Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  What the psychologists said, when you asked them, was that people believed what they wanted to believe. Most of us would be happy to get five million dollars. Many of us desperately want the money. Then there are the very old, who may not always be thinking straight.

  Gregor still thought that the phenomenon was bizarre. No matter how much you wanted to believe, there had to be some part of your brain that was telling you it was all a lot of crap. And that was the word for it. Crap.

  He looked around to see where he was, and found he wasn’t sure. It was a nice stretch of city, with a few small restaurants offering pizza and a few shops already closed for the evening. He went into one of the pizza places and looked around. There had to be dozens of places like this across the United States. There were a few, but only a few, wooden booths along one wall. There was a counter with a glass top and two big pizza ovens beyond it. Most of the business seemed to be in takeout and delivery.

  Gregor sat down at one of the booths. It had started to rain again when he wasn’t paying attention, and his hair was wet. He took out his cell phone and punched in the number 3, which is where Bennis had placed herself. He still didn’t understand the logic of the numbers she assigned to speed dial. If it had been up to him, he’d have put 911 first and not worried about the rest.

  Bennis picked up and asked him where he was.

  “Give me a minute,” he said. He went up to the counter and looked at the menu. Then he read off the name of the place and the street address. “They sell slices. I thought I’d get myself some. Unless you haven’t eaten.”

  “I’ve been picking all afternoon. I’m fine. Can you get a cab from there?”

  “I could,” Gregor said, “but I was hoping you might come get me. I need a ride out to Bryn Mawr.”

  “Gregor—”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “You don’t go to Engine House anymore. I don’t blame you. But I don’t need a ride out to Engine House. I just need a ride out to Bryn Mawr. If I can set this up the right way, you can take me to the police station. And you can wait for me there if I do have to go out to Engine House. The trick, you see, is that you must always concentrate on what in fact happened.”

  “You’re making absolutely no sense,” Bennis said.

  “It’s Agatha Christie. I told you that Tibor gave me those books. I read them on our honeymoon. According to Hercule Poirot—”

  “And you’re the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot?”

  “Don’t be like that. I’ll do something drastic. It’s a good point. What you have to deal with is what actually happened. Not what you think happened, or what you think must be the case because it makes sense. You have to deal with what happened.”

  “I thought that was Sherlock Holmes. ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

  “Not bad,” Gregor said. “Come on out and get me. I’ll get something to eat. If I’m lucky, I’ll talk to Len Borstoi and we’ll be able to meet him at the police station. I don’t think I could stand to pay another taxi for that ride. They charge you enough to buy a house. I don’t even know if I’ve got enough money on me.”

  “I’ll be right out,” Bennis said. “Eat something. You’re going to kill yourself with the way you’ve been behaving lately.”

  “I’ll see you in a minute.”

  It would, Gregor knew, be more than a minute, and probably more than ten. He got up and went to the counter. There were three big pizzas back there, all available to buy by the slice. He asked for a slice of sausage and a slice of onion and mushroom, and waited patiently while the man in the white apron slid them onto a paper plate. Then he asked for a bottle of water, and paid.

  Back at the booth, he set his food and water down and took his notebook out of his pocket. The case of Sophie Mgrdchian had looked simple but really been complicated—that is, it had actually been a con game and not just an old lady passed out on her own foyer floor. The case of America’s Next Superstar looked complicated, but it was really entirely straightforward. It only seemed complicated because people kept insisting on making it make sense.

  No, that wasn’t the way to put it.

  Gregor paged through his notebook and came to the page where he had written out the names of the girls and their roommates. He looked down the list and frowned:

  Shari Bernstein and Linda Kowalski

  Janice Ledbedder and Ivy Demari

  Coraline Mays and Deanna Brackett

  Grace (Harrigan) Alsop and Suzanne Toretti

  Mary-Louise Verdt and Alida Akido

  Andra Gayle and Marcia Lee Baldwin

  Brittney Cox and Faith Stackdopole

  Fourteen girls, each of them chosen from thousands of applicants across the country, and then chosen again from the thirty applicants who had been allowed to do an on-camera audition. Fourteen girls—but it didn’t help, really, to know who roomed with whom unless he also knew the characters of the girls involved, and he only knew those sketchily. No, it wasn’t who they roomed with that was the key. It was—

  He shook his head. The pizza was passable, but not spectacular. The water made him wonder when it had become commonplace for restaurants to sell the stuff in bottles instead of just give it away in glasses. Fourteen girls, plus a fifteenth who was not on anybody’s official list. She had not been asked to come in and audition. She had not been one of the thirty chosen for the on-camera auditions and the first on-camera elimination. She was just there, out of the blue, and if she had had a gun full of real bullets and disappeared afterward, that was all she would ever have been.

  Fourteen girls, plus a fifteenth, dead in a room with a video security camera in it that apparently had been no use at all. If it had been, Len Borstoi would not be floundering around telling Gregor Demarkian he was hired.

  He’d have to ask about the security camera. He’d have to ask about a lot of things. At the moment, he knew a couple.

  He got out his phone and called Len Borstoi’s cell number, a number he’d had now for less than ten hours. He was thinking that if he got Borstoi at dinner, or in bed, he would probably hear about it.

  He got Borstoi at the station house. He knew that because he recognized the sounds in the background. Police stations sound the same everywhere.

  “Listen,” he said. “There’s something you need to do. Or to get the uniforms to do. And it had better be done sooner rather than later. Although I think it’s probably already too late.”

  “Too late to find what?”

  “A glove,” Gregor said. “A single, small stretchy glove. It might be a latex glove, but I doubt it. For one thing, you can sometimes get fingerprints off the inside of latex gloves, although I don’t know why I think our murderer would know that. What she’s much more likely to know is that a latex glove would be a red flag. If it was found on her, it would immediately cause suspicion. And she would have to have had it on her today.”

  “We searched them all today,” Len Borstoi said. “Don’t you think you would have noticed a single glove?”

  “No, I don’t,” Gregor said. “This afternoon, it would probably have been in her handbag. You’ve seen the handbags those girls carry around? They’re the size of suitcases. And they’ve got everything but the kitchen sink in them. Makeup. Pieces of clothing. If one of your guys was poring through a huge bag like that, a single glove wouldn’t look suspicious or like anything but one more bit of stray clothing shoved in the bag when she didn’t know what else to do with it. And my guess is that her bag would have had a fair amount of stray clothing in it. And maybe more than one glove. What you’re looking for is something stretchy that kind of contracts when it’s off the hand, and not too noticeable a color. Maybe a beigy kind of thing, what they call ‘champagne’ in stores. And my guess would be that it’s a lace thing, with mesh and little patches of stuff—I’m no good at describing women’s clothing. There’s this kind of stretchy lace they make gloves out of sometimes that has little applique
d things on it. Butterflies. That kind of thing.”

  “Oddly enough,” Borstoi said, “I think I know what you mean.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said, “well. This afternoon, she would have had it in her bag, but it’s probably gone now. You need to search not just the handbags but the rooms. The bedrooms. I take it the video camera in the study didn’t give you anything you needed.”

  “No,” Borstoi said. “It had been disabled. And it had been disabled a long time before the murder. The last footage was from the night before.”

  “That’s about right. The murder had to have occurred in the morning, the very early morning, before breakfast. You said the body had been moved—”

  “Not from very far. There’s a utility hallway—”

  “Right behind, yes, I know. I suppose the body was left there for a while.”

  “We can’t tell.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Get somebody out there to look, or wait for me and we’ll go out there together and look. I’m a little worried about what’s going to happen if we don’t work fast, but I’d like to talk to you if you’re going to be at the station house for a while.”

  “I’m going to go and see if I can’t get a search warrant,” Borstoi said. “If you’re coming right out, you shouldn’t have to wait long for me to get back. The girls’ rooms, and their handbags, looking for a glove.”

  “That’s right,” Gregor said. “And you’re going to find that glove in the things belonging to a girl named Coraline Mays, and if we don’t get there fast, I think she’s going to commit suicide.”

  SIX

  1

  The police arrived just as Janice Ledbedder was about to go into the interview room. She stood for a second in the hall to watch them pass. There were a lot of men in uniforms, and one of them stopped in front of Olivia Dahl to give her some paperwork. That had to be the warrant, Janice was sure. It made her more than a little nervous to realize that she didn’t know what was going on. She had watched millions of those shows, the documentaries and the mini-documentaries, and the police shows, like CSI Everyplace, and she’d thought she had a good understanding of how a police investigation worked. It turned out she had no idea. The police were not like the police on TV, even if the TV said it was presenting something real, the way it really happened.

  Olivia Dahl came back down the hall and found Janice standing in place, staring.

  “Go,” she said. “What are you waiting for? Sheila will have a fit. And you’re the last one for tonight.”

  “What do you think they’re looking for?” Janice said.

  “I have no idea. They want to look through the bedrooms. I’ve sent them upstairs. Now go do your interview while I go upstairs and watch.”

  Janice went into the interview room. The lights shining on the chair she was supposed to sit in were too harsh. She was very nervous. She was as nervous as she’d ever been during the whole of this competition. She sat down and looked around. When they showed this on television, if they did, they would block out all the background and it would look like she was sitting in empty space. She didn’t know why they did that, but they were not the only ones. She adjusted her skirt so that it came down almost to her knees and smiled.

  “Are you all ready?” somebody asked.

  Janice couldn’t see who it was, but she knew it wasn’t Sheila Dunham. She knew Sheila Dunham’s voice.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “The police are here. I’m a little nervous.”

  “What are you nervous about?” Sheila Dunham asked.

  “Well,” Janice said. “I’m nervous all the time, I guess. I didn’t expect to be on the show. I mean, I came to the audition and I had hopes, but I didn’t think I was actually going to get chosen. So, you know, I’m still having a hard time getting used to it. And there are things.”

  “What things?”

  “I didn’t expect to get on,” Janice said, “so I didn’t make any plans for it. Do you know what I mean? I had to call my mother and tell her I was staying on, and that got her all excited. It was in the papers, you know, about me being asked to the audition.”

  “And has it been in the papers that you made it into the house?” That was definitely Sheila Dunham.

  “I don’t know,” Janice said. “I haven’t had a chance to really talk to anybody. If I was going to change anything about this, I’d change the thing where we’re not allowed to make calls and we can’t have our cell phones. It makes me really crazy not to be able to talk to anybody. I mean, I know that you’re trying to keep it a secret, who gets into the house and who stays and who gets eliminated. But you see what I mean.”

  “Did you shoot at me this afternoon?”

  “What?”

  “Did you shoot at me?” Sheila’s voice sounded very patient. Janice didn’t think that was a good sign.

  “I don’t think anybody shot at you,” she said, thinking it over. “I’ve been trying to remember it all day. I think somebody shot something, but I don’t think they shot it at you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you know, it missed, didn’t it?” Janice said. “And we were all so close. If somebody really wanted to shoot you, they would probably have hit you. I’ve been thinking that maybe they’ve been shooting at one of us. Maybe we have the whole thing wrong. But I could be crazy. I mean, I don’t really understand how people like you live, if you know what I mean. It has to be really odd never to be able to go anywhere without people knowing who you are. I don’t know if I’d really like that.”

  “Then you don’t want to be America’s Next Superstar?”

  “Oh. Yes. I would. I mean, I’d like to win the competition. That would be a good thing. That would be in the paper.”

  “And that’s what you want, to be in the paper, in, where was it—”

  “Marshall, South Dakota.”

  “And you were the one who had a big tragedy, or something, before you came.” There was a rustling of papers. Janice wished she could see past the lights.

  She didn’t like Sheila Dunham. She really didn’t. The woman was old, and she was nasty, too, with that way adults sometimes had of acting as if everybody under the age of thirty was a moron with a morals problem. Janice smoothed her skirt.

  “I don’t think I had a tragedy,” she said.

  There was a long pause on the other side of the lights. “I remember,” Sheila said. “You’re the loser. You’re the one whose boyfriend dumped her for her best friend.”

  Janice rubbed her hands together. This was bad. A male voice from the other side of the lights told her to sit still. You weren’t supposed to move around a lot during interviews. It made it hard for the audience to hear what you were saying if they were concentrating instead on your jumping all over the place.

  “It wasn’t like that,” she said. “They’re very good for each other. And I don’t begrudge her, you know. She had a hard life. She came from a very bad family. Well, it wasn’t a family, really. It was just her mother. But her mother drank. Drinks, I guess.”

  “So you didn’t mind it? Your boyfriend dumps you for your best friend, and you don’t mind it?”

  “I didn’t like it. But I didn’t think about it. And then I got this, and everybody in the whole place just thought I was wonderful for it. And you know, there was a sort of justice in it. She tried out, too. She didn’t get asked to the audition.”

  There was more silence from the other side of the lights. Janice really couldn’t keep her body still. She’d never been able to keep herself still. She talked all the time, and she was always moving. They made fun of her about that at school, and that was one of the things her boyfriend hadn’t liked.

  The papers rustled again. Sheila said. “Do you think it’s a good idea, you telling that story to everybody you meet? You have told that story to everybody here. You’ve told it to me before. You’ve told it to the other girls. You mentioned it in the first interview you did, back at the Ballroom, before you were chosen to come to
the house. Don’t you think telling that story over and over again makes you look pathetic?”

  “I don’t know,” Janice said.

  “It makes you look pathetic,” Sheila said. “It is pathetic. If I had a story like that in my background, nobody would ever hear it from me. Perception is everything. People will think what you want them to think. You want them to think you’re a loser.”

  You want them to think you’re a bitch, Janice thought, but she wasn’t that crazy. She didn’t say it. What she said instead was, “Yes, I can see that. I can see how that would be.”

  “Who do you think took those shots at me?”

  That was better. Janice could breathe again.

  “Oh,” she said, “I don’t really know. I don’t think anybody knows.”

  “But they suspect,” Sheila said.

  “They make guesses,” Janice said, “but I think it’s all just talk. I mean, everybody wants to believe they know what’s going on, so they pretend they do. But it’s just talk.”

  “And who are they talking about?”

  “I wouldn’t like to say.”

  “You wouldn’t like to, or you’re afraid I’d bitch you out for being a rat?”