Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “Get famous,” Gregor said. “By this time, Brian was no longer seeing Emma, and he wasn’t back with Janice. So Janice was dumped and furious, and Emma was dumped and sad, and the letters came. And Janice convinced Emma to come down to the auditions with her and stage a stunt that would get them in the papers, and then they could use that to get themselves famous. The plot was ludicrous, but we’re dealing with a couple of high school girls here. According to Janice’s plan as she explained it to Emma, they’d both fire at Sheila Dunham, and then they’d get caught, and then they’d be in the papers. Janice had the whole thing worked out. They’d give false names. They’d pretend they didn’t notice each other. It would look like the whole world was out to murder Sheila Dunham, and then they’d go on television and tell the world how they were really getting justice for all the rejected girls. It was all a lot of nonsense. A more sophisticated girl would have known it was nonsense. But it was a chance for Emma to get away from home, and she had a lot to get away from. I’d guess that she was also actually upset about not being asked in to audition. Janice had other things she could do with her life. Not many other things, and not anything spectacular, but she was on track to go to the local college and find another boyfriend and get a teaching certificate and find a guy and settle down. That’s what people do in Marshall, South Dakota, at least if you listen to Janice tell it. Emma was on track for nowhere. She had a good chance of ending up like her mother if she didn’t do something with herself.”

  “Where were Emma’s parents in all this?”

  “Emma’s father is long gone,” Gregor said. “Emma’s mother is an alcoholic and a drug addict. She didn’t even notice Emma was gone. Janice told everybody about that, too. She really couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”

  “But I still don’t understand what she thought she was going to accomplish,” Bennis said. “They were going to shoot at Sheila Dunham, and then what?”

  “Janice was never going to shoot at Sheila Dunham,” Gregor said. “She was going to shoot at Emma Ware, and kill her. And before you get all indignant at how complicated it was, Janice didn’t expect it to be complicated. She didn’t think she was going to pass the eliminations and end up in the final thirty, never mind in the final fourteen. She thought they would be part of a big crowd, and Sheila Dunham would be up there talking, and Emma would point her gun and ‘shoot’ nothing, and Janice would keep hers low and shoot real bullets. Everybody would see Emma and her gun. Nobody would be looking at Janice. Janice would just drop the gun where she was and nobody would be able to trace it to her.”

  “But why not just shoot Emma on the street somewhere?”

  “Because it’s harder than you think,” Gregor said. “You’ve got to get your victim to an isolated spot. That means either going out at night or going out into really bad neighborhoods. You know as well as I do there are more people around at those times and in those places than you’d think. And not all of them are junkies.”

  “Most of them aren’t interested in calling the police.”

  “Some of them might be interested in mugging you. The thing about committing the murder in broad daylight in the middle of a crowd actually made a certain amount of sense.”

  “But she didn’t kill Emma Ware at the auditions,” Bennis said.

  “She tried,” Gregor said. “She missed. She wasn’t as close to Emma as she expected to be. In fact, nothing was working out the way she expected it to. There was no mass meeting of the whole lot of them, which was something she’d seen on previous seasons of the show. They didn’t do it that way this time. She never expected to be in the final thirty. She really never expected to be in the final fourteen and living in the house.”

  “And then?”

  Gregor shrugged. “And then Emma got stupid. When she was arrested, she clammed up. Completely. She wouldn’t talk to anybody. She wouldn’t even give her name. She was scared to death, so she just gave the name she and Janice had invented for their little project, and then she wouldn’t say anything else. Then the forensics came in and it turned out that there weren’t any bullets in that gun, blank or otherwise, her legal aid attorney got her out on bail. And now we come to an interesting point.”

  “This is a built-in bookshelf,” Bennis said. “Who puts a built-in bookshelf in their dining room?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t always a dining room,” Gregor said. “Don’t you want to hear what the interesting point is?”

  “Sure,” Bennis said. “But I also want to see the kitchen.”

  There was a swinging door to the kitchen, and they went through it. To Gregor, the room was just huge and messy. To Bennis, it was obviously the greatest thing since—well, since whatever.

  “If Emma Ware had just gone away,” Gregor said, “she’d be alive and well right now, and probably have stayed that way. Janice did not get caught with the gun at the scene because nobody was looking for a gun at the scene. They had the gun Emma had and they thought they already had it. Emma got carted off to jail, and Janice ended up in the final fourteen with a bed in the house and a chance to be on the air. And it could have stopped there. Janice almost certainly would not have risked a chance to win the competition to pull another stunt. If Emma had just skipped bail and run on home, it would all have been over.

  “Unfortunately, Emma didn’t do that. As soon as she got out on bail, she went looking for Janice. For all the nonsense that these people talk about security, everybody on the planet knew where the house was. It didn’t take Emma long to find out and it didn’t take her long to get out there and contact Janice. She needed to know what was going to happen next. She needed to know what was going to happen to her. So she came out. And Janice still had the gun. And Janice agreed to talk to her. And Janice killed her.”

  “When?” Bennis asked. “I thought the house was full of people.”

  “You know Engine House better than I do,” Gregor said. “There’s the central core and two wings. The rest of the people living in the house were in the wings, in the bedrooms on the second floor. Janice met Emma on the first floor in the servant’s area—”

  “Why didn’t the servants hear?”

  “Because there were no servants to hear. They go home at night these days. Janice met Emma there, and killed her in the back corridor. She stuffed the body out of sight in a small closet. Then she came into the nearest room, which turned out to be the study. She came in behind the security camera, which was aimed at the main door out into the foyer. She unplugged it. She looked around. Then she got a really bright idea. She knew the room. She was always watching those television shows about true crime. And she told everybody about that, too.”

  “Lots of people watch those shows,” Bennis said.

  “Agreed,” Gregor said. “Janice, however, made a point of telling me once that she had seen a couple of them on the murder of your father. She knew I’d be likely to be around, because she’d heard from Olivia Dahl that I’d been asked to come in and consult on the shooting in Merion. So she thought she’d do something to, well, steer the investigation into a direction that didn’t have anything to do with her. She’d put Emma’s body on the hearth. She’d make sure neither I nor anybody else could fail to make the connection. She played around with the mirror and managed to dislodge it just a little, so that it was hanging just slightly forward on these ribbons—”

  “Safety tape,” Bennis said. “I remember those. Just in case the mirrors somehow came away from the wall, there was safety tape to stop them from just crashing to the ground. The mirror in the morning room at Engine House has those, too.”

  “With the mirror just slightly forward like that, I was struck immediately with all the resemblances to the first scene. I looked in the door, and there was the reflection in the mirror. It hit me right in the face.”

  “But why didn’t anybody else notice the body in the study?” Bennis said. “Weren’t the girls wandering all the hell around when that was going on?”

  “The body wasn’t there
when the girls were wandering around,” Gregor said. “The body was still in the closet in the utility hall then. The girls and the crew and the staff went out to get into the limousines to go to the challenge. Janice insisted she had to go to the bathroom and ran back inside. Coraline was still in the house, but she’d run upstairs in tears. Janice ran around to the utility hall, got the body out of the closet, dragged it into the study by the utility door, left it in the house, and ran out. It took less than sixty seconds. Then she was off to the restaurant in Bryn Mawr, and it was just a matter of who was going to find it.

  “I think, you know, she expected that Coraline would find it. Coraline was in the house. But Coraline never came downstairs again until everybody else got back. I don’t suppose it matters. Having Coraline in the house was lucky for Janice either way.”

  “Why lucky?”

  “Because it made Coraline a natural suspect. No matter what you read in murder mysteries or see on those true crime shows, in most crimes, the most obvious suspect is the guilty one, and the most obvious suspect is the one right there sticking out like a sore thumb. And that was Coraline. Emma Ware was dead on the study floor and Coraline was in the house, and she was the only one in the house. All Janice had to do to clinch the deal was to dump something on Coraline that could serve as a smoking gun.”

  “The glove,” Bennis said.

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “When she didn’t have any more use for the glove, she just walked into the room Coraline shared with Deanna and shoved it into Coraline’s things. That was the really easy part. The girls were almost never in their rooms except when they were getting up or going to bed.”

  “Wasn’t Janice the first into the house when they came back, too?” Bennis said. “Didn’t somebody say she had to go to the bathroom then?”

  “Probably,” Gregor said. “At least it wouldn’t surprise me. What does impress me was that last bit, where she fired at Sheila Dunham in the living room. In a way, she had to do something, because it was important for the police and everybody else to think that the reason for all this gunfire was that somebody wanted Sheila Dunham dead. And maintaining that fiction was not going to be easy, since there was a dead body to contend with and it wasn’t Sheila Dunham’s. And Janice’s safety, then as always depended on there being no connection between her and the girl who died. So she decided to stage another shooting, another case of somebody wanting Sheila dead. Except she didn’t want Sheila dead. She didn’t even shoot in the right direction. She just shot in the way least likely to get herself caught on camera or noticed by the other girls. She waited until everybody was screaming and jumping up and down and—can you tell me why it is people do that? The screaming and the jumping up and down, I mean. What the hell is that supposed to be in aid of?”

  “It’s supposed to show you’re enthusiastic,” Bennis said absently. Then she pulled a kitchen chair over to the cabinets and stood on it to get a look.

  “It was an interesting case,” Gregor said. “It’s the first time in years it hasn’t mattered if I knew anything about the people at all. Oh, I know now, but at the time, all I had was the certainty that somebody wanted that girl dead, and that that somebody had to be one of the people who were in a particular place in the room at the time Sheila Dunham was shot at for the second time. There were three girls who were more or less in the right place. I had the police check out all three of them, and there was only one with a little blond friend wandering around. Or not wandering around. Doesn’t any of this interest you at all?”

  “These cabinets are mahogany,” Bennis said. “And yes, it interests me. Of course it does. But I want to buy a house.”

  “You want to fix a house,” Gregor said. “That’s the real problem.”

  4

  Down at the Ararat, fifteen minutes later, Gregor told the story all over again to Tibor, and Bennis sat down with Lida Arkmanian to talk about commercial grade ovens. It really was a very nice day. There was no rain, and no extreme heat. There was good sunshine. People had come out to the Ararat who almost never made it for breakfast.

  “It is a senseless thing, Krekor,” Tibor said. “It is such a little thing. I do not understand the reasoning.”

  “I don’t think it really was reasoning,” Gregor said. ‘What Lola wants, Lola gets,’ as the saying goes. Janice Ledbedder is one of those people who is just . . . broken, I suppose. One of those people to whom murder does not feel impossible. I’m not making much sense here.”

  “No, no, Krekor, you’re making sense. It is only—a date to a prom, a boyfriend. It’s stuff for children.”

  “Children kill sometimes,” Gregor said. “Think of Mary Bell, ten years old and she strangled two toddlers to death, and to this day, nobody knows why. Boyfriends and proms probably look less trivial if they’re what matters in the place you live in.”

  “But she was getting out of that place,” Tibor said. “She had this audition, and then she was chosen to be on the show.”

  “And, as I told Bennis, if Emma Ware had just gone off and left her alone, Janice would have let the whole thing pass. Exactly because she had something new in her life and somewhere else to go. It was only when Emma started to look like a threat to Janice’s place in the competition, to look as if she’d let the whole silly plan out and get Janice booted off home, that Janice decided to go through with the original idea. In the end, it always was just a matter of Janice wanting what she wanted and being willing to punish anybody who got in her way. I don’t know. Maybe the psychologists will say something different. I just know that I’ve seen them like Janice before, people who kill for reasons you and I would find incredible. There are too many of them out there.”

  “Yes, Krekor,” Tibor said drily. “Now I will start to wonder about the man at the newsstand and the girl who bags my groceries. This is helpful.”

  Linda Melajian brought them cups of coffee, and Gregor leaned over the table and sighed. Bennis was still on the other side of the restaurant, deep in conference now with both Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian.

  “She’s talking about taking out walls,” he said. “I knew when she said she wanted a house she was going to end up taking out walls.”

  A shadow came over the table, and Gregor looked up to find the three Very Old Ladies standing next to him, looking black and ominous as always. He could never understand why they always dressed like that, or how they could be so intimidating when not a single one of them could be more than five feet tall. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell how tall they were. They were like something out of Greek myth.

  Viola Vardanian was in the middle, and she had her straight black walking stick that she used as a cane. Gregor thought they were all lucky that she didn’t have a death’s head on the top of it.

  “So,” she said. “Krekor. We have spoken to Sophie Mgrdchian now twice.”

  “It was very good of you to look into it all,” Marita Melvarian said. “It’s like I told Viola when all this started, it didn’t make any sense to do anything silly when we had our own policeman here in the neighborhood.”

  “He’s not a policeman,” Mrs. Vardanian said, “and I didn’t need him to tell me something was wrong in that house.”

  “Well, of course you didn’t need him to tell you that,” Kara Edelakian said. “None of us needed him for that. But he did all the other things, you know, and—”

  “And he got that woman arrested,” Mrs. Melvarian said. “And we didn’t get killed in the process, which I was sure was going to happen. I mean, that woman was a murderer, wasn’t she, she did it all the time, and I don’t see why not—”

  “I want to know how you found out who she was,” Mrs. Vardakian said. “She had done something to her fingerprints. She wasn’t carrying her birth certificate.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “She wasn’t.”

  “So,” Mrs. Vardakian said. “What did you do? How did you discover her?”

  “This isn’t,” Gregor started. Then he stopped. “It wasn’t as
hard as you’d think,” he said. “It wasn’t a matter of intelligence, just of boredom. She made her fingerprints unreadable, but she still had her face.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mrs. Vardakian said.

  “She hadn’t had plastic surgery or anything like that,” Gregor said, “not on her face, at any rate. And a woman like that gets arrested a lot. And Susan Lee Parker had been arrested a lot. And every time you get arrested, you get your picture taken. So, it was just a matter of circulating mug shots and waiting. Finally, one came in that had to be the right one. There was a little back and forth, some cops from Lincoln, Nebraska, came in to see if they could make a positive identification, and once we had that it was just a matter of following the paper trail. When you get arrested a lot, you leave a big paper trail.”

  “Ah,” Mrs. Vardanian said.

  “I think it’s brilliant,” Mrs. Melvarian said.

  “I think it is disappointing,” Mrs. Vardanian said. She turned her black eyes on Gregor, looked him up and down as if he were a prime piece of red meat, and shook her head. “This is not how a Great Detective behaves, Krekor. This is not like Sherlock Holmes. This is the kind of thing that could have been done by a secretary with a fax machine.”

  Then she turned her back to them and stalked off, headed for her usual table. The other two hurried after her, fluttering.

  “Well,” Gregor said.

  “Don’t worry, about it, Krekor,” Tibor said. “They’re not impressed with me, either.”