by Jane Haddam
The girls all seemed to nod in unison. Gregor looked across the big clustered knot of them. They all looked very somber.
Sheila stood up. “But none of you should be thinking about elimination now,” she said, making her voice deliberately and, Gregor thought, unbelievably peppy. “Right now, you should be thinking positive, and keeping in mind—one of you is going to be America’s Next Superstar!”
The girls all started jumping up and down at once, thrusting clenched fists in the air and yelling “hooo!” at the top of their lungs.
And right in the middle of it all, two shots rang out.
PART III
The past is always to some extent a fiction of the present.
—David Bentley Hart
ONE
1
He got them all out into the hall. He got the doorway to the living room blocked off as best he could, meaning not really blocked off at all. There was no door to it, as there was a door to the study, but the policewoman was still there. She’d come running when she heard the shots, and then she’d gone running back almost immediately. The chaos was almost complete. The girls were running all over the place, screaming and crying. He’d seen that sort of thing on TV, but never quite like this. The policewoman held her post and kept looking suspiciously everywhere. Gregor turned back to look at the living room and saw the gun, lying right out in the middle of everything, right next to the couch.
He went across the foyer and got the policewoman.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “and I know you’re supposed to stay put, but I need a witness. There’s a gun lying on the floor in the living room, on that Oriental carpet right next to the big couch they have set up in front of the fireplace. All I want is for you to just see it.”
The policewoman looked at him doubtfully, and frowned. Then she turned around, closed the study door, and came with him across the hall.
“Right there,” Gregor said.
“Yes, I see it.”
“It looks to me like a thirty-eight,” Gregor said. “You wouldn’t happen to know if the bullets that hit the wall at the Milky Way Ballroom were from a thirty-eight.”
“No,” the policewoman said.
“Well,” Gregor said, “I can practically guarantee you they will have been. And I can practically guarantee you that that’s the same gun. But that’s not the point now. Did you call this in and get them to send somebody out?”
The policewoman looked puzzled for a moment. Then her face cleared. “Oh,” she said. “Did I call headquarters? Yes, I did. They’re sending somebody.”
“With sirens blaring, probably,” Gregor said.
The policewoman went back to her post. When she did, she opened the study door again. Gregor took note of it for later, because he was too tired to work it out now. He sat down on the staircase, four steps up from the bottom, and got out his phone.
It rang six times before Bennis picked it up. Gregor suddenly realized that she must have been asleep.
“Hello?” Bennis said.
She had definitely been asleep. Gregor took a deep breath. “I’m sorry to wake you. I didn’t think.”
“It’s all right. Are you all right?”
“I just thought of the phrase ‘shots rang out.’ I mean, not just. It must have been a good fifteen minutes ago now.”
“Shots? Where are you? Who’s shooting at you?”
“I’m at Engine House. Nobody is shooting at me. Somebody was shooting at Sheila Dunham. At least presumably.”
“Are you hurt? Is somebody else dead?”
“I’m not hurt, and nobody else is dead. Nobody is so much as injured. I’m a little dizzy. I think it’s from lack of sleep.”
“Are the police there?”
“Not yet.”
“Did you call them?”
“There’s a policewoman on duty at the crime scene from yesterday,” Gregor said. “So I suppose that means that the police are here, except there’s just one of them. But there are others coming because she called them. Am I making any sense here at all? I’m too old to stay up all night, and I’m about ready to pitch the kind of fit everybody else in the world gets to pitch and I never do. And in about two or three minutes, Borstoi is going to come running through that door, and all I’m going to get out of it is to be stared at. Remind me never to listen to you again when you say you just want me to do something to keep busy.”
“I never said anything of the kind.”
“You meant it. I don’t think I’m completely recovered from Jamaica.”
“I think I’m going to call Donna and have her go out there and get you,” Bennis said. “If the police are as fed up with you as you say they are, you’re not going to be able to do anything there anyway. She can bring you home.”
“I can call a taxi.”
“It costs a million dollars,” Bennis said. “Which makes me wonder. How did you get out there to begin with?”
“I called a taxi,” Gregor said.
“Oh, for God’s sake. I’m going to go get Donna.”
The connection went dead. Gregor looked at the phone and sighed. He didn’t like cell phones in general, and he really didn’t like this thing where people could hang up on you and all that happened was no sound at all. He closed the phone—it slid up and down, sort of like the old iPhone case, but not, and it was green—and put it away in his pocket.
If he’d been more awake, he would have kept his eye on the door to the living room. He hoped the policewoman was doing that, and he knew Olivia Dahl was, although that was not a perfect solution. Gregor thought Olivia Dahl was probably in his top five possible suspects. The policewoman did, however, seem to be doing what he had asked her to, so he let it go.
Then he looked up and Sheila Dunham was standing next to him, just at the other side of the stair railing. She was not yelling or screaming. She was not posing for a camera, or for a fan line at a red-carpet event. She was just standing there, and the first thing Gregor thought was that she looked very old.
He blinked a couple of times. Sheila Dunham was not old. She was younger than Bennis by about a year, but she looked a hundred and three.
“Hello,” he said.
“Somebody shot at me,” she said.
“Theoretically,” Gregor said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s supposed to mean,” Gregor said, “that if I had shot at you from a distance of, what was it, maybe six feet? Anyway, if I had shot at you from that distance, I’d have hit you.”
“So she has bad aim. And I suppose that ‘she’ is legitimate. There wasn’t anybody there but women.”
“There were men on the crew,” Gregor said. “I assume some of those men must have been at the Milky Way Ballroom.”
“They all were,” Sheila said. “We hire crew for the run of the season, absent their doing something to get themselves fired. Which doesn’t happen very often, and hasn’t happened this year. Not everybody in the entertainment industry is crazy. The tech people tend to be very—well. Down to earth.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“You didn’t answer me,” Sheila said. “I said somebody shot at me. You said theoretically. I asked you what you meant.”
Gregor took another deep breath. It was all he could do not to yawn. Hell, it was all he could do not to fall asleep.
“Well,” he said, “they didn’t hit you. And they were close. Even the tech people, as you call them, were reasonably close. They might have been as much as ten feet away from you. But whoever it was not only didn’t hit you, he or she didn’t even hit anything that could have hit you.”
“What?”
“The stone hearth,” Gregor said. “If the bullets had hit the stone hearth, they would have bounced off. And a ricochet of that kind would have done some damage. It could have hit you. It could have hit one of the girls sitting or standing in front of you. It could have broken a window. But there was no ricochet. I would have heard it.”
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“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Demarkian, it doesn’t look like you’re in any shape to hear anything at all.”
Gregor nodded. “You’re right. I’m a complete mess this morning. I couldn’t sleep last night. But I do this for a living. And a ricochet is a noticeable noise and it’s not usually quiet. There was no ricochet. When the police get here, they’ll find the bullets in the walls, maybe, or in the painting. There’s a painting over the fireplace in there, isn’t there?”
“I don’t remember.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said.
He looked around the foyer. All the girls seemed to be there. All the tech people were there. All the administrative assistants with their clipboards were there. This was, Gregor thought, the show in its entirety—but, no. The judges weren’t there.
“Why is it,” he asked, “that the other judges never seem to be around?”
Sheila looked at the crowd. “They don’t need to be around,” she said. “Why would I want them to be around?”
“Aren’t they supposed to be judging things?” Gregor said. “Don’t they have to watch the girls do, what do you call them—”
“The challenges.”
“Right. Don’t they have to watch those and then judge them? Isn’t that the point?”
“They watch video,” Sheila said. “Everything the girls do officially, and a lot of what they do unofficially, is taped. We play the videos back in judging and they vote on that.”
“And do their votes count? If they wanted to eliminate a girl you wanted to keep, or if they wanted to keep a girl you wanted to eliminate—”
“I get to do it my way,” Sheila said. “It’s one of the perks of being not only the star but the producer. I own this show—lock, stock, and barrel. It isn’t even leveraged. We had to borrow money the first two cycles, but since then we’ve been doing fine. We’ve got a cash basis accounting system. You have no idea how cheap it is to do one of these shows. Or how much money they make.”
“All of which, I presume, is good.”
“Of course it’s good. It’s better than good. People got stupid. Writers and actors and producers. I don’t know what it is about some people. Most people, really. It’s as if they can’t count.” Sheila came around to the front of the stairs and sat down. She now looked not only old, but tired. “They got—everybody wanted more money. The unions wanted more money. The stars wanted more money. The producers wanted more money. But it’s a different world now. Not so many people watch television, and when they do, they can watch hundreds of channels. They don’t always go to just a couple. The old broadcast channels are absolutely dying. The cable channels have fragmented audiences. Nobody has the kind of share they did in the sixties. So they can all want more money, but that doesn’t mean they can get it.”
Gregor was suddenly interested. “But you didn’t want more money? I thought you just said that a show like this made a lot.”
“Of course it does,” Sheila said. “It makes a lot because it doesn’t spend a lot. For one thing, I don’t have to pay actors. The girls don’t get paid. They’re considered contestants on a game show. So that eliminates one big huge budget problem. There doesn’t need to be a writer, never mind an entire room full of writers. That eliminates another budget problem. And then, due to the nature of the thing, we can save money on down the line: no expensive sets, no costumes because the girls bring their own clothes, an absolute ton of time filmed on stationary cameras plugged into walls that don’t even need a cameraman to run them. Fifteen years from now, the unions are going to fall apart. People want to work.”
Out in the distance somewhere, there was the sound of a siren. Gregor and Sheila both looked toward the door at once.
Gregor stood up. “I’d better get ready for this one,” he said.
Sheila Dunham stood up, too. She was right below him, and although she was tall, she wasn’t a match for his own six feet four. She retreated down the stairs and watched him come after her.
Then she leaned very close to him and said, “It wasn’t Mallory. That girl in the study. Olivia wants me to think that was who it was, but I’ve seen Mallory just last year. It wasn’t Mallory.”
Gregor had no idea who Mallory was. The police sirens were right up to the front door. He stood still in the middle of the foyer and waited for the trouble to start.
2
Len Borstoi was the first through the door when the police came in, and he didn’t bother to knock. Gregor filed that away for later. It was probably against two dozen laws and a mountain of court cases. Borstoi was followed by two uniformed officers, both of them with their guns drawn. Gregor’s head hurt. The girls did what they could be expected to do when they saw the guns. They screamed and started running around the foyer. The girl called Coraline was sobbing. The one called Janice who had tried to go to the bathroom before was jumping all over the place as if her underwear had been invaded by ants.
Another siren started coming up the drive. Gregor looked up and through the open front door and saw that it was an ambulance. He wanted to sit back down and go to sleep.
The policewoman who was charged with guarding the study came up to Len Borstoi and said something to him, too quietly for Gregor to hear—but then, Gregor was not trying to hear. Borstoi went to the doorway of the living room and looked in. Then he went into the room. Gregor moved just enough so that he could see what the detective was doing. He was staring down at the gun on the carpet. Then he was walking around the room. Then he was walking up to the wall around the hearth. The living room was huge, and he walked all around that, too.
He came back into the foyer, and Gregor looked him straight in the face. “If you don’t mind,” he said, knowing that the man minded, “I’d like to know where the bullet holes are.”
“The bullet holes,” Borstoi said.
“They’ve got to be somewhere,” Gregor said. “They didn’t hit anybody. They didn’t ricochet. And don’t ask me how I know. I know a ricochet. Did they go into the furniture?”
Len Borstoi was still staring at him. Gregor thought that this was the worst part about his incredible tiredness. The very air around his head felt as if it had texture. Everything pulsed a little. Everything glowed.
“I know you think I shouldn’t be here,” Gregor said, “but I am here, and I think I know a couple of things. It couldn’t hurt to listen to me, and if you want to, I’ll absolutely promise to act as if I had nothing to do with it. Hell, I always prefer to act as if I had nothing to do with it.”
“The press likes to write as if you had everything to do with it,” Borstoi said. “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. The master detective showing all us poor dumb slobs how it’s done.”
“I’d be willing to bet just about anything,” Gregor said, “that the gun lying on the carpet in there is the gun that fired the shots at the Milky Way Ballroom. You may not want to talk to me, but the Merion police are apparently not so close with information. The gun the girl was holding at the Milky Way Ballroom wasn’t the gun that fired the shots there. It wasn’t even loaded with live ammunition. When the Merion police got the bullets out of the wall, they were bullets from a different gun. Then, when you got the bullets from yesterday’s murder to the lab, they turned out to be bullets from the same gun. And now, I’m pretty sure that the gun lying in there is the gun in question. In fact, it has to be. Nothing else makes any sense.”
Len Borstoi was looking at the ceiling over both their heads. “How did you know about the bullets from yesterday?” he asked.
Gregor shook his head. “I’ve got people in and around the city of Philadelphia who tell me things like that,” he said. “I’ve got some kind of minder over in the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office who’s got even more people to tell him things like that. The bullets that hit the wall at the Milky Way Ballroom and the bullets that killed that girl yesterday were from the same gun, and, like I said, that gun in there is probably the gun in question. I’m not trying to ge
t publicity at your expense. I’m really not. I’m just bumping up against—things.”
Borstoi was still not looking at him. Gregor thought he might be looking through the door of the study. It was hard to tell.
“Did these people hire you?” he asked, waving his hand around to indicate the present company.
“No,” Gregor said. “They did ask me to look into things, but I didn’t make them any promises, and I didn’t agree to be hired. I don’t usually work for private individuals. I consult for police departments. That way I’m not stepping on people’s toes and I can’t be charged with hindering a police investigation.”
Borstoi looked back at the door to the living room. “All right,” he said. “Consider yourself attached to this investigation. I’ll get you paperwork later. My bosses all think you walk on water, in case you’re interested.”
“I don’t walk on water,” Gregor said. “I’m just less distracted than most police officers. I only work on one case at a time.”
Borstoi looked at Gregor for the first time. “Come with me,” he said.
And suddenly, Gregor had a second wind. Or a fourth one. He had no idea how long he’d been this tired. The two uniformed policemen were rounding up members of the cast and crew of America’s Next Superstar. The policewoman was sticking to her post.
Gregor followed Len Borstoi through the living room door. The gun was still lying on the floor. The crime-scene people would pick that up and bag it later. Gregor looked around. There were no signs of bullets in the plaster wall around the fireplace. There were no signs of bullet holes in the couch. Borstoi pointed at the floor, and Gregor saw them—just two, right there, dug into the hardwood.
“She had to be aiming down,” Gregor said.
“She?”
“Sheila Dunham had a point,” Gregor said. “Everybody around her was female. There was the crew, but—”
