Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  Then one of the doors popped open, and there was a noise, and suddenly there was something right there on the sidewalk in front of her—a dead body, a huge dead body, a man who had to be a million feet long, with his throat cut and the blood pouring out of him.

  Andra’s mother had looked up, and blinked, and said, “Fuck it.”

  FIVE

  1

  There was a message from Dr. Halevy on Gregor’s voice mail when he got up the next morning, and it was just the kind of message that was likely to put him in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

  “I’m very sorry I couldn’t take your call when it came in,” she said. “I was hoping you could answer the same question. We don’t know who Sophie Mgrdchian’s regular doctor was. The police couldn’t find any information that would help us. We know what medications she is taking regularly because she had one of those plastic pill organizers on her when she came in. As I said before, it wasn’t much. Arthritis, high blood pressure—she’s in pretty good shape for a woman her age, or she was, or we think she was. If someone you know has information on her doctor, though, we’d appreciate it.”

  Gregor sat on the arm of the couch and looked at his cell phone. Nothing was likely to put him in a good mood today. He went back into the bedroom and shook Bennis awake.

  “Wake up,” he said. “Listen to me for a minute.”

  Bennis sat up in bed. She was one of those women who looked good woken out of a sound sleep. Gregor wondered what the evolutionary adaptability of that was. Then again, he didn’t.

  Bennis turned on the light and looked at the clock. “Are you all right? Are you not feeling well? Should I call nine-one-one?”

  “I want to know if you know how to get into Sophie Mgrdchian’s house.”

  “What?”

  “Well,” Gregor said reasonably, “there must be a way. I’ve lived on this street long enough to know that none of you has the sense God gave a squirrel when it comes to security. It’s not like you hire outside experts to make sure your places are impenetrable. There must be a way to get into that house.”

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning.”

  “I have an early meeting downtown.”

  “But why do you want to get into the house?” Bennis asked. “I mean, what’s the point? That woman isn’t back yet, is she?”

  “No, and I don’t know if she’s coming back. I don’t know what’s going to happen to her once they let her out of the hospital. I had a voice mail overnight from Dr. Halevy.”

  “Who is—”

  “The doctor who’s treating Sophie Mgrdchian at the moment,” Gregor said. “I called her to ask if she knew the name of Mrs. Mgrdchian’s doctor. She didn’t. Mrs. Mgrdchian had a pill organizer on her when she was brought in. That’s how the hospital knows what medication she’s taking. Other than that, they don’t have a clue. Apparently, the Very Old Ladies don’t, either.”

  “Oh,” Bennis said. “I remember that. When the paramedics were here. They asked around, but nobody knew who Mrs. Mgrdchian’s regular doctor was.”

  “It’s absurd,” Gregor said. “You’d think the whole pack of them would have some Armenian guy they’d been going to forever. That’s how they do things most of the time. Dr. Halevy said the police couldn’t find any information that would help, which means they must have looked. But there has to be something. There has to be an address book. There has to be a refrigerator magnet. Or a cell phone.”

  “You think Sophie Mgrdchian had a cell phone?”

  “Why not?” Gregor said. “I have a cell phone. Old George Tekemanian has a cell phone.”

  “You have one because I gave it to you, and old George has one because his nephew gave it to him. As far as we know, Sophie Mgrdchian didn’t have any family in the area.”

  “She has that niece.”

  “Who isn’t in the area,” Bennis said, “and if she was, she’d have come forward by now, wouldn’t she? And if there’s a reason why she wouldn’t—oh, never mind, Gregor, I’m getting confused. Aren’t we going to get into trouble going into the house by ourselves at four o’clock in the morning?”

  “I don’t see who we could get into trouble with. It’s not a crime scene. There’s no family in the vicinity. Sophie Mgrdchian is in the hospital and needs our help, so if she wakes up and decides she’s mad at us for looking through her house, I’d say we have a defense. Do you know how to get into that house?”

  Bennis sighed. “We could climb through a window,” she said. “I’m surprised somebody hasn’t done that already. Really, Gregor, if you could just wait until daylight.”

  But Gregor didn’t want to wait until daylight. He was the closest he’d ever been to being completely fed up.

  2

  It was surprisingly cold in the dark. Gregor found himself thinking that he had never understood weather. He should have put on a jacket other than his suit jacket. He should have dressed in something other than a suit. Bennis sometimes said that the only clothes he owned were suits, and that he sat on the sand in Jamaica in wingtips and a tie.

  Gregor thought about his honeymoon, which had been very good, really, with the house borrowed from friends and the privacy and the utter lack of feeling like he wanted to kill somebody. It was the kind of thing that would make a sane man want to retire, but sane men didn’t retire because work was bothering them. Sane men retired because work was boring them. He was not bored. He was just exasperated.

  “There’s a reason,” he said, as they chugged down the street, past the dark church, past Lida Arkmanian’s town house, past the closed-up Ararat. “There’s a reason I work as a consultant to police departments. It’s one thing when the police ask for your help. And even then, there are going to be a lot of people who aren’t happy with you. But when the police haven’t asked for my help, everybody is mad at you, it’s virtually impossible to get information in any coherent, cohesive, or complete way, and—”

  “But I thought the police did want your help,” Bennis said. “I mean, they’ve certainly been asking for it. And it’s not even as if we know there was a crime here. You’re the one who said it was just as likely that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for everything and it would all turn out to have been just . . . um . . . I think you said ‘unfortunate.’ ”

  “I know what I said,” Gregor said. “I’ve changed my mind. And it wasn’t those police I was thinking of anyway.”

  They had reached Sophie Mgrdchian’s house. It was close to the very end of the neighborhood. In the block just past it, Cavanaugh Street became a different kind of place—emptier, dirtier, less comforting. Gregor looked up at the tall facade, at the stone steps leading up to the front door. The place looked haunted.

  “I remember this building from when I was growing up,” he said. “Three families lived here, but that was the good news. That was far fewer than in most of the others. There was a boy here named Mikail. He was my brother’s age. He died in Korea the same week my brother did. I can remember the funerals.”

  “She lives here all by herself now, doesn’t she?” Bennis asked.

  Gregor nodded. “I don’t know when that happened. I don’t know when most of the transformation of the street happened. I wasn’t living here then. I suppose a spare key under the doormat isn’t likely.”

  “There isn’t a doormat,” Bennis said. “What police were you talking about, if you weren’t talking about these?”

  “The Bryn Mawr police,” Gregor said, climbing the steps to the front door very carefully. There was no light on over the door, of course. It was still too early in the year for there to be dawn before six. “Maybe the Merion police, too, for all I know. I haven’t talked to any of them yet. But there I was, right in the middle of this guy’s murder investigation, and he did not want me around. Do you ever feel like life is spinning completely out of control?”

  “Not lately,” Bennis said.

  “There are dozens of people involved in these two things,” Gregor said. “Th
ere are police officers and witnesses and suspects and it’s more like Cecil B. DeMille than The Thin Man. A cast of thousands. And none of it makes sense.”

  “It’s not going to do us much good just standing here in front of the door,” Bennis said. “Why don’t we go back home and wait until daylight, and then you can call that guy from John Jackman’s office and maybe he can get the police to let you in. At least that would make a certain amount of sense.”

  Gregor got some tools out of his pocket—his file, his miniature wrench. “Burglar’s tools,” the police always called them, but they were ordinary items that anybody might have around a house. He was fairly sure the door would not be bolted. There was nobody inside to bolt it. He tried fiddling with the lock for a while, but it didn’t budge.

  “Do you actually know how to do that?” Bennis asked him.

  “No,” Gregor said. He looked around again. “What about a back door?” he asked. “Do these houses have back doors?”

  “Of course they do, Gregor. There’s an alley back there where they keep the garbage cans between pick-up days. Do you think the back door is going to be any easier?”

  “I think Sophie Mgrdchian was an old woman,” Gregor said. “I think the back door might just be open.”

  Bennis made a noise. Gregor ignored her. He went back down the stairs and around to the side of the house. In some places, the sides of the houses were right up next to each other, with no space in between. In others, there was a small walkway. He picked the wrong side the first time. The second, he found a walkway so narrow he almost thought he was going to have to go through it sideways.

  “I hope you’ve got your phone,” Bennis said. “I can just see us getting trapped in here.”

  They made it through to the back, where the space was much larger, but also much darker. There were actually lights back here, but not on Sophie’s house. The house across the alley had one trained on its own back door, and the houses to either side seemed to have light coming from them one way or the other. Gregor found the back door and went up to it. It was locked.

  “Well, that didn’t work out,” Bennis said.

  The locked door was behind another door, a rickety one with screens. Gregor propped that back with a rock he found in the alley and went to work with the file. It was too bad that trick with the credit cards didn’t often work.

  “Both of these things,” he said, working away, “are wrong. They’re just wrong. I saw two bodies lying on the floor this week, and both of them were wrong. Sophie Mgrdchian wasn’t technically a body, since she wasn’t dead, but it was still wrong. And the body of the girl at Engine House—well . . . all right. That one I know for certain was staged.”

  “How do you know it was staged?” Bennis asked.

  “Because the mirror on the wall was tampered with—listen to me. How do you tamper with a mirror? Never mind. That mirror usually sits flat against the wall. Somebody changed it so that it was leaning just slightly forward, just enough so that the body could be seen in it from the doorway. And the only reason to do that was to make sure that whoever saw the body had it drilled into their heads that the body was where it was as it was.”

  “Okay,” Bennis said. “But Mrs. Mgrdchian? Why do you think that was staged?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. He got the file between the door and the door frame. He thought he might have splintered some wood.

  “Do you think this woman, this sister-in-law, or whoever she is, do you think she did something to Sophie Mgrdchian when she was out cold?”

  “I think,” Gregor said, “that there should have been an address book in this house. Sophie Mgrdchian is an old woman. Old people have doctors, pharmacists, maybe physical therapists. They’ve got all kinds of people keeping them going. And they don’t have the kind of memory to hold it all in their heads. They’d have to write it down.”

  “So we’re going to find the address book?” Bennis said.

  “No,” Gregor said, as the door popped open under his hand. “We’re going to search through the house and discover that no address book is here. Because it isn’t here. If it had been, the police would have found it.”

  “And this required coming out at four in the morning?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Gregor said.

  That was literally the truth.

  3

  Gregor arrived at Dexmali thinking he should have known better. Even on City Ave, a place with that kind of name was likely to be a shining example of the New Philadelphia. Gregor had very little use for the New Philadelphia. He understood that time did not stand still. He understood that having a metropolitan area full of “creative class” types—who in the name of God ever took “creative class” seriously, besides Richard Florida—anyway?—was better than being Detroit, a city that was dying out from under you. On the other hand, creative class types seemed to come along with pretentious art and precious enterprise. Nothing could be named Joe’s Diner anymore, unless it was a forties-retro shining chrome dining car that served things like Macaroni and Cheese Florentine.

  Gregor didn’t understand what people ate anymore. He really didn’t. He liked large slabs of meat, preferably called Porterhouse, and big flat fried potatoes. He didn’t want McDonald’s and he really didn’t want Macaroni and Cheese Florentine. And if a cheese was made from a goat so rare it only lived on a single Himalayan mountain, he thought they should all just leave it all alone. If the goat was a Buddhist—

  He was very tired. He was very, very tired. He should not have gotten up in the middle of the night, no matter how urgent it had seemed. He should be sitting in the Ararat right this minute, bribing Linda Melajian to bring him bacon and sausage when Bennis’s back was turned.

  Gregor could see David Mortimer sitting at a table near the back, against the wall. The tables were plain and serviceable, but there was a menu in the window. That was not serviceable. It included something called a “rose hip omelet.”

  Gregor went in and looked around. There was no seating hostess, which was not surprising. There were not that many patrons. This was not a good area for the New Philadelphia. There were lots of college kids, but not the kind of college kids who ordered rose hip omelets.

  Or quiche with feta cheese and violet petals, either. He was not making this up. That was the special, and there was a picture of it, along with a description of it, on a chalkboard on an easel at the very back of the room.

  Gregor went to David Mortiner’s table and sat down. Mortimer seemed to be eating a whole wheat burrito with vegetables that looked like they had been invented for a Roger Corman movie.

  “I thought it was a good idea,” Mortimer said. “You know. Get away from the usual thing. Also, I’m watching my blood pressure, and my cholesterol. You know how it is.”

  “Um,” Gregor said.

  A young woman came over without a notepad. That was something else that was endemic in the New Philadelphia. The restaurants all thought there was something wrong with waitresses carrying notepads. The young woman did have a menu, but Gregor wouldn’t take it.

  “Coffee, please,” he said. “I don’t suppose you have hash brown potatoes and breakfast sausage?”

  “Oh, yes,” the young woman said. “We have hash browns with rosemary, cooked in olive oil. And we have three kinds of breakfast sausage: turkey sausage with sage, vegetarian sausage with—”

  “How about pork sausage, sort of spiced up?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, yes,” the young woman said. “Of course. We use thirteen different spices—”

  “That’s all right,” Gregor said. “Why don’t you get me the hash browns, and the pork sausage, and whatever kind of coffee you have that comes black and heavily caffeinated.”

  “It’s fair trade coffee,” the waitress said.

  “Fine,” Gregor said.

  David Mortimer watched the young woman retreat. “Fair trade is a tremendous deal to a lot of people,” he said. “They don’t like to think they’re contributing t
o the oppression of peasants in Latin America. It’s actually very good coffee.”

  “If you want to make sure you’re not contributing to the oppression of peasants in Latin America,” Gregor said, “you’re going to have to do a lot more than buy coffee from self-consciously virtuous co-ops. In fact, buying from the co-ops might not be a good idea to begin with. I’ve had absolutely no sleep. I’ve just broken into a house in the dead of night. I’m completely out of patience. I hope this is important.”

  Mortimer looked nonplussed. “Why did you break into a house in the middle of the night? And whose house did you break into? Are we going to have to do something about that to keep you out of trouble?”

  “It’s nice to know that John Jackman thinks he has to keep me out of trouble,” Gregor said. “And I broke into Sophie Mgrdchian’s house looking for her address book. As to why I did it in the middle of the night, I was royally annoyed and I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t find an address book, by the way. And that tells me something.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “It tells me that you should tell the police and the mental hospital to find some excuse for keeping that woman locked up. And no, I’m not sure why yet. But I’m sure.”

  Mortimer took a deep breath. “I’m not sure we can do things like that,” he said.

  “No,” Gregor agreed. “You can’t. What did you want to talk to me for, and why did you want to talk to me out here, instead of just having me come into your office? It’s not like the mayor’s people aren’t used to seeing me.”

  “Yes,” Mortimer said. “Well. Here’s the thing. This is sort of under the table.”

  “You’re doing something John doesn’t want you to do?” Gregor asked. “You probably shouldn’t do that. He’s not known for being lenient with employees who—”

  “No, no,” Mortimer said. “The mayor knows all about it. That’s why we’re here. He suggested it.”

  “John Jackman suggested a restaurant called Dexmali?”