Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “Not-married married,” Gregor said. His eyes were half closed now. “That’s a good way to put it.”

  “So I thought I’d ask,” Bennis said, “whether the way you’re behaving has something to do with me. Because you’re behaving like a lunatic.”

  Sleep was a foreign country, but Gregor was right there, at the border. He could see the little guard station and the little guard. He could see the gumdrop houses and cotton-candy mountains. This was the silliest line of thought he could remember himself having in all his life.

  He forced his eyes open. “It’s not you,” he said. “It’s time.”

  “What?”

  “I’m in the middle of two things, and they’re both sensitive to time,” Gregor said. “There’s only a short amount of time, and if we don’t get them right then something bad is going to happen. Well, it is definitely in the one case, and it could be in the other.”

  “Which case?” Bennis asked.

  Gregor made himself sit up just a little. “Sophie Mgrdchian,” he said. “She’s still lying in a hospital bed, but they’ve been through just about everything they can think of, and it’s been, what, two days? And they don’t have any reason why she should be in practically a coma. So they can’t hold this woman—”

  “Karen Mgrdchian,” Bennis said. “That’s Sophie’s sister-in-law, isn’t it? Didn’t you tell me that?”

  “She says she’s Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said, “but I’m pretty sure she isn’t. In fact, I know she isn’t. But I can’t prove she isn’t, and nobody can prove that anybody did anything to Sophie Mgrdchian to put her in the state she’s in, so there we are. The court handed this woman over for a psychiatric examination, but that’s limited to four days. By the end of the week, they’re going to have to let her out of there, and if they do, I’d be willing to bet she’d find a way to kill Sophie Mgrdchian in no time flat. Either that, or Sophie will die of whatever this is before she ever leaves the hospital.”

  “Isn’t that odd?” Bennis asked. “I mean, Sophie Mgrdchian is in the hospital, away from this woman. If she was being poisoned, or something, shouldn’t she be getting better? With nobody around to poison her anymore?”

  “There is that,” Gregor said. “And, of course, that’s one of the reasons why it’s going to be nearly impossible to hold this woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian after the observation order. Especially now that she’s acting like a perfectly normal human being. But she can’t be Karen Mgrdchian. She just can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she destroyed her own fingerprints,” Gregor said. “And I’ve been telling that to everybody who would listen since this thing started. And what I hear is that lots of people destroy their own fingerprints accidentally. But Bennis, you know, they don’t, they really don’t. I can’t think of a single case among all the people I’ve known in my life. Not one. Junkies do it sometimes, if they’re playing around with, I’m sorry, I can’t remember the name—the gas in industrial-sized canisters of whipped cream. Nitrous oxide? Anyway, people who play around with those sometimes get their hands stuck to them and frozen solid and then the fingertips have to be cut off to get the canister off, but does this look like a woman who uses nitrous oxide?”

  “The day we found her,” Bennis said, “she was acting like she was on nitrous oxide.”

  “Yes, well, I still can’t see it. Anyway, homeless people do it to themselves sometimes because they grab metal, a metal bar, a metal railing, they’re just trying to steady themselves and it’s freezing cold and they get their hands stuck, and then they pull them off and there you are. But ordinary human beings do not do that, and we all know it. And I’m sitting here trying to figure out what could possibly be causing Sophie’s condition and what I could possibly say that would make the Philadelphia police look at this differently than they do, and I keep running up against brick walls. I told David Mortimer this morning about searching the house and not finding an address book or refrigerator magnets with doctors’ names on them or a cell phone or anything. And Billie Ormonds said that from what the police have been able to figure out, Sophie Mgrdchian wasn’t even on Medicare. How the hell could she not be on Medicare?”

  “She didn’t sign up?” Bennis suggested.

  “The doctors would have signed her up,” Gregor said. “Or their nurses would have. Doctors like to get paid. And she has to have been seeing doctors. You need doctors to get prescriptions. I need to convince them to go search that house.”

  “Sophie’s house? Haven’t they already searched it?”

  “No, the other house,” Gregor said. “The Mgrdchian house in wherever it is. Cleveland? I can’t remember. That house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m fairly sure there’s at least one body in the basement.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe two,” Gregor said. “In a worst-case scenario, maybe three. But that’s getting ahead of myself. I’ve got to get some sleep.”

  “I can see that,” Bennis said.

  “Do me a favor,” Gregor said. “Get my phone, and look at that address-book thing . . . Then there’s Billie Ormonds.” She spells it like Billie Burke, you remember, that actress who was Glinda in The Wizard of Oz. Tell her who you are and then tell her I need to talk to her, later this afternoon, as soon as she’s got a minute to give me. I’d do it now, but I’m—”

  “In no shape,” Bennis said. “I can see that.”

  “See if you can’t get an appointment for me to talk to her, to see her face to face, I don’t know. Invite her to the Ararat for dinner or something. She’s not a homicide detective. There isn’t any homicide as far as anybody knows, and there isn’t anything we know that could make it a suspected homicide, in spite of the fact that—”

  “Don’t go into all that again. You’ll fall over.”

  “I’m okay. I’m fine. I’m getting up. Do that for me, if you don’t mind. I’ve got to—”

  “You’ve got to get at least a few hours of sleep,” Bennis said. “I know. Go ahead.”

  2

  Going to sleep was not always the best idea in the world. It wasn’t always the second best idea in the world. Gregor threw himself out of his clothes and into his bed as if he were diving into water. When he hit the mattress, he thought he might have passed out, but it was an odd kind of passing out. He couldn’t count the number of stories he’d heard about people who were supposedly in comas—or who really were in comas—who could actually hear and see and understand everything that was going on around them. He remembered the story of one woman who had laid in bed day after day, listening while her family and her doctors and her nurses had all argued the pros and cons of taking her feeding tubes out and letting her “die with dignity.” There was some kind of a show on that one—Oprah, maybe, although he wasn’t sure. The woman had written a book about her experiences. The television shows had gone looking into it all and found out that the phenomenon was rare, but not vanishingly rare. There were a couple of dozen people out there, now alive and well, who had been through the same thing.

  Gregor wondered how many dead people there were who had actually been just like this comatose woman, who lived. The woman had had one granddaughter who was adamantly opposed to taking out the feeding tubes. This granddaughter had fought hard and long and managed to delay the day, and then the woman had woken up. How many dead people hadn’t had granddaughters like that, or anybody else who would keep them from being—

  Killed off, Gregor thought. He understood the reasoning behind taking people off machines that did things like make their hearts beat and make their lungs work when those organs would no longer operate on their own. The coma patient, however, hadn’t needed machines like that. Her heart and lungs had been working on their own. All she’d needed was food and water, delivered through a feeding tube.

  Why was he thinking about these things now? Sophie was not on machines, either. Her heart and lungs were working. She only had a feeding tube. Nobod
y had suggested that they take it out. Could this woman—the woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian—could she have the authority to demand it be taken out? If she was who she said she was, she would be one of only two existing relatives. The other one would be the daughter, who would be Sophie’s niece. That assumed that the daughter wasn’t in the basement, with her real mother.

  This was getting worse than surreal. He had liked it better when there had been gumdrop houses and cotton candy mountains. He kept seeing things floating through the void, like the things in the tornado in The Wizard of Oz—it was like everything had a theme. He saw syringes and IV tubes and plastic pill organizers and latex gloves that changed mysteriously into beige-colored lace ones, stretchy beige-colored lace ones that—

  Oh, Gregor thought.

  He tried to force himself awake, but it didn’t work.

  3

  It was Bennis who woke him finally, sitting down at the edge of the bed and shaking him by the shoulder. Gregor started to surface very slowly, and all the way up he was convinced that he had thought of something very important, and that he’d better remember it. He couldn’t remember anything. His head hurt.

  “Gregor?” Bennis said.

  “Is it six o’clock already?”

  Bennis cleared her throat. Gregor wondered if he’d ever actually said anything about waking him at six o’clock. He might not have. He turned in bed—he usually didn’t turn at all in bed—he always slept on his left side, and forced his eyes awake.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “It’s five, if you want to know the truth,” Bennis said. “I’ve got a dinner appointment for you at seven with your Billie Ormonds person. I should be waking you up anyway. But that isn’t why I’m here.”

  “You’re waking me up,” Gregor said reasonably. “So that is why you’re here.”

  “The Very Old Ladies are in the kitchen,” Bennis said. “I tried to get them to sit in the living room, but they weren’t having any. They’re making that kind of coffee . . . you know, Lida serves it sometimes, it’s like mud and it can double as rocket fuel.”

  “Turkish coffee,” Gregor said. “Except you never say Turkish in an Armenian neighborhood. Call it Armenian coffee. I need to take a shower.”

  “I agree, you do, but they’re here. They climbed all those steps. On purpose.”

  “I don’t suppose I could take a quick shower and then come out in my bathrobe.”

  “Somehow,” Bennis said, “I’d guess the answer is no.”

  Gregor knew the answer was no, too. He waited for Bennis to stand up. Then he sat all the way up himself and swung his legs onto the floor. He was wearing nothing but boxer shorts, and he was willing to bet that if he looked in the mirror, he’d be a mess. He saw his clothes piled on the floor. They looked wrinkled and dirty. He didn’t want to put them on.

  “I am going to take a shower,” he said. “I’m not going to put on fresh clothes when I’m like this. Give them something to eat and I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “If I give them something to eat, they’ll complain about how I can’t cook,” Bennis said. “And they’re right, so I can’t even tell them off about it.”

  “They’d only swear at you in Armenian if you did,” Gregor said. “Fifteen minutes tops. Less than that. I’ll be right out.”

  He was right out, too. He made sure by turning the water on full blast and cold. It woke him up, and it got even his hair washed in record time. He kept going over and over the dreams he remembered. They were jumbled up, and Terri Schiavo was in one of them. He did know what that one was about, though. He’d known that before he’d fallen asleep. It was the other things that were making him nervous. He remembered a tornado with things floating in it. He remembered the syringe, and the gloves, but the gloves were wrong.

  He got out of the shower, toweled off, and went back to the bedroom. He took a fresh pair of boxers from the top drawer and found a clean suit hanging in the closet. He threw on a plain white button-down shirt, which was the only kind of shirt he ever wore. Bennis always complained that he dresses as if he were still in the FBI.

  He got on socks. He thought about dispensing with the shoes. He thought the Very Old Ladies were going to notice. They always noticed everything.

  He opened the bedroom door and stuck his head out into the hall. He could hear murmuring noises coming from the kitchen. He hoped Bennis was holding her own.

  He left the bedroom, walked down the hall and through the living room, and went into the kitchen. The kitchen was “eat in,” because there was no dining room. Sometimes he understood what Bennis meant when she said that the apartment was cramped.

  The Very Old Ladies were sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee out of large mugs that were only half full. Gregor guessed that this had been Bennis’s compromise with the fact that she didn’t own any of the tiny little cups Armenian coffee was supposed to be served in. According to Bennis, Armenian coffee was not a beverage. It was a drug addiction.

  There was an empty chair at the table. Bennis was standing up, leaning back against the sink. She looked a little dazed.

  Gregor sat down. “Good afternoon,” he said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world for these three women to have climbed three sets of stairs plus the stoop to sit in his kitchen. He suddenly wondered if they had elevators in their houses, or if they’d kept in shape all these years making their way up and down staircases that were difficult for much younger people to manage.

  Viola Vardanian, made a face. It was a very sour face. “We’ve come to find out what is going on,” she said. “We have tried to talk to the police officers, and they will not tell us.”

  “What police officers did you try to talk to?” Gregor asked.

  “We went to the precinct, Krekor,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “What did you think we would do. We went there, and we went to the hospital, and talked to Dr. Halevy. Nobody would tell us anything, because we are not next of kin.”

  “I think that’s probably the law,” Gregor said.

  “They did ask us a lot of questions,” Mrs. Melvarian said. Mrs. Melvarian was the small round one, the one that looked most like an Armenian peasant grandmother. “Dr. Halevy especially asked us. And she expected us to answer.”

  “It’s been hard to get information,” Gregor said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything anywhere to tell us, well, to tell us things. Who her doctor was, for instance.”

  “Yes, yes,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Dr. Halevy asked us the same thing. You should find Sophie’s little book and use that. Although I don’t think I’ve ever known her to go to the doctors. She doesn’t like doctors.”

  “Doctors can be necessary,” Gregor said. “What little book are you talking about?”

  “Oh, her niece made it for her when she was in the fifth grade,” Mrs. Edelakian said. It was more like gushing. “When the niece was in the fifth grade, I mean. It’s beautiful, it really is. It’s got pictures on the cover of it, all these pictures of Sophie and her family. Sophie herself, and Viktor, and Dennis and Marco and their wives, and Clarice, too. Clarice made it in her art class.”

  “Clarice is in fifth grade?” Gregor was confused.

  Mrs. Vardanian snorted. “Of course she isn’t. She’s a middle-aged woman now, I would think. But Kara is right. She always used that one. She kept it in the little telephone table in the kitchen.”

  “I looked in the telephone table,” Gregor said. “I looked in a big cedar chest in the living room. I looked in the night table next to her bed. I spent nearly three hours this morning going through every room in the house, I didn’t find any address book, with pictures on it or not. I didn’t find much of anything except very old lace and some copies of a magazine in Armenian.”

  “The police say this other woman is Marco’s wife,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “We need to find out what doctor Sophie was seeing,” Gregor said. “He or she might be able to tell us something about wh
y she’s still in a coma. If it is a coma. I get the medical terms confused, sometimes. We need to know why she’s unconscious.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Maybe there isn’t any doctor. Sophie wasn’t sick. She was never sick. She didn’t even get colds. And she didn’t have the aches the way the rest of us do. She had a little arthritis, but that’s to be expected, Krekor. People didn’t always go running off to the doctor every time they have aches. There’s no point to it.”

  “And it costs a fortune,” Mrs. Melvarian said. “Even with the Medicare.”

  “She had to be seeing a doctor,” Gregor said patiently. “She had one of those plastic pill organizers on her when she was taken to the hospital. She had medications, and the only way you can get medications is by seeing a doctor. She had a prescription painkiller for the arthritis. She had one of those drugs that lower blood cholesterol. She had one of the ones that lower blood pressure—”

  “She never had any such thing,” Mrs. Vardanian said.

  The other two Very old Ladies looked equal startled. “Oh,” Mrs. Edelakian said, “Viola is right. Sophie couldn’t have had blood pressure medicine.”

  “She really couldn’t,” Mrs. Melvarian agreed.

  Mrs. Vardanian would have looked triumphant if she hadn’t looked so disgusted.

  “Sophie Mgrdchian,” she said, “has low blood pressure. It’s so low that once when she went in for a gall bladder operation and they gave her Demerol for the pain, when they did the blood pressure test they thought she was dead. Except that she was sitting up and talking, so she wasn’t. Sophie Mgrdchian never took a pill to lower her blood pressure in her life. It would have killed her.”

  FOUR

  1

  The individual interviews were an important part of the show, just as they were an important part of any reality show. They were always filmed as if the girl being interviewed was talking by herself, as if nobody was asking her questions or even in the room. The trick was to convince the girls that nothing they said would be heard by the judges—and especially by Sheila Dunham—until the show was in postproduction and about to be aired. You didn’t want the girls pulling their punches, or saying insipid little nicey-nice things because they were afraid of Sheila having one of her fits, or of being eliminated. You wanted them right there and pumping away, saying the kind of things that made viewers write in and call them bitches.