Wanting Sheila Dead (23 page)

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 yesterday, 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.”

“What do you need?”

The coffee was going crazy. Gregor watched Bennis turn around and take a pair of mugs out of the cabinet next to the sink.

“I need to sit down with somebody who was there at the time—at Engine House when your father died—to help me go over what the scene looked like when we found the body.”

“Ah,” Bennis said.

“I really don't want to ask you to do that,” Gregor said. “I'm not an idiot. I know that you won't be all right with it.”

“But you are an idiot,” Bennis said. She put the coffee mugs on the
kitchen table. “You don't need to talk to anybody. You can do better than that. There are pictures.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “yes. But I'm not sure—”

“The
City Confidential
TV program,” Bennis said. “There were pictures of the study, and my father's body, and that silly bust of Aristotle—anyway, I think they were still pictures and they were in black and white, but they were there. We watched that together. Don't you remember?”

“I remember that we shouldn't have watched it,” Gregor said. “Or you shouldn't have.”

“It doesn't matter now. Tibor's got the complete set of all those
City Confidential
and
American Justice
and
Snapped
things you've been in. All of them. On DVD. All you have to do is go over there and get him to play them for you. It'll be a lot better than talking to my brothers. Christopher won't remember much, and Bobby will embellish what he does know, and if you could find Teddy, he'd just lie.”

Gregor Demarkian did not call ahead to make sure Father Tibor was at home. Father Tibor was always at home at this time of the evening, unless he was having dinner in the city, and if that had been the case, he would have mentioned it at breakfast. Gregor walked up the street toward Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, crossed in the middle of the block, and then made his way down the alley and to the back where Tibor's apartment was. This was a new apartment, just as the church was a new church, both having been rebuilt only a few years ago. The alley had been spruced up, too, and decked out in security lights. The whole thing reminded Gregor of those little side streets in London where traffic was no longer allowed to go.

Gregor made his way into the courtyard and knocked on Tibor's front door. Overhead, the second-floor apartment that had been built in the hopes of finding Tibor a priest assistant for the church was still empty, dark and a little forlorn looking. It was not shabby, because the
women on the street made a point of keeping it up, but it still looked wrong.

Tibor opened the door and stood back to let Gregor in. The little front foyer was full of books, stacked one on top of the other against the wall, just as the foyer in the old apartment had been. The books were cleaner now, because with the new apartment the women's auxiliary had insisted on hiring a housekeeper. This was not altogether a happy thing—it wasn't just the foyer that was full of books stacked against the walls—but this apartment was at least more comfortable for Gregor to sit in, and he was grateful for that.

“I take it Mrs. Flack wasn't in today,” he said, waiting for Tibor to close up.

Tibor shrugged. “She was here this morning, but I've finished putting everything back. Why is it that she can't understand that Jacqueline Susann belongs with Aristotle and Augustine belongs with Stephen King?”

“I haven't the faintest idea,” Gregor said.

Tibor led the way into the living room. It was a much larger living room than the one in the old apartment, but it already looked cramped. Gregor sat down in a big overstuffed armchair, then immediately stood up again. He felt around in the cushions and found
Last Exit to Utopia
by Jean-François Revel.

“Oh, thank you,” Tibor said, taking the book. “I was looking everywhere for that. I must have left it on the chair. Mrs. Flack wouldn't put it there, would she?”

“It doesn't seem like her kind of thing.”

“She must have missed it. Maybe I'm wearing her down. It's hard enough to keep track of the books in here when I don't have somebody moving them around, but with Mrs. Flack.” Tibor shrugged. “I spent forty-five minutes last weekend trying to find my copy of Irenaeus to use in the homily, and she'd put it on a bookshelf in the bedroom. In the bedroom. The church fathers do not belong in the bedroom.”

Gregor was afraid to ask where they did belong. He didn't put it past Tibor to say the breadbox, or the refrigerator. He stretched out his legs and put his head back.

“Have you been watching the news today?” he asked.

Tibor sat down, too. “Yes, of course, Krekor. The murder in the house where Bennis grew up. But it isn't her family there now. She said that the other day. It's somebody her brother has rented to.”

“A reality TV show,” Gregor said. “Do you remember the first time we ever met?”

“Yes, of course, Krekor. How could I forget?”

“That was when Bennis was still living in Boston, before she bought the apartment on the street. And she bought it because we were all here, because she'd met us when—”

“Yes, Krekor, I know. When her father was murdered in that house and when you solved the case.”

“That's when we all met John Jackman, too. It's odd the things you forget.”

“I haven't forgotten any of it,” Tibor said. “But then, you know how it is. I have less on my mind than you do.”

Gregor sat forward. “Yes, well,” he said, “here's the thing. I went to that house today on a whim. I was talking to the people dealing with Sophie Mgrdchian, and this woman, Karen we know now her name to be . . . or she says it is. Never mind. I get tangled. But that was it. I was feeling tangled and frustrated, so I got in a cab and paid the price of a trip on the space shuttle to get out to Bryn Mawr, and when I got there there was a body—there was a body right where the other body was.”

“What?”

“It was right where the other body was. I told Bennis it was in the study, and it was, but it was more than that. It was laid out in front of the hearth just like old Robert Hannaford's body was when I first saw it.”

“And it was the same?” Tibor said. “This girl, she had her head—”

“No,” Gregor said. “No head bashed in, no bust of Aristotle to do it with. There were three visible bullet holes in her chest. Which isn't official, by the way. I haven't been hired by anybody at the moment. I don't have access to official information. It looked like three bullet holes from what I could see. But the whole thing was wrong. It was just wrong. And I can't quite put my finger on why.”

“Do you usually put your finger on things that quickly?” Tibor said. “Of course there is something wrong that you should have noticed, Krekor. That's how a detective works. You told me that. Agatha Christie told me that.”

“Bennis says you have DVDs of the episodes I've been on for things like
City Confidential.
”

“Yes, Krekor, of course. I have all of them. Do you want to see them?”

“I want to see the
City Confidential
episode about the murder at Engine House. How do DVDs work? Can you pause them the way you could the VHS tapes, so they stay still on one frame and you can look at it?”

“Of course, Krekor. You want to see just one frame?”

“I want to see the picture the police took of Robert Hannaford's body on that floor. There is a picture like that. I remember it.”

“All right, Krekor. You will give me a minute and I will find it. In the meantime, you will tell me what is going on with Sophie Mgrdchian.”

“Nothing much is going on with Sophie Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “I talked to her doctor. She gave me a list of the medications Mrs. Mgrdchian was taking. They didn't amount to much. A lot of vitamins. Some painkillers for the rheumatoid arthritis. One of those medications to help with high blood pressure. The police even had the stuff analyzed. There was nothing in it that could cause a semicoma, or whatever is wrong with her. And the two women have been separated for days. Lily—Karen—whoever it is, can't be feeding Sophie Mgrdchian some kind of voodoo poison when she doesn't have any access.”

“Voodoo?” Tibor said.

“Something Dr. Halevy said, “Gregor said. “That Sophie Mgrdchian's condition is practically like voodoo.”

“So what will happen to, what shall I call her, Krekor? Mrs. Mgrdchian? If she is Marco Mgrdchian's wife—”

“Widow,” Gregor said. “At least, as far as I could tell before her lawyer got me out of there. At the moment, nothing is happening to her. She was bound over for a four-day psych evaluation, so she'll be in the hospital for a four-day psych evaluation. After that, it's anybody's guess. I can't see that they're going to be able to hold her. There isn't actually any evidence that she did anything to Sophie Mgrdchian. If she really is the sister-in-law, there's no reason not to think that it's probable she was invited in. Then the two of them had some kind of physical breakdowns, or something, coincidentally at the same time—”

“Tcha,”
Tibor said. “Everybody in this country always assumes that when someone is old, it only makes sense that they have physical breakdowns. Look at the Very Old Ladies. They could probably walk to Washington, D.C., from here if they had a good reason to. Being old does not necessarily mean that you are falling apart.”

“For most of us, it does,” Gregor said.

Tibor had been paging through a big black carrying case for DVDs. There were hundreds of them all placed in clear plastic pockets, one after the other, page after page. Now he had stopped on a particular page and was tapping through the possibilities.

“This one, I think,” he said, taking a DVD out of one of the pockets. “I should label these more clearly, but most of them have all the information you need on the disk itself, so there doesn't seem to be a point. Have you met this woman, this Sheila Dunham that everybody talks about? Is she as awful as they say?”

“She's very rude,” Gregor said. “But I wasn't all that impressed. I've met rude people before.”

Tibor put the DVD in the DVD player, fiddled with his television set, got a blue screen, then got the DVD to play. It was a really magnificent television set, and a really magnificent set of equipment to go with it. When the parish had replaced Tibor's apartment, they had
defined the word “replaced” the way most people would define “upgraded.”

Tibor had the DVD started. He held up a remote and stopped the action. “Here is what we can do,” he said. “We can go through the scenes as if they were still pictures, and you can tell me the one you want me to stop on to look at. Will that work?”

“I think so,” Gregor said.

Tibor sat on the couch, aimed the remote at the set, and started clicking. It was like watching somebody turn the pages of a photo album. There were pictures of Bryn Mawr, the self-consciously “quaint” downtown, and the wide roads winding through the estate areas. There were pictures of Gregor himself, and of various members of the Hannaford family. It took a while to make it through to what he wanted to see. Then, there it was, on the screen.