Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “Me, too,” Tibor said. “I prefer America’s Next Top Model. I don’t like the woman on America’s Next Superstar so much. She’s, she’s—”

  “A dyed in-the-wool bitch,” Bennis said. “Yes, I know. I actually met her once, before she was reduced to doing reality shows. She used to interview for the Today show. Then she asked Katie Couric—on the air, I’m not making this up—she asked Katie Couric if the stress of being married to her was the reason her husband died of cancer. And that was that.”

  “I think I heard about that,” Tibor said.

  “Everybody heard about it,” Bennis said.

  “So there has been another murder in your house in Bryn Mawr?” Tibor said.

  “It’s not my house,” Bennis said. “It’s the family house, and Bobby got it in my father’s will. No, there hasn’t been a murder, or anything else in the house. It was before that, when they were doing the final auditions. They held them in this place in Merion, and somebody shot at Sheila Dunham.”

  “Just shot at her?” Tibor asked.

  “Well, in front of a crowd of people,” Bennis said. “Just stood up and shot at her. One of the girls who hadn’t been eliminated, I think. Oh, I don’t know. I really don’t. They arrested the girl, and she’s sitting in jail somewhere. She’s just been sitting there. She doesn’t ever talk, apparently. And she didn’t have any ID on her, so they don’t know who she is, and she isn’t saying. And that’s where it stands, I think. So the show asked Bobby to ask me to ask Gregor—”

  “To do God only knows what,” Gregor said, “since there’s no murder here, and I’m not the kind of detective who tracks down missing identities. The police will figure out who this young woman is, eventually. They’re good at that kind of thing. And they have resources I don’t. There’s absolutely no point in my going around doing nothing particularly sensible—”

  It was the tip of old Mrs. Vardanian’s walking stick that Gregor noticed first. All the Very Old Ladies used walking sticks, although most of them didn’t seem to need them to walk.

  Gregor sat back and away from his food, feeling a little breathless.

  “Mrs. Vardanian,” he said. “Good morning. Ladies.”

  The Very Old Ladies nodded in unison. They were like a Greek chorus, those women, a Greek chorus made up of Furies, or Harpies, or something else equally intimidating.

  Mrs. Vardanian picked up her walking stick and pounded it on the floor.

  “There’s something going on down at Sophie Mgrdchian’s place,” she said. “And I think you ought to go down there and look into it.”

  TWO

  1

  It had been late fall when Gregor Demarkian first moved back to Cavanaugh Street. He had a tendency, when he was indoors, to imagine it always that way: dark and cold, and with that wet sting in the air that promises snow.

  It was now late spring, though, and the air was thick and warm, and the landscape was bright. The fronts of the town houses that lined both sides of the street looked washed. The windows of the stores looked as if they’d been polished. Back down the street a bit, back toward his and Bennis’s own apartment, the new Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church glittered in the way that could only happen if women had come out to wash the sidewalk in front of it.

  “Probably hired someone,” Gregor said to himself.

  “What?” Bennis said.

  The Very Old Ladies had led them out onto the sidewalk, and were now marching them down the block in the other direction from the church. The air smelled like something in the country. Gregor wasn’t sure he liked it.

  “They probably hired someone,” he told Bennis. “The sidewalk in front of the church has been washed down, and I know the city didn’t do it. When I was growing up, the women did it, the married women, but I can’t imagine them doing it now. Can you see Lida Arkmanian out here with a tin pail on her hands and knees, scrubbing the sidewalk?”

  “Maybe if the pail were Gucci,” Bennis said.

  The Very Old Ladies were marching relentlessly forward. They moved faster than you’d think they would, but not really fast. Gregor was just reluctant to catch up with them. By now, there was a little parade of people moving along: the Very Old Ladies themselves, Gregor and Bennis and Tibor, one of the Melajian boys (who’d probably been ordered to report back), Sheila Kashinian and Hannah Krekorian and Lida.

  They passed Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store and Lucy Ohanian came out, the youngest of the girls, the only one left on the street now that the rest of her siblings had gone off to college and jobs. Gregor always found it incredible how many children people in this neighborhood still wanted to have.

  They got to the Donahue town house and Donna came out, looking a little disheveled. Her husband Russ was just behind her, holding the baby, and keeping Tommy from running out into the street.

  “What’s going on?” Donna asked Bennis as she caught up to them. “You look like some kind of procession. I thought there was going to be a casket.”

  “We don’t know where we’re going,” Bennis said. “Mrs. Vardanian and company came and grabbed us, and here we are.”

  “There’s going to have to be a casket for somebody if she keeps up this pace,” Gregor said.

  They had crossed another intersection. Now they were in that part of the neighborhood that was exclusively residential. The first block of it had good-looking town houses on both sides, well kept up and repaired. The Kashinians had their place in this block, and there were three houses divided up—like the house Gregor lived in in the other direction—into floor-through apartments. Hannah Krekorian had one of those.

  The block after that one was not so pretty. It was not a slum. No part of Cavanaugh Street was a slum anymore. Gregor supposed it had been one when he was growing up here, and instead of floor-throughs the apartments had been more like rabbit warrens. Still, it had always been clean, what with women washing sidewalks, and other women washing clothes so often that lines of the things had seemed normal to him, a part of the architecture.

  He snapped himself back to the present. The present was not bad. He liked his life these days. The Very Old Ladies had stopped, and the whole crowd of people who had followed them was now standing in front of a tall brick town house that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in forty years. There was mail in the mailbox out front. It must have been left from the afternoon before.

  Mrs. Vardanian mounted two of the steps up to the door and looked the house over. “There,” she said, sounding satisfied about something. “That’s what we want you to do something about.”

  Gregor looked the house over one more time. “What’s what you want me to do something about? I can’t fix up the house, if that’s—”

  “No, no,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “It’s not the house. It’s Sophie Mgrdchian.”

  “She’s the woman who owns the house,” one of the other Very Old Ladies said.

  Sometimes Gregor could not keep the Very Old Ladies apart in his head, except for Mrs. Vardanian who was easy to remember because she had a lot in common with the bogeyman of his childhood.

  Gregor tried to think of what he was supposed to say here. “Is she a friend of yours?” he asked.

  “What difference does it make if she’s a friend of ours,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Of course she is, or she used to be. She doesn’t go out very much, not even to go to church these days. Her husband Viktor died—”

  “In 1984,” yet another of the Very Old Ladies put in. “I remember the funeral. It wasn’t a very big funeral. There’s a niece, I think, in New York somewhere.”

  “It’s California,” the first of the Very Old Ladies said.

  Gregor was beginning to feel a little dizzy trying to remember who was saying what.

  “Here is what we want you to do,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “We want you to find out what has happened to her.”

  “Has something happened to her?” Gregor asked.

  “Yesterday,” Mrs. Vardanian said, “I saw a woman come
out of this house and leave the neighborhood. She came back in a taxi half an hour later with grocery bags. It was not Sophie Mgrdchian.”

  “Maybe it was the niece,” Gregor said, “or, I don’t know, the sister? Brother? Whoever had the niece?”

  “It’s a niece,” one of the Very Old Ladies said. “Sophie’s two sisters are dead. It was a terrible thing, really, there were practically no children. One of Viktor’s brothers had a daughter. But the niece can’t be more than, I don’t know—”

  “Forty,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “She’s probably younger. This woman looked as old as Sophie. And she was—”

  “She was messy,” the third Very Old Ladies said.

  “She was dressed in layers,” Mrs. Vardanian said positively. “The way homeless people dress. And she wasn’t Armenian, not even close. And she was too tall.”

  “Tall,” Gregor repeated.

  “Sophie was barely five feet,” one of the Very Old Ladies said. “This woman had to be about five seven or eight.”

  “So,” Mrs. Vardanian said, “what we want you to do is find out what happened to Sophie Mgrdchian. I know we haven’t seen much of her in the last fifteen years or so, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to stand by and let some strange woman kill her off and steal her house.”

  “You think somebody has killed Mrs. Mgrdchian and stolen her house because you saw somebody you don’t know bringing groceries there yesterday?” Gregor said. “Maybe it’s a friend. Maybe she’s got a visitor. Maybe—”

  “She doesn’t have a visitor,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “I know every single person Sophie could have as a visitor, and it wasn’t any of them.”

  “We weren’t just watching yesterday,” one of the other Very Old Ladies said. She sounded a little sheepish. “We’ve been, well, we’ve been—”

  “We’ve been watching for a week and a half,” Mrs. Vardanian said flatly. “We’ve been staking the place out, the way they do on the television. And this woman has come in and out, and there’s been no sign of Sophie. Not a sign.”

  “Why didn’t you just knock on the door and ask what was happening?” Gregor said.

  “We did,” one of the other Very Old Ladies said. “Nobody answered.”

  “And she was in there at the time, that woman,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “I could hear her moving around.”

  Gregor didn’t say that he’d thought for years that Mrs. Vardanian was deaf as a post, because it was only half true. He didn’t understand why these women thought that whoever was in that house would be more likely to answer his knock than theirs.

  He sighed a little and went up the steps past Mrs. Vardanian. He stopped at the door. It needed to be painted. He rang the bell. He could hear the bell sound in the hollow spaces beyond the door. Nothing happened.

  “You can’t just leave it at that,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “You’re a policeman. You can go into the house.”

  “I’m not a policeman,” Gregor said, “and even a policeman can’t go barging into people’s houses for no reason. He has to have probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, or he has to have a warrant, and I’ve got neither.”

  “You do have cause to believe a crime has been committed,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “We told you.”

  Gregor pressed the bell again. He listened to the distant bell sound again. Nothing happened.

  “Maybe Mrs. Mgrdchian is sick and has a nurse’s aide staying with her to do for her,” Gregor said.

  “If Sophie Mgrdchian was sick and wanted to get somebody in, we’d have heard about it,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “She’d have called for the priest. You don’t take chances with that kind of thing.”

  Gregor looked back at the door. Maybe Mrs. Mgrdchian was deaf, and the woman who was with her—if there was a woman with her; if this wasn’t just Mrs. Mgrdchian herself and the Very Old Ladies having vapors—maybe the woman who was with her was deaf, too.

  Gregor raised his fist and pounded against the door, hard and flat, making a big booming noise that he thought almost anybody could have heard. When nothing happened yet again, he raised his fist one more time, gave one more hard pound . . . and the door popped open.

  “The door’s open,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Very good. We can go in there now and look around and nobody can blame us. The door’s open on a city street and that means—”

  “I don’t really think we ought to go in there,” Gregor said.

  “Oh, don’t be such a coward,” Mrs. Vardanian said, pushing her way up the stairs and next to the place where Gregor was standing. “I don’t know what’s wrong with young people today. They’ve got no initiative. They’ve got no—”

  But by then Mrs. Vardanian was looking at what Gregor himself was looking at: the small, thin body of a woman lying across the foyer carpet, flat on its face. Just beyond her there was another woman, taller and thicker and wild-eyed, standing very still.

  “My God,” Mrs. Vardanian said.

  Gregor got out his phone and punched in 911.

  2

  The paramedics and the police arrived first, but only by a hair. The man from the Mayor’s Office arrived right behind them, and he didn’t care half so much about blocking the flow of traffic on the street. Of course, by that point, there was no flow of traffic on the street. The taxis had seen the logjam and had taken alternative routes, radioing in to any other drivers who might need the information. The ordinary motorists were just stopped in their tracks. Some of them had gotten out of their cars. If anybody had to go anywhere in a fast car with lights and sirens flashing, there was going to be a problem.

  The man from the Mayor’s Office was somebody Gregor recognized, but not well enough. He was very young, and very white, and had that look about him that so many of John Jackman’s aides had. John liked to hire graduates of all the Ivy League schools that had once turned him down.

  The young man threaded his way through the crowd and up to where Gregor and Bennis were standing, just off the now open front door. The denizens of Cavanaugh Street were out in force. Even the ones you’d expect to stay in their stores and restaurants just to keep them running were there. Gregor spotted three of the Ohanians and two of the Melajians. The Very Old Ladies were as close to the door as the uniformed personnel would let them, and closer. As soon as all the uniformed backs were turned, they crept in again.

  “Murder,” Mrs. Vardanian was saying. Viola Vardanian said nothing under her breath. It had been decades since she could hear a voice pitched that low—unless it was a voice delivering really good dirt on somebody she knew, and then she could hear it coming all the way from Trenton.

  The young man made it the rest of the way up the steps and held out his hand. “Mr. Demarkian? I’m David Mortimer. Mayor Jackman sent me.”

  Bennis snorted a little in the background. Gregor ignored her. “How do you do, Mr. Mortimer. Except I think I’ve at least met you once, I just couldn’t place you. I hope John is well.”

  “The mayor’s fine, as far as I know,” David Mortimer said. “He thought you might need some help with whatever’s going on in there.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on in there,” Gregor said.

  “It was murder,” Mrs. Vardanian said. She made her way across the front stairs as if nothing and nobody was in her way. She took David Mortimer by the lapels of his very expensive suit jacket. “It was murder,” she said again. “We’ve been saying it for days now, and nobody would listen to us. I knew that wasn’t Sophie Mgrdchian going in and out. I’ve known Sophie Mgrdchian all my life. Damned fool woman in a lot of ways, but she wasn’t that tall American thing coming in and out—”

  “You’re American,” Gregor said blandly.

  “I was born in Yerevan,” Mrs. Vardanian said, “and so was Sophie. And I told you this morning that something was wrong. I told you.”

  “She did tell me,” Gregor admitted. He pointed across to the other two of the Very Old Ladies. “The three of them did. Apparently, they’ve been watching this other
woman, the one we found in there with the body, go in and out, and—”

  “For God’s sake,” somebody said from inside the house, very loudly.

  Gregor and the crowd all turned to look in unison. All of a sudden, there was a fury of activity. People were running in and out of the house. Somebody climbed into the ambulance and started up first the motor, and then the lights and sirens. Two uniformed police officers raced out of the house into the crowd and started clearing the street.

  “Let’s get a pathway, let’s get a pathway,” one of them said. His voice sounded loud enough to be coming out of a bullhorn, although it wasn’t.

  “I wonder what’s happening,” Bennis said.

  “My guess,” Gregor said, “is that we don’t have a murder quite yet.”

  There was another flurry of activity, and four paramedics came down the stairs carrying a gurney with a woman strapped to it. She had an oxygen mask over her face.

  “She’s alive?” Mrs. Vardanian asked, sounding stunned. “She was dead. Dead on the floor. We all saw her.”

  They had done more than see her. Gregor had actually tried to take a pulse while they were waiting for the paramedics to arrive. He hadn’t gotten one, or at least he hadn’t detected one. He felt like an idiot.

  “I’m not trained for this,” he told David Mortimer. “I tried to see if she were alive, but I couldn’t get anything in the way of a pulse, so I just assumed—”

  They all watched as the screaming ambulance edged through the crowd. Police were now running up and down the block and onto the next one, pushing people back onto the sidewalk. Three other police cars had arrived and blocked off the side streets so that the ambulance would have a clear path. The crowd was doing what crowds do. It got back on the sidewalk. It fell off again.

  The ambulance let out a long series of screaming wails at a volume Gregor thought must be something new, and then it was free, careening off into the street with all its lights going and an equally lit and screaming police car following it.