looked up and down the street. When he’d first moved back here, Donna had had a habit of decorating the entire neighborhood for any holiday that came up. She’d once wrapped the entire building in which he lived—and where she then had the top floor floor-through apartment—in shiny stuff and a bow that made it look like a Christmas package. With this last pregnancy, she seemed to have given that up. He was sorry to see that go.

  “I miss the decorations,” he said. He sounded abrupt even to himself.

  Donna laughed. “You’re not the only one. I’ve just got a lot to do these days. Maybe I can convince the youth group to help me out and we can decorate for the Fourth of July. That’s not too far away. Listen, Bennis is up there practically hanging out of the window. She’s very worried about you.”

  “I know she is,” Gregor said. “There’s really nothing to be worried about.”

  Donna gave him the kind of look that said she didn’t believe him for a minute, and Gregor got out and started walking up the steps to the building’s front door. He was light-headed, but that was just exhaustion. What bothered him was that he still felt the nagging half panic that had bolted him awake at four o’clock in the morning, but it wasn’t strong enough to keep him in gear. He wanted to sleep, and he wanted to sleep even though he felt that something awful was about to happen any second now, and that he was the only one who could stop it.

  He let himself into the foyer and saw that the door to old George Tekemanian’s apartment was closed and locked. He supposed George was out somewhere with Tibor or Lida and Hannah or somebody. If there had been something wrong, if old George had gone to the hospital or had an accident or any of that kind of thing, Donna would have known and told him.

  Gregor started climbing the stairs. There were a lot of them. If he had owned this entire building, instead of one of the apartments in it—two, if you counted the one Bennis owned, since they were married now—he would have put in one of those little elevators.

  He got to the second-floor landing feeling winded. He got to the third-floor landing feeling dead. He now had old George on his mind as well as everything else.

  “You look like hell,” Bennis said. She was standing in the doorway of their apartment, holding the door open
. “Have you had any sleep at all? Are you crazy?”

  Gregor went through the door and into his own foyer. He took off his suit jacket and dropped it on the floor. He never dropped clothes on the floor. He heard Bennis come in behind him and pick it up. He kept on walking into the living room, made his way to the couch, and sat down. Or lay down. It was hard to tell which. He had half sprawled across it. He didn’t think he could move again.

  Gregor heard Bennis close the door, and then her footsteps as she came into the room. She was standing right behind him. He could feel it.

  “Do you want me to make you some coffee?” she asked him.

  “No,” Gregor said. “Definitely no coffee. I’ve had enough coffee.”

  “I could make you milk and honey,” Bennis said. “I’d like to say that was what my mother made me when I couldn’t get to sleep, but you knew my mother. It wasn’t the kind of thing she did. On the other hand, it is the kind of thing Lida does, and she told me all about it.”

  “I just need to relax for a minute,” Gregor said.

  Bennis came around the couch and sat down on one of the chairs. She was a beautiful woman. She had been a beautiful woman when he first met her, and she would be a beautiful woman if she lived to be a hundred and six. That was because there was no part of her beauty that was dependent on age. She was not beautiful the way that, say, somebody like Christie Brinkley was beautiful, with that perky blond evenness that indicated an age of twenty-five, and looked strange ever afterward. Bennis’s face was angular and strange. It looked like nothing else on earth. It also worked.

  She leaned closer to him and said, “Is there something wrong? Is there something I should know about? I think I always worried that if we ever actually got around to doing it for real—”

  “We got around to that part years ago,” Gregor said.

  “I meant getting married.” Bennis made a raspberry. “I was always worried that it would freak you out. That we were all right being not-married married, but we wouldn’t be all right being actually married.”