by Jane Haddam
Her hair was a mess. Her makeup was smeared. She washed the makeup off and ran a brush through her hair. She didn’t wear makeup most of the time. At college, nobody had. That was one of the great things about going to a women’s college. She leaned close to the mirror and checked out her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry over Sheila Dunham.
She got up from the little vanity stool and went out into the bedroom. Her roommate Suzanne was sitting on one of the beds, and Ivy Demari and Mary-Louise Verdt were sitting on the other. They all looked up as Grace walked in.
“Mary-Louise is hiding out from Alida,” Ivy said. “And since I couldn’t blame her, I came in, too.”
“Are you hiding from anybody?” Grace asked. She didn’t actually like Ivy. Ivy made her nervous. Grace knew she was fifty IQ points to the good on most of these girls, but not on Ivy. And that made her feel worse than useless.
Ivy and Mary-Louise were on Suzanne’s bed. Grace couldn’t even ask them to get off. She went to her own bed and shooed Suzanne a little to the side. Then she sat down herself.
“I’m not running away from anybody,” Ivy said. “Janice is in something of a state, but she’s talking to Coraline. Come to think of it, Coraline is in something of a state, too.”
“Well, I’d be in a state if I was Coraline,” Suzanne said. “I’d be in one if I was Mary-Louise, too. You hear all these things about the way Sheila Dunham behaves, but you don’t really believe them until you see them yourself. Or she does them to you. You’ve got to wonder how much more of that stuff there’s going to be before all this is over.”
“There’s going to be a lot of it,” Grace said. “Don’t you people understand? I keep saying it, but nobody listens. It’s not real. She stages those things. It makes good television. They get hundreds and hundreds of clips, and then they use the ones that look the most dramatic.”
“I wonder if they’ll use any of the clips of the murder,” Ivy said.
“Do you honestly think they have clips of the murder?” Grace said. “If they had those, they’d have given them to the police.”
“They did,” Ivy said. “At least, Olivia Dahl let the police take something out of the security camera in the study. I saw them. You know, this whole thing could be over in a day. Maybe the camera got a picture of it.”
“The camera doesn’t point that way, does it?” Grace asked. “I thought it was aimed at the door. It wouldn’t see anything that happened in front of the fireplace, would it?”
“It might catch the reflection in the mirror,” Ivy said. “And the mirror’s funny anyway, didn’t you notice?”
“Funny how?” Grace said.
Ivy shrugged. “It’s tilted, I think. I didn’t get much of a chance to really look at it. But it had to be tilted, because I could see the body in it when I was standing at the door, and the only way I could do that is if it was tilted a little ways down. That Gregor Demarkian noticed it, too. I saw him.”
“I think Janice noticed it,” Mary-Louise said. “I think she said something—”
Grace brushed it all aside. “Even if the mirror was tilted, I don’t see what difference it would make. Maybe it just is that way. Things don’t always hang straight. If you leave anything hanging on a wall for long, it’s more likely than not to become messed up one way or the other.”
“I think it’s terrible to think of it,” Mary-Louise said. “That girl. I wonder what she was doing out of jail. I thought they’d arrested her.”
“They did arrest her,” Grace said. “I saw it in the newspaper. They do bring the newspapers in here every day for a reason. You could look at them.”
“Well, if they arrested her, I don’t understand why she was out,” Mary-Louise said. “And I don’t understand why she was here. I mean, how did she even know where the house was? This house, I mean. It’s not like it was a hotel, you know. It’s a private house. Did the show put the address on the Internet or something?”
“I don’t think they’d do that,” Ivy said.
“Exactly,” Mary-Louise said. “So what was she doing here? And how did she get here? And why is she dead, come to think of it. I mean, she shot at Sheila Dunham, that I understand, but today somebody must have shot at her, and none of us even know who she is.”
“It’s like a murder mystery,” Suzanne said. “I hate murder mysteries. Murder, She Wrote and all that kind of thing. They’re really boring.”
Grace got off the bed. “Well, if there really was camera footage, then the police will look at that and know who was in the room. And that will be that. I don’t really care who she was.”
“I heard Olivia Dahl tell the police and Gregor Demarkian that she wasn’t a contestant. A former contestant, I think I mean,” Ivy said. “Anyway, nobody remembers her turning in an audition tape or anything like that.”
“You mean she just came in out of the blue and decided she wanted to kill Sheila Dunham?” Mary-Louise said. “Maybe just from watching her on television? That’s creepy.”
“Things like that happen all the time,” Grace said. “There are stalkers. Anytime anybody is even a little famous, there are always crazy people who follow them around. It can’t be helped.”
“Makes you wonder why you want to be famous,” Mary-Louise said.
“I don’t want to be famous,” Grace said. She went to the closet. She had clothes there for dinner, but she didn’t really feel in the mood for dressing up. She didn’t see why she should have to, either. If you were a superstar, you could do what you wanted. She found a peasant-smocky gold dress with little cornflowers across one shoulder, and chose that.
“Isn’t it a little odd to try out for this thing if you don’t want to be famous?” Ivy said. “I mean, unless you go home the first week, just being in the house will get you a little famous. People do watch this show.”
“I really have to get dressed,” Grace said. “If the rest of you don’t mind.”
Ivy stood up and stretched her legs. “I’m as dressed as I’m going to get. It’s been a long day.”
Mary-Louise got up, too. “I just don’t want to go back to my room and listen to Alida talk about how awful we all are. All of us. And she really hates Andra, and Andra won the challenge. She’s not going to be able to shut up.”
“Come along to my room and I’ll save you from Alida,” Ivy said. “Janice won’t mind. She likes company.”
Grace stood with the dress in her hands and watched them go. Then she went over to the door and made sure it was shut.
Suzanne was still sitting on the bed, but this was Suzanne’s room as well as hers. She couldn’t make a fuss about that.
Grace laid out the dress and looked at it. This really would be enough for dinner tonight, and if Sheila Dunham didn’t like it, she could do what she wanted. Grace wouldn’t even mind being eliminated first, the way this was going.
What she did mind was the idea of that security camera in the study. She kept forgetting that there were cameras everywhere.
It really was not a good omen, though, that there had been a camera there, and that whatever was on it was now in the hands of the police.
THREE
1
Gregor Demarkian did not like to be involved in things he was not officially involved in—that was a convoluted way of putting it, but he knew what he meant. It was one thing to be paid by police departments to consult on difficult cases. He liked that, and even in his days at the Bureau, he had never been one of those men who liked to bemoan the depravity of all things human that he was forced to confront in his work. He knew very well that not all human beings were depraved, or anything close to it. Most of them were good enough for the lives they lived. They weren’t great saints, like Augustine or Aquinas or Frances. They weren’t great sinners, like Hitler or Stalin or even Jeffrey Dahmer. They were just people. In living every day, they made the small but necessary decisions that kept the whole enterprise going: get up and go to work, do your job, pay your bills, help your friends, contribute a li
ttle to charity, pick up your garbage when it drops on the ground.
David Mortimer had given Gregor a ride back into Philadelphia proper. He would have dropped Gregor at his own front door, but that wasn’t what Gregor wanted. It was getting late, although not quite dark, not yet. Spring was well under way. Gregor had Mortimer drop him off on City Ave and started walking. He got onto the campus of St. Joseph’s and walked some more. He liked city college campuses. He liked the fact that they did not look pristine and sealed off from real life.
He didn’t want to go home, right this minute, that was all. And apparently he didn’t want to go home because he was thinking of human beings. In his experience, plenty of human beings did more than the minimum to keep things going. They organized food drives for the holidays. They volunteered in food banks and homeless shelters, and at literacy schools that taught new immigrants how to speak English and pass the citizenship test.
Gregor always found it odd to realize how much work it took just to do the minimum, though. He found it odder to realize how little slacking off could land you and everybody else in a very bad place. He thought he was being obscure again, but he probably wasn’t. If he had walked the other way on City Ave, he would have landed in the middle of a place where too many people did too little of the minimum.
If I keep this up, I’m going to go crazy, he told himself. He sat down on a bench and looked around. The college was in session. There were students everywhere, and too much traffic on the roads. The real problem was going home to face Bennis. The two of them did not talk often about the way they had met, or what it had led to. Every once in a while, Gregor would think that the whole past thing was about to blow up in his face. Then the crisis would come and go, and it would be as if it had never happened, at least as far as he could tell. It had been several years now since that long weekend when the murderer of Bennis’s father had gone to the gas chamber. Bennis had barely talked to him about it at the time, and she hadn’t said a word to him about it since.
The bench was cold. It was colder than the air around it. That was the trouble with spring. The days were warm enough. The evenings got cold, and now it was marching toward evening. It was raining, too, although not as badly as it had been a few hours ago. Gregor’s jacket was soaked through, and he hadn’t noticed it. So was his hair. This was very bad. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe that a marriage had to be an absolute meeting of the minds, with no secrets withheld between both parties. He had his secrets, and he was sure Bennis had hers. That was what happened when two people married in late adulthood.
But there was something wrong with a situation that required him to get pneumonia on a college campus bench rather than go home and talk to his wife.
It would have been different if he’d had an affair. Or if she had.
What was he thinking about?
He got out his phone, found his speed dial list, and called the cab company. He promised to be out on City Ave in less than a minute and a half. It really was interesting, the numbers Bennis had thought to put on his speed dial list.
He got himself off the bench and went to the road. He looked at his watch. It was nearly six. This would be rush hour traffic on the road. It felt like it. The rain started to come down harder. Had he had an umbrella when he started this day? He couldn’t remember.
The cab came, and pulled up to the curb, and stopped. Gregor got in and gave the driver his address. Cavanaugh Street was not an obscure part of the city. It was even featured in the newspapers every once in a while, with the Ararat getting restaurant reviews and the Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store being listed as a good place to get things like olive oil and grape leaves. These days, the street probably showed up on television as well, as the place where a woman had been found in a coma.
Gregor suddenly realized that he had no idea if there had been any publicity at all about what had happened in Sophie Mgrdchian’s house. It made him feel even odder than he already did. It wasn’t like him not to know that kind of thing.
The cab pulled up in front of the five-story brownstone where Gregor and Bennis had the second and third floors. Gregor paid the man and got out and looked around. The street was mostly deserted. The lights had come on in the church and in a couple of the storefronts, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t totally dark. In another hour, the Ararat would start filling up.
Gregor climbed the stairs to the front door and let himself in. Old George Tekemanian had the door to the ground-floor apartment open and was sitting in it, playing with a gadget that seemed to be shooting little arrows of light every once in a while, to no purpose Gregor could see. Old George was in a wheelchair these days, but he was as sharp as always, and his nephew Martin had paid to put in a ramp so that he could go in and out. Martin had paid for the motorized wheelchair, too. Martin’s wife Angela had stopped making noises about a nursing home.
Gregor went to where George was and looked at the gadget.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a light saber,” old George said. “Martin’s son Michael gave it to me for my birthday. It’s a miniature light saber, that’s what. I’ve got to remember to say miniature. I can fight the Empire with it.”
“Empire?”
“Tcha, Krekor. In Star Wars. How can you not know about Star Wars? We had a Star Wars party over at Father Tibor’s back around Christmas. He’s got all the DVDs.”
“So you’re sitting in the doorway fighting the Empire?”
“No, Krekor. I’m sitting in the doorway waiting for Lida and Hannah to come get me. We’ve having dinner together at the Ararat tonight, and I’m supposed to speak Armenian to the Very Old Ladies. I keep telling them that the Very Old Ladies aren’t as old as I am, but they never listen. Lida and Hannah, I mean. They never did listen. Not even as children.”
“No, they didn’t,” Gregor said.
“You ought to take an interest in things,” old George said. “You ought to get a hobby. It’s this running around thinking about criminals that makes you look the way you do.”
Gregor let that one go, and made his way upstairs. Now that the apartments were knocked together, he could have gone in on the second floor, but he didn’t want to. He went up to the third floor and let himself in there, into the foyer of what he thought of as his own apartment. This did not make any sense, and he knew it. They were married. There was a stairway between the two floors. It was their apartment.
On the other hand, the third floor had the areas they used—the kitchen they cooked in, the living room they watched television in. The second floor held mainly the spaces Bennis herself needed for privacy, like a room to write in.
Gregor took his jacket off as soon as he got through the door and hung it on the coatrack. It was an ordinary suit jacket, not some kind of outerwear, and it dripped. He looked at the little puddle of water forming underneath it and then left it there. Bennis could have a fit about what he was doing to the hardwood later.
He went into the living room and looked around. It had been tidied up. It had been tidied up entirely too well. Bennis didn’t tidy. There was the sound of water running in the kitchen. He went through the room and through the swinging door into there. Bennis was standing at the sink, filling a coffeepot.
“So,” she said, not turning around when he came in. “I’ve been watching television.”
Gregor sat down at the kitchen table. One of the great advantages of his marriage was the fact that, with Bennis in the apartment, he no longer had to make coffee for himself. Bennis wouldn’t let him make coffee for anybody.
“It was your idea I talk to the people from the reality show,” he pointed out. “You knew they were renting Engine House.”
“Yes, of course I knew it,” Bennis said, getting the top back on the coffeemaker and plugging it in. She turned around to face him and leaned back against the sink. “I feel like a complete idiot, if you want to know the truth. It’s been more than a decade since all that happened. If you’d asked me yester
day, I’d have told you I was over it. Or over the worst of it, if you know what I mean.”
“People don’t usually get over it,” Gregor said. “I think it changes people, the first time they see a dead body. Any dead body. I think it’s worse when the body is somebody they know, and worse yet when it’s violently dead. You can’t honestly expect to be ‘over’ the sight of your own father’s dead body. Especially considering the shape it was in.”
“I didn’t like my father. And he had no use for me.”
“He was still your father,” Gregor said. “And it was still a shock.”
“If you feel like this about every dead body you’ve seen,” Bennis said, “then I don’t know why you’re not in an insane asylum.”
“You get more used to it over time,” Gregor said. “And the dead bodies I see are almost never of anybody close to me. We don’t talk about all that, you know. I don’t know if we should, but we don’t. If you ever do want to talk about it—”
“No,” Bennis said. “Really. I don’t even talk to my brothers about it. Christopher called, by the way, when he heard the news. And yes, it’s already been on all the networks and the cable news stations. Or I think it has. It’s Sheila Dunham, I suppose. She’s a draw for the press.”
“She’s a piece of work,” Gregor said. “Did your brother Bobby call? Or Teddy?”
“Nobody knows where Teddy is at the moment,” Bennis said, “which is par for the course. And of course Bobby didn’t call. This is Bobby we’re talking about.”
“It’s just that there’s something I need, and I don’t want to ask you for it.”
